The Singing Bone (11 page)

“Project?” Alice said.

Trina slipped the chain she'd chosen into the pocket of her jeans and turned away. They spent nearly every night at Mr. Wyck's anyway. If they didn't, they left as the sun came up, moving slowly through the woods, tired, heavy, drug-edged. More often, though, they fell asleep on the living room floor in front of the big stone fireplace, tangled in blankets and each other's limbs. They were perpetually late for school. Who noticed? Molly's parents tried to keep her in the house, but at night, she'd slip out through her bedroom window or creep down to the basement to open the sliding glass door. In the morning, they'd find her bed empty. Molly's mother kept saying they should call the police, but Mr. Malloy said it was a stage and Molly needed to feel the wind in her wings. At Mr. Wyck's, Molly told them about her parents, in the living room next to the fire, and Allegra turned to her and said, “And do you feel it?”

“Feel what?” Molly asked.

“
Your
wind. Grow
your
wings.” Everyone stared at Allegra. The way she said it made it sound like something they should pay attention to. Do you feel it? The wind—your wings? Allegra asked Molly to make it her mantra when she meditated: Inhale, wind, exhale, fly.

Stover's mother called his father. She took Stover's face in her hands and said, “I am worried about you.” She had to look up at him to say this, but Stover only smiled. He put his hands over his mother's hands and moved them, holding them for a moment. “Mother,” he said. “I'm fine. These are nice people.” So he told Mr. Wyck he wanted to have his mother out for dinner one night, and Mr. Wyck said that was fine but every time they picked a date, Mr. Wyck had to change it, and soon everyone had forgotten about the dinner but Stover's mother, who sat up all night and waited for her son to come home, which happened, as the days got longer and warmer, less frequently. Like Molly and Trina, Stover was eighteen.

Alice was the only one who wasn't eighteen. She'd started school a grade early, and that summer, as they traipsed through JCPenney, Alice was still seventeen. Alice missed her driving test. Alice wondered if her mother even noticed. It was as if she'd spent all those years studying and winning awards for nothing. If she did nothing—or less than nothing—her mother behaved as if everything was fine, as if nothing had changed, and so Alice played along. Each time she stayed out all night, she watched her mother's face the next evening for a sign of dissatisfaction. And suddenly Alice couldn't stand her mother anymore. The rooms of the house they shared were getting smaller—her mother's constant trips to yard sales and second-hand shops were officially an obsession as far as Alice could tell. She had to clear a space for herself when she wanted to eat dinner, moving piles of clothing and knick-knacks aside. Paperback books with broken spines and a single clip-on earring escaped from the pile. Mr. Wyck's house was as sterile as a hospital ward by comparison.

The only person who cared that Alice was away was Mr. Valetti, who cornered her in the hallway and demanded to know what was happening with her. “You're smart,” he said, pointing a finger at her. “You're supposed to be setting an example for everyone. If you keep on like this, they won't let you even show up to graduation. You look like you're on pills. What are you taking?” He peered into her eyes. “I don't know what's happening to you. You're such a good kid.”

“I'm not a kid,” Alice answered. “And don't worry about me. No one else does.” Trina was waiting for her. Molly was waiting for her. Stover was waiting for her.
Mr. Wyck
was waiting for her.

At Mr. Wyck's, they shed their old skins and tried on new ones. They became like Allegra, like Lee, like one another. When their clothes were dirty, they wore Allegra's—embroidered shifts and wrap skirts. Stover wore Lee's faded shirts and jeans. They left their own T-shirts, skirts, and jeans scattered on the floor at Mr. Wyck's house, and Allegra, like a mother hen, washed and folded them so they'd have something clean to wear the next time they stayed.

Allegra taught them yoga. She turned the names of the poses out lightly, in Sanskrit, and Alice thought they sounded magical, otherworldly.
Virabhadrasana
, Allegra called out, and soon they all knew what to do. She showed them how to meditate, telling them to imagine a white light running up and down their spines, and when they finished, she thanked them for their time and said, “May the joy of this day find a place in your soul.”

In the evenings, they sat at the big wooden table and ate the meals they cooked together—beans with basmati rice and vegetables, corn bread. They drank wine with dinner and smoked pot after, their glasses always filled, the sky gradually darkening, the light edging the night out little by little as the days grew longer. Allegra brought out sweets—caramels and salted chocolates. She lit candles. One night Mr. Wyck told them that he'd met some of the Weather Underground that week—that some of them were upstate, and maybe he'd take the group the next time he went. He'd started calling them that, “the group,” “our clan,” “my animals.”

“Those guys are crazy,” Stover said, and Mr. Wyck looked at him, a half-smile, a nod.

“Is that what they told you?” he asked.

“Is that what who told me?” Stover asked.

“You're all brainwashed, man,” Allegra said. “That's what you hear on TV. You should throw your TVs out. Start over.”

Mr. Wyck didn't have a TV. He kept an old radio in his room. He said if he wanted the news, he would go find someone he trusted to tell it to him. He laid a hand on Allegra's leg. “They're just bourgeois, baby,” he said. “They haven't had their eyes opened yet. Remember when you thought like that? It's what you see on the news. What your parents tell you.”

“But they're violent,” Molly said. “They blow up buildings. How does that help anything?”

“Listen to this.” Mr. Wyck leaned in. He put his hands up like a frame. “Do what thou wilt. That is the whole of the law.”

“Yeah.” Allegra held the joint between her fingers. She nodded at them, but no one knew what to say. Alice turned it over:
Do what thou wilt. That is the whole of the law.
She watched Mr. Wyck's face.

“Got it?” Mr. Wyck said, taking the joint from Allegra. “Get it?”

“Like, follow your heart?” Molly tried.

“Yeah, sort of, sweetheart.” Mr. Wyck lifted his glass at her and winked. “The Weathermen,” he went on, “they haven't killed anyone. Their violence is directed at the establishment, not at individuals.”

“The real violence is done when nothing is done,” Alice said, and Mr. Wyck looked at her, his eyebrows raised. “I mean,” she said, “isn't that their thesis?”

“Where did you hear that?” Mr. Wyck asked.

“I read it. I guess in the
Times
,” Alice said. She was fascinated by the Weathermen. They went where no one else could. They were quick and invisible, a revolutionary shadow. They'd freed Timothy Leary from prison, blown up part of the Capitol. When Bernardine Dohrn spoke, ­everyone listened. She was just a girl like Alice, which had mystified Alice at first, that they let her speak for them, but then the magic of it came to her: a fearless woman, a revolutionary child. What was more serious than that—was anything more frightening? She was the sane and intelligent version of Squeaky Fromme. Dohrn and Ayers were still in hiding, but it was rumored that the group couldn't hold out much longer. “You
know
them?” she said to Mr. Wyck.

“They've been here,” he said. “Sitting where you're sitting.”

“Here?” she said, smiling, grasping the sides of her chair. “Did Dohrn or Ayers sit
here
?”

“Sure,” Mr. Wyck said. “I'll take you upstate with me one day. They're forming a new group up there. You'll see. Something more radical.”

“Dohrn and Ayers?” she asked, but Mr. Wyck shrugged.

“I'm not at liberty, baby,” he said. “My lips are sealed.”

Alice was agitated. She hardly listened as Mr. Wyck began another story—something about being
this close
to Mick Jagger at a bar in San Fran. It seemed to Alice that the good things had already happened and that the dreamers were all already dead.

“Take us to Greenwich Village, Mr. Wyck,” Stover said.

“That's all over, that scene. People go to the East Village now, but you wouldn't catch me there,” Allegra said. “No way. It's all different. Junkies. People getting shot. You don't want to go into the city these days. It's best to stay out here where you can be free and real.”

“I could take you,” Mr. Wyck said. “Someday. Allegra,” he said, turning towards her, “you never have to go back, baby.”

“He found me there,” Allegra said. “Strung out on junk. He brought me here. He just scooped me up and carried me out. I was living like a rat, like a sewer rat.” Her chair scraped loudly against the wooden floor as she rose. Mr. Wyck shook his head and stood up to go after her. Alice could hear them quietly talking in the kitchen.

“How about you?” Molly turned to Lee. “How did you end up here?”

“Oh,” Lee said. “Yeah, I can't talk about that right now.” He looked at Trina, who turned towards him and took his hands in hers.

“When it's time,” she said, “Mr. Wyck will tell you everything.”

There were mysteries. People came and went. Some used their real names and some you knew by their monikers: Big John and Lady Linda, Schizz, Tuna, Mr. Grooves. Mr. Wyck knew so many people. When Alice, Molly, and Stover showed up, a party might already be going. It wasn't unusual to meet people one day and have them gone the next. Cars and motorcycles in the front yard, new faces inside, Lady Linda laughing on the front porch when Stover bowed to her and Molly curtsied, her belly jiggling beneath the hem of her halter top.

There was live music at night, a bonfire in the field—LSD, pot, 'shrooms; less frequently, speedballs, coke, and heroin. Everyone was stoned on something, but Alice preferred the brightly beautiful sheen of lysergic acid diethylamide mellowed with red wine and a puff of marijuana. In the ecstatic, visionary trance of a saint, she wandered Mr. ­Wyck's house, a child visitor in a grown-up's world. She found his room and went in and opened the closet. She climbed in and pressed her face to the clothes, breathing in a heady mix of sandalwood, mothballs, Tide.

She found a watch on Mr. Wyck's dresser. She put it on and pushed it up and down her arm. She'd never seen him wear it, and when she put it to her ear, it didn't tick. She put it back and began to open drawers, randomly pulling things out. She wondered if she could climb in and fall asleep, but then she remembered she wasn't as small as she felt. She marveled at the way the drawers slid in and out on their grooves, soundlessly and smoothly. She pulled a sweater out and put it on. Red wool, frayed at the wrists.

Satisfied, she wandered back to the stairs, where she sat on the second- floor landing and watched the party below. Schizz danced in the middle of the living room, wearing one of Allegra's fake fur capes, lifting his legs high in the air. Allegra lay on the floor below him, watching him as he high-stepped over her, laughing; Tuna strutted back and forth in Allegra's lace-up boots, wobbling like a newborn colt. Alice saw Mr. Wyck crawl across the floor and begin to climb the stairs on all fours. She stared, frightened, putting her hands over her mouth—he was an animal, slick with sweat, his arms strong, his tattoos dancing randomly on his arms. Tattoos of birds circled his neck, their black wings flapping as he moved towards her.

When he got close, he put a finger to his lips,
Shh
, and then his face came back—no longer frightening—and he put his head in her lap and closed his eyes, and she stared down at his face in the half-light, thinking his stubble was like lace, that it had a pattern, and she touched it; she drew her finger lightly over his eyelashes, so long, and then around the shell of his ear, which was so fantastic that she could not imagine that she'd ever accepted any ear as something normal. He sat up and stared at her, fingering the sleeve of the red sweater, and she scooted up and down on the steps, crawling towards him and then moving away, until finally he caught her, and staring into her eyes, he said, “Close your eyes,” and when she did, he pressed his palms into hers and moved her hands into the air above them, circling one way, then the other. When he pulled his hands away, she could no longer sense him near her, and she thought she might be falling, but she wasn't. He was carrying her over his shoulder, back downstairs to the party, where he set her down and told her to dance, and she danced with Schizz in the middle of the room, in front of the fire, lifting her feet high like his and laughing madly because someone was hiding in the corner, watching her.

Eventually, the newcomers teetered out and went wherever people like Schizz and Tuna went, disappearing into the night or the dawn, floating six feet above the ground or dragging themselves to safety, and then it was the crazy animals together—Mr. Wyck and Allegra, Stover, Molly, Trina, Lee, and Alice, drinking water and wine and staring into the flames, each seeing whatever it was they saw—that most valuable realization they would never be able to recall. That was when Mr. Wyck told them things, things about his beliefs, about the platforms of the universe and how everything had to align the right way.

When the topic turned to sex, everyone was pretty quiet, but Mr. Wyck said they should know their bodies, that sex had a special kind of energy that made them stronger, more powerful. The more they had sex, the more fortune they could bring into their lives. “Use your beliefs to fine-tune reality. In orgasm, we enter earthly bardo—a state between life and death, where time is suspended, where reality is changeable.”