Pike's Folly

by Mike Heppner

  Farther up the trail, she heard voices and turned her head to listen. Through the trees she could see three men and three women proceeding single file. Defying her own instincts, she remained in plain view, waiting for the group to pass.

  When the first hiker saw her, she stopped about ten yards from Marlene and stared, slack jawed, as the others caught up to her. The hikers were all in their twenties and thirties; one might think they were college friends who’d kept in touch after school. The men all wore beards, and the women were muscular, prim and simple looking. One of them said, “Hey, what’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  Marlene didn’t answer. All of her attention was focused on certain pinpoints scattered on the surface of her body: her left nipple, a fingernail, a spot above her right knee. With her skin a creamy white, she seemed to have taken off more than just her clothes but also an invisible layer she’d always worn up until now.

  The woman asked again, “Are you okay? Has someone hurt you?”

  The man next to her added, “Do you need a doctor? Do you want us to get help?”

  These questions were echoed by the other hikers. Marlene felt her confidence dwindle. She didn’t want their concern or pity. She wanted their admiration.

  In a breaking voice, she whispered, “Just look at me.”

  One of the women said to her friends, “Come on, let’s go. This lady’s giving me the creeps.”

  The hikers filed past and continued down the trail. The women regarded her more severely than the men, but even the men avoided looking directly at her, preferring to stare down at her feet. Long after they’d passed out of sight, Marlene could hear their scornful laughter rising through the forest. This aroused her, since part of her liked being treated with contempt.

  On and on she hiked, until she came to the riverbed the waitress had told her about. The footbridge was narrow and splintery, and she nearly fell into the muddy river as she crossed to the far bank. This high up the mountain, the trees gave way to scrub brush and boulders, and the open terrain made her feel even more naked than before.

  Following the waitress’s instructions, she went ahead another twenty paces, then turned off the trail and skipped across a field of broken rocks. The ground was murder on her feet, but there was nothing she could do about it. Mercifully, the mountainside sloped downward again, and soon she was back in the forest, only this time without the benefit of a trail. The sun was low in the sky, and she began to worry that she might not find Pike’s lair before nightfall.

  She eventually came to a small clearing, where she noticed a faint humming noise. The sound was so out of place that she thought at first she was hallucinating, but no—she distinctly picked out the dull roar of a motor, and voices conversing in low, lackluster tones. When she peered deeper into the woods, she saw nothing to indicate where the noise might be coming from. No point in standing here forever, she thought, and called out, “Hello? Anyone? Where are you?”

  Like two armed sentries, a pair of young boys appeared, both carrying flashlights and dressed in identical uniforms with name tags pinned to their chests. “Shit!” one of them said. “It’s a naked lady!”

  Marlene covered her breasts with her hands. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just trying to find Heath Baxter.”

  The boys recognized the name. The one who’d already spoken said, “He’s working in sporting goods. We’ll take you to him.”

  “Sporting goods?” Marlene wondered but came out of hiding to follow the boys through the woods.

  They walked for another few hundred yards until a faint light, like a will-o’-the-wisp, glowed up ahead. Marlene stopped to catch her breath. “What is it?” she asked.

  Neither boy answered. Instead, they swung their flashlight beams around, picking her out in the darkness.

  “I’m sorry,” she said and lowered her head. “I know I look disgusting to you.”

  The boys didn’t understand her, so they turned and trudged on.

  At a certain point, the trees thinned out, revealing a vast expanse unlike anything she’d ever seen before. Moving past the boys, she stepped onto a surface of newly spread blacktop. Its smoothness came as a relief after walking on the trail all afternoon. The area around the parking lot was lit up with giant stadium lights that ran on power generators—the motor sound that she’d heard earlier. Beyond this nimbus of light, a deep blue forest extended on all sides, sloping upward to the mountains, which looked remote and two dimensional, like scenery in a stage play.

  In the foreground stood Mr. Pike’s fully functional Kmart. The sign hung over the main entrance, which consisted of sliding glass doors that opened onto the foyer. Through the display windows, she could see dozens of cashiers standing idle at their workstations. They appeared lifeless behind the glass.

  A handsome man welcomed her, and she read the solid gold name tag on his jersey: Nathaniel Pike, Store Manager. “You must be Stuart’s wife,” he said. He took little notice of Marlene’s nudity, except to glance down at her breasts. His eyes gleamed cheerfully. “You’ve got balls, lady. I’ve never met a nudist before.”

  Marlene instinctively brought her arms around her chest. The blazing glare of the stadium lights made her feel visible from a great distance. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be. Hey, you’ve got nothing to apologize for. I’ve seen far worse, believe me.”

  Pike’s creation had a hypnotic effect on Marlene, and she found herself forgetting herself entirely, even as she began to attract the attention of the people inside the store. “It’s beautiful here,” she said.

  “Come on, I’ll give you a tour.” He presented her with his arm, which she hesitated to take. “It’s okay, Marlene. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Reluctantly, she slid her hand into the crook of his arm, and they crossed the parking lot together. It was all Marlene could do not to cover herself, particularly when they entered the store and the cashiers who’d noticed her through the display window came forward for a better look.

  Pike led her farther into the building, past aisles and aisles of shelf stock that looked picked-over, like the day after a clearance sale. Marlene began to suspect that the employees weren’t really working for Pike but were living off of the merchandise inside the store. In one section, cashiers who’d gone off shift for the night slept on displays of Sealy Posturepedic mattresses, while nearby a group of stockboys made good use of an electric grill to cook their dinners. The entire store was its own, self-sufficient universe.

  “I’ve got fifty-one employees right now,” Pike explained, “including myself. Of course, anyone’s always welcome, but I’m not actively looking for new hires at the moment. Maybe I’ll open a superstore next year.”

  They’d come as far as the women’s clothing department, where a salesgirl with long, sandy blond hair was sale-tagging a display of floral-print blouses, each identical to the one that she was wearing.

  Marlene halted before the display. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Pike, I think I’ll get dressed now. I just . . . feel weird all of a sudden.”

  Nathaniel withdrew politely. “Of course. Help yourself to whatever you need. It’s all for the taking.”

  She thanked him and went to find her size at the end of the sale rack. Her choices were all arbitrary; the important thing was to cover herself with as many layers as possible. With trembling hands, she tore open a package of plain cotton panties and put them on. Likewise, she picked out a bra, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a cable-stitch sweater. Most of the items had security tags on them, so she brought them up to the salesgirl in the floral-print blouse. “Can you pull these tags off for me?” she asked.

  The girl took the bundle of clothes and set it by her register. “You’re Stuart’s wife, right?” she asked. “Marlene, the nudist?”

  The question startled Marlene, who took a closer look at the salesgirl’s name tag. Hers wasn’t gold, like Pike’s, but a blue and white plastic card that read Alliso
n Reese, Sales Associate. Marlene felt embarrassed at meeting Allison under such awkward circumstances. Having spent so many weeks hearing about her from Heath, Marlene wanted the real Allison to like her. “That’s me,” she admitted softly.

  Like Nathaniel, Allison appeared unfazed by Marlene’s nudity. “Hey, don’t look so freaked out. This isn’t Providence. No one’s gonna call the cops.”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to Marlene until now. “My husband might,” she said.

  Allison laughed. “Stuart? Nah. He might be a little uptight, but he’s not an asshole.”

  Marlene found it strange that anyone would think of Stuart as “uptight.” He’d never been uptight with her, only patient and understanding. She was the problem, not him. If he’d ever acted uptight, it must’ve been because she’d done something to upset him.

  Allison took off the security tags and passed each item across the sales counter to Marlene, who gratefully put them on. “Is Heath around?” Marlene asked.

  “I don’t know. He was supposed to meet me twenty minutes ago for dinner.” Allison frowned. “How do you know Heath?”

  Marlene explained as best she could the many weekends they’d spent working on the video that Lucien had offered to buy from Heath. Allison listened attentively, feeling intensely betrayed that Heath hadn’t told her any of this.

  “I knew that I shouldn’t have gone to England,” Allison said. “Bad things happen when I’m not around. That’s why my parents got divorced, because I went off to college. I’ve gotta learn to just stay put. My father’s lived in Providence his whole life, and he’s happy enough.”

  Marlene couldn’t understand why Allison had to take the blame for anything. This was her fault, no one else’s—her fault that she’d been arrested and lost her job; her fault that Stuart wasn’t talking to her anymore, and even that Allison’s parents were divorced; her fault about 9/11, and the recession, and every bad thing that had ever happened since the day she was born, April 7, 1969, and probably even before that, too.

  “We’ll get your videotape back,” Allison assured her. “Heath’s not going to do anything with it, anyway. He’s a total type A personality. Or type B. I always forget which one’s which. But the one that never gets anything done.”

  After Marlene finished getting dressed, she and Allison found Heath in the sporting goods department and led him out of the store to a copse of tall grass growing on the leeward side of the building. The evening air hung heavy with a kind of blue, suspended mist.

  Understandably, Heath wasn’t pleased to hear about Lucien. “Who is this guy, anyway?” he asked Marlene. “I mean, if he’s a producer, that’s one thing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s one thing?’ ” Allison snapped. “It’s her body. Don’t be so fucking . . . what’s the word?”

  “Paternalistic?” he guessed, and she rolled her eyes at him.

  “Lucien would pay you for the video, Heath,” Marlene said. “He’s a decent, trustworthy man.”

  “See?” Allison said. “He’s a decent, trustworthy man. This sort of thing happens all the time. Like in that musical, Rent, where the kid shot the video and CNN wanted to buy it, but he was stupid and said no. Don’t be stupid, Heath. You’ll make other videos.”

  He didn’t want to argue with her. After many days of careful consideration, he’d finally decided that the raw footage that he’d shot with Marlene and Stuart was too good to waste. He had larger designs for it, though he wasn’t sure exactly what. But he certainly couldn’t do anything without Marlene’s video. The core element of his film had to be genuine for the rest of it to carry any weight.

  Allison nudged him. “Come on, Heath. That video camera doesn’t even belong to you. It’s Pike’s.”

  He hated being reminded of this. “I know, it’s just . . . I wanted to finish that project on my own,” he said lamely.

  “Why? What for?” Allison folded her arms, clearly prepared to reject whatever reasons he might propose.

  “I can’t tell you,” he muttered.

  “Why not?”

  “Not when you ask me like that. You’re just going to make me feel stupid.”

  Marlene took pity on him. “Look, just forget it. I’m sorry I even came up here,” she said.

  Allison turned on her. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever apologize for doing what you want to do.”

  Heath stared at the ground as Allison continued to badger him. What would Brian Wilson do? he wondered but found no answer. This was the same kind of adversity that had finally killed off the Smile album in May of 1967. With the exception of Brian’s younger brother, Dennis, who shared some of Brian’s eclecticism, the other Beach Boys were by degree either perplexed by the tracks that Brian had assembled or else completely opposed to them. At any rate, the consensus was that he’d lost his touch, and in the months following Smile, a new, more democratic Beach Boys emerged. They recorded a very fine album in late ’67 called Wild Honey, then another, equally fine, record the following year, Friends. The albums appeared regularly throughout the next decade before drying up in the early eighties. Dennis drowned in ’83; Carl died of a brain tumor in ’98; Mike, Al and Bruce continued to work the festival circuit; and Brian, the boy genius who at twenty-four had seemed invincible, came to regard his long-lost “teenage symphony to God” as “dated sounding.” If there was a moral to any of this, Heath didn’t know what it was.

  “Just think about it, Heath,” Marlene said. “I don’t know what kind of money Lucien has, but I’ll bet it’s a lot.”

  “It’s not the money,” Heath said. “I don’t need the money.”

  Allison shouted, “What are you talking about? Pike’s not going to support you for the rest of your life, Heath. I’m sure he’s got other things on his agenda.”

  “I know that. Look, let’s not talk about this right now. I don’t feel so good.”

  “Whatever. I’ve got work to do.” Allison glanced at Marlene, then stormed back into the building.

  Marlene gave Heath’s arm an encouraging squeeze. She wanted to say something wise to cheer him up, but she feared that any advice of hers must be cursed.

  Once both women had gone inside, Heath wandered away from the building and lay down in the grass. The ground felt cool and lumpy through his thin work shirt. As he gazed up at the darkening sky, another Beach Boys song came to him, this one from 1964. The song was one of Brian’s miniature master-pieces, with harmonies so beautiful that Heath hadn’t really thought about the lyrics until now. The title said it all, though: Don’t Back Down.

  4

  The next morning, Pike tracked down Heath in sporting goods and announced that he’d arranged a birthday surprise for him. Heath’s birthday wasn’t for another two weeks, but Pike insisted it couldn’t wait.

  At eleven o’clock, a helicopter landed at the staging area just north of the Kmart, and Pike went to meet it by himself. When he returned thirty minutes later, he asked Heath to follow him. “Quickly, now, we’re on a tight schedule,” he said.

  They crossed the parking lot and plunged into the outlying forest, where they followed a trail that the staff used to bring supplies in from the helicopters.

  Pike stopped a few steps short of the staging area and pointed left off the trail. “Walk straight until you come to a clearing,” he said. “You’ll see a couple of folding chairs. Stop and take a seat.”

  “Then what?” Heath asked. As much as he trusted Pike, he felt uneasy about this.

  Pike smiled mysteriously. “Just you wait.”

  Heath followed his instructions and soon was standing between two folding chairs that were facing each other. As they were identical, he picked one at random and sat down. Ten minutes went by before he heard a rustling sound and saw motion in the trees. Someone was coming toward him. He watched apprehensively as the figure drew closer, stepping uncertainly over the rocks and tangled roots on the ground.

  With a last push forward, a man emerged in the clearing and smiled at H
eath. “Are you Heath Baxter?” he asked.

  The blood drained from Heath’s face. He nodded.

  The man offered his hand to Heath, who felt so detached from his own body that he could hardly move to shake it.

  “I’m Brian,” the man said. “Nate tells me it’s your birthday.”

  They shook hands, and the man took a seat in the other chair. He wore slate-blue, ultralight hiking boots, a pair of khakis and an oxford shirt with wide maroon stripes. Over the shirt was a tan windbreaker with a wrinkled hood that hung loosely from the neck. Heath knew from reading his biography that Brian Wilson was a few days shy of his sixtieth birthday, but he easily could’ve passed for fifty. His face was hard and thin, and his brown hair looked like someone had combed it for him. There was something monstrous about him, Heath decided. He looked a bit like Frankenstein, although human, more handsome. His eyes had the same tortured, lovesick quality, and they penetrated inquisitively from two craggy sockets. Despite his weathered features, his body was trim and muscular—a triumph of personal determination, dieting and exercise, pop psychology and, one would assume, a fair number of green and yellow pills. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, and one side of his face even looked slightly spastic, as if he might’ve had a stroke. Yet his voice was the same one that on Heath’s Smile bootlegs told the musicians to make the percussion sound more “like jewelry.”

  “My birthday’s comin’ up, too,” Brian said. “I guess that means we’re both Gemini.”

  “June 20, 1942,” Heath said quickly, then added, “I mean you, not me.”

  His nervousness amused Brian, who sang a few lines of “Birthday” by the Beatles. He laughed to himself, letting his eyes drift. “I remember wanting to do that song with the Beach Boys back in the seventies but . . . I just couldn’t get my act together.”

  Heath still couldn’t believe that this was happening. “What are you doing in New Hampshire?”

  Words came slowly to Brian, but he eventually said, “We’re playin’ a show down in Concord on the third. Nate bought a couple tickets for you and your girlfriend. Then we’re playin’ a double-bill with Elvis Costello on the fourth. I think you’re really gonna like it. We’ve got a smokin’ band this time, some of the best touring musicians in L.A.”