“Where was he waiting?”
“Who the hell knows?” Pete said, and shrugged. “The point is it runs in the family. They probably had a few drinks at the party, maybe smoked a little grass...”
“You think politicians smoke grass?” Patty asked.
“Sure,” one of the boys said. “Everybody smokes grass. They just dump on us kids because we’re easy targets.”
“I’ll bet Nixon doesn’t smoke any fuckin’ grass.”
“Nixon doesn’t even fuck,” the topless swimmer said.
“Nixon’s a fag, you want my opinion,” Patty said.
“Waited a full nine hours to report it,” Pete said, getting back to the subject. “Why’d he do that?”
“Because he was taking her to the beach to shtup her, and he was stoned, and he drove the fucking car in the water...”
“And could only think of saving his own ass.”
“He’s still trying to save his ass,” the topless swimmer said. “When’s he going to make some kind of public statement?”
“They say he’ll be going on TV soon,” somebody said.
“Another Checkers speech,” Pete said sourly.
“What’s that?”
“A speech Nixon made one time. His dog. His dog was named Checkers.”
“What?” Patty said, and burst out laughing.
“Well, what’s so funny about that?”
“What’s his dog got to do with anything?”
“You’re the big protest singer, you never heard of Nixon’s Checkers speech?”
“Never.”
“It’s only famous, that’s all,” one of the boys said.
“Who here ever heard of the Checkers speech?” Patty said, and looked around the fire. Pete and the other boy were the only ones who raised their hands. “Very famous,” Patty said.
“He’s a crook like all the rest of them,” somebody said.
“Who, Nixon?”
“No, his fucking dog,” somebody said, and they all burst out laughing.
“I’ll bet he gets away with it, though,” Warren said.
“Kennedy? Sure, he will.”
“They all get away with it,” the topless swimmer said.
“This fucking country,” Pete said, and shook his head. “They keep telling us what to do, they keep hassling us about everything, but meanwhile they’re cheating on their income tax, and killing off their business competitors, and fucking around outside their marriages, chasing the buck day and night, running in their gray flannel suits to catch their commuter trains, briefcases flying, drinking themselves silly in the bar car on the way home.” His voice lowered, he sat staring into the flames. “You sometimes have to pour my father off the train,” he said.
The fire crackled and spit into the sudden silence.
“I hate this fucking country,” he said.
In Italy, it was a little after 10:00 P.M.
They had taken their meal in the main dining room, and now they sat on the stone terrace overlooking the lagoon and the spindly dock jutting out jaggedly over the water. Jamie was drinking cognac, Connie was idly sipping an Amaretto. When the bartender wheeled a television set out onto the terrace, neither of them noticed him at first. He spent the next five minutes searching for an extension cord and an outlet, and another five manipulating the rabbit ears on top of the set. None of the people on the terrace knew quite what he was up to. There was still the pleasant hum of conversation as the black-and-white picture came on, the clink of ice in late-night drinks. A woman laughed far too loudly, and someone said “Shhh!” and she answered him in French which Jamie took to be insulting; French always sounded insulting to him. A man across the terrace said, in English, “Oh, look, it’s the moon thing,” and Jamie looked up over his head and indeed saw a bright crescent moon in a sky laden with brilliant stars, and somebody else said, in Italian, “Attenzione!” and the woman who’d insulted (he guessed) the man in French suddenly turned her attention to the picture on the television screen and said, “Les astronautes,” which even Jamie understood.
He had not read a newspaper since he’d left the States on the twelfth, but he’d heard other Americans talking about the Apollo-11 blast-off for the moon several days ago. This was the twentieth, he guessed — he had virtually lost all track of time — and he supposed the spaceship was approaching the moon, else why all the elaborate fuss with the television set? The picture was a very bad one, flaked with snow and streaked with vertical lines, but he recognized Houston Control from previous space shots he’d watched on television, and as he turned his attention fully to the set, he heard a voice clearly saying, “Thirty seconds,” and another static-ridden voice replied, “... drifting right... contact light... okay, engine stop... ACA out of... modes control both auto... engine arm, off... four-thirteen is in.” The first voice said, “We copy you down, Eagle.”
Jamie caught his breath.
The distant voice, clearly and sharply this time, said, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
The voice from Houston said, “Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot,” and suddenly everyone on the terrace was on his feet, Americans and foreigners alike, all of them applauding the television set as the voice from outer space said, “A very smooth touchdown,” and Houston replied, “Eagle, you are stay for T-l.” Something garbled from up there on the moon in the sky overhead, and then Houston said, “Roger, and we see you venting the ox,” and suddenly the foreigners on the terrace turned to those who were obvious Americans and began applauding them — Jamie and Connie, and a dentist and his wife from Michigan, and a pair of newlyweds from upstate New York, and an eighty-year-old woman from San Francisco. The Frenchwoman summoned the waiter with a sharp “Garçon!” and then shouted, “Champagne pour tout le monde!” and everyone applauded again, first the generous Frenchwoman, and then the Americans once more, and finally the screen where Houston was saying, “We have an unofficial time for that touchdown of one hundred and two hours, forty-five minutes, forty-two seconds and we will update that.”
As the champagne corks popped, Jamie was surprised to find tears rolling down his cheeks. He guessed it was because he was so goddamn proud of his country’s achievement.
4
No sooner were they home than they were off again. This time in August. This time for a long weekend with Penny Lane and his wife on the Vineyard, though in all fairness the Lanes had invited her along as well, an invitation Lissie had politely declined, thank you. On Friday afternoon, she phoned the Vineyard to say that she and Rusty had decided to drive up to Woodstock. Her father asked, “Where’s Woodstock?” and she told him it was upstate New York someplace, they were only going up there to listen to some rock. Her mother had wanted assurance that Mrs. Klein knew Rusty was taking the car, and had asked only that Lissie call the Vineyard again when she got home that night.
It became apparent almost at once that there’d be no getting home that night, and maybe even no getting to the festival. They had taken Route 84 west to the Newburgh Bridge, and had crossed that onto 87 north, heading in the general direction of the Catskills. There was no index listing for a town called Woodstock on their Mobil map, nor was there one for either Bethel or White Lake. But as they got closer to their destination — or at least assumed they were getting closer — they began to see kids. Kids wearing feathers and cut-offs and open vests and ponchos and T-shirts and minis and capes, kids waving to them from VW buses and campers and cars painted with psychedelic designs, pickup trucks with license plates from California, a dusty Benz with a plate from Colorado, kids on motorcycles and motorbikes, kids crammed into beat-up campus Fords or sleek family Cadillacs, a Chrysler flapping a banner with the words KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL — STAY STONED lettered on it, kids leaning out the windows, waving, kids holding placards that read HEAD POWER, kids clutching guitars, girls with flowers twined in their long flowing hair, boys with beards and beads, a massive army of kids in cars and on foot, thronging the approach road to the festival site.