to bet?” jeered his brother.
“You know what we were doing in the army?” Pump asked.
“Something in electronics. Jay always told me it was classified.”
“Missile tech. Mainly instrumentation. When Jay and I were posted to California, we were part of a team that was —”
As Pump spoke, I heard Guantanamero Bay’s front door open, and voices inside the house. A moment later Willow and Phil were at the living-room doorway.
Willow smiled. “Look at these degenerates. Still awake and toking at this hour. Hi, Wayman. Welcome back.”
If possible, she looked more stunning than ever. Her dress, a micro-mini, was covered with large pastel flowers and fitted her exquisite body tighter than a glove on a hand. Curves aside, I didn’t know why a short dress was so sexy. I had seen Willow in a bikini many times; the upper regions of her shapely legs weren’t unobserved territory. Yet her garment’s hemline revealed a tantalizing expanse between its edge and her knees that was mind-warping. When she tossed her sun-kissed long blond hair back off her face, as she did intermittently, I heard in my brain the rising falsetto of several Beach Boys’ tunes. She was so gorgeous and lovely and desirable that she almost transcended sexiness.
I rose to receive my hug from her, an experience akin to embracing an aura of pure light. Then I shook hands with Phil, who appeared more tanned and muscular than ever.
Since there wasn’t enough space on the porch for all six of us to sit, we moved inside at Edward’s suggestion and settled into the living room’s funky chairs and sofa. During the relocation process, I learned a bit about Willow’s and Phil’s summer. He was planning to stay on with the Costa Mesa roofing crew until Christmas. I asked about his draft status, and he shrugged. He and Willow had taken over the downstairs bedroom at the Bay. Willow recounted their visit that evening to Phil’s mother’s place. She and Phil had stopped off at the Saucy Swan — an English-style pub in Costa Mesa we frequented — for a drink en route home.
Now that Willow had appeared, I remembered my earlier resolve to nudge a conversation with her toward picking up information about Janey. Ranged against the likelihood of this was the lateness of the hour and the distraction of the boys’ absurd notion of launching a hippie satellite. Willow herself was a distraction. As I watched her across the room, the stereo seemed to be serenading her with the piercingly sweet flute riffs of Canned Heat’s “Going Up the Country.”
Jay brought the new arrivals up-to-date on the evening’s dispute over the Woodstock Nation.
“Wasn’t Woodstock bitchin’?” Willow enthused, breaking into Jay’s account. Then, turning to me, she asked, “Did you hear about Woodstock in Canada?”
I was amazed that Willow, whose bag was surfing, would respond so positively to the rock festival. Even Phil ventured that the gathering was far-out. I reminded myself that surfers, like freaks, represented a spectrum of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours, even if they got lumped together under one label. In her other life, Willow was studying art at UCI, just as Phil at the moment was nominally also a roofer.
“You can’t put up a satellite,” Phil said once Jay finished explaining his concept. “Those things cost millions to launch. The phone companies pay NASA big money to have satellites lifted into orbit — Telstar and all that. How could you ever —”
Willow sighed. “Wouldn’t it be groovy if they could, though?”
“Where would you get the bread?” Phil asked. “Organize a benefit concert? I read somewhere even Woodstock’s promoters didn’t make enough profit to —”
“No, no,” Jay said. “We’re not going to pay anybody. What we’ll do is borrow the launch vehicle. From Uncle Sam.”
“What?” sounded simultaneously from Edward, Willow, Phil, and myself.
Jay was unfazed by the blast of disbelief aimed at him. “I was trying to tell you before. This is probably still classified ‘secret,’ so don’t mention it outside this room. When Pump and I got our orders for California, we were assigned to a team decommissioning Revere missile silos. One of them isn’t that far from here. Off 74 toward Lake Elsinore, east of San Juan Capistrano. You go a couple of miles past the Riverside County line and —”
“Decommissioning missile silos?” repeated Phil. “What’s that got to do —”
“I thought you guys were in electronics,” Edward said. “How is it —”
“Isn’t the government building missile silos?” Phil asked. “I saw something about it in Time. The Minuteman system?”
Willow laughed. “Listen to everybody getting excited. I think the guys are just having some fun with us.”
“We’re talking about the Paul Revere sites,” Jay said. “Prototypes for the Minuteman silos. Only eight or ten were operational around the country. Two were in Southern California. One was on Edwards Air Force Base in the desert fifty miles northeast of L.A. The other was over here on Sitton Peak in the Santa Anas. Fifty miles southeast of L.A.”
“The Sitton site is in the desert, too,” Pump said. “They call it the Cleveland National Forest, but it’s nothing but rocks and mesquite.”
“Agave. And tumbleweeds.”
“Snakes and lizards, man. Don’t forget the time —”
“Never mind,” Edward ordered. “How does any of this relate to satellites?”
“The missiles are still there,” Pump said. “We were assigned to mothball the silos. But the brass decided it was easier to —”
“Cheaper,” Jay contributed.
“And cheaper to cement shut the silos with the birds still inside.”
For a moment I heard the surf through the windows.
“The logistics guys took the warheads away,” Jay continued. “We stood down the launch and control stuff. But the birds are intact.”
“Like those bombers you can see from the freeway to Arizona?” Phil mused. “Hundreds of old jet bombers lining a runway out in the Mojave?”
“Yeah. They’re obsolete, so they’re parked.”
“You can’t be serious about firing off an ICBM,” Edward said.
“Why not?” Jay asked. “We were trained to do it.”
“Not exactly, man,” Pump said.
“Okay,” Jay agreed. “We’ve got the know-how, though. You just have to pump the fuel aboard, target it for orbit instead of Moscow or Shanghai or someplace, install the Woodstock Satellite, and wham-o! We have liftoff.”
“The Woodstock Nation takes to the skies,” Pump said.
“Bitchin’,” Willow approved.
“Hold on, hold on,” Edward broke in. “Even if this wasn’t a dope-induced delusion, you’ve overlooked a few tiny details. One is that you’d
