The Do-Re-Mi Page 4

  “Some. I met him when he partied coupla times out at Quig’s, where I stay. Ava brought him out there. You know Ava?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She was cool until Saint Bob got to her.”

  “Saint Bob?”

  Simon turned such a scowl on me, I pictured Saint Bob as some Rasputin, the mystic who suckered the Romanovs, or as Reverend Casey from Grapes of Wrath who evangelized girls into a frenzy then boffed them.

  “Jimmy, though,” Simon said. “Quig didn’t trust him. He asked too many questions, like what’s the best soil to plant weed, what kind of light, how deep in the forest is best. Acted like a junior narc. Or a poacher.”

  “Or he was growing?”

  “Hear this, man — Evergreen’s like Oz, or D.C. Nobody knows who anybody really is. Scratch a biker, or a redneck, or a hippie, maybe you’ll find he’s FBI. Or CIA. Some ugly chick could be Hunter Thompson in drag. Your brother might be KGB. I don’t know. You don’t know. Right?”

  I said, “Take a guess, then.”

  “Say Jimmy was growing, what’s it mean?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Means if your brother didn’t blow the kid away, if you find the guy that did, he’ll be riding a chopper.”

  STEPH had pointed a finger at the Cossacks, Simon seconded her opinion, and who more likely than bikers whose occupation was poaching to kill a guy at night in the forest.

  Agent Knudsen had claimed footprints implicated Alvaro. But that morning my brother had been wearing the military boots he’d gotten used to in Vietnam. And bikers, who also favored boots, could buy the same kind for three dollars at an army surplus store.

  I needed to move on Little Vic and his Cossacks right away. While dwelling on that prospect, I forgot to breathe.

  Simon delivered me to my Chevy. Even while I was jumping out, he started his U-turn. By the time I hit the ground, his microbus was smoking down the road like a getaway car.

  Somebody, probably the sheriffs, had jimmied the driver's side wind-wing of my Chevy. My stuff was strewn around but none of it was gone. I opened the case to my Hummingbird and unwrapped the cotton baby blanket I used to protect the guitar from nicks and bruises. I sat on a stump, cradled the guitar on my knee, fingered chords and wished my right hand back to life. I even mumbled a short prayer and asked for healing. Nothing changed. I managed to strum by wedging a flat pick between two of my numb fingers. After a few beats it slipped out and fell to the ground.

  While I packed the guitar away, I commanded myself not to mope until Alvaro was safe.

  I wanted to gather his belongings and to snoop around the forest and look for the boot tracks leading to the river and for clues the sheriff’s team had overlooked or ignored. But the two black and whites parked near my wagon convinced me to make myself scarce and return tomorrow morning. The deputies — who might be deep in the forest hunting for Alvaro or on their way back to the cars for a shift change or a dinner break — might appear any second. I preferred to avoid lawmen.

  My Chevy was a three-speed stick on the column. Thanks to my bum hand, I couldn’t grab and shift but had to shove the lever up and down using my wrist. I used second gear most of the 4.5 miles along Highball Trial, to the 101 where the northbound lane was still a parade of folks on their way to the jamboree.

  I wasn’t anxious to go into the Crossroads but somebody in there might know facts about Alvaro, the Cossacks, or even Jimmy Marris.

  Only two Harleys and a few pickups were parked in the gravel lot. I pulled in beside the Harleys, pinched my eyes closed, sucked a few breaths and climbed out. After I locked up as best I could with a broken wind-wing latch, I marched inside. The less I paused to worry or imagine, the better.

  Four

  I STOOD just inside the swinging doors for a minute, scouting the layout and waiting for my eyes to adjust. The only lights were neon, displays for Oly and Bud and a glowing sign on which a bear tiptoed into a pond beneath a waterfall. “Hamms, from the land of sky-blue waters.” The jukebox played Merle Haggard’s song about Muskogee, Oklahoma where folks didn’t smoke marijuana or trip on LSD, unlike the folks who had descended upon Evergreen.

  A clean-cut fellow sat with two bikers beside the rear window. One of the bikers was Hound Dog. He was leaning back and had his feet on the table until he saw me. When he sat up straight, his boots socked the floor. The clean-cut guy went to join several older men playing cards in the farthest corner.

  A big redhead stood behind the bar rinsing mugs. She was my height, including her mop of Orphan Annie red hair, and she had such a pair of biceps and robust spirit, I said, “Let me guess. Paul Bunyan was your grandad.” She giggled. Her smile was the guileless, dangerous kind that could make a guy trust her before he ought to.

  I hopped onto a stool. “You don’t wear a name tag.”

  Her lip twitched and she snuck a glance over my shoulder in the Cossacks’ direction. She looked far too sweet to be any outlaw biker’s girl. Maybe they had told her to watch out for Alvaro’s brother.

  “Cherry,” she said.

  “Pretty name.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “Bar scotch. On the rocks.”

  She didn’t move. I knew why. I heard the boot-steps approaching and wheeled.

  I expected Hound Dog but in the lead was a guy as bony as Death. He fingered the bullets in a bandolier that angled across his chest. He had silvery hair in a long ponytail and sunken eyes ringed in dark shadows. His voice didn’t fit. It was toney and mellow. “Yo, Citizen. Me and Dog’d like a word with you. Out front.”

  Hound Dog made a half-smile that showed the gap where two front teeth had gone missing. He came around his bony partner and tried to ease between me and the stool on my right and slip a hand around behind me. I might’ve grabbed it, but on account of my bum hand, I only could block it down and turn to meet his eyes like Alvaro and I had learned during our years studying Tae Kwon Do. In the eyes, you can usually see the next move coming.

  But now the bony guy was shaking his head and poking my ribs with a revolver barrel. “Be nice, Hickey.”

  I stood. He backed away and waved his free hand like a maitre d’. I passed him and shuffled outside. As he stepped out, he slipped his revolver into the holster on his belt. “Pretty Boy,” he said, “didn’t all that college teach you how to listen? Vic sure enough told you to run for your life.”

  From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Hound Dog reach into the bed of the pickup next to us. My fists pounded the sides of my legs.

  “Nervous?” the bony guy asked.

  I noticed Hound Dog circling behind me and shifted around just as he swung a tire iron. He must’ve aimed for the small of my back. He caught me in the side of my belly just below the ribs. I doubled over. My knees buckled.

  “Aw, Hickey,” the bony guy said. “Stand up, show some guts. And then get your weak self down the road before Vic comes. Who knows, he might tell me, ‘Shoot that citizen.’”

  After I heaved, mostly bile, I labored to my feet and stumbled a few steps to lean on the pickup. Hound Dog growled, “Hands off the Dodge, Pretty Boy. Your ride’s the pea-green station wagon. Ain’t they a pair,” he said to the bony guy. “A swish in a station wagon.”

  The bony guy laid his hand on the butt of his revolver. With his other hand, he pointed south.

  I staggered to the Chevy, groped for the keys, unlocked and fell into the driver’s seat. After a struggle to close the door and make the key find the ignition, I backed around and used the first break in traffic to pull into the northbound lane.

  Relief and outrage tugged me back and forth. As I neared every roadside gift shop and gas station, I wanted to pull over, run to the phone and call Pop. But pride made me hold the wheel straight. A ten-year-old boy can pardon himself for needing his father. In an older boy, not to mention a man, even the thought is shameful.

  While the sky faded to steel gray, I drove back to Evergreen and turned onto Manhattan Avenue. By then I ha
d decided where to go. Taverns ought to be the most likely places to find people who don’t mind talking, I reasoned. But this time I would try to pick one with what I hoped might be a more civil clientele, such as Louella’s Lounge in downtown Evergreen. I parked a half block away on a dark street rather than announce my whereabouts to sheriffs or Cossacks.

  Louella’s, with Duke Ellington turned down low and wall-murals of plump, mostly-bare renaissance ladies, was the perfect atmosphere for Scotch. And I truly needed a pain killer.

  Even before I finished dragging myself onto a bar stool, I saw the bartender tossing a signal at somebody. Then a gentleman came out of a booth and walked over. He looked like several of my college literature profs. Middle aged, amiable, stoop shouldered. As he neared me, he offered his hand and inquired, “Clifford Hickey?”

  I nodded and gave him my left, which seemed to confuse him. He recovered and sat on the next stool. “This is awkward,” he said. “You see, first a Bureau of Narcotics agent and then a sheriff requested that I call them if you should come here.”

  “Barker or Willis?”

  He smiled. “Now, you look like a decent fellow. Still, I’m going to make those calls. I’d suggest that you buy a six pack and drink it elsewhere. I’ll charge the Safeway price on the beer.”

  I slid off the stool and walked out. By the time I reached the pay phone at the corner by the meat market, I had rationalized that calling Pop wasn’t out of fear of Little Vic or Hound Dog, but only for Alvaro’s sake.

  I let the phone ring at least twenty times, in case Pop and Mama were on the deck or on the beach close enough to hear. At last, I hung up and walked to the street lamp, took out my wallet and rummaged through the junk until I found my list of phone numbers.

  At our neighbor Harry Poverman’s number, his maid answered. “Gloria,” I said, “Clifford here. Could you look around and see if you can spot Pop or Mama?”

  She knew Mama hadn’t gone any farther than the cedar grove between our house and Harry’s and the beach a few hundred yards each way in the month since she left the sanitarium.

  I gave Gloria the pay phone number, squatted against the wall and waited, trying to ignore my throbbing side and hand and wishing I had asked the man at Louella’s to sell a me pint of hard liquor.

  As the gray sky blackened, I watched locals and a few hippies strolling past the park toward the river bridge. I inhaled the redwood-scented air cut with a bite of sea breeze and felt a little peace and a moment of trust that Alvaro was safe, Mama was recovering, and the truth about the murdered boy would soon come out. I got so entranced by the heavenly atmosphere, I jumped when the phone rang.

  Gloria told me not only had she searched through the grove and on the beach without finding Mama, but she had looked behind our cabin and noticed that Pop’s Cadillac was gone.

  Since Pop, during Mama’s recovery, let Gloria borrow the Cadillac in exchange for her running errands and so informed Gloria when it wouldn't be available, I couldn’t imagine where my folks would drive except back to the sanitarium. And though I realized other explanations might come, the chance that Mama had sunk back into catatonia made me decide the last thing Pop needed was another problem.

  So I dug through my wallet for Agent Knudsen’s business card. Maybe I could convince him to reason with the sheriff. An answering service picked up. I would have told her to get Knudsen word that the Cossacks killed Jimmy Marris, according to a waitress, a smart hippie, and me, since I could guess no other reason the bikers would try to run me out of Evergreen. But I had hardly begun my plea when the woman said, “Sorry, I can only take your name and number.”

  “What if I don’t have a number?” I snapped. “He said you could get a message to him even if he’s flying.”

  “Only your name and number. Agent Knudsen generally takes calls between nine and ten a.m.”

  “Oh, swell. Look, tell him Clifford Hickey’s waiting for him at the McNees campground, east of Evergreen. And tell him I know who killed Jimmy Marris.”

  SIMON had directed me to a campground he recommended, through town and east on River Road along the north fork of Whiskey River past the jamboree grounds.

  McNees Park was a recreation area for loggers and open to campers for the duration of the jamboree, thanks to an arrangement Big Dan Mills had made with Paul McNees. Simon had added, “When a Wobbly and a lumber baron cooperate, inquiring minds want to know why?”

  Big Dan Mills was a folk singer who for twenty years had lived out of his car, coast to coast along the college and coffee house circuit, until The Rattlers’ folk rock version of his song “Nobody’s Slave” hung on the Top 40 chart all through 1967. Then Big Dan had proved true to his rep as an old-time, card-carrying Wobbly socialist, disciple of Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie. He had invested his royalties on a hundred acres of cherry and apple orchards fronting Whiskey River. There he established the first of the Evergreen communes. He and his people bottled and sold apple and cherry cider and founded the Cider Mills Jamboree.

  In 1969, the first jamboree lured a thousand folks to Evergreen. Among them were an heiress and dropouts from prosperous careers who returned, bought land, and began Quig’s and the three smaller communes.

  McNees Park looked as crowded as Brooklyn, with a tent, car, or van between every cedar and redwood, and bonfires enough so I imagined herds of deer charging toward Oregon, fleeing as from an inferno. I made camp in a nook beneath a craggy madrone, tramped through darkening woods inhaling the fragrance of fermenting cherries while I collected branches and twigs. I sat beside what Alvaro called un fuego indio, a modest fire, wondering if my brother had found a hideaway and if the man-hunters had given up at dark.

  From sites all around, twanging banjos, slide guitars, trilling mandolins, and warbling harmonicas joined in weird fusions. Long-haired little boys and girls wearing beads and flowers ran around squealing and dangled from tree-branches. Passersby noticed me sitting alone and invited me to join their crowd. I declined and attempted to review what Steph and Simon had told me and what I had observed. According to Pop, detectives needed time to sit still or stroll and listen for inspiration.

  I attempted to convince myself that Alvaro hadn’t shot any deputies and maybe the search was called off. And I kept wishing life back into my right hand. Still it hung from my wrist like an empty glove. I thought of going to a doctor but decided that could wait until Alvaro was safe.

  As the last of my sticks burnt, I rolled out my mat and sleeping bag, crawled in, and lay reviewing my decision not to call Pop. If I did phone and tell him about Alvaro, I imagined half his heart would command him to speed to Evergreen while the other half would order him not to leave Mama. As I fell asleep, I hoped to God I could wade this morass on my own.

  When gunshots woke me, at first I believed they were real. Then, remembering the previous night, I interpreted these shots as the soundtrack of a dream that carried me back to yesterday before the world turned against us. But the whoops and the revs of two big V-8s changed my mind. I rolled behind my Chevy, sat up, untangled my arms, and watched two six-wheel pickups skid in tandem along the road that jagged through the campground. More cracks and booms sounded. A dozen from pistols, two or three from a shotgun.

  Before the six-wheelers reached my campsite, they cut back toward the entrance. The louts whooped, whistled, skidded out to the highway, and rumbled into the distance.

  Campers shouted after them. Kids screamed. My neighbor sat on a stump between our camps, lit his pipe and offered me a hit. Because I declined, he presumed the intruders had scared me. “Just drunken loggers,” he said. “When I’m king, dope’s legal and booze is a capital offense.”

  I didn’t tell him that whoever they were — between gunshots, one of them had yelled, “Come out and play, Clifford Hickey.”

  DAYLIGHT woke me. While woodpeckers pecked, squirrels chirped, kids chased up the road and campfires crackled, I tossed my things into the Chevy and idled out of the campground. A mile or so west,
just beyond the Whiskey River bridge, I pulled into the jamboree grounds. The site was meadow that lay between the west shore and the weedy field where last summer a community garden thrived. I remembered the garden had been a project of the commune folks called Quig's that bordered the garden-field on the west.

  Concessionaires were already setting up their booths. A crew was at work on the main stage. I stood in what passed for a line and watched for any Jesus freak who might be Ava.

  The gate opened at 8:00 a.m. I paid fifteen dollars for the three-day pass and entered. A sign over the gate read “Private Property. Anyone carrying a gun, knife, or chain, or other offensive object will be ejected. Their weapon will be confiscated and used in the creation of plowshares.”

  Folks were already spreading blankets, staking claim to plots of ground near the stage. After circling and crisscrossing the meadow in search of a pretty girl passing out Christian tracts, I sat beside the river and noted the changes a year had wrought. To the east, Big Dan’s commune had transformed from a rustic site to a rural ghetto. Two dozen A-frame shacks, teepees and yurts surrounded Big Dan’s log house and the geodesic dome meeting hall. West toward Evergreen, brown weeds and nettles covered the field where last year tall corn, pole beans, tomatoes and watermelons thrived, and where graceful hippie girls stood by the roadside, waving at cars and lavishing whoever stopped with sacks of produce and flowers.

  I remembered a willowy girl called Bluefeather who invited us to meet her and some girlfriends later at a swimming hole. We did, and seven or eight of them showed and frolicked naked in the pool and all around, dancing and leaping from one smooth rock to the next, while Alvaro and I mostly stayed submerged, to hide our priapism. A year later, I remembered the scene with fond and vivid precision. On the drive to Evergreen, I had hoped for another encounter with long-legged, creamy Bluefeather.

  The river was higher than last summer, its ice-blue water slow through the shallows where by nine, naked boys and girls and their topless parents paddled and splashed. I noticed among them the three cupids and the father who had clustered around the roadside shrine a half-mile south of the Crossroads. I felt sure they were the husband or lover and kids of Steph's friend Sara who had crashed in a ditch after swerving to miss Hound Dog. The dad cradled the smallest cupid in the crook of his arm. The older ones held hands. Their free hands pounded the river as if they meant to break it.