Читать книгу Little Green - Loretta Stinson - Страница 13

Tight-Wire

JANIE UNZIPPED THE TENT AND STEPPED OUTSIDE. CHINA stretched and shook herself, happy to be released from the small space. Early morning light filled the sky. Janie had been awake, waiting for morning to come so she could sneak away without seeing Paul. She dressed and crept through camp, hoping she wouldn’t wake anyone. Yesterday she had noticed a trailhead at the campground entrance and she headed there now.

Janie walked to the makeshift kitchen and saw Paul’s bike. She took some fruit, a jar for water and part of a loaf of bread. She’d stay away all day. Maybe by sunset he’d be gone. As she walked down the path to the main campground, she began to relax. Being near Paul made her feel as if she couldn’t catch a breath.

The lower campground looked like a suburban neighborhood transplanted into the woods and smelled like bacon. Janie used the cinder block bathhouse to shower. There weren’t any tipis down here. People camped out of motor homes and trailers; only a few had tents. Although it was still early, people were up. When she’d been on the road before Stella’s, she liked wandering around neighborhoods checking out houses from the street, looking in windows, seeing what people did. It made her sad but she could never resist a glimpse of regular families, eating meatloaf and watching Gunsmoke.

Janie found the trailhead. An official looking notice encouraged hikers to write their names, time they left, and destination in a battered notebook chained to the post. Janie dug in her pack for a pen and wrote, Saturday morning early, then paused and scratched it out. She wished she’d left a note for Stella. Nobody else would miss her.

PAUL SAT AT the picnic table sipping his coffee, waiting for Janie to appear. He had tried to get there earlier, but it didn’t happen because Ernie wanted him to cop enough acid to light up this birthday party. Paul was happy to oblige, but he didn’t have it on him and had to see the twins in Seattle. They didn’t get off work until late. That was the thing about dealing, you could spend hours just waiting to score. You had to be patient, had to have time to kill, had to be willing to wait. Now with a pocketful of acid tabs, the rest of the weekend was his.

He wanted to talk to Janie. He had stayed away from her, going to the bar only to do business. He stayed away hoping he’d forget her. Before if he stayed away long enough most memories lost their sharpness leaving behind a dull ache, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Janie. He’d gone down to San Francisco to do some business, and when he got back he’d stopped by Dee’s place. Janie wasn’t there. He went to The Habit. Dee said Janie was living with Stella. She made it sound like they were together, but Ernie told him Janie had been beaten up pretty bad, maybe raped, trying to hitch out of town. Paul wanted to ask Stella how she was but he couldn’t. Stella never liked him and wouldn’t give Paul anything, not even information. He hoped he’d see her. Make sure she was all right. She’d come around sooner or later.

Ernie, shirtless and sunburned, came down the path from the tipi. “Hey Paul! When’d you get here?” He belched and rearranged his shorts.

“Late.” Paul took a joint from his shirt pocket and lit it, taking a hit and passing it to Ernie. “Happy birthday, man.”

Ernie took the joint and examined it, smoothing the seam with his finger.

“Let’s see what you got.”

Paul took a baggie with a sheet of paper stamped with tiny purple pyramids. He handed it to Ernie.

Ernie cut two squares from the sheet with his Swiss Army knife, popped them in his mouth, and handed Paul two squares. “Let’s get lost.”

JANIE ROLLED ON her back and stretched out in the sun. Sometime today, unless she didn’t go back, she was going to see Paul. Unless he left. That was a possibility. Thinking about him made her stomach feel tight and a little sick. She wondered how much he knew about what had happened to her. That’s how she thought about it the thing that happened to me and she did her best not to think about it. She wondered what she would say to Paul if she saw him and why she thought about him at all.

Nobody was on the trail when she’d started out, and she didn’t see many hikers as the day wore on. She and China had the mountain to themselves. She hiked all morning and they stopped in a sunny clearing for lunch spreading a towel on the grass. Janie fell asleep with China’s head resting against her stomach.

When she woke, the light had changed. Maybe Paul would be gone by now. She hiked down the mountain to the swimming hole. She stayed there watching the light retreat slowly behind the mountains listening to the sounds of the nearby campground, the wet thunk of wood being chopped, and kids playing. When the light changed to shadows on the water she climbed the hill to the camp, and her heart began to pound. She rehearsed what she would say. She repeated her lines like a mantra. As she cleared the top of the hill, Paul Jesse was the first person she saw, standing there like some hippie version of Paul Bunyan, swinging an axe, cutting up a stack of firewood. Nobody else was around. Her stomach dropped. Paul looked right at her. She wanted him to hold her and she wanted to hurt him. Janie kept walking. He followed her.

“Wait up a minute.” He was right behind her, touching the back of her arm.

She stopped, trying to control her voice. “What?”

He didn’t take his hand off her. “Look, I heard what happened – ”

All she felt was the place his fingers met the bare skin of her arm. Her words dried up, and whatever she’d planned to say was lost.

Amber trotted toward them from the meadow. She slung her arms around Paul, and he dropped his hand from Janie. “Hi Paul, I’m so high, Paul.” Amber giggled. “Janie, you have any of that cherry lip gloss?”

“No, I don’t have any lip gloss.” Janie started walking to the meadow.

“I want that cherry kind. I could eat a stick of it, you know? Janie, where you going? Don’t just walk off. It’s okay about the lip gloss. I’ll ask Dee.”

STELLA SWUNG THE croquet mallet while he waited for his turn. The game had broken down now that it was getting dark and just about everyone was high. None of them could remember whose turn it was anyway, or even how to play. Janie hadn’t been around all day but Stella wasn’t worried. China was with her. Ernie turned on everybody who asked for a hit of the acid. Stella didn’t do any himself. Just being around so many hippies all lit up at the same time made him think of San Francisco, 1968, the year he’d come home. He’d met Cookie that summer.

Wandering around the U C campus, feeling lost and alone, he’d seen a group of protesters in Sproul Plaza under a sign that read, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Long-haired men in army fatigues, amputees in wheelchairs, all of them united by the same broken look. The crowd wasn’t big, and there were only a handful of women. Stella stood at the edge of the crowd listening to a former captain – now a double amputee in a wheelchair – speak. Stella didn’t realize tears were running down his face until he looked into the eyes of the petite Latina standing next to him. She put her hand on his arm and led him away to a house she shared on Prince Street. She made him tea with honey and brought it to her room. They talked the rest of that day and well into the night. By morning he was in love with Galletas Novella. Everyone called her Cookie.

Here in the meadow with the sun on her brown skin, she looked no older than the day they met eight years ago. One of the girls had painted a butterfly on her cheek, and her thick hair floated in waves to her hips. She knocked the ball through the hoop with her mallet and laughed at Ernie. Wearing Dee’s pink kimono and a pair of Hawaiian print swim trunks, Ernie carried a can of beer in one hand and a parasol in the other. Delores hung on his arm, trailing a feathered boa behind her.

From the edge of camp Stella saw China come bounding through the tall grass with Janie close behind. He put down his mallet and waved her over. Her face was pink and her eyes looked as if she’d been crying. “You were gone a long time.”

“I went for a walk up the mountain and fell asleep.”

China crowded around them snorting and chuckling. “Looks like China had a good day. I’m glad you took her with you or I would have been worried.”

“Can I sleep in the tipi tonight?”

“Sure.” Stella patted her back. “Bad dreams?”

“I just don’t want to be alone.”

JANIE MOVED HER sleeping bag to the tipi and walked back to the fire. Cat, her face painted with tiger stripes and whiskers, stood at the picnic table chopping tomatoes. Across from the table, Paul sat on an upended log, smoking a cigarette. He watched while Janie pretended not to notice.

She stuffed her hair into a ponytail. “Want some help?”

Cat handed her a bag of avocados. “Cookie said there’s enough beans left to make burritos. You make guacamole. There’s limes and garlic in that box.”

Janie sliced an avocado, removing the pit and putting the fruit in a large wooden bowl.

Cat chopped the tomatoes. “See they look like baby turtles when you turn them over. You should get some acid from Ernie and catch up with me. You look kind of sad.”

“I’m just tired. I hiked all day.” Janie used a fork to smash the avocados with some juice from the limes.

“Yeah. But you should do some acid anyway. Acid cleans out your psychic blockages – like a laxative.” She laughed.

“I’ll pass.”

Cat shook her head. “That fork’s not really doing it for you.” She stuck her hands in the bowl and began to squeeze the avocados. “I don’t know why we’re making all this food. Everybody’s so high they’re not going to eat.”

Amber trotted over to Paul and stood in front of him, shaking her head back and forth like a bobble-head doll. “Has anybody seen my brush? When you got hair like mine you got to brush it a lot or you get rats in it.”

“No shit? Rats?” Cat licked the avocado from her finger.

“Not real rats. Of course not,” said Amber. “Rats are a special word for the tangles girls like me get if we don’t detangle and condition and all like that.” She leaned over close to Paul, her breasts peeking out of the halter top she was wearing. She giggled. “You want to brush me out, Paul?”

Cat wiped her hands on an old towel. “Thought you said you didn’t have a brush?”

Paul smiled and looked at Janie.

Janie chopped garlic.

Amber tossed her head like a pony. “Paul wouldn’t need a brush to take care of my tangles.”

“Find yourself another stylist.” Paul stood up. “I’ll see you later.” He walked away toward the meadow. Amber trotted after him.

The thirty or so people congregated around the picnic tables as the smell of Cookie’s black beans filled the air. Tripper, an older guy who kept telling anybody who’d listen that he’d been to Woodstock, brought out a large pan of brownies. He offered one to Janie. She could smell the pot from them and declined.

Ernie grabbed a handful from the pan. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

Tripper put the pan on the table. “Watch out. They’ll sneak up on you.”

Despite Cat’s prediction, everybody ate. Janie took her plate and sat next to Stella and Cookie. Stella had taken off his shirt. Painted in gold and silver body paint across the broad canvas of his back were several stars. “What are the stars for, Stella?”

Ernie, sitting close by heard her. “You never told Janie how you got to be Stella?”

“It never came up.” Stella wiped a bit of bean from the corner of Cookie’s mouth.

Ernie took a swig of beer. ”Well, it’s kind of more than just your name, Clarence.”

Janie tilted her head, confused. “Who’s Clarence?”

Ernie grinned. “Janie, let me introduce you to Clarence Stubbs.”

Delores plopped herself down next to Ernie and took a bag of pot from her jacket. “Look what I’ve got.”

Ernie grabbed the bag, opened it and smelled the contents. “Nice looking bag of bud. Let’s break it out.”

Delores grabbed it back and emptied the bag of pot on a clean plate. From her wallet she took a plastic card and began sifting seeds and stems from the buds.

Paul sat down next to her and took the plate. “You can’t roll for shit, Dee.”

Ernie cleared his throat. “So, I was telling Janie Stella’s name and all.”

Ernie leaned back against the table, scratching his belly before taking a hit from the joint that came his way. “We all came up from the city. San Francisco. Me and Clarence met in Sister Mary Joseph’s second grade class. Paul was two years behind us. Still is.

“Anyways, me and Clare were friends from school and the neighborhood. Paul’s sister, Cathy, and my sister, Tina, were best friends so we knew each other. After high school, Clare wanted to go to college so he enlisted and went off to be a medic. He shipped out pretty quick cause of how many casualties the corpsmen were taking that year.” Ernie stared into the fire.

Stella shook his head. “Man, do we really have to talk about this?”

Ernie didn’t answer.

Ernie’s voice sounded like it was coming all the way from Vietnam itself. “You know, they don’t train you for war. I mean, you go to boot camp, but everything’s out of a book. It’s all clean there. Nobody’s really trying to kill you.”

Stella stood up and walked away. Cookie followed him.

No one spoke for a moment. There was only the sound of fire popping and the wind in the trees.

Ernie poked at the fire with a long stick stirring up the coals.

“As you get off the plane seems like everybody and their mother wants you dead. I got assigned to Lima Company and Stella was already there. He was our corpsman – our medic. Man, I was so happy to see somebody from home, somebody I knew. He’d already done one tour. At first I couldn’t figure out why he re-enlisted, but by the time I left I got it. You just change so far you don’t recognize the you that you used to be. You can’t see yourself back in the world.” Ernie took a sip of his beer.

“Nobody tells you how to survive heavy fire. They don’t tell you that if you’re six foot four and a medic – like Stella – you’re a prime target. Stella made it through his first tour ’cause he hung around the fire team and moved with them the first three months. Stella did the same for me. He showed me the ropes.

“You know how in the movies if a soldier gets hit some asshole always yells‘ Medic’? That never happened in ’Nam. Medics had code names so Charlie wouldn’t know to shoot you. Sometimes they’d get a man down and wait for someone to come give aid. That was the motherfucker with Stella’s job most of the time. Sniper’d be off in the razor grass waiting for a kill.

“So Clare got the name Stella because our platoon leader was a wop and a fucking Brando fan – I guess ‘stella’ means star in Italian. At night all you could see was his teeth. By the time I met up with him, he’d been Stella for some time. We were stationed out of Nui Kim San. Close to Marble Mountain and Da Nang. By then he’d learned shit they don’t teach at Lejeune. I seen him stop a sucking chest wound with the cellophane off the dude’s cigarette pack. And when he ran out of morphine, he’d give dudes M&Ms and tell them it was some righteous dope. We all thought Stella had some kind of special top-secret government drugs on him. Man, you had to be missing a body part or so wasted you were going home in a bodybag to get one of those M&Ms.” Ernie looked up and shook his head. “Enough. We were both lucky motherfuckers. I’m going to see a man about a horse.” Ernie got up, got another beer from the cooler and walked out into the night.

Delores sat next to Paul. “I met Ernie and Stella through Paul. Paul and me were living in the Haight on Piedmont. Remember that little studio we had, Paul? It was in the basement, but the windows faced the courtyard. This was back when you could rent a place in the city for pretty cheap.” Paul didn’t smile or nod. He looked at Janie and she wouldn’t look back.

Delores’s hair was piled up, and her skin glowed in the firelight, the auburn in her hair reflected the fire. In this light, she looked like the beauty she must have been ten years ago. “I was dancing at the Spanish Moon over on Exeter in the Tenderloin. Paul came by to pick me up and he sees this fat dude with a ponytail at the bar. Turned out to be Ernie and they knew each other. After my set, we all had some drinks and Ernie says I should get a friend and come dance at his place. It’s going to be in Alaska, he says. The pipeline and all. Turned out they never made it to Alaska, and I ended up in bumfuck Washington with Ernie dancing at The Habit. Now you know everything, Janie.”

Janie could see it wasn’t Dee’s intention to be friendly, or to just tell a story. Delores was marking her territory.

People began putting food away, nibbling on leftovers as they cleaned up.

Stella and Cookie came back with Ernie. Stella carried a set of congas roped together over his shoulder. He put them down and started to play. Janie had never seen him play anything. He popped out a rhythm, making the skins sing. Someone played a guitar. Moon had a harmonica. A girl called Pickle had a flute. It seemed to Janie everyone could play something.

Cat and Cookie started dancing with a black-haired girl named Demetra. She was belly dancing to the music. She wore a red velvet skirt that twirled out like a big red flower as she danced. Tiny bells sewn to her halter-top jingled to the music. Janie stood at the edge of the crowd watching the girls dance. In another life she had been fearless. Since the rape she didn’t wear girl clothes, didn’t dance, didn’t do anything that would make men notice her. She missed the dancing. More people were moving with the music. As she swayed into the crowd, Janie closed her eyes for just a second and pictured herself stepping off a rock cliff five hundred feet above a cobalt sea.

PAUL WAS HIGH, definitely high, but he didn’t think that even if he were straight he’d be able to stop looking at her. Janie was dancing. She moved like a storm coming in fast across the mountains. Her face was flushed pink in the firelight, her eyes wide open. She spun, she strutted, she barely missed colliding with other bodies. She was consumed by grace. Janie was dancing, and her face was so open with joy it hurt Paul to see the inch-long scar on her forehead and the bump from her broken nose. He had never wanted to touch a woman the way he wanted to touch Janie.

EVENTUALLY THE DANCING stopped. Cookie and Stella had gone off to the tipi. Janie went to clean up at the pump, trying not to stumble in the dark. From the path she could hear Tripper playing alone on the guitar. She felt Paul behind her before she could see him.

“Janie, can I talk to you?”

“It depends on what you have to say.”

“Look I feel bad about what happened – “

“I don’t want your sympathy.” Words she didn’t know she wanted to say kept coming. “If you love me, say it, if you don’t, then leave me alone.”

Janie knew it was true once she said it. The words hung between them. A breath, a sound, the falling away of sound, leaving a deep silence neither moved to fill.

A flashlight beam interrupted them. Janie left Paul standing at the pump and almost ran into Delores on the path as she hurried to get away from him.

COALS STILL BURNED in the small stone ring in the center of the tipi, giving Paul enough light to find her. He’d looked in her small tent but it was empty. He’d sat by the fire for an hour waiting until he knew what he would do. In the crowded tipi, he unrolled his bag. Janie didn’t move. The dog whined once and moved to the bottom of the bag. For a long while, he lay next to her, propped up on one arm looking down at her in the dim light.

Her eyes blinked open.

Paul touched his fingers to her lips. She lay still, her breath warm against his fingers. He outlined her lips slowly, wanting this moment to make up for everything that had gone wrong before now. He traced the scar on her forehead, his fingers above her eyes and down across the bump on her nose. He could see everything in her eyes. His hand cupped her face and he mouthed silently, “I’m sorry.” She nodded, kissed the palm of his hand, and turned on her side.

Paul lowered himself down next to her, his face buried in the back of her neck. He pressed his face into the hollow at the back of her neck, breathing in deeply.