All You Ever Have To Do

By Richard Quarry

"I made San Francisco for the Summer of Love and Saigon for the Tet Offensive. I'm not that easily impressed any more."

But when ex-MP Lonnie Davis, fresh back from two tours in Vietnam, agrees to track down missing counter-culture acid queen Mara Isaacs, the two find themselves pursued by police, bikers, bounty hunters, attack dogs, and a very pissed-off CEO who believes Mara murdered his son. Join them on a wild death ride through a country tearing itself apart in the wake of Kent State and the Cambodian Invasion, in a noir thriller that shows collateral damage begins at home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Quarry
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201374006

Book preview

Chapter 1

Ohio State, Spring 1970

Steve Kelman expected fire-gutted buildings, quads strewn with rocks, and fist-waving radicals shouting off the pigs! Just like on the evening news. Why else would the governor call out the National Guard to cordon off the campus? But aside from a few sloppily painted banners strung from dorm windows — Free Huey, Free Bobby, AmeriKKKa out of Cambodia, Spiro Bites The Big One — Ohio State looked fully as ... well, bourgeois, as when he’d gone here twenty years ago.

Some polite students, not at all put off by the suit and tie that had set the longhairs muttering fascist back at Tappan College, directed him to the new gym. Amid the clank of iron plates Kelman entered a vast cavern as brightly lit as a recovery room and reeking of sweat and floor polish.

He picked his way past over-achievers groaning in the grip of hulking machines. In a far corner a bare-chested young man hunched panting on a weight bench. A round scar about the size of a half-dollar piece glared from his left side. Below his shorts another, more ragged scar crossed his left leg.

Lonnie Davis, his marks.

Kelman held out his hand as he approached. Lonnie? I’m Steve Kelman. My brother sends his regards.

Wiping his hands on an already damp towel, Davis rose and offered a strong grip callused from long acquaintance with the weight bar. How is the Captain?

Major now, actually. He’s back in Saigon. He seems to like it there.

Davis chuffed. Yeah, well, after you’ve been back in the world a while, Nam doesn’t look so weird.

Dishwater-blond  hair, clumped in strands by sweat, hung halfway over his ears. His comfortably rounded features, vaguely at odds with an angular, strong-jawed head, hosted a slight lift at the corners of his mouth that seemed to herald a smile. Only that smile never quite found its way up to his ice-streaked blue eyes, and a certain gleaming, let-it-all-hang-out intensity there hinted it might not be unalloyed good news for whoever happened to be around when it did.

So how’s student life? Kelman asked, sizing him up.

Eh. Davis wiped the towel across his forehead. The jocks think I’m a head, the heads think I’m a jock, and the radicals call me a baby-killer. Wasn’t for the Supreme Court, I’d probably have my own water fountain.

I suppose it takes time to adjust.

Me to them, or them to me?

So much for small talk. I’m looking for a girl, Kelman said. A student at Tappan College. He had to speak louder than he liked, to be heard above the crash of weights and the rah-rah of teammates urging each other on. They take that never-trust-anyone-over-thirty business seriously there. All I came up with was accusations that I was spying for the FBI, the NSC, even the CIA.

Paranoia strikes deep, Davis observed, sitting back down on the bench. Though not truly bulging, his muscles rolled like dockyard cables at every movement. Kelman’s professional eye put him at six foot one, with a naturally wiry frame pumped up to one-ninety, maybe two hundred pounds. She a hippie chick, this girl?

What makes you ask?

You’re talking to me.

She tends in that direction. In fact she’s spent more time out of school than in, doing her best to become every parent’s nightmare.

Well, that 77 Sunset Strip look of yours sure ain’t gonna cut it. I’ll run her down for you.

You seem pretty eager.

Blinking salt from his eyes, Davis looked around the gym. This is a nowhere scene. For me, now, a real nowhere scene.

Kelman couldn’t decide. Davis looked just offbeat enough — counter-culture, wasn’t that the word they used? — to lure Mara Isaac’s acquaintances out of their shells. But the bullet scars and those unshielded, penetrating eyes made Kelman wonder if maybe Lonnie Davis hadn’t brought a little too much of Vietnam back with him.

Too much for what? Campuses being shut down all across the country, rioting in the streets, four students killed by the National Guard at Kent State, and now the generations hurling curses and accusations at each other, both urging further violence as their solution of choice?

The girl called her parents two days ago, he said, putting his doubts on hold for now. Asking for money, all they could spare. According to her mother, she sounded nervous. Very nervous. Not a good sign, coming from a girl who I gather has seen most of what student life has to offer in the turn on, tune in, drop out line.

Davis nodded. Which is why they called in a private detective instead of the cops, right? For all they know she could be planning to blow up the White House. Small loss.

Something like that. They might have been willing to give her, say, three or four thousand dollars. Might still be willing. Only the mother demanded to see her face to face, and the girl refused. Hasn’t called back, either.

Davis massaged his neck. Weird. I mean, from what you say she’s been pulling shit on them for years and they’re still footing the bills. She could talk them into anything. So why not see them? Unless she’s afraid the cops might tag along. Only the heat haven’t made the scene yet — have they?

Not yet.

She’s afraid of something. If not the law, then what?

There’s one more factor, said Kelman, chalking up a positive mark for Davis’ perception, at least. Or might be. She’s been hospitalized for psychiatric disorders. Only once, actually. But it must have been a doozy. More than six months, back when she was fourteen.

Huh. If she’s freaked out and the cops haven’t picked her up yet .... Davis shook his head. There’s some bad scenes out there she could stumble into. And some bad people. For a moment he looked thoughtful, then shrugged it off. But hell, I can deal with that. Let me get a shower and grab some things, I’ll be ready to rock.

Slow down a minute, Lonnie. Understand something. I’m hiring you — if I do — to point me in the girl’s direction. The rest, you leave to me. I want this settled legally. And peacefully.

Davis gave a snort. You’re not going to find much of either in this country these days.

That’s my worry. And I hope I don’t even have to bring this up, but just in case, one rule above all. No guns.

I don’t have a gun. Don’t want a gun, comes to that.

Good. So stay out of situations that might require one. Hearing more heat in his voice than he’d intended, Kelman stopped and rasped a palm across his chin. "Sorry. I’ve had a frustrating couple of days. The girl could be in serious trouble, her folks are frantic, and everyone I talk to acts like I’m the enemy. There’s so much hate out there. Ever since that Kent State business—"

Goddamn toy soldiers. Twisting on the bench, Davis stared at two very large students encouraging a third through an evidently painful set of leg extensions. If those draft-dodging home-front heroes want to shoot off their guns so bad, he said, raising his voice alarmingly, they oughtta go try their luck with Charlie.

The biggest of the group, a crew-cut 6’4" blond built like an offensive lineman, with lumps of muscle where his neck should be, glared back.

Screw you, Davis. Those freaks burn down the ROTC, throw rocks at the National Guard, then cry for their mommies soon as someone pushes back. I just hope the Guard blows away a few of these leftist faggots we got here, too.

Oh, hi, Peterson, Davis called gaily. Didn’t see you there. Your hardship deferment come through yet?

Weights clanked down all through the gym. The slash of a smile creasing Davis’ face began to lift and tighten.

Over there, he told Kelman, you see the sad results of a lab experiment gone bad. How it was, they were trying to make a giant potato that talked like a man. You can see they did real good on the giant potato part — the lineman took several steps forward, hands folding into fists — but no matter how they tried, they could never get it to act like a man.

The lineman came for him. You little faggot, I’m gonna kick your ass all over—

Davis shot off the bench with a disembodied looseness that reminded Kelman of a jack-in-the-box. Startled by the speed of the movement, the lineman fell back a step, belatedly bringing up his fists.

Start kicking, man, Davis said.

The lineman stood in place, trying to work himself up to strike. His two companions came up on either side.

Not here, TJ, one said. You’ll lose your privileges.

The lineman took another step back, trying to hide the way his breath came in tight puffs. Later for you, he growled.

Yeah, right.

As the three moved off muttering, Davis came back with his full smile finally unleashed, rivaling Burt Lancaster for gleaming white teeth. Just joshin’. Wasn’t nothin’ gonna happen.

You didn’t know that.

Hey, the one thing I actually know something about is when a guy’s gonna swing on me and when he’s gonna slink off.

Every time?

Eh. Make it two-thirds. But I gotta get my jollies somehow.

I think maybe we better call this off, Kelman said. You’re a little too volatile for what I have in mind.

Well, it’s your money. Or her folks’. Only give me a spot before you go, huh, chief? You can see I don’t have a lot of friends here.

All right.

Here, hold the bar so it doesn’t tip.

Kelman grabbed the thick chrome-plated bar close to the uprights and pressed down while Davis loaded heavy plates first to one side, then the other. It looked like an awful lot of weight.

Davis lay on the bench and adjusted his hands around the checkered sections of the bar. He took a couple of deep breaths and heaved the bar free of the stand. He let the weight sink to his chest, then grimaced as he strained to straighten his arms. The bar stuck about a third of the way up. Davis made a hissing noise and slowly forced the bar to full extension with a slight side-to-side rocking of his shoulders against the bench.

Kelman expected that to be it, but Davis eased the weight back down to his chest. This rep was harder from the start, and Kelman leaned forward, ready to grab the bar. But Davis gave a quick, tight shake of his head, and groaning through clenched teeth, worked the bar up in increments, left-right, left-right, a very slow, agonized sawing motion. At the top he held it locked out while he gasped for air.

That’s enough, Kelman said.

Davis ignored him. He lowered the bar again, this time letting it bounce off his chest to get better leverage for the initial push. The bar froze in position eight inches above him. Davis’ face contorted like an astronaut in a centrifuge. He moaned, then forced the bar up another inch. His arms began to quiver. Alarmed, Kelman started to reach for the bar.

"No!"

Davis lifted his tailbone slightly and slammed it back down against the bench, rocking his chest up in reaction and forcing the bar up one more straining inch. Another slam, another inch. A distressed little whine squeezed through his teeth. Again he slammed against the bench, working the bar a little further up. His face flushed toward redline, his neck muscles fluttered with a giant tic. He shook and slammed and quivered and groaned. Until finally his arms locked straight out.

"Now!"

Kelman grabbed the bar and helped guide it back onto the uprights. Davis rolled off the bench and fell to his knees on the floor, rubbing his forehead back and forth against the padding while his arms gripped each other with kneading fingers.

Jesus, he gasped. Oh Jesus.

Finally he recovered enough to rise and seat himself back on the bench. Thanks man, he wheezed. I learned something.

Good for you. Kelman started to leave.

Hold up, chief.

Kelman turned.

You really should take me on.

Oh? Why?

‘Cause this girl’s stepped in some deep shit. And you know it, too. I got some idea of what your brother would have told you about me, and you wouldn’t be here otherwise.

A pretty good guess. Say you’re right.

Then time’s not on her side, is it? Peace, love, harmony and legality aside, this isn’t likely to be a job for the boy scouts. And while you’re farting around looking for one, she may be going down the tube. Davis sat hunched like the Thinker, still panting while he kneaded his arms with his fingers.

Look, he sighed. I made San Francisco for the Summer of Love and Saigon for the Tet offensive. I’m not that easily impressed anymore. I can find her. You can’t.

Kelman recalled one of the stories his brother had told him. One night a squad of MP’s confronted a GI talking crazy and waving a .45 around. The man did not respond to their long-range attempts to talk him into putting down the gun. So Davis approached, hands empty, speaking in a mild, soothing voice. Eventually the soldier let the pistol hang by his side.

Only as Davis came closer he suddenly changed his mind and shot him. Davis took a solid hit — the livid scar on his side testified to that — but instead of falling to the ground and letting his companions terminate the affair with gunfire, he jumped in and disarmed the man.

Kelman liked that story. It suggested a certain restraining compassion not easy to find in the hair-trigger sort of men willing to poke their noses into ratholes for small amounts of money.

The girl’s name, he said, hoping the restraint might in the end win out over whatever other legacies Vietnam had left Davis with, is Mara Isaacs.

Chapter 2

Back at his dorm Lonnie Davis showered, then threw on jeans, workshirt, a pair of low-cut boondockers, and a tan corduroy jacket with the elbows worn slick. Not exactly hardcore head gear, but nothing to mark him as Mr. Jones, either.

Kelman filled him in on Mara Isaacs during the drive up to Cleveland. Following which, Lonnie hit the detective up for a lot more expense money than he wanted to fork over.

You can have fast, Lonnie explained, or you can have cheap. But I’m thinking the girl needs fast a lot more than her folks need cheap. So don’t be a grinch, man.

Finally shelling over the bread, Kelman dropped him off at a car rental. Lonnie picked up a puke-orange Chevy Nova, then cruised up Euclid Avenue. On the outskirts of Case Western University he scored an ounce of hashish off a dealer he knew from Saigon, where he generally looked the other way unless guys were pushing the hard stuff.

Tanner, a rifleman switched to driving truck after a bout of mortar fire, used to transport weed to the boonies till the second time he ran over a mine. Some guys were a flat shrapnel sponge.

Lonnie crashed at Tanner’s pad, toking some hash to get his head back in shape. He’d gone off drugs in Nam. Besides they made you slower and a whole lot more likely to get clobbered by something you never saw coming, what was there out there to groove on?

He’d been straight since coming back to the world, too. Something about getting all his shit on one boat. Now he needed to practice, because the first time after a long drought, you were liable to zoom right past giggly into double-vision, here-come-the-blue-meanies paranoia. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

Tanner chain-scoffed Saltines and babbled about Star Trek. (Man, for those dudes, Charlie’s like mind freaks and shape shifters and Klingons and shit.) Between a constant case of the munchies and the cane he needed to help carry around the thirty or forty pieces of metal the army docs had left in in his body, he’d turned into the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Lonnie figured him for about another six weeks. Even as a student you couldn’t deal from your own hooch forever. Tanner didn’t sweat it. He said that as a disabled vet they’d stick him in the monkey house for three days like they usually did, then cut him loose.

Tanner asked Lonnie if he’d like to be Captain Kirk and boldly go tooling around in the Enterprise where no man has gone before. Lonnie considered for about two seconds.

Shit yeah. Wouldn’t you?

Tanner turned solemn. I used to, only my shrink says I shouldn’t want to be anyone but me.

Which Lonnie didn’t say so, but he thought that shrink must be some stone establishment goon. Even numbnuts I-can’t-change-the-laws-of-physics Scotty had to be a better trip than what Tanner was on.

Next morning Lonnie took the disk of hash, rather like a sand dollar only dark brown and sweetly aromatic, down to Tappan College. At first the students shied away. Lonnie wasn’t over thirty, but he was an athletic looking twenty-five, and his blond hair, four months out of the army, was stuck at that mid-length level sported by British rockers back when they wore Nehru suits. Or narcotics agents, who had to present themselves for inspection regularly whether they were working undercover or no.

After a quick recon of the snack bar Lonnie slid into a booth alongside a likely-looking trio of heads, bleary-eyed and droopy at ten in the morning and huddled in mud-stained pea coats despite the full warm sun outside.

As they looked up he opened the baggie to give them a quick whiff. That got their synapses sparking. He offered to sell a chunk at four dollars a gram. It had cost him five, even for an ounce at a war-buddies discount.

Suddenly they were all charter members of the brotherhood of heads. Narcs could buy, but they couldn’t sell.

His new friends took Lonnie to an off-campus duplex to smoke to good fellowship. They sat cross-legged in the dim light of a red bulb glowing through a plastic-wrapped lampshade that threw leafy shadows. The furniture consisted of a couple of Salvation Army mattresses, a plank-and-cinderblock bookcase, a scratchy white plastic record player, and posters of Einstein, Cream, and W.C. Fields.

Lonnie stuck a chunk of hash in a little brass pipe and they toked up to Music From Big Pink. Once they’d levitated close to the cackling stage, Lonnie announced he was looking to move weight. He would spot them a half ounce commission for anyone they turned him onto who could handle a pound of Moroccan blond. That motivated them past their already weakened sense of caution.

Trouble was, they couldn’t name any major dealers at Tappan. Grams, no problem. Ounces, yeah, maybe. Pounds, that was like heavy, man.

Lonnie spaced out in mid-sentence when The Band started up Chest Fever. The organ tolling behind the story of a woman constantly at the vanishing point gave him a chill. But a good chill. Like charging toward the sound of breaking glass when you were all psyched up to kick ass and take names. Looking around at the textbooks and spiral notebooks scattered around, he couldn’t imagine how he’d hacked school as long as he did.

Okay, he said, beaming back as the song trailed off. Since we’re all cool here, let me throw out a name. Mara Isaacs. Know her?

By their reaction, a gliding-eyeball check-it-out routine, they did.

Man, where do you know Mara from? asked Mitchell, his black brows rising to lose themselves behind the upper frame of hornrim glasses.

Kind of a friend of a friend kind of thing, Lonnie replied. This guy I know, he had a thing going with Mara out in Berkeley, oh, a while ago. Way he told it, she’s a head with bread. Sounds cool to me.

Everyone at Tappan knows Mara, said Mitchell. "She was a sophomore when I was a freshman. Now I’m a senior, and God knows what-all she is. Mara kind of comes and goes. Mara’s ... I don’t know. Like, you look at Mara and you think, hey, all right. Then you look again and you know you could write the Great American Novel, play lead guitar for the Rolling Stones, and end the war, and she’d still laugh in your face. Mara, I mean she’s way out there."

She’s put guys in the psych ward, muttered Jerome, who’d been staring intently at his knees the last fifteen minutes.

How’s that? Lonnie asked.

As Jerome zoomed back into the ozone, Mitchell took over. Only one guy on campus. The other, I heard that was at Antioch. This guy here, him and Mara dropped acid. Mara came down, he didn’t. Landed in the clinic for a few days, then his parents came and hauled him back to Detroit. He never came back. Never came back to Tappan, I mean. I don’t guess he’s still on the locked ward.

Man, I need a Clark bar, said the third head, Steve. They all looked around, wondering what had changed. It took a moment to realize the music had stopped.

Put on Vanilla Fudge, Steve suggested.

Man, fuck Vanilla Fudge, said Jerome, roused from his meditation on his knees. He stared around like a bear coming out of hibernation. Hey, remember Slater?

That sent them into a burst of giggling. Then as Lonnie waited for the punch line, Jerome pulled back into his shell.

Mitchell, plainly the group den mother, took it up. Man, that was a trip. This guy Slater, he thought he was some studly dude, you know? So there’s Mara sitting by herself in Bascomb Hall, he decides to put the make on her. Mara always looks super soulful. You know, black clothes, black hair, huge dark eyes ... I mean, like Dylan probably had her in mind when he wrote ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.’ So Slater sits next to her and starts carrying on about how he’s really this stone intellectual, he reads Sartre and Camus and takes in Bergman flicks and just sweats bullets from one existential crisis to the next.

Mitchell rubbed his fingers across a wispy mustache with vain pretensions to maturity. Mara puts down her book. Which for her, that’s got to be first base at least. So Slater escalates. Eventually he’s got himself worked up to how it’s all he can do to keep from killing himself, he’s so sensitive and all. At which point Mara, who still hasn’t said a word, stands up, unscrews a lightbulb, and breaks it against the table. Then with half of Bascomb Hall looking on, she grinds the broken glass into her wrist. And man, she wasn’t kidding, either. Like blood all over the place. And then she walks away, leaving Slater’s mouth hanging open and a trail of red drops on the carpet. And her eyes didn’t even flicker.

Man, Jerome marveled, that’s like, God looked down and said, let there be cool.

So is this chick on campus? Lonnie asked. I’ll take my chances with the psych ward if I can maybe lay off some hash on her.

I don’t think she’s around, Mitchell said. She’s someone you don’t miss.

Jerome stared at Lonnie’s hair. Hey, man, were you in the Army?

Sure was.

She’s gorgeous, Mitchell continued, without missing a beat. Only in kind of a weird way. Like ... like a heat-seeking missile.

Silence while the idea was absorbed, then they all broke into riotous laughter at once. Even Lonnie, who’d never seen more of Mara than a couple of photographs Kelman had and didn’t entirely grasp the connection, found it one of the funniest jokes he’d ever heard.

Man, that’s heavy, Jerome said to Lonnie as the uproar died down. Like, Vietnam?

Lonnie pulled up his workshirt to show off the scar. Me and Charlie didn’t get along too good. They couldn’t tell the difference between an American .45 and a Russian 7.62. He had one of them too, but he didn’t feel like pulling down his pants to show it off.

Mitchell: Holy shit!

Steve: Jesus fuck!

Far fuckin’ out, man, said Jerome. That must have been heavy.

Lonnie tucked his shirt back in. On the whole, all things considered, I’d say yeah, at the time it was rather heavy.

Silence. Then they all started puffing, then sniggering, then again all at the same moment, laughing hysterically.

On the whole, all things considered! cried Marshal.

I’d say yes, it was rather ... rather ... rather— Steve rolled backward from his cross-legged posture and lay with his legs drawn up choking on guffaws.

Lonnie was glad they got such a kick out of it. After dropping out of college his sophomore year he’d hitched around some, then spent 1965 and a sliver of ‘66 in San Francisco. Best year he ever had. Best year he could ever have imagined. Better than he could have imagined in fact, because LSD and the sexual revolution were kind of hard to wrap your head around until you’d actually been there. He turned on, tuned in, dropped out. Saw the world unfold in Day-Glo petals.

Then got himself busted halfway between Berkeley and Big Sur. Holding a diddly-squat two ounces of middling grass. His Public Defender ran the numbers by him. Eighteen months in the joint, or four years in the army. For two freakin’ ounces full of twigs and seeds! When he finally got back, the sixties were over. It still pissed him off.

"Man, I really need a Clark bar," said Steve.

So go get one, Jerome snapped. Just don’t go anywhere near that record player with Vanilla fucking Fudge.

Steve rose to his feet, clumsy as an anesthetized bear. Anyone coming?

Lonnie handed him a fiver. Stock up. Bring back a few Cokes, too. And see if you can locate where this Mara Isaacs is at. I’m getting intrigued. He fished a small stockman’s knife from his pocket and cut off a chunk of hash with the sheepsfoot blade. Well over a gram’s worth. They eyed it hungrily.

Here’s for the hassle.

***

Mara Isaacs, it turned out, was believed to be at a commune called Cloud Song, about a two-hour drive to the southwest. The commune had been purchased a couple of years earlier by a Tappan dropout named Ellen Barkman, who bought it with the insurance money after Arab terrorists blew her parents’ plane out of the sky. Shortly after the Kent State shootings, when it became apparent that despite a lot of revolutionary rhetoric no one really much wanted to burn down the campus after all, some of the heads made it out to Cloud Song, Mara among them. The other students had returned a week ago.

Celia Graves says she was registering like major bad vibes, Steve reported. Bikers, attack dogs, all kinds of heavy shit. Mara stayed on.

Figures, said Jerome.

Is she there now? Lonnie asked.

Dunno. She was there a week ago.

This commune. Cloud Song. It is to puke. They all heads out there? This Ellen Barkman must have some bread, she bought the place. She ever deal?

Ellen, Marshal pronounced, would never deal. Not unless she’s changed. She’s no straight arrow, but she’s .... He groped for the word.

Righteous, supplied Jerome.

Blond, said Steve. And into that whole Eastern trip. You know, like karma and shit.

Jerome looked Lonnie up and down. All things considered, he mused. You and Mara, man, that could be interesting. Why don’t you check it out?

I just might do that thing. Seeing as how there doesn’t look to be much action here.

Lonnie sat around a while longer, grooving on The Who Sell Out while he let his head flutter gently back to earth. They told him the FBI had fifty agents on campus. By which they actually meant informers. Which gave Lonnie some insight into why he’d cooled it with the dope. When you spend a lot of your time high, you naturally become the center of the universe. And if you were the center of the universe, then it made sense the FBI would have fifty informers watching your every move.

Finally he got it together to saddle up. On his way out of town he picked up some Cokes and, despite himself, Clark bars. Power of suggestion. The intrepid explorer bound for the wilds. Too bad he couldn’t trade in the Nova on the Enterprise. A few phasers and photon torpedoes might come in handy too.

He called Kelman from a gas station phone booth. If the detective was either surprised or gratified that Lonnie had run Mara down so quickly, he did a good job of hiding it. Lonnie thought he deserved more accolades. Kelman wanted to check out Cloud Song himself.

Get real, man, Lonnie exclaimed. "They gave you the cold shoulder here at Tappan. You gonna wave your suit and tie around someplace called Cloud Song?"

Are you all right? Your voice sounds, oh, a little deeper somehow.

I’m fine. A thick layer of fatigue was turning all the associations he’d thought so brilliant a little while ago into question marks. All I’m saying is, let me scope it out. This is a lot more my kind of scene than yours.

I suppose that’s true, Kelman acknowledged. But be careful. Don’t let her suspect anything.

Hey, don’t sweat it. I can be like really subtle, man. Well, why not? Just because he’d never tried didn’t mean he couldn’t do it. Like sex. After a time or two, turned out he was pretty good.

Bad vibes, they said. Lazy, lava lamp bubbles percolated through his consciousness, and with them a strain of music. She can’t be here no more.

Lonnie?

Only you know what? I’m thinking she’s gonna be gone.

Chapter 3

The Ohio countryside lay flat and green below cotton candy clouds that had Lonnie singing Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds. Rows of spindly windbreak trees flanked two-story balloon-frame farmhouses. Cows grazed everywhere.

Good sign — no mines. Lonnie had learned that from the 11B’s. See a few of your buddies get their feet blown off, they told him, you look at grass a whole new way.

He struggled to keep from getting distracted by the hashish tendrils still curling around his brain, causing the graveled curves planted for no apparent reason in the generally straight-arrow roads to rush up alarmingly fast.

Been a while since he’d done that eight-miles-high number. Maybe if he ever did get his shit together, sandpapered down a few of the more splintery sections of his mind, he might check it out, get cosmic again. Groove on that old time non-reality. (Watch that curve, man, that non-reality can put really big dents in your car.) Wisdom of the East. Karma and shit.

Thing was, he kind of missed Nam. In a funny sort of way.

Did you just think what I think you thought?

Okay, forget it. But this student trip, man, people keep telling me to think of my future. What future? Life used to be more fun, when I was barely hanging on by my fingernails to the minute I was in right now. Even Saigon. Bummer in a lot of ways, but real, you know?

What the fuck you talking about, shit-for-brains? I suppose you miss getting shot, too.

Actually, I know it sounds weird, but—

Look, do yourself a favor and don’t listen to anything you think. And watch that foot. The speedo’s crowding seventy, and you’re holding. Bust city. Man, your feeble little head just can’t be trusted with drugs, can it?

Just thinking, is all.

***

After two and a half hours of cruising and a bit of hunt-and-peck among crumbling blacktops (call these directions? Goddamn ROTC shavetail could do better) he found the entrance to Cloud Song. The Nova lurched around deep potholes in the narrow hardpan path that curved behind a small wood. Smoky Robinson’s Tears of a Clown came scratchy from a station right at the edge of reception. Little too much string section for Lonnie’s taste, but man, dude could sing.

A quarter of a mile in, on a shallow grassy slope that sank from left to right, sat a big turn-of-the-century farmhouse straight out of Sergeant Pepper. Third floor dormers, buttressed Transylvania eaves, and gingerbread trim painted red, yellow, and orange framing electric blue fishscale siding.

So much for operate and maintain. Once you unlocked your eyeballs from the scubadelic paint job, the sagging roofline, gaps in the siding, a jackstraw disarray of drainpipes, and the snaggle-toothed roof slates pushed up by clumps of moss gave the house more of a diseased, Bates Motel look. Or maybe he was still a little high.

Uphill from the house a chain link fence enclosed a yard where two men trained a big black-and-tan dog to seize the wrist of the one wearing a padded jacket. Or more likely, from the way the men shouted, jerked at the leash, and rolled on the ground, they were trying to teach it to let go again.

Another two dogs of the same square-headed, thick-jawed build cheered their comrade on with percussive barks from kennels at the back of the enclosure. At first Lonnie thought they might be Dobermans, but as he drew up to the house he saw they were too big and too chunky.

A double-ended aluminum trailer rested on concrete blocks next to the dog yard, its silver finish gasping its last amid sandpaper rust. On the opposite side of the house, where the slope leveled out into meadow, a few earth mothers and Siddharthas in loose hippie garb poked about in a spindly, brown-tinged garden that looked like it had been hit with Agent Orange. Further back toward the treeline stood a saddle-backed barn with see-through planking.

Lonnie pulled up in line with a white and purple ‘61 Skylark, a VW microbus painted in fleur-de-lys pastels, and a primer-coated coonskin cap era Econoline with one bumper drooping and the other solid gone. At the far end of the row leaned two gleaming Harley choppers with nose-picker bars and grasshopper forks. Dogs, bikers ... did someone say bad vibes?

Lonnie switched off the ignition and weighed the karma. Beneath his seat nestled the cut-down baton he’d fashioned a while ago out of some weird MP nostalgia. He’d drilled the tip and filled it with solder, just enough to bring the balance forward. Then filed the corners off the end for less blood and bound the handle with friction tape so the weapon wouldn’t pull out of his grasp from its own momentum on a snap thrust.

Now he thought about sliding the baton beneath his jacket. But twelve inches of wood stuck down your pants was bound to poke you somewhere, and he hadn’t come to clean up Dodge. He took a couple of deep breaths to center himself and exited the car with a smile.

Subtle, that’s us.

He approached the porch, side-stepping piles of dogshit old and new. A stringy young man with a ponytail and wispy beard sat in a big wooden rocker by the porch steps, playing blues harp softly and surprisingly well.

Hi, said Lonnie.

The young man took the harmonica from his lips. What’s happening, man?

Name’s Lonnie Davis. What the hell. I heard about you guys at Tappan College. I’d like to say I came to be at one with nature, but fact is, I’m looking to deal some hash.

Cool. I’m Wailer. The young man leaned forward and looked him over. Dogs barked in the training yard, the classic deep throaty roar that made primates think of high branches. Doubt furrowed Wailer’s baby-smooth skin. Maybe you better talk to Ellen.

Hey!

Lonnie turned, casually. The two men from the yard were striding down on him, the taller one holding the big black-and-tan dog, even bigger and blacker now, straining on the leash. A deep frown squeezed the man’s features together at the base of a long tight cone whose point was Lonnie.

I’ll tell Ellen you’re here, said Wailer, slipping rapidly into the house.

Trailing behind the man with the dog came a shorter, dark-eyed, vaguely Hispanic youth with a wide ominous spill-the-wine grin on his face and a loose-limbed big city shuffle. His long black hair lapped out from beneath a