Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ can use my two fingers to get off,” she told the pastor, “and you use your wallet, so my pleasure has a smaller ecological footprint than yours.” The pastor was both baffled and alarmed. She was asked not to attend the youth retreat that summer and so she left the church and never returned.

      She didn’t stand a chance, Liz Waxwing with her poems and paintings, her guitar and her hand-colored scarves, her notebooks covered with drawings of fairies, horses, and snakes. To top it off, the American Way was boring. Boring! She rejected it.

      At seventeen she was busted a second time for a purse full of pot. She failed to appear at her court hearing and a warrant was issued. Unfortunately for Liz Waxwing, a cop was sent to serve the warrant just minutes after Liz dropped three hits of the best acid she ever had.

      Unfortunately for the cop who served the warrant, Liz was lean, supple, and so tripped out that she thought she was being abducted by an alien from outer space. She was pretty sure the shiny thing on his chest said “Pluto.” Ummm, maybe “Polite.”

      When the blue uniformed space monster stopped to eat a whopper and fries, she managed to slip her cuffs and squeeze between the metal netting separating the back seat from the front. There was just one way out, she reasoned. I must steal this car and escape.

      She was easy to catch, especially after she turned on the siren and lights. At ten miles per hour, a speed she considered dangerously fast, she was only a few blocks away when a cop on foot managed to reach past her and grab the keys.

      She was appropriately contrite after the LSD wore off. Her father, whom she had not seen for years, paid for the best lawyer he could find and several teachers came forward to testify that Liz was a bright, creative, and sensitive girl who could be redeemed. The judge sent her to a wilderness therapy program in Boon County, far away from those hippies and punks who were a negative influence. Years later, Liz returned to the back-o-beyond desert that was once the scene of her exile, this time to sit in front of a bulldozer while chained to a gate.

      Jay Paul Ziller was arrested, too. He went by the name Hip Hop Hopi, a reference to a maternal grandmother who was half Hopi and his childhood in Oakland where his parents taught in an inner-city school. They named him after a character in a Tom Robbins novel. It could have been worse. His sister was named Rosy Dawn and he had a brother named San Gabriel after the mountains his parents were camping in when they conceived him. Most people called him Hoppy.

      Throughout his inner-city upbringing, Jay Paul Hip Hop Hopi Ziller expressed a primal urge to rush straight into danger. This tendency may have been reinforced by the frequent need to defend himself and his sister in schools where they were, ironically enough, a small white minority. Although their best friends were non-white and treated them well, Rosy Dawn was widely regarded as a honky name worthy of ridicule, especially by kids who relished the opportunity to give back to whites the hard time they got from them. Hoppy was her defender and jumped quickly into fighting mode whenever she was harassed. He took risks so often that it became habitual. His attraction to action also made Hoppy attractive to young women who had yet to discover that dashing and dangerous don’t pay the bills and may not be positive qualities in a father.

      Growing up in the city, Hoppy loved western television shows and movies. He read Zane Grey in grade school and Louis L’Amour in high school. He also gobbled up nature programs and discovered he had an affinity for wild animals. He fed squirrels and pigeons in a park a block away from home and he knew where the raccoons who knocked over trash cans in the middle of the night denned by an abandoned railroad line. His parents took their kids camping on weekends, often accompanied by a half dozen of their city friends. He lived in the grimy fist of the city during the week but on weekends he learned by heart every trail in Muir Woods. Lately he lived on the road, taking in firsthand the best of the wonders he had imagined while living in Oakland. He visited national parks and other wild places he had read or heard about. He had just landed in Stony Mesa when he decided to join the Sea Ledges protest.

      Hoppy brushed back a mop of sandy hair, quick-smoothed his beard, and walked over to the young woman who seemed to be as smart as she was pretty to ask her name and give her his. He’d been watching her for hours. He liked the way she moved so easily among those in the overcrowded lock-up, smiling, hugging, lighting up each person she encountered with her energy and charm. She could explain the chemistry of climate change to a fellow activist one minute and then engage in a heartfelt conversation about love and loss with that burned-out meth freak, Mona, the next. Her smile was radiant.

      He stood near her and breathed in her aroma, an alluring mix of campfire, sage, and vanilla. Her clothes looked like a happy accident, maybe the best outfit that was ever pieced together from a free box. She even managed to make the orange jumpsuit that replaced her gypsy garb look stylish. She was small but athletic, and hot, very hot, in some way he couldn’t explain. He just had to get to know her. Since he was new to this crowd, having arrived only the day before the protest, he knew no one who could introduce him to her. So he swallowed hard and approached.

      “You’re Luna, right?”

      She turned to face him, smiled, and brushed a wayward tendril of hair from her eyes. Her gaze lingered and then she smiled, nodded yes.

      “How did you get your name?” he asked Luna. “Is it your real name or did you make it up?”

      “Waxwing is my mother’s maiden name. I took it legally as soon as I could because I didn’t want my father’s name. He left us when I was two. My mom says he was home so seldom that it took me a few months before I realized he was gone. He paid for stuff—my braces, piano lessons, my tuition, stuff like that, but I never saw him.”

      Luna had secretly watched Hoppy from a distance, too, and now that he was in front of her she was so nervous that she couldn’t stop talking. Her explanation wasn’t going where Hoppy expected it to go but he did not interrupt her because he liked watching her talk, the way her brows danced above her eyes, the lilt of her voice, that beautiful loose curl of hair that would not behave.

      She paused to brush the wayward lock away from her eyes and continued. “Well, I saw my dad once after he left us. He took me to Disneyland but I threw up on one of the rides and then he got in an ugly spat with some guy who was there from Utah with a dozen kids when my father cut in line. I cried and wanted to go home. For days after I awoke with nightmares about hydrocephalic mice. The next time my father wanted to take me somewhere I broke out in hives and my mother put an end to that. She said that he was her mistake and there was no reason I should have to pay for it.”

      Luna’s heart raced and she was running out of oxygen. Stop talking, she told herself, but she couldn’t slow down. Words were the only defense she had against the urge to throw herself into his arms and melt. There was something about him that seemed so right. There was something she could almost smell or taste.

      Hoppy primed the conversational pump again. “Where did he go when he left you and your mom?”

      “On to the next wife and then another and another. He has a trophy wife now who raises Chihuahuas and has a line of little dog clothing and jewelry that she sells online. She calls it Bow Wow Wow! She has fake boobs and spends a fortune getting her nails done but she looks tan and fit on his yacht and stays out of his business. I guess she’s lower maintenance than the others who ended up in rehab. Low maintenance is important to my father because he has more important things on his mind than the wife and kids. And the ironic thing is that he gives oodles of money to political candidates who proclaim family values and the importance of marriage. The man is a total asshole and I want nothing to do with him.”

      Hoppy nodded and furrowed his brow in sympathy. This chick was a trip. He could listen to her all day. “That’s all very interesting but I didn’t mean your last name. I meant Luna. Is that СКАЧАТЬ