The Girls (7 page)

There were three other girls in the bus, and they turned to me with eagerness, a feral attention I read as flattering. Cigarettes going in their hands while they looked me up and down, an air of festivity and timelessness. A sack of green potatoes, pasty hot dog buns. A crate of wet, overripe tomatoes. “We were on a food run,” Donna said, though I didn't really understand what that meant. My mind was preoccupied with this sudden shift of luck, with monitoring the slow trickle of sweat under my arms. I kept waiting to be spotted, to be identified as an intruder who didn't belong. My hair too clean. Little nods toward presentation and decorum that seemed to concern no one else. My hair cut crazily across my vision from the open windows, intensifying the dislocation, the abruptness of being in this strange bus. A feather hanging from the rearview with a cluster of beads. Some dried lavender on the dashboard, colorless from the sun.

“She's coming to the solstice,” Donna chimed, “the summer solstice.”

It was early June and I knew the solstice was at the end of the month: I didn't say anything. The first of many silences.

“She's gonna be our offering,” Donna told the others. Giggling. “We're gonna sacrifice her.”

I looked to Suzanne—even our brief history seemed to ratify my presence among them—but she was sitting off to the side, absorbed by the box of tomatoes. Applying pressure to the skins, sifting out the rot. Waving away the bees. It would occur to me later that Suzanne was the only one who didn't seem overjoyed to come upon me, there on the road. Something formal and distant in her affect. I can only think it was protective. That Suzanne saw the weakness in me, lit up and obvious: she knew what happened to weak girls.

Donna introduced me around, and I tried to remember their names. Helen, a girl who seemed close to my age, though maybe it was just her pigtails. She was pretty in the youthful way of hometown beauties, snub-nosed, her features accessible, though with an obvious expiration date. Roos. “Short for Roosevelt,” she told me. “As in, Franklin D.” She was older than the other girls, with a face as round and rosy as a storybook character.

I couldn't remember the name of the tall girl who was driving: I never saw her again after that day.

Donna made a space, patting the nub of an embroidered cushion.

“Come here,” she said, and I sat down on the itchy pile. Donna seemed odd, slightly oafish, but I liked her. All of her greed and pettiness was right on the surface.

The bus lurched forward: my gut went jostled and tight, but I took the jug of cheap red wine when they passed it, splashing out over my hands. They looked happy, smiling, their voices sometimes breaking into snippets of song like campers around a fire. I was picking up the particularities—how they held hands without any self-consciousness and dropped words like “harmony” and “love” and “eternity.” How Helen acted like a baby, pulling on her pigtails and talking in her baby voice, abruptly sinking into Roos's lap like she could trick Roos into taking care of her. Roos didn't complain: she seemed stolid, nice. Those pink cheeks, her lank blond hair falling in her eyes. Though later I'd think maybe it was less niceness than a muted void where niceness should be. Donna asked me about myself, and so did the others, a constant stream of questions. I couldn't help my pleasure at being the focus of their attention. Inexplicably, they seemed to like me, and the thought was foreign and cheering, a mysterious gift I didn't want to probe too much. I could even cast Suzanne's silence in a welcoming light, imagining she was shy, like me.

“Nice,” Donna said, touching my shirt. Helen pinched a sleeve, too.

“You're just like a little doll,” Donna said. “Russell's gonna love you.”

She tossed out his name just like that, as if it were unimaginable that I might not know who Russell was. Helen giggled at the sound of his name, rolling her shoulders with pleasure, like she was sucking on a sweet. Donna saw my blink of uncertainty and laughed.

“You'll love him,” she said. “He's not like anyone else. No bullshit. It's like a natural high, being around him. Like the sun or something. That big and right.”

She looked over to be sure I was listening, seemed pleased that I was.

She said that the place we were headed was about a way of living. Russell was teaching them how to discover a path to truth, how to free their real selves from where it was coiled inside them. She talked about someone named Guy, who'd once trained falcons but had joined their group and now wanted to be a poet.

“When we met him, he was on some weird trip, just eating meat. He thought he was the devil or something. But Russell helped him. Taught him how to love,” Donna said. “Everyone can love, can transcend the bullshit, but so many things get us all stopped up.”

I didn't know how to imagine Russell. I had only the limited reference point of men like my father or boys I'd had crushes on. The way these girls spoke of Russell was different, their worship more practical, with none of the playful, girlish longing I knew. Their certainty was unwavering, invoking Russell's power and magic as though it were as widely acknowledged as the moon's tidal pull or the earth's orbit.

Donna said Russell was unlike any other human. That he could receive messages from animals. That he could heal a man with his hands, pull the rot out of you as cleanly as a tumor.

“He sees every part of you,” Roos added. As if that were a good thing.

The possibility of judgment being passed on me supplanted any worries or questions I might have about Russell. At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person.

The hint of sex that crossed their faces when they spoke of Russell, a prom-night giddiness. I understood, without anyone exactly saying so, that they all slept with him. The arrangement made me blush, inwardly shocked. No one seemed jealous of anyone else. “The heart doesn't own anything,” Donna chimed. “That's not what love is about,” she said, squeezing Helen's hand, a look passing between them. Even though Suzanne was mostly silent, sitting apart from us, I saw her face change at the mention of Russell. A wifely tenderness in her eyes that I wanted to feel, too.

I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that had always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.

They discussed plans for the solstice party. Helen up on her knees, tightening her pigtails with happy, brisk habit. Thrilling while they described the dresses they'd change into, some goofy solstice song Russell had made up. Someone named Mitch had given them enough money to buy alcohol: Donna said his name with a confusing emphasis.

“You know,” she repeated. “Mitch. Like Mitch Lewis?”

I hadn't recognized Mitch's name, but I'd heard of his band—I'd seen them on TV, playing in the hot lights of a studio set, sweat needling their foreheads. The background was a shag of tinsel, the stage revolving so the band members turned like jewelry-box ballerinas.

I affected nonchalance, but here it was: the world I had always suspected existed, the world where you called famous musicians by their first names.

“Mitch did a recording session with Russell,” Donna told me. “Russell blew his mind.”

There it was again, their wonder at Russell, their certainty. I was jealous of that trust, that someone else could stitch the empty parts of your life together so you felt there was a net under you, linking each day to the next.

“Russell's gonna be famous, like
that,
” Helen added. “He has a record deal, already.” It was like she was recounting a fairy tale, but this was even better, because she knew it would happen.

“You know what Mitch calls Russell?” Donna spooked her hands dreamily. “The Wizard. Isn't that a trip?”

After I'd been at the ranch a while, I saw how everyone spoke of Mitch. Of Russell's imminent record deal. Mitch was their patron saint, sending Clover Dairy shipments to the ranch so the kids could get calcium, supporting the place financially. I wouldn't hear the whole story until much later. Mitch had met Russell at Baker Beach, at a love-in of sorts. Russell attending in his buckskins, a Mexican guitar strapped to his back. Flanked by his women, begging for change with their air of biblical poverty. The cold, dark sand, a bonfire, Mitch on a break between records. Someone in a porkpie hat tending a pot of steamed clams.

Mitch, I'd learn, had been having a crisis—money disputes with a manager who'd been a childhood friend, a marijuana arrest that had been expunged, but still—and Russell must have seemed like a citizen of a realer world, stoking Mitch's guilt over the gold records, the parties where he covered the pool in Perspex. Russell offered up a mystic salvation, buttressed by the young girls who cast their eyes down in adoration when Russell spoke. Mitch invited the whole group back to his house in Tiburon, letting them gorge on the contents of his refrigerator, crash in his guest room. They drained bottles of apple juice and pink champagne and tracked mud onto the bed, thoughtless as an occupying army. In the morning, Mitch gave them a lift back to the ranch: by then Russell had seduced Mitch, speaking softly of truth and love, those invocations especially potent to wealthy searchers.

I believed everything the girls told me that day, their buzzy, swarming pride as they spoke of Russell's brilliance. How pretty soon he wouldn't be able to walk down the street without getting mobbed. How he'd be able to tell the whole world how to be free. And it was true that Mitch had set up a recording session for Russell. Thinking maybe Mitch's label would find Russell's vibe interesting and of the moment. I didn't know it until much later, but the session had gone badly, the failure legendary. This was before everything else happened.

There are those survivors of disasters whose accounts never begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that they noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before.

Did I miss some sign? Some internal twinge? The bees glittering and crawling in the crate of tomatoes? An unusual lack of cars on the road? The question I remember Donna asking me in the bus—casually, almost as an afterthought.

“You ever hear anything about Russell?”

The question didn't make sense to me. I didn't understand that she was trying to gauge how many of the rumors I'd heard: about orgies, about frenzied acid trips and teen runaways forced to service older men. Dogs sacrificed on moonlit beaches, goat heads rotting in the sand. If I'd had friends besides Connie, I might've heard chatter of Russell at parties, some hushed gossip in the kitchen. Might've known to be wary.

But I just shook my head. I hadn't heard anything.

Even later, even knowing the things I knew, it was impossible, that first night, to see beyond the immediate. Russell's buckskin shirt, smelling of flesh and rot and as soft as velvet. Suzanne's smile blooming in me like a firework, losing its colored smoke, its pretty, drifting cinders.

“Home on the range,” Donna said as we climbed down from the bus that afternoon.

It took me a moment to see where I was. The bus had gone far from the highway, bumping down a dirt road that ended deep in the blond summer hills, cupped with oaks. An old wooden house: the knobby rosettes and plaster columns giving it the air of a minor castle. It was part of a grid of ad hoc existence that included, as far as I could see, a barn and a swampy-looking pool. Six fleecy llamas drowsing in a pen. Far-off figures were hacking at brush along the fence. They raised their hands in greeting, then bent again to their work.

“The creek is low, but you can still swim,” Donna said.

It seemed magical to me that they actually lived there together. The Day-Glo symbols crawling up the side of the barn, clothes on a line ghosting in a breeze. An orphanage for raunchy children.

They had once filmed a car commercial at the ranch, Helen said in her baby voice. “A while ago, but still.”

Donna nudged me. “Pretty wild out here, huh?”

I said, “How'd you even find this place?”

“This old guy used to live here, but he had to move out 'cause the roof was bad.” Donna shrugged. “We fixed it, kind of. His grandson rents it to us.”

To make money, she explained, they took care of the llamas and worked for the farmer next door, harvesting lettuce with their pocketknives and selling his haul at the farmer's market. Sunflowers and jars of marmalade gluey with pectin.

“Three bucks an hour. Not bad,” Donna said. “But money gets tight.”

I nodded, like I understood such concerns. I watched a young boy, four or five, hurtle himself at Roos, crash-landing into her leg. He was badly sunburned, his hair bleached white, and he seemed too old to still be wearing a diaper. I assumed the boy was Roos's child. Was Russell the father? The quick thought of sex raised a queasy rush in my chest. The boy lifted his head, like a dog roused from sleep, and looked at me with a bored, suspicious squint.

Donna leaned into me. “Come meet Russell,” she said. “You'll love him, I swear.”

“She'll meet him at the party,” Suzanne said, cutting into our conversation. I hadn't noticed her approach: her closeness startled me. She handed a sack of potatoes to me and took up a cardboard box in her arms. “We're gonna dump this stuff in the kitchen, first. For the feast.”

Donna pouted, but I followed Suzanne.

“Bye, dolly,” she called, frittering her thin fingers and laughing, not unkindly.

I followed Suzanne's dark hair through a jumble of strangers. The ground was uneven, a disorienting slope. It was the smell, too, a heavy smokiness. I was flattered Suzanne had enlisted my help, like it confirmed I was one of them. There were young people milling around in bare feet or boots, their hair drifty and sun lightened. I overheard feverish invocations of the solstice party. I didn't know it yet, but it was rare for the ranch, all this efficient work. Girls wore their best thrift store rags and carried instruments in their arms as gently as babies, the sun catching the steel of a guitar and fractaling into hot diamonds of light. The tambourines rattling tuneless in their arms.

“Those fuckers bite me all night,” Suzanne said, swatting at one of the vicious horseflies that droned around us. “I wake up all bloody from scratching.”

Beyond the house, the land was scarred with boulders and the filtery oaks, a few hollow cars in a state of disrepair. I liked Suzanne but couldn't shake the feeling that I was struggling to keep pace with her: it was an age when I often conflated liking people with feeling nervous around them. A boy with no shirt and a chunky silver belt buckle catcalled when we passed. “What you got there? A solstice present?”

“Shut up,” Suzanne said.

The boy smiled, raffish, and I tried to smile back. He was young, his hair long and dark, a medieval droop to his face I took as romantic. Handsome with the feminine duskiness of a cinematic villain, though I'd find out he was just from Kansas.

This was Guy. A farm boy who'd defected from Travis AFB when he'd discovered it was the same bullshit scene as his father's house. He'd worked in Big Sur for a while, then drifted north. Gotten caught up in a group fermenting around the borders of the Haight, the hobby Satanists who wore more jewelry than a teenage girl. Scarab lockets and platinum daggers, red candles and organ music. Then Guy had come across Russell playing guitar in the park one day. Russell in the frontier buckskins that maybe reminded Guy of the adventure books of his youth, serials starring men who scraped caribou hides and forded frigid Alaskan rivers. Guy had been with Russell ever since.

Guy was the one who would drive the girls later that summer. Tighten his own belt around the caretaker's wrists, that big silver buckle notching into the tender skin and leaving behind an oddly shaped stamp, like a brand.

But that first day he was just a boy, giving off a dirty fritz like a warlock, and I glanced back at him with a thrilled shiver.

Suzanne stopped a girl walking by: “Tell Roos to get Nico back to the nursery. He shouldn't be out here.”

The girl nodded.

Suzanne glanced at me as we kept going, reading my confusion. “Russell doesn't want us to get too attached to the kids. Especially if they're ours.” She let out a grim laugh. “They aren't our property, you know? We don't get to fuck them up just because we want something to cuddle.”

It took me a moment to process this idea that parents didn't have the right. It suddenly seemed blaringly true. My mother didn't own me just because she had given birth to me. Sending me to boarding school because the spirit moved her. Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien. To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn't be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you'd hoped.

The kitchen was much darker than outside, and I blinked in the sudden wash. All the rooms smelled pungent and earthy, some mix of high-volume cooking and bodies. The walls were mostly bare, except for streaks of a daisy-patterned wallpaper and another funny heart painted there, too, like on the bus. The window sashes were crumbling, T-shirts tacked up instead of curtains. Somewhere nearby, a radio was on.

There were ten or so girls in the kitchen, focused on their cooking tasks, and everyone was healthy looking, their arms slim and tan, their hair thick. Bare feet gripping the rough boards of the floor. They cackled and snipped at one another, pinching exposed flesh and swatting with spoons. Everything seemed sticky and a little rotten. As soon as I put the bag of potatoes on the counter, a girl started picking through them.

“Green potatoes are poisonous,” she said. Sucking her teeth, sifting through the sack.

“Not if you cook them,” Suzanne shot back. “So cook them.”

Suzanne slept in a small outbuilding with a dirt floor, a bare twin mattress against each of the four walls. “Mostly girls crash here,” she said, “it depends. And Nico, sometimes, even though I don't want him to. I want him to grow up free. But he likes me.”

A square of stained silk was tacked above a mattress, a Mickey Mouse pillowcase on the bed. Suzanne passed me a rolled cigarette, the end wet with her saliva. Ash fell on her bare thigh, but she didn't seem to notice. It was weed, but it was stronger than what Connie and I smoked, the dry refuse from Peter's sock drawer. This was oily and dank, and the cloying smoke it produced didn't dissipate quickly. I waited to start feeling differently. Connie would hate all this. Think this place was dirty and strange, that Guy was frightening—this knowledge made me proud. My thoughts were softening, the weed starting to surface.

“Are you really sixteen?” Suzanne asked.

I wanted to keep up the lie, but her gaze was too bright.

“I'm fourteen,” I said.

Suzanne didn't seem surprised. “I'll give you a ride home, if you want. You don't have to stay.”

I licked my lips—did she think I couldn't handle this? Or maybe she thought I would embarrass her. “I don't have to be anywhere,” I said.

Suzanne opened her mouth to say something, then hesitated.

“Really,” I said, starting to feel desperate. “It's fine.”

There was a moment, when Suzanne looked at me, when I was sure she'd send me home. Pack me back to my mother's house like a truant. But then the look drained into something else, and she got to her feet.

“You can borrow a dress,” she said.

There was a rack of clothes hanging and more spilling out of a garbage bag—torn denim. Paisley shirts, long skirts. The hems stuttering with loose stitching. The clothes weren't nice, but the quantity and unfamiliarity stirred me. I'd always been jealous of girls who wore their sister's hand-me-downs, like the uniform of a well-loved team.

“This stuff is all yours?”

“I share with the girls.” Suzanne seemed resigned to my presence: Maybe she'd seen that my desperation was bigger than any desire or ability she had to shoo me off. Or maybe the admiration was flattering, my wide eyes, greedy for the details of her. “Only Helen makes a fuss. We have to go get things back; she hides them under her pillow.”

“Don't you want some for yourself?”

“Why?” She took a draw from the joint and held her breath. When she spoke, her voice was crackled. “I'm not on that kind of trip right now. Me me me. I love the other girls, you know. I like that we share. And they love me.”

She watched me through the smoke. I felt shamed. For doubting Suzanne or thinking it was strange to share. For the limits of my carpeted bedroom at home. I shoved my hands in my shorts. This wasn't bullshit dabbling, like my mother's afternoon workshops.

“I get it,” I said. And I did, and tried to isolate the flutter of solidarity in myself.

The dress Suzanne chose for me stank like mouse shit, my nose twitching as I pulled it over my head, but I was happy wearing it—the dress belonged to someone else, and that endorsement released me from the pressure of my own judgments.

“Good,” Suzanne said, surveying me. I ascribed more meaning to her pronouncement than I ever had to Connie's. There was something grudging about Suzanne's attention, and that made it doubly valued. “Let me braid your hair,” she said. “Come here. It'll tangle if you dance with it loose.”

I sat on the floor in front of Suzanne, her legs on either side of me, and tried to feel comfortable with the closeness, the sudden, guileless intimacy. My parents were not affectionate, and it surprised me that someone could just touch me at any moment, the gift of their hand given as thoughtlessly as a piece of gum. It was an unexplained blessing. Her tangy breath on my neck as she swept my hair to one side. Walking her fingers along my scalp, drawing a straight part. Even the pimples I'd seen on her jaw seemed obliquely beautiful, the rosy flame an inner excess made visible.

Both of us were silent as she braided my hair. I picked up one of the reddish rocks from the floor, lined up beneath the mirror like the eggs of a foreign species.

“We lived in the desert for a while,” Suzanne said. “That's where I got that.”

She told me about the Victorian they had rented in San Francisco. How they'd had to leave after Donna had accidentally started a fire in the bedroom. The time spent in Death Valley where they were all so sunburned they couldn't sleep for days. The remains of a gutted, roofless salt factory in the Yucatán where they'd stayed for six months, the cloudy lagoon where Nico had learned to swim. It was painful to imagine what I had been doing at the same time: drinking the tepid, metallic water from my school's drinking fountain. Biking to Connie's house. Reclining in the dentist's chair, hands politely in my lap, while Dr. Lopes worked in my mouth, his gloves slick with my idiot drool.

The night was warm and the celebration started early. There were maybe forty of us, swarming and massing in the stretch of dirt, hot air gusting over the run of tables, the wavy light from a kerosene lamp. The party seemed much bigger than it actually was. There was an antic quality that distorted my memory, the house looming behind us so everything gained a cinematic flicker. The music was loud, the sweet thrum occupying me in an exciting way, and people were dancing and grabbing for one another, hand over wrist: they skipped in circles, threading in and out. A drunken, yelping chain that broke when Roos sat down hard in the dirt, laughing. Some little kids skulked around the table like dogs, full and lonesome for the adult excitement, their lips scabby from picking.

“Where's Russell?” I asked Suzanne. She was stoned, like me, her black hair loose. Someone had given her a shrub rose, half-wilted, and she was trying to knot it in her hair.

“He'll be here,” she said. “It doesn't really start till he's here.”

She brushed some ash off my dress and the gesture stirred me.

“There's our little doll,” Donna cooed when she saw me. She had a tinfoil crown on her head that kept falling off. She'd drawn an Egyptian pattern on her hands and freckled arms with kohl before clearly losing interest—it was all over her fingers, smeared on her dress, along her jaw. Guy swerved, avoiding her hands.

“She's our sacrifice,” Donna told him, her words already careening around. “Our solstice offering.”

Guy smiled at me, his teeth stained from wine.

They burned a car that night in celebration, and the flames were hot and jumpy and I laughed out loud, for no reason—the hills were so dark against the sky and no one from my real life knew where I was and it was the
solstice,
and who cared if it wasn't actually the solstice? I had distant thoughts of my mother, houndish nips of worry, but she'd assume I was at Connie's. Where else would I be? She couldn't conceive of this kind of place even existing, and even if she could, even if by some miracle she showed up, she wouldn't be able to recognize me. Suzanne's dress was too big, and it often slipped off my shoulders, but pretty soon I wasn't as quick to pull the sleeves back up. I liked the exposure, the way I could pretend I didn't care, and how I actually started not to care, even when I accidentally flashed most of a breast as I hitched up the sleeves. Some stunned, blissed-out boy—a painted crescent moon on his face—grinned at me like I'd always been there among them.