When the Anthonys get to the Greyhound station on Broadway, the protesters have set up on the curb where the buses arrive. It’s a bigger protest than the one that sent his father bonkers down at Moss Street a few weeks back. Louder too.
Matt sees that they’re the usual protest crowd — mostly but not all young — lots of hair and beads and peace signs, all that. He hopes not to see his English teachers among them because Kyle had them in school, too, and what would he think of them protesting him risking his life?
He feels the heavy pressure trip from these loud, sign-waving zealots, telling him what to believe. To take a side. Join us. Can’t he honor his own brother and not want the war? They yell about killing babies, he thinks, but Kyle saved one in a tunnel! He scans the faces in the protest crowd, relieved that his teachers aren’t here for Kyle to see.
Matt halts his mother’s wheelchair well short of the crowd. Kyle is due on the 2:45 and it comes lumbering down Broadway just a few minutes late, swinging wide into the station.
The door hisses open and the passengers spill out, mostly hippies and tourists of all description, families and singles, old and young.
There’s a pause in the exodus and Matt worries that Kyle changed his mind.
But a young serviceman gets off, then another, followed by Kyle Bruce Anthony.
Which is when the protesters come off the curb into the pull-out, signs raised.
Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?
No lies about Mi Lai!
The crowd surges toward Kyle and the other servicemen.
Kill hate, not babies!
Draft beer, not boys!
The lean, short-haired, smooth-faced young servicemen make it to the luggage bay, which the driver has already opened. The crowd closes around them and Matt pushes Julie closer, looking through the bodies. Suddenly, Kyle is coming toward him, his head down but his eyes up, one hand out for protection, the big oblong duffle heavy over his shoulder. He’s got a growing-out buzz cut, pink cheeks, and a nervous smile, and he looks smaller to Matt, maybe even shorter too. Jeans and a T-shirt and combat boots. The shouting is louder now and the signs wave crazily and the protesters close around the servicemen again.
Kyle breaks through and Matt rolls their mother toward him. Bruce swings on his crutches toward Kyle too, but Jasmine easily outspeeds all of them and is the first to fly into Kyle’s open arms.
Matt with Julie, caught in the swarm.
Baby killer! Baby killer!
“He’s not that!” Matt yells. “He saved a baby! He’s not that!”
Matt manages to U-turn Julie and gets ahead of Kyle and Jasmine, pushing the wheelchair forward through the noise and crowd, leading his brother and sister toward home.
An hour later, the party is in full swing. Friends of the family come by and the little house fills up. Matt picks the music and changes the LPs. Good rock, but not too loud because vets like peace and quiet, he has read.
Kyle is mostly smiles, thousand-yard silences, then smiles again. He’s tremendously alert and his eyes dart. He smokes a lot. Matt stands close to him even when Kyle’s talking with someone else. Feels funny to be almost eye-to-eye with his big brother. Kyle has lost weight, but Matt notes the sinewy muscles in his arms and neck.
Matt drinks a beer, then another. Watching his brother he imagines Kyle in the black tunnels of Cu Chi. A helmet light and a handgun. Matt sees that young girl running off with her baby into the safe dark. Then without warning, Matt sees the disciple at the Vortex breathing hard and staring up at the sky after he shot him. The blood on the oak tree. Makes his soul cry. Matt has pictured that man a thousand times, and knows he’ll see him ten thousand more. A million, all the way to his grave. Part of his punishment for taking a life, even one that was trying to take his own.
Laurel Kalina calls, then comes over with a bottle of champagne for Kyle. Matt’s not as happy to see her as he thought he’d be. She’s lovely in a black dress with red roses and her hair is up, and it saddens him to see what he can’t have. It’s a bummer to be not enough. She radiates more than just beauty and every male eye in the room is on her.
Matt wolfs cake, pizza, hot dogs, potato salad, more cake. Sitting on the blue chair in the crowded, smoke-filled living room, he watches his mother and father, brother and sister. Really concentrates on them, one at a time. Draws them in his mind. Pictures them five years ago, then ten, then twelve or thirteen years ago, when his earliest memories start. Those years fly past him now in seconds but they’re not gone, he thinks, just shelved, like books. Like drawings in a pad you can open and look at.
He ponders wholeness, as in being whole. An author was talking about that on Johnny Carson the other night. Matt knows he hasn’t been whole since his father took off back in ’62. Less whole when Kyle joined up, and less than that when Jasmine disappeared. Even less when his mother lost herself to Dodge and the pipe. Now, for the first time in all those years, Matt feels whole. Not like when he was ten but in a more complicated, weirdly less whole way, like maybe a man is supposed to be.
He’s apparently the only one who hears the rattling knock on the front screen door and it breaks his thoughts and he answers it.
Through the screen it’s Sara Eikenberg, a pink dress and granny boots, her hair up on one side.
Matt holds open the door but she doesn’t move.
She gazes past him, taking it all in, skeptical brown eyes on assignment.
Her gaze comes back from the party to him.
“Go for a ride, Matt?”
He turns and looks behind him for a moment, catches Kyle’s eye. Then Jasmine’s. Now back to Sara.
“God, yes. Bitchen.”
Acknowledgments
A thousand thanks to Greg Nichols, Richard Lewis, and Larry McQuirk for giving up their time and stories of Laguna in the sixties.
And to my Laguna Canyon friends from way back — Larry and Nina Ragle; John Parlett; and Kathy, Mike, Megan, and Hallie Jones.
And hundreds more to all the many friends, neighbors, and strangers who offered me their tales of Laguna in my twenty years as a citizen there.
Artist, author, poet, and historian Dion Wright not only gave me some of his cogent observations, he wrote a terrific book about California in the fifties and sixties, Tempus Fugitive. He didn’t just create art and write about that place and time; he lived them. He was it.
Also, many thanks to Nicholas Schou for his terrific account of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. His book is not to be missed by anyone interested in this fascinating and resonant time.
Fond gratitude to my good friends Rick and Debra Raeber, who have welcomed me into the Laguna home for over thirty years. You guys rock.
In memory of Mike Schwaner, waterman and story lover. You are missed.
A thousand thanks to my agents, Robert and Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media, and to my fine editor, Kristin Sevick, who shaped this book into what it is.
Last but not least, thank you, Laguna Beach, where I was delighted and shaped and learned to write. Always the place that formed me. I still love your Thousand Steps.