Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “Two words,” Cole said. “Charlie. Manson.”

  “I radioed the Sheriff’s office and P. J. wouldn’t take my call.” Mackie had indeed blamed the commune for the way he’d been portrayed in the tv show. “The deputy said they don’t do evictions for private citizens and we’d have to work it out ourselves.”

  Sirocco said, “The Welcoming Committee plus the three of us makes eight. We surround him and escort him out.”

  “We need to search him,” Sugarfoot said. “If he stole that stuff, I want it back.”

  “If there’s no private property…” Sirocco said. Sugarfoot gave her a look that said he was not in the mood.

  “Worst case,” Cole said, “we have to sit on him while we search.” He was terrified. He hated confrontations even when they weren’t hostile.

  “Do we know where he is?” Sirocco asked.

  “Sleeping it off in the bachelor’s bunkhouse. Apparently he’s got a girl with him. That 14-year-old kid who came in with her parents last month. The one with all the hostility.”

  “Tessa,” Sirocco said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Jesus,” said Cole.

  They found four out of five of the Committee, three women, one man. Maybe, Cole thought, the women would make him feel less threatened.

  Yeah, right.

  The bunkhouse was nearly empty. It was eight am, the farming day well underway. “Just Keith” was asleep on his back in the highest bunk of a tier of three, his mattress at Cole’s eye level. His right forearm lay across his eyes and he was using his bag as a pillow. Tessa lay half on top of him, long brown hair spread over his chest.

  The bunks were open on both sides. Two of the Committee women walked around to Tessa’s side and one of them touched her on the shoulder. She came up on one elbow and, ignoring the shushing gestures that everyone was making, said, “What’s going on?”

  Keith stirred and Sugarfoot make a grab for his bag. At that Keith came instantly awake, one hand on the bag and the other grabbing Sugarfoot’s wrist, hard. “The fuck you doing?”

  “We’re here to ask you to leave,” Sirocco said. “We need to check your belongings before you go.”

  “Let go,” Sugarfoot said. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Tough shit,” Keith said to Sugarfoot, and to Sirocco he said, “Fuck you. I like it here.”

  Tessa, wearing only a stained white T-shirt, chose that moment to slide out of the far side of the bunk. Keith lunged for her, which meant he had to let go of Sugarfoot, who snatched back both his wrist and the shoulder bag. Sugarfoot tossed the bag to one of the Committee women, who looked inside and said, “The missing bracelet… the missing watch… the missing panties… the missing dope… some bags of white powder… a good deal of cash… a bunch of rings of keys, god knows to what…”

  “What?” Keith said. “You calling me a thief, now?”

  “Oh, what the hell,” Sugarfoot said. He was trembling with nervous anger. “You’re a thief. You’re also a statutory rapist, and God knows what else. Get dressed.”

  Keith considered his options for a second or two, then threw off the sheet. He was naked, and the gust of air from the sheet brought Cole the smells of sex and poor hygiene. They all backed away to let him climb down from the bunk. He got into his jeans and T-shirt and sat down to put on a pair of rank socks and then his boots. He patted his pockets as if he were missing something, and turned half away. When he spun back around, he had a switchblade in his hand, the kind Cole had seen in flea markets across Mexico.

  “Give me my bag,” Keith said.

  The woman holding the bag looked at Sugarfoot. “Give it to him,” Sugarfoot said.

  “Wait,” Sirocco said, and took a step toward Keith. “Give me the—”

  Cole yelled, “No!” at the same time that Keith lunged at her.

  Cole didn’t quite follow what happened next. Somehow Sirocco was standing inside Keith’s reach, and she had both hands on his knife arm. The knife clattered to the floor and a second later Keith was on his knees, facing the opposite way, head bowed, and Sirocco was holding his right hand in hers, Keith’s arm stiff and bent at an unnatural angle as he made noises like “Ah, ah, ah, ah.”

  “Do we have any rope?” Sirocco asked calmly.

  “I don’t think so,” Sugarfoot said.

  “Twine,” the Committee woman with the shoulder bag said. “We’ve got the twine we use to tie up the plants with.”

  “That’ll work,” Sirocco said. “Would you get some for me, please?”

  Sugarfoot sat on a nearby bunk, folded his arms over his knees, and rested his forehead on them. The others stood around awkwardly, Keith still making rhythmic noises, until the twine arrived. Sirocco supervised as the woman with the twine tied Keith hand and foot.

  “Now what?” Cole said. He wasn’t sure if he was frightened because of the way Sirocco had endangered herself, angry because she’d never told him she knew martial arts, or full of homicidal hatred for Keith. All of the above, he guessed.

  “Take everything we know for sure is ours out of his bag,” Sirocco said. “Leave the other drugs and the money. Drop him off at the Sheriff’s.”

  “I’ll be back,” Keith said. “I’ll come back and kill every one of you fuckers in your sleep.”

  “Sugarfoot?” one of the Committee women said.

  “I don’t know,” Sugarfoot said. “This is all… this shouldn’t be…”

  Sirocco knelt beside Sugarfoot and stroked his hair. “Deep breaths. Lots of deep breaths.”

  “You fuckers,” Keith said. “You’re all dead.”

  Sirocco turned to Keith and said quietly, “Unless you want us to gag you, you need to be quiet. If you make me mad enough, I might use one of your own socks to do it.”

  Keith shut up.

  “Sugarfoot,” Sirocco said. “We need to do something.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Do what you want.”

  A crowd had gathered outside the bunkhouse. Sirocco took the farm property from Keith’s bag, picked up the switchblade with a bandana and dropped it in, and slung the bag over her shoulder. She took Keith’s shoulders and nodded to the male Committee member to take his feet. Keith began to buck furiously. Sirocco set him down and put a finger under his jaw. “Hold still. Do you understand me?” He went limp and Cole followed as they carried him out to the lavender pickup and placed him in the bed. “Cole and I’ll ride with him,” Sirocco said.

  Cole climbed in and slammed the tailgate. He sat as far as he could get from Keith, and Sirocco sat next to Cole.

  “You might have asked,” Cole said.

  “What?”

  “Before you volunteered me.”

  “Sorry. I’m a little flipped out.”

  “Man, you sure don’t show it. What was that you did to him?”

  “Aikijujutsu. Daito-ryu version.”

  “You’re like a black belt or something?”

  “Yeah, first dan only. I was lucky, I had a teacher who studied with Tokimune Takeda himself.”

  Cole shook his head. “I don’t know jack shit about any of that. How come you never told me?”

  “Because I don’t like it. I want to live in a world where I never have to use it.”

  Cole shut his eyes. “I want to live in that world too. If you find it, let me know.”

  At the Sheriff’s office, P. J. himself came out to look at Keith. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Fix up your reputation,” Sirocco said. “He’s got what looks like drugs in his bag.” She handed it over. “You’ll also find an illegal switchblade in there, covered with his fingerprints. He attacked us with it, which is assault, and threatened to come back and kill us, which is also assault. Let the voters know you won’t put up with hippies who can’t follow the law.”

  “Clever, ain’t you?” P. J. had always had a certain gleam in his eye when he talked to Sirocco. “Bobby, put this trash in a cell and I’ll talk to him later.”<
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  “Want me to cut this string off him?” Bobby said.

  “It’s just string,” P. J. said. “Can’t be hurting him too much.”

  Keith, who’d been quiet to that point, spat at P. J. “Son,” P. J. said, “you shouldn’t ought to have done that.”

  “You need to take statements from us?” Sirocco asked.

  “Y’all run along,” P. J. said. “I know where to find you.”

  By the time they got back to the farm, everyone had heard some version of the story, which had swollen into an epic melodrama with buckets of blood, hostages, broken bones, and concussions. Cole tried to return to work, pulling weeds by hand from between the intermingled corn, beans, and squash. People kept interrupting. Two fields over, Sirocco was dealing with the same hassles. At one point a small crowd gathered around her, voices getting strident. Cole went to investigate.

  “… never justified,” one of the women was saying, an edge of hysteria in her voice. She called herself Zinnia, Cole remembered. Long auburn hair, no sense of humor. “Passive resistance is the only way to respond to—”

  “Where’s Sugarfoot?” one of the men interrupted. “We need to have a meeting about this.”

  “He’s locked in the office,” another woman said. “He won’t come out.”

  “The rules have to apply to everybody,” Zinnia said, “all the time. No exceptions.”

  “Could we all go back to work?” Cole said. “We can discuss this at the next meeting.”

  “He said he was going to come back and kill us all!” Zinnia said. “We have to decide how we’re going to—”

  “Did we ask your opinion?” the man said to Cole, interrupting again.

  “He’s not coming back,” Cole said. “He’s in jail.”

  “Since when are we going to the pigs to solve our problems?” another man asked.

  Cole felt his own temper rising. Sirocco put a hand on his arm. “Let’s go,” she said.

  As they walked away, Zinnia shouted after them, “This isn’t over!”

  Sirocco said, “Most of the people who came to talk to me wanted me to teach them self-defense. The others wanted me to leave.”

  “Sugarfoot has to take control of this mess. I’ll go talk to him.”

  “Good luck.”

  Cole tried the office door. It was indeed locked, for the first time ever. “It’s Cole,” he said. “Open up.”

  The silence dragged on. Cole knocked again, beginning to worry. “C’mon Sugarfoot, let me in.” This time a chair squeaked and then, finally, the lock clacked and the door opened.

  The yellow paper shade was drawn on the window and the office was dim. Cole took his usual seat at the table. Sugarfoot locked the door again and slumped in a chair across from him.

  “I keep going over it in my mind,” Sugarfoot said. “What Sirocco did was wrong. But I can’t think of any response that wouldn’t have been worse.”

  “She used the minimum force necessary to protect herself from serious injury or death. She didn’t do him any lasting harm. She recovered our property and neutralized the threat.”

  “What if we had just let him walk away? Maybe he would have left.”

  “Get real. He wasn’t interested in leaving, and even if he did, he would have become somebody else’s problem.”

  “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  “No,” Cole said, not entirely sure he believed it. “Once he’s out of jail he’ll want to get as far from Sirocco as he can get.”

  “It’s too hard,” Sugarfoot said. “I can’t deal with it anymore.”

  “Somebody has to,” Cole said. “I don’t have the skill. Sirocco’s in the middle of it, so she’s not a choice. That leaves you. Unless you maybe want Donnie and Carl to run things.”

  “I’m not sure they could do any worse.”

  “If you want to feel sorry for yourself, that’s fine, as long as you do it on your own time. Right now you need to call a meeting, stand up for Sirocco, and get us past this.” He got up and unlocked the door. “Now would be good.”

  Sirocco wasn’t in his bedroom. From his window he saw clumps of people talking and gesturing instead of working. Finally Sugarfoot came out and they all sat down in the shadow of the tepee.

  Cole watched from where he stood. Sugarfoot was brief and to the point. He explained what had happened in the bunkhouse, and called on the Committee members to back him up. Zinnia brought up passive resistance and Sugarfoot said the circumstances did not allow it. Somebody complained about using the Sheriff to deal with their internal problems and Sugarfoot reminded them that on four separate occasions they had taken people to the Wythe County Community Hospital for medical care, which was no different. They paid taxes and received police and fire protection in return. As to the possibility of future violence, from Keith or anyone else, he planned to ask Sirocco to teach martial arts to anyone who was interested. The discussion quickly got repetitive and Sugarfoot called an end to it.

  Gradually people drifted back to work. Cole lay down for a while and went back to his weeding at 1:30. No one spoke to him. Sirocco had disappeared.

  He was ignored again at dinner. He overheard hushed voices and grumbling, and he saw, with fresh eyes, what long odds Sugarfoot had taken on with Eden Farm, how easily one noxious personality could poison an entire community, how quickly years of good will and hard work could be undone.

  At four in the morning he woke to a pale fluttering in the moonlight. Sirocco sat on the edge of the bed. She was luminous and he wondered if he was dreaming.

  “I’m leaving,” Sirocco said. “I’m going to Tennessee, give the Farm a try.” It was the largest commune in the world, with a population of over 1500. “This place is finished.”

  She had not invited him to join her. Though he’d seen this moment coming, the rejection stung and he retreated into himself.

  “When?”

  “Now. By the time the sun comes up I’ll be on the highway with my thumb out.”

  He searched for a way to change her mind. His brain, numb with sleep, came up empty.

  She ran a hand through his hair. “You know what I always liked about you?”

  “No. I always wondered.”

  “You never tried to impress me.”

  “Would it have worked?”

  “No.” She, who cried so easily, was dry-eyed now. “You should go back to playing music,” she said. “You have a gift.”

  “Maybe. I have to not want it so much.”

  She touched his lips with the tips of her fingers. “Go to sleep.”

  He grabbed her hand and kissed her palm. He already missed the idea of her. “Please don’t go,” he said.

  “Maybe our paths will cross again. If that’s our karma.”

  “I don’t even know your real name.”

  “Shhhh,” she said. He saw then that she had already left and he was trying to reason with a shadow, a footprint, the scent of mint and patchouli left on a pillow. She stood up and turned away and she was gone.

  *

  In the end, neither “just Keith” nor Sheriff Mackie nor rattlesnakes nor wdbj-tv landed the blow that killed Eden Farm. That honor fell to a baby chicken.

  Afterward, they figured out that one of the kids had been playing with the chickens and then forgotten to wash his hands. He ran to see his mother, who was working in the kitchen, and within a few days half the population was sick with salmonella. The farm was quarantined, and though their produce was pronounced safe by the Virginia Department of Health, no one stopped at the roadside stand. Two toddlers died, one of whose grandparents filed suit against Eden Farms and Sugarfoot in specific for criminal negligence. As soon as they were well enough to travel, people fled, sometimes ten or twenty in a day. By mid-September it was down to Cole, Sugarfoot, and 11 others.

  Sugarfoot called one final meeting to announce that he was closing the place down. Everyone had two weeks to find another place to live. They were welcome to whatever they could carry away.


  No one had any questions. Cole and Sugarfoot adjourned to the front porch of the Big House and drank beer. “What about the debts?” Cole asked. He knew they’d been dodging the propane company for months, and had outstanding bills for groceries and hardware and diesel for the tractor. Not to mention unpaid property taxes.

  “My father’s lawyer is drawing up the papers for me to file for bankruptcy. And he’s going to make the lawsuit go away.”

  “How pissed is your father?”

  “Not at all,” Sugarfoot said. “He was so pleased to see me fail and prove him right that it moved him to new heights of generosity. Not that he would ever put it in those terms.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Chicago. I’ve been talking to my thesis advisor. He wants me to dump my old idea and write about agronomy in the context of the commune instead. He’s going to give me my ta gig again, and says I can get an assistant professorship as soon as I finish the thesis. Which I’ve already got outlined. I mean, I can see the whole thing in my head.”

  “You sound better than you have in a couple of years.”

  “It’s a load off. Jesus, what a load off.” They sat and drank for a while and then Sugarfoot asked gently, “What about you?”

  “I have no idea,” Cole said.

  *

  Cole was the last, other than Sugarfoot, to leave. Sugarfoot insisted that he take his tool belt and tools, the Silvertone guitar, and what was left of the petty cash, which came to $73.09.

  He got a room in a boarding house on the western edge of Wytheville and signed on with the same construction company where he’d worked the last four winters. This time he trimmed his beard instead of shaving and left his hair in a ponytail. The foreman didn’t seem to care. When Cole told him the commune had folded, he said, “I heard about that salmonella. Tough break.” Cole agreed that it was.

  He ate supper every night at a diner a few blocks from the boarding house, and after a week he had the waitresses trained in the general principles of vegetarianism. The vegetable soup didn’t count if it was made from chicken stock, nor did the green beans that had been boiled in ham hocks. He was patient and smiled a lot and left good tips and over time more and more things turned up that he could eat.