Tales of the City 05 - Significant Others

been here when Genghis Khan began his march across Asia. Something indescribable always happened at this point, some soothing realignment of boundaries which contracted his world and made it manageable for the first time all year.
    Sky and trees and river notwithstanding, the Grove was not the great outdoors at all; it was a room away from things, a cavernous temple of brotherhood, locked to the rest of humanity. There was order here, and a palpable absence of anarchy. No wonder it made him so happy.
    He whistled as he passed the post office, the grocery store, the barbershop, the museum, the telegraph office, the phone bank, the hospital, the fire station. Other members, already anonymous in comfortable old clothes, moved past him in jocular clumps, brandishing whiskey in plastic glasses, calling his name from time to time.
    At the height of the encampment, over two thousand men would be assembled at the Grove in one hundred twenty-six different camps. As Booter understood it, this made for a population density greater than that of Chinatown in San Francisco.
    As he approached the Campfire Circle, he stopped to read the posters tacked to the trees—each a work of art, really—heralding gala nights and concerts, costume dramas and Lakeside Talks. His own address was somewhat drably listed as: Roger Manigault: Aluminum Honeycomb and the Future of the Strategic Nuclear Defense Initiative.
    Another shuttle bus—this one labeled “The Old Guard”—bumped past him as he skirted the lake. Henry McKittrick was seated in the back, red-faced and solemn in his sweaty seersuckers. Booter gave him a thumbs-up sign, but Henry merely nodded, obviously still sore about the contract with Consolidated.
    He headed down the River Road toward Hillbillies, immersing himself in the sights and sounds of the frontier community coming to life beneath the giant trees. The very name of the camps triggered half a lifetime of memories: Dog House, Toyland, Pig ‘n’ Whistle, Sons of Toil …
    Someone was playing a piano—“These Foolish Things”—on the ridge to the left. To the right was a Dixieland band and a chorus practicing a classical number he didn’t recognize. Their voices trailed heavenward, hovering like woodsmoke in the slanting afternoon light.
    As night fell, he assembled with the others at the Owl Shrine for the Cremation of Care. The already drunken crowd fell silent as the lakeside organist began to play the dirge and the High Priest summoned his acolytes. Then the barge materialized, poled silently across the lake, bearing the palled figure of Care.
    When the barge reached the shrine, two acolytes removed the pall, revealing the macabre effigy with its papier-mâché mask. The effigy was dutifully placed upon the pyre, but its incineration was halted, as always, by sinister, electronically enhanced laughter from the hillside.
    All eyes turned toward the ridge as a puff of smoke and a flash of light revealed the presence of the ghostly white Tree of Care. From deep inside the tree thundered the voice of Care itself: “Fools, fools, fools, when will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? Year after year ye burn me in this Grove, lifting your silly shouts of triumph to the pitying stars. But when ye turn your feet again to the marketplace, am I not waiting for you as of old? Fools, fools, to dream you conquer Care!”
    The High Priest answered:
    “Year after year, within this happy Grove, our fellowship has damned thee for a space, and thy malevolence that would pursue us has lost its power beneath these friendly trees. So shall we burn thee once again this night, and in the flames that eat thine effigy we’ll read the sign that, once again, midsummer sets us free.”
    Then, after lighting their torches at the gas-jet altar fire, the acolytes descended upon the pyre and set Care aflame, piercing the night with shouts of ecstasy. The band broke into “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
    Booter smiled, feeling the old magic, then withdrew into the darkness as fireworks burst in the trees above the lake. When he reached the phone bank, he was relieved to see that no one else was there. He placed a local call.
    “Yello,” said Wren Douglas.
    “It’s me,” he said. “Just making sure you’re comfortable.”
    “Sittin’ pretty,” she said.
    “Good. I’ll be up there tonight.”
    “No problem,” she replied.

Mary Ann’s Good News
    T HE CLINIC WAS AN L-SHAPED CONCRETE-BLOCK BUILDING on Seventeenth Street