July 1976
After her birthday, Blue redoubled her efforts. She had to do better. She was never going back to being alone. To atone for
her mistake, she decided she needed to use her best skill. But to do that, she needed something.
One morning, she went out to Dean, who was resting in the hammock with his guitar. (He wasn’t a very good guitarist, but everyone
acted like he was. That didn’t matter anyway, she knew now. The point was enjoying what you were doing.)
“Dean,” she said, squeezing her toes into the milky grass, still damp from rain the night before. Dean looked up from under
the brim of his wide brown hat. “I was thinking . . . I know how to make bread. Really good bread. But our oven is shit. If
I had a real one I could make us good stuff. And, you know, people make ovens. Out of bricks and stuff. Bricks. Wood fire.”
She was careful not to explain too much. She wanted it to seem like the idea was Dean’s. He’d like it more that way.
“An oven,” he said thoughtfully.
“If I could make bread, I could probably sell it too,” she said, shrugging. “But definitely we’d have plenty to eat.”
Two days later, Dean went out with the van in the morning and returned with bricks, sand, concrete, and two guys Blue never saw before or again.
The three worked all afternoon in nothing but their cutoff shorts.
It took a few days of this, the guys returning once more to help with the dome, but by the end of the week, there was a brick oven just outside.
“You see,” Dean said as everyone crowded around to admire what they were all calling his work (though it was really the other
two guys who did most of it). “I provide. Now, Blue, show us what you can do.”
Once Blue had her oven, she began to produce bread every day. The oven was big enough to hold eight pans, so she had a production
line going all day long. Early in the morning in her kitchen, mixing and kneading and resting and rising. They kept the oven
going all night to keep it warm. Sweet Jane often helped her, or Sally. They sold the bread at the co-op in return for deeply
discounted food. The co-op even photographed her and Sweet Jane and Sally for their yearly calendar when they were dropping
off some loaves. Neighbors with bigger gardens and greener thumbs were also happy to trade a bag of corn, a basket of blueberries,
or some watermelon for the delicious bread.
The bread gave them a good reputation with the locals. People used to stare sometimes, when they’d wander down the mountain
in their bare feet and shorts and homemade halters, carrying baskets or pillowcases or whatever they had to bring back food.
Now they made a kind of sense: They were bread weirdos. Leave them be.
For a few weeks, this was bliss. Blue was at the heart of their home on the mountain, where the air was sweet, and there was always someone to talk to as she worked.
Jane was often in the kitchen too, sitting at the table with tarot cards or tomato seeds or watching the dough rise in the sunny spot near the door.
Though it was never clearly defined, it was understood that everyone had a job.
Blue’s was the food. Jane’s was the garden.
Lacey sewed clothes. Cat and Sally didn’t have great household skills—they were better at picking pockets—but they swept and washed clothes in a tub outside and made themselves generally useful.
Denver was usually with Dean, his right hand, conferring as they swung in the hammock.
She was good with tools. She’d spent time at some commune out in California where they’d built their own house, and when a hole developed in their roof here on the mountain, she pulled out the ladder, climbed up, and nailed a board over it to stop leaks. Dean’s job was to be Dean.
Star floated around, mostly smoking grass. She wasn’t interested in the work in the kitchen or garden, she couldn’t sew and
didn’t want to learn, and she wasn’t a thief. She was, however, extraordinarily pretty, and Dean often called out for her,
and they would go into the woods hand in hand. It didn’t take too long for Blue to understand why Dean had picked her to join
them. Denver never looked too happy about this, but she didn’t say a word. Star was being taught the tricks of their trade
and was proving to be a good study, but she hadn’t actually been used down in the city yet.
This is why, weeks later on an August afternoon, Star, Blue, and Jane were at the house while the others worked in the city.
Jane was out in the garden, and Star was in the kitchen with Blue, restlessly pacing and then sitting on the counter as Blue kneaded dough, tapping her heels against the cabinet doors, making Blue tense.
It was unbearably hot, and even though the oven was outside, the kitchen was painful in the heat.
Star was clearly building up to saying something.
“Do you like making bread?” Star finally asked.
“I love making bread.”
“Did you do that before you got here?”
“Yeah,” Blue said. “But that was before. We don’t talk about before, because . . .”
“I know,” Star replied. “Everyone told me, but . . . it’s just us. I’m from Virginia, and I didn’t like school and things
at home were a drag. And then Zeppelin played in Greensboro and I went with my friend Margie and we met these people who were
following them and they asked us if we wanted to come. Margie was too scared and I was scared too, but I snuck home and put
some clothes in a bag and went out the window to go meet them. I was with them for a few weeks, until the tour got to New
York, and they took off without me. It was February and cold and I didn’t know what to do, so I asked this girl who was from
the city and she let me sleep on her floor . . .”
Blue knew she needed to stop Star from telling the sad story of how she blew around the city for a year like a piece of trash in the wind, but she couldn’t.
Blue looked over at her and didn’t see the tiny seventeen-year-old innocent—she saw a girl who had been making it on the streets of New York for a while before they took her in.
Star was young, but she was not stupid. And she had questions.
“I like it here,” Star said. “It’s pretty. It smells nice. Everyone’s nice to me, but . . .”
Blue’s entire body had gone tense. She stared out the window at Jane, who was admiring her fecund pepper plant. It was like
she was miles away.
“But what?”
“It’s just . . .” Star squinched up her face and curled her toes. “I don’t know. We’re free here, right? To do whatever?”
“Of course,” Blue said automatically. But the words tasted wrong in her mouth.
“But Dean tells everyone what to do. And, what’s with the money? I knew some people who hustled in the Village and they said
Dean was . . .”
“Said Dean was what?” Blue asked, keeping her eyes on her dough.
“A hustler. That he had all his girls working for him. Stealing, I mean. There’s got to be loads of money. Where does it go?”
“We give it away.”
“Do we?” Star said. When Blue didn’t respond, she continued, “I know why he brought me here. It’s okay. I like it here. It’s
just . . . what about you? Didn’t you have a job somewhere?”
“We don’t talk about before,” Blue said, nervously pulling her big flour jar closer.
“That’s weird,” Star said. “You know it’s weird.”
“You shouldn’t say these things,” Blue replied, turning on Star and speaking in a low voice. “Don’t.”
“Why?” Star’s gaze met Blue’s. The question was genuine, and sensible. Why? The answer was right on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t say it out loud: Dean says.
Jane was coming toward the house with a bucket of vegetables.
“Don’t say anything to Jane,” Blue said quickly.
“I won’t,” Star replied.
A connection had opened between them—a channel to the place in Blue’s head that had considered the situation and ignored the
conclusions, like the fact that Blue had gone to New York to escape a life of tedium and ended up measuring wheat flour in
a shop for minimum wage—then escaped New York to avoid that tedium, only to end up measuring wheat flour for no money. She
had become a petty thief and a baker on no salary.
Over the next week, she started to think about the money as well. Money was worthless, which was why it was worth so much.
By this point, because she did the food shopping, Blue was the only one who had much contact with money. Anytime she needed
cash, she had to walk Dean through her requests in detail. He’d vanish and then money would appear from somewhere. How did
Dean have exactly what she needed whenever she asked for it?
These thoughts percolated in her head as she measured and kneaded. She and Star exchanged looks but no more words. There was simply a buzz between them. A fissure had opened.
On the next New York run, they took Star along, leaving Jane and Blue at the house. Jane had a fever and was asleep on a mattress
most of the day. This was as close to being alone as Blue had ever been here. When she was sure that Jane was completely asleep,
Blue crept up the ladder, to Dean’s loft. She had only been up here once, on her initiation. Even though everything was completely
open and free to everyone, it was somehow understood that you didn’t go into Dean’s space without his permission. The loft
ran the length of the house and had a low, slanted ceiling and windows on either side, which were decorated with multicolored
glass mosaics that Cat made from broken bottles. They were like stained glass, raining a chaotic and beautiful light on the
naked mattress, the dusty little tapestry rug, the guitar and books. Siddhartha. Tom Sawyer. How to Win Friends and Influence People. His clothes were piled on the side of the room. He didn’t have to share, so he had his own jeans and shorts and T-shirts,
his own beaded vest, two pairs of shoes. Aside from two dollars in one of his pockets, there was no cash.
Where did Dean spend the most time, aside from his loft? Outside. Often in the hammock. He also went into the woods to cut
firewood, which was about the only job he did with any regularity. When she asked for money, he rarely went back into the
house to get it. It was outside somewhere. That is where she would look.
The ground around the house sloped precipitously, with jagged bits of rock jutting out and fallen limbs latticing the ground.
She picked her way through, trying to see the path with new eyes—the forest not for the trees, but for anomalies.
After an hour of circling, she found several cigarette and joint butts ground into the dirt in a tiny clearing.
Close to this clearing was half of a dead tree sideways on the ground.
Its uprooted base had rotted and hollowed, and it looked like sticks and leaves had been placed over the hollow opening into the rotted inside.
She removed these. Inside, pushed as far as it could go, was something lighter in color—a soft tan, with a smooth, manufactured feel.
She had to partially climb inside to reach it, scraping herself up in the process.
It was a canvas bag, lumpen. Weighty. She unzipped it.
There, in the bag, was the most money she had ever seen, rolled and bound with rubber bands. Rolls of twenties. Rolls of hundreds.
The truth was heavy and obvious and landed on Blue like an anvil from above. This wasn’t two dollars for wheat germ money—this
was serious cash. Blue had been trying to make one bottle of dish soap last for months thinking that they’d been distributing
money to poor people—real Robin Hood shit! That’s what Denver had said. Denver had spoken with conviction. She believed. Star
had guessed this wasn’t true, and she was right. Here was proof of the lie.
This was what their little family was about.
They were collecting money for Dean, not for people back in New York.
The IDs in the two wallets featured pictures of men who looked passably like Dean, if he shaved off his beard.
This money was for him, and these IDs would be useful when he took off, leaving them in their rickety house on the mountain with nothing, not even their names.
Her savings—that seven hundred and ninety dollars she had left after he made her rip up her rent money—that was probably in this bag.
She’d been a fool. No more.
It was in that moment that the plan began to form in Blue’s mind. It would have to happen soon, because she couldn’t live
there much longer with this knowledge. One day, she would walk off and take the bag with her.
She just had to wait for the right moment.