The Gorgon Festival

by John Boyd

  Crack a black with a billy club and you’ll find a darky, Ward thought, and dropped his eyes to his crotch. What he saw exposed, whole and unharmed, brought tears of happiness. All he had forgone, the quiet companionship of home and Ester, the lure of the beckoning Diana, all the mountains and hillocks of love, were restored. Like the mad King Lear, he had not thought enough of these things. As his tears slowly dried, as he contemplated the marvel, a gentleness exuded through his pride of ownership and protectiveness.

  “Lord of my love,” he murmured, “to whom in vassalage your merit has my duty strongly knit, how much more beautiful does beauty seem when your sweet ornament before it stands. In those sessions of sweet silent thought when memory, making beautiful old loves, lifts up your burning head…”

  Rapt in contemplation, Ward did not see the denouement of the drama against the wall, but he got the effects when he heard a deputy close by ask, “Is he praying, Sarge?”

  “Maybe. Could be one of those Oriental religions that keep cropping up along Sunset.”

  Ward looked up at a semicircle of deputies around the hood which included Freddie, relaxed and smiling.

  “Mr. Atascadero,” the sergeant said, “this black gentleman has explained the situation to us. We’ve radioed for the meat wagon, compliments of the taxpayers, to take you to the Wilcox Receiving Hospital and get that head sewed up, compliments of the taxpayers. Your counselor, here, tells us you’ll not be preferring charges…”

  “Like hell!” Ward snapped. “Those bastards took my helmet, my wallet, and damned near scalped me.”

  “He’s still out of his head, sir,” Freddie said to the sergeant. “Don’t pay him no never-mind.”

  Freddie didn’t want him to bring charges because Freddie, as a witness, would have been in danger of retribution by the Patriots. As a public-spirited citizen, Ward would have ordinarily overridden such considerations, but there was one he couldn’t overlook. Alexander Ward was a fugitive from Stanford. An investigation would uncover his identity.

  “I suppose he’s right, officer,” Ward said. “After all, they did leave my motorcycle.”

  “And your family jewels,” the sergeant reminded him, “which it might be advisable to cover up. Be sure to catch that ambulance. There may not be another until midnight.”

  Ward slid from the hood, pulling up his trousers.

  After the squad cars left, Freddie steadied the wavering Ward as they walked down the alley. For Ward, the lacerations were less painful than memory of the senseless brutality he had witnessed from so intimate a viewpoint.

  “Freddie, I’m getting even with the Patriots, one at a time or in a group. For my own convenience, I hope I can get them all together. That’s a Stanford vow.”

  “Forget them. They’d kill you and get away with it. They’ve made a name for themselves with the Establishment at student rallies and peace parades by knocking heads. Anyhow, they’re not too bad. Some gangs in Watts make the Patriots look like a sensitivity-encounter group.”

  Freddie’s easy handling of big words brought a question from Ward. “Where’d you learn that Uncle Tom act you put on?”

  “From Miss Frost. I can’t beat the white power structure, but I can bend it my way.”

  “They really called you a mother-lover. I expected to hear something more pungent.”

  “It’s the new breed of sheriffs,” Freddie explained. “Next month they’re coming at us with pink night sticks.”

  As they turned toward the boulevard, Ward asked bluntly, “Why are you doing all this for a whitey?”

  “To save my pigeon. I figure you for mucho bread, since you’ll be around the Daisy Chain looking for the Greek chick.”

  “Forget it. I’m so broke I couldn’t pass the hat-check girl bare-headed.”

  “I got a key to the back door. Be my guest. I work there mornings as assistant maintenance engineer to Big John, who has administrative control of all lavatories… Here, sit on the curb.”

  Ward sat. None of the barefoots milling along the sidewalk made any comments about his bloody head, but twice he heard the remark, “Dig that red suede shirt.”

  Far down the boulevard Ward heard an approaching siren, and suddenly he moaned. “Good heavens! I’m broke, and Big John will take my message off the board.”

  “I’ll have him keep it on the board and put the bill on my tab,” Freddie said, reaching into his jeans to pull out a five-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill. “Here’s bean money.”

  “I can’t take it, Freddie. I’m broke and out of work.”

  Freddie tucked the money into the pocket of Ward’s black leather jacket and buttoned the flap. “You’ve got a job. Report to me, tomorrow night at ten-thirty, at the Kitten Club, six blocks east of here. I moonlight as Systems Analyst Expert for the Kitten Club’s Traffic Placement Department. I’ll deduct my twelve bucks from your pay.”

  “Twelve? This is only six.”

  “The six extra’s to cover my loss of time on the job. You put me late to work… But don’t worry about paying me back. I’m holding your motorcycle in the Daisy Chain store room as security.”

  “So you’ll still have your pigeon?”

  Edging out into the street to flag down the ambulance, Freddie said, “You’re my investment, now. I figure any hog jockey with eight hundred twenty dollars in his pocket who chases a pair of teats into the middle of a motorcycle gang to get a haircut and then tries to bring charges with his pants down has too much machismo for me to let off the hook. But stash your red suede shirt when you report for work. It’ll cut down on your income… Be seeing you, scabhead.”

  On Tuesday morning, Joe Cabroni composed a message to be sent outside routine police channels.

  From: Detective Lieutenant Joseph M. Cabroni, SFPD.

  To: Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  In the course of an investigation into the disappearance of Doctor Ruth Diane Gordon, aged 72, professor emeritus of gerontology, Stanford University, nightclub entrepreneur and owner-director of several homes for the aged, facets of the case uncovered by this investigator indicate areas of possible Federal interest.

  A suspect in the disappearance, Doctor Alexander Wheeler Ward, professor of molecular biology, Stanford University, is also missing and alleged to have fled to Mexico. Reputedly Doctor Ward was engaged in research pointing toward reconstitution of defective DNA molecules. Doctor Gordon was an authority on the theory of random error in the aging process which holds that aging occurs from an accumulation of defective inner cellular DNA molecules.

  Nowhere in the communication did Cabroni advance an opinion, merely editing the facts to fit his theory; but he considered his findings important enough to teletype his message and transmit along with it two photographs, one he had obtained from the personnel file at Stanford and one he had taken from the Ethan Allen yearbook of Ward in his cadet’s uniform at the age of eighteen.

  Cabroni had not guessed wrong about the government’s interest. On Wednesday a figure high enough in the Defense Department to be regarded as a “reliable rumor” by Washington newsmen invited to lunch a member of the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee high enough in the hierarchy to be labeled an “unimpeachable source.”

  After a third martini, the military man voiced a question. “Doctor, if it were possible to reconstitute innercellular DNA in the human body, what would be the result?”

  “Well, General, that would depend. If the body were that of a female past menopause, you’d get a nubile, agile, and infertile young lady. If a man, he would again be subject to draft.”

  By Wednesday, Ward had found that the life style of a parking lot attendant differed widely from that of a university professor. Freddie had introduced him to the Kitten Club manager, who had required Ward to fill out an application for a Social Security number. Ward used the name Albert Atascadero and listed his birthplace as El Paso.

  With street wisdom verging on the intuitive, Freddie reassured Ward in an area where
Ward had been careful to voice no concern.

  “Don’t worry about being checked. All the Establishment wants is a cut of your take, and all I’ll need each day is the money to keep your message on Big John’s board. You can pay on the principal later.”

  Ward might have earned three meals a day on the job if his appearance had not been against him.

  After the doctor at the receiving hospital had shaved his scalp and sewed the cuts, Ward had returned to the motel and rejuvenated his scalp. His head healed immediately, but there were still 422 stitches dangling from livid welts which made his head resemble the striped end of a hairy ape.

  Traveling light, he had brought only the suede shirt Freddie had warned him against wearing. When he washed the blood out and hung it to dry, he found it, the next morning, so shrunken as to be unusable. All that was left to him in the way of a shirt was the top half of the pajamas Ester had given him for his birthday. Before checking out of the motel, he took a towel to fashion into a turban. The white silk pajamas with the Nehru collar and the turban made him resemble a swami.

  His appearance caused no flap on Sunset Boulevard, but the patrons of the Kitten Club were constantly stopping him to talk about the Indian rope trick, cobra training, or Hindu philosophy. Such conversations reduced his tips. While Freddie parked cars, often as not Ward was standing under the club’s canopy discussing the Bhagavad Gita with some tomcat or club kitten.

  But he was developing his cunning. His suede shirt was so shrunken that he sold it to a filling station owner for $2.50 as a chamois cloth.

  Ward’s sleeping accommodations were arranged by Freddie, who gave him directions to a hippie commune near Ferndell in Griffith Park and drove him there the first night.

  On their way, Ward voiced his misgivings about sleeping out in a public place, unsheltered and unprotected, with no toilet facilities.

  “Look at it this way, Swami. It’s like you’ve got one of the biggest pads in town, sixty thousand acres, airy and sunny, only an hour and a half’s walk from work. Public toilets on Ferndell give you free utilities, compliments of the taxpayer. Of course, you’ll have to use the restrooms before the gates open, because the cops will roust you if they find you in the park in daylight. Lay low in the ravine during the day. The hippies will feed you.”

  “At least I’ll get to study those beasts in their natural habitat.”

  “They’re people, Al. They’ll share everything with you. Trouble is, they don’t have much.”

  When Freddie stopped at the gate to Ferndell at the end of Western Avenue, he admonished Ward, “Keep your shirt and turban clean for the parking lot, and when you come to work, walk on a straight line. The fuzz won’t stop you if you’re headed somewhere, like out of town.”

  In the moonlight, Ward found the ravine without difficulty and stretched out with his head pillowed on his shirt wrapped in his towel. After he had removed a few pebbles from his bed, a weirdly pleasant nostalgia riffled his mind. It was his first sleep on the ground since the Battle of the Bulge, and Southern California was immensely preferable to wintry Belgium with German mortars dropping in. Though almost penniless and by now a hunted fugitive, he felt absurdly free.

  “Man, where’d you get that groovy head?”

  A young man, bearded, slender, wearing velvet jacket and tennis shoes without socks was looking down at him in the light of dawn. From somewhere in the ravine, Ward smelled the odor of food as he raised on one elbow.

  “The haircut’s compliment of the taxpayers. The grooves come from the Orange County Patriots.”

  “They broke Glue Head’s arm at the Laguna Festival. You bring any pot?”

  “Pot? I haven’t even had breakfast.”

  “I’ll tell Sadie to save you some, but don’t come till I call.”

  Ward tried to go back to sleep, but the sun had broken through the hills and it blared into his eyes. He arose, stashed his shirt and turban in a rock crevice, and waited until the boy reappeared around a shoulder of the hills and whistled, “Okay, Baldy.”

  Ward followed him up the ravine. Two girls and a boy passed them coming out, all three dressed in jeans, slit serapes, and floppy hats. Compared to Ward, they were well-groomed, and he said, “Hi.”

  They said “Hi,” and averted their eyes.

  Above, they walked onto a level area hardly larger than a tennis court and overshadowed by a huge oak. A girl was stirring something in a lard pail hung over a fire of charcoal briquettes.

  “That’s Sadie,” the boy pointed, “and she’ll feed you.”

  The boy turned and went down the ravine. Ward walked over to his hostess, a tall, raw-boned girl whose thin face peered through a slit in her hair as she glanced at him, momentarily, then looked away.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Morning,” she said, motioning toward the pot. “There it is. It ain’t ham and eggs, but it’ll do.”

  She pronounced eggs as “eyeggs,” and he said, “You’re from the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

  “East Tennessee,” she answered, not looking at him.

  “Like it here?”

  “Better than Dallas. Worse than Tampa. If you ain’t got no spoon, use the big one.”

  Ward took the bent ladle hanging over the side of the pot, squatted down by the fire and scraped the bottom for the remaining morsels of mulligan stew. His appetite overcame his fear of hepatitis, and he found the concoction tasty.

  “Does everyone eat separately?” he asked.

  “Just you. Your head ain’t nice to eat with. Scrape the can. It saves cleaning.”

  “This is good chow, Sadie. Where’d you get it?”

  “Scrounging. The bacon’s store-bought.”

  The stew was vegetables flavored with bacon, but he said truthfully, “It tastes good, Sadie. Can I pay you something?”

  “Put it in the can nailed to the tree.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “Whatever you put in.”

  Ward set the pail and ladle down and walked over to the tree. Inside the can were a quarter and a dime. The two coins looked so lonely they were pathetic. He dropped in four quarters, one-fourth of last night’s tips, after Freddie’s deductions.

  “Wow,” a voice called from above, and Ward looked up to see a beardless boy with the face of a cherub framed in brown curls, shirtless and barefoot, his Levis straddling the limb of the oak.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “I like trees. Do you like trees?”

  “They all look alike to me.”

  “They’re different, after you get to know them. Like this one’s my old man. It digs me.”

  Childish enthusiasm in the boy’s voice brought agreement into Ward’s. “Maybe you’re right. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; nothing we see in nature that is ours.”

  “You talk pretty, but, man, if we get rain, I bet your head grows a crop of corn. It’s plowed and sprouting already.”

  Ward turned back to the glen where Sadie was kicking dirt onto the charcoal and walked over to help her.

  “What do you do during the day?” he asked.

  “Get out of the park, mostly, so’s not to pester people. Everybody but Glue Head and Nature Boy, yonder. Police don’t bother them. They ain’t right bright… Be seeing you.”

  Sadie scooted down the path toward the restrooms and Ward waited a moment before following, to spare her the embarrassment of his company.

  His first impressions of the hippies were mixed, but their first impression of him had been uniform—he revolted them. Instead of long hair, he had stitches dangling from the lacerations made by the Barber’s sprocket chain, and it took an act of courage for him to face the washroom mirror. As he plucked the stitches from his scalp, with each pull he cursed a Patriot by name. After he had run through the roster for the eighth time, Ward knew he could never return to his own age group until he had taught that segment of youth the wisdom of nonviolence.

  His resolution was implemente
d when he returned to the glade and met the other victim of the Patriots, Glue Head. Shirtless, his ribs showing through the skin of his reedy chest, the boy was sitting yogi-style under the oak, his gaze focused far beyond the hills. His hair was plaited into black braids that dangled below his sternum and his bearded face was cadaverous. The right forearm, folded across his chest, was bent from an ill-set bone.

  He resembled a mystic in a deep trance, but he looked up as Ward approached and said, “Shanti. Have you got any pot?”

  “Shalom. No. Am I interrupting your meditations?”

  “There are no interruptions for one who is one with Manito, the great spirit, for I am one-eighth Apache, of the tribe of Sequoia.”

  “Manito was Algonquin,” Ward commented conversationally, “and Sequoia was a Cherokee. But does marijuana help in your religious transports?”

  “Man, that’s where it’s at,” the boy said. “When I first talked to God I was sniffing glue.”

  “That’s Glue Head, Baldy,” Nature Boy called from his perch as Glue Head’s eyes again drifted off focus. “He can’t get his head straight. He’s got more kinks in it than you’ve got in yours.”

  Ward looked around at the hills, thinking, if there was one quick way to make contact with the commune, marijuana would be it.

  Griffith Park encompassed a range of hills which would have been listed as a mountain range in Vermont. Somewhere in its gulches and canyons, Asiatic hemp might have sprouted, and he was familiar with the plant through lectures given by the San Jose Police Department.

  He walked under the oak and called up into its branches, “Nature Boy, do you think you can tear yourself away from your dad long enough to help me hunt for Cannabis sativa?”

  A floppy-brimmed felt hat dropped from the tree.

  “I will if you’ll wear that.”

  Before noon they returned from the hills with their tea harvest and tedded it on a warm boulder for further drying in the midday sun. Ward split for Hollywood Boulevard, where he bought three corncob pipes, one for him and two for the commune. He still feared hepatitis.