“Who have you been talking to?” Her nostrils flared.
“Hippies.”
She sighed and shifted on the bed. “Have you found Philomena?”
“Not yet,” I said. “She left her apartment in an awful hurry though. I doubt she took a change of underwear.”
“It would have been nice to meet you under other circumstances, Mr. Rawlins.”
“You’re right about that.”
She stood up and smiled at my gaze.
“Are you ready to go back to L.A.?”
“First thing in the morning.”
“Good.”
She walked out the door. I watched her move on the stairs. It was a pleasurable sight.
There was a car waiting for her on the street. She got into the passenger’s side. I wondered who her companion was as the dark sedan glided off.
i w e n t t o b e d consciously not calling Bonnie or Cynthia or Maya. I pulled up the covers to my chin and stared at the window until the dawn light illuminated the dirty glass.
1 1 0
17
That morning I headed out toward the San Francisco airport. Just at the mouth of the freeway on-ramp, with the entire sky at their backs, two young hippies stood with their thumbs out. I pulled to the side of the road and cranked down the window.
“Hey man,” a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old red-bearded youth said with a grin. “Where you headed?”
“Airport.”
“Could you take us that far?”
“Sure,” I said. “Hop in.”
The boy got in the front seat and the girl, younger than he was, a very blond slip of a thing, got in the back with their backpacks.
She was the reason I had stopped. She wasn’t that much older 1 1 1
W a lt e r M o s l e y
than Feather. Just a child and here she was on the road with her man. I couldn’t pass them by.
When I drove up the on-ramp a blue Chevy honked at me and then sped past. I didn’t think that I’d cut him off so I figured he was making a statement about drivers who picked up hitch-hikers.
“Thanks, man,” the hippie boy said. “We been out there for an hour an’ all the straights just passed us by.”
“Where you headed?” I asked.
“Shasta,” the girl said. She leaned up against the seat between me and her boyfriend. I could see her grinning into my eyes through the rearview mirror.
“That’s where you live?”
“We heard about this commune up there,” the boy said. He smelled of patchouli oil and sweat.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?” he asked.
“Commune. What’s that?”
“You never heard of a commune, man?” the boy asked.
“My name’s Easy,” I said. “Easy Rawlins.”
“Cool,” the girl crooned.
I suppose she meant my name.
“Eric,” the boy said.
“Like the Viking,” I said. “You got the red hair for it.”
He took this as a compliment.
“I’m Star,” the girl said. “An’ a commune is where everybody lives and works together without anybody owning shit or tellin’
anybody else how to live.”
“Kinda like the kibbutz or the Russian farms,” I said.
“Hey man,” Eric said, “don’t put that shit on us.”
“I’m not puttin’ anything on you,” I replied. “I’m just trying to 1 1 2
C i n n a m o n K i s s
understand what you’re saying by comparing it with other places that sound like your commune.”
“There’s never been anything like us, man,” Eric said, filled with the glory of his own dreams. “We’re not gonna live like you people did. We’re gettin’ away from that nine-to-five bullshit.
People don’t have to own everything. The wild lands are free.”
“Yeah,” Star said. Her tone was filled with Eric’s love for himself. “At Cresta everybody gets their own tepee and a share in what everybody else has.”
“Cresta is the name for your commune?”
“That’s right,” Eric said with such certainty that I almost laughed.
“Why don’t you come with us?” Star asked from the backseat.
I looked up and into her eyes through the rearview mirror.
There was a yearning there but I couldn’t tell if it was hers or mine. Her simple offer shocked me. I could have kept on driving north with those children, to their hippie farm in the middle of nowhere. I knew how to raise a garden and build a fire. I knew how to be poor and in love.
“Watch it!” Eric shouted.
I had drifted into the left lane. A car’s horn blared. I jerked my rented car back just in time. When I looked up into the mirror, Star was still there looking into my eyes.
“That was close, man,” Eric said. Now his voice also contained the pride of saving us. I was once an arrogant boy like him.
“I can’t,” I said into the mirror.
“Why not?” she asked.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen . . . almost.”
“I got a daughter just a few years younger than you. She’s real 1 1 3
W a lt e r M o s l e y
sick. Real sick. I got to get her to a doctor in Switzerland or she’ll die. So no woods for me quite yet.”
“Where is your daughter?” Star asked.
“Los Angeles.”
“Maybe it’s the smog killin’ her,” Eric said. “Maybe if you got her out of there she’d be okay.”
Eric would never know how close he’d come to getting his nose broken in a moving car. It was only Star’s steady gaze that saved him.
“I had a friend once,” I said. “Him and me were something like you guys. We used to ride the rails down in Texas and Louisiana.”
“Ride the rails?” Eric said.
“Jumping into empty boxcars, trains,” I said.
“Like hitchin’,” Eric said.
“Yeah. One night in Galveston we went out on a tear —”
“What’s that?” Star asked.
“A drinking binge. Anyway the next day I woke up and Hollister was nowhere to be seen. He was completely gone. I waited a day or two but then I had to move on before the local authorities arrested me for vagrancy and put me on the chain gang.”
I could see that Eric was now seeing me in a new light. But I didn’t care about that young fool.
“What happened to your friend?” Star asked.
“Twenty years later I was driving down in Compton and I saw him walking down the street. He’d gotten fat and his hair was thinning but it was Hollister all right.”
“Did you ask him what happened?” Eric asked.
“He’d met a girl after I’d passed out that night. They spent the night together and the next couple’a days. They drank the whole time. One day Holly woke up and realized that at some point they’d gotten married — he didn’t even remember saying I do.”
1 1 4
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“Whoa,” Eric said in a low tone.
“Did they stay together?” Star wanted to know.
“I went back with Hollister to his house and met her there.
They had four kids. He was a plumber for the county and she baked pies for a restaurant down the street. You know what she told me?”
“What?” both children asked at once.
“That on the evening she’d met Holly I had picked her up at the local juke joint. We’d hit it off pretty good but I drank too much and passed out. When Holly came into the lean-to where we were stayin’, Sherry, that was his wife’s name, asked him if he would walk her home. That was when they got together.”
“He took your woman?” Eric said indignantly.
“Not mine, brother,” I said. “That lean-to was our own private little commune. What was mine was me, and Sherry had her own thing to give.”
Eric frowned at that, and I believed that I was the first shadow on his bright notions of communal life. That made me smile.
I let them out at the foot of the off-ramp I had to take to get to the airport.
While Eric was wrestling the backpacks out of the backseat Star put her skinny arms around my neck and kissed me on the lips.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re really great.”