"You ain't gonna have any white ones either, at this rate," Rebecca muttered.
Clayton ignored her. "Face it, Peter. The newspapers have cooked up a, I don't know, a mythology about all the shit going on in the country right now, and you've swallowed it whole, but none of it's true. Guys don't want to get drafted, everybody does drugs, rock singers are making millions, the black man wants the white man's money, and all the girls spread like cream cheese." He laughed. "And you think it's the fucking Age of Aquarius!"
Peter grabbed his coat from the floor and stood up. "I'm not gonna sit here and listen to this."
"Come on, Pete, wake up," Clayton said calmly. "There's a handful of people like you and Russell who take all this shit seriously. Everybody else is just fucking around."
"That's bullshit!"
"You know what the bullshit is, Pete? It's people like you two guys thinking that the sixties are any different from the fifties. You think that just because all the guys have long hair and all the girls fuck and everybody wears dungarees and smokes pot and listens to the Jefferson Airplane, we all really give a shit about social revolution and racial equality and the fucking whales and the goddamn fucking rivers."
"Fuck you!"
"Ah, a stinging retort!"
"Just look around you, man. Look at everybody's faces. You think they all think this is as funny as you do? Look at them, Clay. Look at them, damn it!"
Clayton looked at his sister. "Quarter of a mill, Becky. And half of it is yours." He turned to Lydia. "I got a lot more money now. That bother you?" He grinned at Sean. "Anything to say, buddy?" Sean smiled sheepishly, knowing full well that any choice between ethics and ease would be an easy one for him to make. Clayton turned back to Peter. "Yeah, right. Look at 'em, Pete. And while you're at it, grow up, will you?"
Peter looked at the others, and what he saw did not comfort him. On Russell's face he saw sympathy, tinged with an element of rueful vindication; but when he looked at Rebecca, Sean, and Lydia, he saw hesitation, neither approval nor disapproval, but merely hesitation, and that was enough to shatter him. He flung open the door of the bar and stumbled out into the cold winter darkness.
Clayton turned and smiled at a dumbfounded Lydia. "See? Now that was mean."
Rebecca turned on her brother angrily. "Clayton, that was just a terrible thing to do."
"What, selling the land? Don't you want your quarter of a million?"
"That's not the point," she huffed. "Why'd you have to tell him about it like that, I mean like the way you did? You knew how much it all meant to him."
"I'm just helping him grow up, that's all," Clayton responded. "Hey, come on, let's not kid ourselves, okay? I mean, who cares about the fucking river besides him?"
"I do," Russell shouted.
"Yeah, sure you do"—Clayton laughed—"but only because some capitalists are gonna build it. And how's Mao Tse-tung's environmentalist movement doing, by the way?"
Russell shook his head. "I'm not surprised by this. I'm a little disappointed, but I'm not surprised." He turned to Rebecca. "I'm gonna go after Pete, maybe take him to Charlie's."
"What?" Clayton asked. "And give up this great atmosphere?"
Artie Winston walked over from a table on the other side of the room and said in a quiet but urgent voice, "Look, you guys, will you stop shouting? I don't know if you've noticed it, but the bartender has been staring at you."
Clayton shrugged. "Fuck 'im."
At that moment the door opened and Peter walked back into the bar. He was shaking with repressed rage as he resumed his seat beside Dorcas and said, "I'm not gonna leave you alone, Dorcas. And you, Clayton, this is all one big fucking joke to you, but you're too fucked up on drugs right now for me to reason with you."
Alex narrowed his eyes in their direction. Drugs? Drugs?
"Peter, shut up, will you?" Artie said.
"Yeah," Sean added. "Don't start any trouble, okay? I almost screwed myself out of my probation once in this fucking place. I don't need a repeat performance."
"Yeah, yeah, okay," Peter grumbled, and then looked at Clayton angrily. "But tomorrow morning, you and me are gonna have a long talk."
Clayton raised his glass as if in a toast. "I await it breathlessly."
Peter knew that if he made any response to the sarcasm it would lead to more arguing, so he turned angrily from Clayton and asked Dorcas, "Are you feeling any better? Is the bourbon helping?" He saw that Dorcas had closed her eyes and that a slight smile was on her lips. "Dorcas?"
She opened her eyes. "Huh?"
"Wow." He laughed. "I thought you were drifting away for a minute. The acid seems to be wearing of on everybody else. What about you? Are you still hallucinating?"
She did not answer him, for she had reached that stage of an acid trip when garish, outlandish hallucinations cease and are replaced by distortions more subtle, and thus more insidious. At that moment, as Peter and the others awaited a reply, Dorcas was gazing at Peter's face and contemplating the issue of mortality. His flesh seemed transparent to the bone, and she could almost see the individual cells in the process of birth and dissolution. She saw the blood running through the veins just below the surface of the skin and watched the strands of muscle and sinew stretch and contract as Peter's head and lips moved.
"Dorcas?" he asked, and his voice echoed in her ears as if they were spoken in a sound chamber.
Dorcasdorcasdorcasdorcasdorcasdorcas . . .
As she watched the blood flowing she became aware of her own heartbeat, and the pounding in her chest grew almost immediately deafening. My heart, she thought. It feels like it's going to explode. It must be tired, it must be, it's been beating ever since I was born, since before I was born, never stopping, never resting, thud thump, thud thump, thud thump, minutes after minute, year after year. It must be wearing out. It must be wearing out.
Dorcas shuddered. "I'm going to die," she whined.
Lydia coughed nervously. "Well, we're all gonna die, Dork, right? I mean, it's nothing to like be scared of right now."
"Yeah, that's right," Clayton said. Lydia smiled at him, grateful for his support, but her smile faded as he went on, "We're all gonna die. I'm gonna die, you're gonna die, we're all gonna die."
"Clayton," Rebecca said softly, "don't start fucking around, okay? I don't think she's in any shape to handle it, okay?"
"We're all dying right now," he said cheerfully. "You start to die the minute you're born, 'cause every minute you live brings you one minute closer to death. You've been dying your whole life."
Her mouth fell open in wonder. "I have?"
"Sure."
"Clayton, go sit at another table," Lydia snapped. "Now! I mean it!"
"You are absolutely indecent," Russell said. "There's no other word for you."
"Come on, Clay," Sean said, rising from his seat. "Let's go play the bowling machine, okay?"
"Sure. You wanna ask Alex to play, too? Maybe drink some tequila?"
"Real funny," Sean muttered. "Come on." He and Clayton left the table and went toward the old bowling machine, and Sean rubbed his eyes, thinking, Acid's almost gone. Heavy shit, though.
"Thank God Sean got him away from us." Rebecca sighed. "Dorcas, listen to me. Everything's okay. You're doing fine, and you'll be over the trip real soon now."
"No doubt about it." Russell nodded in agreement. "You're handling it fine. Everything, like everything is great."
"I'm really sorry," Dorcas said, looking from Rebecca to Lydia.
"Oh, Dork, don't be silly." Lydia laughed. "Everybody burns out now and then, even without taking acid. It's no big deal."
"No. I mean about last night. I'm sorry I seduced Clayton. I didn't mean to, really."
The smiles on the faces of the other two girls faded into narrow grimaces. "You did what?" Rebecca asked.
"I don't even really remember doing it," she said, starting to weep softly. "But I sort of came to when Clayton . . . I mean when he was . . . I mean like he said that I . . ." Her te
ars began to flow in rivers. "I didn't mean to. I didn't even want to. . . . "
There was no need for Dorcas to finish her sentence, for her few oblique comments had communicated everything. Peter jumped to his feet and ran over to the bowling machine where Clayton was preparing to slide the puck down the alley. He grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face him. "You son of a bitch!" he shouted. "Getting her drunk and stoned and then raping her! You son of a bitch!"
Clayton smiled and shrugged and glanced with amusement at Sean. That one instant of inattention prevented him from seeing Peter's closed fist swing around to thud loudly on his jaw.
"Hey, you!" Alex shouted. "You stop that. I don't have no fights in my bar." He dropped the empty tray he had been carrying and rushed over to stand between Peter and Clayton; but then Peter's words sank in, and he looked down at Clayton, who was sitting dazed on the barroom floor. "What did he mean by that? You gave a girl drugs and you raped her? Is that what he . . ." Alex snapped his head over to look at Dorcas, whose tears were still running down her cheeks. "That's the girl?" He turned to Peter. "Is that the girl he did this to, Dorcas Ostlich?"
The recent conversation had removed Clayton from the roster of Peter's friends, and he did not hesitate as he said, "Yeah, that's her."
Alex grabbed Clayton by the collar and dragged him to his feet. "After everything that poor family has had to go through, you could do a thing like that? You animal! You get the hell out of here, all of you, you goddamn bums, get the . . ." He paused, and his eyes widened. "You were the one found that moonshine jug! You knew where it was all the time! By God, it wasn't that old freak killed that girl, it was you!"
Clayton threw Alex's hand away. "Get the fuck away from me, Alex. Who do you think you're talking to?"
"You talk to the cops, by God!" Alex ran behind the bar and began to phone the police.
Clayton repressed the urge to punch Peter back. "Good work, asshole. Now he's calling the cops."
Peter glowered at him. "Maybe he should call the cops. Maybe he's right." He looked over at Sean and saw the color draining from his face and his hands beginning to tremble. Peter's face registered the shock he was feeling, the refusal to accept the conclusion that Alex had just drawn. "Holy shit," he whispered. "You two guys . . . you two guys did that?"
"No!" Sean cried. "No, just him!"
"Brenner, will you shut the fuck up!" Clayton shouted.
"All I did was help him move the body, that's all I did," Sean whimpered.
Clayton shoved Sean back against the bar. "Shut up, goddamn it!"
Peter stared at Clayton for a moment as if he were a total stranger, and then rushed back to the table. "Lyd, Russ, we've got to get Dorcas out of here before the cops show up, or she'll end up back in the asylum. Come on." No one moved. "Come on, damn it!"
Russell pulled Dorcas to her feet and followed Peter to the door, but Lydia, who had heard everything that had just been said, practically flew at Clayton and began to slash at his face with her nails as she kicked at him and screamed incoherent curses.
"Goddamn it, Lydia, cut it out!" Clayton shouted. "It was an accident. I didn't mean to do it."
"I'll kill you!" she shrieked, her hands flailing.
"Will you listen to me, for Christ's sake? She was mad at me because of something, I don't even know what, maybe because you had just split from your old man's house, and she attacked me, and I pushed her away, and she fell down and hit her head on a rock. It was a fucking accident, Lydia!" He turned to Sean. "Isn't that how it happened?"
"Oh, yeah," he said, nodding his head vigorously, "that's exactly what happened."
Lydia calmed down slightly, but hatred was in her eyes as she snapped, "They say she was raped."
"We made it look that way," Clayton responded, "messed up her clothes and shit like that."
"What the hell for?"
"To make it look like some sort of regular crime. Look," he said, cutting her off as she began to object to his reasoning. "Sean had just gotten probation for the drug bust and he wasn't supposed to be up here at all. We had to make it look like that, like some fucking sex maniac killed her, or else they might have traced the whole thing back to me and him and he'd've ended up in the flicking state pen."
"That's crazy," Lydia insisted. "That doesn't even make sense."
"Okay, so we were stupid, all right? We were drunk and we weren't thinking clear. But that's what happened, okay? Honest to God, Lydia! I'd never hurt anyone in your family, you know that, don't you?"
She felt herself beginning to believe him. "But what about what Dork just said? About last night?"
"Yeah, right," he replied sarcastically. "I seduced her. Sure!"
"Sounds like rape to me," she spat.
"And two months ago she met Grogo the Goblin in the woods a couple of days after he died. And two weeks ago he took her to a cave where that maharishi guy taught her how to pray." He snorted a laugh. "Come on, Lyd. Be serious."
She wanted to believe him, but at that moment the ever-present current of grief was struggling with her infatuation. "My sister is dead," she said, starting to weep.
"I know," he said gently. "And I'm sorry, Lydia. I'm so sorry. But it wasn't my fault, you know?"
"What about Grogo? And that old Hindu guy. What about them?"
"Hey," he said earnestly, "it was them or us. I didn't plan it that way, but that's what it came down to, them or us."
"They were innocent."
He shrugged. "So were we, really." He glanced over at Alex, who was heatedly jabbering into the telephone. "Peter's right. We got to get out of here, all of us."
"I don't want to die!" Dorcas screamed. "I don't want to die! I don't want to go to hell!" The various confrontations in the barroom during the past few minutes had caused the others to forget that Dorcas was in the throes of a bad acid trip, until she began screaming.
"Wonderful," Clayton muttered. "just what we need."
Alex slammed down the receiver of the phone and shouted, "I'll see you in prison, Saunders. When the police put the handcuffs on you, I'll laugh so hard it'll make you deaf!"
Clayton ignored him. "Let's get out of here," he said, and then left the bar. Outside on the street he huddled with a terrified Sean, an angry Peter and Russell, a weeping Lydia, and a very confused Rebecca. "Sean, you straight enough yet to drive?"
"Y-Yeah."
"Good. Take Dorcas and like drive around for an hour or so. Cops should have come and gone by then."
"I'll take care of her," Peter said.
"You'll get the fuck out of here and never come back," Clayton snapped. "Go on, beat it!"
"Don't you tell me what to do. . . ."
"Pete," Russell said, "come on, let's go. I don't want to be here anymore. It's all too disgusting. Let's just drive down to New Paltz."
Peter looked at Dorcas, who was standing nearby, staring at a tree. "I can't leave her alone."
"Pete," Lydia said, "Dork and me live here, you know?"
"Right," Russell agreed. "Come on, Pete. Let's split."
"Peter," Lydia insisted. "Go. She'll be okay. I think the acid's wearing off everybody." He seemed hesitant to leave, so she added, "Look, we don't know what the police will do, and the fewer people there are around to be questioned, the easier it'll be."
Peter's voice was cold as he asked Clayton, "What are you planning to do?"
Clayton sniffed. "What the fuck do you care?"
A few minutes later the street was empty of people. They all went back to Clayton's trailer to pick up their things, and then most of them left hurriedly. Peter, Artie, Deirdre, and Nancy squeezed into Russell's Volkswagen Beetle, Gary and Buzzy appropriated Sean's motorcycle, and most of the others packed themselves into Danny's van. Sean took Dorcas with him in Clayton's jeep, leaving Clayton, Rebecca, and Lydia at the trailer to await the coming of the police.
Chapter Sixteen
January 12, 1969 (continued)
It was all so stupid, Clayton t
hought as he paced nervously back and forth in front of the trailer. Never should have happened, never should have happened. It was really all Grogo's fault, anyway, him and his fucking moonshine. If me 'n Sean hadn't gotten so drunk on that shit, that whole scene with Sarah wouldn't have gone down like it did. He deserved to get lynched for getting me drunk like that, that stupid fucking freak.
Clayton looked out at the road to see if he could see the police coming, but the road appeared dark and deserted. He glanced at the door of the trailer, wondering what was keeping Rebecca and Lydia, and then resumed his pacing. "Sarah's fault, too, the stupid little bitch," he muttered. If she hadn't been such an uptight little pansy-ass, she'd still be alive. "Wasn't my fault," he said aloud, remembering what had happened. "A victim of circumstances, that's all I am."
"That little freak drives me nuts," Sean had said that afternoon three months earlier as he and Clayton were weaving their drunken way through the woods from the old Sweet place. Sean had taken the moonshine jug with him and was gripping it tightly as they stumbled along, walking into trees and tripping over their own feet as they tried to find their way back to the side of the River Road where Clayton had left his jeep. During the five years since the death of Edith Sweet, the forest had all but obliterated the narrow dirt path that had once led for two winding miles from the road to the house, for in all that time only Dorcas Ostlich had trod it in her weekly cleaning visit. In the absence of a real pathway, Sean and Clayton were following a general direction rather than a route back to the road. The combination of marijuana and moonshine caused them to walk with a staggering, meandering gait that made it less than likely that they would emerge from the woods anywhere near the jeep.
"Don't look gift jugs in the mouth." Clayton belched, his voice slurring. "Jugs. That reminds me. I wonder if Lydia's back at the trailer?"
This might have been the funniest joke ever made, for all the ensuing laughter. They stumbled on through the woods, giggling intermittently at nothing in particular, taking turns carrying the jug, stopping every few yards and wondering where they were. Sean strained his eyes to peer of into the darkening woods, and he said, "Hey, somebody's coming."
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