The Trip

ou're still the sneaky, power-hungry sex maniac I knew in San Francisco!" Chick shouted into the closed, musty-smelling space of her little-used car. Patsy, a maroon '87 LTD, strained up a muddy switchback in the road. No, she thought, that would be too general. When she confronted M.C. in his home she wanted his wife there so she would learn how evil he was. "You're stalking me, that's what you're doing, M.C., and I'm going to see your sorry ass in jail!"

Better, except that nervousness weakened her fury. The old Dead tape she was playing to mellow her out didn't seem to be working. She longed to have Donny by her side, but she still didn't dare tell her for fear of unleashing Donny the street scrapper. No way she was going to add to the scars on that fine old body.

The branches of the newer trees along the dirt road grew so low they clawed her roof as she bumped along, and she grasped the cool plastic steering wheel hard to avoid the small craters. She'd never have found this place if the Pensioners Posse hadn't already come to warn

M.C. away and passed along good directions. Their crusade had worked for all of one month.

Why M.C. had retained his obsession with her since their flowerpower days was as much of a puzzle as how both of them could have landed in the same tiny Northwest town twenty years later. It was obviously meant to be, but she couldn't see a way good might come of it, and she knew there was always good somewhere.

Whatever the circumstances, she'd come to the end of her tolerance. He wasn't the only cause of her depression, but swallowing her anger about his harassment made it worse. She'd forced herself to talk more with Donny, not about M.C., but about how she was feeling. Donny, such a wise little street punk, told her that when she'd been younger she'd found it healthier in the long run to get knocked around a little to get the mad out of her system. Chick wasn't planning any fistfights, but a good old confrontation might do wonders to reset her mellow button.

About two miles up she saw a huge barn-like structure and a smattering of abandoned-looking outbuildings. There were no cows, no horses or llamas, not even a goat, only three barking, rough-looking dogs in a chain-link pen under some cottonwoods by the barn. A flowering quince ran undisciplined along one side of the barn, and small wild irises dotted the untrammeled earth. The Scotch broom was blooming, giving the whole place a yellow tinge, like she was wearing yellow fog glasses.

She parked hood out and arranged her keys as weapons between her fingers, ready for anything. The dank air stung her nose with the smell of insecticide. What crop was being sprayed?

"I'm like a mountain," she chanted as she strode toward the barn, parka streaming rain. "I can do this."

It was a beautiful place, filled with vetch and mallows, monkey flowers and-was that a forktooth ookow? She stopped. Yes, and she'd been looking for just that shade of lavender for light summer overalls. R had taught her so much about flowers on their walks through the park in town. The park was teeming with wildflowers. Last year they'd walked about every week.

Could she do this?

In the years before her brother had been prescribed effective meds, she'd learned to fear mental illness. Martin's behavior had been unpredictable, but worse, she'd had no defense against his verbal attacks on her. When they were kids he'd seemed so reasonable when he had told her that his condition was her fault, that their parents' failures could be blamed on her. He'd elaborated on the nursery rhyme about stepping on a crack and breaking a mother's back, convincing her that a sick pet, a grandparent's death, a broken toy she'd watched him destroy-all were her fault.

Until she was ten or eleven she'd believed him and at the same time believed that she could make up for all that by taking care of him. Every day she'd made his bed in a room that smelled of rotting apple cores. Her mother had thought her devotion was cute. At eight she'd learned not only to heat a can of soup for lunch, while their mother and father were at work, but to bake Martin cookies and other treats. He'd thanked her with criticism or, worse, silence.

M.C.

had always been wacko, but everyone had been wacko in the sixties. She might still be considered eccentric in her long skirts and tie dyes, her anarchistic worldview and just-get-by business style, but when

M.C.

smirked in her store window, she could see he'd been, or become, more unbalanced than anyone else from those dangerous days. She stopped, astonished. Inside the barn was another whole structure, two stories high, lining the sides of the barn.

Nothing was painted or even plumb, but it looked sturdy, with windows hinting at an abundance of rooms. Brightly colored window frames and doors painted with the primitive flowers and stick figures of kids made it look like a Laugh-In TV stage set from the 1970s. The roof was punctuated with a half dozen skylights and covered a courtyard that held bicycles, a clothesline, huge stereo speakers, refrigerators, a freezer, stoves, grills, two woodstoves with long stove pipes, and two unpainted picnic tables with benches.

At the far end of one of the benches sat a lone middle-aged woman in a green-and-purple patterned Guatemalan jacket, faded jeans, and kelly green polyurethane clogs. She was brushing her long graying hair. As Chick got closer she could hear that the woman was singing a Beach Boys song in a thin clear voice-"Help Me Rhonda." It was eerie to hear the old music in this backwoods medieval hall. There was no sign of M.C.

The lyrics had become, "Help me, Donny," in her head, and she chanted silently.

"Hello?" she called, her free hand clutching at the crystal on her necklace. This whole place was full of bad vibes, and she didn't know if they all were M.C.'s.

"M.C. took the kids to church," called the singer, turning.

"Church? M.C.?"

The woman's vague smile disclosed gaps in her teeth. "You know how straight-acting the man's got."

Chick edged closer. Would her revelations shatter this fragile creature? She pulled her rain hood back and got her second shock. "Goddess! You're Pennylane, aren't you?"

The woman squinted a long moment. "Isn't that Earthbird from next door? It isn't. It's-Chick? Is that Chicago Chick? Far fucking out!"

Chick felt an impulse to envelop in a hug this living remnant of her past, but held back. No wonder M.C. had become so crazed about Chick. Pennylane was still his old lady. But it had been nothing. Chick doubted that Pennylane even remembered the night she had spent with Chick, tripping and making love until M.C. walked in on them.

Except for that one stoned session, Pennylane hadn't been a woman she'd been particularly drawn to back in San Francisco, but she'd been a constant in the park and at the concerts. She could feel the damp grass of the park under her feet and the strange mix of chill and heat that was the San Francisco air. Pennylane had been younger than Chick, not too far into her teens, and now looked washed out, but not old at all. Chick remembered Pennylane's intense, laughing craziness, a live-free-or-die defiance she'd flaunted. In retrospect, Chick realized that Pennylane had acted as if she had a compulsive need to challenge. She took on cops, business owners, rules, facts, street signs. She remembered when the city had initiated a campaign to stop panhandling in the Fisherman's Wharf area. It had been Pennylane who'd organized the brilliant zap action for the freakiest of them to distribute change to tourists. That had frightened the visitors more than the begging, and made the patrolling cops look silly. And here she was, in Waterfall Falls, all grown up.

"What a trip," Pennylane finally said.

"This is mind-blowing, seeing you transported here from the old scene. You ended up with M.C.?"

"I was a runaway. He was Robin Hood."

"I would have loved to see you around town."

Pennylane shuddered. "Too big. Too many people. Buy this. Do that. The freeway goes so fast. Here I have no newspapers, no TV. We don't even get good radio reception. This is world peace, right here." Lazily, she waved the old "V" peace sign. "Except it's probably time to start Sunday dinner. It takes a while for fourteen."

"That's heavy. You didn't have twelve kids?"

Pennylane's voice had a weary huskiness to it. Her fear of town sounded like burnout. Had she lost too many of her challenges? Chick wanted to hold and soothe this sputtering flame of a woman, but if Pennylane remembered their encounter she wasn't acknowledging it. "Three. My two oldest I sent away, and Luke's with M.C." She looked at Chick, eyes briefly clear. "Marly's the baby machine."

"Marly?" Chick asked.

"You'd split the scene by then. M.C. dropped me, got together with Marly for about six months, then came back. After we got married and moved onto the land, here comes Marly, carrying his first son. We couldn't turn her out."

The words flew out of her mouth before she could stop them. "So he's a bigamist, too."

"No," Pennylane said quickly. "He didn't marry her, only me. By the time Marly showed up I was tired, Chick. All that rebellion takes its toll. I was glad to share him. When he decided the three of us should get it on together I found out-you're still a dyke, aren't you?" At Chick's nod she laughed and continued. "I found that M.C. was not at all necessary." She narrowed her eyes. "But what do you mean too?"

Pennylane didn't look as if she needed to know M.C. was sniffing after yet another woman from the old days.

Of course there was a smell of insecticide, she thought; they spray the dope. It came from outside. Inside, weeds had found their way up through the floorboards. "Only that he's still dealing, honey."

"Oh, sure," Pennylane said with the most tired-sounding laugh she'd ever heard. "He'll show you over the farm. He's got weed and mushrooms all over the woods. The black choppers never pick up on them. We've got grow lights and drying rooms under here with huge fans. M.C. figured out how to rip off electricity from the electric company, you know. Not that the pigs would check out a vigilante's cellar. He never sells locally."

Pennylane chatted away, definitely on some kind of upper. Chick sat at the other end of the picnic bench. The skylights were so high above them that they faded into gloom this far down. The place could be a cavern. This was too strange. She'd seen Sheriff Sweet keeping an eye on the Deadheads who drifted through town on their way to concerts and the hippies headed for barter days and bluegrass fairs. She'd seen front yards hung with tie-dyed clothing for sale. This living space looked as if M.C.'s family had packed up the sixties and moved it whole to Waterfall Falls, then co-opted a little eighties law and order and studded it with some nineties churchgoing for cover. Poor Pennylane.

"That's why M.C.'s so respectable," Pennylane was saying, "to throw off suspicion. Especially since Bobby McGee, Marly's oldest, started making the meth and freed up M.C. to go make nice in town so there'd be no suspicion about us. Him living up in the woods with two chicks and a passel of kids was sure to bring attention our way. He told them Marly was his sister and he was rescuing her from her husband's beatings. I actually shipped my girls out so they could learn there were other ways to live. But Bobby McGee dropped out of school and learned chemistry. He even makes acid for the older crowd. He gets mucho cash for it. Here, I'll give you a couple of hits."

Pennylane rose stiffly, slowly. There were red marks on her throat.

Chick couldn't hide her concern. "What happened to you?" she asked, putting the tips of her fingers to her own throat.

Pennylane said, "M.C. and me had it out again last night. He won't stop picking on baby Luke. He's four now. M.C. treats him like he's some kind of child devil. Somewhere he knows what I never told him about that baby's daddy." Pennylane's eyes drifted off. "You probably heard his daddy play at the old-time music festival over in Birdseye. He's there most years. That man picks a banjo like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Segovia." She touched her neck, smiled her gap-toothed smile at Chick, and added in a boastful tone, "M.C. did this to me, but I blacked his eye."

Chick watched her pluck a huge multivitamin bottle from the table. "Hold out your hand."

"Thanks, but I swore off," Chick said, fascinated and horrified.

The bottle was full. Did the children help themselves too? M.C. was a total monster. He hit Pennylane and cheated on her and mistreated her kid; he left hallucinogens out where his own children could get them. If Pennylane had known enough to get her older children out, why didn't she leave? Immediately, she thought the poor woman probably had nowhere to go. She was strung out on drugs and had probably never held a straight job in her life.

"I'm hip, but stay for dinner. They ought to be back soon." Again Pennylane's gaze wandered off over some horizon Chick couldn't see. "I used to love to cook tripping." She looked as if she were contemplating slipping one of the tabs she'd offered under her tongue. "We grow our own food. I learned how to can. It's a groove, this country life. And as close to peace as anything I'll know on earth." She put down the jar of acid. "I gave up everything but weed."

Chick felt guilty at her relief that she couldn't confront M.C. here, in his make-believe world, with his agoraphobic wife, where he was cool, not criminal; Robin Hood, not a batterer; a father who couldn't turn away his old love, and suspected he'd been wronged by the birth of his wife's youngest son. This was The Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit universe come bizarrely alive.

She'd slipped off her sandals, and now pulled them on with her toes under the table. She had to get out of there fast and tried to think of an excuse.

"I don't know, Chicago Chick. Sometimes I think I've come to the end of a long strange trip and it's time to move on. Sometimes I think I'll stay here till they carry me out. The trouble is, I don't know where I'd go or what I'd do once I got there."

"Your birth family, honey? Friends back in the Bay Area?"

Pennylane, obviously talking to herself, didn't answer. Chick wondered if she'd been looking in the wrong place for the good in this whole M.C. deal. She ran a finger across the rough gray wood of the table. Who said the good had to come to her because M.C. made her suffer? Pennylane was getting the worst of it. Over the years Chick had watched dozens of married women enter a kind of Underground Railroad unwittingly run by lesbians they hardly knew but fled to on their way to new lives, straight or gay. She'd come to Mister Cuckoo's land to help herself, but maybe she was really there to someday, somehow, help Pennylane. What an amazing trip, but not one she wanted to be on.

"Honey, I'm sorry, but I have to split," she said.

"So soon?" Pennylane's face lost its mellow, pleasant expression and turned worried. Chick felt pulled by guilt and by the need to escape. Did Pennylane think she'd brought a sack full of answers, and now was leaving with them?

"Will you come back?"

Instead of telling her that she wouldn't, couldn't be in M.C.'s space again, she found a piece of paper on the picnic table and wrote down the number at the store. "You call," she told her and held out her arms. Pennylane clung rather than hugged her. Her own embrace was tentative, like she didn't want to catch what this woman had. At the last, though, she gave Pennylane a good squeeze. "Know I'm there."

Pennylane pulled away, her tone alarmed. Had she heard M.C.'s car, or was she one of those people who couldn't handle an offer of help? It was probably neither. She'd more likely sensed Chick's ambivalence. "I've got to start dinner. Thanks for stopping by. Peace."

"Peace," Chick responded. The word tasted of her past. It evoked the sourness of green dope, the scent of sandalwood incense. There was a pressure in her head. Could she get a contact high from memories?

She hurried to the car, now anxious to escape before M.C. and his brood returned. Patsy flew from rut to rut, the string of multicolored worry beads on her mirror wildly dancing. She was on the blacktop and streaking toward town before she realized Pennylane hadn't asked her a thing about herself or what she was doing on their land. Chick might have been dropping in at her pad in the Bay Area to buy a chunk of hash, catching up since their last visit. Instead of helping her resolve anything, M.C.'s strange time warp threatened to mess up her mind even further.

It would do no good to confront M.C. or to expose him to his family. He was both their good king and their bad king and most significantly theirs, not vulnerable to an outsider's judgment. For them it would be like trying to sue a physician who was still treating you.

M.C. had the power, right down to meeting their chemical needs.

She'd find another way to jumpstart a cure, one that didn't involve interacting with people crazier than herself.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN