Boonville (24 page)

“It's a wrap,” Blindman said, drink finished. “You mind helping me load the bags into the car?”

“They won't all fit into the trunk,” John told him. “You want to make two trips?”

“Just stuff the rest into the back seat,” Blindman answered. “Folks will think I'm making a dump run.”

John did as he was told, having his own bad decisions to worry about.

On Blindman's command, his wife popped the trunk and helped John heft the bags from the cabin into the vehicle. John said, “Hello,” but she ignored him like she had been ordered not to speak. Or maybe she was scared that John possessed the supernatural power of the squirrels. On their first trip to the cabin, John heard her mumble “Dios mio!” upon seeing the hundreds of carvings. After looking sideways at John, she took a rosary from her pocket and kissed it.

Blindman waited in the passenger seat looking as absurd as the parrot on his shirt. With the dope packed into the backseat,
there was no view through the rear windshield. Blindman's wife didn't seem to care, stealing another nervous glance at Blindman. For a second, John thought she was going to crack a smile at her brightly dressed husband, but she started the car and made a three-point turn. Before leaving, she looked at John and made the sign of the cross.

“Think about next year,” Blindman called from the car. “Keep the tradition alive.”

“No way,” John said, flanked by the gigantic squirrels. “See you later.”

“Not if I see you first,” Blindman yelled.

John heard him laugh. The unlikely couple drove away in a cloud of dust.

J
ohn made his way up Greenridge Road toward the Waterfall commune with a couple of wrong turns and only a few parts shaking loose from the Datsun, nothing so important that he felt the need to stop: a hub cap, a windshield wiper, a chunk of the rear end. He thought he had fixed his headlights but when he flipped on the hi-beams, the left one pointed into the trees, spotlighting squirrels. Driving slowly, he avoided the deer and rabbits that ran onto the road from the forest. He located the glass yurt near the inverted Atlas sculpture and parked next to the found-art heap, which the Datsun blended into seamlessly. John saw a trail not wide enough for a vehicle, leading to a building lit in the distance. He hiked toward the light.

The first person he encountered on the deck of the main house was a naked woman with wild blonde hair and pendulous breasts, crawling on her hands and knees. Trying to act cavalier, John asked her if she had lost a contact lens. The woman glowered at him. She had definitely lost something. Not only was it odd to be naked on all fours, outside, at night, but it was far too cold for that sort of behavior. John could see his own breath and steam misting near the woman's orifices.

His first question having been ignored, he politely inquired the way to Sarah's cabin. The woman barked twice and began to pee, in no particular direction. John watched urine dribble down the side of her leg, reminded of his first sight of a woman's pudenda; he was nine years old at Billy Fulbright's house. He went to use the bathroom in Billy's parents' bedroom and found Mr. and Mrs. Fulbright locked in a love embrace. John didn't quite know what the physical in-out in-out meant. It was still humping to him,
and nobody used the word “hump” once they knew its definition. Mr. Fulbright was behind Mrs. Fulbright, graciously saving John the sight of his penis, both of them panting with the expression of stumbled race horses. Mrs. Fulbright stood, and there it was, coming down the home stretch, a length out in front; Mrs. Fulbright's sunshine. She shrieked. It would be years later until John saw another woman's connie in the flesh and never would it seem so vague and forbidden. But more troubling was how he incorporated Mrs. Fulbright's scream into his idea of sex; it turned into an anxiety of being caught. John was certain someone other than he and his partner were coming. The first play of foreplay was to lock all doors. He wouldn't do it with anyone else nearby or if bedroom walls seemed thin. But the final effect was whenever someone mentioned sex, he still thought of Billy Fulbright's parents. Now this naked hippie woman on her knees was also going to be lodged in his memory like an insoluble dream.

“Can I help you?” a deep voice queried.

“Yes,” John replied, before seeing it was the giant who called himself Aslan that he had seen acting strange at the Boontberry Health Food Store. He was barefoot, wearing the same sarong, and his eyes were as glazed as two donuts. In his hands, he held what appeared to be a bushel of rabid weasels, clawing and squirming.

“I'm sorry, I found her like that,” John said, referring to the naked girl, deciding the best approach to the giant would be to apologize for his presence, immediately, and as often as possible.

“She's beautiful,” Aslan said. “Don't you want to take hold of her and push yourself inside? Feel her buck and squeal? Doesn't she sing to something animal in you, an ancient calling?”

John didn't answer. He was thinking about how he had made a series of bad decisions that had culminated in this final mistake of driving to the Waterfall commune.

“You can't reason away instinct,” Aslan told him. “We are the dominant sex, designed to spread our seed.”

“I'm looking for Sarah McKay,” John said, and even the naked girl looked nervous in the presence of the giant. “But I can go.”

“There is something special about a female on the verge of becoming a woman,” Aslan continued, and John saw the giant was bleeding at the wrists from weasel bites and weasel scratches. “It takes a man who has tasted the cycle at every spoke to understand her natural self. We are men and the Earth holds our destiny if we
listen to its rhythms: fire, water, air. Women are trained to hear those rhythms and follow those messages with their bodies. Men turn deaf ears to their natural calling. We should feel no guilt for what we do to the flesh. It is just a boundary for our conscience alone. And our conscience is not our soul.”

John was beginning to pray for some David to appear with a slingshot when a naked man crawled from the main house. He made his way slowly across the deck to the naked woman and sniffed at her brown eye. Then he barked. To John's dismay not very fiercely, and not at the giant. Sensing something amiss, the naked man looked up to see Aslan. A weasel thrashed loose from his hand and scurried into the woods. The naked man started to back away. The woman followed suit, leaving John flexing the muscles of his bladder alone on the deck with the giant.

“If you kill a man,” Aslan said, taking a mammoth step toward John, “all that is required is to return his body to the Earth.”

The giant's face twitched. He shrugged his shoulders and blinked. John was reminded of his father's Parkinson's. Something in the giant had also gone haywire, but John guessed it was pharmaceutical, not biological.

“I've put travelers into the ground without ceremony,” Aslan said, speaking faster and past John, not just above his head because he was taller, but addressing his words to the mountaintop. “I am not the son of God. I will not forgive those who trespass against me. I have boundaries that won't be crossed. If you steal from me, I will take from you what is most precious and return you a poor man to the dirt.”

John thought about the recently disappeared Balostrasi. It wouldn't have surprised John to notice his earring hanging from Aslan's lobe or to see that the Italian's blood had been splattered across his sarong. It also wouldn't have shocked him if the giant used his skull for a porridge bowl and started shouting, “Fe fi fo fum!”

“A thief steals nothing of value,” Aslan said, words seeming to rise up from Middle Earth as he took another step toward John. “To feel a person inside is what they desire, but they reach for objects instead of flesh. They touch the conscience, not the soul, and die without knowing either.”

“Dad,” someone called from the main house, halting Aslan's progress. “Can you help me with my math homework?”

A boy appeared in the main house doorway wearing a hooded sweatshirt and unlaced basketball shoes. He had a large forehead and not enough hair. His hands were the paws of a puppy who would someday grow into a big dog. They held an opened textbook. He seemed unafraid, although leery of his father.

“What did I tell you about interrupting, Raven,” Aslan scolded. “Can't you see I'm in the middle of something?”

The middle of what? John wanted to know.

“You said you'd help me with my homework,” the boy whined, picking at a patch of acne beneath his ear.

“I'm working, Raven,” his father countered, thrusting his hands forward as proof.

Which, for John, still didn't explain the weasels.

“Do you have any idea how many children I have?” Aslan said. “I can't play favorites.”

“What about Basil and Radicchio?” Raven asked, as if he had decided to order a salad.

“Those two are at a special age,” Aslan answered. “Remember the bedtime stories I used to tell you?”

Raven looked ashamed, cowering into himself with the humble body language of a boy half his size. It was then that John identified the most disturbing aspect of Aslan; he was “the man at the end of the block.” The dark presence in the shingled house his mother had told him to beware of as a child. No rides, no candy, no games of “I'll show you mine, if you show me yours.” Certainly, no bedtime stories. Physically they were different; “the man at the end of the block” was hardly a giant except in the minds of the children on John's street. He had been a pale specimen who defied the Florida sun by wearing dark suits and never sweating. He sat in his weed-ridden front lawn reading books wrapped in covers he fashioned from brown paper bags. His house was the first to be egged on Halloween. One day he moved. A fat woman with cats took his place. The end of the block was no longer off limits.

“What would you learn if I did your homework for you?” Aslan asked. “You have to become your own man.”

John's initial reaction was to ask if he could help Raven with his studies, but he didn't want to overstep any more boundaries or deal with any more naked hippies doing whatever it was that naked hippies did in the privacy of their homes. He could hear Janis
Joplin music coming from inside the building. He couldn't resist looking through the door that Raven had propped open with his foot. He saw a leather couch and a mural painted on the wall that seemed to commemorate the building of the structure, complete with a figure twice as large as the rest of the barnraisers. In the center of the room was a tree the building had been constructed around, only the trunk visible, the top disappearing through the roof. There was a crafts fair of mobiles, weavings, pottery, and mosaics. Paintings filled the wall adjacent to the mural. A couple of hippies sat reading magazines,
The New York Review of Books
, and a foreign
Vogue
, in armchairs built from telephone books and clear packing tape, one drinking a Diet Coke, the other smoking a joint. The naked woman John had met earlier was splayed on the floor with the naked man in a Greco-Roman wrestling pin. Another woman, clothed and standing, spritzed houseplants with an atomizer. Everyone was engrossed in their own activity, oblivious to the others.

“Are you the Squirrel Boy?” Raven asked.

For the first time, John felt like he might come out of this alive. Aslan was still standing too close for comfort, but the giant had become preoccupied with the crease in his arm near his elbow, staring deeply into the fold.

“Yes, I am,” John answered, nobody else seizing on this opportunity for further introductions. “I'm looking for Sarah McKay?”

“She's leaving,” Raven said, looking at his father. “I think she went to Mendocino with Lisa to say goodbye to somebody.”

If she were pregnant, John wondered if Sarah might not be seeing the father of her child, discussing plans, maybe even marriage. Eloping would be more her style. John could imagine Sarah having a quickie ceremony in Seattle or Buenos Aires or wherever people on the West Coast did that sort of thing. Las Vegas? Some blackjack, a wedding band, and then doubling down.

But he remembered Blindman saying Sarah was leaving town to have an abortion. John understood not being ready to have a baby, especially if Daryl was the father. But with a child, there was hope. With death, there was only death. An abortion may offer the chance for others to live fuller lives, but at the core of the decision was the loss of a life.

He recalled his own close call on the baby front with
Christina and how different things would have been if they had had a child. It had made him realize that they were playing for keeps every time they made love. Luckily, it had been two missed periods due to stress and diet pills. But if she had been pregnant, John wouldn't be in Boonville. He would be back in Miami appeasing Christina's desire for them to “get somewhere,” arguing over whether their child should attend public or private schools, and if it should be named Holden or Christopher, Helena or Caitlin, shamelessly jockeying for its affection.

John also remembered how Grandma would well up with tears when she heard a woman had “withstood” an abortion. That was her terminology, “withstood.” She was fervently pro-choice, saying, “A woman's body is not a man's decision,” but she had lost two sons in Korea and a daughter in a car accident, and was left with only John's father. No grandchildren other than John. “There is no worse suffering than for a mother to bury her child,” Grandma had claimed. “And to be the cause of that death, today or twenty years from now, there will be regret and a certain amount of self-hatred. It doesn't matter whether you have the operation in a hospital or in an alley with a coat hanger, the gravity of your actions will resonate within you. It is a viable option, but never a gratifying one.”

John understood there were decisions that altered the course of your life, whether you made them cautiously or not. But he also knew sometimes things just happened.

“Her mother's inside,” Raven said, interrupting John's thoughts. “She might know when Sarah's coming back.”

John now wondered what comfort or assistance he could possibly offer Sarah. Reports suggested that she had made up her mind about the next phase of her life. Looking at Aslan and Raven, the inside of the main house and her comrades, and knowing more about Boonville, John could see how Sarah could come to the conclusion that having a baby and sticking around the Waterfall weren't progressive decisions for a headstrong woman with artistic intentions. But he decided he would leave a note with his address and telephone number. For polar opposites, he felt they had too much in common to lose contact.

“Greta's inside?” Aslan asked, looking up from his elbow.

“Don't you hear the music?” Raven said.

Janis Joplin was singing “Get It While You Can.” Aslan
seemed to understand this was part of Greta's personal soundtrack, if not her theme song.

“Tell her I'm at the lab,” Aslan said. “I'm working on samples that glow in the dark.”

“Tell her yourself,” Raven said, trying to punish his father for not helping him with his homework, the same way, John thought, the young giant would later experiment with drugs and wear goofy clothing, dye his hair purple and not write home except to ask for money. Aslan looked ready to pound Raven into mincemeat for his insubordination, but was hesitant to approach the doorway to the main house. Obviously, the big man wanted to avoid Sarah's mother at all costs.