The Hammer of Eden (19 page)

The thought hit him like a punch. He knew that this earthquake plan was dangerous, of course, but he had mainly considered the peril to himself and the risk of leaving the commune leaderless. He had not imagined Flower alone in the world at the age of thirteen.

“What’ll I do with her?” he said.

“She wants to learn the guitar.”

That was news to Priest. He was not much of a guitarist himself, but he could play folk songs and simple blues, enough to get her started anyway. He shrugged. “Okay, we’ll start tonight.”

They went back to work, but a few minutes later they were interrupted when Slow, grinning from ear to ear, shouted: “Hey, lookit who’s here!”

Priest looked across the vineyard. The person he was waiting for was Melanie. She had gone to San Francisco to take Dusty to his father. She was the only one who could tell Priest exactly where to use the seismic vibrator, and he would not feel comfortable until she was back. But it
was too early to expect her, and anyway, Slow would not have gotten so excited about Melanie.

He saw a man coming down the hill, followed by a woman carrying a child. Priest frowned. Often a year went by without a single visitor coming to the valley. This morning they had had the cop; now these people. But were they strangers? He narrowed his eyes. The man’s rolling walk was terribly familiar. As the figures got closer, Priest said: “My God, is that Bones?”

“Yes, it is!” Star said delightedly. “Holy moley!” And she hurried toward the newcomers. Spirit joined in the excitement and ran with her, barking.

Priest followed more slowly. Bones, whose real name was Billy Owens, was a Rice Eater. But he had liked the way things were before Priest arrived. He enjoyed the hand-to-mouth existence of the early commune. He reveled in the constant crises and liked to be drunk or stoned, or both, within a couple of hours of waking up. He played the blues harmonica with manic brilliance and was the most successful street beggar they had. He had not joined a commune to find work, self-discipline, and a daily act of worship. So after a couple of years, when it became clear that the Priest-Star regime was permanent, Bones took off. He had not been seen since. Now, after more than twenty years, he was back.

Star threw her arms around him, hugged him hard, and kissed his lips. Those two had been a serious item for a while. All the men in the commune had slept with Star in those days, but she had had a special soft spot for Bones. Priest felt a twinge of jealousy as he watched Bones press Star’s body to his own.

When they let each other go, Priest could see that Bones did not look well. He had always been a thin man, but now he looked as if he were dying of starvation. He had wild hair and a straggly beard, but the beard was matted and the hair seemed to be falling out in clumps. His jeans and T-shirt were dirty, and the heel had come off one of his cowboy boots.

He’s here because he’s in trouble
.

Bones introduced the woman as Debbie. She was younger than he, no more than twenty-five, and pretty in a pinched-looking way. Her child was a boy about eighteen months old. She and the kid were almost as thin and dirty as Bones.

It was time for their midday meal. They took Bones to the cookhouse. Lunch was a casserole made with pearl barley and flavored with herbs grown by Garden. Debbie ate ravenously and fed the child, too, but Bones took just a couple of spoonfuls, then lit a cigarette.

There was a lot of talk about the old times. Bones said: “I’ll tell you my favorite memory. One afternoon right on that hillside over there, Star explained to me about cunnilingus.” There was a ripple of laughter around the table. It was faintly embarrassed laughter, but Bones failed to pick up on that, and he went on: “I was twenty years old and I never knew people did that. I was shocked! But she made me try it. And the taste! Yech!”

“There was a lot you didn’t know,” Star said. “I remember you telling me that you couldn’t understand why you sometimes got headaches in the morning, and I had to explain to you that it happened whenever you got falling-down drunk the night before. You didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘hangover.’ ”

She had deftly changed the subject. In the old days it had been perfectly normal to talk about cunnilingus around the table, but things had changed since Bones left. No one had ever made an issue of cleaning up their conversation, but it had happened naturally as the children started to understand more.

Bones was nervy, laughing a lot, trying too hard to be friendly, fidgeting, chain-smoking.
He wants something. But he’ll tell me what it is soon enough
.

As they cleared the table and washed the bowls, Bones took Priest aside and said: “Got something I want to show you. Come on.”

Priest shrugged and went with him.

As they walked, Priest took out a little bag of marijuana and a pack of cigarette papers. The communards did not usually smoke dope during the day, because it slowed down the work in the vineyard, but today was a special day, and Priest felt the need to soothe his nerves. As they
walked up the hill and through the trees, he rolled a joint with the ease of long practice.

Bones licked his lips. “You don’t have anything with, like, more of a kick, do you?”

“What are you using these days, Bones?”

“A little brown sugar now and again, you know, keep my head straight.”

Heroin
.

So that was it. Bones had become a junkie.

“We don’t have any smack here,” Priest told him. “No one uses it.”
And I’d get rid of anyone who did, faster than you can say spike
.

Priest lit the joint.

When they reached the clearing where the cars were parked, Bones said: “This is it.”

At first Priest could not work out what he was looking at. It was a truck, but what kind? It was painted with a gay design in bright red and yellow, and along the side was a picture of a monster breathing fire and some lettering in the same gaudy colors.

Bones, who knew that Priest could not read, said: “The Dragon’s Mouth. It’s a carnival ride.”

Priest saw it then. A lot of small carnival rides were mounted on trucks. The truck engine powered the ride in use. Then the parts of the ride could be folded down and the truck driven to the next site.

Priest passed him the joint and said: “Is it yours?”

Bones took a long toke, held the smoke down, then blew out before answering. “I been making my living from this for ten years. But it needs work, and I can’t afford to get it fixed. So I have to sell it.”

Now Priest could see what was coming.

Bones took another draw on the joint but did not hand it back. “It’s probably worth fifty thousand dollars, but I’m asking ten.”

Priest nodded. “Sounds like a bargain … for someone.”

“Maybe you guys should buy it,” Bones said.

“What the fuck would I do with a carnival ride, Bones?”

“It’s a good investment. If you have a bad year with the wine, you could go out with the ride and make some money.”

They had bad years, sometimes. There was nothing they could do about the weather. But Paul Beale was always willing to give them credit. He believed in the ideals of the commune, even though he had been unable to live up to them himself. And he knew there would always be another vintage next year.

Priest shook his head. “No way. But I wish you luck, old buddy. Keep trying, you’ll find a buyer.”

Bones must have known it had been a long shot, but all the same he looked panicky. “Hey, Priest, you want to know the truth of it.… I’m in bad shape. Could you loan me a thousand bucks? That’d get me straight.”

It would get you stoned out of your head, you mean. Then, after a few days, you’d be right back where you were
.

“We don’t have any money,” Priest told him. “We don’t use it here, don’t you remember that?”

Bones looked crafty. “You gotta have a stash somewhere, come on!”

And you think I’m going to tell
you
about it?

“Sorry, pal, can’t help.”

Bones nodded. “That’s a bummer, man. I mean, I’m in serious trouble.”

Priest said: “And don’t try to go behind my back and ask Star, because you’ll get the same answer.” He put a harsh note into his voice. “Are you listening to me?”

“Sure, sure,” Bones said, looking scared. “Be cool, Priest, man, be cool.”

“I’m cool,” Priest said.

*  *  *

Priest worried about Melanie all afternoon. She might have changed her mind and decided to go back to her husband or simply got scared and taken off in her car. Then he would be finished. There was no way he or anyone else here could interpret the data on Michael Quercus’s disk and figure out where to place the seismic vibrator tomorrow.

But she showed up at the end of the afternoon, to his great relief. He told her about Flower being arrested and warned her that one or
two people wanted to put the blame on Melanie and her cute clothes. She said she would get some work clothes from the free shop.

After supper Priest went to Song’s cabin and picked up her guitar. “Are you using this?” he said politely. He would never say, “May I borrow your guitar?” because in theory all property was communal, so the guitar was his as much as hers, even though she had made it. However, in practice everyone always asked.

He sat outside his cabin with Flower and tuned the guitar. Spirit, the dog, watched alertly, as if he, too, were going to learn to play. “Most songs have three chords,” Priest began. “If you know three chords, you can play nine out of ten of the songs in the whole world.”

He showed her the chord of C. As she struggled to press the strings with her soft fingertips, he studied her face in the evening light: her perfect skin, the dark hair, green eyes like Star’s, the little frown as she concentrated.
I have to stay alive, to take care of you
.

He thought of himself at that age, already a criminal, experienced, skilled, hardened to violence, with a hatred of cops and a contempt for ordinary citizens who were dumb enough to let themselves get robbed.
At thirteen I had already gone wrong
. He was determined that Flower would not be like that. She had been brought up in a community of love and peace, untouched by the world that had corrupted little Ricky Granger and turned him into a hoodlum before he grew hair on his chin.
You’ll be okay, I’ll make sure of it
.

She played the chord, and Priest realized that a particular song had been running in his head ever since Bones arrived. It was a folkie number from the early sixties that Star had always liked.

Show me the prison
Show me the jail
Show me the prisoner
Whose life has gone stale

“I’ll teach you a song your mommy used to sing to you when you were a baby,” he said. He took the guitar from her. “Do you remember this?” He sang:

I’ll show you a young man
With so many reasons why

In his head he heard Star’s unmistakable voice, low and sexy then as now.

There, but for fortune
Go you or I
You or I
.

Priest was about the same age as Bones, and Bones was dying. Priest had no doubt about that. Soon the girl and the baby would leave him. He would starve his body and feed his habit. He might overdose or poison himself with bad drugs, or he might just abuse his system until it gave up and he got pneumonia. One way or another, he was a dead man.

If I lose this place, I’ll go the same way as Bones
.

As Flower struggled to play the chord of A minor, Priest toyed with the idea of returning to normal society. He fantasized going every day to a job, buying socks and wingtip shoes, owning a TV set and a toaster. The thought made him queasy. He had never lived straight. He had been brought up in a whorehouse, educated on the streets, briefly the owner of a semilegitimate business, and for most of his life the leader of a hippie commune cut off from the world.

He recalled the one regular job he had ever had. At eighteen he had gone to work for the Jenkinsons, the couple who ran the liquor store down the street. He had thought of them as old, at the time, but now he guessed they had been in their fifties. His intention had been to work just long enough to figure out where they kept their money, then steal it. But then he learned something about himself.

He discovered he had a queer talent for arithmetic. Each morning Mr. Jenkinson put ten dollars’ worth of change into the cash register. As customers bought liquor and paid and got change, Priest either served them himself or heard one of the Jenkinsons sing out the total, “Dollar twenty-nine, please, Mrs. Roberto,” or “Three bucks even, sir.”
And the figures seemed to add themselves up in his head. All day long Priest always knew exactly how much money was in the till, and at the end of the day he could tell Mr. Jenkinson the total before he counted it.

He would hear Mr. Jenkinson talking to the salesmen who called, and he soon knew the wholesale and retail prices of every item in the store. From then on the automatic register in his brain calculated the profit on every transaction, and he was awestruck by how much the Jenkinsons were making
without stealing from anyone
.

He arranged for them to be robbed four times in a month, then made them an offer for the store. When they turned him down, he arranged a fifth robbery and made sure Mrs. Jenkinson got roughed up this time. After that Mr. Jenkinson accepted his offer.

Priest borrowed the deposit from the neighborhood loan shark and paid Mr. Jenkinson the installments out of the store’s takings. Although he could not read or write, he always knew his financial position exactly. Nobody could cheat him. One time he employed a respectable-looking middle-aged woman who stole a dollar out of the register every day. At the end of the week he deducted five dollars from her pay, beat her up, and told her not to come back.