Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  At intermission, the lesbians in the band surged onto the floor, arms extended for hugs. Jeep stayed with the harmonica player, Cat. Harmonica lips and violin fingers, she thought, what a great combination. Katie watched the other customers drift to tables and the bar, isolating the nest of lesbians, casting quick looks or staring at them. Had the scuttlebutt gotten out that over half the band was gay, or were they too obvious to miss?

  On the stage, one of the women was singing “Muskrat Ramble.” She shook her head. Imagine My Surprise was an eclectic band all right.

  Katie wore her short black leather skirt with a tie-dyed, long-sleeved T-shirt she’d bought at Fina’s Finery. The straights were in pressed jeans and fancy western-style shirts or T-shirts, the men’s printed with trucks and rude slogans, the women’s appliquéd with horses, birds, kittens, and flowers. Her land mates wore homemade outfits and ill-fitting thrift store finery that would not have been out of place on a soup kitchen line. Even R, so regal on the land, looked shabby in slacks worn thin at the knee and a peasant blouse too short at the wrists.

  While R held court with the quieter dykes, Katie drifted away from the group. Sharing R came with the territory.

  She hadn’t been inside a honky-tonk bar since she’d left the trailer park. Except for the people, it was like a gay bar. The dim lights lent it glamour, but underneath were layers of cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and worn fixtures. It would make a good setting for interviewing a rustic local if she ever got her project off the ground.

  She found herself thinking about how much time and energy she used at Spirit Ridge taking care of basic needs like getting wood in for heat and bathing. R had running water, but it was gravity fed and came out of the faucet in a thin, weak, often rusty trickle. Filling the tub was such an interminable task that they shared the water, and when it was her turn to go second—they alternated—the water was tepid. She never felt truly clean. R believed that bath time was yet another ritual, a cleansing ritual, that needed candles, Native American flute music, and intimate talk. She had a habit of touching herself in the tub, and reaching in to touch Katie under the water, which always led to a soapy taste in the mouth for hours.

  A bearded man in a white cowboy hat and snakeskin boots approached Katie. He held out his hand and she automatically shook it. “Don’t tell me a looker like you is with that crowd,” he said.

  He was obviously trying to tell her that he knew she was gay, but thought, like a typical non-gay, it would be impolite to come right out and say it. She’d gotten too much of that even before she’d come out because she was a mix of Mexican and Italian. People couldn’t figure out what she was, but didn’t dare ask. She was shocked at the softness of the man’s hand. He looked like a logger, with jeans held up by suspenders, but from talking to the locals she knew not even an equipment operator would escape calluses so completely. He didn’t smell like engine oil, or horse. He did smell oddly of patchouli.

  “M.C. here.” He looked around at the other lesbians. “You know a big gal named Chick? Gives off new age woo-woo vibes and runs the granola and sprouts store?” When Katie nodded, he said, “We go way back, Chick and me.”

  She somehow doubted that, but gave the fake cowboy the benefit of the doubt. TV professional or not, Katie remained cluelessly gullible at times. She suspected that it was an asset as long as she checked her facts later. People could sense that she believed their every word during an interview and were more forthcoming than they would be to a skeptic. For some reason that made them more honest too. She couldn’t imagine Chick tight with this mangy-looking dude, but stranger things had happened.

  M.C. was maybe five foot, eight inches, skinny, and in his late forties or early fifties. He had an unkempt graying Abe Lincoln beard that shot up under his cheekbones like shadows to give him a cadaverous look, and short, unevenly cut hair with long bangs that met straight dark eyebrows. When you added the bushy sideburns and full drooping moustache that merged with his beard, he looked really hairy. He was slightly stooped, his arms hanging forward like a Planet of the Apes extra.

  “How come I haven’t seen you around here before?” he asked.

  Katie felt R’s psychic pull trying to drag her away, but her curiosity was stronger even than R, and her chatterer was stuck at the on position. She answered him without hesitation. “I’ve never been here before. You’re a regular?”

  “I like to stop in now and then.” He’d been studying her body, but now he spoke directly to her. “What are you drinking? Want a beer?”

  Before she had a chance to answer, he handed her a fresh bottle and lifted his own to salute her.

  “Why not?” Why wasn’t she surprised that he’d come prepared?

  “It’ll get you into the mood.”

  “This is a good thing. I feel so out of it here in hicksburg.”

  “Man, if I didn’t go down to the Bay Area now and then I’d be nuts.”

  They talked about the city. He told her he’d moved here for the easy life on the land. He was vague about how he earned a living, but full of stories about the locals. His quick watchful gaze seemed to take in everyone around him, and he had an anecdote about each of them, mostly unflattering. As uncomfortable as he made her, edging ever closer with the excuse of talking over the noise of the crowd, she felt that flame of excitement. She was gathering material again. New stories had a taste to them, round and nutty and satisfying like nothing else.

  Was there a story here? She found herself talking aloud about the vague project forming in her head. Interviews with guys like him and with the local women. People who made their living here and people who chucked their jobs to migrate here. This place had a history which kept both the 1960s and the 1800s alive. Were the two times similar enough that all these people could co-exist in the twenty-first century? What drew them, kept them? It had to be an anti-government hotbed both with natives bucking against land use rules and with the commune-dwellers and retired hippies into living under the radar of rules and regulations. Why hadn’t they clashed?

  “Hey, little lady, you’re going to stir things up if you put us on TV,” said M.C. “This is live-and-let-live turf. Think of us as babes in the woods who are better off not knowing we should be fighting a civil war.”

  “I wish I had my Sony. That was great!” She searched her pockets for something to write on.

  “What?” M.C. asked. His attention, which had wandered to the crowd while she was talking, veered back. “You want to quote me?”

  Gotcha, she thought. She could see his vanity was now on full alert. “Quote you? I want to film you telling me what you said.”

  “That would be a trip.” He eyed the crowd again.

  Yeah, she thought, like you’re too bored with the idea, macho man. Ka-ching. She knew her hook was in.

  He turned back to her and whispered close to her ear, “So, do you live up on the mountain with all those sister-types?”

  She tried to step away, but bumped up against the bar. She hadn’t realized how far she’d moved from the women. “Yes, I do. How about you?”

  He gestured upward. “I have a place in the hills. It’s no place I’d take a lady, though.”

  Oh, here we go, she thought. I show some interest and this zurramato moves in. Goddess, men pissed her off. You couldn’t have a conversation without a man thinking it was a green light to your bedroom. They were so obsessed with their ugly bodies. She was repulsed at the thought that she might have stayed in southern California and married some slick kid from high school, taking her sustenance from biological chance.

  Fuck this shit, Katie thought, turning toward the band, which was assembling after the break. She caught Jeep’s eye. “Play something fast,” she mouthed. “Help!”

  Jeep, squinting toward M.C. behind her, then back at Katie with a spare-me look on her face, played a few bars of “Do Not Forsake Me” on her harmonica, her cue for the band, then lifted her fiddle and led the band into line-dance mode. The woman who played the plastic
Calistoga bottle moved up to the mike and got the dancers on their feet with some astonishing percussion.

  Katie let M.C. swing her onto the dance floor, planning to melt into the crowd as soon as possible. If he wasn’t lying, Chick could put her back in contact with him, and with a camera in her hands she’d be able to handle this clown.

  As if he’d read her mind, M.C. asked, “Is my old friend Chick in on this with you?”

  “Not yet,” Katie answered him, her fixed public smile in place. She could see that some old guy was asking R to dance. R folded her arms, glaring. It was time to get back to her, but Nightfall was already dragging R away from the man.

  The dykes attached themselves to the end of the line, R maneuvering next to Katie. With a sweet, carefully modulated voice that made Katie’s jaw go tight, she whispered, “I didn’t know you danced with them.”

  “Chill, R. I want him in my film. Scene—women greeting winter solstice with a dance on the Ridge and a huge bonfire. Scene—this cowboy raping the wildflower-covered spring earth with his earthmover.”

  “You’re obsessed by that male career I thought you left behind.”

  “Hey, little lady,” the cowboy said in the gravelly slow tones of a habitual dope smoker. God, was that what he did for a living? Arm across her shoulder, he was trying to steer her back into his sphere. “You can come on out and shoot me any time. I’m with you old-growth tree people.”

  “Cool,” Katie said. “You’re the first dude to sign on.” She made a few more of the right noises, and when she looked back for R, she was gone. It took way too long to disentangle herself from M.C. and go after her.

  She found Sheriff Sweet leaning in the back door of the van, her horse’s bridle in her hand, talking low. The night was fragrant with wet earth, soaked with a steady drizzle that had started in the late afternoon. R sat inside, cross-legged, crying.

  “Girlfriend!” She’d never seen R cry before.

  “I’ll leave you to it then,” said the sheriff, pushing her lanky self off the van and leading her horse, who, except for a few brown patches, was a ghostly white in this light, into the dark. The woman could have as least stayed to explain what was going on, although Katie had a good idea what it was.

  R’s expression would have suited the prosecuting attorney in the trial of a serial child murderer. “You smell like that beer hall,” she said. “I thought you left the cities to be closer to the Goddess. You came so open. You came with love.”

  Katie had also never seen R this furious. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “You were flirting with him to get your story! I could see that. Men oppress us. They destroy the natural world and women as a matter of course. They’re very simply the enemy. How could you?”

  “Everything you say is true, R, but it’s like thinking about death. It’s unbearable. I have to be able to function in the world.”

  “I can’t deal with your other side, Kate. Pushing us to go public about our struggle to protect the mother land. Pulling us down here to consort with men.”

  The door to Señorita’s opened and country-western music jumped out, like a banned cowboy tossed onto the street. Katie became a little Latina girl outside the road house next to the trailer park. She was quivering. It always came back to living in two worlds, always. She lost her language again.

  Then R, as if knowing there was no one left inside to scold, opened her arms. Katie lay in the van with her, surrounded by R’s mountain, the sounds of music and the glow of neon gone faint as they had when that little girl had lived in the trailer parks.

  After a while she smiled to herself. That roadhouse cowboy was outrageously perfect for her film.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Age of Aquarius

  “You know why I love loving you?” Donny asked above her.

  It was late. She’d thought making love would help her get some rest tonight. She sleepily held on tighter, and Donny gave a last thrust, groin to groin, before moving onto her own pillow.

  “Donny, Donny, you’re too much. You make it go on and on.”

  “Do you know?”

  Chick was heavy and felt light. Her mouth tasted salty. She lifted herself, straddled Donny, and grazed her mouth with both breasts, watching her little crystal against Donny’s darker skin.

  “Because I’m a ringer for Ellen Degeneres?” She could hear Donny’s grumble of laughter beneath her breasts. “You’re not laughing at me, are you? Because it wouldn’t take much to smother you with love.”

  Donny widened her eyes and took the tip of a sizeable breast in her mouth, then turned her head. “Who’d want that skinny youngster?”

  “I love that you always say the right thing. So tell me. Why do you like doing it with me? I’ve been wondering what keeps you around.”

  “‘Cause you’re always so wet.” Donny dipped her hand between Chick’s legs and, Chick could tell, came up dry. “Until recently.”

  She could feel the circle of sparks in her chest that would ignite a hot flash and moved to lie on her back. Her body had been giving her away for some time now. She’d been surprised that Donny hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t wanted her to know that sex seemed like another chore except when Donny started it. Even then she sleepwalked her way through, enjoying the sensations while following Donny’s lead. Tonight she’d felt livelier for some reason, maybe because the Pensioners’ Posse was keeping M.C. away, but she knew that he was no more than a leaf on a noxious weed whose complicated roots wound inside her.

  “You think I don’t have eyes in my head, woman?” Donny propped herself on one elbow to look at her. “Go to bed,” she told Loopy, who’d come to peer at them, chin on the bed, when they’d started talking. “You think I don’t see that my laughing, generous, loving Chick is having trouble leaving her bed in the mornings? You used to hate it when I saw you with your hair uncombed, and now you don’t get around to brushing it till you get downstairs. You couldn’t stand to wear the same clothes two days in a row, and now you wear one outfit all week. You look miserable creeping your way downstairs like the executioner is waiting for you.”

  Donny was right. She’d get as far as the familiar, comforting motions of flipping on lights, changing the disks in the CD player, making coffee, and setting up the bakery, and then despair would drain her again. Sometimes she’d visit her downstairs sanctuary, breathe deeply from an herb bag, run her fingers over the curves of a goddess figurine, and feel stronger. On other days she knew there was no such thing as a Goddess within and felt such aversion to her store altar she couldn’t force herself to go near it.

  Bless Jeep. Now that the kid was working at the school she’d come in for breakfast and sing bouncy little tunes as she set up the shop, no questions asked, and handled the first customers while Chick did deep breathing in the walk-in cooler. Slightly buoyed, Chick would move to the bathroom, comb her hair, and draw her trademark smile across her mouth like lipstick.

  “I know you, Chick,” Donny was saying. “Something’s bugging you big-time, and it ain’t Shrub’s tax cuts.”

  Although M.C. was the least of it, she wanted to keep the stalking secret. Donny, the street scrapper, would fight him, only to end up keeping Sheriff Sweet company at the lockup. A lot of good that would do. Sweat collected along her hairline and between her breasts.

  “It’s too mind-bending, sweetheart. I can’t explain,” she whispered, trying to hold back tears. Crying would alarm Donny more. She wished she hadn’t put Neil Young on the CD player. He was too melancholy tonight.

  “What can’t you explain? Did you fall for somebody else? Don’t tell me you’re serious about Jeep.”

  “Oh, my poor baby. No. There’s only you.”

  “Then why can’t you tell me?”

  There was no stopping the tears or the hysteria in her voice. “Please listen to me! I can’t even explain what’s happening to myself. It’s beyond comprehension.”

  The stalking was on top, but underneath was the worry that she�
��d get as sick as her brother, the damned hormones ricocheting around inside her like pinballs ringing her bells, and the despair itself that left her exhausted and hopeless. To make this whole trip worse, M.C.’s appearance had triggered her old self-hatred. She’d been trying to kill her warming, cushioning fat body back in her hippie days, trying to stifle her gay soul with drugs and self-medicate herself out of depression. She’d lived on booze in the girl bars, then battled hepatitis for a year. Now she knew she’d been trying to die. Back then she’d thought she was having fun.

  The heat left her body. Her sweat turned cold. And I’m getting old, she silently sang along with Neil Young. How could she begin to put all that into words? She breathed deeply, deeply again. She thought if she could spend her life doing deep breathing, everything would be fine.

  “You’re fantastic, lover. Just the fact that you’re in my life keeps me going. If you weren’t I’d be finito. I’m really working on getting more cheerful.” She reached into the night table drawer.

  “What’s this?” asked Donny, examining the prescription bottle Chick handed her.

  Chick gave her best chortle, but it caught in her throat and she coughed. “I’ve joined the designer drug generation. You know, better living through chemistry?”

  Donny looked stunned. “You’re jiving me. You, the laughing lady, on Prozac? Since when? This shit takes people over the edge.”

  “You liked me over the edge enough a few minutes ago, lover-woman,” Chick said, rolling onto her side, rubbing her hand over the gray curls at the bottom of Donny’s belly.

  Donny ignored her. “I thought you were seeing Doc Wu about hormone pills for the change.”

  “They were a big zero, Don.” She moved closer, belly to belly with her lover. “I got into a funk. Freaked when I couldn’t get out of it.”