Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi

that perfect place, holding the heat of his body against the heat of hers until they find it.
    When they finally emerge from the van, the rain has stopped. The girl takes his hand. “Come on, baby,” she says. “Let’s hear the music.”
    He allows her to lead him into the mass of people, over the vast muddy field, into the swaying, gaily colored army spread across the alfalfa amphitheater. She knows exactly where they are going. She knows everything. She must know where Molly is. His heart lifts. She is taking him to Molly! They jump over hands and arms flung out, body parts. They skitter through more bodies, some sitting, some lying, some standing. This is what Civil War battlefields must have looked like, strewn with undulant soldiers, but with air sweet from the smell of blood rather than dope. Heaving magnitudes of life, so close—the further she leads him into the crowd, the more his stomach turns. Vietnam would be still worse, bodies sunk in jungle, tangled in vines. He would run back into the trees, he would head back toward the road. But he has to find Molly. He cannot leave without his cousin.
    The girl points and, leaping over a kid sleeping on a towel in the mud, pulls him down onto a tarp. About fifty feet to their right is the first of three huge red towers, pulsing with sound.
    And it’s one two three,
    What are we fighting for?
    Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
    Next stop is Viet Nam…
    The girl sings, too, clapping. Everyone is singing along with Country Joe and the Fish. He covers his ears to shutter the sound, but the shouting comes through his hands, through his skin, into his bones. He gives up. “Where’s Molly, man?” he turns to say to Eugene, except Eugene isn’t Eugene but some cat with colorless hair and a dark blue bandanna around his forehead and a pipe in his hand. He knows this cat. He’s met him somewhere. “Molly’s cool,” the guy says, dragging on the pipe. “Molly’s beautiful. Molly’s in the sky with diamonds.” The guy passes the pipe to him. He drags on it, then passes it on to the girl and lies back. Is Molly up in the sky? Instead, he sees his father’s image—not as he last saw him, crumpled on the lawn, the blood drained from his bronzed face, but young and fresh-cheeked in the army portrait his mom keeps on her bedside table, even now she’s remarried.
    His daddy is in the sky with diamonds. But not Molly.
    Tears spill down his cheeks. They roll down his neck and into his T-shirt, all the way into his jeans. He is bathing in his tears. He is not a stand-up guy.
    “He’s having a bum trip,” the girl says. He’s laid his head down onto her lap. Raindrops. That is the wet. The music has stopped.
    “Did you take the brown acid?” the guy who isn’t Eugene says. “What are you on, man?”
    “I brought my younger cousin,” he says, staring up into the girl’s sunspot eyes, shooting flames of chestnut from their black centers into green and gold. “Like, I should have made her stay home. She’s only fifteen, man. I’m responsible for her, man.” His voice is rising, he cannot stop it, he can feel his heart, his throat, everything inside him rising.
    “It’s cool, baby,” the girl says. Her white blouse is transparent from the rain. “She’s okay. It’s beautiful. Everything’s beautiful. Look at all these beautiful people.”
    “He’s beautiful,” the guy who isn’t Eugene says, smiling at him but talking to the girl. “Like, I dunno, man, like, some kind of painting of Jesus. That’s some kind of beautiful kid you found there.”
    “You found him,” the girl with sunspot eyes says. “You handed him your guitar. And he’s like honey sugar candy. Like Twinkies. Like Pixy Stix. Like a Tootsie Roll. Sweet sweet sweet.”
    “You like my old lady?” not-Eugene asks him.
    “Your…” he begins, struggling with a new panic.
    “So when are you going over, man? Are you going over?” not-Eugene is asking him now. “Is that it, man?