Helix of Cole Read online

  Neil Young played on. His words seemed to float along with Cole’s speeding car as he headed back toward San Francisco. “You’re all just pissin’ in the wind, you don’t know it but you are. And there ain’t nothin’ like a friend who can tell you you’re just pissin’ in the wind.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The backside of Topanga State Park didn’t have homes occupied by movie stars. The trees were sparse and the earth was dry. The vistas were extreme, and the rocks looked like a razor gashed them. The Topanga Canyon of songs and movies seemed a million miles away. Off a gravel road, off the Mulholland Highway was a rutted dirt road that wound its way down to the bottom of a box canyon. The Bureau of Land Management’s topographical map identified it as Canyon 136. The east side of the canyon opened onto a dry expanse of rock and sagebrush. Facing the open end of the box canyon was an old ranch house, once used in Gene Autry westerns. Now it was as bleached out and dry as the rocks around it. If Curtis Winger had a home, this was as close as it would get.

  The old man and woman who’d lived there more than 50 years had been there so long that no one remembered that they actually were the cook and ranch manager to the family who once lived there. The original owners died during the time of the Korean War. Their son drank up what little money his parents left him, and one night he drove over a cliff on the way home. His body wasn’t discovered for more than a month. Nobody ever bothered to check the deed or ask why Pete and Cleo moved into the big house. Nobody really cared. The land was for all purposes worthless.

  The little garden that Cleo tried to grow next to the barn always failed. Pete gave up raising anything bigger than a chicken in the early ’60s. Twice a week, Pete and Cleo got dressed up and drove their faded green 1959 GMC pickup to town for groceries. Once a month, when their Social Security checks came, they would go to the movies. Lately, it was getting harder and harder for Pete to sit through the feature because of his restless leg syndrome. His leg would start feeling tingly and twitchy, and he’d have to get up and walk it off.

  Over the years, a lot of men and a few women came to the ranch to look for work, hide, or just pull their lives together. In the ’40s, it was draft dodgers and deserters. In the ’50s came the Braceros hiding from immigration and homosexuals hiding from who they were. In the ’60s, a fellow named Manson and a flock of girls tried to stay in the barn, but Pete chased them out. He wasn’t havin’ none of that free love stuff. In the ’70s came hippies who had done and seen too much. The ’80s brought the coke burnouts and beautiful people who fell through the bottom. The ’90s brought shattered children, misused, abused, and confused street kids. The 21st century brought a new generation of deserters, tree spikers, and the walking wounded of a society plagued by priests who forgot their vows, parents who abandoned their natural barriers and a socio-economic abyss that had no bottom. Through it all, Pete and Cleo were at peace knowing they wouldn’t be around to see the children of the new crop of castoffs of the 21st century come rolling in.

  Neither Pete nor Cleo could remember when the man who now called himself Curtis Winger first came to the ranch. He was Kevin Westerman back then. He had been so many people since then, it was hard to keep track, but he was back. He always came back. He looked so much older than the last time. Cleo blamed it on poor diet. Pete tried to never judge people who came to the ranch for help, but Curtis’ eyes were cold, bitter, and angry. No one was ever chased off who needed help. Pete chased off a fair share of bums, but people in real need—no matter how hard they seemed on the outside—always softened up with a few days of Cleo’s cooking and the hard work Pete said was payment for their upkeep.

  Kevin, or Curtis or whoever he would be next time, arrived the night before. Said “hello,” ate a sandwich, had a cup of coffee, “thanks,” “goodnight,” then went out to the tack room in the barn. The only other thing he said was, “Is my stuff still here?”

  “Just where you left it. Probably buried in dust a foot thick by now but still where you put it.” Pete went to a rack on the wall next to the stove and got a brass key that hung by a loop of twine. “Here, you’ll need this. I had a mangy bunch a while back. I felt like they might steal something, so I put a padlock on the cupboard. Didn’t want anything happenin’ to your stuff.”

  Curtis just nodded and went to the barn.

  The young man who became Curtis Winger first came to the ranch in the spring of 1970 when Mel Lyman came west to record an album with Jim Kweskin. Curtis was on his third day of an acid trip that lasted a week and got the plan wrong. Lyman and Kweskin left Boston for San Francisco, but somehow Curtis wound up in Los Angeles. He was never able to hook up with them again. Curtis read that in recent years, the Lyman Family gave up their allegiance to the revolution and become fat and wealthy, while he alone remained true. Down through the years, he sought refuge at the ranch a day here, a week there, but he always disappeared without warning or goodbye.

  Curtis pulled back the big barn door, which groaned and creaked on its sprung hinges. Through the dusty window of the tack room, he could see the orange glow of a cigarette. The tack room door was open, and he could smell the bittersweet mix of tobacco, old leather, and body odor.

  “Come in,” said a voice from the dark. “Here, let me light the lamp.”

  The flash of a match lit the dark room and bloomed into the flame of a kerosene lamp on a small table. “My name is Thomas Whitehorse.”

  Curtis didn’t respond, just moved to the bunk bed on the wall opposite where the man sat.

  “Smoke?” Thomas said, extending a pack of Salem cigarettes.

  “No.”

  “You know the rules here? You been here before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. I mind my business, you mind yours, we’ll have no problems.” Thomas paused. “The guy who left yesterday stole my coat.”

  “I don’t steal.” Curtis said, staring at the man across the room. “You Indian?”

  “I am Dineh, Navajo.”

  “Do you know the Peyote ritual?

  “I have lost many of the traditional ways, not living on the reservation so many years. Why do you ask?”

  “I need healing. I need a vision of what I am going to do.”

  Thomas Whitehorse laughed. “What? Are you one of those mescaline-eating hippies who want to touch the earth and sky and all the movie Indian bullshit?”

  “No I—” Curtis began.

  “Look, God made Peyote. It is His power. It is the power of Jesus. Jesus came afterwards on this earth, after Peyote. We have eaten Peyote of 10,000 years. God told my people through the Peyote visions the same things that Jesus told the whites. You need your white Jesus, not no Indian Peyote.”

  Curtis answered. “I’ve eaten the sacred mescal buttons many times. It’s a power I don’t understand, but the visions have directed me. I took a lot of acid, but it was just a high, you know? I never saw my spirit, my future, the stuff my life would be. I have to do something important, and I need to see, really see what to do.”

  “Find another way,” Thomas said with a tone that signaled the end of the discussion.

  “Just thought I’d ask,” Curtis said flatly.

  “You did.” Thomas dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his booted foot.

  Thomas Whitehorse lay back on the bed, and then rolled, putting his back to Curtis. Curtis stood and walked the few feet across the room to a row of cabinets with plywood doors. Two were padlocked; the others, simple slide latches. He took the key from his pocket and tried the first lock. It was four years since he was here, but he remembered which cabinet he used.

  Inside in the shadows was a footlocker standing on end and two cardboard boxes. A coat or sweater of something dark hung above on a nail. Curtis took the lamp from the table and put it on a chair next to the cabinets. He pulled out the top box. There was nothing of any value. Mostly wire, switches, and a length of fuse. He set it on the bed. The next box held manuals, notebooks and drawing schematics o
f explosives he used or designed. He pulled out a yellow spiral notebook and flipped through the pages. This was his life’s work, field-tested recipes and formulas for poisons. Batch sizes, effects, and timing of various compounds and their strengths carefully documented. Urban Chemical Warfare was written on the cover. Curtis smiled. This was what he knew, his first love. He knew he could build bombs, demolish buildings, and cause incredible destruction, but he did love the quiet simplicity of chemical death.

  He tossed the box on top of the bed, and then gently laid the notebook on the old stained pillow at the head of the bed. Curtis approached the footlocker slowly and with something close to reverence. Carefully, he pulled the long wooden chest from the cabinet and laid it on the floor in front of the bed. He ran his hand lightly over the top of the army green box. Curtis reached under his shirt and pulled a thin silver chain with a small chrome key over his head.

  For a long moment, Curtis looked at the key, slowly turning it in his hand. He never thought for a moment that Pete would let any harm come to his things. He only asked about his things to give the old man the impression that he didn’t completely trust him or anyone. It was true, but in all the years Curtis came to the ranch, he never saw or heard of Pete helping the sheriff or losing anything entrusted to him. Even though he hadn’t been to the ranch in four years, the footlocker had been setting in the tack room cabinet for more than 10.

  Curtis unlocked the footlocker and gently lifted the lid. The contents were few, but their value to Curtis and the revolution were immeasurable. Strapped to the bottom of the box was a stainless steel canister and an aluminum rectangle that together made a Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM)—what the cable news channels like to call a Nuclear Suitcase Bomb. Since 1991, the existence of these portable atomic bombs were argued about and debated from Moscow to Langley, Virginia, and every Western capital in between.

  The truth is, there were more than 200 at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall. They all disappeared. In January 2000, a Russian defector named Col. Stanislav Lunev told a U.S. congressional committee that terrorist leader Osama bin Laden paid the equivalent of $700 million for two bombs, but he wouldn’t say when. They were supplied by the Russian mafia who bought them from former KGB agents.

  Curtis and his network of anti-government friends found the report amusing. If they had four between them, Osama must have a whole lot more than two! On several occasions, Curtis was offered the new “backpack” atomic weapons, a dirty little bomb made up of three coffee can-sized canisters that created lots of radioactive debris. The problem with these lightweight devices, in Curtis’s thinking, was that they simply made a mess and made people sick.

  He was only interested in making a statement. The statement had to be punctuated with as much death and destruction as possible. The bomb in the footlocker would make just such a statement. A great many people would die from the force of the explosion itself. Many survivors of the blast would die of radiation poisoning in the weeks afterward. Those even farther away from the explosion would suffer radiation sickness in the days and weeks to follow.

  This was terror! This was homegrown, all-American terror, a domestic statement of revolution. Violence is as American as apple pie and baseball. This kind of violent attack in the homeland would unite the people. This time, they would be united in their understanding that the machine became the government was no longer what the men on the money had in mind. This time, the people would rise up to bring an end to Big Brother monitoring their lives, taxing them into poverty, and destroying their planet for selfish gain.

  This kind of bomb would put fear and anger in enough people to bring down the incompetent pigs that ran the establishment government. It would replace it with a system of local committees that are friendly to the earth and personal freedom, unencumbered by the petty “spit on the sidewalk” laws that the bloated government passed by the hundreds each year.

  No government was best, but a crippled, hated, ineffective government would do just as well. We the People knew best, not the rich, lying lawyer bastards that took over what the Revolution of 1776 began. Curtis was reborn and renewed in his determination to complete what he had signed on to do in 1968. Even if all the leaders of the revolution faded away, he was still fighting the war. Even if he were totally alone, he knew the righteousness of his cause. His commitment was total.

  Mel Lyman taught Curtis and the other members of the Family, “At this particular time, on this particular planet, in this particular nation, there has become a vast number of people whose inborn moral development is at a higher state of maturity than the very law which was created to bring about that state of development, and for these people that law is no longer necessary.” Mel was God, and even though he went back to the realm of the spirit, he still reined in Curtis’s being. Mel showed the way, the path; Curtis would take it to the next step.

  Curtis reached down and stroked the canister. There was something inexplicably sensual in stroking something that could remove a city from the face of the earth. Curtis had the tools, he and the commitment, but no plan, no clear vision. That damn Indian could have helped. Peyote never failed him in the past. It gave him the vision of killing the traitors in the Urban Warrior Alliance. He saw the FBI, as clear as if standing in front of him. Perhaps they were. He saw the Judas kiss of the three traitors. They took money. There was no doubt what he must do, and he did it.

  Alongside the lustrous canister of the bomb was a coarse-woven dark green army blanket. Curtis could not remember why it was there. The bomb was securely strapped down; there was no need for packing. He lifted the blanket out of the footlocker with both hands and laid it beside him on the bed. As he began to unroll the blanket, he was surprised to see several bundles of $100 bills, four magazines of 9mm ammunition, a manual for the bomb, and three passports, each with his picture.

  The names in the passport were all different and in the photos, Curtis’s hair and beard were different colors, styles, and lengths. Since he never legally possessed a passport or been fingerprinted, he didn’t exist to the authorities. He left lots of fingerprints that he was sure were on file with the FBI and other government agencies, but every document he ever possessed had been a forgery. As he looked at the passport showing him with short-cropped black hair, he smiled and thought to himself that he must have been pretty stoned to have paid for such an obvious fake.

  As the last fold in the blanket fell away, it revealed a leather pouch a little smaller than a man’s hand.

  “Yes!” Curtis whispered, recognizing the beaded sun embroidery on the bag.

  Loosening the leather thong, he emptied its contents into his palm. At least two dozen black leathery mushroom-shaped chunks spotted with green mold lay in his cupped hand.

  “It is a sign.”

  Curtis dropped the Peyote buttons back into the leather bag. He looped his finger through the drawstrings and pulled them tightly closed. The money, bullets, and other items he could understand forgetting, but forgetting the bag was unconscionable. This was God’s way of contacting him, speaking to him. How could he have forgotten? No matter, he thought. I will receive my vision and my mission will be made known to me. Curtis was so excited, he could hardly contain himself, but he didn’t want the sleeping Indian to know. He refused him. Well, they refused Jesus, too, and they turned their backs on Mel Lyman, but Curtis Winger would complete their missions. He would bring the harmony of the plan of heaven back to people’s minds, and he would bring the restoration of the Law of Eden back. People would once again see the need to embrace nature and the gifts of Mother Earth.

  Curtis rolled up the blanket and tried to place everything back just the way he found it except the sun bag. Before putting it back in the footlocker, Curtis decided to look more carefully in case he should find anything else to help guide him through. On the bottom of the chest was a newspaper that he couldn’t understand why he saved, a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, and a sewing kit. Lying on the side, partiall
y hidden by the bomb base, was another sign.

  Lifting it out as though it were the most precious document in the world, Curtis raised the dog-eared copy of the Autobiography of a World Saviour. Curtis brought the book to his lips and gently kissed it. To get more of the lamp light, Curtis turned slightly on the bed and opened the cover of the book. The flyleaf and copyright pages were long gone. Underlined in faded blue fountain pen were several lines from the Introduction with the words “This is the Word from Mel his self” written in the margin. Curtis lightly ran his finger over the words then read to himself:

  The only pain is separation and the only joy is breakthrough, and the battle only really begins when man has finally, through exhaustion, worn out every tangible means, devoured everything in sight, and arrived right back where he started, with an empty belly and a world with no food, having cried all of his tears and standing completely naked and alone, knowing full well that there is no comfort outside of himself.

  Above the Introduction was inscribed, “To Jason – Live, Love and Learn, our time is short, Mel.”

  “Jason. I am Jason. Jason Reed. Jason Weston Reed!” As he whispered the words, he was Curtis no more. He closed the book and laid it on the pillow beside the leather pouch. As he reached to close the lid on the footlocker, he saw the newspaper clipping he glued in the lid.

  Dated August 19, 1984, The Chicago Sentinel, the headline read, “Warriors of the ’60s Revolution; Gone and Nearly Forgotten.” Jason seethed as his eyes skipped across the yellowed page. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, The Black Panthers, Minutemen, Weather Underground, The Manson Family, Mel Lyman. His eyes froze. The words seemed to glow in the dimly lit room: Prison, Dead, Professor, former Congressman. Phrases of text seemed to stoke the fire of his rage: “all but forgotten,” “footnote to history,” “mellowed with age,” “his antics seem almost silly now.” How dare they defame the ones who showed the way? How could the list have Mel’s name? He was God come to Earth to show a better way. In the months he was in Roxbury with the Family, Jason’s life changed forever.