“Are you okay?” Adams asked.
The boy nodded.
“Get off the bus, son. Go find your folks.”
“We’re just riding around,” Billy said. “We’re going to get some gas.” The boy seemed a little defensive, a little defiant. Adams knew Billy wasn’t old enough to understand the danger he could have been in if the Shanti Sena hadn’t arrived when they did.
“Your folks’ll be looking for you.” Adams’s words brooked no argument. “You need to go to them. I’ll come around in a little while.”
Reading the expression in Adams’s face, Billy scrambled down the bus steps and ran off, but by this time another boy, this one much older, had also come forward from the back of the bus and now moved to stand in the door. He looked to be a teenager, but one of an unreadable age—he could have been anything from a tough-countenanced thirteen to a baby-faced twenty. Adams didn’t recognize him, but later others would realize they’d spotted him with Ramos at past Gatherings. For a moment the only sound was the click of the camera, as it freeze-framed his dirty-blond mullet, his shopworn, dissolute mien and indifferent pout. He wore his jeans slung low with a hunting knife strapped on the belt loops; a wide expanse of skin showed below his gray short-sleeved T-shirt. His expression was vacant, his pose slightly provocative, like Ramos’s. He remained silent.
“I’m leaving,” the older man said in an injured tone. “I don’t want to stay where I’m not wanted.”
“Just hold on a minute, brother.” Barry Adams stifled the instinct to happily accede to his wishes. “Folks here need to counsel some and come to an agreement.”
The council of three considered their options. They wanted Ramos gone as much as he wanted to leave, but should they try to make him stay long enough to call in authorities? The benefit of the doubt was wearing thin.
Adams turned back to the bus. “We might have us an attempted kidnapping. You were leaving with one of our young’uns.”
“That’s just crazy.” Ramos turned and gestured to the empty interior. “That kid and his brother been practically living on this bus. I fixed their meals and watched over ’em like they were my own. His folks are my friends. You heard him, we were just going to get gas. I promised him I’d take him into town.” Ramos looked restless. “I’m leaving, and you can’t stop me.”
They couldn’t and they knew it. Ramos was free to go. If not, the Shanti Sena were well aware they themselves could face kidnapping charges.
“You’re no longer welcome in our home,” Adams finally told the man. “Even if you didn’t hurt anyone, you made an agreement and you broke it, so we can’t trust you. You better go on down the road and don’t come back.”
“I’m telling you, nothing happened,” Ramos reiterated one last time. “I didn’t hurt nobody.” The older teen glared at the Rainbows and moved farther back inside. As Ramos closed the door, Adams’s friend with the camera circled around. From behind the bus just before it pulled away, she snapped the curlicued letters advertising tarot card readings, and the numbers off the license plate.
The Rainbows walked down the road to follow until the bus turned out of the encampment. Then they went off to “A Camp” to talk to Billy’s parents.
Joe and Cherie Taylor were mainstays at the rough-and-ready “A Camp,” which usually set up at the edge of the Gathering, to enjoy a beer or two… or twenty, away from the disapproving eyes of most Rainbows, who frowned on alcohol as a Babylon drug. Joe Taylor ran the “A Camp” kitchen by day, a well-maintained, crowd-pleasing mess, and drank lustily by night. Well respected by many, he was more likely to break up a fight than start one; a man who knew the difference, as he liked to say, between peeing on someone’s tires and peeing on someone’s car.
Cherie Taylor was his wan shadow, whose cornflower blue eyes could occasionally still brighten a once luminous face. But at thirty-one, she looked a decade older, and the ravages of her family’s marginal existence, coupled with years of ill health, showed in the deep lines etched into her pale complexion.
During the rest of the year, the Taylors were inveterate road dogs, living off day jobs, the state, and the kindness of strangers, but the Gathering was an annual refuge that briefly anchored them in community. Cherie told folks there that she came every year to regain her strength. It’s what keeps me going, she’d say. Her family had been on-site as far back as mid-May, living out of and serving meals from a broken-down mobile kitchen, a gift from sympathetic locals. By all accounts, they were loving parents who, even if caught up in their excessive lifestyle, tried to do right by their children, seven-year-old Billy and eight-year-old Joe Jr.
When Barry Adams and John Buffalo came to see Joe and Cherie Taylor after the run-in with Ramos, the parents listened with alarm.
“We’ve been watching this brother on account of trouble with him in the past,” Adams said. “He might be a child molester, he might not. We’ve never been able to prove anything. We’d talked to him, though, and he wasn’t supposed to be alone with our kids. But Billy was on his bus.”
“We met him in Missouri last year,” Cherie said, “and he hung out with us a lot. We knew him as Michael, and he seemed like a nice guy. I think he brought that older kid with him, but I don’t know much else about him.” And yes, she said, Ramos had been minding her two boys, especially after hours, when their kitchen turned into a bar scene. Cherie had been relieved when they’d slept over on his bus two days earlier, safely at a distance from the late-night carousing. But just the day before, she recounted, she’d told the boys to stay away from Ramos. Another friend, the man who’d warned Barry Adams earlier that day, had seen the boys on the bus, and had dragged them kicking and screaming back to their mom. There, the friend had warned Cherie too that Ramos wasn’t to be trusted.
“Stay off of his bus, and go down to Kid Village,” she’d told her sons. When Joey had come to ask her if he could go with Ramos to get some gas in town, she’d said no. But his younger brother didn’t bother asking permission. Even if he had, everyone knew that if you wanted Billy to do something, you only had to tell him it wasn’t allowed.
“Why don’t you talk to your youngsters and let us know if they report anything bad happened. They may be just fine,” Adams said now. “We’re going to track this dude down the road a stretch, while we put out the word to see who else might have information. I’d hate to think he messed with some other kids, but if so, we should know about ’em.”
It was several miles from Bus Village to the first paved road, and as Adams and Buffalo covered the terrain, stopping to spread the word, they were relieved to see no sign of their quarry. It looked as though Ramos was gone for good.
CHAPTER 12
Hard Evidence
The VICTIM’S mother and father appeared on station with the VICTIM, and advised this officer that their 8 yr. old son had been sexually assaulted by the above mentioned SUSPECT. SUSPECT apparently made friends with the child by giving him toys and candy and letting him stay in his bus, which is apparently set up for living….
… VICTIMS parents then discovered from other members of the Rainbow Family that the SUSPECT was alleged to have a past history of attempted child molesting. VICTIMS parents at this point questioned the VICTIM about any touching with the SUSPECT and the VICTIM at this time related to the parents what had happened. SUSPECT departed the Rainbow Family Encampment on the 22nd of Jun 86 at approx. 1500 hrs.
—Initial Incident Report, PA state trooper Blaine Kuhn, June 23, 1986
Pt is an 8 yr old male who alleges five incidents of sexual abuse on June 20th and 21st, 1986…. Verbalizes well about the incidents and his history is lucid and consistent…. I would recommend an evaluation of the alleged perpetrator for venereal disease, including determination of the HTLV III status.
—physical evaluation of Joey Taylor by Barbara E. Barnes, MD; Forest Area Family Health Center; June 23, 1986
It’s 2:22 p.m. on June 23, 1986, and we’re here at the Pennsylvania State Police Bar
racks in Tionesta.”
Trooper Blaine Kuhn sat in the small room off the front entrance and started the interview tape. Facing him across the desk was a little boy in a raglan-sleeved baseball shirt, sweet-faced, eight-year-old Joey Taylor, Billy Taylor’s older brother.
“Joey,” Kuhn began gently but without any coddling, “do you know the difference between right and wrong?”
“Yes.” Joey nodded, speaking so quietly Kuhn strained to hear.
“Don’t add anything to it, just say exactly what happened. Do you understand?”
The boy nodded again.
“Tell me what happened,” Kuhn went on. “You’re going to have to speak up now.”
While Billy Taylor had continued to tell his parents that Ramos had left him alone, that morning Joey had finally retracted his own denials.
“He touched my pee-pee.” Joey’s soft chirpy voice cut through any preliminaries. “And he stuck his pee-pee in my butt.”
“And where were you?” asked the trooper.
“At the Rainbow Gathering.”
Kuhn had been down to the Rainbow encampment in Heart’s Content. Relatively speaking, the boy and his parents, who sat in chairs flanking their son, looked pretty ordinary—no Middle Earth costumes or multiple piercings in sight. Joe Sr. had a full beard and shoulder-length hair beneath his knit cap, but he wore a white golf-collared shirt and seemed respectfully subdued. His wife was in jeans and a neat floral top, her straight brown hair pulled back to the nape of her neck.
She turned slightly toward her son, arms crossed, listening intently to his account, nodding encouragement as Joey answered the trooper’s questions.
“What did he say to you?”
“He said, ‘Will you tell?’ and I said ‘No.’ But then I did.” The boy looked chagrined, as if he was well aware he’d broken his word.
He certainly was composed, though, Kuhn thought, not like some kids who get hysterical. No sign of coaching—fearful looks to his mother or father to check if he’d said it right. They weren’t riling him up either, the way parents can do in these sensitive interviews. The trooper knew how these Rainbows felt about involving the law in Family business. He was surprised but grateful that they had brought in their son.
Young Joey went on to describe the candy and toys, the mini Donkey Kong computer games, the Obi-Wan figures that Michael—as he called himself—handed out to the kids. The man had long curly hair and a beard and sometimes he wore glasses. The eight-year-old put his own fingers into a “junior birdman” pose around his eyes to illustrate. When asked about hair color, Joey was stuck, until he pointed to the salt and pepper at Kuhn’s temple. Kuhn thought he showed no signs of dissembling and was clear about his story, even when Kuhn himself had trouble keeping it straight.
“Did he have his clothes on or off?”
Joey considered this. “On Saturday he had his clothes off.”
“What about Sunday?”
“It wasn’t Sunday,” Joey unself-consciously reminded the man. “It was Friday and Saturday.”
On both days, Joey recounted, Michael had invited him and Billy onto the bus to play with his big dog. On the bus, Michael told them stories and let them listen to music. Eventually the man suggested they lie down and rest, Billy on the floor and Joey on the daybed.
“Michael told me that he got the boys to take a nap,” interjected Cherie Taylor, “and I said to him, ‘How did you get them to do that?’ ”
It was during the naps, said Joey Taylor, while lying on the daybed as his brother slept on the floor, that Michael did these things to him.
“That would have been Friday, the nineteenth?” the trooper asked.
“Then again, Saturday,” added Joey, “on the first day of summer.”
That stopped Kuhn short for a minute. “It was the first day of summer on Saturday, wasn’t it?” he mused out loud. “The longest day of the year.” The things kids remember, he thought.
On Friday night, Joey went on, he and his brother Billy had slept over on Ramos’s bus.
“When he put his pee-pee up your butt, this was Friday night?” Kuhn was trying to cement the order of things in his head.
“Yes,” replied Joey.
“And then on Saturday?”
“Yes.”
“How many times did this happen in all?” asked the trooper, and Joey spent a moment doing the math, an addition problem in his head.
“Five,” he finally said.
“Five times?”
“Okay.” Joey scrunched up his face and splayed out his hands as if he were trying to break it down for this man who wasn’t understanding. “Two times-es on Friday and three times-es on Saturday.”
Three times on Saturday, thought Kuhn, the longest day of the year. Five times in two days.
“Who else was there on the bus, besides you, your brother, and this man Michael?” the trooper asked.
“Oh, Jesse James was there too,” said Joey. “The dog.”
Through the session, Joey’s parents sat immobile, arms crossed, looking tautly controlled, almost blank, as though they were either dazed, wildly defending against any feeling, or trying to contain their rage. Joey himself appeared remarkably straightforward and unself-conscious. The only signs he might be ruffled were the occasional swing of his arms to grip the chair behind him. The boy really only hesitated once during the entire line of questioning.
“Did you do anything to Michael?” Trooper Kuhn asked Joey.
“He turned around,” answered Joey, “and he said, stick your pee-pee up my butt.”
“And did you?”
It was just a brief pause, but then Joey nodded, answering in what was almost a question.
“Um… yes?”
“Just tell the truth,” Kuhn prompted gently.
Joey’s mother added, “Don’t be afraid.” She patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.
“Don’t be afraid,” Kuhn repeated, relieved to hear the mother respond so calmly. “It’s not your fault.”
Kuhn had worked dozens of these cases, and parents sometimes reacted badly when they heard this part of the story. Co-opting the victim into his own seduction was the favorite tactic of a clever pedophile. Complicity begets self-recrimination begets silence. There was no way to know for sure whether the Taylors would take this boy home and beat the crap out of him outside the presence of the law, but Kuhn doubted it. These two seemed typical of the Rainbows he’d come across—earnest folk, rough around the edges, but with their heart in the right place. They’d clearly been easy prey. The Taylors told Kuhn how Ramos had come to their bus the night before he was chased out. He was already talking of leaving, but he was stuck.
“He had no gas,” Cherie explained, “so my kids went out and got him some, and they gave him some money that they had.”
“Your kids gave him money?” Kuhn was amazed at the man’s audacity.
“Yeah,” said Joe. “He asked them to go out and hustle him money and he sent ’em out to get gas.”
When Kuhn explained to the parents that Joey would have to testify if the case moved forward, Joe Taylor looked determined. He didn’t know where they were going after the Gathering, maybe to Maine—they’d heard the coast was beautiful; or up to Woodstock, to help friends build a house. They were going to look for someplace nice to put the kids in school come fall. But wherever they were, he said, they would bring the boy back when he was needed, no matter what.
Cherie Taylor provided the numbers of two relatives who could keep them in touch and assured Kuhn they’d check in with him before they left the area when the Gathering ended. Then he ran the license plate numbers the Shanti Sena had given him, and came up with a Florida address, date of birth, and Social Security number for Jose Antonio Ramos. With all this information, a vivid description of their suspect and his bus, Kuhn told the Rainbows he was optimistic.
“We’re going to send this all out,” he said to Joe and Cherie Taylor. “He’s got a twenty-four-hour head start, so he
could be back in New York or halfway to Florida by now. But if he hasn’t left his bus, we’ll get him. The way you describe that thing, it’s like he’s driving a blimp down the road. He’s going to be noticed wherever he goes.”
Jose Ramos hadn’t gone far. When he and his teenage passenger had left the Gathering a day earlier, he’d cut south on country roads heading for I-80, the east-west interstate that divides Pennsylvania. East would be a straight shot to New York, west led across the border first to Ohio, where his young companion lived, and then I-80 could take him all the way to San Francisco, if he wanted to get that far away. But maybe his bad karma was finally catching up to him, because Jose Ramos made it no farther than the entrance ramp to I-80 at Shippenville, Pennsylvania, when his engine sputtered, then died, and he was forced to veer off into an adjacent parking area. The teen hitchhiked away, leaving Ramos behind, stuck in his bus through the night and the next day. He hadn’t made it twenty miles from the Gathering.
Carl Reese owned the Exxon station that looked out onto the I-80 entrance ramp. From his front window he could see the blue school bus sitting idle most of the day, and watched with distaste as the ragged man picked his way across the road to Reese’s cramped gas station office. Reese liked to say to anyone who’d listen that he’d served four years in the Navy defending this country in ‘Nam, and then returned home to find it overrun by lowlifes, like the one now walking into his garage. Greasy hair pulled back into a ponytail, pockmarked face covered in a full beard. Even if Reese had known that Jose Ramos was a Navy man too, it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. People who went around looking—and smelling—like that showed no respect, and didn’t deserve any in return. Creeps, is what Reese always called them.
“Hey man,” the creep said. “Can I get the key to your bathroom? I’ll be quick.”
“Sorry. Out of order.” Reese would have lied about it, but he didn’t have to. The electricity was cut so the pump wasn’t working. But the man didn’t want to take no for an answer.
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