Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [65]
Winger looked sheepish. “You heard about that. I guess I grew up watching too many cowboy movies. In retrospect, it’s funny now. But we were all just kids who’d dropped out of the establishment to create a brand-new society, live peacefully, and change the world. Free love, flower power, new identities, and lots of dynamite drugs. We wanted truth, enlightenment, sex, and freedom to get high without any bullshit.”
Winger shifted in the chair, with a sunny look on his face as he warmed to the memories. “Looking back, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing. We built chicken pens and then let the birds run wild, put up a big dome—sort of an aboveground kiva we used for family meetings—that almost blew down during the first big storm. Hell, the most substantial structure on the whole place was the outhouse. It had six seats and was made of scrap slat lumber.”
“Looks like you came through it all right,” Kerney said, thinking of his year in Nam, which occurred probably right about the time Winger and his friends had been trying to build their utopia.
Winger smiled. “Yeah, and most of it was fun. The one thing I learned was that you can’t live without rules. It’s a great idea but it doesn’t float.”
“Did Debbie do a lot of drugs?”
“She smoked some pot, but that’s about it.”
“How long did she stay?”
“Three, maybe four months, until her boyfriend showed up. They split two days after he arrived.”
“When was that?” Kerney asked.
Winger closed his eyes and thought hard, “Shit, I don’t know. Sometime in the summer. I was on a really bad head trip at the time. People were staying wasted, not pulling their share, or just bitching each other off right and left about the crops we couldn’t raise, the goats that got into the garden, the pig nobody knew how to slaughter, the tools that had gone missing. There were maybe a dozen of us left and nobody was getting along or doing any work.”
It was clear that Winger had told the story of his youthful, hippie escapades many times. Kerney decided Winger wasn’t a rogue or ruffian, fraud or fugitive. He was just a guy who wore his counter-culture experiences as a mark of his individuality.
“Tell me about the boyfriend,” he said.
Winger made a face. “Now, that was strange. He showed up one day driving a new truck with Mexican license plates. It was like he didn’t want to talk to anybody but Caitlin. They went off together in his truck. Two days later they came back, picked up her stuff, and left. That was the last time I saw her.”
“Describe him to me.”
“Average height, real fit looking, with a shaved head that he covered with a bandana. Oh yeah, and a fairly new mustache he was cultivating. Somebody asked him what had happened to his hair, and he said he’d picked up head lice and had to shave it off in Guatemala.”
“Did he have a name?”
“Caitlin called him Breeze.”
“Can you give me a little more detailed description of him?”
Winger chuckled. “I can go one better than that. Photography was my thing back in those days. I was documenting communal living and keeping a journal. My plan was to write a book about it someday. Never did get around to it. Anyway, I snuck around taking pictures of everyone and everything with a telephoto lens. Before Caitlin and Breeze left, I snapped a couple of frames from a distance for my rogues’ gallery. Got a nice tight head shot of both of them.”
“I need to see those photographs,” Kerney said.
“Hell, I’ll give you copies if you’ll tell me what this is all about.”
“If I’m right, Breeze may be a solider named George Spalding who faked his death in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Why he did it, I still don’t know.”
Winger’s eyes widened. “A deserter. Isn’t that something?” He scribbled on a piece of paper and passed it across the desk. “Meet me at my house in an hour. It shouldn’t take longer than that for me to dig through my archives and find the photographs.”
“One more question,” Kerney said, pocketing the address. “Do you have any idea where they went?”
Winger shook his head. “They could have gone anywhere. South to Silver City. There was a commune