The Hammer of Eden (3 page)

That was all Priest needed.

He was hardworking, quick to catch on, and easy to get along with, and in a few days he was accepted as a regular member of the crew.

Now, as he sat down, Lenny said in his slow Texas accent: “So, Ricky, you’re not coming with us to Clovis.”

“That’s right,” Priest said. “I like the weather here too much to leave.”

“Well, I’d just like to say, very sincerely, that it’s been a real privilege and pleasure knowing you, even for such a short time.”

The others grinned. This kind of joshing was commonplace. They looked to Priest for a riposte.

He put on a solemn face and said: “Lenny, you’re so sweet and kind to me that I’m going to ask you one more time. Will you marry me?”

They all laughed. Mario clapped Priest on the back.

Lenny looked troubled and said: “You know I can’t marry you, Ricky. I already told you the reason why.” He paused for dramatic effect, and they all leaned forward to catch the punch line. “I’m a lesbian.”

They roared with laughter. Priest gave a rueful smile, acknowledging defeat, and ordered a pitcher of beer for the table.

The conversation turned to baseball. Most of them liked the Houston Astros, but Lenny was from Arlington and he followed the Texas Rangers. Priest had no interest in sports, so he waited impatiently, joining in now and again with a neutral comment. They were in an expansive mood. The job had been finished on time, they had all been well paid, and it was Friday night. Priest sipped his beer slowly. He never drank much: he hated to lose control. He watched Mario sinking the suds. When Tammy, their waitress, brought another pitcher, Mario stared longingly at her breasts beneath the checkered shirt.
Keep wishing, Mario—you could be in bed with your wife tomorrow night
.

After an hour, Mario went to the men’s room.

Priest followed.
The hell with this waiting, it’s decision time
.

He stood beside Mario and said: “I believe Tammy’s wearing black underwear tonight.”

“How do you know?”

“I got a little peek when she leaned over the table. I love to see a lacy brassiere.”

Mario sighed.

Priest went on: “You like a woman in black underwear?”

“Red,” said Mario decisively.

“Yeah, red’s beautiful, too. They say that’s a sign a woman really wants you, when she puts on red underwear.”

“Is that a fact?” Mario’s beery breath came a little faster.

“Yeah, I heard it somewhere.” Priest buttoned up. “Listen, I got to go. My woman’s waiting back at the motel.”

Mario grinned and wiped sweat from his brow. “I saw you and her this afternoon, man.”

Priest shook his head in mock regret. “It’s my weakness. I just can’t say no to a pretty face.”

“You were
doing
it, right there in the goddamn road!”

“Yeah. Well, when you haven’t seen your woman for a while, she gets kind of frantic for it, know what I mean?”
Come on, Mario, take the friggin’ hint!

“Yeah, I know. Listen, about tomorrow …”

Priest held his breath.

“Uh, if you’re still willing to do like you said …”

Yes! Yes!

“Let’s go for it.”

Priest resisted the temptation to hug him.

Mario said anxiously: “You still want to, right?”

“Sure I do.” Priest put an arm around Mario’s shoulders as they left the men’s room. “Hey, what are buddies for, know what I mean?”

“Thanks, man.” There were tears in Mario’s eyes. “You’re some guy, Ricky.”

*  *  *

They washed their pottery bowls and wooden spoons in a big tub of warm water and dried them on a towel made from an old workshirt. Melanie said to Priest: “Well, we’ll just start again somewhere else! Get a piece of land, build wood cabins, plant vines, make wine. Why not? That’s what you did all those years ago.”

“It is,” Priest said. He put his bowl on a shelf and tossed his spoon into the box. For a moment he was young again, strong as a pony and boundlessly energetic, certain that he could solve whatever problem life threw up next. He remembered the unique smells of those days:
newly sawn timber; Star’s young body, perspiring as she dug the soil; the distinctive smoke of their own marijuana, grown in a clearing in the woods; the dizzy sweetness of grapes as they were crushed. Then he returned to the present, and he sat down at the table.

“All those years ago,” he repeated. “We rented this land from the government for next to nothing, then they forgot about us.”

Star put in: “Never a rent increase, in twenty-nine years.”

Priest went on: “We cleared the forest with the labor of thirty or forty young people who were willing to work for free, twelve and fourteen hours a day, for the sake of an ideal.”

Paul Beale grinned. “My back still hurts when I think of it.”

“We got our vines for nothing from a kindly Napa Valley grower who wanted to encourage young people to do something constructive instead of just sitting around taking drugs all day.”

“Old Raymond Dellavalle,” Paul said. “He’s dead now, God bless him.”

“And, most important, we were willing and able to live on the poverty line, half-starved, sleeping on the floor, holes in our shoes, for five long years until we got our first salable vintage.”

Star picked up a crawling baby from the floor, wiped its nose, and said: “And we didn’t have any kids to worry about.”

“Right,” Priest said. “If we could reproduce all those conditions, we could start again.”

Melanie was not satisfied. “There has to be a way!”

“Well, there is,” Priest said. “Paul figured it out.”

Paul nodded. “You could set up a corporation, borrow a quarter of a million dollars from a bank, hire a workforce, and become like any other bunch of greedy capitalists watching the profit margins.”

“And that,” Priest said, “would be the same as giving in.”

*  *  *

It was still dark when Priest and Star got up on Saturday morning in Shiloh. Priest got coffee from the diner next door to their motel. When he came back, Star was poring over a road atlas by the light of the reading lamp. “You should be dropping Mario off at San Antonio
International Airport around nine-thirty, ten o’clock this morning,” she said. “Then you’ll want to leave town on Interstate 10.”

Priest did not look at the atlas. Maps baffled him. He could follow signs for I-10. “Where shall we meet?”

Star calculated. “I should be about an hour ahead of you.” She put her finger on a point on the page. “There’s a place called Leon Springs on I-10 about fifteen miles from the airport. I’ll park where you’re sure to see the car.”

“Sounds good.”

They were tense and excited. Stealing Mario’s truck was only the first step in the plan, but it was crucial: everything else depended on it.

Star was worrying about practicalities. “What will we do with the Honda?”

Priest had bought the car three weeks ago for a thousand dollars cash. “It’s going to be hard to sell. If we see a used-car lot, we may get five hundred for it. Otherwise we’ll find a wooded spot off the interstate and dump it.”

“Can we afford to?”

“Money makes you poor.” Priest was quoting one of the Five Paradoxes of Baghram, the guru they lived by.

Priest knew how much money they had to the last cent, but he kept everyone else in ignorance. Most of the communards did not even know there was a bank account. And no one in the world knew about Priest’s emergency cash, ten thousand dollars in twenties, taped to the inside of a battered old acoustic guitar that hung from a nail on the wall of his cabin.

Star shrugged. “I haven’t worried about it for twenty-five years, so I guess I won’t start now.” She took off her reading glasses.

Priest smiled at her. “You’re cute in your glasses.”

She gave him a sideways glance and asked a surprise question. “Are you looking forward to seeing Melanie?”

Priest and Melanie were lovers.

He took Star’s hand. “Sure,” he said.

“I like to see you with her. She makes you happy.”

A sudden memory of Melanie flashed into Priest’s brain. She was
lying facedown across his bed, asleep, with the morning sun slanting into the cabin. He sat sipping coffee, watching her, enjoying the texture of her white skin, the curve of her perfect rear end, the way her long red hair spread out in a tangled skein. In a moment she would smell the coffee, and roll over, and open her eyes, and then he would get back into bed and make love to her. But for now he was luxuriating in anticipation, planning how he would touch her and turn her on, savoring this delicious moment like a glass of fine wine.

The vision faded and he saw Star’s forty-nine-year-old face in a cheap Texas motel. “You’re not unhappy about Melanie, are you?” he asked.

“Marriage is the greatest infidelity,” she said, quoting another of the Paradoxes.

He nodded. They had never asked each other to be faithful. In the early days it had been Star who scorned the idea of committing herself to one lover. Then, after she hit thirty and started to calm down, Priest had tested her permissiveness by flaunting a string of girls in front of her. But for the last few years, though they still believed in the principle of free love, neither of them had actually taken advantage of it.

So Melanie had come as kind of a shock to Star. But that was okay. Their relationship was too settled anyway. Priest did not like anyone to feel they could predict what he was going to do. He loved Star, but the ill-concealed anxiety in her eyes gave him a pleasant feeling of control.

She toyed with her Styrofoam coffee container. “I just wonder how Flower feels about it all.” Flower was their thirteen-year-old daughter, the oldest child in the commune.

“She hasn’t grown up in a nuclear family,” he said. “We haven’t made her a slave to bourgeois convention. That’s the point of a commune.”

“Yeah,” Star agreed, but it was not enough. “I just don’t want her to lose you, that’s all.”

He stroked her hand. “It won’t happen.”

She squeezed his fingers. “Thanks.”

“We got to go,” he said, standing up.

Their few possessions were packed into three plastic grocery bags. Priest picked up the bags and took them outside to the Honda. Star followed.

They had paid their bill the previous night. The office was closed, and no one watched as Star took the wheel and they drove away in the gray early light.

Shiloh was a two-street town with one stoplight where the streets crossed. There were not many vehicles around at this hour on a Saturday morning. Star ran the stoplight and headed out of town. They reached the dump a few minutes before six o’clock.

There was no sign beside the road, no fence or gate, just a track where the sagebrush had been beaten down by the tires of pickup trucks. Star followed the track over a slight rise. The dump was in a dip, hidden from the road. She pulled up beside a pile of smoldering garbage. There was no sign of Mario or the seismic vibrator.

Priest could tell that Star was still troubled. He had to reassure her, he thought worriedly. She could not afford to be distracted today of all days. If something should go wrong, she would need to be alert, focused.

“Flower isn’t going to lose me,” he said.

“That’s good,” she replied cautiously.

“We’re going to stay together, the three of us. You know why?”

“Tell me.”

“Because we love each other.”

He saw relief drain the tension out of her face. She fought back tears. “Thank you,” she said.

He felt reassured. He had given her what she needed. She would be okay now.

He kissed her. “Mario will be here any second. You get movin’, now. Put some miles behind you.”

“You don’t want me to wait until he gets here?”

“He mustn’t get a close look at you. We can’t tell what the future holds, and I don’t want him to be able to identify you.”

“Okay.”

Priest got out of the car.

“Hey,” she said, “don’t forget Mario’s coffee.” She handed him the paper sack.

“Thanks.” He took the bag and slammed the car door.

She turned around in a wide circle and drove away fast, her tires throwing up a cloud of Texas desert dust.

Priest looked around. He found it amazing that such a small town could generate so much trash. He saw twisted bicycles and new-looking baby carriages, stained couches and old-fashioned refrigerators, and at least ten supermarket carts. The place was a wasteland of packaging: cardboard boxes for stereo systems, pieces of lightweight polystyrene packing like abstract sculptures, paper sacks and polythene bags and tinfoil wrappers, and a host of plastic containers that had contained substances Priest had never used: rinse aid, moisturizer, conditioner, fabric softener, fax toner. He saw a fairy-tale castle made of pink plastic, presumably a child’s toy, and he marveled at the wasteful extravagance of such an elaborate construction.

In Silver River Valley there was never much garbage. They did not use baby carriages or refrigerators, and they rarely bought anything that came in a package. The children would use imagination to make a fairy-tale castle from a tree or a barrel or a stack of timber.

A hazy red sun edged up over the ridge, casting a long shadow of Priest across a rusting bedstead. It made him think of sunrise over the snow peaks of the Sierra Nevada, and he suffered a sharp pang of longing for the cool, pure air of the mountains.

Soon, soon
.

Something glinted at his feet. A shiny metal object was half-buried in the earth. Idly he scraped away the dry earth with the toe of his boot, then bent and picked up the object. It was a heavy Stillson wrench. It seemed new. Mario might find it useful, Priest thought: it was about the right size for the large-scale machinery of the seismic vibrator. But, of course, the truck would contain a full tool kit, with wrenches to fit every nut used in its construction. Mario had no need of a discarded wrench. This was the throwaway society.

Priest dropped the wrench.

He heard a vehicle, but it did not sound like a big truck. He glanced up. A moment later a tan pickup came over the ridge, bouncing along the rough track. It was a Dodge Ram with a cracked windshield:
Mario’s car. Priest suffered a pang of unease. What did this mean? Mario was supposed to show up in the seismic vibrator. His own car would be driven north by one of his buddies, unless he had decided to sell it here and buy another in Clovis. Something had gone wrong. “Shit,” he said. “Shit.”