juniper tree. Buster grabbed the shovel, the pick, and the machete, and went to the duck yard. Clearing the blackberry bush for the ducks he loved he thought of settlers in wildnerness. With his arms bleeding in the sun he thought of Berkeley as a wilderness, the heart of the Beast. And thinking of Guevara he transformed his work into an adventure. Sucking delicious blood and sweat from where the thorns had cut his arms, he whacked at the bramble and with each whack of the machete he imagined a jungle: whack for Guevara, whack for satchidananda, whack for everybody, and whack for the ducks.
Enough bush in the back for plenty of berries, and clearing this one in the center would leave space for a pond, the big pool of duck happiness. But the bramble was tight, woven with generations, and no end or beginning to untie the knot, no way to clear it except by slicing, slicing vine by vine like a pioneer in a forest. The butter flies applauded with a ballet over the fence. Finally he had it all down and rolled it tumble by tumble to the truck. Now with the pick he ripped into the white pulpy roots that gripped tight to the soil, generations fat from their undisturbed sucking. He smashed and killed them, his hands burning, biceps swelling. He sighed:
— Ah, it feels good.
The two mallards, the muscovy, and the six white Pekings stared at him not with curiosity but fear, their steady unblinking eyes wide like lunatics tortured with paranoia.
—It’s for you guys, you quack-quacks. A big pool. Cool water. Happiness.
They kept staring at him standing there with the pick in his hand, all their wings clipped, each one held captive in his prison.
And now to complete my gestalt is Daphne, the youngest member and the only one who works “out there,” commuting between here and the world outside the driftwood fences of the garden. She moved in after telling her old boyfriend to go fuck himself, and then she got the job at the Post Office she’d been waiting for. She’ll be here for a while, but not for long.
DAPHNE
In autumn the scoters and coots are joined by canvasback, golden eye, bufflehead, merganser, and pintail. Day by day the sun sets further and further south and sinks behind the Golden Gate. And on one late afternoon when the heavy clouds were drifting away, Daphne could see it floating between the pylons of the bridge, a red balloon dropping in a cradle. During the rain that day she ate her lunch in a relay box, stuffing peanut butter and jam in her cheeks like a child in fruit-crate. But at the end of her route the rain had stopped and she studied the sky and its shifting light, gray, then gold as scud clouds gibed with the sun. Wet wine-red leaves of the plum trees and leaves of the liquid amber, cerise and yellow, decorated the sidewalks like mosaic. So many trees, elm, Chinese Elm, buckeye, cedar, incense cedar, redwood, camphor, ginkgo, bay, banya-banya, juniper, palm … there were more different trees in Berkeley than there were people. Often she couldn’t see the difference between freak, straight, poor and not so poor black, who were always changing as the city itself changed from the Free Speech Movement to communes to ashrams to people living alone again as they did before the war. She had come here a girl eager for college and found herself six years later eating peanut-butter and jam in a mail-box. She was tired, her bag full of letters marked NO LONG ER AT THIS ADDRESS. Berkeley had become a flyway to her migratory generation. She hopped in her little three-wheel scooter and zipped down the hill to Telegraph Avenue. At twenty-four, in gray sweater and skirt, she felt old and wise, and for old time’s sake stopped in the Mediterranean Cafe to sit by the window and watch the people go by. “Tell me about FSM,”
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