Fieldwork: A Novel (18 page)

Now, the ironic thing was, Thomas tended to dismiss most everything in
Christian Family Alert!
If people in America would get half as upset about the unconverted masses of the world, half as upset as they seemed to be about what was on the dang television, if they'd get so upset that they'd just get down on their knees for twenty minutes a day and ask the Lord to save the Dyalo and all the other lost peoples of the planet—that, Thomas figured, would achieve something useful. Thomas read
Christian Family Alert!
more out of sociological interest than anything else, to see what the folks in the Home Country were thinking these days, and having read the magazine, he usually spent a good forty minutes once a month at the dinner table complaining that he didn't see why Nomie read that thing anyway, until Nomie pointed that in the first place, she didn't subscribe, Sarah did; in the second place, he was eating a very fine zucchini casserole thanks to that magazine; and in the third place, she didn't think
Christian Family Alert!
made its way out of the kitchen, up the stairs, down the hall, and beside the toilet every month all by itself, thank you very much.

On the release of
Star Wars, Christian Family Alert!
sent out to its subscribers a "Special Action Bulletin" warning Christians of the danger that popular film posed to their children, what with its vaguely messianic slant, its mysterious magical "force," its Manichean battle between good and evil, and its complete omission of any deistic references. The Walkers were all very eager to assure me that the odd thing was, this was
precisely
the sort of thing about which Thomas usually could not and would not get himself all lathered up. Nobody knew just why that film, which he had never seen and had no intention of seeing, rubbed him so the wrong way. But he had read about
Star Wars
in
Christian Family Alert!
, and the movie stuck in his throat like ashes.

"What is going on back home with this
Star Wars
stuff?" Thomas asked his family over the dinner table. America was always "home" to the Walkers, although of all those at the table, only Nomie had ever spent more than eight consecutive months there. "Can somebody just tell me what people are thinking? Don't they know what is going on over here?"

Long silence at the table. With Dad, sometimes the best strategy was just to
stay quiet
.

"Do you know what they said in China when we first came with the Word? Linda-Lee, what did they say?"

" ‘Two thousand years,' Dad. They said, ‘Two thousand years we've been waiting for this Word, why didn't you come sooner?' "

"That's right. Exactly right. We
cried
because they wanted to hear the Word so badly. There wasn't a minute we weren't out there preaching, your uncles, your grandfather, me, because the people were so eager to listen." Thomas shifted to his didactic mode. "So what we are seeing now, you see, is a complete and total reversal of roles. Even as the Dyalo people are going toward the Lord, the people in
our own country
are turning their backs on Him. Sad, really. Crisscross, you see. A film like this one,
celebrating
everything that we have spent such a long time fighting, a film like this one would have been unthinkable when I was a boy, when America was still a Christian country. When I first started working with the Dyalo, we had a whole country praying for us, and you could feel the difference. It was like having wind in your sails. Now it's not the same. A boat can't sail without wind. And you know who suffers? Paul, tell me who suffers because of this."

"The Dyalo, Dad. The Dyalo are suffering because of this."

"That's right. That's exactly right. People in America go around watching your
Star Wars
or what have you, and thinking that there is something else in this world more powerful than Jesus Christ, and they forget to pray. Just forget, if you can imagine that. I remember when I used to go up in the mountains and tell the people about Jesus. There wouldn't be enough hours in the day to baptize all those who were ready to be baptized—we'd have them lined up—and now, well, just look at the difference. Still the same Gospel, same as it's been for two thousand years. Still the same people, same old Dyalo. I'm still me. What's the difference? I'll tell you all the difference. Not the same
prayer backing
in the Home Country. They're sending us out to fight the battle and not giving us the tools we need. And you know why not? Because their minds are being filled with trash. David, are there kids at your school who have seen this movie?"

David looked down at his plate and made a little rice mountain with his fork.

"David, that was a question for you. I asked if there were kids at your school who had seen this movie?"

"Yes," David said.

"And what do you say to them?"

" ‘May the Force be with You.' "

The fight that followed was a turning point in the Walker family dynamics. David, frustrated to the point of tears, tried to tell Thomas that
Star Wars
had nothing to do with the Dyalo, nothing to do with demon worship, that it was just a movie, a good one, that he had seen it three times and loved it, and that if his father wanted to know why the Dyalo didn't listen, perhaps, just perhaps, it was because he kept pointing at his son, and saying that his son wouldn't ever grow as big as him on account of the end of the world, when his son was two inches bigger already; and Thomas, hurt and angry, wondered just how David could be wasting his time on trash like that when he had grown up himself in a Dyalo village and seen those hurting people who needed his prayers and love, and how long had he been lying to the whole family? It took Nomie two days of shuttle diplomacy to make the peace, which was finalized over breakfast two days later, when Thomas asked David if he'd be going upcountry with him the next day. That Thomas had asked and not presumed was a sufficient gesture for David, and he said that he would. Nomie thought to herself that boys were
so
much easier than girls: had the offended party been Ruth-Marie or Linda-Lee or Margaret and not David, she would have been staring at two months of sulking, pouting, and slammed doors,
minimum
. David really was a good, calm kid.

But with the fight over
Star Wars
, something had changed. Before, David had considered his involvement in the big world a source of guilt and shame; after the fight, David went to the movies openly. He was now a senior in high school, and following the fashion of the time, he allowed his hair to grow long, which irritated his father, not because it was a countercultural gesture (in fact, Thomas, who had simply missed the 1960s, would hardly have recognized it as such), but because it reminded him of the queue worn by the cruel Chinese Mandarins of his youth, who forever impeded His progress with the Dyalo. David, who had been plucking out hymns on his guitar since he was a boy, started a rock-and-roll band with three of his classmates called Waterwheel, and stopped going up into the mountains with his dad on weekends. He went out with some kids from school and came home reeking of cheap whiskey, which would have provoked a monster fight had Grandpa Raymond not taken Thomas aside and said that as a boy in Tulsa, before he found the Lord, he'd certainly taken his fair number of nips from the bottle. Just give the boy an aspirin, Raymond advised. David bought himself a record player and started playing such horrific music on his speakers that Nomie no longer knocked on his door and asked if she could hide in his room.

David graduated from high school and spent half a year with his big feet flopping over the ends of the fake-leather couch in the living room watching the goldfish Olympics, until his Aunt Helena, who'd been telling him all along that one day he'd be big enough to do whatever he liked, told him that now that he was big, he ought to get off his duff and do something. She called
her
Aunt Jean in Tulsa—this would be Laura's other sister, these Walkers had aunts like China has heathens—and had her send over pamphlets and brochures from the local community college, and she convinced the whole family that the best thing was if David went off for a while. Grandma Laura, who always felt that it wasn't entirely a good thing for the kids to lose touch with their heritage, especially supported the plan. She wasn't quite sure what to make of it all, however, when Aunt Jean wrote the family in Chiang Mai to say that six months after David had arrived in the States, he had left Tulsa to follow a rock band called the Grateful Dead. Laura was only partially comforted by the thought that given the group's name, at least David seemed to be involved with good Christians: if Laura's long experience had taught her anything, the only people who were particularly happy about the prospect of being dead were those who had been saved.

Let me tell you. If you think it's tough to ferret out the doings of an unknown anthropologist in a village of unlettered tribesman deep in the remotest jungle in the heart of Southeast Asia, just try finding out exactly what David was up to on the Lot of Dead Tour twenty years ago. If you find someone who remembers it all that well—actually, I couldn't find anyone who remembered it all that well; and those who do remember something tend to have memories that sound a lot like this: "Oh yeah, that was the show when the boys did ‘St. Stephen' and Mickey did a cosmic drum solo, and then this girl Moonbeam who was a twirler and this guy Miguel who was a taper and I decided to go to Boulder to see this guy she knew who could hook us up with some jimsonweed." Then try doing it all over the telephone from Chiang Mai, dealing with more than your fair share of people who for one reason or another are just a little suspicious about calls from strangers. For this reason, given how hard it was to get the lowdown on David during his Dead Tour years, I think I should here and now give a big "Hey now" to my friend Rabbit, whose help and assistance lacking, no story would have been possible.

Rabbit—full name, Gray Rabbit, legally changed from Jeffrey McLean—was old school: in his Boulder home, he told me, he has over two thousand bootlegs, from the band's very early days in San Francisco to Jerry's very last terrestrial show, including the European tours and Egypt.
*
I asked Rabbit how many shows he had seen himself and elicited only a low groan, which I think meant either very many or very, very many; and when I began to think about what those very, very many Dead shows really meant, I began to think in terms of
planets
circumnavigated in that gray-green Volkswagen van, license plate magicmn.

Rabbit told a typical Deadhead story: on the road first in 1975 at the age of eighteen, when the Dead first blew his mind wide open; off the road finally in 1997, when a bad case of trucker's back and a profound distaste for Phish convinced Rabbit that Boulder was a nice-enough town, if you had to live somewhere; and in the middle, largely continual traveling. Rabbit was an American nomad who from the comfort of his Caravan, at once cozy
and
mobile, like a Mongol in his yurt, roamed across endless scorching deserts and over white-crested mountains, down lonely highways bordered by fields of corn and wheat and cotton, on the soles of his Birkenstocks always a few stray grains of sand from the shores of one great ocean, to be washed away only when Rabbit swam in the waters of the other. And through all that wandering, there was only one place where Rabbit was at home, free from the withering glances of the highway patrolmen who pulled him over, called him a vagrant with no fixed address, looked at him from behind mirrored shades, and suggested that he best be heading upstate soon, adding a maddening, sneering,

condescending "
son
"; only one place where he was free from the suspicious eyes of disapproving Pakistani AM/PM clerks, who, taking in his straggly beard, long hair, and tie-dyed T-shirt, assumed that Rabbit was trying to steal those Pringles, although Rabbit supported himself perfectly well making and selling the best damn devil sticks on the lot, thank you very much, best damn devil sticks there
is
.
*
That place where every eye was friendly and every mouth was grinning was the Lot. No matter where Rabbit had roamed or how long it'd been since he'd seen a show, Rabbit came home when he pulled over into the parking lots outside the coliseums, amphitheaters, and fairgrounds where the Grateful Dead were playing; when he smelled the incense and saw the rows of yellow school buses, VW vans, trailers, pickup trucks, brightly painted RVs, campers, and tents; when he heard more people banging on their drums than all the rain chiefs in Africa invoking the water devils in a drought. Home is the sailor in from the sea, home is the hunter down from the hills. That's what people even said, the Deadheads on the Lot, when they saw that their friend had made it down safely from Santa Fe to Austin, one more leg of their unending trip completed:
Hey now, Rabbit. Welcome home
.

Rabbit first met David sometime in 1981. This was the best that Rabbit could do, specificity-wise, and he knew it was 1981 for sure because he had just gotten back on Tour after taking 1980 off on account of his failed experiment in domesticity. Somewhere in his wanderings, Rabbit had gone to the Show single and come back to the van married. Everything in between was a blur. His bride was a fellow Deadhead, a pretty little earth goddess who wore flowing faded paisley skirts and homemade macramé tank tops, who spent two years in the Rabbit