A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (15 page)

But it wasn't Charlie; it was someone else. Someone or something blocking out Charlie's light or filling in the hole of
darkness Charlie had opened up, compensating for Charlie's vibes, whatever they were—Yin, Yang; black, white. Fixing the hole.

He was clean, that's the first thing that came to mind. Straight-looking, like a guy in the Marines or a cop; his face smooth, clean-shaven, not even sideburns. Black cap over his head like he was dressed to go on a creepy-crawly. And he was talking to her, inside her head the way Charlie did sometimes when they were all high on something and he was next to her on a mattress touching her legs and tits as if he were thinking of buying her like one of the horses out back. Words in her head now too, but from a space totally new to her:
Tanya and you should go—right now. Take your daughter and leave . . .

This new cat flickered and glowed like something she would see when she was on acid—he had this freaky black-light kind of glow around his shoulders and head even though he was standing behind the car in the shadow of Swartz's trailer.
Tanya. Tanya. Tanya. Tanya.

This voice in her head battling with Charlie's. Charlie's voice like a background hiss on an old record. It came to her then that it had never let up since the first day she met him—the soundtrack of this movie she was living.

Now these other words were breaking through:
Go get your daughter and get the fuck out of here.

But Charlie wanted her for the piggy run, the knife in her hand part of him—his love machine in her hand pointing the way. Helter Skelter. She had been chosen. It was all about Revelation. Revolution 9.

.
.
.
go get your daughter, put her in the car and get the fuck out of here.

The weird glowing figure moved closer: his hand was coming up, reaching out to her.

“Get thee behind me, Satan.” She said this out loud, then turned toward the light of the yard, the saloon, to Charlie standing with the others. It was like looking at the sun. Like breathing pure oxygen.

She still had the knife in her hand, a bayonet, really, part of Charlie's stash of the army-surplus shit he was hoarding. The black tape handle making it feel more like something from a toolbox.
Stick it to the Pigs. Stick it to the Pigs.
Charlie's words in ascendance now, eclipsing. She saw him turn then and step off the boardwalk in front of the saloon, his eyes swinging round—lighthouse eyes sweeping round—and the others like mechanical dolls turning with him.

The man beside her, the glowing figure, faded like a dying flashlight. He stood before her now—solid. No more disco strobe thing happening, thank God, she thought. He was shorter than before, as if the glowing, pulsing version of him had been standing on something or floating in the air. Real all of a sudden. Downer-real in his wool hat and black jeans. Wearing black clothes like the rest of them now, but they weren't quite normal: it was as if the outfit had come from a movie costume department—there was something weird about it her mind couldn't grab on to. He was clean, though: clean-cut; like a narc, sort of. His clean soft face like a little boy. He moved closer; his mouth was saying things she could really hear now. And his voice was like a shaft of clear light, somehow. Breaking the spell:

“I'm not from around here, Linda, but I know who
you
are and I know what Charlie's up to. If you don't get out of here right now you're going to regret it for the rest of your life.”

As he began to speak Simon felt the weight of a body, his own body, suddenly pull him to earth.
I've done it. Landed in the past. A full-blown CM.
“He wants you to kill for him, Linda.” His voice sounded odd, distant—attenuated like a voice on an overheard phone conversation. His throat felt raw; he was breathing air older than he was. “Kill innocent people, young mothers just like yourself—pregnant women. All she wants to do is have her baby. That's what she's going to say just before she dies. ‘I just want to have my baby'—just like you. You're going to have another one, right? A little brother for Tanya?” Simon felt as if he were preaching to her but that's what the situation called for—a lecture. To get through the drug fog and the Manson brainwash bilge her head was full of. He could feel it working through the color, the scent of her thinking—that's the way he perceived it then: it was as if she were shedding waves of pheromones, odors—the stench of what Charlie had filled her with. It was all coming out of her. And Simon's words were filling the air with the scent of hibiscus and roses, lavender and vanilla extract—fresh-baked cinnamon rolls. Yes. All that Norman Rockwell stuff. Whatever he could come up with to drive away the stink of Charlie.
Jesus Christ, I'm doing it! Talking to someone right here in 1969!

Linda was thinking how calm his voice was. And suddenly everything he said made sense to her—as if she'd woken from a bad dream, as if she'd been hypnotized and now she was coming out of it—his clear words like someone snapping their fingers. “He's killed already, Linda. Shorty, and that guy Hinman. You've heard those names, right?” She
had
heard them—from Sadie and the others, when Charlie wasn't around—they spoke their names like cusswords, holy words
Charlie had sole rights to. “Go get your daughter, Linda. Get in the car right now, find your daughter and get the hell out of here before it's too late. You've got to believe me.”

“Who are you?” she finally said, moving closer. At the same time feeling Charlie's eyes eating into the back of her head. Preying on her thoughts, pushing buttons. She swiped at the stranger with her knife and his arm fell away. Where she had cut him glowed for a second, like before but he kept talking to her:
“Fuck, what'd you do that for? Get out of here, for Christ sake. Get your daughter
out
of here!”
He faded into black-light poster flashes again. His voice squawked like a bad phone line.
“Get the hell
. .
.”

“Hey, Linda. Who you talking to? What the fuck's going on?” Charlie's voice this time—from over by the saloon.

Linda dropped the knife and got in the car. She turned the key and the engine sputtered for a second, then came to life. She put it in drive and stepped on the gas—the back wheel dug and spun through gravel and sand—some of it clattered against the side of Swartz's trailer. More voices then—squeaky giggly voices, then Tex's voice, and Charlie's like a knife in her ears. She sped past the corral back toward the creek to where the children were: the trailer they were all sleeping in tonight—Tanya, her baby.
One
of her babies. It seemed as if she were awake for the first time in days. Awake and aware of exactly what she had to do. What her responsibilities were: all lined up before her like the rungs of a ladder, steps out of a dark stinking hole—one rung leading to the next.
Get Tanya; get the fuck out of here. Go right to Chatworth—the cops.
The police station she remembered seeing that time they had gone out to dig old food out of the supermarket Dumpster.
Think of your baby, Tanya, and the one inside you—then think about
yourself.
Her mind was dizzy with it all. Everything seemed turned inside out or the right way up: Charlie not Jesus after all—it seemed so insane all of a sudden—more like the Devil. And all the shit he had been feeding her these past weeks, all the crap about Revolution 9 and the messages in the Beatles music about Armageddon. All turned round in her head now.

She got out of the car and yanked at the falling-off door of the trailer. Mary was playing den mother, smoking a cigarette and breast-feeding her own kid on the bed in the corner—she barely looked up. Linda could hear Tanya's voice calling to her then, out of the squeals and babble and baby-shit stink. The kids looked like a nest of newborn mice, a knot of little bodies writhing on a dirty mattress.
Kids living like rats,
she thought.
Worse off than the fucking horses out back.
She wanted to take them all but she knew she couldn't—the rungs of the ladder again. First things first:
Tanya. Out of here. Then the cops.

She grabbed Tanya and went back outside without saying anything. She heard Mary's voice as the door slammed but she didn't look back. She put Tanya through the driver's-side door and jumped in after her. “It's okay, baby. We're going home,” she said as they pulled away.

Charlie was out by the corral along with the others by this time; Sadie was jumping up and down, waving her arms and yelling—trying to flag her down. Linda put her foot to the floor and the car swayed through the loose sand and gravel. Tanya was bouncing around in the seat; she fell toward Linda and started to cry. The beam of the one headlight that worked swung around and played across the piles of lumber and
broken
-down cars—and all the people in her way all of a sud
den. She almost hit Brenda, and Tex kicked at the side of the car as she gunned it onto the road.

The only one not moving was Charlie. He'd climbed up on an old stage-prop buckboard; he just stood there through it all, pointing at her as she sped by, zeroing in on her with his outstretched hand, straight out from his chest like a half-raised Nazi salute.

Simon tumbled back, in slow syrup motion that rippled into a stuttering, strobing bone-rattle of a ride. Through eddies and vortices that finally spit him out into deep silence—it was as calm and compliant as the bottom of the pool after a particularly good dive.

Fight your way home, fight your way home. Come up for air.
He was lost for an instant—disoriented, not knowing up from down. This way, that. Till he finally broke the surface.

Back in his room at Calliope. In a cold sweat. He was trembling; and his heart was trying to break down the door of his chest.
Not like a real dive,
he thought.
No crowds cheering this time.
Silence . . .

And his arm was on fire: he felt a searing line of pain below his elbow.
Jesus. Fucking bitch was trying to kill me.

He had touched down in the right place, at least; he knew that much. The right night? He wasn't sure. He looked over at his clock radio; he'd been out of it for twenty minutes. His lungs sparkled with smog itchiness when he breathed. He opened his eyes, pulled off his wool hat, and sat up. There was a shallow wound about three inches long across his right forearm.

Maybe I imagined it all; maybe I just fell asleep and dreamt
it all. Cut myself with my own fingernails.
He remembered watching this hippie chick, Linda Kasabian (it
was
her, he could see her name in the background of her thoughts, written on the sky of her consciousness, the sky like a blue canvas tent with graffiti scrawled across it, airbrushed with her identity), finally get in the car and drive off. Mission
accomplished
—maybe. The fucking cut on his arm, though—that was
definitely
not part of the plan.

Thanks a lot, Linda baby. It was fun while it lasted, wasn't it? We'll always have Spahn's Movie Ranch.

I touched down; I was actually there.
It was easier than he'd ever imagined (harder than he'd ever imagined!).
Making history before I was even conceived of.
Corporeal manifestation in the past.

Changing history.

In the morning he would check it out. One thing altered, one small incident—but what about the ripple effect? How much damage, how much repair work? Maybe nothing. All a dream.
If that's the case, why does my fucking arm feel like it's ready to fall off?

Sharon Tate—the comeback years . . .

Simon woke up dreading the day to come—his morning hard-on like a bookmark in his dream: where the sound of a slamming car door had slammed the book shut. Waking up to the day as if it were another lap of the pool in an Olympic event he had no interest in—time trials that went on forever.
No. You don't do that anymore; stay away from the water. No more fucking gravity. You never have to hit the water again. Not even the sky's the limit.
His arm still hurt and that brought it all back—where he had gone last night, what he had done, or not done.

He got out of bed and opened the blinds—the sun was shining, the brush on the side of the hill random, clinging—if it had changed since yesterday, he couldn't tell. It amazed him that here, even in the tropics, life could be so fragile, on the dge.

He turned on the TV. CNN—the continuous bowel movement; the same shit as yesterday.
New shit happening! Live!
This war, that war, a train wreck in Italy—a mud slide in Peru; a bomb going off somewhere, another somewhere else—
different
brands: Irish, Syrian, Serbian. All the same ingredients, though. Semtex getting its fifteen seconds of fame again. He flicked through the meager range of channels for a few minutes and came up with nothing that would suggest a shift in the flow of things; his modest intervention, even if it were successful, overwhelmed by the flood of human endeavor—acres of it, aeons of it.

He had pulled a
zeitgeist
heist.
Zeitgeist.
The Germans had good words for everything—long-winded some of them, but right on the money.
Schadenfreude
was his favorite. When he'd first discovered it he realized that he'd always lived by it to some degree—the pleasure in the misery of others.

His own memories of the event hadn't changed. Sharon Tate dead; she and her friends murdered by Charlie Manson's Family. That song of Charlie's Guns N' Roses had recorded a couple of years ago—all in his head, part of the big picture. The
old
big picture. But there was a second picture of things overlaying parts of the old one now—a subtle, out-of-phase variant on the original theme.

He had to find something outside his own head—
something
that would prove he'd actually done it. Maybe not finding any
references would be evidence enough. Being
dead
was what had made the Tate chick memorable, not surviving. Millions of people survived every day.

He would have to seek out something concrete, literal. Give Sharon a call, maybe. Ask her what she's been up to lately.
Sharon, my dear, how's little—no, he must be my age by now, older. Is he a little shrimp of a guy with a Roman nose like his daddy? Or does he have your—I know, he's an actor, right? One of those second-generation Hollywood types who show up every couple of years in a Movie of the Week about regular folks dealing with some tragedy, in the last segment learning something about “Life” with a capital Elgar riff on the soundtrack (or is it Elton John these days?). AIDS, or frostbite; affirmative action; chapter eleven bankruptcy; false memory syndrome—that's a good one; he could rewrite the book on that one. That kind of career? Have I got him pegged? Gets to go on
Larry King
every now and then and smile through all the questions about you and his Dad, rather than him? .
.
.
well the same to you. I'm sorry I called.

Maybe this is happening all the time, he thought, heading for the john. Like the future—we're always changing the future. Why can't the same be said for the past? It occurred to him then that someone not even born yet could be fucking with all the stuff in the past; and all the shit he was doing was orchestrated by someone else. He shut down his thinking on that one—it could only lead nowhere and everywhere.

To the so-called library with the big TV. On the way he passed through the lounge and grabbed a coffee. The doughy muffins in a basket as usual, the tea bags, the nondairy creamer, just like always. Polythene Pam curled up in an arm
chair reading a book, wearing shorts today; her legs not half bad if they weren't the color of something out of the frozen poultry section.

As far as he could tell the coffee tasted the same, a bit stronger today maybe. He remembered that in the original version of events Abigail Folger, the heiress to the Folger's coffee fortune, had died along with Sharon Tate and the others that night in 1969. He wondered whether her salvation could have worked its way down into this one cup of coffee.
Thank you, Mr. Hayward; here's a little bit more caffeine for you.
The ripple effect.

Not enough books on the shelves to call it a real library—travel magazines, old issues of
Time,
a few salt-water-wrinkled paperbacks. A row of aging hardbound also-rans probably bought by the pound or the yard. But he found a Random House one-volume encyclopedia, a huge
Webster's
dictionary, and an outdated Leonard Maltin movie guide.

She was in there: Sharon Tate, with a list of movies he'd never heard of; a few he had:
Nashville
and
Superman III.
And another that almost sounded familiar, one of Woody Allen's:
Crimes and Misdemeanors.

He looked up
Nashville,
just to be sure. Yes: 1975, directed by Robert Altman. A huge list of characters: Ned Beatty, Lily Tomlin, Henry Gibson, Geraldine Chaplin, among others—there she was: Sharon Tate.

He went out to the patio, then over to the lounge, listening for things, looking for them—signs of what he had done, the ripple effect washing over him: a wave of panic. Pam wasn't wearing her headphones, and there was something in her eyes when she looked up at him—a quick dismissal as usual, but something about her had changed. He was afraid all of a sud
den; the mess he could have made of things, the ripple effect again—that image in chaos theory: the flutter of a butterfly's wing turning into a hurricane.

He walked out to the road with its long view of the shoreline, where the planes seemed to come right in on top of the line of palms and the terra-cotta roofline of a distant hotel. Tourist planes from all over the world landing at Juliana Airport. Nothing this morning, just the dazzle of the eastern sky. He could see the diagonal edge of the huge casino sign about a mile down the road, intact like last night, the neon filigree dark now, like burned-out fireworks. The foot-square sign about the security system planted in the shrubbery near the wrought-iron gate; it was like a designer label on an expensive scarf—obvious and almost inviting disaster, comparisons, challenges. It looked familiar but how could he tell? His memory wasn't that good; he didn't know everything. Even the stuff in books—he would be second-guessing it even if it rang true.

Stop. Give it up. Get on with it. Why the fuck aren't you jumping up and down? You passed the test. You did it, for Christ's sake. Now go out there and make some fucking money.

He would phone his sister, Beth, and ask her outright. About Sharon Tate. She knew shit like that: details about things that didn't need details. Maybe that was what the dream had been all about: the door slamming, Linda Kasabian driving away. The door slamming in one version of things, opening in another, letting in all that carnage—the bookmark a reminder.

And he remembered both versions—which made sense, since he had orchestrated the changes. It came to him then: an image of Charles Manson with his own web site, and at the same time the absolute conviction that he didn't have one;
that his White Album was clean again and there was no more bad “Helter Skelter” vibe attached to it. RehabiliTATEd!
Yes! A pun. Why the fuck not?

He saw his own hard dick breaking the surface then, up and out of the water—a fleeting sense of it being his future, the unlimited potential of it all. Flying off into space, then coming to earth. Gliding down to the surface—like those strider bugs walking on pond water. Moving through life on a meniscus of wealth.

But the money wouldn't be enough, he realized then; there was a yearning for something else. Notoriety, celebrity,
infamy
—all those notions that transcended wealth. It all came down to being remembered for something—anything, as long as it rated some sort of public recognition. Something to do with why he couldn't really connect with the mystique of Sharon Tate anymore—the new, resuscitated version. Bits of it, yes—vague recollections of a second-rate, has-been actress that he'd lost interest in when he was about fourteen. The other version seemed so much more appealing somehow. What made “bittersweet” so much more interesting than “saccharine.”

Maybe he should phone her up and tell her he'd saved her life.

No. He couldn't do that—she'd think he was crazy.