Three Day Summer

by Sarvenaz Tash

  chapter 5

  Cora

  DON’T BUY YASGUR’S MILK! HE LOVES HIPPIES! The sign is huge, the letters almost taller than me and I stand about five foot four. If a sign could scream, this one would be out of lung capacity.

  But that’s not what makes me stop in my tracks as I’m walking across the little field to my shift in the medical tent. No, I screech to a halt because of the five-foot-six sweaty farmer who’s emphatically hammering the sign’s left post into the ground with his good arm.

  “Dad?” I say in disbelief.

  My father looks up at me, his eyes squinting into the sun. I’m wearing my candy striper apron again and a plain blue dress underneath it. None of that “hippie nonsense,” as my dad is fond of calling some of my friends’ more fashionable duds. Not that it seems to matter anyway because the glint of disappointment is suddenly diamond bright in his eyes.

  “And where do you think you’re going, young lady?” he asks.

  It takes everything I have not to roll my eyes. I sigh. “Dad, I’m working the medical tents. You know that.”

  “Damn hippies. If they’re going to get themselves liquored up and drugged up and God knows what else, they don’t need my daughter’s help to get them back on the straight and narrow. They can sleep it off like everybody else.”

  I point at the sign. “Mr. Yasgur, Dad? Really?” Max Yasgur owns more land than anyone in all of Sullivan County. He’s the purveyor of most of our milk and a sweet, soft-spoken guy. As of about three weeks ago, he also happens to own the farm that’s about to host an enormous music festival. No surprise that my dad and some of Bethel’s other disgruntled citizens have done everything in their power to try to stop him from leasing it. The idea of rock stars, and hippies, and fifty thousand young people descending upon our sleepy little farm town is not exactly a palatable idea to people like Dad.

  Obviously, their protests haven’t been working. But asking people to boycott Mr. Yasgur’s milk? This is just too much.

  “This is what he gets,” my dad says stubbornly. “We told him it’d be like this and we’re as good as our word.”

  “It’s just a music festival, Dad. Jeez, what do you think is going to happen?”

  Oh, crud. Now I’ve done it. Dad’s face has just become six shades of red, his cheeks and the tip of his nose flaming as brightly as a siren.

  “Cora Fletcher. I wonder if that’s exactly what some seventeen-year-old girl said to her dad right before the Democratic convention. Right before she got her head bashed in at the riot. Or how about before Martin Luther King was assassinated? Or what about President Kennedy?! Just a parade on Main Street?! Is that what that was?”

  “Dad, there are no presidents or dignitaries here. It’s just a rock show,” I mutter.

  “This music gets all you kids riled up and then you’re all tumbling and who knows what your brain is telling the rest of you to do.”

  He means “tripping,” not “tumbling,” but this doesn’t seem like the right time to get into semantics.

  “Okay, Dad. Okay. Just calm down, all right?” He had a mild heart attack just a year ago and I don’t need him to have another one. “I’m just going to be working the medical tent with Anna. That’s all. Everything will be fine.”

  Anna is the nurse I usually volunteer under. She recruited me two weeks ago for this—basically as soon as we all found out that the festival was kicked out of Wallkill, New York, and about to suddenly descend on Bethel instead. (Funnily enough, I don’t think it was ever slated to take place in the actual town of Woodstock.) Anna is also a friend of the family. I can see Dad’s red cheeks fade into a slightly less alarming dark pink.

  This is my cue to skedaddle. “See you later, Dad,” I say quickly as I turn around and practically flee across the field, nearly going face-first into something dark and sculpted. Wait a minute, those are pecs.

  I let my eyes follow the chest muscles up to a grinning face, dazzling teeth matching bright white sunglasses. “What’s the rush, sister?”

  “Ergh” or some hideous noise close to that comes out of my mouth.

  He takes my hand and gives it a loose shake. “I’m Rob.”

  Rob is beautiful. He’s also wearing an unbuttoned denim shirt and tight striped pants that showcase how beautiful all of him really is.

  “See you around,” he says before ambling off. He’s with three girls and two other guys. One of the girls is tall and blond, wearing a long, rainbow-colored dress and silver rings on each of her ten fingers, a dainty daisy drawn on her cheek. The other two are darker, one dressed in tiny denim shorts and a midriff-baring crocheted vest, the other wearing a shorter dress that’s dripping with beaded turquoise necklaces. The two boys are both in bell-bottoms, one about the same height as Rob and carrying a humongous backpack and the other slightly shorter and skinnier with longish dirty blond hair and something that looks like the palest wisps of peach fuzz around his lips.

  The girls pay me no attention, and Rob and Backpack Guy have clearly already forgotten about my existence. But Peach Fuzz keeps his gaze on me a moment longer as they walk away, nearly walking into Rob, too.

  Hmmm—I look down to assess myself—pretty sure he was staring at my legs. And then I remember I’m in my stupid uniform.

  I roll my eyes at myself. Not exactly the height of fashion, especially compared to the company he’s keeping. I shake my head and start walking—with purpose this time—back to Mr. Yasgur’s farm.

  chapter 6

  Michael

  That chick has nice legs.

  Really nice. Sort of a glowing, deep golden color, tapering perfectly at the ankles and everything. She’s wearing some sort of weird stripy uniform thing, though, which I vaguely remember as meaning something. Nun in training, maybe? I hope not. What a waste of legs.

  By the time I peel my eyes away from her, Evan and the crew have plopped down on a bit of grass in the meadow and Evan is digging into his backpack.

  He takes out a bunch of bananas, a thermos, four teal plastic cups, and a tin packed nearly to the brim with weed. He also takes out a small brass pipe, which he sets about packing.

  Rob eyes the bananas. “Think we can go look for some real food after this? I wouldn’t want anything as prehistoric as hunger pains to invade my consciousness once the music starts. Know what I mean?”

  I nod emphatically as I take the pipe Evan is offering me. “Since we’re not in yet anyway, maybe we should hit that lunch counter we passed on our way here? In that little town . . . White Lake?”

  “Cool,” Evan says as he repacks the bananas, thermos, and cups.

  The pipe goes around once and then we get up and start ambling back. The town we passed on our way from my car is about three miles away, but I don’t mind the walk. We don’t have anywhere to be yet, it’s a beautiful day, and the weed has created a nice buffer of calm, as per usual. Even Amanda is holding my hand and keeping the peace.

  White Lake seems to have a sort of main street with a couple of shops, a grocery store, and the lunch counter I remembered. There is a small line out its glass door, but since we have nothing but time, we cheerfully get on the end of it.

  “I’m not going back, Jane,” a girl in front of me with braided red hair says to her friend.

  “What are you gonna do if you’re not in college, Meg?” Jane shoots back, her eyes big with worry.

  Meg shrugs. “I’ll be fine. There are plenty of things that don’t need a college degree. Growing food, playing music, becoming a mural painter. Anything. That school’s stifling me! And besides, it’s not like I have to worry about getting drafted.”

  It’s like someone has taken an oil drill and tapped straight into the biggest nerve in my body. I go crashing down from my small high, about to explode into a million pieces.

  I can hear the fight with my mom, the one we’ve been having practically ev
ery day of the summer. Pieces of it have just been echoed, word for word, in front of me.

  “I don’t want to go, Ma. I’ll be fine. There are plenty of things I can do that have nothing to do with college.”

  “Not if you’re dead in a field you can’t. It’s the safest way to stay out of Vietnam, Michael.”

  I don’t think I want to go to Vietnam. I’m not a fighter. And sure, if I go to the community college I reluctantly enrolled in, I won’t be drafted. But I know for sure I don’t want to go to school. I just can’t imagine ending up like my dad. He spends ten hours a day at his office. I assume he talks to people there, because by the time he comes home, he has no words left for Ma or me.

  The worst is looking into his eyes. It’s like looking at a burnt-out wick, dark and purposeless. When I was younger, I used to sometimes stare at other people’s eyes to see if I could recognize the same thing in them. Is that what it meant to be an adult? That was when I started really getting into music. I’d look at pictures of my rock heroes. John Lennon never looked like that. Neither did Jerry Garcia. Or Donovan. Or Jimi Hendrix.

  I have no idea what or who I want to be, but I know for certain what and who I don’t. And that’s all I see when I think about going to college. A one-way ticket to future soullessness.

  “Hey, are you checking that girl out?!”

  A sharp voice brings me out of my unpleasant daydream. Amanda’s.

  I look at her in a daze, only then realizing that I’ve been staring at the redhead.

  “What?”

  “Asshole!” Amanda says as she punches my arm.

  The redhead catches my eye and gives me a small, secret smile.

  I shrug and smile back before turning away. No need to fan the flames of Amanda’s psychoses.

  It takes us another forty-five minutes to get a table. By the time our burgers arrive, Amanda still isn’t talking to me.

  But, man, will I remember that meal. A juicy, perfectly cooked slab of meat, doused with ketchup, and large, crunchy slices of sour pickle. Perfectly salted fries, crispy. A Coke.

  My consciousness definitely feels ready for whatever’s about to come next.

  chapter 7

  Cora

  I’m afraid, Cora.

  I think of Mark’s letter. This is the first time that he has ever said those exact words to me.

  His terror is terrifying. My fearless older brother who’s been gone so long now. Almost two and a half years. What could have happened that would cause him to be scared now when he never has been before? Or is it just that he has never told me before? Does he think I’m getting old enough to handle the truth now?

  “Cheer up!” a voice says to me, and I look up to see an older guy in a big cowboy hat and white jumpsuit grinning at me. He’s missing several of his front teeth.

  “Ready for the time of your life?” he asks.

  I give him a small smile. Despite my worry, something about his easy joy is infectious.

  “Hugh, I can’t find the gruel.” A girl with frizzy brown hair and a guy with a long beard come up to the jumpsuit guy. They are both festooned with red bandannas with a picture of a white flying pig silk-screened on them. The guy wears his around his arm, and the girl uses hers to pull back her hair.

  Hugh looks at them thoughtfully for a minute. “Aha! It’s in the back of Lisa’s van,” he finally says triumphantly.

  He turns around to walk away and I see that the back of his suit has a large embroidered blue and red star design. Very patriotic.

  “I’m worried we won’t have enough food,” the girl says as they walk toward some food tents that have been set up across the small woods from the medical tents. She glances nervously at the significant number of people already gathering in small herds. There are a lot more of them than there were this morning. If I had to guess, I’d say the number has at least quadrupled.

  “Worry? Now, why would you go and do a silly thing like that for?” Hugh says cheerfully. “We can feed fifty thou a day easily. It’ll all be groovy.”

  Their voices fade as I veer to the right and walk past the woods to my little yellow tent, Hugh’s red, white, and blue emblem watermarking my thoughts.

  I wonder what the American flag means to Mark now, whether he still shares Dad’s enthusiasm for it. He’s tired of fighting in its name, that much I know. I want to come home, Cora. More than that, I want all of us to come home.

  He didn’t even finish the story of Jack and his underwear. It’s the saddest letter he has ever written me.

  I eye the knots of people everywhere, a lot around Mark’s age of twenty-two, a lot around mine. He should be here with them. If he hadn’t signed up for the army when he was the eager-eyed, antsy nineteen-year-old I had last seen—gung ho to follow in his father’s footsteps instead of continuing college—he would be.

  I catch a glimpse of one small group that seems to have somehow procured a sheep. A guy with shoulder-length red hair, a long orange tunic, and white pants is lovingly petting it. He looks like a reverse flame. My eyebrows raise and I’m immediately worried for the animal, especially in the hands of city folk. I decide I can keep an eye on it from my medical tent.

  “How’s it going?”

  I turn. Wes, my brother, is sitting cross-legged right outside my tent, his light brown wavy hair hanging down to his shoulders. Even though he’s my twin, we hardly look alike at all. Aside from the curl in his hair, Wes has almost all of Dad’s coloring and features, and I have almost all of Mom’s. Wes and Mark look a lot more like they could be twins than we do.

  “You left me with the hens,” I protest.

  “Couldn’t deal with the Drip kissing Mom’s ass today. It was destroying my morning.” The Drip is Wes’s nickname for Ned. To be fair, he never really liked him even when he was my boyfriend. But ever since he accidentally caught me red-eyed the night we broke up, he’s been particularly furious with him. Wes has seen me cry maybe twice ever, and I’ve cried maybe a lifetime total of five times. It’s usually not how my emotions work, unless something bomb-shelter levels of catastrophic has happened.

  “We have a letter from Mark,” I say.

  Wes smiles. “Cool. I’ll check it out later. For now, do you have a bandage?” He holds up his right palm, where a pretty sizable wound is bleeding.

  “What happened?” I ask as I kneel down beside him.

  “No big thing. Just a splinter.” He gestures nonchalantly at the sign next to him. END THE WAR NOW it blares. It’s mounted on what looks like possibly the most decrepit piece of wood I’ve ever seen.

  “Wes!” I squeal. “You’re going to need a tetanus shot.”

  His eyes flash a second of fear and then narrow. “Small price to pay to try and save the millions who are, I don’t know, being killed over there,” he says with an attempt at valiance.

  I sigh. “You’re preaching to the choir, you know,” I say as I take his noninjured hand in mine and help him up.

  I turn around without another word, and he follows me into the tent, grumbling a low apology.

  Walking over to the table we’ve set up, I take out some bandages, cotton balls, alcohol, and a dark bottle of Mercurochrome. I take his hand and examine it.

  “There’s a little piece of wood still in there. I’m going to have to take it out.”

  Grabbing tweezers, I wipe some alcohol on it, and start digging around in Wes’s hand as gently as I can. He winces.

  Wes isn’t so good with physical pain. My father, the two-war veteran, rides him about it all the time, constantly comparing him to the derring-do of Mark, especially when Wes starts talking about dodging selective service.

  Threshold of pain aside, I can’t say I exactly blame him. Being a girl, I don’t have to put my name down for a draft when I turn eighteen, so I’m not faced with the high probability of being sent into a battlefield. Though I a
m faced with the heart-wrenching possibility of coming out an only child at the end of everything. I’m not sure which is worse.

  “Ow!” he yells when I finally pull the piece of wood out. To be fair to him, it is a rather long piece.

  He hisses when I rub Mercurochrome on his wound, staining his skin orange before I wrap it up in a bandage.

  “Thanks,” he mumbles as he steps back toward the entrance of the tent.

  “Not so fast.” I grab the sleeve of his green tie-dyed shirt. “Tetanus shot.”

  “Oh, come on! It was just a tiny splinter,” he whines.

  “Not based on the noises you were making,” I say. Turning around, I spot the middle-aged brunette I’m looking for. “Anna,” I yell over to her, not daring to leave my brother’s side in case he attempts escape. It wouldn’t be the first time. “Can you give this fool a tetanus shot?” I point a thumb at Wes.

  Without any hesitation, Anna looks into one of the dozens of bins neatly stacked up on the side of the tent and emerges with a syringe wrapped in plastic. She rummages around in another bin and comes up with a vial of liquid.

  I turn to Wes, noticing his wide-eyed look of fear. Time for a distraction. “So where are Adam, Laurie, and Peter?”

  “Protesting.”

  “Obviously,” I say with an eye-roll. “But where are they? And really, you and Dad are opposite sides of the same coin. What do you think is going to happen by protesting here?”

  Wes turns to me with a glare. “Millions of people are going to be watching this weekend, Cora. We’re protesting for them to see. To hear just what this generation wants. And it ain’t war! OW!!” he howls. Anna has stuck him with the needle.

  “All done,” I say with a grin as Anna places another bandage on his arm.

  “Were you trying to get me riled up just so I wouldn’t feel that?” he spits.

  “Well . . . yeah,” I say.

  “Oh. Well, thanks. I guess.”

  I shake my head. “You’re welcome. Try not to get into any more trouble out there, okay?”