CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

MILA KINSLOW

(Excerpted from interview #MC1803/D)

Things really started getting sad after the sandwich shop got wrecked and the record store burned down. I heard something about one of our guys being inside when it got torched, but nobody talked about it, so I didn’t know which one, or what happened to him. After Sweet Pete and the other guys got sent out on sojourn, the vibe around the ranch got really weird.

“We need to drop some truth bombs in the shit stream,” Scary Larry said one night at the bonfire. Deva and the other goon who worked down at the hangar smiled and nodded their heads like they knew what he was talking about. I had no idea myself, and I could tell the other girls didn’t either. All we knew was that we wanted to keep our distance from those guys.

We had started to call the other goon Mac Nasty cause of the way he tried to grope us all the time. He smelled like moldy peanut shells and motor oil, and the skin under his fingernails was always dirty. He had this weird shaped ear where he said a piece got bitten off one time when he’d been in a fight, which I believed because he was straight-up mean. Scary Larry, though, was just plain nuts. He had a wall-eye that made him look even crazier than he probably was, but he was tall, and thick around the chest, and loaded to the gills most of the time.

In the beginning, when Pete and I first got to the ranch, nobody really paid much attention to those guys. Once in a while, a plane would fly in at night and fly out a couple hours later. The hangar was pretty much off-limits to everybody except Deva Ravi and those two, but as far as I could tell, nobody really paid it much attention anyway. We all had our own jobs and shit to do, so whatever went on down there was someone else’s movie, you know?

One time, Deva asked me and Aurora to go and meet the plane when it came in. What he really wanted was for us to fuck the pilot while they serviced the plane. We did it, which was okay, but then Deva’s goons decided they wanted a turn too. It was the first and last time that ever happened. That’s all I’m saying about that.

You’d think that we would have all been happy when we heard that Saigon had fallen, and that maybe the war would finally end. The squares in Washington said they were going to end the draft, but they kept issuing draft numbers anyway, so even though the whole lottery trip wasn’t happening at the moment, nobody my age really believed a word the politicians said. The way we saw it, the lottery thing was probably a setup of some kind. There was even a rumor about giving amnesty to draft dodgers and deserters, but we knew for sure that that was bullshit. Deva said it was The Man trying to trick those poor guys into coming back out into the open so that the Feds could toss them all in jail.

“You know why the dinosaurs died off?” Deva Ravi said to us one night. “Because the cavemen ate their eggs.”

I remember that his eyes looked like they were totally on fire, like he was radioactive. Scary Larry had started wearing that big hunting knife—in a sheaf or sheath or whatever you call it—on a belt around his waist. Had it with him all the time. He was all lit up too.

“See, the cavemen got tired of being stomped on all the time,” Deva said. “So they got smart, and snuck into the dinosaurs’ nests when they were out hunting and ate all of their eggs. Pretty soon, no more dinosaurs, right?”

We all kinda nodded, because his point sort of made sense, even if we had no idea what he was getting at.

“If we want to send a message to the Straights who want to kill us all and send us off to war, we gotta eat their eggs, man,” Mac Nasty said. “You dig what Deva’s saying?”

None of us really believed that Deva wanted to actually hurt anybody’s kids, at least I didn’t. I liked it a lot better when we used to sing songs and pass around a bomber joint, and talk about the stars and phases of the moon.

I missed Sweet Pete and the other guys, too, and it felt as though Deva had begun to move from seeking higher consciousness to no consciousness at all. He was operating the community by committee now, but the problem was, the committee members all lived inside his head.