Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (33 page)

“Wow, you’re glowing,” he tells her. That doesn’t come close to describing what he actually sees, but it’s the best he can do under the circumstances.

“Headrush!” Francesca giggles. She does a pirouette in front of the bonfire. Sparks surge up behind her in a tower and trailing images follow her. Gordon wonders if anyone else can see them.

“Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” he asks her.

“Which kind of witch do you want me to be?”

“Good,” Gordon answers.

“Bad,” Jimmy cuts in.

“I can be both,” Francesca says.

Thunder rumbles through the shadowy trees behind them. A dozen eerie, jittering balls of light dart through the black branches, headed toward the bonfire. At first Gordon thinks it’s some kind of supernatural trouble–Archons on the warpath–but then he sees it’s just the headlights on a herd of Harleys riding up to join them. As the lead motorcycle nears the bonfire’s flames, he makes out MacDuff.

“We’re headin’ up to the cliffs for a look at the stars,” MacDuff says, coming to a stop. “Who wants to ride with me?”

Flinging her long red hair to one side like a scarf, Francesca hops on the back of the Harley without hesitating. Seeing her bare legs straddling MacDuff’s big machine makes Gordon feel suddenly inadequate. His newfound sense of stoner virility dissipates like a puff of pot smoke.

MacDuff turns to Corky and says, “Hey Cork, how ‘bout you follow us with Gordon and Jim there in your Bug? If you get lost, we’ll be on the far side of the creek up top of Honeymoon Pool.”

“C’mon, you guys,” Corky says. “This should be good.” He leads Gordon and Jimmy over to a Pepto-Bismol pink Volkswagen Bug parked behind one of the tents. “Go on. Get in,” he says. “I just hope I’m not too fucked-up to drive.”

Gordon thinks,
Even if you are, I’d rather crash in this thing than riding on the back of a motorcycle.
The interior of the Volkswagen smells like an old lawnmower. As Gordon climbs into the backseat, his foot bumps against a can of Quaker State 30-weight motor oil, reminding him of an old masturbatory disaster. There’s also a racy blue can of STP on the floor and a red plastic funnel wrapped in greasy newspaper. The Bug must burn a lot of oil.

“What a crappy car!” Jimmy says from the front, giving Corky shit. “Why would you even drive this faggy piece of junk? Are you broke?”

“I drive it so I won’t get pulled over by the cops.”

“It’s like some ugly hippie girl’s car….”

“Exactly!” The Volkswagen’s engine starts with a tubercular roar. Bearings rattle like dice in a ceramic cup. Talking above the noise, Corky says, “It barely even goes the speed limit, so mostly the cops just ignore me. Which is great, since I’m usually hauling massive amounts of drugs.”

“You’re a drug dealer?” Gordon asks, secretly thrilled to be in such perilous company. That’s one of the great things about the Hells Angels: they make moral failings look like fun.

Corky asks rhetorically, “Would an ugly hippie girl have a stereo like this?” He twists a knob on a sophisticated-looking black panel built into the Volkswagen’s dash. The spooky electronic organ and glissando guitar solo that opens Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” fills the interior with the ambience of a concert resonating inside a cathedral. “That’s a top-of-the-line Blaupunkt with a 200-watt amp and JBL speakers,” Corky shouts. “I’ve even got a subwoofer under the backseat.”

No kidding.
Gordon can feel the subwoofer vibrating through his skinny butt on the low notes. It’s the best stereo system he’s ever heard. As Corky puts the Volkswagen in gear and lets out the clutch, his coolness in Gordon’s estimation goes up considerably.

The VW lurches over a log (or someone’s leg) and scuttles onto the road leading out of the campground. The engine’s fuzzy chugging rousts an owl from its perch. It goes lunging across the beams of their headlights like a Doberman pinscher chasing after a bobcat.

The music is too impressively loud for conversation. After about ten minutes of driving through the dark, Corky turns down the stereo and says, “We’re almost there.” He steers the VW off the paved road. It bounces along a rutted dirt trail that ends in a dark meadow. Dozens of the Hells Angels’ Harleys are parked between two picnic benches illumined in the Bug’s headlights. The Hells Angels themselves are somewhere else, beyond the light’s reach.

Someone howls like a coyote as Corky and Jimmy get out of the car and head into the darkness beyond the picnic tables. It takes Gordon a little longer to climb out of the backseat. He has to run to catch up with the others. Wet weeds lash against his bare legs. The night smells green. As Gordon’s eyes adjust to the moonlight, he sees the Hells Angels up ahead, gathered near the edge of a cliff. MacDuff sits on his Harley among them, tilting his head back to admire the starry night. The coyote howl is coming from him.

After MacDuff finishes his lonesome barking, there’s some laconic talk about it being a perfect night for a little black magic. “Anyone up for sacrificing a virgin?” Corky asks as he walks up to them. A wave of sinister laughter erupts from the other Hells Angels after MacDuff adds: “Not that any of
you
guys’d qualify.”

Gordon sees Francesca standing off by herself, a few yards from the main group. He goes over to join her. He’s still seeing auras, but they’re no more than pale shimmers now, like the iridescent scum made by old motor oil in a puddle of rainwater. Jimmy, tagging along behind him, no longer has an aura at all–he just seems to be roiling with inner heat.

“It’s goddam beautiful up here,” Francesca says as they come up beside her. She’s standing right at the cliff’s edge. When Gordon looks beyond her bare feet, his knees shudder with vertigo. It’s a very long way down. The creek is just a tiny black ribbon glinting in the starlight. Honeymoon Pool, directly below them, looks like two wet inkblots on a Rorschach test. The Moon reflects on the water like a milky, blind eye in the shadowed face of an oracle–some black-cloaked goddess masquerading as a crone. Francesca is right. It’s goddam beautiful.

“Shit, how far down do you think it is?” Jimmy asks of no one in particular.

Gordon does some quick calculations. He counted 138 steps on the way back up from their fishing excursion. Each step was around eight inches high, so for every three steps, that’s two feet. One-hundred-and-thirty-eight divided by three then multiplied by two…. “It’s around 92 feet,” Gordon says, “if this cliff is as high as the other side.”

“I’ll bet it’s even higher,” Jimmy says. He looks over at MacDuff, who seems to be looking back at them a little too intently. “Hey MacDuff,” he asks, “has anyone ever jumped in the creek from here?”

“And lived? Doubt it.”

Francesca hugs Gordon from behind and says, loud enough for everyone to hear: “I’ll do it if you do it.”

She’s kidding, right?
Just the thought of jumping almost makes Gordon retch, but he doesn’t want to look like a chicken in front of all those Hells Angels.
She’ll never do it, anyway. No one could be that crazy….
Teenage bravado forces him to say, “Sure. You go first.”

Even before the words are out of Gordon’s mouth, he knows he’s in trouble. He sees a madly hopping collection of colored lights scooting out from under MacDuff’s Harley. Those airborne splashes of neon pink, tungsten blue, and electric yellow seem all too familiar when they dance across the hummocky grass and leap onto Francesca, where they coalesce into the shape of a transparent cartoon rabbit. It’s that ass-kicking Easter Bunny all over again! In the middle of July, which seems incredibly unfair. Now Gordon knows he’s
really
screwed.

Francesca, of course, puts her hind legs together and does a little bunny hop right off the cliff’s edge.

“
Ohgodohgodohgod…
” Gordon thinks. His mind takes a snapshot of Francesca’s Yosemite Sam embroidered ass jack-knifing in midair. He’s horrified. Astounded. His arms are going limp. He can’t feel his face. He waits for the wet smack, the crunch of breaking bones, the yip of pain before death. Instead, he hears a tiny splash and then Francesca’s thin voice calls up to him: “C’mon in, the water’s fine!”

Hell isn’t such a warm place, after all.

Every Hells Angel suddenly looks like a greasy, leather-clad vampire. Some of them have even acquired protruding fangs and crooked, blackened wings. Gordon is seeing with his third eye wide open and it’s freaking him the fuck out.

In his mind, Gordon backs up and jumps off the cliff with a running start and a scream. Everyone else just sees him topple over the edge like a felled tree. Rather than a full-blown narcoleptic collapse, this time he’s experiencing something akin to a vivid form of sleepwalking.

As Gordon plummets, the granite cliff he’s rushing past becomes a movie screen on which the film of his life is projected at a million times normal speed. He sees every moment of his past and future, but it all goes by so quickly that he can’t commit anything to memory. One insight, however, will stick with him: that place the Tibetans call the
Bardo
–the dreamscape where all souls rise or fall depending on their merits–it’s not just on the other side of death. It’s earthly life as well.

The Moon’s reflection through a haze of stars rises up to meet Gordon. And when he flicks his eye, the Moon explodes.

Splash, terror, water
–and Gordon’s awake, he’s alive–but maybe not for long. He’s drowning. He’s underwater and everything is dark. Then his foot touches gravel and he reflexively pushes himself up. When he breaks to the surface in a surge of icy bubbles, he feels as if he’s been reborn.

As the water clears from his ears, Gordon hears Hells Angels laughing far above him. Francesca swims over to where he’s treading water and holds up her hands as if describing a tiny fish that got away. “You missed the boulders by this much,” she says with her witchy grin. Then she kisses him. It’s a sweet, lingering kiss. Gordon’s first. It makes every horrible experience that led him there suddenly seem worthwhile. The next time his mother asks him, “If your friend jumps off a cliff, does that mean you have to do it, too?” his answer will be, indisputably,
“Yes!”

He and Francesca swim over to the other side of Honeymoon Pool and climb the 138 steps to the top. They walk hand-in-hand along the campground road, talking about their lives in a haphazard way–astrological signs, favorite characters on
Gilligan’s Island
, books they’ve both read, the possibility of life existing in other parts of the universe. Gordon tells the story of his father’s recent death in an airplane crash and Francesca doesn’t disappoint him by reacting to it in that fake adult way most teenagers fall into when the subject of funerals comes around; instead, her response is genuinely warm and human. By the time they arrive at Gordon and Jimmy’s empty tent, Gordon is hopelessly, insanely, idiotically in love. He wants Francesca to fly away to Paris and live with him there forever. They’ll get an elegant little apartment on the Île de la Cité with a windowed terrace overlooking the twin bell towers of Notre-Dame. They’ll pass their days eating in fine restaurants, browsing old bookstores, and retracing Gertrude Stein’s daily dogwalk (with a poodle named Basket) through the Jardin du Luxembourg. Their nights will rival the revelries of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Somehow, Gordon will find the time to get a lot of writing done. His every new novel will be a bestseller in Europe and Francesca will be feted as a great beauty, a muse for paintings and sculptures that are acquired by the Louvre. Everything will be perfect and they’ll love each other always and inspire each other forever and their union will last until the final heat-exhausted star collapses inwardly upon itself in the heavens….

But then Gordon remembers that he doesn’t have a passport, or any real money to speak of. He doesn’t even have much in the way of pubic hair.

Sometimes being thirteen really sucks.

They kiss again, standing in front of the tent, but it’s not quite as magical this time around. They’re both shivering so hard that their teeth are chattering.

“I’m f-fucking f-f-freezing!”
Gordon stammers.

“Me, too!” Francesca says, bouncing up and down and rubbing her arms for warmth. “We need to get out of these wet clothes and dry off. Are there any towels in your tent?”

“Um, yeah. You wanna come in?”

“Uh-huh.”
She gives Gordon a quick kiss on the cheek, then crawls through the tent flap with a wag of Yosemite Sam’s soggy beard.

It’s dark inside, but there’s enough illumination from the moonlight shining through the canvas tent fabric to see what’s going on. By the time Gordon gets through the flap, Francesca has already shed her leopard skin bikini top and is about to wriggle out of her cut-offs. “Don’t look,” she says demurely, but Gordon can’t help himself. He doesn’t even pretend to look anywhere else.

Free of her clothes (
amazing breasts, big nipples, a dark thatch of pubic hair, my god!),
Francesca unzips Gordon’s sleeping bag and snuggles down inside it. She finds a battery-powered Coleman lantern and shines its bright beam on the bulging zipper of Gordon’s shorts.

“That’s quite the little pup-tent you’ve got going there, Gordon. Aren’t you going to get undressed?”

“I’m not so cold now,” Gordon says. There’s no way he’s letting Francesca see his practically hairless crotch.

“You’re still shivering. C’mon, I’ll warm you up.” She opens the sleeping bag and pats the spot right next to her.

“Turn out the light.”

“You’re so modest!”

The lantern goes off. In the few seconds that it takes for their eyes to readjust to the darkness, Gordon peels out of his clothes and jumps into the sleeping bag. Francesca squeals: “God, you’re so cold! Don’t touch me until your hands warm up!”

Shivering anew in earnest, Gordon says through his chattering teeth: “Your feet are like icicles!”

“Okay, wait. I’ve got something that’ll warm us both up.” Francesca turns on the lantern and rummages around in her discarded cut-offs. She comes up with her Yosemite Sam lighter and a screw-top aluminum canister the size of a shot glass. She unscrews the lid and shakes out a joint. “Whew! Still dry…. Here–try this.”