Molly saw this, and popped Norman on the shoulder. He jumped and Sadie moved her hand. He was wearing a T-shirt but no button-down oxford shirt over it, and the jeans Pam had tucked into the bus for him. Molly couldn’t resist. “Norman, they look like they just came from the Penney’s catalog counter and off your mom’s ironing board!” He ignored her, but it embarrassed him.
The newborn baby cried and a cheer rose from the collective.
“Where’s Sadie?” said one.
“Here!” Sadie took Norman’s plate, handed it to Molly, grabbed Norman’s hand, and said with great earnestness, “This is when I go to work. Can you help me?”
Norman didn’t ask Molly’s permission. Whatever Sadie needed, he would help. He gave no thought to the scene they were walking in on. They disappeared inside the tipi and closed the flap.
“I’ll pack,” Molly said with as much sarcasm as she could capture, although to think of a new baby coming into the world in a tent on top of a mesa in New Mexico … it was something she’d never imagined to be present for.
“It’s a girl!” cried a young man with an enormous mound of brown curls falling into his eyes. He stepped out of the tipi long enough to let everyone know. “Her name is Summer! Born on the solstice!” He ducked back inside.
“Welcome, Summer!” was the cry then as people circled the tipi and sang a song about peace on earth.
“To the meadow!” shrieked a gaggle of kids running and threading themselves around the grown-ups.
“Molly, come look!” called Carol.
Norman’s bus sat in the parking area, painted white. A group of painters young and old were spattered with their handiwork. Flam acted the role of inspector, walking around and around the bus as if his opinion on the paint job was the one that counted.
“Don’t you love it!” exclaimed Carol. Moonglow sat at her mother’s hip and clapped.
“How … ?” began Molly, shocked. Norman would be so upset.
“We wanted to say thank you for the ride yesterday,” said Carol. “I saw that you’d started painting it already, so we just finished it for you.”
“Here,” said Ben, appearing at Carol’s side with a paintbrush. “Your turn, Molly. We didn’t touch your flowers. And there’s lots of white to work with now.”
“Let it dry,” said Carol. “Then it’ll be a canvas just waiting for you, and you can paint to your heart’s content. We’ll help you. It will be fun to do in the meadow.”
There was no resisting them after that. Molly walked the perimeter of the bus with Flam and admired the paint job. These kids were obviously practiced at it. The bus looked great to Molly’s eyes. It had completely lost its Charleston County Schools look, along with four seats.
“Norman told me we could take a few,” said a young man named Charlie-O who was trying to grow a mustache. “I asked him last night while we were drumming. We could use them in the pueblo. We’ll fix you up with some flooring we took from the old mining camp in the valley. We can do it —”
“— in the meadow,” Molly finished with him.
“Yeah!”
She decided to intercept Norman and break it to him before he stumbled upon his unrecognizable precious bus on his own and accused her of sabotage.
She walked back to the site of the new birth in the community to find Norman and Sadie emerging from a different tipi from the one they’d entered. Norman wore no shirt or shoes. His chest was blindingly white. His jeans were crazily crisp. Sadie carried a blanket over her arm, a small bottle of something in her hands, and Norman’s missing clothing.
Molly came to a full stop. She didn’t even know how to begin. What could she say or do in this situation? She was embarrassed to be standing there, watching Norman take his T-shirt from Sadie. Then he did the most amazing thing Molly had ever seen him do. He hugged Sadie. He hugged a girl. He hugged her with the entirety of his long arms and tall body, he folded her right into his bare chest, slowly and fully and completely. And Sadie hugged him back.
Molly turned on the heel of her Keds and walked away as fast as she could.
* * *
They carried an extra tent with them in the bus as they left the mesa with everyone else and caravanned to the Aspen Meadow. Flam took to riding in a seat now with his snout hanging out a window. Summer and her parents stayed at New Buffalo along with the midwife and Sadie and a small home crew who would celebrate there.
Norman’s spluttering at the paint job was all he managed before their bus filled with kids and they were on their noisy, singing way. Then they were in the meadow with the mallow and cacti and hundreds of white-trunked aspens in full green leaf. They were in the meadow with hundreds of kids from the communes around Taos; from Morningstar East with all its battered vehicles dotting the parking area like a crazy-quilt landscape; Five Star and its winning baseball team already organizing a game; Reality Construction with its Wild West vibe; the Family with their mounds of beads and scarves and rings and Las Vegas winnings, which meant hot dogs for everyone; and Lama, who brought a real life swami from India who had kids sitting cross-legged in front of a makeshift geodesic dome structure covered in a parachute, their eyes closed and fingers fixed in a supplicating position.
“What are they doing?” asked Molly.
“Meditating!” said Sweet Caroline.
“What’s that?”
The mood was festive and made more so by the arrival of the psychedelically painted buses of the Hog Farm and their charioteer, Wavy Gravy. Kids spilled from the buses and into the meadow with great shouts of happiness and abandon. They had a hog with them, too, who promptly set to sunning himself. The kids set up an enormous black gong on a tripod of poles and rang it to bring everyone to order and begin the celebration.
There was little order to be had, however.
“Who brought the food!”
“Look in the Kitchen Bus!”
Norman, swept up in the moment, handed over their peanut butter, bread, jelly, a bag of cookies, and all their Kool-Aid packets and sugar, which was met with great acclimation. He wore a huge grin on his face. Even in his sputtering over his painted bus, the grin had not left him. This place, he thought. These people. Constant improvisation. It’s like jazz. And I fit in. This could be my life. Freedom. Improvisation. Jazz.
“Let’s go to the hot springs!” someone shouted. “Let’s go swimming!”
Molly found herself swept into that group, thanks to Sweet Caroline, who grabbed Norman by the hand and asked him to drive. They left Flam with the Hog Farm kids — they had dogs, too. When they got to the springs, Molly was horrified to see sixteen kids peel off their clothes, drape them over the boulders, and climb, laughing and screaming and splashing one another, into the rock-rimmed, sandy-bottomed pools of warm water hidden only by the rushes and the river grasses that grew near the old stagecoach stop along the Rio Grande.
Norman peeled off his T-shirt. “Oh, no you don’t!” said Molly. “You’ve already had enough fun for one day!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know what you were doing in that tent with Sadie!”
Norman untied his Converse All Stars. “You don’t know anything, Molly.”
“I know she’s too old for you, Norman. She’s been to college!”
“Now look who’s talking.”
“I mean it, Norman. This is not right.”
“Why not?” He peeled off his socks.
“Because!”
“Because why? Because it makes you uncomfortable?”
“Yes! For starters!”
“Then don’t come. Stay here with the bus. I’m not going to miss my chance for a little bit of freedom because you don’t want me to!”
“Norman! You’re scaring me! What’s happening to you?”
He took off his belt and tossed it onto his shoes and socks. “Was Sadie undressed?”
Molly thought about it. “No.”
“That’s right. She wasn’t. It’s not what you think.
She gave me a back massage.”
“What’s a massage?”
He sighed, but he hadn’t known what it was, either, until he’d watched Sadie massage the newborn Summer.
“I feel great,” he declared with a conviction he didn’t know he possessed, “and I’m going swimming.”
“Norman —” Molly began, but Norman turned around, walked away from his cousin, and disappeared in the tall reeds.
MAGIC CARPET RIDE
Written by John Kay and Rushton Moreve
Performed by Steppenwolf
Recorded at American Recording Company, Studio City, 1968
Drummer: Jerry Edmonton
NORMAN
I drive back to the meadow singing “Wooly Bully” at deafening decibels with everyone in the bus. Everybody but Molly, who sits in the very back, bouncing in the last seat and scowling with her arms crossed. Her loss! Sweet Caroline sits in the navigator’s seat behind me. She’s a terrible singer, but I don’t care. She’s a great swimmer.
Nobody knows all the words to “Wooly Bully” but nobody cares. We all know the chorus. I want to drum out the beat on the steering wheel, but the road is too narrow and winding for that. Some kids dance in the aisles and I yell, “Sit down!” but I’m laughing. Sweet Caroline yells, “Yeah! Siddown!” And we laugh together, the two of us.
In the meadow, the Hog Farm Band is playing something awful and out of tune with beat-up instruments — a trumpet, a sax, some guitars, a recorder, a flute, and a cowbell. They’re playing their crazy hearts out, mainly because Wavy is conducting them in a clown costume complete with rubber nose, big shoes, and a bowler hat. They have no drums.
“I can fix this!” I shout.
“Welcome, young prince!” Wavy bellows. “Come play!”
I start handing out my equipment. One snare, two toms, a bass drum, some cymbals — not Hal Blaine’s — three sets of drumsticks and some tympani mallets. I want to shout: My brothers! My sisters! But I catch myself as willing hands reach for drums and sticks and keep right on playing.
“Attaboy!” shouts Wavy. “It’s cosmic! We’re the Cosmic Solstice Orchestra, the CSO!”
Sweet Caroline blows me a kiss — Oh, thank you! — and runs after Molly, who is stalking away from me. Two terrible tunes into the orchestra’s performance, someone starts yelling from across the meadow, “Bus race!” The CSO disbands immediately and kids start running for six colorful buses that are lining up at an imaginary start line, engines revving.
The saxophone player for the CSO — the most pimply-faced kid I’ve ever seen — says, “You’ve got a bus. You in?”
“I’m in!” I say, but I’m not sure. “How does it work?”
“C’mon! I’ll show you! My name’s Red, what’s yours?”
“Florsheim.”
“Ha! Shoes!”
We climb on and make for the middle of the Aspen Meadow in my white bus. Kids are running pell-mell to the competing buses, climbing on them, slapping them like they’re horses, calling Giddyup! crowding onto the roof racks. I rumble past them and Red points them out. “That’s Road Hog. That’s the Hospital Bus. the Kitchen Bus. That one’s Blue Bayou. That one’s Further — it’s famous — don’t know that other one. And oh, there’s Queen of Sheba, my favorite.”
They are all haphazardly rolled into place as if the starting line is just a suggestion. I trundle my bus into a gap-toothed opening between the Hospital Bus and the Kitchen Bus and put it into park. “Now what?” I ask. I hear barking outside and open the folding door. “Come on, boy!” I call to my dog, and Flam scrabbles on board.
Kids start climbing onto the roof of my bus and I panic. I yell back to Red. “Is this okay?”
“Oh, yeah, man!” shouts Red. “Let me out! I’ll help.”
Red gives kids a leg up onto the bumper, then they scramble in front of me onto the hood, then onto the roof where Barry installed a canoe carrier. It’s not much to hold on to, so I run outside and yell up to them, “I don’t think it’s safe!” They ignore me, as more kids pile on. I look around helplessly and Red says, “It’s cool, man. Nobody dies or goes to jail.”
Wavy appears in front of the buses and yells, “Who’s in charge?”
“Nobody!” comes a chorus from everyone.
“Well, somebody put a flag up at the other end, so we know where to turn around!” Wavy yells. White exhaust from the buses puffs around us like clouds. The noise from the engines is crazy-loud, but I can pick out Sweet Caroline’s voice calling for Molly. I look for her but can’t see her.
Wavy climbs onto the roof of the Kitchen Bus. “Let’s run one at a time!’ he yells. “Use a stopwatch! Fastest time’s the winner!”
“That’s for sissies!” yells the driver of the Hospital Bus.
“That’s Ken,” Red tells me. “Watch out for him. He’s a terrible driver.”
“Let’s go!” yells Ken. “Once around the meadow, turn around at the flag and get back here first!”
The rest of the crowd surges onto the bus roofs. There are metal racks around the roofs of the other buses that function like porch railings. I swallow hard and look for Molly. Nothing. “Wait a minute,” I start to say, but Ken’s holler fills the meadow.
“Start your engines!” This despite the fact that all engines are revving and ready to go. “Wait!” comes the collective call. Kids change allegiances to buses like they’re betting on a horse race. They climb off one and onto another as they get settled. The roof of my bus is swarming with bodies and it sounds like a stampede is going on. The whole bus rocks and I open my arms to catch a kid who slides down the front windshield with a squeal.
“Wait a minute!” I say again.
“Whose bus is this?” yells a girl in pigtails.
“Florsheim’s!” yells Red.
“Well, come on, Florsheim! Floor it!”
I give up. I half smile and half wave and get back on my bus, nervous. Molly would tell me not to do this. Barry would do it in a heartbeat. What about me? My heart knocks at my rib cage with uncertainty as I dump myself in the driver’s seat and put my feet on the pedals, my hands on the steering wheel. The bus continues to rock as kids settle themselves on the roof. Flam whines and I let him out the door. I peer at the buses next to me, parked at cockeyed angles.
Wavy gets on his knees from his perch atop the Kitchen Bus and points straight ahead with both arms. “The United States of America! And step on it!”
I close the door. Then I open it. I need to see as much as possible.
A barefoot kid in torn jeans takes off his red T-shirt and holds it in the air like a flag in front of the bulls. The buses are so much bigger than he is and they are making so much noise, puffing and pawing to be first out of the starting gate.
That’s when I admit, it’s exciting. It is. It’s like waiting to take your solo and whale on the drums, or the guitar, or sing your part. There is so much energy in it, even the air in the meadow is vibrating.
“This is great!” says Red. “Come on, Florsheim. Let’s beat ’em all!”
And in that moment, I make a decision: I’ll show them what I can do.
The shirtless boy waves his flag and the buses lurch, wheeze, rattle, and roar off the start line. Kids scream above me, around me. Exhaust envelops us like the morning fog over the Cooper River in Charleston. I can’t see a thing.
But after so many days of constant driving, I know how to get this bus off the starting peg handily, and I take the lead. My passengers are a mass of shrieking banshees over my head. “Hold on!” I yell, even though I know they can’t hear me. My heart pounds, my pulse races. All I can hear over the grinding of gears is a steady chant from the riders above me. “GO GO GO GO GO!”
MOLLY
It was bad enough I had to sit by myself in the puny shade of a gnarly old tree while they were all “swimming” at the hot springs, I had to suffer them all coming back in fits of stupid giggles and silly jokes and leaps and twirls, climbing on the bus, with one guy singing
“Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!” over and over like he was at the opera. And worse, Norman with his hair dripping wet and his feet bare, paying no attention to me at all.
When we get to the meadow, Sweet Caroline wants to be my best friend. She runs after me off the bus, past the Wavy Gravy band, past the sunbathers and the kids tossing footballs.
“Molly!”
“I don’t want to talk to you!”
“Molly!” she keeps calling and I keep walking.
But then the whole mood in the meadow changes. “Bus race!” somebody shouts, and the buzz it creates is contagious. Suddenly, kids are everywhere, not much older than I am, not much older than Barry, and they swarm around me like they know me, Come on! and they run past me laughing and shouting Come on! and a girl I don’t even know says, “Ride with me!” and grabs my hand, and we’re running, me stumbling to keep up with her.
The bus is called Road Hog. There’s a ladder on the back. “Up!” shouts the girl I don’t know. A tall boy standing at the ladder grabs me at the waist and hoists me high enough on the ladder to grab hold. I grip the rungs and start climbing. Kids are above me, reaching down hands. Kids are below me, waiting for their turn. The tall boy hoists up another kid and I keep climbing. It’s like being at recess in school when I was a kid, climbing up the side of the monkey bars so I can swing across, only at the top, there are kids and kids and kids, and one of them is Sweet Caroline, dangling over the roof edge, her yellow curls in her face and still damp from the hot springs.
“Come on, Molly!” she yells. The tall boy grabs my hand and pulls me all the way up and onto the roof of the bus, and in spite of myself, I laugh, partly because I didn’t fall and kill myself, and partly because everyone is gleeful and it is breathtaking to be so high, on top of the world in a meadow surrounded by mountains of pine.
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