Evergreen, Chapter 25
Coda: July 28 and 31
July 28
“This is KING TV, Luke Wardlow reporting. Last night, the House Judiciary took the long-anticipated step of recommending that the President of the United States be impeached and removed from office. In the first recommendation of impeachment in more than a century, the committee charged President Nixon with unlawful activities that formed a course of conduct to obstruct the investigation of the Watergate break-in and to cover up other unlawful activities. The vote was twenty-seven to eleven. Six of the committee’s Republicans joined all of the Democrats on the committee to send the article to the larger House.
“In addition, an article accusing the President of abuse of power is expected to be approved Monday when the committee reconvenes. Approval of a single article of impeachment by the House is enough to send the case to trial in the Senate. While reports from San Clemente, where Mr. Nixon is staying at the moment, confirm that the President is confident that the House will recognize that he has not committed any impeachable offenses, Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield will meet Monday with Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott to begin preparations for an impeachment trial. ‘The line of demarcation has been reached,’ Mansfield said earlier today.”
“In other news, closer to home, Seattle Police have announced that they have been gathering more information about the disappearances of 23-year-old Janice Ott and 19-year-old Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah on July 14, and may be close to identifying a suspect in the alleged abductions. Witnesses have described both girls as leaving the area with a man bearing the same description. The suspect, pictured here in this composite artist’s drawing, was seen wearing a white tennis outfit, with a sling for what was presumably a broken arm, though detectives doubt that it was actually broken, and driving a tan or beige Volkswagen. One of the witnesses overheard the man introduce himself, with a hint of a British accent, to one of the girls as ‘Ted.’ Seattle police chief Robert Hanson has asked anyone with knowledge of a man fitting this description to contact the Seattle Police Department immediately.”
July 31: 19th Birthday
My hands are aching, but the day is almost over. We should be getting picked up soon.
“Hey, why are you chopping down the dandelions?”
“They’re not dandelions. It’s Scotch broom.”
“Whatever they’re called, those flowers are pretty. You shouldn’t be destroying them.”
The driver of a beat-up Rambler station wagon has stopped on the Parkway next to where I’m working, pulling long, reedy Scotch broom plants out of the ground and stacking them by the side of the road to be picked up later. We get this complaint from passersby at least half a dozen times a day.
“They’re weeds. They’ll take over everything if we don’t get rid of them.”
The Rambler pulls away. I watch it drive off and notice that Alice, one of my co-workers, is walking toward me through the tall grass along the parkway. She points behind me, at the grounds-crew truck arriving to take us back to headquarters, our day of “destroying pretty flowers” done. The truck pulls up, and Tony, another co-worker who’s sitting in the bed of the pickup, says, in a high, pinched voice, “Why are you killing the dandelions? They’re so pretty,” as if he hasn’t said this at least once a day this week.
“C’mon, you two. Let’s go. It’s starting to rain.” Arnie, one of the permanent grounds crew staff, is in the passenger seat. He’s right, it is raining now, but this doesn’t mean that he’ll let us sit with him in the cab. Alice and I know to join Tony in the back.
When we pull into the small parking lot next to the grounds-crew headquarters, a temporary trailer attached to a large concrete multi-vehicle garage, Jenny is sitting on the rear bumper of Ezra’s pickup, parked next to the trailer. I haven’t seen her all summer. Today is my nineteenth birthday, but I don’t remember who I’ve told. I wonder if she knows.
“Hey, what are you doing here?”
“I wondered if maybe you’d want to get some dinner? Something easy? Like the Blue Night Café?”
“That’d be great. Let me get my bike.”
“You can throw it in the back.”
After retrieving my Clubman ten-speed from behind the trailer and hoisting it into the truck bed, I give her a quick, chaste hug and walk around to the passenger side, kicking the mud off my boots on the front tire before I climb onto the seat bench.
“How’ve you been?” I ask. “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been at my mother’s most of the summer, and a couple weekends in Seattle with Alma. I’m good. I’m waitressing at a restaurant near the university in Moscow, but just dinners, so it’s not too bad. I spend a lot of time with Mom, helping her out around the house, and practicing the piano. It’s been good to get away from Olympia. How about you?”
“Things are good. I’m living on the Westside in a house with Eric, playing a lot of music.”
“I heard. You guys get along pretty well, right?”
“We do. He’s not working. He practices all day, figuring out things from records and learning tunes. When I get home, he shows me what he’s learned, so I’m picking up a lot without having to work too hard for it.”
“Why isn’t he working?”
“His parents told him he didn’t have to. They’re happy for him to just practice all summer. And rent on our place is probably nothing for them. But he thinks the real reason they’re cool with him staying in Olympia is that they’re in the process of splitting up. His dad moved out, and they probably didn’t want him to have to choose which of them to live with if he went back to Portland. He seems OK with it, though.”
“That’s good. How’s the job?”
“It can be a bitch. It’s exhausting, and we’re out in the rain a lot, of course, but I like it. I’ll be happy to be done, though. I spent the last three days swinging a machete and pulling weeds, clearing out all the brush and debris along the Parkway. My hands get sore and stiff—I have to massage them at night before I can play the fiddle or guitar—but I’ve only got another month, and I’ll have a couple weeks off before school starts.”
“Have you been doing anything else? Other than playing music with Eric?”
“Sally and Walt come down from Seattle now and then. Walt’s driving a cab, and he has Sundays and Wednesdays off. They should be here now, actually, at the house. A couple of musicians from Eugene are staying with us, a banjo player and fiddler, Delia and Butch. They met Liam at a fiddle contest in Idaho, and he told them they should look us up on their way home. Sally and Walt were planning on coming down today anyway, so there should be a big party going by the time I get home.”
“Is it OK we’re having dinner?”
“Of course. I don’t know what their dinner plans are. They’ll probably just order a couple large pizzas or something. Eric doesn’t cook much. But it doesn’t matter. If you can drop me after we eat, there’ll still be plenty of time for tunes. It’s just off Division.”
“Sure, of course. How about Sofía? Is she around?”
“No, she’s been in Seattle most of the summer. She came down a couple weekends ago, and she might be coming down again this weekend, I’m not sure. She decided to live with her parents for the summer so she can bone up on her Spanish; she’s doing that program next year that goes to Guatemala spring semester. But she says it’s hard to get her parents to speak Spanish around the house, they’re so used to English now, so she may be regretting she decided to spend the summer at home.”
“Guatemala, huh? So, are you two . . .”
“We’re good friends, and . . . she’ll be gone a lot next year, so . . . It’s funny, sometimes I feel like she started sleeping with me because she thought she was supposed to, because we were hanging out all the time. We slept together when she came to visit last time, but it was mostly just easier than making her sleep on the couch. It’s probably best I don’t get too attached, you know. I have trouble with that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. That’s not what I meant. You know, I understand . . . about all that.”
“Actually, you don’t. Remember? I never explained.”
“It’s OK, I . . .”
“That’s why I’m here . . . why I wanted to see you.”
“OK. Should I be worried?”
“No, no.”
We pull into the gravel lot outside the Blue Night Café. It’s nearly empty, and the café is quiet. We take one of the booths at the back of the room, and a college-age waitress, probably a ’greener, brings us menus and water. Jenny’s reason for the visit has silenced us. I feel like I should try to make small talk, but I can’t think of anything to say. My heart is pounding and my mind careens between thoughts of nights at Willowberry, Ezra, and Jenny’s secret meadow full of princess flowers.
We order sandwiches and soup and when the waitress disappears, Jenny says, “This isn’t easy for me. I’ve only told a couple people about this, and . . . I didn’t want to have to tell you, but it . . . but, you should know. I want you to know.”
I reach across the table and lay my hand on hers. She smiles and our fingers entwine.
“I told you about my stepfather, right?”
“A little.”
“So, he used to be a heavy drinker, but when he married my mom, he stopped. They both did, for a while. But when I was fifteen, he started again. Actually, it was my mom who did, and I guess he figured, what the hell, if she’s going to drink, he might as well, too. Anyway, after a few drinks my mom usually gets sleepy, and if she’s at home, she’ll just nod off, wherever she is—the couch, her favorite armchair. But not him; the booze seems to give him some sort of weird energy. That summer, I got grounded for a couple weeks. They found out that I had been hanging out with a couple friends, our next-door neighbors, who got busted for pot. I left just before the cops showed up, so I didn’t get arrested, but, of course, my mom found out.
“So, I had to stay home with my folks at night for a couple weeks; I’d watch TV with them or listen to music in my room, mostly. One night, after whatever we were watching was over, and I was getting ready for bed, my stepfather came into my room, like he wanted to talk about something. Mom must have been asleep in the living room, and I think he waited until he heard the toilet flush or something, so he knew I’d be in my room, ready for bed. That summer was super hot, and we didn’t have air conditioning, so I’d go to bed in just a thin nightgown, no bra or panties. He came into my room, sat on my bed, and started asking me questions about school and boys I liked, pretending he cared about me. But I don’t think he listened to anything I said. I could smell the alcohol strong on his breath, and I was lying on top of the quilt. The window in my room doesn’t open, and I was probably sweating. I’d just gone through puberty that year, I’d just . . . you know, gotten breasts. So, then, uh . . . oh, fuck, this is harder than I thought it’d be.”
She looks around the café, which is still empty, and grips my fingers like she’s holding on to something she doesn’t want to lose.
“OK, I’m just going to . . . He molested me, almost nonchalantly, while he talked. He put his hand on my knee at first and then slid it up my leg, under my nightgown, and . . .”
“Oh god, Jenny, I’m so sorry.”
“Let me finish. Please. Don’t interrupt, or I’ll never . . .” She looks around the room again to make sure no one is listening.
“After a few nights of this, he raped me. Maybe because I started wearing panties and a bra under my nightgown. And he would have had to remove them to get at me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t really struggle, he’s a big guy, and his breath made me sick. Sometimes I thought I was going to throw up right on him. He always managed to leave my room before my mom woke up. After the two weeks grounding was up, I would spend most evenings with friends, and my mom would always wake up when I came home, and if she didn’t, I’d let the front door slam, so she would wake up. And then I talked my mom into letting me visit my dad in Seattle for a few weeks.
“There were a few nights after I got back when I didn’t have anywhere to go, and he did it a couple more times. But when school began, he stopped. I don’t remember what happened. Maybe my mom stopped drinking, or she was just more vigilant at night, making sure I finished my homework. Maybe she could sense I needed her—we kind of got closer there for a while, I don’t know why. Or maybe he got tired of me. He told me that if I ever told anyone about it—‘what we did’ he called it—that he would beat me. And I believed him. He’d get this look in his eyes that was almost subhuman, like he’d do anything, to anyone, like he didn’t care what happened to anyone but himself. I only saw that look a couple times, but it terrified me, so I never said anything, not till last summer anyway, when I told Alma. I’d gotten afraid of him, again. He had started brushing against me when he passed me in the kitchen or somewhere, groping me. And he came into the bathroom once when I was in the shower. I could have sworn I’d locked the door, but . . .
“Anyway, Alma came out to visit, to help me pack up and drive to Evergreen, to spend a few weeks with her at Willowberry before school started. She could tell something was wrong. One day, she went out to the backyard and laid down on a blanket in the sun, in her bikini. I was helping my mom with something, but when I saw Alma out there, I went out and sat with her. She told me I should join her, put my bikini on, but I wouldn’t, and I got really nervous. You know how beautiful she is, and I was afraid my stepdad might try something with her, especially if he saw her in her bikini. I just sat there, shaking, so she asked me what was going on, and I told her. That night, she confronted him and threatened to tell my mom. I don’t know why she didn’t just tell her, too, but we were going to be leaving in a couple days anyway.”
“I’m so sorry. I can certainly understand why you’d have trouble with sex then. I had no idea . . .”
“But I haven’t explained. Let me finish.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t have trouble with sex. Sometimes it feels like I should, but . . . I’ve had sex with a few guys since I was sixteen, some regularly, most just flings, one-nighters. Maybe I was trying to find something good about it, not have it be so horrible, so wrong. But I can’t compare those affairs with . . .”
“But then, why . . . ?”
“Because you smell like him.”
“What?”
“When you and I had sex. The reason I couldn’t go through with it was . . . was that you smell like him, and the smell would bring it all back. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, that horrible summer. It was like I was transported right back there, his horrible breath, the sticky sweat, the . . .”
“Jesus, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. You can’t help how you smell.”
“So, that means, I guess . . . there’s no chance you’ll change your mind, is there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but . . . I tried, you know. That last night you slept over? When I suggested we take a shower, after that walk in the rain? I thought maybe a shower would wash away the smell, and that would make it OK. It’s not that you smell unpleasant, I don’t normally dislike your smell, but when you’re . . .”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“No, not really. How could I? But I feel bad that you had to go through that, my fault or not.”
The waitress brings our food, and we sit in silence for a while, eating our sandwiches. A family has come into the café, but they ignore us. Their two hyperactive boys bounce up and down on their seats in a booth across the room, chattering nonstop. I’m stunned and saddened by Jenny’s story. I suppose part of me thought, when I saw her standing by Ezra’s truck earlier, that she wanted to try again, that she’d missed me during the last couple months, that . . .”
“So, do you think we can still be friends?” I ask, finally, needing to get out of my head and the spiraling dread rushing up from some dark, interior cave.
“I hope so. I was hoping you might want to play guitar with me a bit next year. Maybe just you, me, and a bass player? Something small and acoustic? I’ve been learning some Linda Ronstadt country songs and simple swing tunes on the piano, Billie Holiday songs.”
“I’d like that. Are you going to keep singing with Angelica and Alma?”
“Oh, maybe you didn’t hear. Angelica is staying home next year, or at least for the first semester. Her dad is sick, emphysema, I think, and she’s going to stay and help take care of him.”
“Oh man, no, I hadn’t heard. She wrote me a month ago, but that’s the last I heard from her.”
“She seems fine with it, staying home I mean. She can take classes at the University of Illinois, and she has friends in Chicago she’s been hanging out with. They have a band, funk and Motown covers mostly, and they want her to join, but she doesn’t want to leave her family.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. I’ll miss her.”
“Me too.”
Silence returns, my mouth dry, struggling to form banalities. Jenny turns to her soup, her gaze downcast. She has cut her hair since I last saw her. It still reaches to her shoulders, but some of its wild beauty has been tamed. And she seems surer of herself. Her eyes, still languid and deep, no longer search the room for something, for someone, as they used to.
“Can I ask you something?” I say. “The reason you can’t have sex with me? Is that what happened with Tracy, too?”
“No, it’s not.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not going to tell you. That’s his story, not yours. This is your story, our story. But there is something else I want to tell you. I’m leaving tomorrow for Europe—Italy. I’m going with Ezra for six weeks, but I’ll be back before school starts.”
“I thought you and Ezra were . . . I don’t know, since you’ve been in Moscow, I figured you’d broken up.”
“We did. I needed to get away from here, go where it’s quiet, some time alone, some time to sort things out with my mom. I finally told her about my stepdad last week, and it’s helped. She was horrified, of course, but we’ve become closer. I think she understands me a little better. She’s forgiven me for . . . for things she didn’t like about me. I’m still working on forgiving her, but . . . She told him she doesn’t ever want to see him again, and that if he comes to the house, she’ll call the police, and she’ll tell them what he did to me.
“So, it was good to be away from all the drama here, away from Ezra, the Fruits, all that. Ezra asked me at the end of school if I would go with him to Italy, and I told him no then, but he and Alma came out to visit two weeks ago, and he asked again. I feel stronger now. It’s like I woke up one morning and everything was clear.
“I’ll have to borrow money for the plane ticket, but Ezra has some friends with a place in Italy, on the Adriatic coast, where we can stay. He met them in Mexico. They have some sort of restaurant or villa, by the edge of the sea, and they’re hiring him to play music on the weekends for the guests. I’ll be singing with him, too, maybe playing a little piano or ukulele, so it’ll cover our room and meals, and we can spend the weekdays exploring Italy, going to the beach, whatever people do in the Italian summer.”
“That sounds idyllic.”
“I hope so. I hope we get along. He asked them for two rooms, so if it’s not working out, at least we’ll have separate beds. He’s been good about it. He knows about you.”
“What about me?”
“That we were . . . that I fell in love with you and . . . and you broke my heart.”
“Is that what happened?”
“I don’t know. But that’s how it feels.”
I know how I want to respond, or wish that I could respond, but . . .
“That’s how it feels to me, too. Only . . .”
I watch Jenny’s truck pull away from the curb in front of my house.
“Are you going to wish me Happy Birthday?” I call out to the bits and pieces of us lingering in the sky above.
I walk slowly toward the house, stumbling as I wheel my bike around the side to the dilapidated storage shed in the backyard. Entering through the back door, I’m greeted by the sounds of a raging old-time session. Eric and Sally are in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table, chatting, laughing. The jam is in the living room: Walt, Mike Breedlove, Delia, and Butch. I pull out my fiddle without saying anything and pull up a chair. The circle of four expands to let me in.
We play “Old Molly Hare.” Eric and Sally join us in the living room and Eric asks if I want a beer. I nod and he returns a few minutes later from the kitchen with three bottles. We’re playing “Western Country” when he returns. He puts a beer on the table in front of me, atop a small pile of New Yorkers.
When we finish playing “Western Country,” I take a long pull from the bottle, an Oly. It’s cold. I haven’t had a beer since New Year’s Eve. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stomach it, but it tastes good.
We play “Sugar Hill.”
Then we play “Black-Eyed Susie.”
Someone suggests “John Brown’s Dream,” but it’s in the key of A, so the banjo players, Walt and Butch, have to retune. I don’t want the music to stop. I’m afraid someone will ask me something—how my day was, how I’m doing—so I go into the kitchen to get another beer from the fridge, and one for Walt.
I return to the living room and set my beer down next to the first, which is still half full. Eric gets out his guitar and Sally picks up her banjo-uke, which has been lying on the couch.
We play “John Brown’s Dream.”
Then we play “Candy Girl.”
Then we play “John Henry.”
Then we play “June Apple.”
Mike and Delia get up and go into the kitchen. Eric says he has to pee.
We play “Bull at the Wagon.”
Eric returns.
We play “Grey Eagle.”
Then we play “Breaking up Christmas.”
Walt sings “When Sorrows Encompass Me Round,” an old hymn, and I lean the fiddle on my leg and let my long hair fall over my eyes while I drone a few open strings to accompany his singing.
When sorrows encompass me round
And many distresses I see
Astonished I cry “can a mortal be found
Surrounded with troubles like me”
When the song is over, I get up and go into the kitchen. Delia and Mike are laughing. They ignore me. I go out to the backyard. It’s raining steadily now, and the raindrops join the tears sliding down my cheeks. I wait till I’m good and soaked before I return to the living room and pick up my fiddle again, forgetting that I’m now dripping wet. I go into the half bathroom off the living room to dry my hands and grab a clean, dry washcloth to use as a shoulder rest.
Mike and Delia have returned from the kitchen. Sally has switched to fiddle, so there will be three fiddles now. Before I take up mine, I stand at the bathroom door and gaze with affection at the group in front me, my throbbing heart subsiding slowly. These people, playing music in my living room, celebrating my birthday—though they may not know it—bound by something I can’t explain, and wouldn’t want to if I could. Are they the ones I’ll love? Is this what will get me through, hold me up?
I sit down and Mike launches into “Ways of the World.”
Then we play “Cluck Old Hen.”
Water drips from my hair onto the top of the fiddle, creating pale circles on the tea-stained maple.
I start “Little Billy Wilson” while the last note of “Cluck Old Hen” is fading away.
Then we play “Old Bunch of Keys.”
Then we play “Rye Straw.”
The water dripping from my hair has found my bow, which squeaks as it skids up to the high E string.
Someone starts “George Booker.”
Then we play “Camp Chase.”
Then we play “Dance All Night.”
Then we play “Lonesome Road Blues.”
Then we play “Let Me Fall.”
The End
Acknowledgments and Sources
While many of the events in Evergreen are invented, some are based on actual events, and for those I relied on a few essential sources.
Quotes in the Watergate sections are either invented or come from the following:
The Watergate Hearings: Break-In and Cover-Up, Proceedings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, as edited by the staff of the New York Times. Bantam Books 1973.
The Nixon Tapes 1971–1972, Edited and Annotated by Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter. Mariner Books 2015.
A transcript of Nixon’s November 17, 1973 “I Am Not a Crook” speech.
A transcript of Archibald Cox’s October 20, 1973 press conference resigning his position as Special Prosecutor.
An article by George Lardner Jr. in the Washington Post on December 7, 1973 about Alexander Haig’s December 6, 1973 testimony about “sinister forces” that may have caused the 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes.
Of course, I also relied a great deal on Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men and The Final Days.
For the Ted Bundy sections, I relied on:
The Stranger Beside Me, by Ann Rule, Pocket Books, 1980, 1989
The Bundy Murders, A Comprehensive History, by Kevin M. Sullivan, McFarland and Co., 2009
I am also thankful for the online archive (https://archives.evergreen.edu/1973/home1973-01.htm) of Evergreen State College student newspapers (first called The Paper and later The Cooper Point Journal ) and Evergreen’s weekly “Newsletter” and “Happenings.”
Stokely Carmichael’s speech is a combination of quotes from the October 11, 1973 issue of The Paper, Carmichael’s Black Power, and a speech Carmichael gave in an address to the Organization of Arab Students conference held at the University of Michigan in August 1968 as reported in “African Americans and the Palestine Solidarity Struggle, by Abayomi Azikiwe” published on the Workers World website, workers.org, January 21, 2009.
I also quoted Matt Groening’s “Whole Dearth Catalogue” from the May 9, 1974 issue of the Cooper Point Journal and the article “Expo: A Look at Dick” in the May 23, 1974 Cooper Point Journal. I also relied on the April 4, 1974 Cooper Point Journal for information about the disappearance of Donna Manson, who would not be identified as one of Ted Bundy’s victims until he admitted to murdering her just before his 1989 execution.
The “cantos” in the first four Ted Bundy sections in Part 1 are inspired by sections of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, particularly Cantos 1–9 and 13. For a while, I thought of them as “rewritten” versions of sections of those cantos, but then I realized that I had revised them so much that they, in fact, bear little resemblance to the originals, and only occasionally coincide with them.
I relied on two translations of Inferno, the first by Allen Mandelbaum, published by Everyman’s Library, 1995, and the other by Robert Pinsky, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. I followed Pinsky’s example by writing in terza rima, as Dante did, but with “a more flexible definition to rhyme.” Pinsky said that his “translation is based on a fairly systematic rhyming norm that defines rhyme as similar consonant-sounds—however much vowels may differ—at the ends of words.” For example, in the first “Ted” section, I rhyme “mother” with “farther,” “death” with “path”, “seen” with “cervine,” but also, much more tenuously, rhyming “balm” with “daemon” or “moon” with “rustling” and occasionally I abandon the terza rima scheme altogether for a line or two, usually at the end of each “canto.”
The short poetic inserts in the fifth, sixth, and seventh Ted sections are also inspired by excerpts from Inferno, but are, obviously, not in terza rima.
Throughout Evergreen I used the concept of “echoes” that Valeria Luiselli uses and talks about in her novel Lost Children Archive. I used some very short phrases from three Bob Dylan songs (“You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “I Don’t Believe You [You Act Like We Never Have Met],” and “Farewell Angelina,”), the cantos from Inferno mentioned above, and Farid Ud-din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. In most cases, these are no more than two-to-four-word phrases, which in revising, may have become no more than allusions or echoes consisting of one or two words.
I am deeply thankful for the input and advice I got from my wife, Claudia Campazzo, and my mother, Phyllis Daniel, in writing, editing, and revising Evergreen. I’m also deeply thankful for the influence all the musicians I first met at Evergreen from 1973 to 1975 have had on my musical and personal life, including my teachers Tom Foote and Bill Winden. I hope that if any of them recognize parts of themselves in any of these characters, they understand that these portraits come from a place of deep love and affection.