She looked around the room for somebody to talk to, somebody she liked, but hardly recognized anyone. It was a different crowd than she was used to, the kind of people who were going to school to become park wardens and Fish and Wildlife officers, where the hot topic, besides the bigger party that she'd missed the night before, was fishing. But out of common courtesy, she resolved to mingle for an hour or so, then slip out the back. She said a few hellos and accepted a snub-necked bottle of Lethbridge Pilsner from a guy she'd once been introduced to, though had since forgotten his name. He asked her if she had come with Patricia, one of her classmates, who was apparently with her sister downstairs (at the word “downstairs,” he had widened his eyes with drama, but Denise didn't feel like taking the bait and asking what he'd meant by it). “Not really,” she'd answered, already looking for the stairwell, thankful that there was at least someone in the house she knew. She lit a cigarette, left the conversation, and, beer in hand, started down the unlit steps.
The stairwell descended to several small landings, the second of which was the porch for the back door. Just outside, Denise saw three men through the doorglass, standing in a circle, passing around a hand-rolled cigarette, each of them squinting as they took their turn to suck in an enormous lungful of abnormally blue smoke. They were dressed like they hadn't showered in days, weeks maybe, their hair unkempt and greasy, clothes more colourful than they should have been. And as she turned on the landing to continue down the steps, she caught a sniff of their skunky smoke, and it all came together. They were hippies! And that was marijuana they were smoking, here, behind the very house she was in!
Like everyone else, she knew all about the
existence
of the counterculture, had seen the Vietnam protest marches on television, the banner-waving tie-dyed processions, the braless women with their beaded headbands, and the men with their patchy beards and circlet sunglasses. But those types certainly weren't seen around Lethbridge. The police had made it clear that such antisocial behaviour wouldn't be tolerated in the city, making all sorts of inquiries and arrests at the mere rumour of drugs and printing an anti-narcotic series of articles in the newspaper. In fact, only a month before, four raggedy-looking people were seen standing in front of the local theatre, and a paddy wagon promptly appeared to take them into custody, for questioning under suspicion of drug possession. It turned out that they were actors taking a cigarette break at a dress rehearsal days before the premiere of
Oliver
; Fagin's grubby apprentices from a Victorian society gone wrong, a perfect match to the modern version, who were slipping down the same criminal slope.
Not knowing what else to do, Denise pretended she hadn't seen a thing and continued downstairs. But as soon as she stepped into full view of the basement, she wanted nothing more than to turn around and run. The suite was split into two large rooms, the first with a pool table as the focal point, five or six respectable-looking college students scattered around it, none of them women, and most of them using their cues as a crutch while they paused to leisurely look her over, and the second was candlelit and blaring with music, every piece of furniture draped with real true-to-life bona fide hippies.
There were only two people she recognized, a young man named Arthur, who was holding a beer and watching her, leaning with his hand on the green felt of the table (to the understandable irritation of the players), and her classmate Patricia, who was in the other room with the hippies, having what seemed to be a heated argument with one of the women.
Denise gave them all a sheepish grin. “Hi.”
Arthur perked up. “Hell, it's Denaise! How y'all doin', sweetie pah?” Arthur was one of those people who liked to do accents and impersonations, the Texas cowboy theme one of his trademarks. Two of the pool players rolled their eyes at his back.
“I'm good, fine,” she said, taking a long sip from her beer and looking around the room. She could see that the basement suite belonged to a hunter, who was trying his hand at amateur taxidermy, stuffed birds flying out of the walls, an antelope head mounted on a velvet plaque and craning its neck to look in her direction. Right beside her, frozen into a stance that had it snarling into her face, was a mink or weasel perched on a piece of driftwood, eyes shining black, nose threateningly wrinkled, its teeth bared and even linked with a silicone stream of saliva. It occurred to her that the animal itself was thinner and more fragile looking than her wrist.
Arthur strutted over from the table as if he'd been riding a horse for five too many decades. “Ah know whucher thinkun,” he drawled, “that that there weasel there ain't so beg. But I'll tell yuh somethin', them creatures is right vicious thangs.” He swigged his beer, wiped his mouth, nodded. “Trust meh, it was him . . . er may.”
She smiled and pointed into the other room. “Sorry, I'm just gonna go'n say hello to Patricia for a sec.” She squeezed between Arthur and the weasel and excused herself through the other men as well. Then she stepped into the clatter of music and the thick haze of incense that threaded the air of the second room.
To Denise, if anything was immediately clear, it was that the hippies had full control of the music. There was certainly no Tammy Wynette standing by her man in this crowd, no sir, it was more the likes of Janis Joplin bellowing out to a microphone whose metal stand she was probably thrusting her pelvis at, and Jimi Hendrix, squelching through an electric guitar like he was wringing the life out of a six-year-old plugged into an amplifier. Denise had no idea how people could listen to such noise. The only thing she could be sure of was that this sound, this new “genre” of music, wouldn't last. It couldn't. It just happened to suit these counterculture types because it balked at the contemporary ideas of what music should be.
It occurred to her that the coarse and aggressive sounds that were blasting from the speakers couldn't have been more incongruous with the way the hippies were acting. Their eyelids were half-closed, eyes bloodshot, glassy, and staring into the centre of the room. Except for the two women arguing, no one was saying a word, or nothing intelligible anyway; one of the men was nattering on about something in the music, pointing his finger at the stereo whenever itâwhatever “it” happened to beâpounded out of the speakers. “There! Right there! Just
listen
to that shit!” Though, aside from him, no one really seemed to be. They were ogling at nothing, focused on nothing, grinning at nothing. They were, thought Denise, people who had abandoned themselves. They were lost.
Seeing as Denise was standing directly behind Patricia, and the two women were so involved in their dialogue, neither of them noticed her. And though all Denise wanted was to say a quick hello and leave, she wasn't about to cut into an argument to do so, and soon found herself squatting down to a shelf, running her finger across the spines of a record collection, tilting her head to the side as if reading the titles but really only eavesdropping on the squabble. She had been wondering what someone like Patricia, who seemed to have her feet on the ground, would be doing in the farthest corner of a basement, arguing with a hippie. But it soon became clear.
“No way, Patty. A chance like this won't come along again. There's enough room in their van, and Fawn knows this cat in the city that we can stay with for a while. I'd regret it forever, not going.”
“Regret? You're throwing your life away here, Joan! Can't you see that? I mean, just forget about Mom and Dad and everything else you hate about this town for a second, okay? Think of how you're gonna get by. You don't have any money, any
skill
. What are you gonna do, marry one of
them
?” Patricia waved a hand at one of the chesterfields where four of these “cats” were sinking into the creases of the cushions like jellyfish into quicksand. “Find yourself a nice drug-dealer husband who'll do what for youâwhat? Pimp you out in some slum, spread you around to his friends so you both can have a roof over your heads? Is that the plan? I mean, wake up.”
Her sister laughed, trailing off into a cold trill. “Would you
dig
this!
You
telling
me
to wake up? That I'm throwing
my
life away? Just look at you, for Chrissake. Going to school for Mommy, prancing in and out of those stupid classes. Secretarial Studies. More like How to Please Men 101. Every one of you wearing the same skirts, same length, same shoes, bobs, same little cat's eye glasses. For what? To get behind some reception desk where some rich boy can cherry-pick you, pluck you out of the office and into his little house for you to spit out a few kids, iron the smears of lipstick out of his shirts for forty years? You think you'll be touching a typewriter in two years? I mean, Jesus, Patty, that's some high horse you're sitting on. You could write the book on selling yourself short.”
Patricia buried her face in her hands and let out an annoyed groan. Meanwhile, Jimi Hendrix sang on about being down on the ceiling, looking up at the bed, and, as if on cue, one of the hippie girls looked up at the light fixture and shook her head to clear the hair out of her eyes.
Denise had made herself into a progressively smaller ball of limbs crouching on the floor, hoping not to be noticed. She felt a kind of burgeoning instability in her stomach, like someone had reached into her belly and knocked over the first of a coiling network of dominoes that she hadn't known resided there. She wanted out of this basement, wanted to walk away and forget that her life choices had ever been challenged, that her unspoken incentives to go to college had been spoken, by a stranger. Luckily it was by some waste-of-a-life drug addict.
She noticed an ashtray on the shelf in front of her and laid her cigarette against its rim, getting ready to leave, still hoping to slip out of the room unnoticed. But just then the three men who had been smoking outside walked into the room and stepped past her to slump onto the arms of the sofas and anywhere else they could fit. One of them greeted her with an offhand, “Hey, what's happenin'?” but instead of replying, she'd bent closer to the record titles as if having found an album she'd been looking for. Which is when the debate behind her ignited again.
“And all these drugs?” Patricia began. “You really think that smoking themâor injecting them, or whatever you doâisn't gonna catch up to you? You're gonna kill yourself. Eventually. Can't you see that? Can't you at least wake up to that much of it? For me?”
“Okay,” her sister began in a calm enough tone, rattling the bracelets on her arms, uncrossing her bellbottomed legs, “if it's really just the pot and love and freedom that get to you, let's justâfor like a secondâpretend that they have nothing to do with it, okay? And let's take a good look at that nice square world you want me to âwake up' to. Don't worry, you don't have to go far, just take a look around in your little junior college canteen, with its new microwave oven zapping food with some kind of
rays
, and read a few titles of the books people are holding:
Naked Ape. Diary of Che Guevara.
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Or if it's magazines, read the headlines: peace marches, rallies for the Poor People's Campaign, Red Guards disbanded in China, Vietnam casualties, amputee vets, draft dodgers smuggled over the border, a black model on the cover of
Glamour
, only a year after Martin Luther King was assassinated . . .”
“Oh so that's why you do drugs. That's just great,” Patricia interrupted, “to bury your head in sand cuz things are . . .”
“Shut up. Now students burned the Paris stock exchange, the Orangeburg Massacre, riot police mowing down thousands in London, Black Panthers, John and Yoko's album banned, Trudeau trying to legalize abortion, the pill, double helix, pirate radio, superpowers scrambling to put a man on the
moon
!
Christ,
Patricia. Don't tell
me
to wake up. The shit is hitting the fan all around you. In a couple months, your little square world won't even
be
there to wake up to.
“So you can spare me the lecture about . . .” she continued, but Denise wasn't listening anymore. She was surprised to find herself standing, looking down at her bottle of beer on the carpet, her cigarette in the ashtray with a strand of smoke rising from its tip. Jimi Hendrix was blurting out with a different tune now. “Hey, Joe,” he was asking, “where you goin' with that gun in your hand?”
Then she found herself walking, quickly, pushing past the men playing pool, Arthur half blocking the door to the stairs, standing beside the weasel again. “Yer not headin' aowht so soon, are-yeh, sweetie pah?” He posed in front of her, chin out, eyebrows raised. But she shoved past him, up the stairs, out through the back door, and into the unlit yard where mounds of disturbed earth were lumping the garden, pickets demarcating rows of future tomatoes, the wooden stakes pointing inflexibly up at the clouds that striated the sky, starlight piercing their fringes from tens of thousands of light-years away, many of them suns that were, she'd recently read, already extinguished, transformed into something else entirely, their history lagging far behind their projection. She stumbled around on the grass, looking up at them, blinking wildly. The stars blinked back.
Then she was running, to her car, lurching on her raised heels under the illuminated orbs of two streetlights, into her seat, where she slammed the door and locked it shut. She fastened her seatbelt, put the keys in the ignition, took a long look at the dashboard of her 1964 Ford Comet, then slumped over the steering wheel and wept.
The following Tuesday, she went to the first of her final exams and saw Patricia there, looking unhappy, listlessly arranging her pencils on the table in front of her. Which must have meant that her sister Joan had really gone through with it, that she was in the States somewhere, right then, marching in front of government buildings, protesting wrongs, advocating rights. Denise wasn't sure anymore if she viewed this as reckless or courageous, wasn't sure if it was authentic integrity that Joan was acting out of or egotistical abandon, hedonism. Who could say? The only thing she could be certain of was that Joan believed in something, and she believed in it strongly. Whether it was piquing her own pleasure or placating humanity's pain, she'd chosen an epic voyage and had set out on it. On an epic ship. In an epic wind.