by Cole Alpaugh
“Any good plans for the summer?” His attention was no longer fully on the girl. A shimmer of white fish bellies had caught the pelican’s eye, and he couldn’t help watching the tasty treats darting unwittingly about, directly beneath his predatory gaze.
“No plans, really. Just gonna keep looking for my dad.”
“Did you see that?” Gus asked the girl suddenly. The school of fish had been joined by another, much larger group, and the roiling mass had bumped the large, floundering pads of the bird, teasing his senses.
“It tickled.” Gus’s head now tilted completely to one side to eye the water beneath him. “There must be a million of them down there.”
“I thought your belly was full.”
“But they look so good.” Gus was tantalized by the glimmering flashes, oh so close. “Maybe just one more?”
“Can you catch one from up high?”
“You called me a showoff last time.”
“You know I was only kidding,” Morgan said. “I think it’s wonderful. Please?”
Gus stretched his wings, then beat them down to gain lift, and rose in an awkward, almost impossible manner. The enormous school of small fish scattered in all directions away from Morgan’s board before rejoining at the edge of the reef, swirling and rolling like a huge, shiny torpedo just beneath the surface.
“From way up high!” Morgan called to the pelican, whose initial clumsiness was replaced by a muscular, slow grace. Gus climbed to about a hundred feet and began easy clockwise laps around the reef and girl, head again tilted to search out the goggle-eyed scads that had shifted to the west.
“They’re getting away!” Morgan teased, but Gus had already apparently zeroed in on his target, ignoring the girl. As if a switch was snapped, Gus’s forward progress halted and he dropped like an anchor from an airplane. Unlike some dive-bombing birds, his wings remained outstretched, his neck still arched. Gus slammed through the surface of the ocean, hitting the water hard. The impact would by no means have impressed an Olympic diving judge, for he sent a splash of salty water five feet into the air behind him.
Morgan marveled at the show, nearly tumbling from her board as she clapped and screamed at the bird’s mighty descent. Gus broke back through the surface, shaking water from his Mohawk, a shiny, foot-long fish sideways in his beak, twitching weakly.
“That was amazing.” Morgan paddled toward her friend, who tilted back his head to gobble down the scad.
“Thank you. Oh, there’s something I almost forgot to tell you.”
“What?” Morgan asked, as the pair paddled back toward the safe spot at the center of the reef. The deep water always felt a little creepy to Morgan, especially this time of day, when the sun was getting lower.
“I heard a rumor from a passing flock of mallards.” Gus trailed off as column of scad wandered back across the reef to rejoin the school scuttled about by the plunging pelican.
“What rumor, Gus?”
“Well, you know I’ve been sure to mention the little girl from the big island who has been looking for her dead father for many years.”
“And?”
“And just last week, I spoke to a duck who claimed to have spoken to a bird, of which species I don’t recall.” Gus paused, perhaps trying to recall the species, but having no luck.
“Yes? What did the bird say?”
“It was a bird who was once a man with a daughter your age. And, most curiously, she had your name. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Morgan’s heart began to race. “What did he say, Gus? He met my father?”
But Gus only stared at the girl, bobbing in rhythm a few yards away. “Gus, please, what did he say about the bird?”
Still silence. “Gus!” Morgan shouted, and the bird rose up and flapped its wings, backing away from the commotion. “Gus, please tell me!”
Morgan gave up pleading and just bobbed on her boogie board, waiting to see if the pelican would resume his story. But the evening wind had picked up, and the hot day had turned chilly out on the open water. The standoff lasted another ten minutes before the large bird turned away from the girl, flapped its heavy wings, and performed its awkward takeoff again. This time, the bird headed low over the ocean to the north, leaving the little girl alone.
“Please,” Morgan said, but there was nobody to hear her. No answer, only the rocking sound of her board on the choppy sea. Morgan turned her back on the low orange sun and kicked her swim fins in steady strokes. It was a very long way back home.
Chapter 31
It was the Fourth of July on Fish Head Island and the money flowed in like high tide during a full moon.
Two hundred thirty-some years of independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain was reason enough to pay for the privilege of witnessing swords being swallowed, fire being eaten, and death being defied in various hair-raising manners. Illegal fireworks exploded over the inlet, mirrored in the murky water.
Business was booming, despite the cannon having been abandoned in the hurried exodus from the Atlantic City parking lot. With a half-dozen workers assigned to garbage duty, even Warden Flint was apt to be found in a fair mood, straddling one of the hay bales lining the gravel road along the inlet coastline, sipping from a tall bottle of Russian vodka. A wry smile cracked his ruddy face when a couple strolling by mentioned how nice it was there were no bugs.
“You’re welcome,” Flint drunkenly mumbled, tipping the bottle in a toast, as he watched that reporter guy down at the far end of the inlet. He was hunting around the mud flats like a hungry bird, stooping over and gathering up small bits of something from the edge of the still water. His pants were rolled to just below the knees, and his bare feet were black from the warm mud.
The ranger also noticed the crazy old Rooney broad hovering behind the reporter, arms folded across her chest, but he had no way of knowing if any words were actually coming out of her flapping gums. The woman was always fuming about something, and her mouth never stopped running, even if no words were being spouted.
Flint had the displeasure of a brief encounter a few days back, as he passed her in his truck, sticking his hand out the window with a friendly wave. Rooney had been strolling along the gravel near the bridge to the entrance of the island and looked up with a genial-enough expression.
“Go fuck yourself,” Rooney told the ranger with a cordial wave of her hand, as he rolled slowly by in his truck. Flint was watching her in his side view mirror, brow furrowed, trying to figure out what the hell that was about. Not paying attention to the road, he had to slam on his brakes, stones crunching, when the clown he nearly ran over screeched.
Now, Flint watched the old bat skulking about behind the reporter, thinking he wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see her walk up and kick the guy in the ass.
* * *
Lennon Bagg squared his shoulder to the water. He took a deep, relaxing breath, adjusting his bare feet in the warm, shallow surf. He cradled the flat, round stone, tumbled smooth by a thousand years of waves, between index finger and thumb, preparing for another toss. Reaching back his right throwing arm, elbow level to the water, Bagg snapped his wrist forward, sending the stone skimming past the tiny shore breakers to the glassy water beyond.
He counted, “One … two … three … four … five-six-seven-eight …” before the front spinning edge dug into the water and jammed its progress to a splashing halt.
“You dumb fudgepacker!” The voice from over his left shoulder startled Bagg enough to make him spill the collection of stones he’d been cradling in his shirt. “My husband could skip a rock better than you and he’s been dead and rotting for ten years. Asshole!”
“Afternoon, Mrs. Rooney.” Bagg didn’t look up at the old woman. Making eye contact invited more insults that lasted longer. He set about retrieving all his good stones before the tide pulled them into the deeper water.
“Get a haircut, Bagg,” she called to him from the gravel road. “Your hair makes you look like some kind of hippi
e shithead.”
Belinda Rooney, who the kids and some of the adults called Cruella, was the owner of the sharp, energetic voice heard echoing around the game stands.
“Hey, Peckerhead, I bet you wish you threw like a girl,” was a regular taunt. “Hey, lard-ass, wanna work a few calories off throwin’ a dart?”
Whether Rooney had developed the art over years or had always been so caustic, nobody remembered. The Pisanis had tried to tone down her insults—at least cut some of the profanity—but once she was on a roll, she was on a roll. On the bright side, she seemed to get real enjoyment from her job and her game tills were always overflowing.
Rooney paused for a reaction, then gave Bagg a disgusted look as though she knew he was busy jackin’ off in the water, probably just lurking there for some ten-year-old boy to wander by so he could whip out his little dick. People are for shit, Rooney constantly reminded those around her.
“Fucking hippie.” Mrs. Rooney looked depressed, as if needing some other fuckwad faggot on which to bestow a little rage. Finally she stalked off, her blue housedress flapping indignantly in the light breeze.
Bagg took another deep, relaxing breath, momentarily contemplating hurling a handful of wave-smoothed stones at the old loon, before refocusing on the calm waters out beyond the break.
Calling Bagg a hippie was a jab Mrs. Rooney likely imagined would get under his skin. And even though she was infamous for her evil tongue, her ability to call on small pieces of information to personalize her attacks was often effective.
Bagg had talked about his parents while drinking beer and roasting marshmallows in the community fire pit. His folks had been honest-to-God hippie folk, right down to living on a commune, eating what they grew. The Summer Farm flourished during the late sixties and early seventies in New York’s Catskill Mountains as an anarchist retreat for seventy or so souls who had rejected the establishment. It was hectic and disorganized on purpose, since any sort of organization was shunned. There were no established meal times or any real codes of conduct, and transients were always welcome and immediately given equal say in whatever needed deciding. The main drawback was all the fist fights due to the unbending demand for anarchy.
“I bet they had their own still,” one of the mechanics jealously lamented, having to spend his hard earned money on store-bought booze.
“I don’t remember a still,” Bagg said.
“I bet they grew their own pot,” another man said, who had then taken a deep drag off a joint filled with crappy Mexican dirt weed that smelled like a wet dog set on fire.
Bagg’s father had been an admirer of Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin for his hand’s on style of revolution. His father sported the same Lenin-style goatee, and had gone so far as to suggest naming his son after the Bolshevik, although the two tabs of microdot acid he’d swallowed turned the spelling into the English music legend’s version. The young commune couple had let it be, so to speak.
The commune where Bagg was born was unofficially founded on April 16, 1967, the day after an anti-Vietnam war protest in New York City, where Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Dr. Benjamin Spock were all headliners.
Honey and Dylon Bagg were among the four hundred thousand marchers gathered in and around Central Park for a peace fair, on an unseasonably cold and dreary day. Dark clouds spit on and off icy drizzle and fat snowflakes. The mass of people then headed down Fifth Avenue and made their way east to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the UN.
The city officials had braced for violence and mayhem, sending out thousands of New York City’s finest to keep the rabble-rousers at bay, but only five arrests were made, despite numerous reports of police provocations. The five arrests were actually people belonging to a group opposed to the march.
As speeches wound down, the marchers made their way back up to their tents in Central Park. They hoped to warm up and sing a few songs accompanied by the hundred or so acoustic guitars slung from various shoulders. Politics over, it was time for a peaceful party.
But late that night, when the television crews and newspaper photographers had made their deadlines and gone home, four dozen busses on loan from Rikers Island, Sing Sing, and even all the way up from the Attica Correctional Facility, groaned to a halt along East Drive in the park. Out marched hundreds of cops in full riot gear, where they proceeded to round up as many of the trouble-making hippies along the Central Park Zoo fencing and on the shore of The Pond as they could grab.
In all, the raid netted some seven hundred peaceful demonstrators, who were likely the most stoned and therefore the least able to run away.
Dylon and the recently impregnated Honey were shoved into a black bus with Sing Sing Penitentiary written in bold white letters down each side. Their tent and sleeping bags were rolled up with those of their fellow dirtbag hippies and strapped to the long rack on top of the prison bus.
Four bumpy hours later, three of the buses pulled to the side of a dark country road. The cops riding in the front seats barked for everyone to get off. The camping gear was tossed from the roofs, and a scraggly group of peace marchers found themselves stranded in darkness and utter silence. They were left shivering from the cold and numb from the drugs, which had mostly worn off.
“We need to make camp,” Dylon Bagg suggested, setting the hippies into motion. A small flashlight was found among their belongings and everyone picked up a fair share of gear. A single file of about seventy people, including ten children, followed the small light away from the road and down to a clearing next to a stream.
“Home sweet home,” someone said, and none of these people had any idea how prophetic those three words would become. The New York City Police Department had cleaned up Central Park and restored some of the normalcy for its upstanding and tax-paying citizens. A bunch of dirty, troublemaking hippies had been properly and quietly expunged.
The newly pregnant Honey Bagg was credited with naming the planet’s newest commune The Summer Farm, after using a bottle of nail polish to paint the words on a white bandana and flying it from a stick over their tent.
“It sounds warm,” Honey said.
On Fish Head Island, those first nights spent around the fire pit, safely surrounded by the carefully arranged maze of trucks, were something of a homecoming for Lennon Bagg. These people were familiar. Sitting next to him, the old woman with leather for skin, not a tooth left in her head, might have been pointed to by mothers as a warning for who would come snatch Johnny away if he didn’t keep his room clean. In fact, there were plenty of Boogie Men for mothers to point to among the forty or so remaining workers. From the obvious Freaks of Nature to the boy with one leg shorter than the other.
Bagg had lived his adult life surrounded by people with health plans and money for deductable payments. He had lived among people with an expectation of at least trying to fix things that went wrong with you or your children.
But that hadn’t always been the case.
Bagg had witnessed the form of dentistry practiced at The Summer Farm. The whiskey pain killers and the pliers used for rough extractions. As a little boy, he’d seen a broken arm set with wooden splints, no thought for an x-ray. Bad cuts had been splashed with soapy water and stitched like a torn house dress.
People hadn’t intended to lose their teeth. Their babies hadn’t been born with treatable conditions on purpose. The people who raised Lennon Bagg simply lived with whatever damaged them. As a little boy, he’d never been told there was a Tooth Fairy, probably because you never stopped losing teeth until they were all gone.
The leathery woman now gumming a bottle of warm Old Milwaukee might have been the same woman who had come running into the woods toward the screaming boy when Bagg was just five or six. Bagg had been exploring a deer path in the woods up on the hill above the Summer Farm. He was either naked or wearing torn old underpants when he tripped on a cable-like vine, falling forward into an innocuous looking pile of brush. When he went to push himself back up, a fiery burst of unim
aginable pain raced up from his right hand, a pain so terrible, the first screams caught in his throat and no sound came out.
The boy again tried to pull away from whatever had him, but the same electric pain gripped his entire body. Reaching with his left hand to clear away the sticks and leaves, Bagg discovered that he’d been impaled squarely through the middle of his hand by a section of broken root. A bloody, half-inch-wide piece of wood had entered his palm and exited the dorsum. It looked like an angry finger pointing toward his face.
Little Bagg found his voice, shrieking so loud and long that he blacked out from lack of oxygen. Passing out had saved young Bagg the excruciating sight of the root being removed, an act he later found out was left to the toothless old woman who had reached him first.
Even back in 1973, most anywhere in America, an ambulance would have been called and emergency medical technicians led jogging into the woods to perform such extractions. But among circus folk and commune dwellers alike, when something was broken, you fixed it yourself. And scars were the lines that etched the events of your life.
Bagg’s eyes fluttered open to the sight of the old woman’s straw-like white hair and the mass of wrinkled skin that was her neck. Her filthy dress had come unbuttoned and a flabby mound of warm flesh pressed against his cheek, a coarse nipple rubbed as if offering to be suckled. Another child waking to such a sight would have been convinced they were being abducted by an awful monster, some sort of wicked and perverse witch. Bagg’s eyes drifted beyond the old woman to the trees and flickering sun behind. The rhythmic bouncing of the downhill walk, combined with what was now a dull throbbing from his wound, made all the color run out of Bagg’s world.
“It hurts bad.”