“Out of sight,” the girl says. “I can dig the old stuff. The old stuff is like old, but new, but old. You know what I mean?”
He lies facedown in the water and floats away, letting the soap suds trail off his skin. Eugene’s and the girl’s voices become tiny ants crawling through his outer eardrum into his inner eardrum, through his brain. He rolls onto his back, slaps the water, shakes his head. His hand hits something hard—a knee. He looks up into the face of a chanting boy sitting on a surfboard. There are others; they are all crowded on the surfboard, singing. He pushes away from them.
Now he is standing on the edge of the lake, bulrushes tickling his legs, water streaming down his naked body. Someone has laid a cloth of many colors around his shoulders, deep blue with pink and brown and green explosions of paisley all over. But he needs his clothes, his blanket, and the banged-up steel army canteen that once belonged to his father, the black Bakelite stopper attached by a little chain in a way that seemed miraculous when he was younger. He once believed war had to be a magic thing, littering such treasures in its wake—he didn’t yet understand that the treasures littered by war are people’s lives. Like his father’s. Like maybe that of Mike, over in Vietnam right now, or Luke, if their mom can’t wrestle him back to school fast, or Eugene. Or maybe of his own self, if the president ends educational exemptions.
Welcome to Woodstock, canteen. Welcome to the sixties.
There are his clothes. The arm of his shirt is thrown back as though waving to him. “I’m sorry, man,” he mumbles, slipping his long, thin legs into his jeans, losing the cloth of many colors. “I wasn’t just gonna forget about you.”
Watch out or you’ll end up like your uncle Paul, his mom said one time when he didn’t come home for dinner and didn’t call, either, when he just couldn’t bring himself to join the others. But it always just looks as though he’s running away, because he has yet to find anything to run toward. She wouldn’t have said that if he could find someplace he belongs. Something he could be good for.
“I wouldn’t leave you here,” he says, louder.
Music has started up in the distance, a rumbling echo, and he fumbles his feet into his sneakers, shoves his T-shirt into the back of his pants, picks up his blanket and the canteen, swings the cloth of many colors back around his torso. His movements become swifter and swifter until the cloth trails purple and green through the air in front of him, enveloping him in color, a cocoon of colors, like the blankets their mom wrapped Sissy in when she was still little, blankets worn thin from having swaddled his own baby body before Sissy’s, and Luke’s and Mike’s and Patty Ann’s before his.
Family. He is sure he did not leave Molly, not on purpose. They were sitting on the great heaving hill listening to the music; he, Molly, and Eugene. And when Joan Baez finished singing, no more than a sunflower-seed speck leagues away whom only he with his twenty-fifteen eyesight could make out, but with a voice louder than thunder, and the stage went dark, the three of them moved through the swarm of people as far as they could, settled Molly’s plastic tarp in a field, popped the two-person tent, bound themselves in their individual blankets, and squeezed inside together. Hey, man, Eugene said. Look at that: we’re bivouacking! and practically drowned in his own laughter. Sometime in the morning, awakened by the heaviness of the air in the tent, the risen sun on the canvas, they went looking for the portable toilets and fresh food, and all of that took what felt like hours, and while he was on line for something, some guy handed him something, which he took because they’re at the Woodstock rock festival and that’s how it is here, and then there was rain again and they started back to the tent but headed into the trees instead and Eugene said, Hey, man, where’s Molly? And that was it. Molly was gone.
Eugene doesn’t know where Molly is, either.
He shouldn’t have brought Molly. He should not have brought her. He. Should. Not. Have. He told her so from the beginning. There are about ten million freaks rolling around on this hillside, and Molly is one tiny drop of water somewhere among them. But she insisted: Francis, you gotta take me. Mom will be cool. And he said: I don’t know, Molly. You aren’t even sixteen. Molly laughed. I’ll be sixteen in ten days! Jesus, Francis, you’re only seventeen. C’mon, I’ll die if I don’t go. Country Joe and the Fish, and Canned Heat, and Janis Joplin. They say there’ll be, like, thirty thousand kids there! If you won’t take me, I’ll go on my own. I’ll hitch a ride. Maybe I’ll get stabbed and murdered, like Sharon Tate.
“Whoa, cat. Who you talkin’ to?”
The guy has a beard and glasses with edges that drop down onto his fat cheeks. A pipe made out of tinfoil is in his hand. Hair is flying off his arms and shoulders; it’s moving and swinging and jumping out at him, dark and springy.
He swipes the air to fend it off.
The guy puts up the hand not holding the pipe, and a thousand hands follow. The hair is waving. It’s alive. The guy’s arm is a caterpillar, orange and black, spotted.
He steps back, shields himself.
“Whoa, cat. Everything cool?”
His thoughts must have grown voices. He will never be able to have a secret again. He backs away from the caterpillar guy, trying hard not to think any thoughts, thoughts that could be heard. “No one. I was talking to no one.”
“Hey, just checking everything’s okay, friend. You look a little freaked out.” The guy walks on past the pond toward the trees.
Without knowing why, he follows. His feet rustle through the goldenrod, releasing breaths of tiny yellow seed. He stops when he reaches a clump of thin, gnarly apple trees to touch their bark, rough and alive against his palm. He no longer sees the guy, but he hears the music.
“Hey, Eugene,” he says softly, turning. It feels as though he’s traveled miles, but the lake is still there. “Let’s go listen to the sounds.”
Eugene is sitting with the girl on a rock on the edge of the water. The girl named Dawn. Dawn…hasting from the streams of Oceanus, to bring light to mortals and immortals.
He waves to them, and Eugene makes a peace sign back, his glasses glinting from the light off the lake. The girl is still smiling.
The music is louder now, a drum and a flute, and maybe a guitar. It’s not coming from the direction of the stage, farther away. What he hears is closer, a delicate motif against a larger print. Maybe it will lead him to Molly! Through the cluster of trees, and here’s a forest of little tents and a VW bus atop the mud in a clearing. The side door of the VW yawns, two guys sitting in its mouth. One taps on a drum, delicately but steadily, and the other holds a guitar. A girl with slippery braids and a puffy white shirt faces them, playing a flute, swaying. At first her face is hidden from him, but she turns and looks at him over the silvery tip of her instrument, and both her eyes and the glittery sound go straight into his chest.
“You know how to play?” The guy hands him the guitar. “I’m gone.”
He accepts the guitar and sits down where the guy was sitting, pulling the guy’s life around him like a new skin. Before his mom and Ronnie moved them to Phoenix, he worked weekends all one school year alongside Eugene, serving up cola and fish fries down by the pier, to save for his own guitar. Don’t be a fool and bring that, Eugene said when they set out yesterday morning and Francis picked it up. I’m not pushing another piece of cod again in my life.
He starts strumming “Angel of the Morning,” the first song to come to his head. The girl plays along on her flute. The afternoon slides into puddles of sound and people dancing, time passing like ripples made by a breeze. The music warps around him in huge ribbons until it begins to rain again and the drummer wanders off and the girl pulls him into the van and rolls shut the door.
In the obscurity, her eyes shine dark with a bright center. She pulls her white shirt off, and it flutters above her bare pale arms like a ghost. He rises to his knees and draws his shirt off as well. She pulls hard on his belt buckle, pulls down on his jeans. He lifts his hands wide and far like Jesus Christ on th
e cross and allows her to take his clothes; he will allow her to do anything. He is safe here with her in their Volkswagen capsule, the massive crowd kept outside. He pushes her down, lowers himself onto her. He lowers himself into her, fumbling until she puts her hand on his to help. She is soft, warm. He pushes hard, and the world explodes into a flash.
Everything, everyone that has ever worried him is gone. He himself is gone. He is a million trillion molecules thrown up in handfuls across the universe.
And yet he is whole; he is perfect. He could sob with relief.
“Baby,” she says, stroking his hair. “Baby baby.”
He hides his face in her neck. “I’m. I was. Jesus.” He rolls off and lies naked on his back. She moves onto her side and kisses his bare chest. She starts to sit up, but he pulls her down. He pulls her in close to him again, searching to return to that perfect place, holding the heat of his body against the heat of hers until they find it.
When they finally emerge from the van, the rain has stopped. The girl takes his hand. “Come on, baby,” she says. “Let’s hear the music.”
He allows her to lead him into the mass of people, over the vast muddy field, into the swaying, gaily colored army spread across the alfalfa amphitheater. She knows exactly where they are going. She knows everything. She must know where Molly is. His heart lifts. She is taking him to Molly! They jump over hands and arms flung out, body parts. They skitter through more bodies, some sitting, some lying, some standing. This is what Civil War battlefields must have looked like, strewn with undulant soldiers, but with air sweet from the smell of blood rather than dope. Heaving magnitudes of life, so close—the further she leads him into the crowd, the more his stomach turns. Vietnam would be still worse, bodies sunk in jungle, tangled in vines. He would run back into the trees, he would head back toward the road. But he has to find Molly. He cannot leave without his cousin.
The girl points and, leaping over a kid sleeping on a towel in the mud, pulls him down onto a tarp. About fifty feet to their right is the first of three huge red towers, pulsing with sound.
And it’s one two three,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Viet Nam…
The girl sings, too, clapping. Everyone is singing along with Country Joe and the Fish. He covers his ears to shutter the sound, but the shouting comes through his hands, through his skin, into his bones. He gives up. “Where’s Molly, man?” he turns to say to Eugene, except Eugene isn’t Eugene but some cat with colorless hair and a dark blue bandanna around his forehead and a pipe in his hand. He knows this cat. He’s met him somewhere. “Molly’s cool,” the guy says, dragging on the pipe. “Molly’s beautiful. Molly’s in the sky with diamonds.” The guy passes the pipe to him. He drags on it, then passes it on to the girl and lies back. Is Molly up in the sky? Instead, he sees his father’s image—not as he last saw him, crumpled on the lawn, the blood drained from his bronzed face, but young and fresh-cheeked in the army portrait his mom keeps on her bedside table, even now she’s remarried.
His daddy is in the sky with diamonds. But not Molly.
Tears spill down his cheeks. They roll down his neck and into his T-shirt, all the way into his jeans. He is bathing in his tears. He is not a stand-up guy.
“He’s having a bum trip,” the girl says. He’s laid his head down onto her lap. Raindrops. That is the wet. The music has stopped.
“Did you take the brown acid?” the guy who isn’t Eugene says. “What are you on, man?”
“I brought my younger cousin,” he says, staring up into the girl’s sunspot eyes, shooting flames of chestnut from their black centers into green and gold. “Like, I should have made her stay home. She’s only fifteen, man. I’m responsible for her, man.” His voice is rising, he cannot stop it, he can feel his heart, his throat, everything inside him rising.
“It’s cool, baby,” the girl says. Her white blouse is transparent from the rain. “She’s okay. It’s beautiful. Everything’s beautiful. Look at all these beautiful people.”
“He’s beautiful,” the guy who isn’t Eugene says, smiling at him but talking to the girl. “Like, I dunno, man, like, some kind of painting of Jesus. That’s some kind of beautiful kid you found there.”
“You found him,” the girl with sunspot eyes says. “You handed him your guitar. And he’s like honey sugar candy. Like Twinkies. Like Pixy Stix. Like a Tootsie Roll. Sweet sweet sweet.”
“You like my old lady?” not-Eugene asks him.
“Your…” he begins, struggling with a new panic.
“So when are you going over, man? Are you going over?” not-Eugene is asking him now. “Is that it, man? Is that why you’re freaking out? You been called up?”
“He’s not going over,” the girl says in a singsong voice. “He’s a baby. Baby baby baby. Sweet baby.”
“Not yet, you mean. Not yet. Fuckers.” The leather necklace around not-Eugene’s throat bobs. “Who’s Molly, then? She belong to you?”
The rain is falling harder, every single drop hits him and explodes, as though his face were a hill in the jungle and each raindrop a tiny liquid hand grenade. He jumps up, and the girl stands up with him, two in a sea of people. She takes his hand. “We’ll find her,” she says. “Your Molly.”
She’s leading him again through the unreal people, through the raindrops. The farther they walk, the more the crowd thins. They pass a grove of trees where a couple is cutting up a watermelon while listening to the concert on the radio. They offer up chunks of the bright pink fruit, and he feels the shock of food in his stomach. He hasn’t eaten for hours, or maybe days. Is there anything left that bread could buy to eat here? No one is selling local corn or lunch-size cartons of chocolate milk made from local cows along this path anymore. Eugene packed most of their food in the army-issue brown-canvas rucksack his dad had given him to use as a suitcase again this summer. It took my Dad through the Apennines, Eugene said, stuffing a package of sliced American cheese, a jar of Jif peanut butter, and a loaf of Wonder Bread into the oversize rucksack while he and Molly sat at Aunt Jeanne’s kitchen table. It can get us to Woodstock. They tossed some of the beer and cola in there, too, the rest in a box, the tent on top and everyone’s blankets thrown over it, and he and Molly carried it between them. Somehow he still has the canteen around his shoulder. He still has his blanket. Eugene has probably given all the food and beer away by now. That’s how Eugene is.
“Umm,” the girl with sunspot eyes says, licking watermelon juice off her fingers. “Groovy.”
And then suddenly she is gone. He is standing alone on the road, an open-mouthed endless yawn of crookedly parked abandoned cars, of puddles and swollen ditches. There is no crowd, hardly any sound louder than the sound of evening. Relief peels off layers of weight from his already lean body.
He hoists himself onto the hood of the nearest car and pulls his blanket around his torso. The glass of the windshield feels cool against his back and head. Above are stars, thousands of them, twinkling. There is Uranus again, god of the sky, father of the creatures on earth. The air sprinkles a dust of amplified music and country sounds over him and the blanket. The smell of mud and motor oil rises. The breeze blends together the sweet hovering remnants of grass and hashish.
The globe is slowing. The sky is clearing. The world is reassembling. He tucks his blanket all the way up to his neck. Sleep tugs on him and drags him under. It brings no dreams with it.
“I don’t know.”
He struggles to open his eyes. It’s still dark out; the stars are still shining. Hours may have passed or just minutes.
“That’s the password,” Molly says.
He touches her arm. It is solid.
He closes his eyes long enough to swallow the rush of his heart. “Password for what?”
“I don’t know.” She laughs. “The free concert. To get in. Can you believe we paid for our tickets? Such suckers.”
She leans over
the hood of the car, a dark silhouette in the heaviness of night.
“You look terrible,” she says.
“You smell terrible.” But she doesn’t smell terrible. She just smells like Molly. “How did you find me?”
Molly lifts her ankle-length granny dress and clambers up onto the hood. At fifteen, she’s taller than most boys her age. She’s not taller than he is, but their legs stretch side by side on the hood of the Chevy. “That was easy.”
“Yeah?”
“I just started walking away from the crowd, in the direction of the highway.”
“I wasn’t going to leave without you,” he says. “I was looking for you.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“A lot of people here. More than thirty thousand.”
“Yeah. A lot more. Ten times more.” She smiles and slugs him. “Pretty far out.”
He opens the flap of his blanket, and she squeezes under it. They lie there, looking at the stars, listening to the faraway sound of music.
“Bet your brother Luke wishes he were here,” she says.
Maybe Luke is here. Who knows? “There’s Sagittarius,” he says.
She searches the sky. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” He uses a finger to trace the archer for her. “See? There’s his centaur body. There’s his shield. There’s his lifted arm.”
Molly pulls the filthy blanket further up over her, claiming most of it. She tucks her chin in. In the dark, she looks even more like Aunt Jeanne than usual—long-faced, coconut-haired. “You know what I’ve always thought was kind of strange?”
“What?”
She giggles. “How can there only be male centaurs? I mean, wouldn’t there have to be female centaurs, too? So there would be, you know, new centaurs?”
He remembers the girl with sunspot eyes. He thought getting it on with a girl would be the ultimate trap, but it turned out to be the opposite. For a brief minute—he winces; a very brief moment, the first time around—he disappeared entirely. Now he wants to do it again and again. He wants to find that girl. He wants to find all the girls. All the Joans. All the Lisas. He wants to disappear over and over again into them. They won’t own him. They will free him.
Shining Sea Page 8