The drive down to Santa Monica was uneventful and blissfully quiet. The radio stayed off and there was no chatter about things that didn’t matter, or that did matter but we couldn’t change. There was a certain comfortableness between the young white woman and me that I wouldn’t understand for many years to come.
“Just follow the coast highway up,” she said when we got down to the beach.
I wasn’t expecting the drive to have any kind of emotional effect on me. After all, I had taken that ride a hundred times since moving to L.A. in 1946. But the last time I’d cruised up that highway, in the wee hours, I was barefoot, drunk, and heartbroken.
As I passed Sunset Boulevard where it ran into the highway, my breath was loud in my ears like a bellows, and my hands were shaking nervously on the wheel.
“What’s wrong, Easy?” Coco asked. It’s a good thing she did, because I might have become the man I had been when I drove headlong off the road otherwise.
“I was just remembering the accident.”
“What accident?”
I told her about the last night before I awoke from my partial coma.
“Sounds more like a suicide attempt than an accident,” the clear-eyed, overly blunt young woman said.
This straight talk made me smile and relax.
“Yeah, it does,” I said. “I learned back in the army that when a man’s at war his impending death has no more hold on him than a drink of water or the need for a nap.”
“What war?” she asked, looking around at the road in front of us.
“We’re always at war,” I said, not really thinking about the words I spoke. “Vietnam is a war we’re in. But not only that—the Strip is a war of the new against the old, my skin is a war not of my making, and love … love is a war too.”
“That’s very romantic, Mr. Rawlins,” Coco said. I think she meant it as a compliment.
After that we drove for over an hour. Coco took one of the three books from her velvet bag and began reading. I didn’t mind the silence.
My mind was filled with images and imaginings about life before and after the car crash. I was thinking about sharecroppers again: those small-bodied, powerful men and women who dragged bulging sacks up to five times their size across fields of cotton. This image seemed the appropriate metaphor for my life. That huge sack was my house, my car, my job hunting down a boy I never met. Rather than a burden, this weight, this millstone was my chance at deliverance. If I could survive that labor then my rest would be deserved.
We’d passed through Oxnard and Ventura and were well on our way to Santa Barbara and Isla Vista when Coco said, “You see that sign that says Caller’s?”
Up ahead was an unofficial little white sign, like a flag of surrender on a green pole that had the name rudely painted on it.
“Yeah. That’s not a regular highway sign.”
“There’s an action group called Puck and His Magic Tricksters that puts up signs like that for hippie folk. It tells us where the magic is at.
“About a mile up is this dirt turnoff to the right. You can tell because there’ll be just a green stick to mark it. You go in and there’s an underpass to the beach. That’s where you can get in to hike up to Caller’s.”
I followed her directions, making it down to a leveled lot where there was nary a car. I parked and got out. The salt air was lovely. I breathed it in, hardly thinking of the night when I followed that scent over the side of a mountain.
“Come on,” she said. “The path is back this way across that little stream.”
The stream was just a trickle and the dense foliage beyond might have daunted me except for the Gator’s Blood. I was at full tilt at that moment, ready for anything—at least, that’s what I thought.
“It just looks impassable,” the educated hippie said, “but after about twenty feet of bush there’s a little trail.”
This was true. The trail was actually a creek bed that had gone dry. It was rocky and uneven, but I welcomed the irregular pace, because this was all a part of my rejuvenation. It was my Yellow Brick Road. This was the path Mouse had set me on, that Mama Jo medicated me for, that I had to travel if I was going to make it home in one living piece.
As I walked I felt that something was missing. After a while it came to me that it was the pain in my ankle that was absent. I wondered at the power of Jo’s elixir. She was a backwoods genius and I was the nonbelieving beneficiary of her craft.
We hiked up a pretty steep incline for twenty minutes or so. Coco was breathing hard, but I fell into my role as a GI in the Italian Alps and the walk was like nothing to me.
When we got to the clearing the young woman sat down on a fallen tree and I squatted next to her.
“Is this it?” I asked.
“I don’t get it, man,” she said. “This morning you could hardly climb down a ladder but now you run up this hill like you were a mountain goat or somethin’.”
“I just needed to get warmed up. It this it?”
“It’s what most people call Caller’s Creek, but it’s not where we’re going. Across the way there’s an old oak tree and behind that are these two big boulders. If you go between them for thirty feet or so there’s another path that leads down into Rev’s Commune.”
I stood up to look around.
“I think you’ve ruined your suit,” Coco said.
She was right. The cuffs of my pants were stained beyond cleaning, and there were spots of tree sap on my jacket, but I didn’t care.
“Pretty silly for me to be dressed like this,” I said.
“You didn’t know.” Coco got up and marched us to the oak tree and then around to the close-standing sandstone boulders.
It was a tight fit for me down the corridor of stone, but I made it through.
On the other side was a proper trail under the sun-dappled shade of various trees leading downward. This decline was a relief for Coco.
The pace was faster and we reached a turn in the path in less than fifteen minutes. Instead of continuing on, Coco studied the bushes to our right and spread them apart.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Terry has these friends up here who keep to themselves. It’s like a commune but not everybody is invited to stay. I’m pretty sure that’s where Vixie took your friend.”
“Lead on.”
The tiny zigzag path beyond the wall of bushes brought us to a stone ledge that looked down upon a crude campsite which seemed empty except for one occupant—a bare-chested black man with his arms bound behind him, around a pretty thick sapling elm. His head was bowed as if in sleep or defeat, and my heart sang an unbidden, bitter song of revenge.
“Is that him?” I asked.
“You don’t know what he looks like?”
“All I’ve seen is the picture, and his head is hanging down.”
“That’s Evander.”
“It’s usually just four guys. I don’t know their names. There used to be a street preacher named Rev that lived here, but after these guys moved in he went up north.”
“I don’t have to know their names,” I said, needing to challenge something.
“These guys get grass off a boat that comes up from Mexico every two weeks or so. Terry buys a few keys from them now and then. But he doesn’t like them too much.”
Just then three long-haired men came out from behind a tree at the far end of the camp. I laced my fingers together so that I wouldn’t grab my pistol and go down there shooting.
The men spoke to each other but we were too far away to make out what they were saying. One of them, sporting dirty blond hair and wearing a dark red shirt, nudged Evander with his foot and the young man jolted awake.
“I don’t remember,” the prisoner said loud and clear.
Redshirt leaned down and slapped him.
“We should go get the cops,” Coco said.
“What’s on the other side of that tree where they came from?”
“It’s a shed they built to hold the dope until they move it.”
“Come on.”
I was a sergeant again, in the army again, waging war on the Germans—the absolute white men of the twentieth century—again. My army was a brown-haired white girl who fell into line behind my command.
We worked our way through the wilderness around the smugglers’ camp. When we got to the storage shed I went inside and found it vacant. Maybe the fourth man had joined his friends. That was a stroke of luck for him, because I would have certainly strangled him as I had done to five Germans during my brief tenure as defender of the American way.
There was a kerosene lantern and a cheap pine table in the room that was piled high with plastic bundles of marijuana. I took the glass guard off the lantern, lit the wick, turned the flame up high, and placed it directly under the table. Then I hurried out and gestured for Coco to head back the way we’d come.
“What did you do?” she asked as we went.
“Made a diversion.”
“A diversion for what?”
“For I don’t kill them hippies like I want to do.”
Back at the ledge I could see that all four hippie men were having a meal around their prisoner. Evander was wild-eyed, looking back and forth between his captors. I studied my breathing and waited for my moment.
“What did you do back there?” Coco asked after a minute or so.
And, as if in answer, Redshirt yelled, “Smoke!”
He pointed at the air above the trees. Their stash was on fire and so the whole tribe rushed to put it out.
“Come on,” I said again to Coco.
We ran down to the campsite and I used a knife from one of the tin plates to cut Evander’s bonds.
His hands were swollen and he cried out when the rope was cut.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Friends of your mother, Evander,” I said. “Now get up, because we got to run.”