Boonville (13 page)

“One…”

Mancub bared his teeth, wolfing a succession of barks. Saffron pinched her nipples, eyes never leaving Sarah's to further her excitement. Jeremy appeared uncertain, caught between getting his rocks off and a hard place.

“Two…”

Saffron reached for Mancub's hairy butt which she squeezed as they both found a rhythm, yawping and grinding. Jeremy waded in to their midst, but lent no limb or appendage. Sarah felt sick.

“Three!” she said, spinning on her heel to search for her camera.

“Wah ugh all,” Jeremy grunted.

Saffron stopped stroking Mancub and gave Jeremy the sneer of a woman cheated out of her orgasm by a man who had given into his own. Mancub turned from his penetration of the pillows, lint clinging to his penis.

“What?” Sarah said, almost at the door. “Speak the language. I don't have a doctorate in primitive cultures.”

“Wah ugh all,” Jeremy repeated.

“Waterfall?” Sarah asked. “She went to the waterfall?”

“Ughh.”

“What does ughh mean?” Sarah demanded.

“It means, yes, you little cunt,” Jeremy said, his voice scratchy from lack of use. “It means someday I'll give you what you deserve and you better hope your diaphragm's in when I do.”

“Really?” Sarah replied, used to this kind of vulgarity. “Didn't Hobbes say the great equalizer in the state of nature was that everyone had to sleep? Your cabin's by the water tank, isn't it? If you ever dream of touching me, Jeremy, you better wake up and pray you still have a penis. And if my Mom's not at the waterfall, pick up tomorrow's paper, I might misspell your names. Saffron, is that with one f or two?”

Sarah extended one, then both middle fingers. Saffron charged forward on her knees, baring her teeth. Jeremy grabbed her by the ankles, pulling her back. Mancub padded over and clamped his mouth tightly on the nape of her neck. Sarah was ready to kick Saffron square in the face.

“Let the freaker go,” Sarah told them, but they didn't remove a finger. They were into the restraint. Sarah could see Jeremy's member was hard. Mancub pawed Saffron's breasts, turning her howling from aggressive to erotic. Saffron thrashed between them, but it was play-acting now. Sarah turned to go before she needed another lifetime of therapy, muttering, “Fucking experimental hippies.”

The waterfall was a mile from the main house. A trail off the main road led to a path that curlicued to a ravine where water fell from a river into a pool sixty feet below, shattering into shards of sparkling light, shimmering rainbows, shadows of leaves tattooing your body. There was another pool at the bottom of the gorge, the water of the first pool filtering over the sides into the second, twenty feet lower, then flowing into a river that wound into the forest. Although there were two waterfalls and two water holes, the first was where residents hung out. It was a sanctuary, the inspiration for the commune, out of a storybook where nymphs bathed with fairies and unicorns. But of course Sarah could never be there alone, an assortment of hippies were omnipresent, messing with her boogie.

As a child, Sarah had prided herself on being able to walk from the main house to the waterfall at night without a flashlight. If she got lost, she pretended she was a wiccan and asked directions from animals and birds, the moon and stars. But she knew the way by heart, rocks and inclines, fallen branches and stumps. She was ready with word magic if evil spirits came to harm her. The hills were full of spirits, some bad. The worst wasn't a spirit at all, but Mom's ex, Marty the Poobah.

Sarah remembered a yellow crescent above the trees, fixed firmly with indifference as she ran, branches lashing at her arms. She turned to see a strawberry jam smile smeared across the Poobah's face, a bleeding animal in his hands. The juices of lust. She was a rabbit bounding in a predictable pattern, through the underbrush, over boulders and low limbs. His naked body flashed white whenever she snuck a peek to gauge the distance between them. She would die if he caught her, possessed her insides. “E pluribus unum,” she shrieked, but the spell had no effect. He was on her tail.

Sarah had always been lucky enough to get away. Others at the Waterfall were less fortunate, girls and boys. As they aged, Sarah saw them develop violent and promiscuous dispositions. They became withdrawn, fascinated with fire, crying in their sleep and drawing pictures of monsters, sucking their thumbs and refusing to eat.

“All the men are after you,” Mom had said, after Sarah blew the whistle on the Poobah for chasing her. “Do you know how hard that is for me? You're young and beautiful. I can't compete with that.”

“Mom, he tried to kill me,” Sarah told her.

“Hon, there's a difference between sex and death,” Mom said. “You're gonna have to learn that.”

For months, Sarah wouldn't let herself be alone. She became inseparable from Lisa, stopped going to the waterfall, bought a deadbolt for her door, and quit relying on Mom for protection. She turned to her friends, music, books, painting, the marlin bat, spirits. On her own, she learned the difference between sex and death, making love and rape. It wasn't clear to her whether or not Mom ever did.

Sarah heard splashing as she neared the clearing where the steepest part of the climb remained. Descending, she spotted someone swimming in the icy water and her mother lying out on a towel in her black Dior one-piece, looking like she was poolside at the Betty Ford Clinic. Today there wasn't much sun, even less heat. But since the glut of skin cancer reports and the depletion of the ozone, residents of the commune had started wearing swimsuits, large hats, and sunblock. Some swam naked, but covered up after they got out of the water. Even the Future Primitives and hard-core nudists kept to the shade.

“Aren't you cold?” Sarah asked, sliding down the last incline, almost losing her Walkman in the process, putting it back into her jacket pocket as she regained her balance.

“If Kate Hepburn can do it every day, so can I,” Mom said, setting aside her paperback and lighting a Gauloise.

“What's his excuse?” Sarah gestured to the boy she identified as one of the Poobah's illegitimate children, Raven Newchild, who was climbing the face of the gorge and diving off its side with workmanlike repetition.

“Crank or X,” Mom answered, taking a pull of the cigarette. “He was tripping when I got here. Drugs affect children differently.”

Really? Sarah thought. No shit.

“What are you reading?” Sarah asked instead, deciding there was no need to start harshing right away.

“Something Aslan's into called Cyberpunk,” Mom said. “It's sort of Raymond Chandler meets William S. Burroughs. Bleak landscape, lots of computer talk, virtual reality. Sort of literary acid house.”

What a contradiction, Sarah thought, “literary” and “acid house.” Sometimes people smoked pot and recited bad poetry, but not like they dropped acid and watched
Fantasia
or took Ecstasy and listened to shitty music. She had never seen someone embrace an altered state and reach for Tolstoy.

“Shouldn't you master one reality before you move on to another one?” Sarah asked.

“Cute, hon,” Mom said. “You know negativity makes you tense. Look how clouded your crown chakra is. And your posture. You're so tight.”

“I know, I'm slouching toward abrogation, the great black void,” Sarah said. “Only happy thoughts and a good chiropractor can save me.”

Sarah spied a newt in one of the tiny pools of water in the rock. She caught it by its slippery orange tail. As a girl, she used to hunt them for hours. It wriggled between her fingers, tail whipping. She stroked its back and belly, experiencing the tactile pleasure of its slimy skin before returning it to its home.

“Why don't you go for a dip and clear your channels?” Mom asked.

“Because it's freezing,” Sarah answered, her hand cold from
catching the newt, wondering why Mom wasn't shivering.

“Temperature is a state of mind,” Mom said. “The water is cleansing, not cold.”

If Sarah didn't change the subject, she would have to listen to how Mom had walked on coals and made love on a frozen pond, the personal experiences she always cited in arguments about mind over matter.

“Where's the Poobah?” Sarah said, watching Raven plunge into the water hole, bobbing to the surface with frenzied eyes.

“I don't know,” Mom said. “I think he's tending his hamsters.”

The Poobah had been trying his hand at genetic engineering in a shack where he also cooked synthetic drugs. He was attempting to create a breed of designer rodents that could be put into the anal passage to heighten sexual pleasure during intercourse. The Poobah wanted to cash in while gerbil jamming was hot. He was toying with bone structure, crossbreeding hamster cells with armadillos and porcupines, trying to create rodents he could package as “ribbed” and “studded.”

“He's so sick,” Sarah said.

“He's a visionary,” Mom said, flicking an ash. “You just don't like him.”

“I try to stay away from people making a buck by helping nuts stuff small animals up their asses,” Sarah said.

“You've never given him a chance, even when we were dating,” Mom accused. “You've always been down on him.”

“I've never been down on him, and he's never gone down on me,” Sarah said. “With the exception of you, Mom, I try to avoid psychos.”

“That's a mean thing to say,” Mom told her.

Sarah stared toward the waterfall, distracted by Raven Newchild's bare body falling into an explosion of water.

Yeah, Sarah thought, it was a mean thing to say, but Mom had said worse to her even more impassively. And Sarah was serious, she had written off her father, divorced her husband, kept mostly to herself on the commune, and her friend Lisa, who received most of the attention she was willing to invest in another human being, was relatively normal.

“Whatever,” Sarah said, unsure of what she really wanted to say now that she was here. “I heard the music, so I came out looking for you.”

“You didn't have to do that,” Mom told her. “You made a choice.”

“I know, Mom,” Sarah said. It was impossible for her to be anything around Mom but fourteen years old again. “Here I am. Rock me like a hurricane.”

“I wanted to talk to you at the main house but some Primitives were there,” Mom said. “They weren't grooving on the music.”

“Nobody grooves on that music,” Sarah informed her. “You're the only one.”

“It didn't seem that way in the sixties and seventies,” Mom said. “It's better than that heroin music you listen to. At least there's some life in Janis.”

“Not any more,” Sarah said.

“Very funny,” Mom said, without laughing. “I suppose now I'm going to have to listen to you tell me the reason you identify with heroin music is because I fucked up your childhood. Everything comes down to me being a bad mother, right? I'm sorry for the millionth time. Can we get beyond that? I do have my own set of problems.”

Mom had a way of turning conversations, heading off any conflicting viewpoints before they were presented, admitting guilt to everything and nothing at the same time, trivializing what Sarah felt by simplifying her thoughts into extremes, then discarding them because they were overstated. There was no discussion with Mom, just her voice skipping over yours to topics she wanted to lecture on.

“Why can't you let me feel something without acting like it isn't valid?” Sarah asked. “I came here because I wanted to see what was wrong. And to tell you to quit playing that music. It doesn't remind me of happy times.”

“Lookit,” Mom said, “If you're going to be venting, I'm not into it. I'm having a tough time myself. If you want to be there for me, fine. If not, fine too.”

“What about being there for me?” Sarah wanted to know. “How about not playing music you know freaks me out? Not laying all your shit on me?”

“I've been there for you,” Mom stated.

Sarah was interested to see how she would get out of this one.

“I offered to pay for therapy,” Mom said.

Exactly, Sarah thought. Hit and run.

“It's not my job to be your mother anymore,” Mom tried to rebound. “You're an adult, not an infant.”

“Which one are you?” Sarah inquired.

“Here we go again,” Mom said, stubbing out her cigarette and placing it on her paperback.

“That's right, here we go again. And don't give me any of your origami apologies,” Sarah told her. “Sometimes I wonder if we're speaking the same language.”

“I don't think we are, hon, you're just yelling,” Mom said. “You can't see my point of context. I got you out of that middle-class bullshit, away from the mainstream where you could be what you wanted, independently as a woman.”

“That's what you wanted, not me,” Sarah reminded her. “I was a girl. I wanted Popsicles and dolls. Independence was low priority.”

“You think you would have been happier with your father in Tahoe?” Mom asked. “Wearing a Catholic school uniform all your life, him trying to screw your friends.”

“Dad wasn't like that,” Sarah said.

“Your father wasn't around long enough for you to know what he was like,” Mom informed her. “It's fine to fantasize about what a great guy he was, how everything would have been peach fuzz if you had lived with him, but he didn't take responsibility. I did. I said I was sorry I wasn't in the PTA, baking cookies and tying your hair into pigtails, but that shit was killing me. I didn't want it killing you before you even got started.”

Sarah remembered Mom at her school's open houses back in San Francisco, the nuns making her nervous. After an hour, she would disappear with one of the cute fathers. Sarah, brimming with energy from cupcakes and fruit punch, would notice Mom missing from the proceedings. One of her classmates would eventually report someone was smoking in the bathroom. Mom would return, blouse askew. She had gone to Catholic schools herself.