I heard a screen door open. It clattered shut. I looked up at the porch and saw—for lack of a better etcetera—Earth Mother. She was standing at the top of the steps with her arms folded. She was a biggish woman, maybe thirty, wearing a loose blouse and a long skirt. She was barefoot—I could tell because she didn’t have any shoes. Her hair reminded me of my own. It was longer though, dark brown, and hung clear to her waist. I’m not entirely certain if there is a direct cultural connection between hippie women and the women’s liberation movement, but I suspected that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
She was wearing a smile though.
“Are you hungry, stranger?” she said in a voice so softly timbered that I almost couldn’t make it out. It was as if she was imitating the hippie men who were famous for talking in breathy whispers during the sixties. But this sounded like the real thing. She confirmed it after she took her time coming down the steps and walking among the kids and approaching me. She reached out with both hands and took my right hand in hers. “If you are hungry, we will give you food. If you are thirsty, we will give you water. You are welcome to share in everything we have.”
I got rattled. I had been psyching myself up to break into a sales spiel, but she threw me for a loop. I couldn’t remember the last time anybody had welcomed me anywhere. However, there was the possibility she was playing mind games with me, so I decided to “go with the flow.”
“The guy in the pickup truck invited me to lunch,” I said, pointing off toward the fallen tree where the dust of the passing vehicle was settling.
She turned and looked that way, raised her palm above her brow and studied the empty landscape. Then she looked back at me. “That would have been Otto,” she said softly.
There you go. Not Peter but Otto. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that Dennis turned out to be named Brent. Otto and Brent—the gate guards. I never did learn the third guy’s name. But I did find out that he wasn’t a strong-arm man. He was just a kid who liked to ride in the bed of the pickup.
“Then you’ll join us?” she said.
A red flag went up in my mind—a rather worn and tattered flag, I might add. Any time I hear the word “join” I get edgy.
“Right on,” I chirped.
If my brain was going to start interrupting me every five minutes and parsing every damn word it heard, I was just going to have to ignore it, the way wild teenagers ignore teachers. I was going to be here only long enough to find out where Janet and Vicky were and see if they would be willing to flee for their spiritual lives.
“What have you brought us?” Earth Mother said, looking toward the open door of the van.
Again—a red flag, this time at the word “brought.” I did not “bring” them anything. I was a salesman.
“Knickknacks, trinkets, books and toys, clothes for girls and records for boys.”
I was winging it, all right?
Earth Mother’s placid smile broadened, and she stepped toward the van. At this point the kids began crowding around the van, too, and I noticed that there were now smiles on their faces. Some sort of “okay” signal seemed to have been given. That sickened me. People shouldn’t have to wait to be told to smile, especially free spirits who have turned their backs on the anal retention of the uptight middleclass. I was really starting to get into this.
“Feel free to crawl inside and browse,” I said. “If you see something you like, make me an offer. Doctor Lovebeads does not believe in price-fixing.”
I walked to the rear of the van and opened the back door. Ingress and egress, that’s how I live, that’s how I love, that’s how I increase my customer base.
“What’s this?” a boy said, holding up an 8-track tape.
“Oh my goodness,” Earth Mother said with a friendly chortle. “I haven’t seen one of those since the seventies.” “But what is it?” the kid said.
“That’s an eight-track tape,” Earth Mother said.
The kid got a questioning frown on his face.
I grew embarrassed. I should have just left the damn things at the Salvation Army store. But for some reason I had been expecting the hippies to be older than they turned out to be. Okay. I’ll admit it. Half of the 8-tracks were mine.
“It’s like a cassette tape, man,” I said, leaning into the rear where the kid was kneeling. “They don’t make them anymore. That’s what’s playing on my stereo right now.”
The kid glanced into the front seat, then looked back at me, “This is kinda neat,” he said, fingering the plastic box. “How come they don’t make them anymore?”
I sighed.
“I … don’t … know,” I said, which was true. Why did they stop making Fizzies? Why do people stop doing anything?
By now the girls were plucking blouses from the racks and draping them in front of each other. The boys were fingering the paperbacks and lifting LPs and examining the titles. A cold fear gripped me. What if they asked me to explain what a record was?
A bell started ringing. It sounded like one of those triangle things that farmers rap on to call the hired hands in from the fields, like at the start of The Real McCoys TV show. If you’re not familiar with The Real McCoys I won’t press the issue. It starred Richard Crenna though. He later became Rambo’s commanding officer. If you don’t know who Rambo is, I might as well resign from the human race.
The kids who were inside the van suddenly began shuffling out. I noticed that they also put back whatever they had been examining. The girls re-hung the blouses, and the boys slid the LPs back into the working-class cardboard boxes that I had used in lieu of uptight mahogany shelves.
Another signal had been given, obviously by the metal triangle. The Eloi gathered in a silent group, no longer smiling. They weren’t surly though, they just weren’t smiling. But to me that has always meant “surly.” If people aren’t smiling at me, I get worried. It’s an ego thing.
“Let us now go to the feasting place,” Earth Mother said, and began herding the kids like chickens up the road toward the fallen tree. I stood there staring after them, Earth Mother turned to me and said softly, “The feasting place is on the hill. Come.”
“Let me close up the van,” I said.
“No need,” she said. “Your possessions are safe.”
This made me feel good. Not the “safe” part, but the fact that she described them as MY possessions.
“Groovy,” I said. I walked away from the van with the doors standing wide open. This normally would have bothered me, but for some reason it made me feel wild and free. It made me feel like I could run around in circles in the front yard and nobody could stop me. It wasn’t a good feeling.
Nevertheless I went with the flow. I did feel a bit uneasy about the van itself though. After all, it belonged to Wally. Ever since I had borrowed it the previous evening, my Univac had been filing away excuses that I could draw upon to explain any damage to the van, whatever that would eventually turn out to be. I had faith in my Univac. It generates all-purpose excuses even when I’m sleeping. It’s sort of like the print-spooler on my RamBlaster 4000.
The group walked in a loose formation up the dirt road. I stepped alongside Earth Mother and made a point not to march instep with her feet. She might interpret that as conformity. I had to keep looking down at her skirt to time her footsteps so we would be out of synch, but then I noticed she was looking over at me, and all of a sudden Catholic guilt jumped out of a tree and landed on my shoulders because I was staring at her skirt—and I think we all know what’s underneath skirts.
“Did you make that dress yourself?” I said, thinking faster than I had ever thought except when suspected of murder.
“Yes. We make many of our clothes here. Some of the boys manufacture leather belts that they sell in the city.”
“What city?”
“Boulder. Sometimes Denver.”
I scrambled to keep this conversation going. Thank God we were drifting farther away from the subject of legs. Farther! I was beginning to understand the works of Ken Kesey in a new light.
“Maybe we can do some bartering,” I said. “I’m into the trade trip, too. Money isn’t everything.”
“It isn’t anything,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
I nodded, but it took some effort, given the fact that I had spent the past fourteen years rising at dawn in order to collect a whole lotta nothing.
We were approaching the felled tree, and I readjusted my estimate of its girth. The trunk was more like ten feet in diameter. It rested directly across the road. I’m talking a ninety-degree angle, if you think of a crossbar as an angle. I know mathematicians do, but if it isn’t on a diagonal, it isn’t an angle to an English major. Anyway, I was astonished by the sight of the tree blocking the road, and I wondered how it had gotten there, beyond the obvious laws of physics.
I wanted to ask, but I refrained. I didn’t want to come on like Mister Ask-A-Million-Questions until I had gotten to know these people better. I was trying hard to not completely be myself. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but fighting temptation does not come natural to me. Refraining from succumbing to instant gratification takes at least one set of unusual circumstances, and I was dealing with a couple right at that moment: a hippie commune high the Rockies, and missing girls. So instead of asking how the tree had gotten there and who the hell had chopped a path wide enough for a pickup truck to pass through, I simply stared at the age-rings as we walked between the high walls. I felt like Moses.
The land leveled out after we passed through the tree. To our left was what appeared to be an adobe cabin. Parked next to the cabin was an ancient trailer-house. Not as ancient as the trailer in The Long, Long Trailer starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, but more of a mid-sixties model, squarish, smaller, pre-RV (road vehicle). Who do you suppose the genius was who named the “road vehicle”? I don’t know about you, but I never did buy into the ending of The Long, Long Trailer. Why would Desi go back to a woman insane enough to hide a ton of rocks inside their trailer? Did she really think she was going to get away with that crap? She could have gotten them killed on that mountain pass fer the luvva Christ. Talk about foreshadowing. I pegged their marriage as doomed from the get-go. Thank God for Fred and Ethel Mertz. They saved the sitcom as far as I’m concerned.
Thirty yards farther along, the land rose to another plateau, and from the top edge trickled a small stream, which meandered down the hill past the small, small trailer. As we walked along I kept scanning the landscape, which I had learned to do in the army. But I wasn’t just sizing up the terrain and noting escape routes, which had become habitual with me during KP. I was looking for Janet and Vicky. I hadn’t seen them so far. But I did see something that sort of freaked me out. A few naked people were walking along the rim of the farther plateau.
“What’s that?” I said, pointing at the naked people.
“That’s the pond,” she said.
“The pond?”
“It’s a man-made pond,” she said. “We use it for swimming.”
I almost said, “Who made it?” but caught myself in time. I was relieved though. At least a bunch of free luv wasn’t going on up there. Or was it? I felt guilty squinting at the naked people, but I wanted to know if Janet and Vicky had shed the last remnants of civilization, i.e., clothes. I didn’t see them. I counted three males and three females wandering around. They appeared to be gathering up and putting on their remnants. It was lunchtime.
The group stopped in front of the adobe cabin. The good odor of something cooking drifted from the jerry-built front door of the cabin. A wisp of smoke rose from a chimney. The cabin was very saggy-looking. I figured it was man-made. By that I mean as opposed to machine-made. Then it occurred to me that everything that isn’t natural is man-made. This place was starting to make me feel insightful. Booze does that, too.
“This is the feasting place,” Earth Mother said.
There was the imprint of a large circle engraved in the dirt. The kids began seating themselves on the circle. I figured the circle was butt-made. The stream that trickled from higher up bisected the circle. I didn’t know if this bisection was a coincidence or if it was an element of a symbolic ritual, like candles lined up along a table where rich people eat. The primitive rituals of the wealthy fascinate me.
But it was kind of cool to have a “river” running down the middle of the dining room table. I sat cross-legged on the ground next to Earth Mother and waited to see how this feed would play out. All of the boys sat in the circle, but a number of girls went into the adobe and began bringing out bowls of soup and plates of beans.
Uh huh.
Sexism!
June Cleaver could have written that script.
Rebellion.
Give me a break.