I Cannot Get You Close Enough by Ellen Gilchrist Page B

act that way? Daniel liked to read comic books or books about football or, better yet, nothing at all. He liked to do life, not read about it. Then he broke his collarbone in the first game of his last season in high school and a week later his girlfriend got sent to Switzerland to school and as soon as she was there she wrote and told him she was in love with a boy from Winston-Salem. That was it as far as Daniel was concerned. He tied his arm up in his purple sling and went down to the record store to find out where to buy some marijuana. A month later he was out in California with the hippies.
    Â 
    A year before, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Summer Deer Wagoner, who was two years older than Daniel, had become bored with her brothers and sisters and trying to be a Cherokee Indian in the modern world. She was bored with living in a tiny house with seven other people on the outskirts of Tahlequah. Summer Deer had known about marijuana all along. It grew wild in the Ozark Mountains and bootleggers had been harvesting it and selling it to Mexicans for as long as anyone could remember. Then some white kids at universities around the area began to smoke it and some of the more ambitious ones began to drive out to Colorado and California to sell it to richer kids at richer schools. The year Summer Deer was eighteen she was invited along on such a trip. She told her brothers and sisters goodbye and headed west in an old Buick with four of her friends. By the time Daniel arrived in Berkeley she was settled in and was well known for her common sense and her unbelievably long and beautiful black hair. She was also much admired for her promise as a poet. “The White Man Is No Man’s Friend” was a poem she had written that had been printed up as a flyer and tacked to a thousand telephone poles in the area.
    The white man is no man’s friend,
    Even his own woman
    Even his own child
    So sorrowful, like a river
    Without water
    That was the whole poem. It was the only poem Summer Deer had written. The sight of it tacked up on telephone poles was very strange to her. Sometimes it made her happy to see it tacked up beside notices of meetings to stop the war or pleas to outlaw prefrontal lobotomies. Mostly, however, it made her afraid to write another poem for fear it would not be as good as the first one.
    On the day Summer Deer met Daniel she was sitting on the lawn in front of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus. She was sitting cross-legged on a blanket breathing in the morning air and cultivating her reputation for reticence and silence. Occasionally she would reach down into a bag from the baker’s and take a bite of the cinnamon roll she had bought for breakfast. Then she would go back into her stillness. Daniel did not know of Summer Deer’s reputation for enjoying solitude. He thought she looked like she was lonely. He was lonely. He had been in Berkeley for three days without finding anyone to talk to for more than an hour at a time. He stopped his bicycle to admire her long black hair. Then she smiled at him. She was wearing shorts and a khaki T-shirt that said KISS in long drips of red paint. Underneath the letters her breasts moved and rearranged the word. Daniel returned her smile. He was a gorgeous young man with curly dark blond hair and eyes as blue as the sky. Summer Deer liked the way his hair lay against his forehead in ringlets, plastered down by the sweat he had worked up riding the bicycle to the campus from his rented room twenty blocks away. She smiled through her solitude. She smiled again.
    â€œHello,” he said. “I’m Daniel Hand from North Carolina. I just got here. I’m looking for friends.”
    â€œYou want to smoke a joint?” she asked. She lifted her head and smiled at him again. One breast moved into the angle of the K , the other moved into an S . Her hair fell across her shoulder.
    â€œSure,” he said. “You got anything? I’ve got lots of money if