Boonville (7 page)

John looked both ways, letting his sight settle for a moment on the asphalt where he had blacked out. A truck trailing a load of grapes roared past followed by a camper, a logging truck, and a group of teenagers in a green AMC Hornet. Someone behind him honked. He clicked his turn signal and drove, wincing at the sight of the brick building next to the Pic 'N Pay. The Lodge's beer sign winked its neon eye. He steered into the parking lot of the Boonville Hotel.

No alcohol this time, he told himself. Caffeine.

“If it ain't the Squirrel Boy,” the bartender greeted him. “Rumor had it, you died.”

“The way I feel,” John said, the bartender's voice booming between his ears, “maybe I did.”

“You don't waste no time takin' over where your grandma left off,” the bartender observed. “What can I get for you? Hair of one of the dogs that bit you?”

“You got cappuccino?” John asked, thinking how Christina
would take care of him if he were home: coffee, grapefruit juice, ice pack, kisses.

“Guess you're on the dissie stool,” the bartender grinned. “Cuppa cappa comin' up.”

John didn't know if he was on the dissie stool or not; his seat looked like all the other empty ones in the bar. He figured the phrase meant something like “on the wagon.” He didn't bother asking the bartender to clarify the term. The energy he had generated at the cabin had disappeared.

When his coffee came, he held his face above the cup, letting the steam play against his skin. Cooling slightly, he bottomed it in two gulps. The milk had been scalded and the espresso was bitter. He asked for a refill of regular coffee, which he loaded with sugar. His insides began to warm. On this trip into town, he had noticed the Horn of Zeese, the truckstop from the news article he had read about Boontling. It was across from the hotel and not too far down the road. He thought about braving it for some eggs, but his stomach didn't feel ready.

“You got a pay phone?” John asked the bartender.

“Cross the street at the market, ours is out of order,” the bartender said. “But if you're callin' your hornin' buddies, none of 'em got phones. Billy Chuck don't pay the bills, Sarah's too far outta town, and the Kurts ain't good with numbers.”

“I take it word travels fast anyway,” John said.

“What else do we got to do in this town?” the bartender replied. “Sounds like you had a night. You remember any of it?”

“Up to a point,” John answered.

“Which one?” the bartender asked

“How many were there?” John replied.

“I heard you were higher 'n Dwight's flagpole,” the bartender said. “Laid out in the road with the Kurts and Billy Chuck, sniffin' after that hippie girl's yeast-powder biscuit when I told you she was trouble.”

“Can I ask you a question?” John said, uncertain if he wanted to know the answer or if he would be able to translate the bartender's reply into Basic English. “How did my car get wrecked? And how did I get home?”

“That's two questions,” the bartender told him, then inquired if John's car had collected any road signs.

Not wanting to admit guilt, John took a sip of his coffee.
Smiling, the bartender informed him that he was now an eco-terrorist, a soldier in Judy Bari's army. John had never heard of Judy Bari and was even less enthusiastic about being linked to the word “eco-terrorist,” thinking it sounded worse than “dissie stool.”

“Those hippie girls are environmentalists,” the bartender explained. “For kicks they hunt road signs. They think they're ugly and bring the wrong kind of business to the valley. But that ain't all they do. You weren't at any lumber sites or LP land, were you?”

“I don't think so,” John answered, rummaging through his short-term memory.

“Good, 'cause they're also monkeywrenchers,” the bartender said.

“Do monkeywrenchers and eco-terrorists sniff yeast-powder biscuits?” John asked, letting the bartender know he wasn't following him.

“Ain't you heard of Earth First!?” the bartender said, surprised. “Protesters spikin' redwoods and sabotagin' lumber equipment, savin' old growth and the spotted owl? Ain't you never read
The Lorax
? Don't you watch ‘Sixty Minutes'?”

John had read
The Lorax
, but he didn't know how the children's story applied to the topic at hand. But he didn't watch “Sixty Minutes” anymore; Andy Rooney annoyed him and Diane Sawyer was at the top of his list, with new-entry Margaret Washington, as one of the top ten women he would hate to be stuck in an elevator with. All that smug nodding, the person interviewed forced to respond to questions whose answers were later edited into whatever slant the network thought would earn better ratings. John used to fill his quota of Orwellian hate for the week by tuning in, but he saw a segment they did on the poultry industry and to this day couldn't eat chicken. He figured if he watched long enough, he would develop the same reaction to all his favorite foods.

“I try to miss it,” John admitted.

“Earth First! is big up here,” the bartender explained. “I'm for the trees, but I sympathize with the loggers; like the steel workers, they're losin' their industry to bigger profits made elsewhere, mostly Mexico and Japan. But in a few years there ain't gonna be any trees or jobs left. Everybody loses. I ain't gonna climb up on a soapbox though.”

“I appreciate that,” John said, then added. “Do you know
how I got home?”

“Eee tah, Squirrel Boy, invite me out with you next time, then maybe I'll know.” The bartender extended his hand across the bar. “Folks call me Hap.”

“What's your real name?” John inquired, shaking his hand.

“Hap,” the bartender said. “That's why folks call me Hap.”

“Nice to meet you, Hap,” John said, unsure whether he was being made a fool of. “You have a strange way of talking. Is that the local language I heard about?”

“I'm a kimmie can harp Boont,” Hap said, proudly. “But lemme tell you one thing before you go. If I heard you was with that Sarah, you can bet her ex did too. Keep your eyes peeled. Leek bee'n. Get me?”

“Leek bee'n,” John said, understanding Hap was telling him to watch his ass.

He paid for the coffee and thanked Hap again. In the parking lot, two kids with skateboards were evaluating the damage to the Datsun, one saying to the other, “Dude, he's totally foiled.” The other, seeing John approach, observed, “He's the poster child for hating it.” John looked at his car, the loser in a demolition derby. With a wave of his hand, the first kid said, “Adios, Mr. Morose,” then both teens scooted off down the center of the highway, doing a few tricks as they rolled away.

John drove to the pay phone at the Anderson Valley Market. The telephone booth had a sign above it, “Bucky Walter.” John wondered if the booth had been memorialized for some local motor mouth or if it was independently owed. Maybe it was more Boontling. He'd ask Hap about it sometime he didn't want a straight answer.

John searched his pockets for change. Depositing a quarter in the telephone, he remembered when the cost was a dime.

“Hello,” he said, into the receiver.

“Peace and love,” a voice answered.

“Could I speak to Pensive Prairie Sunset?” John said.

“I am she and she is me,” the voice replied.

“This is John Gibson,” he identified himself against his better judgment, thinking he shouldn't get involved with anyone named Pensive Prairie Sunset who spoke in Beatles lyrics. “You left my grandmother's car for me at the San Francisco airport.”

“How are you?” Pensive cut in. “Did you have a safe trip? I
hope you ordered a vegetarian or low sodium meal for the flight. You can suffer severe autointoxication from just one in-flight meal, especially when you combine it with that terrible recycled airplane air. Last time I flew, I had to fast for a week after I ate the apple pancakes on a red-eye to Cleveland.”

“I'm in Boonville,” John said.

“Fantastic,” Pensive replied, no pauses or pitch change in her voice, coming at you like the flat groan of a Ray Manzarek keyboard solo. “We must be doing O.K. then.”

“I don't know,” he admitted. “I called to get the keys to my grandma's cabin.”

“Where are you calling from?” Pensive asked.

“A pay phone that says ‘Bucky Walter' outside the Anderson Valley Market,” John said.

“That means telephone,” the woman informed him. “I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

Click. Dial tone.

Some unwanted force was now bearing down on John like in a 1970s disaster film:
Airport, Earthquake, Towering Inferno, Billy Jack
. There was nothing he could do. He dialed zero, trying to place a collect call to Christina, but the line was busy. 911 seemed extreme.

Stepping from the pay phone, he peered into the Anderson Valley Market past a stand of magazines and romance novels. John's eye caught the headline of the local paper: “Congressman Calls Coasters ‘Hippie Potheads.'” The cashier was counting out change for a man with a nylon Bush Hog hat. A woman dragged a little girl whose face was smeared with chocolate from the store, screaming and kicking. Dogs barked from the back of a truck. The woman stopped to swat the girl, but the girl broke loose from her grip and darted toward the truck with the dogs. “I want fudge!” the girl howled. The woman looked on the verge of violence. Nearby, a group of Mexicans in cowboy hats conversed in Spanish, their accents sounding different to John than the Cubans in Miami. They weren't wearing guayberas either or playing dominoes. Peterbilts loaded with logs whizzed past, diesels roaring, chrome nude girl silhouette mud flaps. The man with the Bush Hog hat walked past the Mexicans and joined the woman and girl at the truck with the dogs. With a voice offering no room for argument, he told them both to get into the truck,
the girl wasn't getting any more fudge until after lunch.

“When's lunch?” the girl asked, swiftly obedient.

“When your mama makes it,” the man said, petting the dogs and looking without affection at his wife. “Sometime before dinner.”

“We'll eat when we get home,” the woman said. “Fish sticks and chili.”

For the sake of his stomach, John tried to put the woman's lunch menu out of his mind. But what time was it? He checked his watch, black and silver, with flecks of green fluorescence. Waterproof up to two hundred feet. “In case you take it snorkeling,” he remembered Christina had said, before he could see what it was he had unwrapped. He kissed her, setting the watch aside, and they rolled into wrapping paper. Tinsel reflected bulbs of red and green. Pine needles fell into her hair. She kissed his hairless chest. His hands pushed at soft cotton and lacy underthings. Tiny lights pulsed. He felt the curve of her thighs, her firm buttocks, and the full of her weight came down to swallow him. His body stilled in paralytic ecstasy. She pressed wet lips to his, and whispered, “Merry Christmas.”

1:12 p.m.

He had been gone less than two days and he couldn't quite remember why he had left. The air-conditioned nightmare. His eyes blurred the parking lot of cars and high-riding trucks parked parallel to the store, three rows wide. Some were penned in and couldn't leave until other drivers came out of the store and moved their vehicles first. The Datsun was one of the trapped cars.

“Kinda makes you wonder,” a voice said. “Maybe aliens really did kill Kennedy.”

John turned to see a man sitting on a picnic table in front of the market. His face was serious, almost grim, like he had lost something important but couldn't remember what it was. The man spit a glob of tobacco.

“I'm sorry,” John apologized. “Did you say aliens assassinated Kennedy? John F. Kennedy?”

“Haven't you seen the videotape?” the man asked.

John shook his head, half because he hadn't seen the tape, half because he couldn't believe he was entering this conversation.

“Where have you been?” the man said. “I saw that video six months ago. It wasn't really the aliens, it was the show-fer. They slowed that Zapruder film down and you seen the driver plug the
president like a fish in a barrel. Blowed his head clean off. That's why Jackie O was crawlin' out the back. She seen it was the driver. The same people coverin' up the UFOs. They had the real E.T. and nobody knew it, except government agents, and when he died they destroyed the body. They got more, but their fingers don't light up. It's complicated and linked to drugs and patterns in cornfields and LBJ not runnin' for a second term. And Incas. But it's really this secret government run with aliens. That's why I wonder if it wasn't aliens killed Kennedy. It would explain the ‘magic bullet.' You know aliens got ammunition like that.”

John tried to grasp the concept of a secret government of drug-selling aliens assassinating President Kennedy and denying President Johnson a second term in office.

“Kennedy sure is dead,” he offered.

“Yep,” the man said, spitting. “There's a lot we don't know about. Like Einstein said, ‘Anything's possible.'”

“Was that Einstein?” John asked.

“I watch out for 'em,” the man answered. “Like you say, Kennedy sure is dead.”

“No doubt about that,” John replied, entering the market and leaving the man outside to worry about conspiracy-oriented extraterrestrials.

Scanning the shelves of the Anderson Valley Market, John noticed that whoever did the purchasing had gone heavy on beverages and sugar-coated cereals. A shopper told him if he wanted to buy more than Budweiser and Frosted Flakes, he should drive over the hill to Ukiah where they had several supermarkets, including an Albertson's. John saw that the rear section, some one-third of the store, was dedicated to wine. He guided his cart back toward the front, searching hard for merchandise, having logged too much media time not to buy something. He could always be persuaded by packaging, cookies with a midget or an elf on the wrapper, a thirst quencher, a quick-and-easy, light-and-tasty, new-and-improved, thirty-percent-more, half-the-calories, cholesterol-free taste treat. John dutifully filled his cart.