Everyone tastes everyone until languor and slumber set in.
Screams bring her out of a long, velvet funk, a meditation on skin and hair, lips and—
But whose screams? And why? High-pitched, but male or female? The crash is inevitable. Bobbie wakes in a tangle of sodden blankets,
wet and sticky, smelling of sweet wine. Her head throbs and her hands shake, her stomach feels tender and raw.
Can she move? Is she alive or dead, and whose hands, whose lips, touched her last? Why does she remember blood and screaming?
The sound of retching comes from the bathroom upstairs. Bobbie wonders whether the commune’s single toilet will be enough.
Earth into airy, light, shiny forms, useful things as old as mankind. Shaping wet clay with his fingers, the sensuous feel of it like making love, the hot flame hardening, setting, glazing, taking it to another dimension of existence. All this Scott loves about his work.
The ancient Japanese technique of raku separates his pottery from the clumsy chalices and honey pots turned out by most hippie potters. He creates works of art, delicate yet strong, powerfully shaped yet thin as glass, iridescent colors swirling in metal-based glazes whose formulas were intricate and tricky to produce.
Timing is all. Baking just long enough, cooling just at the right moment in a water bath of the right temperature. Some cracked, some hardened too quickly, some just didn’t sing when they were finished, lay there like the mud they were, soulless and dead.
Getting rid of Quinn, saving his family from evil, will take the same attention to detail, the same precision, the same dispassionate, artistic eye.
One week later, alone in his tepee, Quinn dies.
Everyone got sick, but while most of them just felt dizzy, Quinn was still seeing visions, ranting about the earth melting and giant spiders coming after us, all kinds of weird shit. Mandy was scared for Katie, listening to all that craziness, so she asked Leo and Warren to get Quinn back into his tepee.
What were they supposed to do? Call the pigs, tell them there was a guy out here stoned out of his gourd and please send an ambulance? Get them all locked up and it was his fucking shit in the first place; none of them would have taken the mushrooms if he hadn’t turned it into a fucking ceremony.
The thing is, he really seemed to be getting better. He stopped throwing up—but then he’d stopped eating, so there wasn’t anything left to throw up. He slept a lot, and he did seem to have nightmares, but it wasn’t until the last day of his life that everyone realized Quinn wasn’t going to make it.
It was awful. Convulsions, retching horribly and blood coming out of his mouth, sweating like hell, as if every single drop of fluid in his body had to come out one way or another.The tepee smelled terrible, and Patrice sat outside in lotus position, rocking and sobbing.
The only person who seemed more upset about Quinn than Patrice was Bobbie Tate. Which was weird because if anybody hated the guy, Bobbie did.
Melting golden coins fluttering in the air, the sound like baby hands clapping. Hot sun boiling her skin, big huge blisters going to pop, flood her with water, skin so hot, so hot, hot like Enid, hot like Quinn with his crazy fever: Quinn dead and gone, could she die out here? Float away like a dry leaf, like the dry leaf suddenly in her hand, the essence of dry, no life, no softness, only decay and brittle falling apart into fragments like the fragments of her heart.
“Take another little piece of my heart, now, baby. You know you got it, if it makes you feel good.”
Her heart hurts, she can feel it beating, hear blood whooshing through like water down a flume, like the Esopus when you float in an inner tube and your butt gets cold and your knees gets sunburned. Blood rushes through her veins like the Esopus, loud as a sunset, powerful as a summer storm, red life keeping her from blowing away.
Blowing in the wind, the golden coins hanging from the white birch tree, birchbark like paper, like the dead leaf, peeling like the paint on the outside of the farmhouse. Golden leaf coins from a living tree, bending and swaying. Staying alive. Sap rising in the trunk like the blood in her veins; cut the tree, and it would bleed her own red blood.
She is the tree; the tree is her secret soul made flesh.
She asks the tree for a single leaf and it says yes, bending over her like a mother, like the mother who’d left when she was eight. She cries, soft spring rain tears of relief and joy, and rubs the golden leaf against her cheek and prays to the tree for forgiveness, and when sanity returns, only partly welcome, she is Birch. Birch who bends and does not break, no matter how fierce the pain.
No longer Bobbie, Roberta Susanne, Bobbie Sue Tate—she is Birch, and she will be Birch forever.
August 1970: The Pigs
It was a hot summer, hot as any Ulster County could remember. Corn all but roasted itself on the stalk and tomatoes burst on the vine. Flowers withered unless they were watered daily, and most people knew better than to waste water that way. Some said better to waste it here than send it down to NewYork City, but they were in the minority.
A storm was needed. The kind of Catskill thunderstorm old Washington Irving used to write about, the kind where the gods vented their fury on a world gone mad—which it had ever since the rock festival. Lightning and thunder fit to scare the worst sinner back to church, splitting the sky with light so powerful you could read by it. Gully-washing rain, ripping whole sides of mountains, pushing boulders down the hillside for the county to plow off the roads in the fall. Maybe a storm like that would send the hippies back where they came from.
The storm was overdue by a long two weeks when the call came in. Sam Tate, Woodstock’s chief of police, took it himself.
“A dead body? You sure, Al? Yeah, of course you are, I just mean, well, hell, we don’t get a whole lot of dead bodies around here, so— “A hippie. A dead hippie out by Wittenburg Pond.” Sam wasn’t surprised. Ever since the festival, the whole Hudson Valley had become a magnet for dropout kids wearing fringe and headbands. Not to mention that Bobbie was one of them, living in that goddamn
commune.
He couldn’t think about that now. He turned his attention back to his caller.
“Just off the pond road, mile or so out of Bearsville.” He nodded and jotted a note on the pad in front of him. “You’re calling from where? The firehouse? You gonna wait there?”
A mental picture of the scene rose in his mind: August foliage, deep, dense, green, shading and blocking the pond from the view of passing drivers on State Route 40. So how had Al—oh, yeah, Al had a prostate the size of a grapefruit, probably stepped out of his pickup to take a piss and stumbled over a dead body.
“Well, yeah, I can see where you need to—but, Al, it would really be a big help if you’d just wait there and take me to the body, okay?
“Al, I owe you one, buddy.”
Thorsten Magnussen, the only detective on Woodstock’s tiny police force, grabbed his notebook and walked to the black and white with a heavy heart. A dead body outdoors in August wasn’t going to be pretty, and a dead hippie was going to make Sam madder than any other kind of dead body. The whole town wondered why Sam didn’t just drive up to that commune and drag Bobbie home, but Thor didn’t wonder. If Sam did that, Bobbie would run away to Godknew-where the next day, and at least this way Sam knew where his daughter was, even though he hated where she was.
“Any idea how long the body’s been there?” he asked as Sam headed toward Bearsville.
“No.” A man of few words before his daughter was discovered holding hands with Enid in the Tinker Street Cinema, Sam was positively Trappist now.
“Any idea how the—”
“No. I figured we’d wait and see what the coroner had to say.” Sam shifted his unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, chewing on the end with a ferocity that told Thor to stop asking stupid questions.
The hippie was dressed in well-worn jeans and had a fringed leather vest over his flannel shirt, moccasins on his feet, and a leather thong arou
nd his neck.
“Pretty hot for a long-sleeved shirt,” Thor remarked, wiping sweat from his sunburned brow. Big, blond, and Nordic, he suffered every summer, but this one was especially brutal.
The coroner pushed his way through the bystanders with his medical bag in one hand and a fishing rod in the other.
“He didn’t die here,” Foley said after a cursory glance. “Body was moved.”
“Hey, I’ve seen that guy!” A small, balding man pointed at the body. “He was at the post office about a week ago. Said his name was Quinn, and he was staying out at the old Thompson place on Meads Mountain—you know, where those hippies are. The ones with that purple van.”
Sam stood frozen, his face a mask. Thor took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.
He knew the Thompson place, all right. It was where Bobbie Tate lived.
An hour later, Thor flipped on his left-turn signal and waited for traffic to pass before turning left and making his bouncing way up a steep gravel trail off Meads Mountain Road, about four miles before the Buddhist temple at the top.
Eighteen trees later, a rutted, signless dirt road opened; he cut another left and dropped his speed, taking the second and then the third right fork, moving upward until he caught a glimpse of dirty white paint.
“Shit.” Doppler ran the window down and tossed out his butt. Thor said nothing, just hoped the damn thing was fully extinguished. “Look at the state of that place. Damn dirty shame, house like that going to hippies.”
“It needed a few coats when old man Thompson was alive, as I recall.”
“Hey, the man had arthritis, he couldn’t take care of the place. These kids just don’t give a shit, live like animals. No wonder somebody died out here, the shit they get up to. Drugs. Group sex. Never had this garbage till they had that damn rock concert.”
This was a litany Thor had been hearing for too long and really didn’t want to hear again. He gunned the car up the last stubborn bit of hillside and pulled up sharp, kicking the gearshift into park and slamming on the emergency brake.
“Holy shit!”
Thor’s eyes followed Doppler’s pointing finger. In the meadow behind the house stood a tall, white tepee.
“Think that’s where Tonto lived?” Doppler asked.
The man in the barn looked exactly like Jesus Christ—if Jesus wore jeans and worked a pottery wheel. Hair and beard the color of mahogany, mild brown eyes, bare feet in sandals—put a white robe on this guy and churchgoing Woodstock would say it had seen a vision.
He stopped the wheel, taking his foot off the pedal and cupping the wet clay in his hands until it subsided into a mass ready for reshaping. “Who are you?” Doppler spoke without removing his cigarette
from his lips.
“I’m Scott. Scott Andrews.” The Jesus face grew guarded, wary, but Thor had to admit, he’d probably look the same if he’d ended up on the wrong side of Doppler.
“We need to talk to you and your pals,” Doppler went on. “Get ’em all together; we’ll talk in the kitchen.”
Doppler turned without waiting for an answer. He stepped from the barn to the back of the house, swung open the screen door, and walked into the kitchen as if he’d been invited to dinner. Showing that he knew the house, felt at home there, and was going to by God be in charge.
Thor followed. He’d never been inside the old farmhouse, but doubted that the hippies had made it any worse than it was when a drunken old man had lived there.
To his surprise, the kitchen sported a new coat of cream-colored paint and had handmade green stenciling on the walls. Mismatched, old-fashioned kitchen tools and canisters sat on the counters: a red-handled pastry cutter like the one his grandmother used, a faded ceramic dog-shaped cookie jar, hand-thrown bowls and pots, a cutting board striped with different shades of wood. It was homey and inviting, cluttered but clean, speaking of careful purchases at junk stores and yard sales coupled with handmade things.
The commune residents made things to sell at the crafts cooperative off Route 28A.Thor, grandson of artists, had pictured crude, shapeless masses of clay, tie-dyed T-shirts, macramé pot hangers—useless objects made by clumsy hands. But the stained-glass piece in the window, the glazed pot on the hand-rubbed kitchen table, all spoke of a love of materials and an attention to detail that impressed him.
Scott came into the room, followed by a dark-haired woman wearing a long patchwork skirt and a light-skinned black woman with a shiny, oiled Afro. “I told the guys,” he said. “They’re coming in.”
The women were Mandy and Patrice.
Doppler turned to Thor. “Which one’s the lezzie?”
“Neither,” Thor replied. The girl who’d seduced Bobbie Tate was a light-skinned blonde with a slender figure and an exhibitionist’s way of showing it off.
The women looked at one another, naked fear on their faces.
Was the fear because they knew the dead man, or because all hippies hated and feared all pigs? It was too soon to tell.
“We just found a body in the woods,” Thor said, carefully moving his eyes from one face to another. “Someone said the man might have belonged to your commune.”
“He had on a leather vest,” Doppler added, “and it looks like he died of a drug overdose.”
Many times in Thor’s professional life he’d had the urge to strangle Doppler, and this was one more to add to the list. He glared at the man and added, “Right now we just want to identify the guy, notify any family he might have.”
Again, the two women exchanged looks but said nothing. A man with long, curly hair and a lush beard came in, introduced himself as Leo, and told them Enid was in town buying supplies. No one answered the questions Doppler kept peppering them with until Warren entered the room, and all eyes turned to him.
He was pasty-faced and clean-shaven, with long, straight, lank hair and heavy, dark-rimmed glasses. Buddy Holly gone flower child.
“What are the pigs doing here?’’ His voice was reedy, but his tone expected answers and expected them now.
“They found a body somewhere, and they think we know something about it,” Scott replied.
“We don’t. So you can leave now,” Warren said, challenge in his cool gray eyes. “You can take your kid with you if you want,” he added. “We’re not keeping her against her will or anything.”
“Nobody said you were,” Thor replied mildly. “And she isn’t my daughter.”
“Who lives in that tepee out back?” Doppler jerked his thumb toward the kitchen window, where the tent dominated the view.
“Oh, we take turns using it,” Warren said. “It kind of belongs to all of us, like everything else out here.”
Thor left the kitchen stonewalled and frustrated.
“Lying sonsabitches,” Doppler muttered. Thor cut him off with a brusque wave. A little girl about six, her hair the same maple syrup color as Mandy’s, sat in a tire swing, her bare feet scuffing the ground. Thor signaled Doppler to stay back and approached the child. He knelt down on the grass near the swing and said, “That looks like fun.
Who put it up for you?”
“Scott.”
“What’s your name?”
“Katie.” The child gazed directly up at Thor with candid blue eyes. “That tepee is pretty neat,” Thor said. “Do you sleep in it?”
“No, that’s where Quinn sleeps. He’s an Eskimo, and he lives in a tepee. My mom makes him soup because he’s sick. Really sick, throwing up and everything.”
“When’s the last time you saw Mr. Quinn?”
“Not for a while, because he’s so sick. Mom says I have to be quiet and let him sleep, even in the daytime. He stays in his tepee all the time, and Patrice brings him my mom’s soup. He won’t let anyone else come in.”
“He never slept in the house?”
Katie shook her head. “Not at night. Sometimes in the day.”
“He slept inside during the day?”
“Sometimes. He’d go to Enid’s room and th
at’s why Bobbie sleeps in my room. Because she didn’t like him going to Enid’s room.”
“Hey, what are you doing talking to her?”
Thor turned; Warren stood on the back porch, an outraged expression on his face. “You get out of here now, and don’t come back without a warrant. We know our rights.”
For a moment, Thor thought Doppler was going to make a fight out of it, but in the end they had no choice but to leave, to let Warren have his temporary victory.
Back inside the car, Doppler said, “The dead guy didn’t look like an Eskimo.”
Thor sighed. Sometimes he felt like an interpreter. It wasn’t that he was a hippie, just that he did live in the actual twentieth century and listened to WDST on his car radio.
He explained to Doppler what he’d later have to explain to Sam Tate, that Quinn the Eskimo was a character in a Bob Dylan song,
and his name came from dealing cocaine. That was enough for Sam. He got on the phone to the sheriff in Kingston, asked for a full tox screen on the dead man. Then he called the most anti-drug judge in Ulster County and got a search warrant.
“Take that place apart,” he told Thor, and he didn’t seem to mind at all when Doppler’s mean little eyes lit up.
And what if they did find drugs? What if they had to arrest Bobbie?
As long as he’d known Sam Tate, he didn’t know the answer to that one.
“No drugs?” Sam couldn’t keep the amazement out of his voice. “Nothing, not a marijuana seed?”
Thor shook his head. The old house had four bedrooms. The biggest had a double mattress on the floor, covered with an Indian cloth. In one corner, an old-fashioned cradle on rockers had a handmade quilt tucked into it and a sleeping baby under the quilt. Mandy and Scott.
The second bedroom belonged to the little girl, Katie. The third bedroom was Warren’s, the fourth Enid’s, and Leo slept in the unfinished attic. Not one of the rooms had a bed in it. Mattresses, sleeping bags, homemade pallets of blanket and quilt lay on the floor like dog beds. They’d searched everything, emptied drawers, dumped clothes onto the floor, shredded sleeping bags.
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