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  In a move so quick we couldn’t see it coming, this Jackson stands behind our booth and grasps Billy, one hand on his hair, the other under his left shoulder. Siler starts moving toward him, but Billy is kicking. Still, Jackson’s able to pull him up and out of his seat, as if he’s going to drag Billy over the back of the banquette. Grace is grabbing at Jackson’s arms, but they’re so big around she can’t even get a grip.

  Jackson is clearly trying to pull back Billy’s hair so that Siler can get to it with his knife. That’s it, they want to cut off his long hair. I watch all this like it’s in slow motion, paralysed. But thank God Butter isn’t. With one bump she hip-bucks me off the seat; I’m startled and barely get my feet under me so I don’t sprawl on the linoleum. When I’m out of her way, she slides fully out, then runs full bore at Siler, head down like a charging bull, and hits him in his chest.

  “Oooomph!” flies out of him.

  Jackson has lifted Billy far enough so that his bottom is on the top of the seatback; Billy’s almost fully extended. He’s thrashing back and forth, unable to break Jackson’s grip, but then he goes weirdly still, and everything freezes for just a second. At that moment Butter throws herself at Siler again, this time spinning him back; his foot gets caught in a gumball machine and he falls to one knee.

  And that’s when Billy, with both his feet planted against the edge of our table, thrusts himself back as hard as he can. His head and shoulders hit Jackson, and he teeters backward, then loses his balance. Jackson collapses back, his head cracking against the floor, with Billy sprawled frontside-up on top of him.

  Both our assailants are down. Grace reaches out and grabs Billy’s hand just as Butter grasps mine and gives it a tug. “Run!” Butter cries. “Now! To the van!”

  The four of us dash all at once out the glass door to the diner, then down the concrete steps. In the wide parking lot full of plain Fords, Dodges, and Chevrolets there’s a VW bus painted in the wildest colors. That’s what we’re running toward. I see stars and wide-petaled flowers and droopy mushrooms and a swirling rainbow front to end. Butter gets the back open, and she and Grace and I leap in. There’re thick Indian wool blankets there, and we all tumble on top of them, then each other. We’re in shock for a second, but as Billy, who’s taken the driver’s seat, begins peeling away, we start laughing—can’t control ourselves. Hooting and chortling and tumbling over each other like puppies.

  As we swing past the front of Pollyann’s Rest and Reload, I move up to the passenger seat. The van is reflected in the mirror glass, and I see that its whole front is drawn brown—a hairy, woolly head with two jutting horns and a wide, snorting snout.

  “What’s that painted on the front of the van?” I ask once we’re on the road.

  Butter’s right up beside me, half perched on the side of the shotgun seat. “It’s a bison,” she says.

  “A bison—you mean, like a buffalo?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, Flower,” she says with a big smile, “you’ll see.”

  - - - - -

  Look at Flower, in this pointy-top wigwam—say it fast, over and over: wigwamwigwamwigwamwigwamwigwam—it’s almost enough to trip you out, just the sound of the words (at Old Bison they call mumbling like this a mantra); and I’ll tell you, tripping out is what everyone else here is doing. Let me count the ways. They started with something called mescaline, which makes you hallucinate. There are also slices of magic mushroom served up on a gold-plated platter; little cellophane-like pieces of paper drenched in LSD; an old bison horn turned into a pipe gooey with hashish residue; and even from time to time a simple, unadorned, brown-Zig-Zag-rolled joint.

  In the wigwam today are twelve other people, about a third of the commune, all longhairs, guys, chicks, even their babies; has to be at least five little kids in the cowhide tent with us. There’s a fire burning in the center of the oval floor, cranking out enough heat that we’re all sweating into our clothes, what there is of ’em. A lot of the guys are wearing nothing but loincloths, wrapped tight around their waist and legs; the girls are in shorts and T-shirts (some of ’em are even bare-topped); and the kids are mostly stark naked. I’m wearing my old Bend High track team shirt and short shorts. And we’re all sailing high. The kids aren’t dropping or toking or smoking, thank goodness, and neither am I, but we’re all high just being here, from the smoke and the vibes and the way the cowhide of the wickiup keeps swaying in and out like we’re inside a huge drum and God Himself is pounding the skins.

  I’m on what Harley used to call a contact high, and I’m digging it—digging the whole scene here at Old Bison—when this older guy Chester, with even longer hair than Billy’s, a wrinkly, graying head, and a leather necklace with a mysterious wood carving on it, says, “Hey, what’s with the new chick?” He lifts his chin. “Babe, you ain’t tripping?”

  It takes me a minute across the smoky space to realize he’s talking to me. I shake my head.

  “Something wrong with you?”

  I’m suddenly back down to earth, feeling heavy, sinking, on the spot. “I’m—”

  “You a narc?” This from Sally, who’s leaning against Chester. She has thick waves of brown hair and no top on. Her breasts are pretty large, with the biggest horse-brown nipples I’ve ever seen, wide as sand dollars.

  I shake my head. “I’m just—”

  “I don’t dig it,” Chester says. His long teeth are showing, catching red flares from the fire. “This is a commune, babe. I mean, we’re all in it together, and if you’re not on the trip, then, you know, it just bums the whole friggin’ deal.”

  I’ve been here long enough to know that Chester is kind of the leader of the commune. That is, he has power, or at least is on what my friend Butter calls a power trip. The way he’s looking at me, all intense and all, reminds me a little of that cowboy dude at Pollyann’s Rest and Reload. Chester used to be in the Merchant Marine but left it in San Francisco, where he got Sally and Billy and Grace and a few others together before they moved here to New Mexico. Butter herself came down in May from Michigan, where she was a preschool teacher; everyone else was scattered just as wide. “I don’t—you’re not—” I start to try to get out, but the weird hostile vibe’s got my tongue tied.

  Thank goodness Butter speaks up. “Hey, guys, I’m digging Flower. She’s—she’s got a glow about her. I don’t think she needs drugs.”

  “Man,” Chester says with his pointed teeth in a leer, “everybody needs drugs.”

  Butter shakes her head. Her wiry copper hair catches the flickering light from the fire, her pale mushroom eyes glow cool. “Flower’s a beautiful soul—she’s on a natural high.” Her voice is light but kind of forceful, at least as much as it can be in this smoky place. “I can dig it.” Then right at Chester: “I think we all should.”

  Chester shoots Butter a look, then slowly his head floats back. Around to him goes the bison pipe, and he tokes it deeply, making the small cube of hashish bubble and pop. He holds the smoke in for what feels like forever.

  When he finally hisses the smoke out, a thin gray stream that joins the smoke from the fire and rises heavenward through the smoky top of the wigwam, he simply gives us an airy smile with nothing in it. Nothing! It’s weird, but it’s like he’s forgotten everything he just said.

  Butter shrugs, then pats me on the top of my head. When I look up, she’s giving me her huge bright creamy smile. I close my eyes, and though it takes a few minutes, the groovy vibe comes over me again. Flower, the girl on the natural high, floating beautiful as a glorious kite—a sky-scooping concoction of tissue and balsa wood and string just soaring air-light over it all.

  - - - - -

  After the night in the wigwam Butter becomes my special pal; she shows me the ropes. We room together (we sleep here like the lumberjacks did at lumberjack camp, ten or twelve to a room; Butter’s my bunkmate up top), and then she asks if I’d like to go to work with her at the zoo.

  “Zoo?”


  “The Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque. It’s a trip.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Well, me and this other chick, Saffron—you’ve seen her around, she’s always wearing a yellow granny dress?” I nod. “Well, we work there three days a week. Saffron’s a veterinarian’s assistant. I help out with the big cats.”

  “That sounds cool.”

  “Yeah. It’s one of the things with the commune. Chester and Sally want us to work. Get out there, make some bread, have experiences. It’s a smart deal. I also work at this other place on Saturdays. Tex Albom’s Balloon Farm.”

  I shake my head. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, I’ll take you sometime. Tex has this business, he sends people on balloon trips.”

  “Wow!”

  Butter’s all smiles. “Yeah, it’s groovy.”

  “So what’s up with the zoo?”

  “They always need people.” Butter gives her copper hair a happy shake. “Let me see what I can do.”

  Look at Flower, sunlight beating down around me like a storm of light and filmy air, wearing a pair of overalls and the Bend track T-shirt I’ve already sweated through, moving a wheelbarrow down the wide concrete path at the Rio Grande Zoo, on my way to the snake exhibition. I have a bucketful of mice, all jumping and tumbling over each other—if they were just a trace smarter, wouldn’t they pile on top of one another till at least a couple of them could leap out of the pail; but, hey, they’re just mice—and I’m basically bringing the snakes their dinner. Lucky snakes!

  My job? I’m the low of the low. I feed snakes, lizards, and birds—the big animals have specially trained feeders—and I muck out stalls; well, not stalls, ’cuz there aren’t any horses (that’s what I did growing up), but it’s the same thing: me, a rake, a shovel, a wheelbarrow. I wear rubber waders up past my knees and rubber gloves past my elbows. And I love it.

  The days we work, we work really hard, and Butter, Saffron, and I are in a good mood when we drive the van back to Old Bison. Each night we clean up together, scrubbing till our skin is pink.

  Then all of us at Old Bison have dinner together. Billy and Grace, my friends from the diner, are the cooks, and they keep stews with roots and vegetables bubbling on the huge fire-stoked stove. Grace wears a chef’s hat perched crooked on her head, and Billy has this moonlight-blue apron with an embroidered image of an eyeball—huge and glowing—across his chest. Everyone’s totally into new-fangled grains, and if it’s not nutty brown rice one night, it’s something called quinoa or amaranth the next. They’re all chewy, but once you get into them, not bad. Butter makes the bread, and Chester’s old lady Sally has put up jams and jellies; they’re really fruity and great. Oh, and Billy makes a wild banana cream pie.

  Meals at Old Bison, everyone talks a lot, about anything and everything, even the kids. One of them, Chester and Sally’s seven-year-old daughter, Suri, has taken a shine to me, and she likes to crawl into my lap after dinner when the doobie comes out. (I’m not smoking, so I’m happy to have Suri in front of me.) When we’re done eating, like most nights, Chester starts telling the story of Old Bison.

  This is kind of a ritual thing, like something my mother did back in Bend after Pentecostal; and at first I’m not that into it, but after a while I come to expect the story and then, well, it’s just what we do.

  Chester always starts the same way. “We began in a vision a man had on a boat in the South Pacific,” he says. We eat by candlelight, and by the time we get to Chester’s story, the candles are burned almost out, and the room is smoky and full of shadows; and as Chester tells the story, his eyes kind of roll back and get half shut, and his voice deepens and resonates. It spooked me a little at first. “The man looked off the bow into the pellucid blue sky and saw perfection.”

  “Purrrrfection,” a guy across the table who calls himself Window whispers. He’s got shorter hair than most of us, and a widow’s peak. He speaks so low it’s almost like a breath, but we hear it every night at this point.

  “The man knew he couldn’t sustain perfection on the ship. His vision showed him he had to leave it, to search for the right place for the new beginning.

  “We are to become perfect,” Billy’s old lady Grace says softly. The words hang there, but then slowly, one by one, half the rest of the people at the table say, “Purrrfect.”

  “We found a bus, our first bus, and severed all ties to the pig society, and before us we beheld a cloud in the sky—a beautiful white cloud, free as the sky—and that cloud became our guide. We followed it south, to the state they call New Mexico, that we call New Beginning.”

  At this point we all join hands. Suri reaches out, and I take her hand, then add the hands of the people next to me, Butter on my left and one of the original people on the bus, a longhair named Antoine, on my right; and we all hold tight to each other. We’re a linked circle.

  “We called our new land Old Bison,” Chester goes on.

  “And the bison looks over us,” Window says.

  We all press each other’s hands tighter.

  “Please, let us bow our heads,” Chester says.

  We all do. On my lap Suri drops her head so quick she’s like a jack-in-the-box whose spring gave out.

  “Tell me,” Chester goes on. “Who are we?”

  The people at the table know the answer.

  “We are the lost who have been found.”

  “And how are we living our lives?”

  “In peace and harmony and beauty and freedom.”

  “And whom do we share it with?”

  “With the air and trees and the water and the animals.”

  “And what do we know above all else?”

  There’s only silence, then Billy says in a low, deep whisper: “I was nothing before I found Old Bison, and I would be nothing without Old Bison.”

  Grace follows, then Sally, then Window, then Antoine. One by one the rest of the commune joins in. “I was nothing before I found Old Bison,” they say, “and I would be nothing without Old Bison.”

  I look at Butter. I’m still holding her and Suri’s hands. Butter’s speaking the refrain over and over. I catch her eye. She sees that I’m not speaking, and after a moment’s puzzlement, she smiles and gives me a short, gentle nod.

  And then, as every night, Window whispers, “Amen.”

  When we all look up, we see Chester’s smile stretching from ear to ear.

  “O.K.,” he says, his tone different, sharper. “Tonight’s rap. Freedom.”

  “Freedom’s beautiful,” Grace says.

  “Freedom is beautiful. The whole world wishes to be free—like us.” Chester lifts his chin. I hear something a little raw in his voice now, pushy. We let each other’s hands go, though little Suri keeps holding mine.

  “Right on,” Window says.

  “Exactly.” Chester pauses. “And as we’re free, so should everything else in the world be free. Just as we respect every leaf and tree and beast in the world. Right?”

  “Right,” we all say, even me. Who could argue with this?

  “But how much freedom is there?”

  Nobody says anything for a moment, then Grace goes, “Not enough.”

  Chester folds his hands together. “Not enough . . . never enough. And isn’t it our work to make everyone—every thing—free?”

  “Why not?” I say. The words just pop out of me; I get no contradiction.

  “And who—or what—is maybe the least free of all?”

  His question hangs there, and it looks like all kinds of answers are running through our heads. Finally Sally, Chester’s old lady, says from right next to him, “Tell us what you’re getting at, Chet.”

  “O.K., babe.” Chester nods to Sally. “Could be worms, could be snakes, could be cactus, could be anything. But right now I’m thinking about the animals.” Chester lifts his chin, points down toward Butter, Saffron, and me; the way he’s looking at us, I feel a chill. “I’m thinking about your guys’ zoo.”

 
Up go everyone’s eyebrows; mine, too.

  “You’re saying the zoo animals aren’t . . . free?” Butter says, almost to herself.

  “Well, are they?”

  Butter faces Chester, shakes her head. “No, of course not. They’re in cages, or behind fences—”

  “And?”

  “And if they’re not, they’ll eat each other.” Butter has a spoon in her hand and points her utensil down the table. “They’re animals!”

  “I don’t get this,” Saffron says, quieter. She has a few streaks of silver in her hair, and as usual is wearing a yellow paisley granny dress. “What are you saying about our animals?”

  Chester faces Saffron directly. “I’m trying to imagine what it must be like to be a lion or tiger there. To feel—hell, to know—that you’re superior, and yet to be bound up, fenced in, tied down. It’s like—like when I was in the Merchant Marine, man, the regimentation, the boundaries, the total ass—”

  “I can dig what Chester’s saying,” Sally says from next to him.

  I rub my eyes. I’m thinking, But what is he saying? when Grace says, “Chester, what’s your trip?”

  Chester leans back in his seat at the head of the table, then folds his hands together. His eyes glow bright. “I’m just thinking what God would want. All His trees and leaves, His animals. . . .” A long pause, then: “Isn’t it our job to liberate them?”

  Butter’s fork stops in midair, just like that; her curly red hair seems jolted with electricity.

  But it’s Saffron who speaks. “Wait, you’re talking about going into our zoo and . . . stealing an animal?”

  “Not stealing, liberating.” There’s a sly smile on Chester’s face. “And not just any animal. One that’ll really make a statement. A lion or a tiger—”

  “A tiger?” Butter’s voice skirls up.

  “Or maybe a bison?” He’s looking sharp at us. “You guys do got bison, yes?” We nod. “So wouldn’t that be righteous?” Chester’s wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Think about it. You know how every time we go into town, people stop and look at us, the way we’re dressed—just like we’re in a zoo.” He leans back. “But we’re not. It’s just like people have these cages they see. Well, we have to break that up—”