Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

He paused, glancing around at the others like a quarterback in a huddle. They were all rapt-stoned and rapt. “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to play a game we all played when we were children. It’s called hide-and-seek, and we’re going to play it like our lives depended on it. We’re going to split up, and we’re going to hide in the woods, separately if possible. Don’t bunch up, and most of all, stay off the trail- off the trail, because that’s where the danger is. Everybody got that?”

There were a few murmured assents; the rest of the cosmic rangers were too stunned or too high to respond.

“Good, good. So let’s go now, let’s split up. Find the best hidey-hole you can, and stay in it, stay in it until you hear someone calling-” And here he lowered his voice to a whisper, “until you hear someone calling ‘Ollee ollee in free.’ Even if it takes all night. No matter what you hear, no matter what you see, you stay in hiding until somebody calls ‘Ollee ollee in free.’ We can do this, people-I know we can do this. Now off you go.”

Nobody moved.

“Please-go! Now!” Oliver rose from his squat and made shooing motions, until at last the group began to disperse. By then the sky had faded from gray to starry black, the night wind had begun to rise, and the leaves were whispering and murmuring like the hungry ghosts of Buddhist mythology.

It was a little frightening, being unable to remember one’s name. But it was also somehow liberating, like having been relieved of a heavy, lifelong burden. He foresaw that when his name did come back to him, he would regret the loss of this unaccustomed buoyancy, this lightness of being.

Unless of course he was dead. That seemed like a distinct possibility, since there seemed to be an arrow sticking out of his side. But there was no blood, and little pain beyond a mild soreness in his ribs and a slight aching in his head, probably from striking the ground when he fell. So he ripped open the sport jacket pinned to his side and discovered that the arrowhead penetrating the leather safety flap of his shoulder holster had lodged in the trigger guard of the pistol inside it with such force that the metal rim had deformed outward.

And that was all it took-seeing the shoulder holster immediately transported him back down to the plane of everyday existence, the plane where he had a name, Ed Pender, and carried a gun, a Smith amp; Wesson Model 10. Where he and a man named Skip were trying to catch a killer. Where somebody had slipped him a heavy dose of…of the dread El Ess Dee.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds, he thought- that’s a song. Then he looked up at the sky and actually saw the aforementioned diamonds sparkling there, and suddenly another lyric fragment went fluttering through his mind: something something the diamond sky… Followed by another: stars shining up abuuuuve you …And yet another: bewitched, bothered, and bewildered …And now there was no stopping them: abandoned and forsaken…no direction home…can’t tell the forest for the trees…of greeeen, red roses, too-

Enough! Enough! He squeezed his head between his palms, trying to slow the flow of lyrics so he could think… think…think what you’re tryin’ to-

No! Make it stop!.. in the naaame of love, before you-

Please, God, somebody, help me make it… through the night…

“Fuuuuck!” shouted Pender. The cry bounced off the surrounding trees and echoed across the clearing. Then the night went dead quiet, probably because there weren’t any oldies that started with fuuuuck.

He was still tripping, though. Soaring. Suddenly the night noise came flooding back, like somebody’d turned up a big volume knob in the sky. The clatter of the aspen leaves like a zillion castanets, the lugubrious who-who-who of a great horned owl.

“Special Agent E. L. Pender, that’s who, who, who,” he said aloud, and discovered that, for some reason, talking out loud seemed to help. “Special Agent E. L. Goddamn Pender, getting his shit together for your FBI in peace and war, from here to eternity, till death do us-Shut up, Pender! Yes sir, this is me shutting up, sir!”

Now what? Got to find those fine folks in the pajamas before he does. Make them safe. Because like you told McDougal a couple centuries ago, that’s what you do. Even more significantly, that’s who you are. So focus, pal, focus.

“Okay, this is me focusing. First thing I need to do is…” He snapped off the arrow just above the ferrule and tossed the shaft aside, leaving the arrowhead embedded in the bent trigger guard. “Okay, now all I have to do is find the trail.”

Which turned out to be easier said than done. Because from the center of the perfectly round clearing, everything looked the same. There were no directions, and the twinkling stars, though bright enough to sugar-frost the round expanse of clover, were not twinkling brightly enough to light his way.

But if the clearing was perfectly round, Pender told himself, then he couldn’t get lost in it, could he? All he had to do was walk around the whatchamacallit, the circumference of the circle. Pick a direction, clockwise or counter-, and stick to it, and sooner or later he was bound to strike the trailhead.

And that was how it worked out. Pender aimed himself toward the edge of the circle, kept going until he couldn’t go any farther without leaving the clearing, then turned to his right and continued walking, with the clearing on his right and the trees on his left. Then all he had to do was not forget which was right and which was left-a challenge, in his condition, but not an insurmountable one.

To keep the deluge of song lyrics at bay, Pender counted his steps as he marched, and had reached sixty-two when the trees to his left parted, revealing what looked like the mouth of a narrow, twisting tunnel. A rush of triumph, then a sudden wrench of panic-what if this wasn’t the path? What if it was some other path? Or no path at all? How goddamn lost would he be then?

His momentum halted, Pender was on the brink of the condition known as paralysis by analysis when a voice that sounded suspiciously like his own growled, “Nothin’ to it but to do it,” and the next thing he knew, he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen paces up the tunnel, and counting.

The rocky, uneven path from the main trail to the Omphalos hadn’t been easy to descend in daylight, without psychedelics; the ascent in the dark, alone, on acid, must have been nearly heroic. Or so Pender had to assume when he reached the top, because he had no memory of the climb whatsoever: his runaway mind had switched his body over to automatic pilot.

Coming upon the golf cart parked by the side of the marked trail, Pender felt as though he’d stumbled on a relic of a lost civilization. Just beyond it, the trail forked downhill into the darkness to the left, uphill into the darkness to the right. The left fork, Pender somehow recognized, would take him back the way they’d come this afternoon, back to the Center and the hot springs and a telephone he could use to call for the cavalry to come bail his ass out of this one, because he had definitely screwed the pooch trying to handle it with only a gimpy P.I. for a partner.

“Left fork it is, then,” he said aloud.

On the other hand, said that little voice inside Pender’s head, not the one that knew all the song lyrics, but the one that listened to them.

“On the other hand, what?”

On the other hand, if they all went that way, they’re probably already back and they’ve already called in the cavalry, so what do they need you for?