The Early Stories (103 page)

They are less exotic than hippies. Many are the offspring of prominent citizens; the son of the bank president is one, and the daughter of the meat-market man is another. But even children one recognizes from the sidewalk days when they peddled lemonade or pedalled a tricycle stare now from the rocks with the hostile strangeness of marauders. Their solidarity appears absolute. Their faces, whose pallor is accented by smears of dirt, repel scrutiny; returning their collective stare is as difficult as gazing into a furnace or the face of a grieving widow. In honesty, some of these effects—of intense embarrassment, of menace—may be “read into” the faces of the hillies; apart from lifting their voices in vague mockery, they make no threatening moves. They claim they want only to be left alone.

When did they arrive? Their advent merges with the occasional vagrant sleeping on a bench, and with the children who used to play here while their mothers shopped downtown. At first, they seemed to be sunning; the town is famous for its beach, and acquiring a tan falls within our code of comprehensible behavior. Then, as the hillies were seen to be sitting up and clothed in floppy costumes that covered all but their hands and faces, it was supposed that their congregation was sexual in motive; the rocks were a pickup point for the lovers' lanes among the ponds and pines and quarries on the dark edges of town. True, the toughs of neighboring villages swarmed in, racing their Hondas and Mustangs in a preening, suggestive fashion. But our flaxen beauties, if they succumbed, always returned to dream on the hill; and then it seemed that the real reason was drugs. Certainly their torpitude transcends normal physiology. And certainly the afternoon air is sweet with pot, and pushers of harder stuff come out from Boston at appointed times. None of our suppositions has proved entirely false, even the first, for on bright days some of the young men do shuck their shirts and lie spread-eagled under the sun,
on the brown grass by the Civil War obelisk. Yet the sun burns best at the beach, and sex and dope can be enjoyed elsewhere, even—so anxious are we parents to please—in the hillies' own homes.

With the swift pragmatism that is triumphantly American, the town now tolerates drugs in its midst. Once a scandalous rumor on the rim of possibility, drugs moved inward, became a scandal that must be faced, and now loom as a commonplace reality. The local hospital proficiently treats fifteen-year-old girls deranged by barbiturates, and our family doctors matter-of-factly counsel their adolescent patients against the dangers, such as infectious hepatitis, of dirty needles. That surprising phrase woven into our flag, “the pursuit of happiness,” waves above the shaggy, dazed heads on the hill; a local parson has suggested that the community sponsor a “turn-on” center for rainy days and cold weather. Yet the hillies respond with silence. They pointedly decline to sit on the green that holds the church, though they have been offered sanctuary from police harassment there. The town discovers itself scorned by a mystery beyond drugs, by an implacable “no” spoken here between its two traditional centers. And the numbers grow; as many as seventy were counted the other evening.

We have spies. The clergy mingle and bring back reports of intelligent, uplifting conversations; the only rudeness they encounter is the angry shouting (“Animals!” “Enlist!”) from the passing carfuls of middle-aged bourgeoisie. The guidance director at the high school, wearing a three days' beard and blotched blue jeans, passes out questionnaires. Two daring young housewives have spent an entire night on the hill, with a tape recorder concealed in a picnic hamper. The police, those bone-chilled sentries on the boundaries of chaos, have developed their expertise by the intimate light of warfare. They sweep the rocks clean every second hour all night, which discourages cooking fires, and have instituted, via a few quisling hillies, a form of self-policing. Containment, briefly, is their present policy. The selectmen cling to the concept of the green as “common land,” intended for public pasturage. By this interpretation, the hillies graze, rather than trespass. Nothing is simple. Apparently there are strata and class animosities within the hillies—the “grassies,” for example, who smoke marijuana in the middle area of the slope, detest the “beeries,” who inhabit the high rocks, where they smash their no-return bottles, fistfight, and bring the wrath of the town down upon them all. The grassies also dislike the “pillies,” who loll beneath them, near the curb, and who take harder drugs, and who deal with the sinister salesmen from Boston. It is these pillies, stretched bemused between the Spanish-American War
memorial urns, who could tell us, if we wished to know, how the trashy façades of Poirier's Liquor Mart and Bailey's Pharmaceuticals appear when deep-dyed by LSD and ballooned by the Eternal. In a sense, they see an America whose glory is hidden from the rest of us. The guidance director's questionnaires reveal some surprising statistics. Twelve percent of the hillies favor the Vietnam War. Thirty-four percent have not enjoyed sexual intercourse. Sixty-one percent own their own automobiles. Eighty-six percent hope to attend some sort of graduate school.

Each week, the
Tarbox Star
prints more of the vivacious correspondence occasioned by the hillies. One taxpayer writes to say that God has forsaken the country, that these young people are fungi on a fallen tree. Another, a veteran of the Second World War, replies that on the contrary they are harbingers of hope, super-Americans dedicated to saving a mad world from self-destruction; if he didn't have a family to support, he would go and join them. A housewife writes to complain of loud obscenities that wing outward from the hill. Another housewife promptly rebuts all such “credit-card hypocrites, installment-plan lechers, and Pharisees in pin curlers.” A hillie writes to assert that he was driven from his own home by “the stench of ego” and “heartbreaking lasciviousness.” The father of a hillie, in phrases broken and twisted by the force of his passion, describes circumstantially his child's upbringing in an atmosphere of love and plenty and in conclusion hopes that other parents will benefit from the hard lesson of his present disgrace—a punishment he “nightly embraces with grateful prayer.” Various old men write in to reminisce about their youths. Some remember hard work, bitter winters, and penny-pinching; others depict a lyrically empty land where a boy's natural prankishness and tendency to idle had room to “run their course.” One “old-timer” states that “there is nothing new under the sun”; another sharply retorts that
everything
is new under the sun, that these youngsters are “subconsciously seeking accommodation” with unprecedented overpopulation and “hypertechnology.” The Colorado couple write from their gallery to agree, and to suggest that salvation lies in Hindu reposefulness, “free-form creativity,” and wheat germ. A downtown businessman observes that the hillies have become something of a tourist attraction and should not be disbanded “without careful preliminary study.” A minister cautions readers to “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” The editor editorializes to the effect that “our” generation has made a “mess” of the world and that the hillies are registering a “legitimate protest”; a letter signed by sixteen hillies responds that they
protest nothing, they just want to sit and “dig.” Dig? “Life as it just is,” the letter (a document mimeographed and distributed by the local chapter of
PAX
) concludes, “truly grooves.”

The printed correspondence reflects only a fraction of the opinions expressed orally. The local sociologist has told a luncheon meeting of the Rotary Club that the hillies are seeking “to reëmploy human-ness as a non-relative category.” The local Negro, a crack golfer and horseman whose seat on his chestnut mare is the pride of the hunt club, cryptically told the Kiwanis that, “when you create a slave population, you must expect a slave mentality.” The local Jesuit informed an evening meeting of the Lions that drugs are “the logical end product of the pernicious Protestant heresy of the ‘inner light.' ” The waitresses at the local restaurant tell customers that the sight of the hillies through the plate-glass windows gives them “the creeps.” “Why don't they go to
work?
” they ask; their own legs are blue-veined from the strain of work, of waiting and hustling. The local Indian, who might be thought sympathetic, since some of the hillies affect Pocahontas bands and bead necklaces, is savage on the subject: “Clean the garbage out,” he tells the seedy crowd that hangs around the news store. “Push 'em back where they came from.” But this ancient formula, so often invoked in our history, no longer applies. They came from our own homes. And in honesty do we want them back? How much a rural myth is parental love? The Prodigal Son no doubt became a useful overseer; they needed his hands. We need our self-respect. That is what is eroding on the hill—the foundations of our lives, the identities our industry and acquisitiveness have heaped up beneath the flag's blessing. The local derelict is the only adult who wanders among them without self-consciousness and without fear.

For fear is the mood. People are bringing the shutters down from their attics and putting them back on their windows. Fences are appearing where children used to stray freely from back yard to back yard, through loose hedges of forsythia and box. Locksmiths are working overtime. Once we parked our cars with the keys dangling from the dashboard, and a dog could sleep undisturbed in the middle of the street. No more. Fear reigns, and impatience. The downtown seems to be tightening like a fist, a glistening clot of apoplectic signs and sunstruck, stalled automobiles. And the hillies are slowly withdrawing upward, and clustering around the beeries, and accepting them as leaders. They are getting ready for our attack.

The Tarbox Police
 

Cal.

Hal.

Sam.

Dan.

We have known them since they were boys in the high school. Good-natured boys, not among the troublemakers, going out for each sport as its season came along, though not usually among the stars.

Indeed, they are hard to tell apart, without a close look. Cal is an inch taller than Hal, and Dan has a slightly wistful set to his jaw that differentiates him from Sam, who until you see him smile looks mean. Downtown, they don't smile much; if they started, they would never stop, since they know almost everybody passing by. If you look them in the eye for a second they will nod, however. A bit bleakly, but nod. In the summer they wear sunglasses and their eyes are not there. In their short-sleeved shirts they would melt into the summer crowd of barefooted girls and bare-chested easy riders but for the knobby black armor of equipment, strapped and buckled to their bodies in even the hottest weather: the two-way radio in its perforated case, the billy club dangling overripe from their belts, the little buttoned-up satchel of Mace, and the implausible, unthinkable gun, its handle peeking from the holster like the metal-and-wood snout of an eyeless baby animal riding backward on its mother's forgetful hip.

They not only know everybody, they know everything. When dear Maddy Frothingham, divorced since she was twenty-two and not her fault, upped and married the charmer she met on some fancy island Down East, it was the Tarbox police who came around and told her her new husband was a forger wanted in four states, and took him away. When Janice Tugwell fell down the cellar stairs and miscarried, it was the police who knew what house down by the river Morris's car was parked in
front of, and who were kind enough not to tell her how their knock brought him to the door fumbling with his buttons. It is the police who lock up Squire Wentworth Saturday nights so he won't disgrace himself; it is the police, when there's another fatal accident on that bad stretch of 87, who put the blanket over the body, so nobody else will have to see. Chief Chad's face, when the do-good lawyers come out from Boston to get our delinquents off, is a study in surprise, that the court should be asked to doubt things everybody
knows
. We ask them, the police, to know too much. It hardens them. Young as they are, their faces get cold, cold and prim. When in summer they put on their sunglasses, little is hidden that showed before.