The Totem

As near as Dunlap could remember from the photos he had studied in New York, there didn't seem much difference between how the town had looked back then and what it looked like now. A few new buildings maybe, and of course the slogans had been erased from the walls, but really nothing much was changed. The same wide central street, the same two-story buildings that went straight down on both sides, their clapboard walls painted white. A pocket of tradition. Continuity. The place had likely looked the same back in the fifties too. Dunlap had seen pictures of the confrontation in the town, beaded hippies face-to-face with stern-eyed men in cowboy hats, state policemen standing by patrol cars waiting for trouble; fights and local people jeering; flying stones and bottles, broken windows, tents and garbage through the park-and more fights, further confrontations, each day worse than the one before until the roundup in the park, patrol cars all around it while the troopers went in from all sides and pushed the hippies toward the center, county buses waiting for them, those on foot at least, others forced to start their cars and trucks and vans and get the hell out from the town. The state police cars stayed with them right through the town and valley, up the pass, and only left them when they reached the other side. There were some who, stubborn, came back, but they didn't last long, forced to leave again, and then that part of everything was over. The story idled.

There was nothing doing. Newsmen and photographers soon left. Potter's Field was by itself again, except for Quiller and the compound.

So much for the files that Dunlap had gone through in New York. Parsons had been right, of course. The press had sided with the hippies. Civil rights and freedom of expression, not to mention that the hippies were the underdogs. All the same, Dunlap couldn't blame the town. It really hadn't been prepared for several thousand strung-out, West-coast freaks descending on them. There was just too little understanding. It didn't matter anyhow. That wasn't what he'd come for, although he'd have to note it for perspective in his story. What he wanted was the story of what happened next, the story no one else had covered, the subtle many-year changes that when isolated didn't have much drama but when put together and compressed might make a dramatic point.

Quiller and the compound, what went on up there behind those sentries and that gate? Dunlap was guessing that the new republic failed, all that wealth and i

Well, the only way to know was to do the research, get the facts, and get out of here. Dunlap sat before a microfilm machine. He was in the newspaper's basement, in a small room at the far end of a corridor. His coat was on a chair, the only light the one that glowed from the microfilm machine. It was pleasant down here in the half-dark, cool and faintly soothing, even with the sound of a fan that blew air past the film to keep the reading light in there from burning through it. He had asked the man in charge down here to give him all the reels for summer, 1970. Actually he'd been surprised that Parsons had the Gazette's morgue on microfilm. Most town papers like this just had issues put in storage, destroying many when they needed room. Parsons, though, was up on things. Dunlap hated reading microfilm. All the same, he was impressed.

He sat there, fooling with a reel, adjusting it. He turned the reel until he got an image on the screen before him, centered it, and started reading. What he wanted was some aspect of the story that the files he'd read had not included. Some small detail that would tell him what had happened in the compound while the troubles in the town upstaged it. For a time, the microfilm before him and the files he'd read in New York were the same. Different writers handled them. There were different slants, one in favor of the town and one against it, but the information was the same. Then he came across an item that he'd never seen before. The cars and trucks and vans that went up in the compound. Quiller had them sold. Some he sent down to the local dealers, trading at a loss for cash. Then the trouble in the town intensified so much that angry dealers wouldn't any longer trade with him, and emissaries from the compound had to leave the valley for the dealers in the nearest other towns. Emissaries. That was it. Quiller wasn't ever with them. What was more, the emissaries wouldn't ever mention what was going on up there. That was no surprise, of course, although Dunlap thought that it was subtle. Good religious precepts. Swear your followers to secrecy; have them give up all u

Dunlap looked ahead for several weeks, and still there wasn't any mention. He would have to check the other newspapers, of course. But could it be, was it possible that Quiller had ordered his members to sell their vehicles and, while they did it, had kept his own? What the hell was going on?

Dunlap turned the reel and read more of the microfilm. Once again, except for how events were slanted, this was much the same as what he'd read in files back in his New York office. The roundup, the expulsion, and the slowly settling peace. Then there was a difference, local items on how much it cost the town to clean the garbage from the park, to put in new windows, and to scrape the slogans off the walls. There were letters praising how authorities had handled things, attempts to understand a strange and changing world, confusion and bewilderment. Only one dissent, no name, saying that the town had been too hasty, that "instead of beating on those kids we should have tried to understand them." Maybe so, but if there had been others who agreed with that, there was no published sign of it. The overwhelming sense was of a town that still had not recovered from its shock. Weird beaded costumes, long hair, beards and what all, they were one thing, although Dunlap guessed that local people with their cowboy clothes and gingham dresses had seemed just as strange to all those West-coast hippies as the hippies seemed to them. Dope and shiftlessness and filth, though, they were something else, something that the town could neither understand nor tolerate. A woman wrote in, angered by two infants she had seen, dirty-faced and crying, diapers unchanged, while the mother stretched out on the grass and looked away. Another woman wrote that all she'd seen some children eat was half-cooked rice and moldy cheese and milk which with the specks of straw inside had clearly not been pasteurized, and where on earth they'd got that kind of milk she didn't know, but what was going on? The dope had really done the trick, though. They had evidently smoked it clear out in the open, almost flaunting it, and Dunlap, going through the items in the paper, was surprised that no one was arrested. Sure, he understood that too, he guessed. To pick up one, you'd have to take them all. Otherwise you punished one and let the others get away. The jail was likely far too small, the trouble just not worth the cost of feeding them. Better just to clear out the lot of them. Which is what they did.