1- Raid at dawn
They
were just fading at dawn, bodies sprawled across the interior of the farm house
like mannequins, each limb frozen into its last, drug-induced orgasm faces
thrust into one another's bosom, men with men, women with women, a mingling of
both, gasping as if dying rather than making love.
Chris’ walnut-colored Cherokee fingers
clutched the inside ledge of the window with both hands, keeping her back to
it, wishing it out of existence, wondering how people could get so out of
control.
But it always came down to this. Each shipment
of dope from Denver called for such a ritual. Only it wasn't safe this time and
none of them had listened. Not that the drug lords up north cared. They no doubt
took into account the habits of their hippie connections, adding enough for
indulgences at each step along the route.
It
was something else. A feeling which had been growing on Chris for days and now
throbbed acutely in her temples.
The silence outside the house.
Normally there were birds and occasional
trucks moving along the road in and out of Albuquerque. Now there was nothing.
Just a slight breeze through the stalks of corn. Her garden, a puddle of green
below the window while everywhere else dusty and grey. Not quite dessert and
yet...
Someone watched from it. Hidden in the folds
of earth. The police, maybe. Or someone darker. More deadly. The pain and
pressure were that intense. God knew the music had been loud enough at one
point to hear downtown, rocking the rustic walls with Hendrix and Stones.
She wanted to crawl down into her garden and
hide among its leaves, as if it had been the reason for her mothering each precious
plant up from the dry soil-- though there was ritual to that, too, a need to
fill in the hours, days and weeks of waiting.
Michael is coming!
Mike's face floated somewhere in the back of
her mind, a distant ghost she couldn't exorcise, whispering noises of their own
love- making now years out of date.
There!
She saw something move, a flash of chrome
along the upper level of the twisting drive-- a drive which circled in on
itself so from the porch one might see a car moving once in one direction then
again in the opposite. On its reverse angle, she saw the cherry top and yelled:
"Cops!"
For a long moment, it did nothing. Faces
turned up towards her.
But
the limbs seemed tangled and unable to move.
"Didn't you hear me?" she screamed.
"It's a raid!"
That did it. But it was a confused and
senseless dash of people with nowhere to run, trapped rats charging from room
to room, banging drawers and secret compartments, flushing both toilets.
City kids. Out here on a lark. Communal
living? They knew nothing about it. This was all one long vacation for them
which was now ending up with a bust.
Chris slipped out the front door, the sound of
tires loud on the gravel just around the last bend. More than one car. More
like twenty. She leaped down the stairs to the path, then off it to the right
and through her garden, parting the tallest of the tomato plants which hid the
hole in the building's foundation.
There was no basement, just a crawl space
under the floor of the main room-- her little insurance policy against just
such an event.
In
winter when there were no plants to cover the hole, she used a piece of
plyboard-- which she slid closed behind the plants now, hoping it would escape
view.
She propped herself on her elbows behind it,
peeping through the crack. Upstairs, the children panicked as cops pounded on
the doors. They understood this no more than they had nature-- presuming
nothing could harm them, as if there was no laughing Coyote to snatch their joy
from them. But Chris had grown up in this part of the world, and understood the
evil of nature, and how it dried up people's lives by degrees. It had sucked
life out of her people and condemned them to reservations.
But children learned; even as they screamed
for mercy.
It seemed to take hours to sort itself out;
first banging and tears, then enforced silence. Chris counted the sound of
their footsteps on the porch, putting a face to each sobbing as it was snuffed
out by the slam of a car door. Then, finally, silence, and by her count, the
police had come up at least one hippie short...
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