It took some time for the four naked people to stir. They huddled on the blanket, exhausted and unmoving, resting and regathering strength after the wild orgiastic fucking they had just participated in. Semen and perspiration and female cum mingled and glistened on their shining bodies and on the dampened blanket beneath them, the air seeming to crackle with the lewd emotions and desires that had been unleashed.
Moses was the first to move. He crawled over to where Bob lay, completely spent from his sexual exertions. Moses grinned at him as though they shared some kind of secret.
"How you feel, Bobby my boy?"
Bob Seikerd looked up at him, and chuckled.
"Well, it was good for appetizers… but I'm ready to start on the main course now."
"My sentiments exactly, Bobby, my sentiments exactly," Moses agreed, and they both turned to leer at the huddled bodies of the two naked women they had just so completely subjugated.
Ann stared at them unbelievingly, and held Lani tighter to her breast. But then she saw the smile of happiness radiating from her daughter's young face, a smile intended only for her, a smile that said more than a thousand words could convey. And the warmth of that smile dissolved in an instant all the shame and remorse, the guilt and inhibitions which had fettered her for so long; and as she returned Lani's loving gaze, Ann knew instinctively that, no matter what happened to them now, their future was going to be a future together, a future with and for one another, a future that promised peace and happiness for both.
Strengthened by this realization, the two women turned bravely as one, to face the two grinning, leering men, who had already begun to advance on them once again.
EPILOGUE
The novel ends here – but the Walker's story does not.
Ann and Lani left the commune called The Zodiac the very next morning, after having convinced Moses to give them the car keys, and drove straight to South San Francisco. Within two weeks, Ann had given up her job at the Bay Construction Company, and the two had moved to the Midwest, where they hoped to find a secluded haven in which they could ignore the outside world, and concentrate only on themselves. This they did indeed find, in a relatively small town in southern Kansas.
Their past, California and the commune, the traumatic experiences they underwent together, have all been forgotten now, and they live together in a small frame house, each working at small jobs and keeping the house like a pair of loving sisters. The small town they're living in suspects nothing of the beautiful, and yet socially unacceptable relationship that binds them, and Ann and Lani are careful to keep that relationship hidden from the sometimes prying eyes of their neighbors. But life is again joyful for them, after the untold misery of that fateful weekend in Mendocino, and neither of them could be happier.
And what of the future?
As Lani told me in a letter she wrote after reading this manuscript: "Our future is now, and we both know that. Life changes, and people change with it. You ask how long we will be content with our present life? I can only answer that, as of now, the present, we are happy and content, but who knows how tomorrow will find us? We do not make the mistake of building our lives around tomorrow's dreams – we have found that today is enough of a world to live in…"
And so Ann and Lani Walker, mother and daughter, continue, for the time being at any rate, to soar through life on the wings of their special love for each other. It is a love which includes sex, as every true love must; but I, for one, will not judge them on that count. They are living their own lives, free from emotional restraints and inhibitions, aufficient unto themselves, looking into the future without fear, secure in the knowledge that the joy of the present is well worth the insecurity of the future… and how many of us can say the same thing?
Ann and Lani Walker: two small, unimportant people. And yet two inspiring examples of the kind of free, self-sufficient life that beckons us all forward, to test our courage and stamina in the pursuit of its ever receding happiness. Will we ever reach it? Who can say… but perhaps the Walker's story will give some of us the courage we need to keep on trying.