Dream Dog was back in the hallucination. His snaggletoothed grin was beatific.
“What did Axel do?” I asked.
“That’s when his bad trip started,” Dream Dog said. His smile faded. “He remembered something about his dad and that made 7 0
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him mad. It was his dad and two of his dad’s friends. He called them vulture-men feeding off of carrion. He ran around the ashram swinging this stick. He knocked out this tooth’a mines right here.” Dream Dog flipped up his lip and pointed at the gap.
“Why was he so mad?” I asked.
“It’s always somethin’ inside’a you,” the hippie explained. “I mean it’s always there but you never look at it, or maybe on the trip you see what you always knew in a new way.
“After he knocked me down Polly put her arms around him and kissed his head. She kept tellin’ him that things were gonna be fine, that he could chase the vultures away and bury the dead . . .”
“And he calmed down?”
“He went into a birth trip, man. All the way back to the fetus in the womb. He went through the whole trip just like as if he was being born again. He came out and started cryin’ and me and Polly held him. But then she an’ me were holdin’ each other and before you know it we’re makin’ love again. But by then Axel was sitting up and smiling. He told us that he had been given a plan.”
“What plan?”
“He didn’t say,” Dream Dog said, shaking his head and smiling. “But he was happy and we all went to sleep. We slept for twenty-four hours and when we woke up Axel was all calm and sure. That was when he started doin’ all’a that travelin’ and stuff.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“A year maybe. A little more.”
“Around the time his father died?” I asked.
“Now that you say it . . . yeah. His father died two weeks before — that’s why we did acid.”
“And where is this Polly or Molly?”
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“Her? I dunno, man. She was goin’ from door to door sellin’
brownies. Axel an’ me were ready to trip and we asked her if she wanted to join in. Axel told her that if she did he’d buy all’a her brownies.”
“But I thought you said that you were at this other place.
Asham?”
“Ashram,” Dream Dog said. “That’s the prayer temple that Axel built out behind the trees in his backyard. That’s his holy place.”
“Where do you live?” I asked Dream Dog.
“On this block mainly.”
“Which house?”
“There’s about five or six let me crash now and then. You know it depends on how they’re feelin’ and if I got some money to throw in for the soup.”
“If I need to find you is there somebody around here that might know how to get in touch?” I asked.
“Sadie down in the purple place at the end of the block. They call her place the Roller Derby ’cause of the street and because so many people crash there. She knows where I am usually.
Yeah, Sadie.”
Dream Dog’s gaze wandered down the street, fastening upon a young woman wearing a red wraparound dress and a crimson scarf. She was barefoot.
“Hey, Ruby!” Dream Dog called. “Wait up.”
The girl smiled and waved.
“One more thing,” I said before he could sprint away.
“What’s that, Dupree?”
“Do you know where Axel’s San Francisco office is?”
“The People’s Legal Aid Center. Just go on down to Haight-Ashbury and ask anyone.”
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I handed Dream Dog a twenty-dollar bill and proffered my hand. He smiled and pulled me into a fragrant hug. Then he ran off to join the red-clad Ruby.
The idea of karma was still buzzing around my head. I was thinking that maybe if I was nice to Dream Dog, someone somewhere would be kind to my little girl.
i w a l k e d a r o u n d
the block after Dream Dog was gone. I didn’t want him or anybody else to see me investigate the ashram, so I
