Peyote Read online

  PEYOTE

  He proposed it, and she thought it would be a pretty neat thing to do - hitch-hike up the coast to Big Sur, camp there, maybe eat some payote (she was dubious about this part), and hitch-hike back on Sunday for the wedding party of a friend. They would miss the wedding, and that was all right with her.

  She was twenty, he was twenty-two, both students at the State University, Indian-looking people with dark hair and prominent dark eyebrows. A big girl, her hair was long, well down past her shoulder blades - sweet, beautiful face.

  His hair was really black, worn fairly long, and he had a sort of Texas face; even the part in his hair looked Western -

  They might have been taken for brother and sister.

  She was an English major and so was he - both looking around ... They were lovers, had been for almost two months now: she'd stay at his apartment two or three nights a week. They were both working hard as students - read those novels, studied those poems, wrote those papers!

  She had had two other lovers, not of his type, and liked them both very well.

  Now she liked him very well. She was deliberate about such matters as about everything, a girl of good family who could think along pretty steadily - people liked her, and many even loved her, on sight.

  She was quiet and shy, but you'd notice her instantly in a crowd.

  No Bohemian, either one of them. She looked too aristocratic for that; and he too strong for it, like some sturdy, watchful young man just in from a ranch on the west Texas plains.

  You'd notice him, too. He was a man.

  Not good material for Bohemia. What would they be good material for? Citizens of the Republic, on the march to the good life, one way or another, and they'll get there before most of us, I think.

  A middle-aged man in a Buick was the driver, fascinated by this pair, and before they'd gone ten miles he was offering to drive them all the way, veering off his course to do this.

  He drove fast, held it at well over eighty going up 101. The boy sat in front, talking a little to be polite. She sat in back, looking out slowly - didn't say anything.

  On Highway One, where the road narrows and gets curvy, he slowed down. Some sports cars passed him.

  They got to the campground at Big Sur at four-thirty, walked a long way around the Ranger Station (not wanting to pay for a camp site), chose a place and took possession of it by spreading out their sleeping bags. Then they prepared a meal - some fruit, some things out of cans. After eating they walked around, took things in (the big sycamores and the sycamore leaves on the bottom of the river), and just passed the time until they were sleepy. They went to bed without making love - no harm in that. There were people around, and it had been a long day; they knew what they wanted, like married people.

  It got cold during the night (it was late October), and they rolled against each other in the sleeping bags - the heads were together, and he said nice things into her little ear.

  The next morning after breakfast, he got out the peyote, smallish disks, wrinkled, like dried apricots, and at first she was reluctant, as she had been right along; she had come for the camping - she was used to that, for her family had always done a lot of camping. He talked her around, though - made fun of her reluctance.

  They cut it up into pieces for easy chewing, and there was some cottage cheese and sections of lemon to help with the taste, and neither helped at all. Frightful it was, like a warning from Mother Nature that one is not supposed to be eating this thing!

  She got angry with him silently about this bitter new experience.

  Once having eaten their assignment, and there was quite a lot of it, they went off through the woods, going up the river, and stopped after half an hour to sit down under the trunk of a big sycamore; there, some fifteen minutes later, she began to feel nausea, and very quickly was really sick, wanting to vomit and unwilling to do it.

  She made a scene - spoke roughly to him on the theme that you've made me sick, and why should you have wanted to do that, you bastard. She said some other swear words, very naturally, as nice girls can do, sometimes. She domesticated them.

  Still, they stung him.

  As she got sicker, he tried to comfort her. She lay down with her head in his lap, weeping now; he patted her, kissed her cheek, talked to her, and under the stimulus of the situation talked rather better than he normally did, so that she was really rather pleased with the way things were going; and after a time the nausea passed away, and he smiled happily at the news of this.

  Then they settled themselves to have the experience of peyote, looking up into the sycamores.

  Objects became alive (so it seemed). They came up out of their mute natures. The big white boulders arranged to be on intimate terms with something or other in the psyche, for example.

  One thing after another. No hurry.

  Goats must feel like that when they get on the wrong fodder.

  Presently she observed that the leafage of the trees was composed of an immense tangle of snakes, and she was not at all afraid of this, though she had a great dislike of snakes. I don't think this has any phallic significance.

  They stayed there some hours, stricken.

  Then they went wandering around, and on the way back to camp after dark, got lost in the forest for a few minutes, as was proper.

  Clouds were building up meanwhile, and by the time they'd had their supper, a light rain was falling. They set to work against it by stretching a little tarpaulin between a big tree and a little one, and ditching around the sheltered area underneath (he had brought an army-surplus entrenching tool). Then they went to bed, still pretty high, enjoying the sound of the rain, and feeling secure in the sleeping bags. No lovemaking.

  Sometime after ten, the rain picked up and the waters began washing here and there; it happened that one of the streams came their way, inundating their ditch very suddenly, and splashing down through their little bed making the sleeping bags wet instantly.

  What sort of disaster this was you can imagine who have been in such a fix.

  No fun.

  Dark and cold and boring. One is bored immediately, and the day, which will dry things out, is a fading memory. There is a lot of clumsy movement impossible to regulate according to the dictates of reason - you just hurry along, trying to get the stuff together, and wondering if there's any place where you can hide.

  They looked, but there was nothing to the purpose, and the air was getting noticeably colder. They were still a little high, you understand. They'd have moved into the ranger's house if they could have found a room with the window unlocked - well, not quite that far, maybe. But they'd have thought about it- that's the possibility!

  Finally he had the idea that they could go into one of the privies, and this was done - the Men's. It had one of those National Parks toilets that consist of a drum over a hole, with a toilet seat hinged to the top of it; such an arrangement always seems to smell a lot stronger than its farm counterpart which is sawed out of boards, and this one had a particularly strong smell because there had been a lot of people using it over the weekend-one imagines the strong powders doused by the caretaker upon the steaming pile in the darkness below. It's nothing to hold against her that she was distressed to be there, sitting down most of the time, up to her knees in sleeping bags that could not very well be rolled up, since they were wet, and the packs, and her lover's legs. It was crowded in there.

  All they could do was wait through each second in the hope that the daylight would come before too long. Umn. There's a situation that's difficult to bear gracefully . . . Of course, she was happy. She was really very happy.

  When finally there was enough daylight to justify the attempt at the highway, they gathered things together, and went out there.

  No cars for quite a while, then a
sailor in a '57 Chev. stopped, and they were on their way, this time requiring three different cars before reaching the off-ramp they were seeking at a little before two-thirty in the afternoon, and by this time they had brightened to the day and the night was merely an unpleasant thing that had happened, about which it was possible to remember that the last impulses of the peyote had somewhat mitigated the unpleasantness ...

  A friend in a Volkswagen came down the offramp as they were standing there, and he was willing to take them home (to the boy's apartment), where they took showers and made love, for the first time in five or six days; it was a nice love-making; she came, for the first time with anybody, and this made them both happy.

  At four-thirty they went to the wedding party, and six weeks later they had parted forever, for he believed that she was interested in marrying him.

  She was heart-broken, naturally, and has survived to be more beautiful than ever, while he has graduated and gone off to Los Angeles, so they say.

 

 

  Les Weil, Peyote

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