[16]

Clementine, 1975

His mother was dead. His life changed. The Mont Blanc landscape, the red clay roads, the Holy Redeemer Church, Grandma Winter, and the Reverend Whitehouse were the same. No one seemed to notice that he’d been away.

“What was she thinking, running off like that?” Winter asked.

When Buckley tried to answer, she stopped him. It was a rhetorical question. Winter and John Whitehouse suggested that Abigail’s death was God’s judgment.

After all, she’d had an illegitimate child. She’d run away, abandoning her husband and mother.

Winter complained, “I buried a husband. Now my only daughter is dead. God judges me too.” Trying to make sense of things for Buckley, she said, “Your mother sometimes lived wild and wouldn’t listen. It isn’t fair for you to be a victim all your life.” Then she sobbed. Was she really sad? he wondered. Buckley didn’t understand Winter Pitank, and he didn’t have the energy to try.

The reverend took Buckley to the barber on Main Street to remedy the boy’s weird hippie look. He bought Buckley new Wrangler jeans at the Kmart in Sherrill City. The boys at school no longer said or did mean things to Buckley. Instead, they ignored him.

• • •

In 1975, Buckley met Clementine Wistar, quaalude addict and resident of Drop Out City, Arkansas (a wannabe commune in Mont Blanc).

Clementine ran through a field of crackling sun-snapped briars toward Drop Out City’s perimeter, a rusty barbed-wire fence that bordered Buckley’s backyard.

There, Winter hung laundry out to dry, and Buckley, sixteen and red-faced, a morose young man, sat on the back steps of his cinder-block house, drawing a peace symbol in the dirt with a twig. It was August and hot.

Clementine wore a man’s striped dress shirt and a pair of green army boots. She waved from the barbed wire to Buckley, her hair dark and slick, even from that distance, just like his mother’s.

“Where you going?” Winter asked.

“No place.” Buckley walked toward the barbed wire that separated Winter’s property from the hippies in Drop Out City, formerly Moss’s Ranch and Stables. He carried his drawing twig and pretended to amble, all the time heading straight for Clementine. Such a pretty girl, he thought. She could be a Barbi Benton if she weren’t stick thin, if she weren’t a drug addict. He knew what she was. He knew she was weak. He wanted to know her weakness better. He wanted to save her, but there are some people who can’t be saved. Who can’t be lifted up and made into the people they were never born to be anyway. Buckley didn’t know these things. He saw possibility in her dark eyes, and even on this day, when Buckley saw Clementine up close—her eyelids droopy, her face pale, spotted here and there with stray freckles like a blind man had dotted a white canvas—when she hid her face behind a freckled hand, the skin yellowed around her mouth, he still believed he could save her. He said, “How’s it going?”

Clementine’s lips were dull and cracked, like the clay under his feet.

Buckley squeezed between the bottom two wires, the barbs catching and tearing his shirt. “Did you go down to the free clinic?”

“No,” she said, “I changed my mind.” Clementine leaned against the barbed wire. “Shit,” she said, sucking at a bead of blood on her forearm.

“What’d you do that for?” he asked.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Guess I’m klutzy.”

She wiped at the cut on her arm.

“You should go to the clinic. It’s free. You can get a checkup.”

“I’m not much for charity. They’ll treat me like dirt.”

“No they won’t. You have to give people a chance.”

She said, “I love you.”

“You don’t even know me.” He stiffened, sliding his hands deep into his pockets.

“Sure I do. I know you, silly.”

It seemed to Buckley that her eyes were barely open. He looked toward Winter, who was oblivious (she needed glasses), hanging his underwear in the August heat. Winter complained about Drop Out City all the time. “Bunch of hippies is what they are. Peace and love, my foot. I think the lot of them ought to move to Mexico or Canada if they don’t like how real Americans live.”

Clementine grabbed Buckley’s wrist, the drop of blood beading down her arm onto his hand—which he kept in a fist because his fingernails were crusted black. Clementine guided him back the way she’d come, toward Drop Out City. Then, halfway through the brambles, Clementine stopped and said, “Touch my neck. Touch my back.” She let go of Buckley’s wrist and settled on the scorched earth, the briars pricking her calves and knees. Buckley knew she felt nothing. Down on the ground, he rubbed her neck, his hand inside the man’s shirt that bunched at her knees. He rubbed her shoulders and her back, and Buckley thought, She’s such a small thing. Five feet, maybe, and not more than one hundred ten pounds wet.

“Do you remember when we met?” she asked.

“Last week.”

“Do you remember what you said?” she asked.

“I said hi, and I asked you what it was like living in a hippie commune.”

“And what did I say?” Clementine tilted her head to the right.

“You said it’s like living anywhere else.”

She laughed again. “Do you want to drink some beer? My old man is split.” She put Buckley’s palm on top of her head as if he were mea suring her height, marking it on an imaginary wall. “I feel good.”

She did feel good. So very, very good, Buckley thought. “All right,” he said—about the beer. Buckley knew her old man, as Clementine called him, had split. That’s mostly what she talked about when she did talk: about how her old man was supposed to make a big score and they (she and the old man) were getting the hell out of Drop Out Shitty, Arkansas; about how she was going to New York City to get herself together and be a superstar or some kind of star. She said, “I’m not kidding, Buckley,” and when he didn’t say anything, like Of course you’re going to be a superstar, I know you are, you’ll be a big star, she said, “Fuck you. You don’t believe me.” She slapped him on the arm. It didn’t hurt because she moved in slow motion. He’d known Clementine Wistar a week, but it seemed years.

As they sat on the hot earth, Buckley held Clementine’s hand. It was soft and tiny in his. He listened to the sound of her breath. This was how it was with them: quiet a lot of the time. A while later, Clementine got up and they climbed the steep orange cliff dug out by a bulldozer. Moss, the former owner of the ranch, had years ago begun a housing development on the property. Unfortunately, the backers pulled their money out, and now there was a steep clay hill where a few of the remaining kids from Drop Out City rode flattened cardboard boxes down the slopes.

Drop Out City, like the rest of Mont Blanc, had endured a six-year drought. The idea of subsisting off the land had failed. The end result was a barren landscape littered with trash. Buckley spotted a Roger’s Gourmet Pork ’n’ Beans can and kicked it.

Today, Clementine and Buckley walked past the garden. It was a forty-by-forty-foot plot of inedible, sun-scorched vegetables and fruits. Nothing ever grew big or juicy enough to consume. The tomatoes, peppers, squashes, and beans shriveled and dropped desiccated onto the dirt. The garden was intended to be the center of the community, and in a sense it was. As the food source diminished, so did the dropouts. Those who remained in Drop Out City like Clementine lived off the scarce charity of Mont Blanc’s residents—most of whom hated the people they termed “deadbeat hippies.”

The Vietnam War, which was never officially a war, had ended unofficially this year. After fourteen years of fighting and 56,559 Americans dead, the unofficial war, the “minor skirmish,” was over. This same year, the dream of communal living died forever in Arkansas. This dream of brotherhood and sisterhood and peace had disintegrated into a circle of tin shacks inhabited by drug addicts, fed by a dwindling few drug dealers—like Clementine’s old man, Scott.

Most of the deadbeat hippies had left by August 1975, when Buckley went to Clementine’s tin-roof shack for the first time. The dropouts had dropped back in, going home to their suburban parents to endure the “I told you so” speeches. They were the lucky ones. Not Clementine. She was unlucky. She didn’t know the way home anymore.

As they sat on a sleeping bag, dirty clothes strewn and heaped around them, flies buzzing at the doorway, Clementine said, “I’m going to New York City. That’s where the action is. I just gotta get some money saved.”

Buckley knew what to say by now. “You’ll be a big star on Broadway.”

“In movies too,” she said. Clementine sang a version of “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie. Her voice was scratchy, but charming nonetheless, Buckley thought. Clementine crawled around, digging under her clothes until she found the stash of beer. “They’re warm.” She dug into a paper bag and popped a pill.

“What are you taking?”

“You know.”

“Can I have one?” Buckley wanted to feel good.

“I only got three left. If I get some more, I’ll share. You understand. Have a beer.” Buckley knew that Clementine was lonely. Anyone who chose to hang out with him was lonely. He wasn’t the best company, he imagined. He didn’t have much to say.

“When I get to New York, I’m going to get my own apartment and a good job in a skyscraper, and I’ll look out at the world.” She fell back on the sleeping bag. “The world is so big. Drop Out Shitty is so small.” Buckley drank his hot beer. It tasted terrible, but he drank the three beers she gave him as fast as he could. Otherwise she’d say, What’s wrong with you? Get out! Get the fuck out. She’d said these things previously. The first time he refused her offer of a warm beer, she said she didn’t have time to waste on squares. He drank quickly now, smiling and burping.

The last two times they chilled in her shack, the flies had buzzed too. She’d said, “I’m seventeen.” He’d lied and said, “Me too.” It was only a year’s difference from the truth. She asked about his family and he lied some more, saying, “My dad’s a sea captain.” She didn’t care what he said. She never pressed him for the truth. He told her that his mother was dead, but he left it there. He still couldn’t talk about her death. It was two years ago, but it was like yesterday.

Today, Buckley thought about how Clementine was so small and pale despite the Arkansas sun, so pretty, even with the yellow stains around her mouth—and then she touched him. She pressed her head, that silky, oily head of hair, onto his stomach and slid her hand under his belt into his jeans. He said, “Stop. You don’t have to do that,” and he tried to scoot away. Or maybe he only considered scooting away. It’s what he should’ve done. He should’ve stopped her, but she made him feel so good, and it was better with her small hand, better than using his own. Those black fingernails he couldn’t scrub clean for all the soap in the world. And then, after he made a mess on her sleeping bag, she said, “Get out.”

Before he left, she was sound asleep on a pile of clothes.

The next day she was at the barbed-wire fence again, explaining that her old man, Scott, would be back any day. “Then, this won’t be cool,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. She scratched at her neck, which was red from a mosquito bite. “Anyway,” she said. “You know. I don’t know. What are you doing?”

Buckley and Clementine made for the clay hill again and went to her shack. The few people meandering through the commune, even the little girl not more than six, a sickly-looking barefoot waif, didn’t say hello or anything to either Buckley or Clementine. Like all of Mont Blanc, Drop Out City was not a friendly place, but it didn’t matter because today Clementine was in a bright mood, her eyes open wide. Buckley suspected she was running out of pills, and he asked as much.

She said, “The fuckers won’t share.” She scratched again at the mosquito bite on her neck. “It’s cool though. Scott’s gonna be back anytime. Maybe today. So it’s cool.”

Buckley had brought her a Baby Ruth candy bar. She ate it, licking the bits of chocolate and caramel from the wrapper. She said she might bleach her hair blond in New York. She thought she’d look good with blond hair. “What do you think, Buckley?”

This time he touched her. He held both of her breasts, one in each of his hands, which he’d struggled to scrub clean the night before. He’d used an old brush with black bristles, and the tips of his fingers were raw from scrubbing, but his nails were clean. His hands were clean, and as he knelt beside her, kissing her stomach, noticing her unshaven legs, the dark hairs and the orange dirt caked on her shins above her black boots, he wanted to give her a bath.

She said, “I think if I plucked my eyebrows, I’d make a good blonde.”

Buckley thought, I could be anybody. He pressed his nose into the dip beneath her collarbone, and she said, “I don’t like red hair. I don’t know what it is. Definitely blond.”

“I like your hair how it is now.”

When Buckley said, “I better go,” she said, “Please don’t. I can’t be alone.” She looked around the shack. Buckley looked too. There was nothing to see but the grooved tin roof, the light streaming through the spaces where the walls failed to meet it. She said, “Scott said he’d be back before I ran out. I don’t know what to do. I mean, no one will share. What am I going to do? How am I going to fucking sleep?”

“I don’t know.”

“Just go,” she said. “It’s cool. Go on.”

“I’ll come back.”

“Can you get me something? Can you get me something that might help me sleep? I’m wigging. I can’t stand being this awake. It’s not right for a body to be this way, man.”

After Buckley left, Clementine wrote in her diary.

She shut her diary and, watching the light fade through the cracks, waited for Buckley.

Two hours later, Buckley returned with a plastic grocery bag full of canned green beans, corn, succotash, and a box of half-eaten Cheerios. She didn’t want the food, and he knew she wouldn’t. She wanted something to make her feel numb. Something to let her sleep again. Stealing two of his grandmother’s Nembutal sleeping pills, Buckley had come through for her.

Clementine said, “Red devils. You’re a lifesaver.”

Buckley shrugged. He didn’t know what a red devil was.

She swallowed them with the last remnants of a day-old beer. “Thank you.”

In September, Buckley skipped school to be with Clementine. Neither of them did much talking, but it was comforting because he could be quiet with her. Every day, they went to the post office to see if her old man, Scott, had sent word. Finally, there was a postcard addressed to Clementine Wistar, Drop Out Shitty, Arkansas. She was jubilant.

“It says he’s coming back. It says he’s just got to raise the bus fare. He’s coming back.” Her eyes glazed over with glee or tears or sedatives.

Buckley smiled and said, “Great,” even though he doubted Scott would return from California. There was some woman—Diana—he was seeing, and she had cash, Buckley knew, because sometimes Clementine went into a rage talking about Miss Moneybags. “Fucking bitch.” “She’s old as shit.” “I hate her!” “Scott’s just after the money.” “He needs the money so he can come and get me. It makes perfect sense.”

“Definitely,” Buckley agreed.

Clementine stole six-packs of beer from the Safeway. Buckley drank with her.

Buckley stole his grandmother’s sleeping pills, wondering what he’d do when there were no more left, when Winter discovered they were gone. He wouldn’t think about that right now. Right now, he was in love. It was a good thing to be.