Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

No, if he’d been smart enough to escape capture thus far, Mesker would certainly be smart enough to cut off the trail long before he came into sight of the clearing, then circle around and approach the clearing from clover-No, cover! From cover. They don’t even rhyme, those words. Cover and clover. Lots more songs about clover though. Roll me over in the clover do it again. And I’m looking over a four-leaf clover. Or, as they used to sing when he was a kid, I’m looking over my dead dog Rover, Who lies on the bathroom floor. One leg’s broken, the other one’s lame, Dah-dah-dah-dah, He got run over by a railroad train.

Pender’s mind wandered back to 1952 Cortland, he and his gang playing soldiers in the woods, wearing plastic G.I. helmets and gunning down Japs with their Daisy rifles. Bang! I got you! No, I got you first. Lie down, you’re dead. No, you lie down, you’re-

A crackling in the brush wrenched Pender back to the present. What’s the matter with you? he asked himself. Can’t you concentrate on the job at hand for five goddamn minutes without…drifting…

Looking around, he realized suddenly that he could no longer see the clearing. Everywhere he looked, every direction he turned, three hundred and sixty degrees of trees, trees, and more trees, stretching outward to infinity. Pender held his breath, listening, and heard the forest-or was it the universe? — breathing all around him, expanding with every inhale, shrinking with every exhale. When he looked down again, his feet were so tiny and far away he could hardly see them.

And that’s when it occurred to him that he’d been drugged, involuntarily dosed with LSD. Suddenly he was afraid, more afraid than he’d ever been, except for when he’d nearly blinded himself with a firecracker when he was a kid. This was worse, though, because not only was he afraid, he was afraid of being afraid.

But you didn’t eat the crouton, his mind protested. You never even had it near your mouth.

Which meant what? That Stahl had played him like a Stradivarius. Don’t eat the crouton? Ha! The crouton was a straw man, a red herring. A red straw herring man. Because the LSD was in the grape or the water-that was the how of it. As for the why, Pender realized with a sad, sinking sensation that it didn’t really matter. Stahl, you stupid fuck, he thought, more in sorrow than in anger. You stupid, stupid fuck.

The humans are gone. But they haven’t passed him on his way up from the parking lot. Therefore, Asmador reasons, they must have gone in the other direction. And when he hunkers down outside the two-story building and squints up the dirt road, he notices that the surface is scuffed with sneaker and sandal prints, all pointing uphill. And cutting vertically down the center of the road are two lines of tire tracks too thick for bicycles but too close together for an automobile-they must have been left by the golf cart he’d seen Pender driving earlier.

Confident that he’ll be able to hear or scent the humans long before they hear or scent him, Asmador makes no attempt to conceal his presence as he follows their trail up into the forest, his stiflingly hot night-camo jumpsuit unzipped to the waist. Occasionally he practices reaching behind his back, drawing an arrow from the quiver, nocking it, and drawing the bowstring back to his cheek in one slick, effortless motion, without slowing his pace.

He never lets a practice arrow fly, however, because based on the number of footprints he’d seen before the road narrowed and the tracks went single file, there appear to be a whole herd of humans shuffling along ahead of him. If they stay all bunched up, he realizes, he may have need of every arrow in his quiver. But oh, how happy the vultures would be-Asmador hasn’t entirely forgotten about the vultures.

In fact, he is finding it increasingly easy to concentrate his mind as the day progresses. He hasn’t seen a demon all afternoon, and although things are still kind of squirmy out on the edge of his vision, as if the tree limbs were hung with writhing snakes and worms, when he swivels his head to look directly at them, they turn back into ordinary trees just as meekly as you please.

The first indication that he’s caught up to the humans is a glimpse of blue-and-yellow fabric winking into view on the far side of a meander in the path. Asmador ducks behind a tree, peers around the trunk, and recognizes the striped circus tent canopy of Pender’s abandoned golf cart.

The key, conveniently enough, is in the ignition. As Asmador slips it into one of the jumpsuit’s many pockets, his ears pick up the eerie, inhuman sound of humans chanting. It seems to be coming from the direction in which the arrow-shaped wooden sign is pointing.

But instead of following the sound of the chanting, Asmador edges past the cart and continues up the main trail, hoping that, as the path climbs, it will lead him to a vantage point from which he can look down upon the humans and, in the remaining daylight, work out the best way to hunt them down and pick them off later, when it’s dark.

Feeling a tender hand stroking his forehead, Skip opened his eyes and found himself lying on his back with his head in Anna’s lap, posing for the Pieta. But when she smiled down at him, light streaming around her round, light brown face, he realized this wasn’t Anna, who was dead, but Juana, who was alive. Only there wasn’t really any difference, because they were all made of the same…stuff. And death wasn’t real, either-it couldn’t be, because time wasn’t real.

“Wow,” he breathed reverently. He wanted to tell Anna/Juana so many things. How he felt as if he’d been away for eons, flying through other universes; how he’d seen terrible and wonderful sights; how he’d learned all these important lessons about life and death, time and eternity, fear and wonder, and why they call a trip a trip. He also wanted to tell her how great it felt to be back, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was another, longer “Wow.”

He looked past Juana and saw that Oliver, Steve, and Candace had gathered around and were looking down at him all relieved and happy like the farmhands at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Then he remembered how he’d seen Oliver turn into a lion. How mind-blowingly perfect and interconnected everything was.

But that’s acid for you. Like existence, only more so. Skip spent the last hour of full daylight in a state of pure cosmic bliss. Colors were otherworldly bright in that sun-kissed clearing, and human contact profound. They took off their tops, even the women-even old Beryl-and worshiped the sun, whose light was everywhere broken into crystalline prisms and streaming rainbows; they turned druid and bowed to the whispering aspens; they found the keys to koans that had stumped generations of seekers. The answer to “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” was Schwingggg! The perfect answer to “What was your face before your mother was born?” was, for some obscure reason, Larry.

As the sun neared the treetops, Oliver asked everyone to join him on a hike up to a bluff where they could celebrate the sunset by performing something called a Bija ceremony. The others cheered, but Skip’s heart sank. To him, hike was just a four-letter word. He’d tried hiking before, and it was hard to say which he hated more, the pain of struggling to keep up or the anxiety and sense of abandonment he experienced when he inevitably fell behind.

Maybe it would be different this time, though, with these people. And besides, it seemed to Skip that there was a reason he needed to go with them, needed to keep Oliver in sight. The same reason why the sky seemed to darken when he thought about staying behind, alone. Something about-