War and Watermelon (5 page)

Cars are everywhere; not just in the road and on the shoulders, but up in cornfields and down in ditches. “How many people are going to this thing?” Ryan asks, shaking his head.

“Millions,” Skippy says. “We must have walked fifty miles. I'm out of cigarettes.”

“Now
that's
an emergency,” Jenny says. “Skippy without a butt. Think you'll survive?”

“I'll bum some at the concert,” he says. “Where is it?”

“We ain't there yet,” says a woman walking behind us. She's wearing a peace-sign necklace and a long skirt. She waves up the road. “It's another couple of miles.”

“This is insane,” Skippy says.

We walk along the edge of 17B. At least it's mostly flat here. After ten more minutes I say to hold up. That Tang's made its way through me. I take a flashlight from Jenny and duck into a gate, where a sign says EVERGREEN CEMETERY.

I decide I've carried the cooler long enough and I'll just pick it up on the way back. So I ditch it behind the gravestone of Johnny Townsend. It says he died on May 26, 1889. I like that name—Town's End. I feel like I've walked through the world's longest town.

“Does this concert go all night?” I ask Ryan when I get back to the road.

“I don't know. It goes late. We'll catch a ride back to the car when it's over.”

“
Sure
we will,” says Jenny. She yawns. We hear a low rumble of thunder and start walking again.

We pass a white wooden church packed with people. Light is shining from the stained-glass windows. There's a bonfire in the dirt parking lot, and some hippies are dancing around it.

In about twenty minutes we start to hear music way in the distance and we feel a few drops of rain. We turn onto a dirt road and start moving faster.

“That's Ravi Shankar, I bet,” Ryan says.

Never heard of him, but I get a chill anyway. Must be significant if Ryan thinks so. The music sounds tinny and weird to me, but we're still a good distance away.

The rain becomes steady, then turns into a downpour. But the air is warm and we're overheated from walking so far, so it feels good. I can smell wood smoke and swamp.

We reach the top of a hill and there's this huge valley below us, and it's absolutely filled with people. Unbelievable. There's a stage way down at the far end throwing light onto the hill. People are sliding down the muddy slope on their butts. Everybody is dancing and spinning and yelling.

“Jesus,” Ryan whispers. “We made it.”

We just stand there with our mouths hanging open, staring at the throng of people packed shoulder to shoulder on every inch of the hill. Even in the partial darkness, I can tell that there has to be
way
more than sixty thousand here. That's about how many you'd get at a Mets game, and this crowd looks like it would fill Shea Stadium more than twice over. Everybody seems to have long hair and bare feet and scruffy dungarees and peace signs and headbands and tie-dye shirts. That is, if they're wearing shirts at all. A lot of people aren't.

The crowd is waving their arms and chanting, “No rain! No rain!” between songs, but it's coming down in buckets. It's dripping down my face, and my sneakers are full of mud. I join in—“No rain!”—but who cares? Let it come down. I start laughing for no reason. Just happy.

We make our way down the hill; there's no sign of a ticket booth. It hasn't been raining long, but the grass is already slick. It smells like cow manure.

The closer we get to the stage, the denser the crowd, but there are flashes of lightning, so some people head for cover. We get to within twenty yards of the stage. There are people sitting in the mud with pretty much all of their clothes off, smoking marijuana and laughing. You hear lots of shouting about the war between songs. About ending it.

The guy onstage is singing a sort of familiar song, saying how he sees the morning light after staying up till dawn.

“Yeah!” Ryan yells. “That'll be us in the morning.”

“We'll be dead meat in the morning,” I say, but I don't care. Ryan is part of this thing, part of the reason for it, part of this throng that doesn't want to kill or be killed for that immoral war. I'm not even sure what
immoral
means, but it isn't good.

There's no place I'd rather be than in this muddy field with him.

Ryan laughs. “Dad's gonna kill us. But what can you do?” He starts clapping his hands really hard. “Enjoy it, Brody! That's Arlo Guthrie a piss length away from us, singing a Bob Dylan song! Can you stand it?”

He's right. Forget about tomorrow. This is the coolest thing I've ever done in my life.

A while later I feel that Tang again. I've always had a small bladder. “Ryan, I gotta take a leak,” I say.

He laughs and points up the hill. “Find yourself a tree with roots,” he says.

I look up at the massive crowd and wonder how I'll ever find my way back to Ryan in the darkness. But there are small campfires on the hill, and the strobes from the stage are bright. I glance around for some landmarks—a guy in a sleeveless leather vest, a woman in a yellow sun hat—then trudge up the hill.

It takes several minutes to get clear of the crowd, and I just duck behind an overflowing trash barrel and piss. As I'm walking back I hear a familiar voice. “It's that kid,” she says.

It's the two girls we picked up hitchhiking. I don't see the guys, but then again, I don't look around much. Not only aren't they wearing bras; they aren't wearing
anything
up top. First time I've seen the real thing in person. “Brady!” Annie says. She's wet with rain and spattered with mud.

“Brody,” I say, my voice coming out all squeaky.

“Isn't this outasight?” She puts her hand on my shoulder, as if she's about to hug me. I think I'd pass out if she did.

The other one is hurrying across the hill and Annie yells, “Wait up,” and follows, not even looking back at me or saying good-bye.

It takes a few minutes to find Ryan and Jenny and Skippy, but I feel pretty safe among all these peaceniks. When I reach them, they're sitting in a circle with a white guy with a big Afro and sunglasses and a huge woman with a red bandanna, and they're passing around a joint and a bottle of wine. Arlo Guthrie is singing “Amazing Grace,” and there's a flash of lightning way in the distance. The rain is still steady.

I take off my shirt and make a little pillow and lie back in the soaking wet grass. Sooner or later I nod off.

R
yan nudges me awake just as Joan Baez is taking the stage wearing a greenish hippie dress with fringe and some kind of scarf and carrying an acoustic guitar. Jenny is jumping up and down and the crowd is roaring.

I couldn't have been asleep for more than fifteen minutes, but I feel wide awake immediately. I listen to Baez's folky protest music, but I mostly look around and can't believe there are this many people in one place who seem so different from everybody I've ever known. I mean, the war always seemed so far away until Ryan and Dad started fighting about it, and this whole idea of protesting and peacing out and standing up to the government just isn't the way it goes back home. You do what they say, right or wrong. Of course, an awful lot of these people are just here to get wasted. Skippy, for one, is lying facedown in the grass, partied out.

But I'm in the midst of more people than I've ever seen in one place, and none of them cares what their parents think right now or if anybody's staring at their breasts or whether a cop might come by and slap handcuffs on 'em for smoking weed. I can practically hear my dad: “Bunch of freeloading idiots. ‘Peace and love, la-di-da.' Just wait till they have to get real jobs and haircuts.
That'll
be an amazing grace.”

Ryan puts his arm around my shoulder and leans into my ear. “Things are changing right before our eyes,” he says. He starts clapping his hands and whooping. “Stop the war!” he yells.

I yell, too. Anything to keep Ryan from going.

The concert ends for the night about the same time the rain does, sometime around three in the morning.

“We gotta haul ass,” Ryan says. “We are so screwed when Dad gets ahold of us.”

The good news—if you can call it that—is that nobody else is leaving the grounds at this hour, so we can make some time. There are people sleeping in heaps in the mud, but there are also lots of little tents pitched on the hill and other people rolled up in sleeping bags.

A guy with long stringy hair is handing out leaflets that say GET OUT OF 'NAM NOW, and we all take one. Ryan gives the guy a raised-fist salute and says, “Peace, brother.”

We pass a pond and hear people splashing and laughing, and a naked guy and woman walk across the road right in front of us, saying, “Bath time!”

The dirt road is a total mud hole, but it gets better when we reach the highway.

I duck into the cemetery again to retrieve the cooler, and they all follow me. “Thanks, Johnny,” I say to the tombstone.

Ryan shines the flashlight on a gravestone just across from Townsend's. “Here's why what we did was right,” he says. “Why you never pass up a chance for an experience like this.”

The stone is simple:

“You never know when you'll take your last breath,” Ryan says. “Grab your life and shake it.”

It takes another two hours to reach the car, and we eat my mother's peanut butter sandwiches on the way. They're soggy from the rain, but we haven't eaten much since that pot roast.

The sun comes up, and there are patches of clear sky between the clouds.

There aren't a whole lot of abandoned cars behind us, so we're able to back the car up for about a quarter mile, then turn around and head for Port Jervis.

We pull into Aunt Lizzie's driveway a little before seven.

She's up, and the house smells like coffee and toast. Ryan calls home and luckily he gets Mom, who had called the New York State Police—twice—and was told about the impossibility of communication at the concert and that the Thruway was closed because of Woodstock traffic.

So me and Ryan and Skippy sit on the couch wearing fluffy pink towels around our naked bodies while Aunt Lizzie washes our mud-soaked clothes. We watch
The Jetsons
and
Magilla Gorilla
, then eat homemade pancakes and fried eggs. Jenny falls asleep in an armchair, wearing nothing but a purple bathrobe. She's content; Joan Baez closed the show last night.

“I have a football game at one,” I say, yawning for the hundredth time. We're more than an hour from home.

“No sweat,” Ryan says. He looks happier than I've ever seen him. And that's saying something.

 

“Today we'll see what you're made of,” Coach Epstein barks as we huddle up around him. “See how you handle yourselves against another team.”

The players from Lodi are doing jumping jacks at the end of the field. This is a “controlled” scrimmage, not really a game, so we're still at the dirt practice field behind the high school and we're wearing our gray practice jerseys. Our real home games will be on Saturday nights under the lights at the athletic field next to the swim club. First one is only two weeks away.

Coach lowers his voice and looks around. “Don't let the chocolate ones scare you,” he says. “They go down the same as anybody else when you hit 'em.”

I look over at the Lodi players and see that they've got four black guys. We don't have any. There's not one black kid living in our town.

I try not to yawn but I can't help it.

“Am I boring you, Mr. Winslow?” Coach asks.

Some of the guys laugh.

“Sorry,” I say, wiping my mouth. We got home in time for me to brush my teeth, eat a hamburger, and get into my uniform. No sleep except for maybe fifteen minutes in the grass last night.

“Discipline, boys,” Coach says. “We're an army; that should be your mind-set.”

It doesn't matter that I'm so tired, because I spend the entire afternoon kneeling on the sideline, watching. It's raining on and off, and the grassless field is a mess.

I know the coaches aren't happy that I skipped practice yesterday, but I did bring a written excuse from my mother today. After that run I made in practice the other day, I would think they'd give me some playing time.

Tony gets in at linebacker for a handful of plays, then he kneels next to me. His uniform is covered with mud like everybody else's—except for mine and Joey Salinardi's, that is.

Across the field, there are three or four Lodi players who haven't gotten in yet, either. We keep glancing at each other and sizing one another up. The scrimmage has been dead even.

Finally Coach Epstein waves me and Tony and Joey onto the field. It's our ball, and we huddle up around Coach. In a controlled scrimmage, the coaches stay on the field and call the plays.

Same formation as in practice: Joey at quarterback, Tony at fullback, and me behind them at tailback. Coach calls that forty-six pitch and I feel a shiver. Salinardi catches my eye and whispers, “Break this one.”

I glance at the defensive line, particularly the tackle and the end I'll be trying to cut between.

I immediately realize that I've made a dumb mistake, looking right at the hole I'll be heading for. Maybe they didn't notice.

Salinardi takes the snap, and I hesitate for a second before cutting right. The pitch is bad—low and almost behind me—but I should be able to grab it anyway. I don't.