Ed Gorman: Bad Moon Rising

A woman named Barbara Thomas was waiting for us on the porch. She was another one who’d skimped on costuming herself. A very flattering pair of black bell-bottoms and a white flowing blouse. She’d been in our high school class and had married a lawyer. She was one of those girls who’d ignited many a speculative sexual conversation among boys. She’d always seemed aware of just how stupid we all were.

“Hi, Wendy.”

“Hi, Barb. How’re your twins?”

“Exhausting but beautiful, thanks. There’s a phone in the den, Sam.”

They stayed on the porch while I worked my way through the costumed revelers. The den was as big as Wendy’s living room and outfitted with enough electronic gear to make me suspect that the owner of the house might be in touch with Mars. He was some kind of short-wave enthusiast. Four different kinds of radios and three different gray steel boxes that made tiny chirping sounds contrasted with the traditional leather furnishings.

I picked up the phone. “Sam McCain.”

“Sam. It’s Richard Donovan.”

“You really needed to call me here, Richard?”

“Look, we’ve got a real problem out here.”

Donovan was the leader of the commune. He brought rules and regs to the otherwise disorganized life out there. When one of his people got in trouble in town-usually being harassed for no reason by one of police chief Cliffie Sykes’s hotshots-Donovan was the one who called me.

“And it can’t wait until morning?”

“No.” Then: “Look, I’m not stoned or anything and I’m telling you, you need to get out here right away.”

The tension in his voice told me far more than his words. “You’re not telling me anything, Richard.”

“Not on the phone. We’ve had run-ins with the feds before. They may be tapping our phone.”

Paranoia was as rampant as VD among the hippies these days. The troubling thing was that some of it was justified.

“I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

“Thanks, Sam. Sorry I had to bother you.”

If the trouble was as serious as it sounded, and if I got involved in it, I would certainly hear from my boss. Though my law practice was finally starting to make reasonable money, my job as private investigator for the judge was still half my income. And Judge Whitney, along with many other people in town (including a couple who kept writing letters about me in the local newspaper), didn’t like the idea that I was representing the people at the commune. They wanted the commune and its hirsute folks to move to a different county. Or maybe, if God was smiling that day, out of the state. Judge Whitney didn’t believe any of the ridiculous rumors about them-they were satanic and were summoning up the old bastard himself to turn the town into flame and horror being my favorite-but they did violate her notion of propriety, which had come to her down generations of rich snobs who felt that all “little people” were suspicious, period.

I had the feeling that whatever Richard had waiting for me wasn’t going to change the minds of either the judge or the two people who kept writing letters about me.

On the porch, Wendy and Barb were smiling. I remembered Wendy telling me that Barb was one friend who hadn’t deserted her after her husband died in Vietnam, when she took up the bottle and inhabited a lot of beds that did her no good at all. Both women had warm girly laughs and the sound was sweet on the air, overwhelming the sitar music from inside. Oh, yes, somebody was playing sitar music now. I realize that not liking sitar music marks one as a boor and a likely warmonger and maybe even satanic, but I can’t help it. Sitar music should only be played for deaf people.

“Oh, oh,” Wendy said.

Barb smiled at me. “Wendy said you’d look a certain way if you were going to go see a client and dump her at home.”

“‘Dump,’” I said, “is a pretty harsh word.”

“How about push me out of the car at a high rate of speed?”

They reverted to their girly laughter, leaning together in that immortal conspiratorial way women have of letting men know that they are hopelessly stupid. I could imagine them at twelve, merrily deflating the ego of every boy who passed by.

“I promise not to go over ninety,” I said, lamely continuing the joke.

“Well, I’ll have to let you two finish this,” Barb said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “My husband’s in watching TV, and I’d better get in there before he loses all his clients. He made the mistake of telling Walton from the brokerage that if he was ten years younger, he’d probably be a hippie himself. Walton didn’t think that was funny. Then they started arguing about the cops beating up all those kids. You know how Walton is. He thought Ike was a Communist. And he was serious.”

Wendy slumped against me as soon as Barbara got inside. “Whew. It just caught up with me. One minute I was sober and the next minute I was-”

“-drunk?”

“Again. That’s the weird thing. I kind of sobered up but now-”

“Let’s get going. I know this curve where I’m going to push you out. It’ll be fun.”

“Yeah, well, the first thing you’ll have to do is help me to the car. I’m really dizzy. All that drinking I used to do. I must be out of practice.”

She wasn’t kidding. I had to half carry her to the car.

A month earlier a gang of bikers had invaded the compound and smashed up the farmhouses and made several of the male hippies strip. For a few people in Black River Falls-anywhere you live there are a few people-it was a tough call. Who was more despicable? Drunken bikers or hippies?

The commune had a history. Shortly after the war two brothers decided to get a GI loan for a large farm they would work together. They built two modest clapboard houses about forty yards apart and proceeded to marry and raise their respective families. They were decorated warriors and popular young men who’d been raised on a farm in a smaller town twenty miles west of Black River Falls. Everything went according to Norman Rockwell for the next nine years, but then, true to many of the stories in the Bible, one brother began to covet the other brother’s wife. Well, in fact, he did quite a bit more than covet, and when the cuckold caught his brother and wife making love in the shallow wooded area behind the outbuildings, he became so distraught he ran back to his home, killed their only child (a girl of seven) and then killed himself.

The survivors left the farm, the bank foreclosed, and despite the efforts of a couple of other farmers to buy it and lease it out to starter farmers who couldn’t afford the purchase price, the land refused to cooperate. There was a scientific explanation for this, as a state agronomist repeated to anybody who listened, but locals preferred the notion that the land was “cursed” because of what had happened on it.

The hippies came two years ago. Twenty or so of them stayed in the main house, the white one; another fifteen or so stayed in the smaller, yellow house. Some of them worked in town; some of them raised a good share of the food they ate; and a handful, from my observation, were so stoned most of the time that they couldn’t do much more than tell you what they’d seen in their last acid vision.

Peace and love, brother. Age of Aquarius. Brotherhood of Man. Every once in a while, stoned on nothing stronger than beer, I’d get caught up in one of the many rock songs that espoused those precepts. But then I’d remember Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, both of whom had died earlier this year, and I’d remind myself of how naive it all was. There was no peace and love in the slaughter of Vietnam or in the streets of bloody Detroit or Los Angeles.

In some respects I felt sorry for the hippies. I understood in a theoretical way what they were rebelling against. Our country was war-happy and our culture was pure Madison Avenue. What I didn’t understand were the ways they’d gone about expressing their distrust of society. I’d look at their babies and wonder what kind of lives the little ones would have. The same for the sanctimony of their language. Without seeming to realize it they were just as doctrinaire as the straight people they put down.