“Me get an—”
He stopped himself, swallowing the words before they got out.
“So what do I do now? What if I get stopped again?”
“Then flash your ticket, man. They’ll see you got the message,” the policeman said, shrugging, smiling as if smiling came burdened with regulations and unhappiness. He slipped into his car. “Hang loose.”
“Right,” Jim said. He looked at the tag in his hand. Eighty dollars.
The official representative of Painesville had just met him, to welcome him home. Home, indeed.
The rep drove off, pursued by white ice-swirls in the road. Oddly it made him think of the musica del viento that would swirl behind the procession of a saint carried to chapel. Yo, Saints! he wanted to cry out. Where are you in this cold land?
Jim turned at the next intersection, opting for the diner instead of the coop. If he were to see Vicki again, he wanted to do so in a good mood. Any chances of that had slipped into that car and driven away.
Warm smells of simmering soup and cooking meat and potatoes greeted him at Millay’s. His bad experience already beginning to fade in memory, he gratefully took a stool at the counter beside a man in a checked flannel shirt.
Millie noticed him, her fifty-something crowsfeet deepening in recognition.
“Jim, is it?” she said. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
“Sure is. Good to see you again, Millie.”
“Long time no see, Jim. Long time. You went down a good ways away, didn’t you?”
“Helped set up some farms, that’s right. Way down in Central America.”
“Well, welcome back. What can I bring you?”
“I think I might be getting a cold, coming back into this ice and snow. So I was thinking about some chicken soup.”
A quiet fell over the diner for a second. Talk rose again immediately to wash over it.
Millie shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, sounding genuine in her regret.
The man in the flannel nodded over at him. “You’ve been away for real, I guess. You know some idiot made health claims for chicken soup. Now you can’t order the stuff, less you have the doctor say so.”
“Huh?”
Millie shrugged. “My hands are tied,” she said. “If you got a scrip, no problem.”
“Scrip?”
“Prescription,” the man said. “Frigging F.M.A. found out people were making health claims about chicken-bone soup—big surprise, right? I mean, your grandma probably fed you chicken soup when you got a cold, right? So what happens? The A.M.S. and the drug companies got their way with everything else that people make a health claim about. And chicken soup got sucked up into the damned regulations. Hell, it’s just about getting hard to order a low-fat anything, even, let alone ordering it on whole-wheat. Or a damned bran muffin, for god’s sake.”
“Christ,” Jim said. “You could say water’s good for you, if you’re dehydrated. They going to require a scrip for that?”
“Air, too,” the man said, and shook his head with a resigned shrug of shoulders. “If you live in the big city and have ozone wreaking hell with your lungs, a bit of real air would be as good as medicine, wouldn’t it? And by god they’re going to require a scrip for pure air, I bet you.”
“Can I get you something else instead, Jim?” Millie said.
Out the glass door he saw a familiar car pull up.
“Maybe later,” he said, getting up. “I’ll check back in a bit, OK, Millie? I’m just getting this feeling I better skedaddle.”
“There’s nothing wrong with asking for chicken soup, Jim,” she said.
“Hope not.” Jim grinned nervously as the policeman opened the glass door.
The red-eyed man nodded. “You got taste in eating establishments,” he said.
“I used to,” Jim said, slipping out into the cold again.
Even if his mood had hardly been improved, seeking Vicki sounded a lot more inviting than going back to the apartment and unpacking. Besides, he needed something against this cold. If chicken soup was out of the picture, then he needed something else. The year before, he had visited a local farm that raised cone-flowers, Echninacea angustifolia and E. purpurea. Something along the lines of those Native American remedies might help, if he were to be denied the old European folk-remedy—not to mention the homey comfort—of chicken broth. Besides, finding Vicki would be akin to finding some community again.
Finding community. It struck him that he sought that, as much as anything, in his return.
He looked down the cold winter street at the closed houses with doors sealed, and windows doubled and tripled against the cold with weather-curtains pulled: the walls shut out cold and shut people in, stranding them on islands of individuality. Maybe they found community at Sunday events or weekend evening get-togethers with comfortable crowds of friends, or in pool halls or bars after work, or in bowling leagues or darts leagues. Or their only community might be found in front of the television. What had T.S. Eliot said? With TV, he said, millions of people could listen to the same joke at the same time, and still stay lonesome. Community indeed!
Not that things had worked much differently in C.A. For all the much-touted easy and relaxed pace of the tropics and near-tropics, families lived apart and developed circles of silence around them not so different from the silences surrounding these houses in the drifting snow. Women and children could occupy private spheres that might not open for hours; and men, if they were the ones leaving the house to earn a wage, would return home to enter that quietness, not to bring into it some part of the outside world. A society could be made of endless silences and private views, spaced contiguously without touching.
Jim had failed to do more than make good acquaintance among the men and women associated with the agricultural co-op project—failed, that is, until the first Fiesta. That hit like a wall of water. Instead of a flood that obliterated everything, however, the flood of the Fiesta shocked everything into life. People poured onto the streets, riotously discarding whatever silences had wrapped them twenty-four hours before, shedding whatever had clothed their noisy and exuberant insides. They exploded. Jim found himself exploding likewise alongside men, women and children on a suddenly electrical street, becoming instantaneously part of the community in a socially induced high that immaterially but still profoundly altered his place in the village for the remainder of his year. He found a place: a home. When the individual spheres of silence returned to the families, after the days of fiesta, none of it perturbed Jim: into his own small circle, within himself, he carried the community. He had failed to see where such circles of silence touched, before.
Here he knew no such event happened. Americans warmed towards a few Fiestas, called Holidays: but even as social energies burgeoned and threatened to burst outward at the onset of each one, everyone managed to hold it in, and to pull tightly into their individual households, and to make each a private event contained within four walls. Community, like so much else in America, had become privatized.
Turning onto Holdings Street, two blocks from the food co-op, Jim saw a figure moving in a distinctively furtive way, appearing like a gangling, dark stick from behind a snow-decked pine. The stick-man slipped across the street, where he held himself close against a building wall, scanning the view. He darted across again, to the farther corner.
Then his head clearly turned in Jim’s direction.
He felt exposed and discovered. He pushed down the absurd thought: What if he’s undercover, trying to catch clandestine walkers?