Summer of Love, a Time Travel (29 page)

Bang
bang bang
shatters the night.

Ruby
stumbles over a log, steps on something squishy smelling of mold. Starbright
and Chi follow, holding hands. Chi takes the canvas bag from the kid’s shoulder,
slings it over his. It’s about time, Ruby thinks.

At
last they come to a clearing and a neat circle of teepees around a flickering
campfire. A freckled woman with a grim face and disheveled chestnut hair steps
out of a teepee, brandishing a shotgun. A chocolate-brown puppy bounds out
after her, tail wagging furiously. After the puppy, Leo Gorgon steps out,
zipping up his jeans.

Uh-huh,
Ruby thinks with a pang. Why oh why does she keep falling for bad dudes like
him?

“It’s
cool, Rainbow,” Gorgon says to the freckled woman, laying his hand on the
shotgun’s barrel. “This is Ruby and Starbright and Chiron. They’re cool.”

“Is
Stewart here?” Ruby asks.

“Stewart
left last week,” Rainbow says. “Left his sculptures, too.”

Sure
enough, in the campfire light, Ruby glimpses the car-chrome man clutching his
hammered-steel lover. The red hose between his legs is limp. Stewart had wanted
to install the sculpture someplace with good plumbing. There’s no good plumbing
here. No plumbing at all.

Now
more people duck out of the teepees. Men with hair to their waists and beards
trailing down their chests. A woman with a baby suckling her breast. Other
women in long dresses or jeans. Some of them carry shotguns, too.

They
crouch around the campfire. Rainbow adds kindling, building the flames. “Raisin,
come here, Raisin.” The puppy frolics, bounding from person to person for a pat
on the head or a kiss on the snout. Rainbow hangs a huge iron pot on a tripod
over the fire, bangs on a lid.

Ruby
passes around her bottle of Napa burgundy. No one drinks except a guy with
Einstein hair who shares with her. She passes around the food she brought.
Everything is divided up and devoured before she and Starbright can get their share.
She and the kid watch wistfully. Ruby is
very
hungry. The kid must be,
too. Chi watches, impassive.

The
teepee people eat ravenously. They are all painfully thin, a patina of grime on
their faces and hands, their clothes as fragile as the wings of the moths
circling the campfire.

Rainbow
rises and takes the lid off the iron pot. Steam rises from a fragrant bubbling
stew. She dishes hot stew into wood bowls, giving the first servings to Ruby,
Starbright, and Chi. The stew is mostly brown rice, with a few diced onions,
carrots, and zucchini. Ruby wishes there was more salt and a lot more spice,
but the stew is fresh and good. Just about anything would taste good now.

Chi
sets his bowl on the grass for Raisin. The puppy practically inhales the stew, snuffling
and sneezing.

“We
had to send Filly and Pink to the hospital,” Rainbow says. “Hepatitis. Guess we
messed up, digging the latrine ditch so close to the campfire. We dug a new
outhouse downwind, fifty feet out. Plus, I got a lid for the pot to keep out
the flies.”

“Duh,”
Chi whispers, and Ruby elbows him in the ribs.

A
man brings out a guitar, begins to strum. The tart herbal scent of marijuana
blows over the campfire. People rise to their feet and dance in the shadows. A
woman sits next to Ruby and Starbright, takes out a piece of white cotton onto
which she’s embroidered a peacock. She’s sewn human eyes on every green and
blue feather.

Starbright
smiles, but she’s watchful, silent, glancing over her shoulder now and then,
eyes wide. Raisin snuggles in her lap, but she’s too tired to give the puppy
much attention.

Chi
is inscrutable, but he cocks his head, too, listening.

Gunshots?
More gunshots?

The
teepee people’s paranoia is contagious, as paranoia usually is. Ruby hauls
herself to her feet. “We’d best be going.” Better to find a roadside rest stop
and sleep in the car. The vibrations here are too weird.

“No,
let’s stay a while,” Gorgon says. He can’t take his bloodshot eyes off Rainbow.

“You
stay, Leo.” Ruby retrieves the canvas bag and the empty picnic basket. “Find
your own way home. We’re gone.”

Rainbow
comes and wraps her arms around Ruby, planting a kiss on her cheek. “Thank you for
bringing food and wine and your good energy.” Her eyes are bottomless, filled
with sorrow. “It was beautiful of you to visit us. We have so little good
energy here anymore.”

Ruby
nods. “You all take care of yourselves, you hear?”

“We’ve
got a garden out back, behind the teepees.” Rainbow retrieves a flickering
kerosene lamp. “I’d love to show you. The cabbages are beautiful.”

In
the lamplight beneath the waning moon, Ruby and Starbright and Chi follow
Rainbow out behind the teepees to see the garden.

And
Rainbow is right. The cabbages are beautiful.

July
27, 1967

Rumors

10

Dedicated to the One
I Love

Susan
lounges with Cyn on the grass in the Panhandle, keeping an eye out for cop
cars. She takes a mauve chalk from her box of pastels and draws two eyes on the
sidewalk. The police have been busting sidewalk chalk artists on the charge of
defacing public property, not to mention sweeping hip girls off the street on
suspicion of being runaways. It’s strange and exciting to feel like an outlaw,
drawing chalk pictures on the sidewalk.

“Did
you hear about the concentration camps?” Susan says.

Cyn,
the ninety-pound white-blond runaway, shakes her head.

“They
say it’s happening in Tule Lake and Tuscon and Oklahoma City. The FBI and the
Defense Department are doing it. I heard this building contractor went to a
priest for confession. He was all in a panic. He confessed they hired his
company to refurbish World War Two detention centers. They’ll be able to detain
up to forty thousand people. Anti-war protesters and anyone cool. We’ll all be
arrested if there’s a National Security Emergency this summer.”

“I
believe it.” Cyn is from Texas. She’s got a whispery drawl and ends nearly
every sentence as if she’s asking a question even when she isn’t. She gazes at
Susan’s artwork with her palms lying open on her fragile knees. Cyn never looks
anyone in the eye, not even Susan.

Susan
loves to draw eyes though she well remembers when she also was afraid to look
in people’s eyes. Eyes seemed too personal, too revealing. The meekest checkout
clerk at the grocery store used to scare her. It didn’t help that her mother
never, ever looks her in the eye. It was Daddy who knocked her aversion to eyes
out of her one day. He was yelling about something or other, his face in her
face. “
Look
at me when I’m talking to you, young lady,” is what her father
said. And that’s when she learned how to look someone in the eye and not let
him see her soul.

She
draws her trademark star-pupils and abundant lashes. Twiggy eyes. Goddess eyes.
Ideal eyes. This is dedicated to the One Eye Love. Groovy! Oh, little I, who
peeks at me, what do U see? Over the Summer of Love, Susan has developed a new
view of eyes.

Morning
commuters in their business suits and big-finned cars stream downtown. The sky
is the color of a mourning dove’s wing, the air chilly and damp. Susan feels
good lounging on the grass, drawing on the sidewalk. How good it is to wonder
about things. She never got to wonder in school, she was always so busy memorizing.
She feels free, even though she owns no more than an overnight bag and less
than fifty dollars, not counting the hundred bucks Stan the Man still owes her.
She feels freer than the commuters hurrying off to their jobs where someone
will probably yell in their faces about something or other.

“I
heard the Vietcong got cannons hidden in North Beach,” Cyn says.

Susan
laughs. “I don’t think
that’s
true. I mean, people can barely hide a
nickel bag from the Man, let alone cannons in North Beach.”

“I
heard the Vietcong’s gonna bomb Union Square.”

“
I
heard the CIA is putting rat poison in acid,” Susan says. “They want to kill
the heads.” She squirms, thinking of Stovepipe’s accusation.

“I
heard the CIA killed President Kennedy.”

“Well,
there you go. If they can kill President Kennedy, they sure can kill the heads,
if they’ve got a mind to.”

Cyn
nods. “I heard bikers have taken over Morning Star Ranch and are bangin’ the
chicks.”

“Now,
that
is
true.”

Susan
leans over her drawing, a bit sore in her belly. She woke with cramps and a
rush of dampness. For the first time in her life, she’s happy to get her
period.

Chi
sits apart from them, leaning up against a tree trunk, his long legs stretched
out. He smiles warmly when she glances his way. Susan thinks this is very
enlightened of him, letting her do what she wants, rap with people, but always
being
there. His eyebrows and lashes are as strawberry-red as his hair. She’s never
seen anyone with facial hair so perfectly matched to the hair on his head. Yet
the rest of his face is as smooth as an eggshell. She feels funky and crude beside
him. He’s so
perfect.

She
doesn’t mind Mr. True-Blue Eyes watching her anymore. For one thing, he’s
started being cool. Always helpful. More than friendly. But he doesn’t put the
make on her, which makes him easy to be around. And also makes her wonder. Doesn’t
he think she’s pretty? She finds herself taking his hand before he takes hers,
letting him look down her blouse, bumping into him accidentally. It’s really
stupid, but there you go. She’s never spent so much time around a guy who’s so.
. . .
good.

Chi
is forever muttering to himself and gazing at the palm of his hand. She’s seen
the lavender light. So has Ruby. Ruby says Chi may be a spy, after all, like in
Goldfinger,
which she and Nance saw when they snuck in the back door at
the Cedar Center Theater and which devastated them both. Nance painted her
whole hand with gold enamel and was starting in on her arm when her skin began
to itch and she got an awful rash. Susan isn’t sure what Chi’s mission could
possibly be. What in the Haight-Ashbury would attract the likes of James Bond?
Well. Aside from half-naked girls. Chi tries to peek at the lavender light when
he thinks she’s not looking, but then he becomes so absorbed, only an idiot
wouldn’t notice.

When
she asked him about his ring and why he keeps whispering to it, he stalled at
first, then told her the ring is a computer and a calculator. Typical Chi
shuck. Susan knows computers are as big as a whole room. And calculators?
Ruby’s calculating machine is as bulky as a sack of potatoes and just about as
heavy. He says he’s calculating the probabilities, searching for a Prime Probability.
He reminds her of Professor Zoom, searching for his Final Expression. Only
Chi’s Prime Probability has nothing to do with God. It has everything to do
with demons.

The
girl with her face. A Devolved Entity Manifested from the Other Now? A demon? A
demon that wants to
kill
her? It’s like the rumors of concentration
camps. It’s so weird she can’t believe it, and so plausible she can’t afford to
disbelieve it.

But
what can she
do
about it?

“Don’t
die,” Chi tells her grimly. “Be ready, always. You’ve got to survive,
Starbright. Survive the Summer of Love.”

Cool.
But it isn’t cops-and-robbers, a tangible thing she can stab with a knife or
shoot with a gun. The demons are pollutants, Chi tells her, unpredictable and
uncontrollable. Poison blowing in the wind.

Don’t
die. Survive. Be ready, always. It’s terrifying and exhausting. Anyway, she
is
going to die someday. That’s one thing she’s come to understand and accept over
the Summer of Love. But how can she be ready, always? Ready how? Ready for
what?

“What
is the demon trying to do when it comes near me?” she asked.

“Didn’t
it pull you toward the edge of the cliff?”

“Yes,
it did,” she said slowly.

“And
didn’t it try to push you toward the dog-killer in front of the Psychedelic
Shop?”