The Bottom

He wasn't sure if got there, after all. He thought so. For him it was decisive: he'd been seized by it and felt turned inside out. Out the window, bottomland in moonlight. He glanced at the bed, a mat, and at her: flushed, breathing hard.

A steady reggae beat made the building feel slightly alive. It was a remodeled barn, large and blocky, painted a bold purple, with a peace sign painted on a bedsheet hanging above the front door, from the second story. He'd been holed up for the best part of three days, before the combat sister had poked her head through the trapdoor and climbed in. It was a bare, unfinished room, plywood for a floor, but private. He'd needed time to think, and after the first 24 hours of solitude, assumed he'd been forgotten about. He lived on water, crackers, and cold soup mix stirred into his aluminum mess cup, just as he had in the woods.

She was, he supposed, in her way, after the politics, ravishing. He was often put off by dreads, but hers were clean, soft and long, a shade of red that looked natural. Her face was alert, passionate, with an inviting smile.

She wanted not just to change the world but to stop it in its tracks and send it spinning the other way. And she thought she was on the verge. She wore a caftan, relic of the 70s. But on her it was updated. At first, in the room, there was only the moonlight gleaming through the unfinished window. Then she lit a candle. As she moved around him, she sang, and the dark mass of her body, backlit my moon and candle, was both strong and lean, with small breasts tacked securely to the material by emphatic nipples. Her hips rolled and moved like a silent sea -- her ankles were hairy -- barefoot -- she kicked a pillow against the wall, faced him, and sank to a crosslegged squat which left her legs bare to the knee in a sudden flowering. She used her hands to hide herself, but in the shadows there wasn't much. The V of her calves, hairy but not at all bad. Slight curve to the shin bones, octagonal kneecaps.

"Are you a cop?"

His first thought was to laugh. Then he realized how peculiar it had looked, and he knew there was a paranoia behind everything about the purple house. First there was the weed, always present, being traded, sold, smoked, cooked and he supposed other things. Then there was the revolutionary idealism. They were assembled for no less a purpose than to overthrow the present system, They used words like hegemony and paradigm, and there were large posters of Che and Bob Marley in every room one visited. The bookshelf was crowded with environmental newsletters, communist pamphlets and Wobbly newspapers, little red books and heavy tomes, as well as Tree Finders, sporting goods catalogues, marijuana literature and growing manuals, all mortared together with zeroxed 'zines on any given aspect of the current revolutionary lifestyle. On sundays they made soup and fed it to the poor. People from the house manned the Peace and Justice center, played guitar on the Plaza, and depended for survival, when all else failed, on the beneficience of the dumpster at Safeway.

"If I was, everyone here would have been locked up long ago." He felt a little like Bogart in Casablanca. There was a war on, and he wasn't up to taking part. This alone made him a suspicious character to any true believer. And the purple house was a nest of true believers, if nothing else,

She produced a glass pipe already loaded with a dense ration of the house special. She glanced at him, a lifting of the eyebrows accentuated by her wiry dreads, a loop of which had strayed between her eyes. She lit up and, cheeks distended and squinting, handed him the bowl. He thought how much she resembled somebody smoking weed for the first time, a girl in the backseat of a Camaro in the Sprouse-Reitz parking lot, Twenty years ago. But no, she was the here and now.

He took the bowl and touched the flame to it,

It would have been difficult to explain himself completely, but, he discovered, he rarely had to. People would talk endlessly if he stayed quiet, maybe the occasional query to show interest. But in general they could talk forever, and it really didn't matter if they knew who the hell you were or not. He supposed that was because so many people kept arriving in town, and their first mission was to discover and become part of the secret underground. They were commited, but they didn't understand the rules. And they were lonely.

She, like all the rest, was a refugee from a world she no longer loved or understood. She she was making a new world, by her rules, She said as much, by way of idle talk, as the weed took hold and the reggae vibrated under and through her. They both began to feel at ease; warm and sexy, in the soft light. She told him about her parents -- both in medicine, as it turned out, in Redwood City. But they were all about acquisition and power. They had stuffed her into Humboldt State the way a hunter takes game to the butcher, expecting results but not much involved in the process.

"My dad works at that big new hospital in Oakland. But he's not a doctor anymore. He's a vice president. So he travels. He sits on boards. He's The Man. I know it's just the world he came from. People had expectations then. But he doesn't get me at all. It's like I'm on a different planet."

She referred to a small wooden casket for another chunk of the weed, and carefully picked it apart before scooping it into the bowl. This time, she passed him the green.

"You're about as old as him, aren't you?"

He looked at his hands. They appeared large and worn. If she only knew. Older than a lot of things.

"I don't know. I'm pretty old, if that's what you mean."

"It's not that. Some guys your age, I'm all Ewww, but you, you don't seem old. You just seem a little weathered. But you don't act like my dad."

"I probably never did."

"Yeah, huh."

"So I thought I was hiding out up here. What made you decide to visit?"

"They started asking about you. Someone said you were a reporter, working undercover, but someone else said you were a cop. So I volunteered to find out."

"I'm just here for the music."

She smoked some more and passed him the bowl. Her serious demeanor fell apart whenever she took a toke, as she made great efforts to retain the smoke, and to pass him the bowl swiftly, trying to protect the curl of smoke that rose from the ember. Their fingers touched each time they passed the paraphenalia, at first lightly, then with authority, until finally she slipped a few fingers around his wrist and squeezed it, looking into his eyes and leaning close.

Then she kissed him, and it was the same bizarre feeling, except now he was in the front seat of his 72 Pinto out on Todd's Point, kissing his first real kisses with a girl who would leave him for a series of bikers, fishermen and hotrodders until he finally got the message.

The lips were strong and sensuous, and her thick tongue jabbed at his until he pushed back. She was spry and forceful and pushed him backward onto his mat, neatly discarding the caftan in a toss that revealed her slender, catlike form.