It was a short song, no more than two minutes or so, but by the second run-through a couple of the hippies had begun to sway their shoulders and shuffle their feet; by the third time around they were dancing, throwing out their elbows and letting their arms writhe over their heads. The nephew had got hold of a thin blond girl in stacked-up shoes who looked like Twiggy's American twin, and a little five-foot girl with a missing tooth and a tie-dyed shirt grabbed Iron Steve by the hand and started pogoing around the room with him. Sess put another quarter in, hit the tune three more times. Skid Denton let out a groan, Richie Oliver put a finger to his temple and pulled an imaginary trigger, and still more hippies poured through the door and spilled back out into the parking lot where somebody cranked up the big speakers in the bus and a whole shimmering spangle of weird hippie guitar music drifted out into the muskeg. There'd been nothing like this here since the last alien visitation, and Sess was too young to remember that.
“Sess!” Skid Denton was shouting over the uproar, waving a full shot glass as if he were proposing a toast. “Where'd you find these freaks, anyway-the Ringling Brothers' circus?”
“And Barnum and Bailey,” Sess shouted back. He snaked his arm between a chinless character with a beard so sparse it was barely there and a big-shouldered girl-woman, Pamela's age at least-whose breasts were on full display in some sort of leotard thing, and said, “Excuse me,” as he reached for his second beer. But the woman reached for it simultaneously and got there first. She let the neck of the bottle sprout between her thumb and forefinger before bringing it to her lips for a long calculated swallow and then handing it to him. “Hi,” she said, and he could see the mascara caked on her eyelashes, definitely a downtown sort of girl and what was she doing in the Three Pup? “I'm Lydia,” she said. “And you're Norm's friend, right?”
Norm? Who the hell was Norm? He just smiled, and the guy with the nonexistent beard smiled, and she smiled too. “Yeah,” he heard himself say, “that's right.”
And now her face really lit up. “Well, I just wanted to thank you, that's all, on behalf of all of us, I mean, because we really didn't know how our whole trip was going to go down up here-I mean, we didn't know if it was going to be like _Easy Rider__ or _Joe__ or what.”
“Trepidatious, that's what we were,” the guy said, but he was a kid, really, twenty, twenty-one maybe, with a head that was too big and shoulders that were too narrow and a pair of eyes that were a vast delta of broken veins. He slipped his wrist inside Sess's and attempted some sort of secret hippie handshake, but the beer bottle got in his way, so he leaned back and made the victory sign with two fingers. “Peace, man,” he said, and then he started off on a monologue about how he'd always wanted to shoot a moose and skin it and a bear too and have a bear rug on the floor and maybe catch a king salmon and have it stuffed at the taxidermist's-for over the fireplace, you know what I mean? — and did he, Sess, have any idea where the moose were this time of year, like up in the hills or down by the river or what?
The thump of the bass was like friction: the floor was moving one way and Sess was going the other, even though he was standing stock still. He looked across the room to where Pamela sat at a table with the pigtailed woman, waving a beer and declaiming about something, and then the woman chimed in-it was all in pantomime over the intervening roar-and Pamela chattered right back at her. The hippies had caught on and kept feeding the jukebox quarters and the only song they played-the song of the night, the anthem-was “Mystic Eyes.” It was a joke. Hilarious. Fifteen times, twenty, twenty-five. They danced and pounded and threw back beers and shots of peppermint schnapps and whatever else they could lay their hands on. All was movement and noise and the swirling interleaved colors of the dancers' shirts and jackets and the flapping wind-propelled cuffs of their pants. _We went walkin' / Down by / The old graveyard / I looked at you-__
Sess was going to answer the kid-he was going to tell him that the season was fish, not meat, and that the average moose stood taller than any of the cabins along the river and just might be a tiny bit too much for a chinless, slack-armed, eye-bleeding, California hippie to take on before he got his feet wet and pulled his head up out of his ass-but he never got the chance, and Lynette was the deciding factor. She came out from behind the bar like the shadow of something swift-moving and vast and jerked the electric cord out of the socket beside the jukebox. The music died. Everybody froze.
“I want you out!” Lynette cried in a wild strained falsetto that made it sound as if she were trying to take the song to the next level and beyond. “All of you-out! Now! If you think I'm going to listen to that shitty rock and roll crap one more time you're out of your mind. Now get out! Everybody! This place is _closed.__”
From outside, in the mosquito-hung lot, there came the sound of the hippie guitars, more noticeable now in the absence of the jukebox. It was a mournful, contemplative music, each note plied out of a crevice to be held up and viewed from all angles before the next one allowed itself to be dug out and the next one after that. Sess stood immobilized amidst the throng, and then he felt himself moving toward the door and the sad sparkling wrung-out promise of the music. He drained his beer. He felt Pamela at his side. Then they were outside in the air that had a sweet riparian smell to it, the smell of the river recharging itself with meltwater, and the hippies were dancing like moonwalkers to the drugged-down testudineous beat. Lucius was there, nosing at his cupped hand, and he realized he hadn't fed him since he'd claimed him from the pound, and that was remiss, it was. “Come on, Sess,” Pamela was saying, tugging him toward the corner of the porch where they'd dropped their packs full of marshmallows and dill pickles and cheese graters and all the rest of the claptrap they just couldn't seem to live without. “Time to go. We've got a big day tomorrow. The garden, remember? All those logs that need to be peeled? The salmon?”
That was when he locked eyes with the woman who'd put her lips to his beer-Lydia-and she gave him a long slow re-evaluative look out of eyes the color of the lupines sprouting along the road, one thin slant of sun catching her face, and whoever made her, whoever pulled the genes up out of the parental hat, sure didn't stint, that was what he was thinking. But then the brunette in the cowgirl getup looped her arm through Lydia's and she turned her back and began a weaving in-and-out snakedance that was like dripping hot oil right down the front of his pants.
“Hello, Sess. Remember me, your wife?”
He blinked twice, grinned.
“Enjoying the scenery?”
“They sure don't waste a lot of money on underwear, do they?”
She slipped an arm round his waist. The notes fractured and burst like bubbles, bubbles of aluminum, of pewter, hard metallic bubbles made by a machine somewhere in hippie land and bursting through the hippie speakers secreted in the back of the hippie bus. What was it? What would they say? Mind-blowing. It was mind-blowing. Skid Denton came through the door then with a soft-faced girl on either side of him, talking French a mile a minute. “No,” Pamela said, leaning into him, and she was feeling pretty good herself, no offense taken and the night was young, still young, “no, I don't guess they do.”
And then it was Iron Steve, his shoulders hunched and head bowed low so as to better breathe in what the little gap-toothed girl was all about-“Oh, yeah,” he was saying, “yeah, it gets cold, _shit, yeah__”-and Sess discovered another beer in his hand even as he was helping Pamela duck into the straps of her pack.