CHAPTER TWO
"Bob, you just don't understand," Lani Walker was saying, "your home life was so screwed up, you just can't see what I'm talking about. I love my mother… we've got a really beautiful thing between us, you know?"
Lani lay on her back, her eyes searching the cloudless California sky, her bare toes playing little games with the golden brown grass that covered the hills of Mendocino.
"I mean, my mother doesn't have all the hangups about her kid that your parents have. She treats me like an adult, so there isn't any need for me to rebel against her. I mean I didn't run away from her like you did from your parents. There wasn't any need to."
"Look, kiddo, I didn't run away from my parents. I just left, see? And anyway, I think you're just kidding yourself, because your mother just isn't as understanding as she pretends."
"Bob, that's not true…"
"Yes it is true, baby, I know it's true… When we were all down at your mother's place, she was hanging all over you, man, like you were some kind of teddy bear or something…"
"Come on, Bob, that's not fair! Just because you can't visualize any kind of love between parents or children doesn't mean it doesn't exist, right? I mean…"
"All right! Let's just forget about it, O.K.? It's Saturday afternoon, and the sun is shining… let's talk about something else for Christ's sake! The whole thing is so fucking sentimental I think I'm going to cry."
Lani looked over at him as he turned away on his side, and then she sat up abruptly, and looked away. Her long blonde hair was tangled with strands of grass, and her eyes were moist with a few tentative tears caused by the lack of understanding on her boyfriend's part. Her face was almost an exact replica of her mother's, with the same soft brown eyes and delicately formed features, but lacking the coolness, the distance her mother had cultivated after so many years of frustration. Lani was young, but already had a figure that surpassed even her mother's, with large rounded breasts and gently flaring hips, and soft smooth thighs that were tanned a delicious golden brown by the hot California sun. Her slender arms reached out around her shapely legs, and clasped together tightly around her knees, which were trembling slightly now with emotion. She glanced over at Bob, and tried to decide why he was sometimes so harsh with her. She knew he had had a rough life, but still… sometimes it was as though he didn't have any feeling for her at all.
She quickly turned her thoughts away from this unpleasant thought, deciding that it was absurd to even suspect that Bob didn't love her. After all, wasn't he one of the main reasons she had come to the commune in the first place? She looked away, across the lush green hills covered sparsely by single standing oaks in irregular patterns, and her mind wandered aimlessly through visions of her past, her school, old friends, her mother…
"Look, kiddo, I'm sorry."
Lani's memories were invaded by Bob's deep masculine voice. She didn't turn to him immediately.
"Oh, that's all right Bob. I guess I get carried away sometimes when I think about Mom. It's my fault really."
"No, I shouldn't have yelled at you. It's my fault. But, like I don't understand one thing, kiddo."
She turned to him questioningly.
"… I mean, if everything was so fine back in San Francisco, why did you come up here? Christ, you could have stayed there in your Momma's lovin' arms!"
Lani looked at him in surprise, but saw he was serious. She'd come for him, of course!
"Oh, I don't know. I guess I just had to settle down in a place of my own, you know? I mean, ever since I remember, Mom and I have been either moving in or moving out of crummy little two bedroom apartments. I can't even remember how many. And, I never went to the same school more than a year and a half… Oh, I don't mean it was all that bed! All I'm saying is… well… I just had to find something a little more stable, you know?"
Bob leaned over to her, and drew her supple young body over to him roughly, pressing her up against him.
"Yeah, I know kiddo… something stable like me, huh?"
Lani winced a little from the unexpected roughness, and then eased herself into the curve of his huge, muscular frame. She snuggled up like an infant against his massive chest, and worked her face up against the rough stubble of his week-old bear, sighing with pleasure. She felt the crotch of his jeans begin to bulge as his hidden cock quickly grew excited by her tantalizing closeness, and laughingly reached down to touch its fabric-covered hugeness with her small tanned hand.
"Mmmm… well, I guess you're pretty stable, all right…"
With a throaty growl, Bob threw her over onto her back, and pressed her breasts back against her small frame with his powerful body. He reached under her skimpy body shirt and ran one hand teasingly up over one soft unencumbered nipple, raising it to an instant hardness.
"Want to see just how stable, kiddo?" he asked laughingly.
Lani moaned with the pleasure elicited by his expert manipulations of her breasts, and answered only by reaching down seductively to slowly unbutton the top button of his straining blue jeans.
Ann Walker eased her Ford Falcon to the side of the small one lane road, and pulled out the map the man at the local postoffice had given her. Farm Road 1789. This must be it, she thought, looking up for confirmation at the billboard on her right. Past the Quaker State sign and turn right. She set the map down on the seat beside her, and eased the car into gear.
She hadn't started as early that morning as she'd wanted. As soon as she'd woke up, she'd thought of a million things she could spend that Saturday doing, errands she'd put off for months, letters she'd never planned to write… but then her mind had stopped rushing around desperately trying to think up excuses for not coming, and she'd realized she was just being silly.
She was still nervous, though, even after her long drive – nervous about how Lani would receive her surprise visit, uncertain whether she might be intruding. She was almost convinced that Lani would be overjoyed to see her, but not quite. She hoped that the single fact of her presence would not put any kind of pressure on her daughter, making her feel as though she had to choose between her mother and the commune. The reason Ann felt this way, of course, was that unconsciously she hoped Lani would make that choice, and would return to South San Francisco with her.
She drove back onto the road, and turned right onto Farm Road 1789. She drove up a long hill with the sun at her back, and continued on until the paved road turned into gravel, and the gravel finally gave way to a rutted, sun-baked dirt that threatened to wrench her old car's shock absorbers from the chassis. Bravely, she went on, and finally came to an old broken down fence stretched haphazardly across the road with a carefully painted sign hung beside it, the words "The Zodiac" emblazoned on the sign in red letters.
Well, this is it, she thought to herself nervously, and looked with apprehension at the dry hillsides around her, broke only by the line of rusted barbed wire that stretched out from the gate until it disappeared behind the curve of the hill. The isolation and apparent desolation of the place disturbed her, and she wondered how Lani could enjoy being so cut off from civilization. She got out of the car, and opened the old gate, which creaked in the hot stillness of the afternoon, eerily, like an invitation to enter another world. Getting back in her car, she drove through, stopped, got out once again, and closed the gate behind her. You're here, the gate creaked at her once again, and she hurriedly got back into her car and drove on.