Fieldwork: A Novel (19 page)

mobile before telling Rabbit that either they got themselves a den or Rabbit would be wandering alone. Rabbit loved his little Sugar Magnolia and tried out life in Babylon, as the followers of the Dead called the sober stationary world, but the sight of his parked Caravan sitting out front every day got to be too much, and Rabbit bolted, never looking back. He got back on Tour in 1981, and in the way that Dead Tour tends to bring you together with all different types, from policemen to Wall Street bankers to farm kids to hippies, he got to talking with this really nice kid with an incredible story—"the most polite kid you ever met," Rabbit said—just outside Indianapolis, who was looking for a ride to the show in Buffalo.

That kid, of course, was David Walker.

Dead Tour! It just seemed
so right
. Where else in America, Rabbit asked, could a kid like David announce that he grew up in a near–Stone Age village in northern Burma with a tiger cub for a pet preaching the Gospel to illiterate tribesmen who hunted with poison-tipped arrows— and have folks just look at you, say "Cool," and remind you not to bogart that joint? On Dead Tour, David was hardly even considered odd, not compared with Mean Jim, say, who'd followed the Dead since being discharged from three tours in Nam, slept with a foot-long hunting knife under his pillow, and
worshipped
Phil Lesh, the bassist, in the most literal sense of the word, right down to the shrine, the candles, and, rumor had it, the occasional sacrifice.

David had a bumper sticker right on the back of his big green backpack: "Life Is Better When You're Dead," and David put it there because it was so true. The Walkers don't like to admit it; they talk about it as David's time of
soul-searching
, when he was
lost
, the
lonely
time before David
got right with God
. But don't believe a word of it. Just talk to Rabbit. David
loved
Dead Tour. He woke up every morning, and that kid who had been told all his life that God put him on this Earth to save the Dyalo from the bondage of demons, he was surrounded by ten thousand of his closest friends who couldn't have said whether a Dyalo was a primitive tribe in the Tibeto-Burman hills or one of those spiffy new Japanese imports with the great mileage. The only
demon
on tour was the narc. And that kid who had been told that
Star Wars
was a sin, the only time on Dead Tour he heard the word "sin" was in connection with spilled bong water.

I asked Rabbit what it was about life on the road, and he just sighed, a soft, lilting sigh, not entirely dissimilar to Thomas's much later when I finally summoned up the courage and asked about Jesus. David couldn't believe how big the country was, just couldn't believe it. He had seen Nevada when the Dead played Vegas, but he had never seen New Mexico. Never saw Alabama. Never saw Idaho—and folks said it was
beautiful
. But they were there and waiting for him. He had time. Sometimes, he'd wake up at three in the morning unable to sleep, and he'd decide to go
right now
, without waiting for dawn, just to see what was between here and Austin, where in two days' time the Dead were playing a four-show set.

Dead Tour was David Walker's Yale College and his Harvard: David met people on Tour he never knew existed—and this was a kid who'd met witch doctors and Burmese generals; but he'd never met someone like the slender young woman who spent almost six years in the company of the New York City Ballet before she broke her leg. She told David that she knew she was done dancing ballet from the moment when she was lying in a hospital bed, her leg in a cast, and realized that the best time dancing she'd had in the past six years was when she went on a date with a guy who took her to see the Dead play Madison Square Garden. David never forgot a face: he remembered everyone he met and he greeted them by name, often wrapping his long limbs around them in a spontaneous bear hug.
Hey now, Moishe
, the former professor of political science at Northwestern, who'd been on Tour almost five years. The former Green Beret.
Hey now
. The son of the senior senator from Indiana. Pretty girls from every county in the country, girls who spoke with twangs and lisps, harsh nasal northeastern vowels, soft southern whispers. For the first time in ten years, David could tell the story of Elijah Cat and expect big, big eyes.
Hey now
. People who were obsessed with making sure that every note that Jerry played was recorded on tape. "It's a responsibility, man. In a hundred years—the people won't
have
Jerry anymore. This is what they'll have."

David had a propane stove, and he made rice stir-fry which he sold on the Lot for a dollar a plate, and vegan burritos and tofu enchiladas, and he rolled incense, and Rabbit taught him to make devil sticks; when he got his own van a year or two later, he went down Mexico way and bought copperware, which he sold to yuppie Deadheads in places like San Francisco, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Seattle. David would stay on Tour months at a time, usually driving from show to show with Rabbit, then disappear for a while the way people on Dead Tour tend to do, maybe because that nice couple he met at the Nashville show had a little communal bio-organic beet farm somewhere up in the mountains and they invited David to spend a week which turned into a month which turned into six. Winter was coming, Dead Tour was over for the year, but Jerry Tour—the Jerry Garcia band—was just starting up, and when the people on the Lot saw David, wherever he went, they said:
Hey now, Bamboo. Welcome home.

Every few months, David would call Chiang Mai, from Buffalo or Memphis or Des Moines or Phoenix or Spokane or Mobile or Malibu or Eugene. When Norma answered the phone, the same strained conversation predictably ensued:

"Are you eating okay, David?"

"Yeah, of course I'm eating okay, Mom."

"What are you doing all day?"

"I'm just, you know, traveling around the country, and listening to music, and being with friends."

"Are you in a cult? Do you need help? You can tell me if you need help."
Reader's Digest
, which Norma read weekly, had recently run an article about cults and cultlike behavior.

"No, it's not like that."

"We love you very much, David."

"I love you, too, Mom."

"We're praying for you, David. All of us."

David would hang up the phone and he had the strange sensation that for the duration of the call his soul, his very soul, had been sitting in the big, pink house in Chiang Mai and was having a difficult time returning to his body. His soul was floating out over the Pacific Ocean, dawdling and indecisive. He could imagine, being the good, kind kid that he was, the conversation over the dinner table that night. Norma would tell Grandma and Grandpa and Dad at dinner that David called that afternoon, and everyone at the table would lean forward.

"So when's he coming home?" Grandpa Raymond would ask.

Mom hated to say she didn't know, so she always said soon.

"Oh, I hope so," Grandma Laura would say. "I hate to have him so far away."

"That boy's not coming to this home until he cleans up his act, no sir," Dad would declare. His sister Linda-Lee, with whom David occasionally exchanged letters, had told him that Dad said that a lot. "He cuts his hair, gets himself some clean clothes, starts to act like a man, then he can come home. Not until then." Still, almost every night, Linda-Lee had said, it was Dad who gruffly asked his wife:
Hear anything from Davy lately?

And when the Walkers of Chiang Mai prayed, Linda-Lee had said that they all put prayers for David's safety right up at the top of their list, even Raymond, who had prayed above all else for the conversion of the Dyalo for some sixty years now.

That strange, mildly disorienting feeling of having lost his soul somewhere over the ocean persisted for perhaps five minutes after every phone call with his family, and then the sadness would be drowned out in the general tumult, chaos, and weirdness of the Lot. How could David explain Dead Tour to his family when he couldn't even explain it to himself?

I thought I knew David by this point. I really thought I did. I'd known kids who'd gone off and followed the Dead in college, kids like Henry Sifton, who straight out of school and armed with perhaps the least useful bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies ever earned, went on Tour with a half dozen of his friends in a huge yellow school bus which he and his friends called the
Little Red Bus
; and Emily Something-or-other, who in junior year went hippie chick. She started wearing long, flowing skirts and made the big mistake of using an herbal deodorant. Dead Tour was such a cliché that nobody said one word about David but I didn't have an inward flash of recognition and perception, a palpable sensation that David could have gone to school with me, could have even been me: out of college, I had hit the road myself, not on Dead Tour but in India and Indonesia, floating from Karnataka to Tamil Nadu and up to Calcutta, through Bangkok and Malaysia down to Sumatra, places which I found every bit as thrilling and exotic as David found Montana and Indiana. Who couldn't sympathize with David's flight from parental expectations? I figured he couldn't have been
that
different from me.

But I was dead wrong. David was nothing like me, not at all. Of course he wasn't: David was a Walker.

For the rest of his short life, David would tell all the people who asked and plenty of people who didn't about the moment that he got right with God. He could never bring himself to say that his life on Dead Tour was sinful; but, he would admit, there had been a time in his life when he was blind to his responsibilities. But the glorious thing about God, he would tell his Dyalo audiences, the truly glorious thing, was that God wanted you to come Home as badly as you wanted to go.

He had been on Dead Tour for almost four years when Jerry told him it was time for him to go home, on a warm August night in Eugene, where the Dead were playing a five-show set, not three weeks after David had celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday.

What a treat Eugene had proved to be! Whenever the Dead played Eugene, Rabbit's hometown, Rabbit stayed with his family, who did not much approve of Rabbit's way of life but had long since stopped fighting it; Rabbit had invited David to park his van in front of the hutch for a few days. Of course, Rabbit's mom had insisted that David stay inside the house, and the last few days, David had the very finest hospitality the elder Rabbits could offer: Mrs. Rabbit had made him two hot meals a day and not just carrots and lettuce either. Mr. Rabbit had shown David his fine collection of fishing ties and lures. The gentle atmosphere of home-cooked meals, cozy beds with fresh-washed sheets, and hot showers had relaxed David, to the point where when Rabbit announced that fateful, final afternoon on Dead Tour that it was time to head down to the fairgrounds, David had almost decided not to go. The senior Rabbits had a big-screen television and cable in the basement, and David was seriously considering whether it wouldn't be nicer to watch a little tube with Mr. Rabbit than to see Jerry one more time. He'd been to two shows now in Eugene, and, truth be told, although he didn't much like to admit it, the boys hadn't been playing their best lately: Jerry had been out of tune, no disrespect, I mean, Jerry out of tune is
still
Jerry, but Jerry, I mean, it's just a fact, he had been out of tune; Phil was on Planet Phil, as always; and Bob was doing this new thing where he … he just seemed to
wail
. Only Mickey was on top of his shit. But in the end David decided to go, chiefly because there was a rumor going around that the band was going to play "St. Stephen."

It was the warmest, gentlest of summer afternoons, big cumulonimbus clouds floating overhead, the kind his grandmother called "angel pillows," with just a hint of a northern breeze breaking up the still heat. The Lot smelled of barbecues and beer and pot and mud. David didn't have a ticket and didn't have the money to buy one, so he took a pizza box from the floor of the van and with a bright green crayon wrote on the back: "I need a miracle!" He tied the pizza box around his neck with a shoelace and started walking the Lot. He would never walk the Lot again.

David stopped for a lemonade with some folks he'd met in Seattle a few weeks earlier, a housepainter named Mike and his girlfriend who'd driven down for the show in a beat-up Bug. The housepainter had also heard the rumors about "St. Stephen." When David got to his friend Sequoia's RV, he accepted an invitation to step inside for a bong hit and play with Sequoia's new kitten. David spent some time watching a teenager with a homemade "Grateful-fucking-Dead" T-shirt juggle fruit, and by the time the kid had three apples, two oranges, a mango, a grapefruit, and a pineapple in the air, David had to admit that this was some serious juggling talent, and he gave the kid a dollar. It was almost time for the show, and the Lot emptied out. Maybe he wasn't going to get a ticket. That happened, too, sometimes, and a big-screen television
chez
Rabbit made things easier to accept. He was philosophical about it either way. He could hear clapping from inside the fairgrounds, as the warm-up band took the stage. A few latecomers arrived and ran for the entrance. David watched them enter the fairgrounds. The sun was high in the sky, and a cloud passed over it. David started to give up hope of seeing the show, and headed back toward his van.