by Lee Lynch
“Bad karma,” said Big Harold, “is what put somebody like R in my life in the first place.” He waited a beat, placing one fist on each of his hips and raising his chin in a queenly manner and added, “Anyway, they dropped it and put a crack in it.”
“Say what?”
Joe had a stick and threw it far up the road for Loopy. She took off after it on feet as oversized as a puppy’s, picked it up, and headed back downhill with long pauses for distracting smells.
Harold said, “Putting that in is a hell of a job even for a crew of, ah, individuals born with—ah, who had the opportunity to, develop their upper body strength.”
“You’re talking about the less-equal gender? About you boys?”
Joe said, “It fell on that chinquapin tree stump Dee uses as a table, but didn’t even dent the thing. You can’t buy a table that good.”
“I’m gonna cry,” said Donny. Loopy reappeared, dropped the stick at her feet, and panted up at her.
“Kimama did,” Harold told her.
“Couldn’t you save it?” She was thinking about the way Chick would hoot with laughter when she told her about this later.
“With what, Gorilla Glue? We offered to cut a new pole. ‘You just want an excuse to rape the forest, to take another sacred tree off Dawn Farm,’” Harold mimicked. Joe launched the stick again. “What did you do,” Harold asked, “train that dog to break the speed of fetch? I’ve never seen a slower, sillier-looking animal.”
Donny was still trying to come up with something that would explain the women’s behavior when the three of them started laughing at Loopy’s antics. Hell, why should she defend them? They were brought up to be polite like her and purposely acted ugly to men.
“Was I supposed to train her? I never had a dog back in the city—I didn’t know how. Loopy had to train Loopy. I was too much of a gay dog myself,” she said with a wink.
Joe smiled at his shoes. “Gay dog Donny.”
The men seemed calmer now as Loopy alternated between bringing the stick to Harold and Joe.
“It’s true,” Donny said, “that green wood can make MCS people sick. That’s why we dried the pole all these months.”
“So can green lesbians make you sick,” Harold said. “Excuse me for trying to help the bitch out of a jam, Don.”
“That’s a bitch,” Donny flared, pointing toward her dog. “R’s loopy too, but tell me you’re perfect.”
“Was there ever a doubt in your mind that I wasn’t?” asked Harold.
It was hard to stay mad around these two. While Joe played tug-of-war with Loopy for the splintering stick, Harold said aloud what Donny was wondering. “I thought we got over this man-hating separatist business when we fought the ballot measures together. We need each other.” He gave a deep sigh. “We’d better go before they spot us loitering and accuse us of insensitivity to homicidal lesbians. Thanks for letting us play with your gay dog. She’s very therapeutic.”
“I like to be with Loopy when I’m upset,” Donny said. “I’m a happy animal when I’m around such a happy animal.”
“You lucked out. She’s got a little bit more oomph to her than a purebred Lab.”
“Like me,” Donny boasted. “Did I ever tell you that my mother comes from Ethiopian royalty and my grandfather said an Irish pirate married my great-great-grandmother off a slave ship?”
“Only thirty-three times, Don. And even you don’t believe it.”
She could have sworn she kept that iffy family story to herself around the boys. “Princesses and pirates—sounds like an instant dyke mix to me,” she said.
“Have your writer give you some new lines, girlfriend.”
“Let’s go back up,” said Joe.
Harold shrugged. “I’m over it. We might as well.”
“Not quite yet,” Donny urged. “Not all lesbians have my royal blood. Most of us are still pirates. Go see Chick at the store. Tell her to feed you. Go on.” She made shooing motions. Something to eat and Chick’s laughter would mellow these two out before they stirred the pot back here at Dawn Farm.
“Yes, your Highness,” Harold said with a wide grin.
Joe mumbled, “Maybe she’s got some of that tofu loaf today.”
Donny tromped up the hardening mucky ruts. Steam rose between the twisted branches of a stand of manzanita and madrone. Farther on, the scrub oak and pines took over again while the last spring mushrooms poked through clumps of fragrant earth. When they’d very selectively cut down the trees where Kimama’s cabin was to go, and set them to dry inside the pole barn last October, there’d been gay guys up from the Bay Area with gym-chiseled muscles pretending they didn’t want to break their nails, and dykes teaching them to use chain saws while policing the trails to protect wild flowers and endemic ferns from big male feet. There had been none of this nasty sniping. With the rains, only the locals remained and the party mood was gone.
The sound of hammering, women’s shouts through the woods, and the sound of a patiently wielded saw grew louder as Donny approached the tarped common kitchen, then passed a fenced garden with a perpetual crop of kale and green onion nestled in the weeds. In contrast to the better-planned Spirit Ridge, Dawn Farm was a bedraggled do-your-own-thing effort. A half-dozen shelters made of wood, corrugated plastic, and stone, some abandoned, dotted the thirty-two acres. Women came with their dreams, left after a week, or stayed for years. The resident dog, Maat, an old girl, lumbered over to Loopy and licked her face. Loopy tried to interest her in playing, but she went back under the shade of a sugar pine, one of the few untouched by the white pine blister rust that plagued these woods.
There was Kimama doggedly preparing window frames. She could work about half an hour at a time. Her cat, Muse, a white-and-black Japanese bobtail that didn’t set off her allergies, watched her from a good-sized boulder.
As a clot of women slid lumber up a skid, Muriel and Tundra pulled with rope while R, visiting for the day, directed. Solstice, also over from Spirit Ridge, was sawing wood, and the tall new kid, also from Spirit—was it Tree, Timber? Spruce, that was it—she was working on a threshold with a plane. The notorious ridge pole was not in sight. She took off her hat and fanned herself.
“Hello, Donny,” said R, a sugary tone in her voice and an appraising look in her eyes. “Have you come to help me?”
She was glad Harold and Joe weren’t hearing this woman because they’d about-face and walk again.
“I’m here to help Kimama,” she answered pointedly, but couldn’t resist adding, “Aren’t you?”
R looked into her eyes for a long moment. “Chick said you have a problem with anger. Have I done something to make you angry?”
“Chick told you that?” Donny blurted. Where did Chick get off telling R this kind of shit? Yes, it was true, she was angry, chronically, intolerably, always angry. It was exhausting, this anger. And she was angry at one single unchangeable fact—that she was and always would be the odd woman out here in Waterfall Falls and everywhere, but especially here. She was black in a white land, woman in a man’s world, gay in a straight universe. She wouldn’t be any other way, but she was permanently angry that neither would the world change. The anger spilled out of her and that was probably a good thing, or she would explode from it.
R was watching her. “Shouldn’t I have said anything? I thought you were talking with each other about your problem. You should be talking to someone. It rushes out of you. Maybe one of your so-called butch friends? Katie’s ex probably needs a friend.”
“So-called?”
“Clearly, you’re in the mood to feel offended today. You don’t intimidate me like you do many of the women, but for Kimama’s sake let’s pretend I never said a word, shall we? I see you have your own tools. I’d like to get the roof completed today.”
Intimidating? R was the intimidator around here. Donny was too mad to think what to say to the woman. R reminded her of a pimp she’d come into too much contact with in Chicago. He ran a string of transvestites
who at least pretended to adore him. When he’d walk into a bar trailing a “girl” or two, he acted like he owned everyone in sight. He was so far above them all that he’d clear a bunch of dykes out of a booth with a sweep of his hand. Then, too, she’d been too infuriated to protest.
She followed R’s line of vision and saw the ridge pole. “What the—”
“Aren’t women resourceful? When the pole broke they lashed it together.”
“This is bullshit,” Donny said. “That jerry-rigged thing won’t last through the first wet snow. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to fix? Did you stop to think that roof might crush Kimama in her bed? What is wrong with you people?”
“Donny,” R said in a calm and quiet voice. “You need to know that I find the term ‘jerry-rigged’ highly offensive to the German people. Your color doesn’t excuse that kind of slur.”
The anger stretched her skin till it felt like a mask across her face. The woman was out of line, wasn’t she? Donny couldn’t tell any more whether her anger was righteous. She was so mad at so much. As a kid she’d been mad at black people because everything wrong in her world was their fault for being poor and uneducated. In the sixties and seventies she was mad at white people because everything wrong in her world was the oppressor’s fault. She’d seriously wanted to be a Black Panther.
“I don’t need to know anything from you, R. And why don’t you let the Germans take care of themselves? I find it highly offensive that you fucked up this woman’s roof and disrespected my friends Harold and Joe. They’ve taken too much of your holier-than-thou, anti-man attitude over the years. You may have the rest of these women fooled, but not this bulldagger.”
R was stillness itself. She might be meditating, not acting like a human shredder. “This is old territory between us, Donny. You know I don’t think the term ‘bulldagger’ appropriately describes who we are. Please control yourself or leave us to work in peace.”
“Why? Because I’m the only one around you can’t control? Not my problem. You’re in rare form today, R. Harold and Joe were right on to offer a new pole. What were you trying to prove?”
“I refuse to listen to your abuse. You have got to get control of yourself.”
“Baby, I am controlling myself. You don’t want to see me when I lose control of my bulldagger self. And by the way, I wasn’t inviting you into the bulldagger home-girl club.” Two women began to nail rafters at the top of the cabin. “What’re they doing now?” If R thought Donny was going to let her mad go and start bowing down, she had another thing coming. “When that pole collapses it’s all going to have to be taken out and redone, probably in pouring rain and heavy winds, and then where is that child going to stay?”
“Isn’t she beautiful?” came a soft, very young voice behind her.
Donny turned to Kimama’s beatific smile. Her round face and albino coloring gave her a cherubic air, despite her years as a street kid. Kimama was Shoshone for “butterfly,” and the name fit her well. She must not have heard what was being said over the hammering and the saw.
Kimama asked, “Did R tell you the ridge pole crashed this morning? Lucky Muriel was a Girl Scout.”
Donny could feel her face relaxing, the skin giving up its tautness. “That’s one bad-ass lashing job.”
“I need to go zone out.” Kimama looked up with that happy grin. “And dream about my—almost—roof.”
The last of the fight went out of Donny. She looked around at the woods, at the blue sky, the air so clear she could see buds on the trees. She should holler to shut down the job until it could be done right, but this trusting baby dyke needed her space yesterday. She’d talk with Harold and Joe about ways to make it safe. With any luck R would be running some other crew of women ragged on her own land when they came back out to shore it up. Maybe they could prop it with a couple of sturdy posts. Chick would like that—it would give Kimama someplace to hang herbs to dry and her washing in winter.
Did she intimidate Kimama? “It’ll be a whole roof by tonight, no sweat, girl.”
“I can see why Chick snapped you up, Donny.”
“For my brains and good looks?”
“No, silly, because you make everything sound doable.”
“Well, it is. Just about everything is do-able.”
“But poor Harold and Joe. The women weren’t very kind to them. They’ve helped me from the start, and they’ll be mad if they’re not in on the finish.”
“Harold and Joe will be fine. They’ll be back in a little while.” There she went, reassuring this sweet young femme again. It was a reflex.
Donny unbuttoned her vest and answered the work crew’s greetings. She wasn’t much of a hugger herself, but she put up with some hugging. Maybe she should do more of it, make sure she wasn’t intimidating anyone. That crack stuck in her craw, damn it. Was it her anger that scared them? The floor of the cabin was slick with sawdust. Five minutes later she was straddling a rafter, high on working hard and quick, hoping her creaky joints wouldn’t disable her tomorrow. She used her grandfather’s hammer. He was the one who taught her about tools as he made repairs on his store.
She wasn’t even going to bother to hash out the boy issue or talk about repairs with Tundra and Muriel. They always sided with R, except when the three of them went at it among themselves. Still, as exasperating, brash, and contemptuous as they could be, she had to love them: their hair slicked back with sweat, lips clenched on nails, skinny white arms working those hammers to build a new world. She’d get Harold and Joe out here this summer. Maybe Jeep and the sheriff would help too, although as far as she knew, the sheriff had not set foot on women’s land except during the black helicopter scare when the women living at Dawn Farm thought they were being spied on.
Donny couldn’t budge these political types with their attitudes, but there wouldn’t be women’s land without them. Dykes had some choices besides the bar scene because of those attitudes. Chick would help make peace between them and the boys. She was probably loading up Harold and Joe right now, sending them back with lunch for everyone.
“I’m putting on my working music, women!” she called out.
“Did you bring your disco tapes?” asked Kimama.
“Why? Do you want to dance?” she asked and snapped her fingers.
“Not to that old music!” Kimama said with a laugh.
“It may be old, but it’s not that trashy rap.”
While she worked she imagined in turn dancing with Kimama and watching Tundra and Muriel whup that old pimp’s ass.
Chapter Nine
Pensioners’ Posse
The streets of Waterfall Falls were as wide as they had been in the days cattle thundered through. Natural Woman Foods was the last business at the south end of town, and the last with a roofed sidewalk. When she’d first seen the store, she knew it was the one she wanted if for no other reason than that wooden false front. This was the Wild West whose images she’d grown up with, and it fed some hunger in her for adventure. No matter how strung out she was from this persistent depression on any particular day, Chick never stopped being enchanted by her lonesome outpost. On days like this one, with wetness from the last rain shower sparkling in the pine branches to the south of the store, she felt like the luckiest woman on earth.
She moved from the window to the little nook of the store that made so many of the townspeople curious and a little nervous. Here she sold crystals and amethysts, unscented candles, and mother-earth necklaces. Here were the healing books, the We’Moon calendars and the chakra charts, the anthologies of women’s spirituality, and the herb bags which at times brought her so much comfort, and which some of the older customers bought as sachets. Rattlesnake came in for bundles of sage and complained that Chick abused them by storing them in plastic. Chick laughed and said even the Goddess would sneeze at their smell. This was not merely a display of New Age sidelines; it was her altar at work.
The altar she’d made upstairs, on the secondhand oak hutch Donny
had secretly refinished and given her one Christmas, was more personal. There were pictures of Donny, of Donny and herself, of the bluegrass band in Village People costume, and of Blackberry Mountain with a bonnet of snow. The store altar did in a pinch, and she’d already dusted in there twice today.
Despite facing the shelves, bagging the day-old baked goods, making up dozens of packages of seeds and nuts, waiting on customers, and making half a dozen pots of coffee before ten o’clock, it wasn’t until Clara and Hector White arrived in their rusted pickup that Chick discovered what a truly sorry state she was in. Clara barged inside with Hector limping several feet behind. Would she and Donny look like that in twenty-five or thirty years? Chick careened toward them, arms out, thirsty for hugs and suddenly enveloped in the mugginess of a hot flash.
“Twenty-three years since that old branch snapped back at me, and I still feel her right here,” said Hector, rubbing his arthritic hip. He hugged her, then held her at arm’s length. His fuzzy white hair was bunched like a clown’s around the base of his Ford cap. She could see the top of his long underwear shirt where his collar opened. “You look like the rain’s getting to you too.”
“You know she loves the rain,” snapped Clara.
Chick settled them into seats, pouring coffee with an unsteady hand. “It’s him again. That sleazeball M.C.”
Hector said, “Forgive an old man his memory, but this guy was what, family? A friend?”
“Just a creepy guy who was part of the crowd I hung with.”
“Lordy, lordy, doesn’t that fool know you can’t stand the sight of him?” Clara asked as she patted dry her face and the white hair that escaped the frayed oversized men’s handkerchief she used for a kerchief.
“He’s wanted to baptize me a born-again straight person since my Chicago days.”
Hector looked puzzled.
“Get me into bed,” Chick explained. “Just saying it turns my stomach.” She left out the part about fooling around with Pennylane. “M.C. chased every woman that passed in the street, but Pennylane was the only one he called his old lady. He used to tell the story that he’d fallen in love with me when I smashed a cop in the nose so hard all eight of us were able to bolt from the paddy wagon. M.C. included.”
