The Totem 1979 (8 page)

From all accounts, there wasn’t much to see, regardless: just an open space within the trees, wooden buildings set out into streets and sections, not like houses, more like barracks, just as if this were the Army. That had turned a lot of people off, helping to thin the ranks. The place itself was far off in the forest. Quiller hadn’t bought land near the highway. He had bought it away up in the mountains, also buying a strip of land to get to it. That was why you couldn’t see the compound. Walking up the loggers’ road, you came to where a gate was closed and members of the commune watched it. You could work across and come in from the side. That took several hours, though. The woods were thick and slashed with ravines. But the borders there were guarded too, and anyway the woods were still so thick you couldn’t see the commune. For a picture of it, you would have to walk right to the forest’s edge, and someone surely would have spotted you. There were rumors that one man had gone there, been discovered, had his camera taken from him, and been chased. But no one ever found the man to talk to him, and no one ever knew.

And anyway, so what? The story by then wasn’t at the compound. It was in the town. All the freaks who’d been rejected or had lost their interest showed up in Potter’s Field. That was when the trouble started, when the town rejected all those crazy perverts, wouldn’t sell them food or even gasoline, and called in the state police to have them sent away. There were fights and broken windows, shattered heads, Day-Gloed buildings, litter, obscene gestures, and a lot of dope. It was two weeks that the town wished hadn’t been. In the end, the freaks were all evicted, but the town looked on the compound as the cause of all the trouble. Indeed the town drew no distinction between Quiller’s people and those others, and it wouldn’t sell the compound food.

Dunlap knew that from the files in New York too. He had seen the photos of the San Francisco riot, policemen dragging hippies off, kicking, swinging clubs and pushing, a great mass of pained and twisted faces, bodies trampled underfoot-photos that reminded him of others like them from the previous decade, especially the march on the Pentagon and the Chicago Democratic convention. He had read about the sudden permits that came through, suspecting that Quiller could have had them sooner but that Quiller held off until he made a point, binding all those people to him. Dunlap saw photos of the Corvette heading out of San Francisco, the long procession following; of locals by the road who even in still pictures seemed to shake their heads and turn and frown and ask each other what the hell was going on. State patrol cars waiting for a traffic violation. Restaurants that wouldn’t serve them. By the time they got to Utah, the photos began to seem ordinary. Editors enlivened them, juxtaposing Brigham Young, the Mormon trek, and Quiller’s ragged motorcade. The point was obvious, Day-Gloed buses against covered wagons, this new trek a parody of what had once been dignified and meaningful. Even layouts like that soon lost their effectiveness, however, so that by the time the column reached Wyoming, there was little new to show. Oh, sure, there were the mountains and the valley, the road up to the compound, and the gate. But all those pictures didn’t have much drama to them. Editors rejected them in favor of what was happening in town.

As near as Dunlap could remember from the photos he had studied in New York, there didn’t seem much difference between how the town had looked back then and what it looked like now. A few new buildings maybe, and of course the slogans had been erased from the walls, but really nothing much was changed. The same wide central street, the same two-story buildings that went straight down on both sides, their clapboard walls painted white. A pocket of tradition. Continuity. The place had likely looked the same back in the fifties too. Dunlap had seen pictures of the confrontation in the town, beaded hippies face-to-face with stern-eyed men in cowboy hats, state policemen standing by patrol cars waiting for trouble; fights and local people jeering; flying stones and bottles, broken windows, tents and garbage through the park-and more fights, further confrontations, each day worse than the one before until the roundup in the park, patrol cars all around it while the troopers went in from all sides and pushed the hippies toward the center, county buses waiting for them, those on foot at least, others forced to start their cars and trucks and vans and get the hell out from the town. The state police cars stayed with them right through the town and valley, up the pass, and only left them when they reached the other side. There were some who, stubborn, came back, but they didn’t last long, forced to leave again, and then that part of everything was over. The story idled.

There was nothing doing. Newsmen and photographers soon left. Potter’s Field was by itself again, except for Quiller and the compound.

So much for the files that Dunlap had gone through in New York. Parsons had been right, of course. The press had sided with the hippies. Civil rights and freedom of expression, not to mention that the hippies were the underdogs. All the same, Dunlap couldn’t blame the town. It really hadn’t been prepared for several thousand strung-out, West-coast freaks descending on them. There was just too little understanding. It didn’t matter anyhow. That wasn’t what he’d come for, although he’d have to note it for perspective in his story. What he wanted was the story of what happened next, the story no one else had covered, the subtle many-year changes that when isolated didn’t have much drama but when put together and compressed might make a dramatic point.

Quiller and the compound, what went on up there behind those sentries and that gate? Dunlap was guessing that the new republic failed, all that wealth and innocence not good enough to make a difference. Lofty ideals compromised, gold turned into lead. Not that Quiller’s ideals had been very deep or complicated. Regardless of the I.Q. they had come from, they were mostly well-phrased slogans. Sure, there was the paradox of using wealth to make a way of life that didn’t need it. There was, too, the paradox of Quiller, straight and clean-cut, leading all those hippies, his classic Corvette at the head of all those music-blaring buses. Nonetheless, for all that Dunlap knew, Quiller had just made himself look straight so he could use the system to create his enterprise. The only way to know that was to talk to Quiller, and as much as Dunlap was aware, no one from the outside had heard news of Quiller since he’d closed the gates and gone back in the wood-enshrouded compound back in 1970. It was almost twenty-three years ago exactly. Parsons had been right. Next month, the middle of July, would be about the time the trouble had reached its worst within the town. Dunlap guessed that if the compound went to hell, its members simply drifted off, Quiller with them, so dejected no one wished to talk about it. Could be Quiller lost his wealth and disappeared, no longer powerful, only disillusioned and anonymous. Could be. All the same, you’d think that someone would have told.

Well, the only way to know was to do the research, get the facts, and get out of here. Dunlap sat before a microfilm machine. He was in the newspaper’s basement, in a small room at the far end of a corridor. His coat was on a chair, the only light the one that glowed from the microfilm machine. It was pleasant down here in the half-dark, cool and faintly soothing, even with the sound of a fan that blew air past the film to keep the reading light in there from burning through it. He had asked the man in charge down here to give him all the reels for summer, 1970. Actually he’d been surprised that Parsons had the Gazette’s morgue on microfilm. Most town papers like this just had issues put in storage, destroying many when they needed room. Parsons, though, was up on things. Dunlap hated reading microfilm. All the same, he was impressed.

He sat there, fooling with a reel, adjusting it. He turned the reel until he got an image on the screen before him, centered it, and started reading. What he wanted was some aspect of the story that the files he’d read had not included. Some small detail that would tell him what had happened in the compound while the troubles in the town upstaged it. For a time, the microfilm before him and the files he’d read in New York were the same. Different writers handled them. There were different slants, one in favor of the town and one against it, but the information was the same. Then he came across an item that he’d never seen before. The cars and trucks and vans that went up in the compound. Quiller had them sold. Some he sent down to the local dealers, trading at a loss for cash. Then the trouble in the town intensified so much that angry dealers wouldn’t any longer trade with him, and emissaries from the compound had to leave the valley for the dealers in the nearest other towns. Emissaries. That was it. Quiller wasn’t ever with them. What was more, the emissaries wouldn’t ever mention what was going on up there. That was no surprise, of course, although Dunlap thought that it was subtle. Good religious precepts. Swear your followers to secrecy; have them give up all unnecessary worldly goods. The money they earned from the sale would have been nothing when compared to Quiller’s wealth, but this way they were adding to the enterprise, giving, not just taking. The thing that puzzled Dunlap, however, was the sports car. In all the local items that described the way they traded all their vehicles for cash, there wasn’t any mention of the classic red Corvette. Even back in 1970, a 1959 Corvette was special. Chevrolet had switched designs, and many buyers felt the earlier was better. Surely some reporter would have made a note if it were sold. Dunlap told himself that, when he had the time, he’d have to call the other papers in the area. In the meanwhile, though, and on a chance, he scanned the used-car advertisements on the microfilm. He knew that, if a dealer had his hands on that Corvette, he’d surely want to advertise. There wasn’t any mention, though.

Dunlap looked ahead for several weeks, and still there wasn’t any mention. He would have to check the other newspapers, of course. But could it be, was it possible that Quiller had ordered his members to sell their vehicles and, while they did it, had kept his own? What the hell was going on?

Dunlap turned the reel and read more of the microfilm. Once again, except for how events were slanted, this was much the same as what he’d read in files back in his New York office. The roundup, the expulsion, and the slowly settling peace. Then there was a difference, local items on how much it cost the town to clean the garbage from the park, to put in new windows, and to scrape the slogans off the walls. There were letters praising how authorities had handled things, attempts to understand a strange and changing world, confusion and bewilderment. Only one dissent, no name, saying that the town had been too hasty, that “instead of beating on those kids we should have tried to understand them.” Maybe so, but if there had been others who agreed with that, there was no published sign of it. The overwhelming sense was of a town that still had not recovered from its shock. Weird beaded costumes, long hair, beards and what all, they were one thing, although Dunlap guessed that local people with their cowboy clothes and gingham dresses had seemed just as strange to all those West-coast hippies as the hippies seemed to them. Dope and shiftlessness and filth, though, they were something else, something that the town could neither understand nor tolerate. A woman wrote in, angered by two infants she had seen, dirty-faced and crying, diapers unchanged, while the mother stretched out on the grass and looked away. Another woman wrote that all she’d seen some children eat was half-cooked rice and moldy cheese and milk which with the specks of straw inside had clearly not been pasteurized, and where on earth they’d got that kind of milk she didn’t know, but what was going on? The dope had really done the trick, though. They had evidently smoked it clear out in the open, almost flaunting it, and Dunlap, going through the items in the paper, was surprised that no one was arrested. Sure, he understood that too, he guessed. To pick up one, you’d have to take them all. Otherwise you punished one and let the others get away. The jail was likely far too small, the trouble just not worth the cost of feeding them. Better just to clear out the lot of them. Which is what they did.

Then Dunlap read some issues of the paper where there wasn’t any mention of what happened. Things were getting back to normal. So the townsfolk were pretending. That was just about the time the newsmen and photographers decided that the story was played out and started leaving. They weren’t present for what happened next, the murder, headlines straight across the page. At last.

Chapter Thirteen.

The door creaked open. Dunlap swung. A man stepped into view, outlined by the hallway light that spilled in. He was tall and gangly, wearing suspenders, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his white hair haloed by the light behind him, the man in charge of microfilm whom Dunlap had talked to earlier. “I’m sorry, sir. We close at five.” The words were hushed as if this truly were a morgue, the almost-empty room echoing.

Dunlap stared at him and breathed. Then he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples. He looked at his watch. Ten to five. He’d started shortly after two, so taken up by what he read that he hadn’t realized how quickly the time was going.

Abruptly he felt tired.

“What time do you open in the morning?”

“Eight o’clock. We close at noon.” The room echoed again.

Dunlap lit a cigarette and nodded. “Thanks.” He’d been afraid that the newspaper’s office wouldn’t be open on Saturday. He stood and put his jacket on, glancing at the notes he’d made, surprised that there were so many of them, unaware he’d made them. He put the microfilm back into its box, stacked it on the other boxes, snapped the light off on the reader, picked the boxes up, and walked across the room to hand them over. ‘Thanks,” he repeated, and with his camera, tape recorder, and his notes, he went out past the man and down the hall.

On the street, Dunlap had to squint again. The sun was low, descending toward the mountains, but the glare was as bad as earlier. In contrast with the air-conditioned building he’d just left, the air out here was close and humid, and he started sweating almost immediately. There were people going past, walking home from work, lots more traffic on the street. He glanced at several women, young and tall with soft, loose-fitting dresses that nonetheless suggested hips and breasts, and shook his head. He turned and walked up toward the right. As much as he remembered, that was where the two big buildings with all the trees had been when he’d arrived on the bus at noon. He looked and saw the trees in the distance, and he kept walking. The trees seemed five blocks away at least, and he was wondering if the effort would be worth it. Mostly he was hot and tired, and his hands shook so bad that he knew he’d have to stop soon for a drink. But reading through that microfilm had perked his interest, and he didn’t want to stay here any longer than he had to, so he’d take a chance, and if the office up there were still open, maybe he could save some time. Maybe, but the trees seemed just as far away, the more he walked, and several times he almost weakened, glancing at the bars.