And here it was.
It meant a lot to Priest. It showed that his community was mature. They were not living hand to mouth anymore. They could feed themselves and have time and resources to spare for building a place of worship. They were no longer a bunch of hippies trying out an idealistic dream. The dream worked; they had proved it. The temple was the emblem of their triumph.
He stepped inside. It was a simple wooden structure with a single skylight and no furniture. Everyone sat cross-legged in a circle on the plank floor to worship. It was also the schoolhouse and meeting room. The only decoration was a banner Star had made. Priest could not read it, but he knew what it said:
These were the Five Paradoxes of Baghram. Priest said he had learned them from an Indian guru he had studied under in Los Angeles, but in fact he had made them up.
He stood in the center of the room for several minutes, eyes closed, arms hanging loosely at his sides, focusing his energy. There was nothing phony about
After a few minutes, Priest’s spiritual strength was renewed. He felt alert, confident, centered.
When he went outside again, he decided to check on the vines.
There had been no grapes originally. When Star arrived there was nothing in the valley but a ruined hunting lodge. For three years the commune had lurched from crisis to crisis, riven by quarrels, washed out in storms, sustained only by begging trips to towns. Then Priest came.
It took him less than a year to become Star’s acknowledged equal as joint leader. First he had organized the begging trips for maximum efficiency. They would hit a town like Sacramento or Stockton on a Saturday morning, when the streets were crowded with shoppers. Each individual would be assigned a different corner. Everyone had to have a pitch: Aneth would say she was trying to get the bus fare home to her folks in New York, Song would strum her guitar and sing “There but for Fortune,” Slow would say he had not eaten for three days, Bones would make people smile with a sign saying “Why lie? It’s for beer.”
But begging was only a stopgap. Under Priest’s direction, the hippies had terraced the hillside, diverted a brook for irrigation, and planted a vineyard. The tremendous team effort made them into a strongly knit group, and the wine enabled them to live without begging. Now their chardonnay was sought after by connoisseurs.
Priest walked along the neat rows. Herbs and flowers were planted between the vines, partly because they were useful and pretty, but mainly to attract ladybugs and wasps that would destroy greenflies and other pests. No chemicals were used here: they relied on natural methods. They grew clover, too, because it fixed nitrogen from the air, and when they plowed it into the soil it acted as a natural fertilizer.
The vines were sprouting. It was late May, so the annual peril of frost killing the new shoots was past. At this point in the cycle, most of the work consisted of tying the shoots to trellises to train their growth and prevent wind damage.
Priest had learned about wine during his years as a liquor wholesaler, and Star had studied the subject in books, but they could not have succeeded without old Raymond Dellavalle, a good-natured wine grower who helped them because, Priest guessed, he wished his own youth had been more daring.
Priest’s vineyard had saved the commune, but the commune had saved Priest’s life. He had arrived here a fugitive — on the run from the Mob, the Los Angeles police, and the Internal Revenue Service all at once. He was a drunk and a cocaine abuser, lonely, broke, and suicidal. He had driven down the dirt road to the commune, following vague directions from a hitchhiker, and wandered through the trees until he came upon a bunch of naked hippies sitting on the ground chanting. He had stared at them for a long while, spellbound by the mantra and the sense of profound calm that rose up like smoke from a fire. One or two had smiled at him, but they had continued their ritual. Eventually he had stripped off, slowly, like a man in a trance, discarding his business suit, pink shirt, platform shoes, and red-and-white jockey shorts. Then, naked, he had sat down with them.
Here he had found peace, a new religion, work, friends, and lovers. At a time when he was ready to drive his yellow Plymouth ’Cuda 440-6 right over the edge of a cliff, the commune had given meaning to his life.
Now there would never be any other existence for him. This place was all he had, and he would die to defend it.
He would listen to John Truth’s radio show tonight. If the governor was going to open the door to negotiation, or make any other concession, it would surely be announced before the end of the broadcast.
When he came to the far side of the vineyard, he decided to check on the seismic vibrator.
He walked up the hill. There was no road, just a well-trodden path through the forest. Vehicles could not get through to the village. A quarter of a mile from the houses, he arrived at a muddy clearing. Parked under the trees were his old ’Cuda, a rusty Volkswagen minibus that was even older, Melanie’s orange Subaru, and the communal pickup, a dark green Ford Ranger. From here a dirt track wound two miles through the forest, uphill and down, disappearing into a mudslide here and passing through a stream there, until at last it reached the county road, a two-lane blacktop. It was ten miles to the nearest town, Silver City.
Once a year the entire commune would spend a day rolling barrels of wine up the hill and through the trees to this clearing, there to be loaded onto Paul Beale’s truck for transport to his bottling plant in Napa. It was the big day in their calendar, and they always held a feast that night, then took a holiday on the following day, to celebrate a successful year. The ceremony took place eight months after the harvest, so it was due in a few days’ time. This year, Priest resolved, they would hold the party the day after the governor reprieved the valley.
In return for the wine, Paul Beale brought food for the communal kitchen and kept the free shop stocked with supplies: clothing, candy, cigarettes, stationery, books, tampons, toothpaste, everything anyone needed. The system operated without money. However, Paul kept accounts, and at the end of each year, he deposited surplus cash in a bank account that only Priest and Star knew about.
From the clearing, Priest headed along the track for a mile, skirting rainwater pools and clambering over deadfalls, then turned off and followed an invisible way through the trees. There were no tire tracks because he had carefully brushed the carpet of pine needles that formed the forest floor. He came to a hollow and stopped. All he could see was a pile of vegetation: broken branches and uprooted saplings heaped twelve feet high like a bonfire. He had to go right up to the pile and push aside some of the brush to confirm that the truck was still there under its camouflage.
Not that he thought anyone would come here looking for the truck. The Ricky Granger who had been hired as a juggie by Ritkin Seismex in the South Texas oilfield had no traceable connection with this remote vineyard in Sierra County, California. However, it did occasionally happen that a couple of backpackers would lose their way radically and wander onto the commune’s land — as Melanie had — and they would sure as hell wonder why this large piece of expensive machinery was parked out here in the woods. So Priest and the Rice Eaters had slaved for two hours to conceal the truck. Priest was pretty sure it could not be seen even from the air.
He exposed a wheel and kicked the tire, just like the skeptical purchaser of a used car. He had killed a man for this vehicle. He thought briefly about Mario’s pretty wife and kids and wondered whether they had realized yet that Mario was never coming home. Then he put the thought out of his mind.
He wanted to reassure himself that the truck would be ready to go tomorrow morning. Just looking at it made him edgy. He felt a powerful urge to get going right away, today, now, just to ease the tension. But he had
