Sweet Sunday

by John Lawton

‘Why Chicago? Was he back for that?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  He got up again, pulled a piece of paper off a bulletin board above his bench.

  What he had handed me was a torn piece of a broadsheet newspaper. I recognized it. Not from this paper, but from some other. It must have been syndicated. I was sure I’d seen it, read it somewhere. A punchy, bloody account of Chicago, and in the centre panel a photo of a naked man in Commanche head-dress and paint—still recognizably Notley. I looked for the byline. There wasn’t one. It must have been on the torn corner. The whole piece was stapled to a legal sheet, on which was a handwritten note.

  ‘How nice to see you again, Notley. I have followed your “career” with some interest.’

  Then there was a line I couldn’t read and a signature—Jack Feaver.

  ‘What’s the line at the bottom?’ I asked. ‘Is it Russian?’

  ‘That’s what I thought too. But it’s Greek. Would you believe one of our Moondogs used to be an associate professor of classics?’

  Of course I would.

  ‘It’s Sophocles. From Oedipus at Colonus. It reads something like, “It needs must be that transgression comes, but woe betide the hand by which . . .” I’m paraphrasing but anyway you get the gist.’

  ‘Shit happens.’

  ‘My professor was keen on the word transgression. The implied movement involved. That may be the only word I have right.’

  I was drawn to look at the Elvis again—the three split images created the impression of freeze-frame movement towards the victim—trans-gression as Notley would insist. Where Warhol had merely intended the iconoclasm of repetition, Notley, by turning the figures edge on, had almost made me see the hand pull the gun from its holster and squeeze on the trigger. I was sure this had been moving footage too, that I had seen it on a newsreel. But this was the image that had stuck, the still, the permanent distorted face of the moment of death. The split second the line was crossed forever.

  ‘To whom is he referring. You or himself?’

  ‘Oh, to me. I doubt Jack Feaver thinks he transgressed for a second. There’ve been other notes and letters, but that was how he found me, that piece in the press. Just wrote to me care of The Moondogs, Chiricahua, AZ. The US Mail can be amazing. Finds me every time. Better than the CIA. Thing is, Jack actually approves of what I do. He thinks it has purpose.’

  ‘Doesn’t that worry you—Jack Feaver admiring you?’

  ‘Of course it does.’

  ‘And you admire him.’

  ‘That’s not the word I’d use. But . . . there are more things Mouse didn’t tell you.’

  He stood up. Pointed to the ribbon on his fly.

  ‘You know what this is?

  I nodded.

  He pulled back the hair covering his forehead. There was a blue sort of ziggy-zag scar up near the hairline.

  ‘I got that for this. One purple heart per wound. That’s the way Uncle Sam does things. A measure and a stick. There was blood all over my face and in my eyes. I was in that kind of numb stage when all the body’s morphins cut in and cut you off. The other guys were picking up the bits of Tod and Bob. Feaver wiped my face and checked the wound. “You’ll live,” he told me. “For how long?” I said. “Is it me next?” He said something like, “Hell no, when something like this happens you do it yourself.” From that moment on he walked point. Alone. He led us through two more minefields, marked mines, led us around them, took two to pieces with his bare hands. And he did this until we were within sight of base. What Mouse didn’t tell you was that we’d all be dead if Jack Feaver hadn’t led us out of there. Admire him. No. I don’t admire him. I acknowledge him.’

  ‘And what do you make of “woe betide the hand”?’

  ‘I make “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” out of it.’

  So did I.

  ‘You wanna eat?’ he said.

  §

  I leaned in the chapel doorway and watched cars and vans and motorbikes pour into the darkening canyon. A couple of Ken Kesey-style psychedelic schoolbuses, and at least a dozen beaten up VW campers. The population had swollen from the handful of figures I’d seen dotted round on my arrival to nearer a hundred. Floodlights came on on the rock walls, speakers high up in the trees started to pound out a Canned Heat album. Bob the Bear, six foot what and two hundred and fifty pounds, singing that unexpected, mellifluous falsetto. It looked as though I’d turned up for the Moondogs’ prom night.

  Notley stood at the propane stove chopping vegetables, splashing oil around, and asking me a thousand questions. By the time the meal was ready he knew as much about me as I did about him. I disowned any involvement in organizing Chicago, even the word ‘organized’ seemed to me like a major overstatement.

  ‘But that was a great stunt with the pig—wish I’d done it myself. I’d no idea you guys were going to do it. Last I heard was Wavy Gravy’d thought it up and then decided not to do it.’

  Trust Rubin to think nothing of stealing an idea. Why not? Ours was a left-over culture found lying in the street.

  I sat back down on the floor cushion. Notley set a Spanish omelet and a green salad in front of me.

  ‘We grow the greens ourselves. For that matter we raised the bell peppers too. And you’ll have seen the hens scratching around.’

  ‘Almost self-sufficient?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t make gasoline and acid,’ he said. ‘Though we did have a guy tried making his own acid—never worked. Grass grows easy—all the home-grown maryjane a man could want.’

  ‘Don’t the cops . . .’

  ‘What? Don’t the cops what?’

  ‘Don’t they ever bother you?’

  ‘No they don’t—but I think that’s pure laziness. They’d need to come in force to be effective and that means coming all the way from Tucson. They’d be out of do’nuts and coffee before they got halfway. There’s not enough county cops between here and Tombstone to be worth worrying about. Besides, we’re careful not to piss off the locals.’

  ‘No music after ten p.m.?’

  ‘Hardly,’ he said.

  The bell peppers were fine, the egg yellower and fresher than I’d had since I stopped living in Texas. The mushrooms were kind of bitter though. I must have pulled a face.

  ‘An acquired taste,’ Notley said. ‘Stick with ’em. They grow on you.’

  He was smiling as he said it. The smile turned to a grin. I bit into another bitter, hard, little mushroom and swallowed. Notley grinned some more. I looked down at the plate, ill-lit by candlelight, and fished out a whole mushroom. It wasn’t a mushroom. It was a peyote cap. A moon button. The Moondog had fed me moon buttons. The bastard.

  §

  I drifted on a dream. A far from pleasant dream. The reality of what I was seeing might have been acceptable, tolerable in a state of sobriety. Goddammit, I’d been to orgies before. I’d smoked dope before. But I’d never taken an hallucinogenic before. Sex an’ drugs an’ rock an’ roll were more cheap thrills than I would want in the course of a single day. I’d heard the Stones’ Satanic Majesties before—it had just never occurred to me that it was plain evil. I’d watched people fuck before—I’d just never seen them turn to animals. A guy in the middle of a group grope who suddenly had the head of a wolf. I closed my eyes and shook my head. When I looked again he was human. But he transmogrified into wolf before my eyes. And once set on that path I could not stop—a repetitive lycanthropia. This woman was part pig, the guy whose cock she was sucking part buffalo. Watch out for those molars, feller.

  ‘They’ll grow on you,’ he’d said. Everything grew on me. I wandered around, lost in rock ’n’ roll’s wilderness, feeling like a lone human stranded on the island of Dr Moreau, like Jack looking for the beanstalk. Everything grew—plant and animal erupted and enveloped me. And I ha
ted every damn second of it.

  The last human face I can recall seeing was the Indian woman I’d encountered first. She took me by the arm and spun me round, asking ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ but even as she said it she changed into a dog-woman and I could not answer.

  I drifted on. The music merged into a cacophonous blur, filling the canyon, less like a huge hi-fi and a hundred yards of cable, than God’s own jukebox booming down from heaven. And it seemed that God had a taste for John Lennon’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Maybe they had it on a loop? Maybe it was just that everything had that same insistent drum pattern to it? Maybe I imagined it? The Moondogs became one long chain of coitus, a sexual conga, a gang bang for a hundred heaving buttocks. One or two women—I could only tell that by looking at their bodies, the faces would be horses or tigers or God knows what—came on to me. Sheer hospitality and good manners I’m sure, but I was overwhelmed by nausea. The desire to puke became paramount. A surging tide inside of me that led nowhere and turned my legs to rubber.

  Somehow I found my way to the edge of the stream, where the water calmed after cascading down the canyon wall. I fell down and puked. Puked until I strained and heaved on nothing. I dipped my head in the water and shook myself like a dog. John Lennon’s Tibetan drums seemed to have stopped. I could hear . . . Minnie Riperton singing Dylan . . . ‘how does it feel?’ over and over again ‘how does it fee-ee-ee-eeell?’ way above soprano, like a cross between a boy treble, an angel and a dog-whistle—and I knew it was only in my head. That this was the ‘trip’. And I was the one who’d thought psychedelia was pure hokum. It’s pretty well the last thing I remember of a long night with the Moondogs—‘how does it fee-ee-ee-eeell?’ And, Minnie, I have an answer for you. Awful.

  I woke face down in the stream. It was daylight. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I felt lucky I hadn’t drowned. I raised my head and puked again. Tasted the acidity of bile and sucked in water from the stream. I was prising myself off the ground when a hand came down to grip one of mine and pulled. I was too heavy. I looked up at her. It was dog-woman, dog-woman with her own features once more, the flat little nose and the red tint of skin.

  ‘Again,’ she said, and I got to my feet feeling like Pinnochio on stilts.

  She stuck one shoulder under my arm and propped me up.

  ‘You eat one of Notley’s omelets?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know—he actually thinks that’s funny.’

  I didn’t.

  I looked straight ahead and tried to focus. The canyon seemed quiet, almost empty. A couple of mongrel dogs rolling in the dust, a couple of dozen hens scratching for worms.

  ‘They’ve all gone?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Notley too?’

  ‘Be back tomorrow night. Can you wait that long?’

  ‘Wait? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to move again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry none. You’ll be fine.’

  She sat me down in front of what I took to be some sort of domed teepee, a canvas and roadkillskin cross between the home on the prairie and Buckminster Fuller. She informed me, a little po-faced, that it was a sweat lodge.

  ‘Just what you need,’ she added. ‘Sweat the junk out of your body.’

  I sat and rested a good half hour before she came back to me.

  ‘Give me a hand to finish the fire. Won’t kill you to work a little.’

  About fifty yards from the lodge she’d begun piling up timber and dry branches over a pile of large, smooth, round stones.

  ‘If we finish this now, then you can sleep until it burns through.’

  ‘How long does that take?’

  ‘Hours.’

  It took about another half hour to pile up enough wood, then she put a light to it. We watched it flare up. Another half hour and it settled down into a searing slow burn and she said, ‘We can leave it now. High time you ate something.’

  I dozed off by the lodge. She woke me and stuck a bowl of clear miso soup and a couple of corn dodgers in front of me. I managed about half of it.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘It’s Ethel—Ethel Harvest Moon. And whatever you say next do not sing and do not even think of rhymes involving moon and June.’

  ‘It’s July.’

  ‘It’s damn near August.’

  ‘You . . . you don’t look like an Apache. I mean you don’t look like any Apache I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m Oglala.’

  ‘South Dakota?’

  ‘I was born in Montana, but South Dakota’s home. As much as you can call any place home. You got somewhere you call home?’

  I thought about it. Then I thought about it some more. Then I fell asleep.

  Ethel shook me awake. The sun had moved across the sky. I figured it to be about six in the evening.

  ‘I need you to help me. The fire’s burned down. Time to lift out the stones. I rolled them in, but they have to be lifted out. I can’t do that without you.’

  The stones were a stage beyond red hot, approaching the white—a kind of tangerine heat. I used an old manure fork to place five stones in a pit in the center of the lodge. Ethel splashed water over them and closed the flap. She began to strip off.

  ‘Now—we’ll be naked in there. But let’s get this straight. It’s a sacred place. You lay a finger on me and I’ll break it. Savvy?’

  She was naked already. All it took was one arm to hoist the dress over her head. She could have been the most desirable woman on earth. The state I was in, I would not have noticed.

  I disrobed slowly and in utter self-consciousness.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said in the hope I could distract her from looking at me. ‘Isn’t this where you see visions and spirits of the ancestors come to visit you.’

  ‘Oh, so you read a book on it? Big deal. You have a problem?’

  ‘No. I don’t think it’s a problem. It’s just that if spirits were to come to me . . .’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If spirits were to come to me . . . I don’t think there’s anything I have to say to them right now.’

  I pushed my Levi’s down to my ankles and stepped out of them. I could swear she was grinning at something.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. You don’t want to see spirits, you won’t see spirits. God knows, Notley’s done a sweat lodge every week for almost a year in the hope of seeing spirits—they haven’t favored him yet. You have nothing to say to them. I don’t think they have anything to say to him. Now get your skinny white butt inside and I’ll close up.’

  I have pleasant memories of it. One of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I had stepped into an oven for the roasting of human flesh. When Ethel climbed in after me and pulled the flap behind her we were in total darkness—not a chink to let in a single ray of light. I heard the hiss as she splashed more water on the stones, and then she began to chant in a language I had never heard before—my skin rolled with sweat and my blood ran cold. Maybe it was all those corny old Hollywood movies, Indians dancing in a circle while some white guy waits for the chop. After a couple of minutes she stopped. I was beginning to feel like I was suffocating, and with good timing she thrust back the flap and a blast of cool air rushed in. I gulped it in like water.

  ‘How does it feel?’ she asked.

  I’d heard this somewhere before. I gave the same answer.

  ‘Roll with it. It doesn’t get any worse—and you’ll get used to it.’

  ‘What’s with the chanting?’

  ‘I am invoking the spirits. Mother Earth, Father Sky.’

  ‘Is there a whole family we can’t see out there?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  And she sealed us in again. And she was right. I did get used to it. The sheer foreigness
of her chanting in Oglala or Sioux or whatever diminished as I came to hear it as a kind of music, and when my body said it had had enough she seemed to know instinctively that it was time to take, literally, a breather.

  After half a dozen chants I heard her say, ‘Your turn.’

  ‘Me? I said—I have nothing to say.’

  ‘They’d appreciate a prayer. Even a selfish one. Just pretend you’re phoning home. Your mother’s just glad to hear from you. She doesn’t mind that you’ve called to touch her for twenty bucks. Ask them for something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake . . . use your imagination!’

  I was too hesitant. I mumbled and she said, ‘Speak up. There may be some deaf gods out there.’

  ‘O Mother Earth, O Father Sky . . .’

  So far, so good.

  ‘We have an election due in a little over three years. If you’re listening up there and if there’s anything you can do about it, please don’t let it be won by another man in a suit.’

  I heard the hiss of water on stone, then Ethel’s voice.

  ‘Are you taking this seriously?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Well—she got me to laugh. That was something.

  We crawled out. I was feeling better already. I looked at Ethel. Buck naked and dusted in white powder. I looked down at me—the same effect. Salt. I was caked in salt.

  ‘Now we dunk in the stream.’

  ‘First I got to piss.’

  I stood with my back to her, aiming at the base of a bush. I heard her flop down into the stream, and she said, ‘I wouldn’t worry about the color.’

  The color? Good God, I was pissing pure Florida orange juice.

  ‘That’s because you lost so much liquid in sweat. It lasts a day or two. And don’t worry about the size.’

  The size? Good God, I was pissing through an acorn. What had happened to the damn thing?

  ‘That’s the dope Notley fed you. That passes too.’

  I passed a night in Notley’s bed. In the morning Ethel shook me awake. She was in shorts, T-shirt and hiking boots.