Woodfolk

He had been asleep through the rolling hills of central California and was snoring in the back of the station wagon when the five of them drove over the dam that had shown true the state’s severe dehydration. They awed, the conscious riders, at how low the water was—how far down the drop from concrete to the river-that-once-was went. Daze simply slept, dreamt, and paid no heed to the beauty of it all.

He wouldn’t have cared much anyway. This young man of twenty-three or twenty-four or twenty-five was not enchanted by nature but by the ease of living or living breezy. What got his jollies off was being able to do whatever pleased him. True freedom was Daze’s aspiration, but this mostly meant he was homeless and happy about it. Without the burden of rent hovering over his head, a meager sum of money offered him the freedom to muck about at his whimsy. This was what brought Daze to North San Juan. Another season of trimming marijuana for a couple thousand dollars that would likely hold him over for another year of doing whatever the hell he wanted, that’s what brought him here.

He snored as the others stared in awe at this water-starved mountain town somewhere between Chico and Nevada City, somewhere between desert and wooded glen. A soothing mix of dirt brown, dead foliage green, and uninspired beige surrounded the four travelers and their driver, with the rare splash of still-living green here and there.

As the beauty rolled on past, Daze dreamt of a night spent hanging out and/or loitering in a 7/11 parking lot, drinking forties with an impossible girl who was leaps and bounds out of his league. There, under the dim moonlight of a partial lunar eclipse, no cops would ever bust their midnight fiesta. They’d dance there until sunrise, and ultimately, unbelievably, they’d kiss.

The station wagon’s driver failed to dodge the sunken pothole on the unpaved road they drove upon, dislodging a small backpack from behind the sleeping vagabond. The backpack, belonging to Eva Hart, contained nothing but books on horticulture, mycology, and astronomy. Or was it astrology?

When that pack came tumbling down on Daze’s face, it rolled down his chest and stopped abruptly on the poor dreamer’s chubby half-erection. It wasn’t the book bag that yelped in pain, would you believe it? Rather, it was Daze, now wide awake. He scrubbed at the sleep sand in his eyes with one hand while clutching his pained groin with the other.

“God damn it! What the fuck do you have in this fucking pack, Eva?”

Eva, the tiny blonde girl with the big head full of reasonably artificial dreadlocks riding shotgun, only laughed at this in a way Daze liked to describe as her ‘stupid hippy giggle.’ It was a condescending giggle that, you best believe, was often used to charm or disarm a man she aimed her giggle-gun at. Weaponized cuteness at its worst. Her laughter was no answer to Daze’s swear-ridden question—just another annoyance. It was her boyfriend, if you could call him that, who answered for her.