Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  In the face of his enthusiasm, no one else had much to say. The vote was 14–0 to carry on, with much tearful hugging afterward. Cole was the only abstention, and Sugarfoot cornered him in the hall. “I would have been happier if it had been unanimous.”

  “I’m here,” Cole said. “Actions speak louder than words.”

  “Sometimes you need the words to make the actions happen. For morale, for inspiration. Like wedding vows. To help you make it through the tough times.”

  Cole didn’t mention that his wedding vows had not gotten him through the tough times.

  “You’re the best man I’ve got,” Sugarfoot said. “You’ve got the skills, you work hard, you never complain. But you make me nervous because I’m not entirely sure why you’re here.”

  Cole knew better than to say he wasn’t sure either. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I hope not,” Sugarfoot said. “We’d be in a bad way without you.”

  “Thanks,” Cole said. Maybe that was reason enough. To be tired at the end of the day, to feel like you were making a difference, to be appreciated.

  *

  Cole missed his records and his stereo. Though he’d been tempted on multiple occasions to sit in with the ever-changing personnel in the barn, he couldn’t shake a snobbish conviction that he was too good for them. Few of the farm’s many books appealed to him—multiple copies of Stranger in a Strange Land and Lord of the Rings, beat poets, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Harold Robbins, the Bhagavad Gita, The Whole Earth Catalog, a dozen books on astrology. Despite weekly trips to the Wytheville Library, where he checked out thick volumes of nineteenth-century literature—Dickens, Eliot, Hugo, Gaskell, Stendhal, Tolstoy—he had a recurring dream of walking into Safeway and finding a new Matt Helm and a new Joe Gall in the same rack. In the dream he could smell the ink on the pages. He missed drinking, the feeling of being seriously drunk. He missed going to the movies.

  At the same time, he had become attuned to natural cycles in a way he never had before, energized at the full moon, waking at sunrise, and when the first buds opened on the trees, he felt himself about to burst like a dogwood blossom.

  As Sugarfoot predicted, things improved as soon as February turned to March. Sugarfoot had already plowed up a couple of acres with the commune’s 1948 Ford 8N, a Model T motor on a tractor frame affectionately known as Old Paint, turning under the grass and weeds. All the workers left their straight jobs and began to cover the broken ground with composted horse manure and kitchen scraps, with a sprinkling of lime dust as recommended by the soil analysis that Sugarfoot had gotten from the Ag school in Blacksburg. Sugarfoot came through with the tractor again, turning the compost under, then he broke up the dirt clods with a disk harrow, and finally he hilled up the rows.

  Meanwhile, kids were showing up at the front gate. Sugarfoot took them into his office, the former sitting room of the Big House, and delivered an agreed-upon lecture. Visitors were welcome to stay in the bunkhouse for two days and look around. On the third day they had to go to work or move on. After two weeks, if they wanted to stay, they had to be voted in by a majority of the existing members, at which point their excess personal goods became the property of Eden Farm.

  Some of the new arrivals included people who’d left during the winter. They were now subject to being voted in, like anybody else, and if they left again, it was for good.

  One of the returnees was Sirocco. A few days into her probationary period, Cole wound up planting spinach beside her. They worked parallel north-south rows, 30 inches apart, using bamboo planting sticks to open a hole and drop a seed. When the seed was in, they pushed dirt in the hole with one foot and made the next hole two inches on.

  She showed no lingering hostility from the leather incident, hadn’t so much as cast a withering look at his boots. After a few polite words, they’d worked in silence for a while. The morning was cool and damp enough to turn their breath to steam, and Cole’s fingers had been stiff at first inside his leather work gloves. He’d never used a planting stick and Sirocco advised him on the proper twist of the wrist. Cole thanked her and then said, “Why’d you come back? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  She was tall, only an inch or two shorter than Cole. Her weight was nicely distributed, curving in and out in a way that reminded Cole he hadn’t been with a woman since Laramie left. She wore wire-framed oblong glasses. Her ankle-length skirts and long-sleeved blouses were cream-colored unbleached muslin. Most days she covered her shoulder-length blonde hair with a blue bandanna.

  She sighed. “Sugarfoot’s wrong about a lot of things. But out there in the straight world, they’re wrong about everything.”

  They exchanged some personal history. She was from upstate New York, so Cole asked her if she’d been at Woodstock.

  “I was helping a friend deliver her baby, so I missed it. I heard you were there, though.”

  “Yeah.” He opted not to elaborate. “That’s where I met Sugarfoot.”

  “And Laramie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I liked her. She was smart. And really pretty.”

  “I got the idea you didn’t like much of anybody.”

  “Well, you were wrong.”

  Cole let out short, involuntary laugh.

  “What?” she said.

  “You seem more concerned with right and wrong than a lot of people I’ve met.”

  “Now that’s the most diplomatic way I’ve ever heard that put. You don’t have to tiptoe around me, by the way. You can call me an opinionated bitch and I won’t disagree with you. I will tell you one thing, though. I’m smart, and I spend a lot of time thinking before I make up my mind, which is why I don’t like to back down. And I know a lot about farming, and midwifery, and herbal cures. I know a fair amount about machinery. People say I intimidate them, and I have to stop myself from saying, ‘If you can’t keep up, get out of the way.’ Now what?”

  Cole had laughed again. “Nothing,” he said. “I like you, that’s all. It’s a nice surprise.”

  Cole had built some picnic tables and a ramada next to the kitchen. They sat there and talked some more over lunch. Pinto beans, corn tortillas, spinach salad, cold well water. Cole didn’t want to talk about his former career, because of not wanting to put on airs and also because of some residual pain. In fact Sirocco was more interested in what his parents were like, how much Arabic he remembered, whether he believed in God.

  She’d taken acid a couple of times and didn’t care for it any more than she did for alcohol, marijuana, or cocaine. She liked her thought processes straight up. If she wanted to get high, she said, there was always folk dancing. She didn’t care much for fiction and she thought tv was the new opiate of the masses.

  They worked through the afternoon, until the sunset leached the heat out of the air so quickly that it made Cole shiver. He was dusty and tired and sore and looking forward to dinner. “It’s too dark to work anymore,” he said. “I think we’re done.”

  “Yep. I could use a shower.” She looked at Cole. He could see the whiteness of her face in the last of the daylight, but not read her expression. “Join me?”

  The implications brought Cole to life. “Sure.”

  “If we go now, everybody else will be lining up for dinner. Why don’t we get some clean clothes and I’ll meet you there?”

  Over the winter Cole had helped build the shower building, nicknamed the Turkish Baths, or “the Turkish” for short. It featured a big open area for those who didn’t mind showering together, which turned out to be most of the men and none of the women, with some cubicles for privacy. When Cole got there, Sirocco was sitting on the waiting bench outside. “We’re almost out of towels again,” she said. “I grabbed us a couple.”

  The commune had bought eight identical washers from a bankrupt laundromat, both in expectation of more arrivals and to cannibalize for parts. They were in the barn with the generator. People were expected to take care of their own clothes, but the towels were a rotating task th
at frequently fell through the cracks. Which meant that people tended to steal them to be sure of having one, prompting lectures from Sugarfoot at the Sunday meetings.

  “Thanks,” Cole said, and followed her down the hall to a private shower, his heart beating in his eardrums. Each shower had a small anteroom with clothes hooks and wooden racks on the floors. “Our lucky day,” Sirocco said. “There’s soap and shampoo.”

  Quarters were tight. As they undressed, they constantly brushed up against each other, and by the time they were both naked, Cole’s desire was evident. He waited for Sirocco to make the first move. She looked him up and down with a smile, then took her glasses off and dug a blue plastic case the size of her palm out of her stack of clean clothes. Cole, who had never seen a diaphragm before, quickly figured it out. She smeared the cup with clear jelly from a glass jar, then stuck it between her legs, shifting her weight from side to side until she got it settled into place. Then she turned her back to him and started the shower.

  The rule was to only run water at the beginning and end, turning off the tap to lather up. The place was heavily insulated, with three separate water heaters, so the steam kept the air comfortably warm except for early winter mornings. Sirocco got herself thoroughly wet, including her hair, then made room for Cole. She shampooed while Cole turned off the water and lathered up, and then she turned away and said, “Do my back?”

  Cole obliged. He got her back slippery clean, then put down the soap and began to work her trapezius muscles, which were as hard as two bags of cement. She groaned and leaned forward, putting both hands flat on the wall. He worked his way down her back, then rubbed her big, beautiful buttocks. “Mmmm. Don’t stop,” she said. He reached between her legs and she stepped apart to accommodate him. He was trembling. He bent his knees and moved in over her as she guided his right hand to her clitoris. He tried a few different movements until her breath pushed her spine harder and harder against his chest. In the moment before she came she stopped breathing entirely, and then she let it out in an explosive sigh and he felt her contractions in his hand. He couldn’t wait any longer, and he slid inside her from behind. It had been so long, and it was the best feeling he knew, to be inside a woman. She pressed back against him, finding his rhythm and moving with it. His eyes rolled back in his head. His hands moved up her hips and waist and then slipped around to cup her breasts, her skin rubbery with soap suds, her nipples hard knots against his palms, and all too soon the pleasure was unbearable and he came so hard he thought he might never stop. When it was over he went to his knees and she turned and they both slid to the floor, Sirocco ending up half on top of him, both of them laughing.

  Eventually they got rinsed off, and Cole was staring at her lips, heavy and curvaceous like the rest of her, and realized he’d never had sex without kissing before. He leaned in to rectify that and Sirocco put a finger on his mouth as if to shush him. “No attachments,” she said. Her eyes were a cool gray. “No expectations. Right?”

  “Okay,” Cole said.

  She pushed him away gently and threw him a towel. “Get dressed. I’m starving.”

  They sat together at the oversized dining room table at the Big House. The first round of diners had mostly departed. Phil, the old guy, was on Sirocco’s right and she immediately started up a conversation with him. Cole, who had an empty chair on his left, ran down the possibilities. She could be deliberately trying to make him jealous, which didn’t seem her style. She could be indifferent to Cole’s feelings. Most likely she wanted to reinforce her point that Cole had no claim on her. Sirocco, so relentlessly doctrinaire, would have been appalled by Phil’s meat-eating, cash-embezzling, caffeine-drinking ways. Cole knew that any attempt on his part to narc him out would backfire. Instead he ate his tiresome beans, greens, and cornbread in silence, excused himself when he was done, put his dishes in the soaking pan, and went up to bed.

  He waited a long time for sleep. In the living room downstairs they were passing the guitar around and singing Weavers songs like “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and Carter Family songs like “Wabash Cannonball.” Somebody played a plastic Tonette out of key and Donnie grated away on his harmonica. Cole told himself that if he’d met Sirocco outside of the commune he wouldn’t have given her a second look. Her own self-regard was contagious. But it was more than that. She was smart and capable, comfortable with her own body, unashamed to take what she wanted.

  For two days he only saw her at a distance, then on the second night he woke to a tapping. Before he could answer, the door opened and Sirocco stuck her head in. “Mind if I join you?”

  “No,” he said, his throat suddenly tight. “Not at all.”

  She undressed in the moonlight, taking her time. Without quite falling into the artifice of a striptease, she paused at critical moments to make sure she had his attention. When she was done, she set her glasses and diaphragm and jelly on the nightstand. “What would you have done,” Cole said, “if I hadn’t been alone?”

  “Asked if you minded sharing.”

  She got in between the sheets and Cole smelled mint and patchouli on her skin. This time when he tried to kiss her she put both arms around his neck and pulled him in. Her mouth was everything he’d imagined it might be.

  “Um, do you need to put the diaphragm in?” he asked.

  “In a while. The spermicide is organic, lemon and aloe vera, but it probably doesn’t taste very good.” He raised his eyebrows. “I want you to do what you did in the shower,” she said, “you know, at the start? Only I want you to use your mouth. Don’t worry, I’ll show you. And all the women you make love to after me will be ever so grateful.”

  Much later, she kissed his forehead, making him aware that he’d drifted off as they lay on their sides together. She disentangled herself and reached for her clothes. “Why don’t you stay?” Cole said. “It’s cold out there.”

  She finished dressing and came back to sit on the edge of the bed. She ran her fingers through Cole’s hair. “There’s a part of me that would like that. Part of me wants to leave out the diaphragm and let you knock me up and help me raise a bunch of squalling kids who’ll grow up to be perfect anarcho-syndicalists and smash the state.”

  Cole knew that his brain was awash in sexual chemicals, still, he’d heard plenty of worse ideas. He was sure he could do a better job than his father had. “Why don’t you?”

  “Because we’re just kids. Because I’m not ready to do just one thing or be just one thing for the rest of my life. It was sweet tonight. There can be more nights like this if we both want. We don’t have to own each other.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Property is theft.”

  “It really is, you know.” She kissed him tenderly. “Good night, Cole. Sweet dreams.”

  *

  In April, Cole ate his first truly fresh eggs, out of tan and brown and green colored shells, the yolks fat and dark orange, tasting nothing like the ones his mother used to overcook. Later that month he thinned the spinach that he and Sirocco had planted, putting most of the culled plants into a bag for dinner that night, eating the rest straight out of the ground, the leaves impossibly tender and subtly nut-flavored, a whole different vegetable from anything he’d eaten before.

  They planted potatoes early in the month, a back-breaking job that involved setting pieces of seed potato, eye side up, in a deep, manure-filled trench. Once the potatoes were in the ground, the construction crew put up chicken wire around all the planted fields to keep out the rabbits and the deer.

  The outside world made its occasional intrusions. On May 1, Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia. College campuses around the country erupted and the National Guard killed four kids in Ohio. Cole thought of Alex and wondered if he’d gotten drawn in, if he was safe. Walter and Leon, the commune’s radical fringe, wanted to have an “action” of some unspecified nature. Cole left the meeting early and heard later that it had dissolved into factionalism and pointless alternatives. Sugarfoot had finally shut it down, saying, �
��We are not part of the war, or the war against the war. We are the alternative to war.”

  In the meantime they had work to do. Early May was the season to plant corn. Sugarfoot taught Cole how to run the disk cultivator to keep the rows neat and weeded, and Cole taught Sugarfoot basic engine maintenance. Late in the month they harvested the spinach and replaced it with tomatoes, eggplant, hot peppers, okra. As soon as they finished one job, two more were overdue.

  As compensation, they threw a party after every planting, and while most everyone put in long days, Frisbees, water balloons, and nude sunbathing helped break up the monotony.

  By mid-summer the population had tripled to 45 and the entire chemistry had changed. They had their first black guy, a skinny kid from New Orleans who called himself Big Easy. They had their first Chicano, a Honduran named Jaime, which meant that Cole got to dust off his Spanish. They had a Vietnam vet who claimed to be against the war, yet constantly butted heads with Walter and Leon. Married or otherwise committed couples, plus a couple of single mothers, had brought in a total of seven kids who ranged in age from newborn to 5 years. The ones old enough to walk ran wild with the dogs. Various women were coming up pregnant, and Sirocco had lined up volunteers to learn midwifery. For the moment the couples were staying in partitioned 16 ✕ 32 Army tents, acceptable in the hot and humid summer, hopelessly inadequate for the winter to come.

  In August, with the population at 52 and climbing, Sugarfoot asked Cole to take a walk with him after supper. The sun was low and the temperature was in the low 80s, cooler than it had been in a few weeks.

  “Today is the first anniversary of Eden Farm,” Sugarfoot said. “We should have had some kind of celebration, but I couldn’t see my way to it. It’s not like there’s a shortage of parties here anyway.” They’d been walking for ten minutes and still hadn’t come to the end of the cultivated fields. Cole hadn’t taken the time to look around for weeks, and the sight of all those neat rows of crops filled him with pride and weariness.