by D. D. Miller
“I just brought a little baggie. I’m heading out west, right? Where all the primo shit is, so I didn’t want to waste my money on this east coast crap,” Seth explained as he lit the joint.
“Where are you going?” The pretty girl’s name was Manon, which I was afraid to say because it sounded too French, and I didn’t trust my accent. Seth just went ahead and pronounced it Man-on, like the opposite of Man-off.
“I’m headin’ to Jasper to work for the summer. I don’t know where Kato here is going.”
Seth called me Kato right away, and I was too nervous to ask why.
I tried to look into her eyes and shrug, but I had to look away.
“Jasper, eh?” She said it with a barely contained sneer. There was something about Manon, perhaps the slightly darkened skin around her eyes or simply the way she smoked the joint – as though she’d done it many times before – that made me very, very intimidated. She knew something about life that I didn’t know, I was certain of that. Something important.
“Fuck-ing centre of capitalism, that place.” I liked the way her accent made her emphasise the ing. It made it sound dirtier.
“Are you kidding me?” Seth’s eyes were all pools of glass now; a big stupid grin cut his face in two. “It’s fuckin’ party mecca is what it is!”
“It is a tourist trap; resort town; playground for rich Americans and Europeans.”
“How old are you? Jesus.” Seth looked dejected. His wall of good nature had taken a hit. “You gotta relax, Man-on.”
“So where are you going?” I asked.
“This is a secret. I cannot tell you.”
“Are you kidding!” Seth laughed a Seth Rogen laugh and a big puff of smoke billowed out around it.
“No, it is not a joke.”
“You’re a weird chick.”
“There is nothing weird about you.”
We stared at her, wondering if we were losing something in translation.
“Damn. Let’s retreat, Kato, ma-dam-mo-zel is wrecking my buzz.”
Despite her animosity she stuck with us when we went back inside, maybe because we were the only people close to her age. We sat in the smoking car and she scribbled in a journal while we played Scrabble. Seth was right about playing high. By Rogersville he’d turned the game around. By the time we got to the Miramichi, I was asking for a rematch that I knew I wouldn’t win.
Northern Ontario came across as very beautiful for the first few hours. Trees, broken only by lakes. Then trees and lakes. And more lakes. A lot more trees. By the second day, the allure had worn off: the landscape, sleeping upright in those chairs, the lack of showers. By the time we got to Manitoba we were all happy for the flatness: the open spaces.
Early one morning, I was sitting in the observation deck of the dome car, sipping a coffee when Manon came up and sat next to me.
“Good morning, Kato,” she said.
I hadn’t yet been alone with her. I was almost frightened.
“Where are you going to?” she asked me.
I took a sip of my coffee. My rail pass allowed me to get off and on whenever I wanted. Although I’d expected to stop and explore, I hadn’t yet gotten off the train except to stand at the end of platforms.
“Jasper, I guess. Maybe I’ll see if I can get some work there.”
“Meh.” Her face contorted when she said it: lips crinkling into a sneer; eyebrows bending up like an accordion. I was sure it was something only French people could do. “You don’t seem like the type.”
“What type?”
She threw her head back toward the rest of the train, her little ponytail shuddering on the top of her head. “Like Green Hornet, there.” I took a sip of my coffee because I didn’t know what to say. “He is such a guy-guy.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
She stared at me hard. Like checking-me-out staring. “It’s a secret,” she finally said. “Can you keep a secret?”
I wanted to ask her why she was so willing to tell me a secret, but I just nodded.
“It’s a commune.”
“A commune?”
“Yes, a commune. Near Jasper.”
“Why couldn’t you tell us?”
“Because it’s against the rules. And Green Hornet is not the type.”
“I don’t get your problem with him.” I felt protective because he’d been so protective of me: taken me under his wing and led me through this trip.
“He is a frat boy wannabe.”
He had gotten quite intoxicated the night before and had said some crude things, but I thought he’d been funny. The people in the lounge car certainly agreed.
“It’s a very progressive community.” She stared directly at me as she spoke.
“So why are you telling me?”
“We move around constantly to avoid the police and park wardens. It’s a tent commune.”
“Tents?”
She paused and considered me. “You are different. You are a thinker.”
I blushed and felt like an idiot for it.
“I can see it. You like your friend there because he is so outgoing; he is like a natural leader. These are qualities that maybe you don’t have.”
“He’s not that bad, really. He’s super nice. He likes everyone. He likes you.”
“He wants to fuck me.” She drummed her fingers atop the table between us. I blushed again. “Guys like him are all over places like Jasper. They go there to party and have sex.”
I was staring down at the plastic top of my coffee and when I looked up she was still staring at me. She stared until I had to look away.
“Stick with me, Kato.” It was three in the afternoon and Seth Rogen was getting drunk. We’d just pulled out of Edmonton, on our final push to Jasper. “You stick with me and you’ll have the summer of your life.” We’d run out of pot somewhere near Unity, Saskatchewan, and Seth had started drinking to battle the boredom. “Last summer! Man, let me tell you! Last summer . . .” He took a drag of his cigarette. There were only a few other chain-smokers in the car at the time. “The parties, Kato! The ladies. Fine ladies in the mountains, right. Athletic types. Hard bodies.” He finished his beer. “You got a lady, Kato?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t had a real girlfriend since Shelly McPherson in the eleventh grade. She was my first time. We dated for eight months. I told you about her. She was the longest before you.
“All the better, my friend. Girls always get better staff housing too, so you gotta hook up with one to have a decent place to go.” His face was red and splotchy, his cheeks huge with his perpetually smiling mouth.
Manon entered.
“Man-on! Come have a drink with us.”
She sat down next to me.
“I’m gonna get us all a drink. Celebrate the occasion. Whaddya think?” He got up and went over to the canteen.
Manon spoke quickly, “You should come with me. Come and check it out.”
“I don’t know. It sounds cool, but I –”
“You what? What do you have to lose? You are taking the easy way with him. Go to Jasper and get a job filling hotel room mini-bars and drink away your paycheque every night. What will you learn?”
“Learn? What’s anyone got to learn here?” Seth returned with three cans of beer, which he plopped down on the table. “Learning’s for school.” He cracked a beer and held it up for a toast. Manon and I did the same. “To fine companions on a fine journey!”
We clinked cans.
Manon put hers down and declared, “I have an offer.”
“A what?”
“An offer. I have an offer for you two.”
Seth sat back. “What kind of offer you got for us?” He winked at me.
“I’m offering to take you two with me.”
“And where the hell are you going, exactly? I thought it was a secret.”
“It is a secret. But I will tell you, it’s a commune. In the mountains.”
“A commune?” he almost yelled. “Like
hippies and shit?”
Manon tossed her head back and forth. “I guess so. But we like to think of ourselves more like gypsies.”
“Are you shitting me?” He looked at me but I couldn’t look back. “Whaddya think, Kato? A new adventure?”
“It’s a nomadic commune,” she continued.
“Well how do we find this nomadic commune?”
“It is arranged already; I’m going to be found at the Jasper train station.”
I wanted to go, but I didn’t feel comfortable without Seth. I wasn’t certain what had changed Manon’s idea about him, but I was grateful. The idea of heading into Jasper and getting a job seemed too fixed for me. Too much what I’d set out to avoid. So when Seth finally nodded and proclaimed that “this commune thing might just be kinda fun,” I was relieved.
Manon glanced at me. I stared back and this time she was the one who looked away.
We got picked up in a biofuel-burning Volkswagen van driven by a dreadlocked stoner with dirty fingernails and dirt-black feet wrapped in crusty old Birkenstocks. His name was Leaf. He called Manon Lil’ Tree, and she refused to respond to her real name from that point on. Seth took it all in good humour, immediately appreciative of the joint passed to him by Leaf.
“Here it is, Kato. The good shit,” he said, his teeth clenched, not wanting to exhale.
Leaf pounded the van through some old logging roads for at least an hour and talked and talked, updating Lil’ Tree on the changes since she’d left. She completely loosened up in the van: her ponytail, her facial features, the taut image of the tattoo that crept up her neck.
Eventually they began to tell us the history of the commune. There were about fifteen people in the group with two at a time out on operation (which meant gathering money and recruits). The leader was a guru named Now, who had reached a brief level of fame in the eighties after publishing a book on how to survive in the Rockies by communing with nature.
In all sincerity, Leaf said that the only rule of the commune was “to love thyself.”
Leaf eventually pulled over and drove the van into a garage made of vines. We helped him wrap the vehicle in brush and then began to hike through a fairly dense forest. Seth grunted and stumbled along with his wheeled suitcase. It took about thirty minutes to get to camp. It was so well camouflaged and integrated with the landscape that it would have been easy to miss had you passed by just a few metres away. The roomy looking canvas tents were tucked under canopies of brush and blended well with the foliage. In a small clearing behind the main camp I saw a wood-framed greenhouse.
People exited the tents to greet us. There were lots of dreadlocks and dirty sundresses, dashikis and hiking boots. They all had odd names like Nature’s Path and The Way The Moon Looks Tonight. Lil’ Tree nudged me in the ribs when Now – a tall, gangly man – came out from a tent. He was barefoot, had a shaved head and was dressed in a pair of worn khakis and a baby blue button up. His lips were pinched into a tight grin and his eyebrows rose up on his forehead in rounded arches. When he approached, he put his hands together as though in a prayer and bowed slightly; he moved with such an air of serenity that it seemed as if he were floating.
He reached forward and caressed Lil’ Tree’s cheek with his thumb. He took each of our hands in his and rubbed. He had dainty, soft hands. Long probing fingers. “We’ve been expecting you,” he said to Seth and me.
“Really?” Seth asked, sweaty now. Little bits of dirt and grime were stuck to many parts of his body.
“We shall call you the Hornet,” he said to Seth.
“And you,” he began, looking to me.
“Kato,” Seth interrupted. “We call him Kato. A very powerful name.”
Now continued, unfazed, “Kato it is.” He closed his eyes and nodded. “Hornet, you shall join Leaf in the greenhouse. Kato, as befits your youth, you will join Lil’ Tree in the school tent.”
“But I just graduated,” I blurted.
“As a teacher, Kato. You and Lil’ Tree will be teachers.”
She gave me a playful punch on the shoulder. Seth glanced at me with wide eyes and a big grin. He gave a little shrug.
We settled into the commune as quickly as possible, aided by the fact that the group immediately treated us as though we’d always been there. Hornet had some early success in the greenhouse and managed to remain perpetually stoned, which dried up any ambition to move on. As the new teachers, Lil’ Tree and I replaced Mother II who left on an operation. We had only two students, Mousey (ten) and Bud (eight), and we taught them sitting around cross-legged in a tent. Our mandate, as described by Now, was to teach them absolutely everything we knew in any order at all as seemed most appropriate to the pupil and the alignment of the stars that month or something.
One day, it became obvious to Lil’ Tree and me that the kids knew very little math. Or at least, seemed very wary of using it.
“Bud, how many years have both you and Mousey been alive?” I asked after they stumbled over some basic addition.
Bud just shrugged.
“What about 1+1, Bud?” Lil’ Tree asked gently.
Bud looked down at the floor of the tent and turned over a small beetle that scampered in front of him.
“You know it’s 2, right, Bud?”
Bud poked his finger at the beetle and let its scrambling legs tickle his fingertip.
“Mother II told us that 1+1 only equals 2 because Petrarky says so,” Mousey said proudly.
Lil’ Tree and I looked at one another. Petrarky?
“She says that the Man wants to hold us down with reason and logic.”
“Patriarchy,” I said, and Lil’ Tree clasped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes danced.
Mousey nodded. “She says the world is way more complex than we can know, and that the only thing we can truly know is nature because we are a part of it.”
Lil’ Tree and I looked at each other. She told the boys the day’s lesson was over. Bud gathered up the beetle and they ran from the tent.
“Oh God!” Lil’ Tree cried, and we broke out in a fit of laughter.
“What do we do?” I eventually managed.
“I don’t know. I think we should come up with a plan.”
It was hot in the tent. I had begun to sweat.
“I can’t even think about it now!” A tear slipped from her eye, and she sat in silence for a moment, shaking every so often with remnants of laughter.
“What made you change your mind about Hornet?” I’d been waiting to ask her this since we arrived.
She turned serious. “I decided you were valuable enough to take the risk with him.”
“Why do you keep saying things like that? I’d be lost without him.”
“No, Kato, you are better than him. A better person: sensitive. I saw it in your eyes, and now I see it in the way you are with the kids.” She sat up on her knees and slid closer to me. “I am surprised he has lasted this long. He won’t last the summer.”
“How do you know I will?”
“I don’t. I don’t feel any certainty with you.”
Her neck was red from the laughter and the heat. A vein had popped out and it seemed to pulse a bit under her tattoo. She stared at me like she had on the train the first time she told me about the commune.
“That is why with you, I feel there is a chance.”
I felt myself blushing and hoped she thought it was the heat.
“You will see soon, Kato, that with Hornet, people are just playthings.”
“But I’m Kato. The Green Hornet is nothing without Kato.”
She shook her head almost imperceptibly. “You are more than Kato,” she said and leaned forward. I couldn’t move and watched her eyes close and felt her lips touch mine. Her tongue jabbed at my teeth. A long rivulet of sweat flowed down the side of my head and along my temple. I thought of Seth with his big goofy grin and his glassy eyes. The way he’d wrapped me in a bear hug when I finally beat him at a game of Scrabble. His stupid laugh.
&nb
sp; I pulled back. Lil’ Tree’s eyes opened wide. I slipped out of the tent and walked away quickly.
I’d wanted to kiss her, I really did. But I just couldn’t do it. It would have aligned me squarely with her, and I was not ready for that. I walked along a path that was just beyond the main fringe of the camp. Eventually I came upon the greenhouse. It was a simple, makeshift building; translucent plastic over a simple frame made from modified tent poles. They grew mostly marijuana in it, and a few other essential vegetables. The key was mobility. Everything had to be movable on short notice.
I approached from the rear and walked around it. The aroma of pot was intense. I noticed a thick haze of smoke hovering around the roof inside. As I came to the doors I saw Hornet and Leaf sitting at a small table in the middle. There was a Scrabble board on it. They were passing a huge joint between them. Even through the plastic and haze I could see their bloodshot eyes glowing red in the dense grey. There was an ease between them, a comfortable knowing. At one point, when Leaf said something that made them both laugh, Hornet reached over and grabbed his cheek and patted it; then he reached up and ruffled his hair. I knew Lil’ Tree was wrong about him. He was never going to leave.
I turned and headed back to the camp. I passed a few people without acknowledging them, hoping I wouldn’t run into Lil’ Tree and lose my resolve. I went straight to my tent, grabbed my pack and crammed my belongings into it. I slung the bag over my shoulders and headed to the path that would lead me to the logging road. I would end up walking for five hours all the way to the highway, where I hitchhiked back to Jasper, caught the train and continued west to Vancouver. From there, I moved on to Victoria where I met you.
You know the rest; I don’t need to go into details.
When I saw you in the London Drugs the other day you were with a guy, and I didn’t want to know who it was, so I didn’t say anything. I followed you two around though. Eventually you stopped and looked at vitamin supplements together, comparing them. At one point he said something and laughed. You gave him your you-bastard look, and I had to leave. I know it has been years, but seeing you there with that guy got me thinking about that summer and how we used to joke about it, and I wonder if I should have told you something about it. I wonder if things would have been different. If it would have changed things at all.
