In Laymon's Terms

Then I smelled meat cooking.

I followed my nose to a smaller set of buildings that had been repaired and kept up. This area seemed to be a compound of sorts surrounded by smaller structures and shacks. Lots of footprints in the dust. I heard voices singing and laughing and talking, so I walked into the main hall.

Perhaps forty people were congregated in all. I saw only a couple of middle-aged faces and heads with gray hair. Of the rest of them, the oldest couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. Men with shaggy beards and homemade leather vests and torn jeans patched and re-patched. Barefoot women wearing headbands and diaphanous lace blouses, openly breastfeeding babies. Children ran around half-naked. I heard one little girl call another “Moonglow.”

I’d stumbled into a friggin’ commune.

They were broken into separate groups doing a bit of everything: sewing, painting, smoking, reading, playing guitar. A couple of infants were in a washtub being bathed. One guy hammered heels back onto boots. Another fixed a busted stirrup on a saddle. I breathed in a hell of a lot of burning weed and it mixed well with the aroma of sizzling steaks.

Whenever someone’s gaze settled on me they froze in their tracks, even the children. If Monty was here, I got the feeling that he hadn’t exactly warmed them up to strangers.

“Hey there,” I said.

The music stopped. A few whispers passed among them and I saw two of the ladies leave the room. Okay, they were getting the head honcho, that worked for me. No one else spoke and none of them approached me. It didn’t quite feel like a love-in.

In a few minutes the chief of the tribe walked out. He was about my age, early thirties, and he had the kind of grin that was meant to disarm but you didn’t trust for a second. Small and wiry and filled with a manic energy that kept him twitching. His thick beard covered most of his face but from the squalor of bushy hair his eyes burned.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Chuck. Can I do something for you?”

He stuck out his hand and it smelled of blood.

My hackles stood on end. I’d shared a cell with a guy just like Chuck once, for about a week out on Riker’s while my attorney worked overtime to get me out. I barely slept at all during those several days, listening to the guy talk to himself about God and Lucifer and murder. He was in for butchering a pregnant woman and keeping the corpse under his mattress for a week. I knew he’d done it and would do it again if he ever got the chance. A few months after I was released I heard he’d shanked two guards and started a riot that had killed eight men and the hospital nurse. The guy lived through it. Guys like that lived through everything.

I decided to play it straight. That always seemed to unsettle Californians. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. His car broke down outside of town and I was wondering if he was here.”

Chuck rubbed his overgrown jaw and tried to look perplexed. I’d been around enough shitty actors to know another one when I saw him. Chuck wouldn’t have even made a call-back. “Well, gee, I don’t think he came this way. We’re a very closely-knit community and I would’ve heard if a stranger had come among us.”

He did a slow once-over, taking in my black suit and tie, the white shirt and starched collar, my thousand dollar Italian shoes. “You’re a bit overdressed for this part of the country.”

“I still haven’t quite acclimated to California.”

“But you’re not even sweating.”

“My antiperspirant is holding up.”

He tilted his head but didn’t alter his smile by a centimeter. I bet he even grinned in his sleep. “Why don’t you come with me and we’ll ask some of the community if they’ve seen your friend.”

“Sure.”

We walked around and he introduced me to people with names like Brown Earth Child and Freedom Boy. I didn’t know if they were hippies or comic book characters. Rainbeaux Sweet spelled her name out for me. She took great pride in the fact that it ended in ‘x.’

They were exceedingly cooperative and friendly and sincerely wished me luck in finding Monty. I was offered everything from carrot juice to pulchre to pot, belly-dancing lessons, LSD and home-brewed whiskey. I shared a few drinks with them and they told me about their community, which had been sustaining itself, more or less, since the early seventies. Most of the old-timers who’d taken over the ghost town and dubbed it Masonville had either died or been drawn back into the establishment. Rainbeaux’s father owned a chain of video stores and lived in Malibu. She nearly broke into tears just thinking about it.

Despite the reality that they all had deep tans from the sun I could see that a few of the folks, especially the children, were a touch anemic. They gave me a plate of stunted dried vegetables but it felt like taking rice from an Ethiopian. Gardening couldn’t have been easy out here, that was for certain. I thanked them for all their help and walked around some more. Chuck had drifted off, and I knew he’d be wherever the real action was.