Decades Ch. 03

"Sounds like Kermit the Frog," Doug announced.

"Don't you ever let my father hear you say that!" Kelly warned him as she sat beside him on the couch, put her arms around him and closed her eyes.

"Don't you want to take your bra off, so you fit in better back then?" Doug teased.

"Dream on, and close your eyes already!" But Doug surmised there were no truly hard feelings, for she only clung harder to him after the reprimand. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the music and the hug, and waited.

"They're in the way!"

"Leave 'em alone, man, you'll get your turn with her."

"Not that, man, they're in the way!"

"In the way of what?"

"You know! My aura! I told you last night!"

"Man, I don't know what you've been smoking, but don't do it again in my house. Had it with this shit already."

"Your house? Who the fuck are you?"

"You want to put that to a vote? You'd lose and you know it, man."

Doug opened one eye, just enough to see where they had landed and whose conversation they were crashing. Something told him he and Kelly would be better off if the others didn't know they were awake. A darting glance revealed two shadows on the other side of a dim room, now firmly engaged in an argument with one another and paying no attention to him. So Doug felt safe in opening his eyes. He did so to find Kelly had done the same. They were lying side by side on a narrow bed in a room strewn with ancient furniture and discarded clothing, and the late afternoon sun struggled to find its way inside the filthy windows above them. The room was cold. Doug concluded that they had not landed in summer this time.

"The old Templeton place," Doug said, recalling Aunt Doro's remark earlier that evening.

"That's where you are, all right," came one of the voices. "But apparently this fellow's decided it's the old Sanborn place. Man, it's supposed to be all about sharing and love, remember?"

"Don't hassle our new friends with your bullshit, man," came the more dominant voice, which Doug now realized, without surprise, belonged to Jimmy Sanborn. "They've had a rough week." In a slightly more conciliatory tone, he addressed Doug and Kelly. "You two want to get up now? Dinner'll be pretty soon."

Doug and Kelly sat up, and looked at one another uncertainly. "Thanks, but I'm not really hungry," Kelly said. Doug could tell it was a struggle to remain polite with her nemesis, even all these years before their paths were to cross.

"Yeah, well, you can still do your share with making dinner, though," Jimmy said. Their eyes adjusting to the light, Doug and Kelly now saw he looked younger with fuller and even longer hair, but with the same perpetual scowl. He also sported an unruly beard, leading Doug to touch his hand to his face and realize he was also unshaven.

"Excuse me?" Kelly asked.

"All the girls help with dinner," Jimmy said, as if reminding her of something he had said before. "Told you when we took you in, and we did give you last night off since you were still all shook up by the pigs and all that. But you're safe here, you're not gonna get run out of town and threatened, not unless you hassle the squares on the beach too much, and that means you can help your sisters with the work." He pointed out the bedroom door to the stairway just beyond. "We'll see you downstairs."

Kelly looked at Doug, an uncharacteristically defeated look in her eyes, and Doug knew what he needed to do. He took her hand and stood up with her. "Okay, then, let's go help with dinner," he said.

"That a joke, man?" Jimmy asked. "I said the girls make dinner. Besides, you and me, we got business to talk about."

"What if I want to help them?" Doug asked, chancing another look at Kelly. She was delightfully attired in a peasant-dress of a dozen colors or more, which was swirling around her legs as she fidgeted angrily beside him. Her hair was even longer than it had been that night in the bar, straight now and parted down the middle. As if in keeping with his request, she did not appear to be wearing a bra, and Doug rather suspected she blamed him for that.

"Man, you better not argue with him," said the other man, who was blond and clean-shaven. "The way the two of you looked yesterday, I wouldn't want to be back out on the road just yet. And he will throw you out if you give him a hard time. I've seen it happen."

"That's right," Jimmy said smugly, "And sometimes I wonder why I let Mikey here stick around. It's not like he hasn't got anywhere else to go."

"I ain't been called Mikey since I was ten, man!"

"You shut up, and you get down and help your sisters with dinner!" Jimmy snapped at Mikey and Kelly in succession.

Kelly reluctantly stomped out of the room, her humiliation subsiding only when she reached the top of the stairs as she realized now she could chat with the other women of the house, unencumbered by Jimmy or the other guys, who she was sure were just as chauvinistic as he was. Maybe that was just what they needed. One thing was sure: they had definitely found the right place. The dilapidated mansion whose main staircase she found herself descending was surely Mr. Sanborn's old stomping grounds. The huge living room was strewn with beer cans and ashtrays all over the beat up furniture and the floors. An old teacher's desk sat in one corner, laden with books and scraps of paper and a manual typewriter. Kelly felt like she was stepping into a museum exhibit.

She followed the sound of a few female voices through the empty living room to the kitchen. It proved to be just as dingy and outdated as the living room, but at least the lights cast some badly needed cheer against the gray day outside. There were four women in the kitchen, all of them busy with preparing dinner, and all but one of them turned to greet Kelly when she stepped in. "Hi! Kelly, isn't it?" asked a redhead who had been chopping vegetables by the sink. She came around the table, and before Kelly knew what was even happening, she found herself wrapped in the stranger's arms. "I hope Jimmy and the boys let you get some rest before they sent you down here."

"Uh...yeah," Kelly said. "Yeah, I'm fine. But I've got to say, I didn't appreciate Jimmy ordering me around like that."

"My husband orders us all around like that," said the redhead, who Kelly now realized must be Meg. "It's just the way of the world, though, isn't it? Boys will be boys and all that, and it's really all about love in the end."

"You've got to pick your battles, Kelly," said one of the other women, who was busying herself with washing dishes. "And speaking of battles, how are you coping?"

"Coping?" Kelly asked.

"She means about the mess with the pigs yesterday," Meg told her. "I don't know what your man was thinking, bringing you to Bob's by the Bay. That place is square territory, and they'd never serve us if they even let us stay in the first place." Kelly regarded Meg while she listened, and Aunt Doro's unpleasant recollections of her condition rang out in her memory. Those recollections had been on the mark: Meg looked haggard and older than her years despite her brightly colored clothes and beads. At least Kelly couldn't detect any bruises.

Kelly could only guess what had come before. "Oh, yeah, well, Doug loves Bob's by the Bay. He always used to talk about that place. I'd only been there once before but it was a memorable visit."

"You've been in Pascatawa before?" Meg asked. "You guys aren't townies. I'd have remembered you from prison."

"Prison?!" Kelly asked – Aunt Doro hadn't said anything about that!

"She means school," said the third of the women who had greeted Kelly, who was busy mashing potatoes. "Meg and Jimmy always called it prison, they couldn't wait to get out of there and run off to California. And they did, only now they're back here and they'll never even tell us why."

"You don't need to know why!" Meg snapped. Turning back to Kelly, she said, "Sorry. Aurora over there knows everybody else's business, or thinks she does. Anyways, I don't know what your man looked like the last time he got into Bob's, but we're definitely not welcome there now. Even guys who went over there to fight the war aren't welcome if they're in with us now. You can ask Eddie about that."

"Eddie?"

"Another townie," said the woman by the sink, whose name Kelly hadn't learned yet. "He joined up right out of high school and did his year over there, and he doesn't want anybody else to have to go through the horrors he saw. And for that, the squares hate him. Even his father kicked him out. So he lives here now."

"You'll meet him at dinner," said Meg. "But I wouldn't bring up what happened to you last night around him. That stuff can really set him off."

"He's not the only one," grumbled the one woman who had not greeted Kelly when she came in. She was seated at the table, kneading dough from the look of it, and Kelly looked down at her for the first time. While the other four had long hair just like Kelly's, their taciturn friend's hair was cropped closer than a crewcut and her scalp showed signs of barely-healed cuts. A bruise was visible on her temple as well. Jimmy's handiwork, Kelly wondered?

"I'm sorry, Muffin," Meg said. "You don't need to hear about all this yet again." To Kelly, she said, "Let me show you around the downstairs while we have a few minutes." Before Kelly could say a word, she had taken her hand and guided her back out into the living room.

"Muffin?" Kelly asked as soon as the kitchen door had swung shut behind them.

"That's the name she gave us when we took her in," Meg said. "What's in a name your parents gave you anyway?" She pointed Kelly to the least-dirty couch in the room and both women sat down. "Now, about Muffin, I am sorry but we shouldn't have talked about what happened to you in front of her."

"Did Jimmy do that to her?" Kelly demanded.

"No!" Meg snapped – Kelly could see she had touched a raw nerve, but Meg did not elaborate. Instead, once she had calmed down, she explained, "Muffin is what you could have been if you hadn't been so close by here when you got in trouble with the squares. She and her man were hitchhiking up in the mountains and they got a little out of their patch. They wandered into some town that had nothing but squares, and the sheriff there took one look at his long hair and beard and her hairy legs and he flipped out. He and a couple of his pig buddies dragged them into jail, didn't even bother with pretending they'd done anything wrong. They tore off her clothes and shaved off all her hair, on her head and her legs, and did God-knows-what else to her – she won't talk about it much except to say they humiliated her, and then the next morning the sheriff dressed her in a man's t-shirt and jeans and drove her to the town line and ordered her out of the car. She ended up on the beach here a couple of days later and Jimmy took her in. We don't know what happened to her man."

"Wow...I wish Doug were down here to hear that," Kelly said.

"Why would you want that?"

"He has this thing about idealizing the sixties, all peace and love."

"Well, it is about peace and love. And freedom and equality too. That's what we're all about here," Meg protested.

"Is that why the guys can order us to make their dinner?" Kelly demanded.

"Don't hassle me about that!" Meg said angrily. "Jimmy takes good care of us all, and we've got to do our part while he's doing his part to fight against the war and the man. If you don't like it, you can go back out and take your chances on the man treating you like Muffin!" She got up and stormed back to the kitchen, and held the door open. "If you want to eat tonight, Kelly, I suggest you help us."

Upstairs, Doug was sitting through a lengthy treatise on freedom and morality from Jimmy. "You want to stay here, man, you've got to have some respect," Jimmy said while his wife could be overheard yelling at Kelly downstairs. "Your lady should know her place and you ought to know yours. Your job is to help us with the war against the war, you got that. You don't do your part, you're out of here."

"And I wouldn't suggest going to Bob's again," Mikey piped up. "Our friend Eddie could tell you about that place."

"Eddie?" Doug asked. "Not little Eddie from the drive-in?"

Jimmy grabbed Doug by his collar. "Don't you ever bring up the drive-in when he's around, you got that?! His old man threw him out in the street because Eddie hated what was wrong. That drive in – we burned it down last year, by the way, but they could never prove it was us – that place is everything that's wrong with this right-wing Nixon-loving town, and Eddie's history there is all about his Ozzie-and-Harriet past. We don't talk about that here. The past is dead, period."

"You get your hands off me," Doug said evenly. After standing up to Sarge, nothing much scared him now.

"What if I don't want to?" Jimmy taunted. "My house, my rules."

"Maybe that's your problem," Doug said. "Now get your hands off me."

"When I'm good and ready."

They were still engaged in their standoff when the door opened and a young man in an old Army jacket stepped in. Doug looked up. Older and much more world-weary, but it was unmistakably the same face. Little Eddie.

"Speak of the devil," grumbled Jimmy, and with a final flair he shoved Doug back onto the bed as he let him go. "Eddie, this is our new brother...what's your name again?"

Rather than answering Jimmy directly, Doug stood up and shook Eddie's hand. "Hi, I'm Doug."

"Welcome, Doug," said Eddie. After an awkward pause, he added, "Do I know you from somewhere?"

"Yeah," Doug said. "A long time ago, and you probably don't want to talk about it."

"Man, I told you not to bring that up!" Jimmy said.

"And I didn't bring it up," Doug teased.

"Sure you did, man. I don't want no more of that!"

"Jimmy, knock it off!" Eddie said. "If I have a problem with Doug I'll take care of it myself."

"What can you take care of without me?" Jimmy said. "If we hadn't taken you in you'd be just another drunken babykiller vet in the street."

Eddie had Jimmy pinned to the wall in no time, hand at his throat, while Jimmy gasped for breath. Mikey and Doug both jumped up and tried to pull Eddie off him, but they were no match. "Man, he's not the trouble you'd get in!" Mikey reminded Eddie when it became clear they couldn't pull him away.

"You're right, he ain't." Eddie backed off and Jimmy sank to the floor, sucking in his breath at last.

"If it were anybody but you, man, you'd be out in the street right now," Jimmy whined. "We need vets in the movement, that's the only reason you've got a place to sleep tonight."

"Dinner!" Meg called from downstairs.

"Fuck you, Jimmy, and let's go eat," Eddie said.

The kitchen table was set, and the women were lined up behind it as the men filed in while the food waited on the counter. Jimmy, Mikey and Eddie sat down and looked expectantly at the women. Doug, the last of the men to come in, stood uncertainly in the doorway as he realized what was to happen next. He looked at the women, all of whom looked back as if expecting him to sit down and be served first along with the others – all except Kelly, who was glaring at him.

His friend's look sealed it for him, and the consequence be damned. "Let me help you serve," he said, and he joined the women at the counter.

"Doug, sit down!" Meg said with a nervous grin, but none of the other women protested. Instead they looked impressed with him; even Kelly looked begrudgingly appreciative.

"Do you not know your place at all, man?" Jimmy snapped. "Are you even a man at all?"

Doug forced a smile at Jimmy. "Potatoes?" he offered.

"Sit down or we don't eat!" Jimmy ordered, banging his fist against the table.

Meg, standing between Kelly and Doug, had had enough. "Jimmy," she said. "Our guest wants to help, and you can show a bit of appreciation for a change or maybe you won't get to eat!"

"Amen," said Aurora. "Jimmy, grow up, the man just wants to be a gentleman."

"Where's the rest of your gentlemanly manners?" mumbled Muffin, who had stood silently off to the side up to that moment.

"You," Jimmy said to her, standing up. "Only you can get away with that, 'cause of what the man did to you. You're damaged goods and you need your time to heal. I get that. But one of these days you're gonna be over your bad trip and then I ain't gonna stand for that. You got that?!" He grabbed up a hunk of bread off the counter, and turned to Doug. "I will deal with you later!" The others were all silent as they watched him bang the kitchen door nearly off its hinges and then listened to him stomp off upstairs.

None of the other men volunteered to help serve dinner, but neither did they object as Doug helped transfer the food to the table. Kelly and Muffin sat down without helping, while the other women assisted Doug.

With Jimmy out of the way, dinner was pleasant and lively. Meg regaled them with tales of San Francisco and the road trips from coast to coast, though details of just what had gone wrong remained elusive. All the others knew not to ask, so Doug and Kelly followed their lead. Eddie tried a few times to guess where he and Doug had crossed paths before, but that night a decade before at the drive-in never came to his mind and Doug knew better than to bring it up himself. Luckily, Aurora steered the conversation into safer waters. "So where did the two of you come from?" she asked.

"Iowa," Doug answered off the top of his head. "Our family farms were just a few miles apart and we grew up together. Real square place."

"Ain't it the truth," Kelly added. "Church every Sunday and honor your father and mother and all that garbage. We both knew we had to get out of there all the way back in high school."

"Just like me," Meg said wistfully. "Only you did get out."

"You did too, didn't you?" Kelly asked, though she was worried about stepping on toes again.

"For a while, yeah," Meg said. "God, I loved California so much. And there was talk of going to India, Morocco, so many great places. But it wasn't to be."

Doug managed to keep his mouth shut, but for Kelly the temptation was too great. "It's none of our business what happened, but you know you could always go back," she said as gently as she could.

"No I can't," Meg said with some finality. Kelly took the hint and said no more, and in the awkward silence that followed, no one else could think of anything to say either. Finally, after an uncomfortably long silence, Meg spoke up. "I mean..." she said tentatively. "Oh, hell, we're all sisters and brothers here and there ought to be no secrets." She looked at the door and then the ceiling for signs that Jimmy might return. "I don't want him knowing I told anybody anything," she said, looking around the table.

"No one wants to cross him, Meg," Eddie said. "Trust me."

"Okay," Meg said, and she took a deep breath. "You'll all see why I've never talked about it before. We were out there, staying in a place like this only even more raw and close to the land, and they were really ahead of the curve with their love and openness, and Jimmy is who he is. He was always hiding his wedding ring when some new girl washed up on our couch, and convincing them that they'd be handing victory to the military industrial complex if they didn't sleep with him, and –" She paused as Mikey burst out laughing, and a stern look from her silenced him. "Mike, you know Jimmy. You know how he can pull off a line like that with the right kind of girl. Remember Star, from last spring?"

"Yeah, I remember her," Mikey said in a repentant tone. "She just disappeared that weekend in June, too."

"And now you know why she disappeared," Meg said. "Anyway. Jimmy was having his way with any girl he wanted, even though we were already married, and he didn't even care if I knew. Just the way of the world, you know, and guys are like that and blah blah blah. Well, one day a clean cut guy showed up, fresh out of college and trying to figure out how to stay out of Vietnam. Roger was his name. A real boy-next-door type, and of course Jimmy didn't trust him. Said nobody got turned away on his watch, but he'd better not turn out to be the square he looked like, or something like that."