Chapter Eight. Sing Along!

They found themselves confronted by a group of youngsters sitting around a campfire. Flint noted instantly that the group consisted of seven boys and four girls, all between roughly eighteen and twenty-one years of age. At first glance they reminded him of a band of gypsies, such as the brothers had encountered in The Mystery of the Gypsy Band. But upon closer inspection he spotted many differences.

As with any group of gypsies, there was a great deal of brightly colored clothing in evidence, as well as strings of beads and sandaled feet, but these youngsters lacked both the swarthiness and the truculence of those European wanderers. And although the males had let their sideburns fill in and their hair grow into moptops (several of which were bedecked with flowers), none sported the bandanas or hoop earrings that were the trademarks of the nomadic folk of Romany. In the end he was forced to concede that he was not going to be able to pigeonhole these most unusual youngsters.
The youngsters themselves were studying the newcomers just as intently. Abruptly one of their number, a teenage girl, sprang to her feet and approached the trio. “Hey man,” she called cheerily, although she didn’t seem to be addressing any of the three “men” in particular. “You want to sing with us?”
Flint’s trained eye immediately noted that the girl’s hair was parted down the middle and hung limply down the sides of her face, without benefit of curl or flip, and that her face was bereft of makeup. The dress she wore, a loose gingham affair, reminded him of the dresses his grandmother had favored. In an instant he realized that the girl’s look was identical to that adopted by Lucy Diamond!
Jelly Roll, to the surprise of the brothers, quickly accepted the invitation. Although it was their stout chum’s habit to raid the picnic hamper first thing when making camp, here he was agreeing to join a group of strangers on an empty stomach!
More surprising still, as the trio approached the group, one of the boys flashed them a V-for-Victory sign. Flint had no idea what to make of this. The war, after all, had ended twenty-two years ago. Had America’s police action in South Vietnam, he wondered, already resulted in victory? That would be great news indeed, but it seemed unlikely, as just the other night his father had predicted that the Reds probably wouldn’t surrender completely until the end of the year, or even early 1968. Whatever it meant, Flint had a hunch that the gesture signified something special to this group, so he flashed the sign in return.
“Peace, brother,” another youth called.
“Uh, of course,” Flint said faltering. “We, uh, come in peace, too.”
That, inexplicably, earned them some strange looks, but nothing more was said about it. As the boys sat themselves around the fire, a youngster with a wispy beard and the type of shirt that Flint remembered once seeing on a Hindu hatchet-man, reached behind his back and produced a guitar. This gave the Burlys pause, but both elected to remain seated for the present. Should a malignant influence begin to seize their minds, they could always make a break for it.
A teenage girl wearing bells on her fingers and a t-shirt upon which were emblazoned in dazzling colors the words Feed Your Head said, “Play something by the Stones, Catfish.”

The boy thus addressed played a song that the Burly boys didn’t recognize, something about a girl who wouldn’t say where she came from. Most of the group did, however, as they evinced by singing along with the guitar player. Then the boy fielded requests to play songs by bands called, improbably, Buffalo Springfield and Country Joe and the Fish. To the great surprise of Flint and Chip, Jelly Roll started singing along with a last song, a tune about a girl who dressed in black with celestial secrets engraved on her back.

When the song ended Chip cried out, “Do you know On Top of Old Smokey?”
Now it was Chip’s turn to feel himself impaled with the most peculiar of looks. Had he not known better he might have interpreted the looks as hostile. But why, he asked himself, should a simple song request provoke hostility, especially when the song was a campfire standard?

Just as the scowling Catfish seemed on the brink of saying something to him, Jelly Roll cried out, “Hey. Do you know Mellow Yellow?”
The scowl left the guitarist’s face as quickly as it had come and he launched himself into the number. Jelly Roll once again surprised the brothers by not only knowing the name of such an outlandish song but all the lyrics as well. The girl who had invited them to join the group suddenly sprang to her feet and started dancing—although it would be more accurate to say that she undulated and swayed rather than executed any recognizable dance steps. For a brief moment it seemed to Chip that she was attempting the Frug, but after his apparent faux pas he refrained from asking if such was indeed the case.
Finally Catfish laid his guitar down. A boy wearing moccasins that came to mid-calf asked if anybody had any dope. Flint assumed he meant the dope, but he didn’t have any idea as to the nature of the information requested. Everybody else turned expectantly to everybody else, but nobody spoke up.

“Oh, well,” said the boy with the extravagant moccasins, “there’ll be plenty of dope when we get to San Francisco.”
“Oh, you’re going to Frisco, too?” Flint asked, instantly alert.
“Who isn’t?” a girl asked. She had wildly frizzy hair and a tiny rainbow drawn on her cheek.
“It’s a happenin’, man,” Catfish said.
“The summer of love, man,” a boy wearing Benjamin Franklin spectacles said.
“They say Haight Street’s a trip,” the girl with the bells said.
“Hate Street?” Chip said. “But I thought you said it was the summer of love.”
“Oh, man,” Catfish said. “Are you guys for real?”
Flint almost answered in the affirmative before he caught himself. Of course they were real! Did he think they were fictional characters? How was he even supposed to answer such a preposterous question?
 Suddenly a youngster who had been sitting to the far right of the Burlys and who had yet to say a word leaned forward until he was illumined by the flames.

The boys saw with shock that he was a Negro! But a Negro the likes of which they’d never imagined. His hair was all bushy and he wore a bright yellow scarf around his forehead and his t-shirt was a swirl of riotous colors. “Hey, man,” the Negro said. “Why the hell are you going to San Francisco?”
Flint promptly pulled the photo of Lucy out of his wallet and handed it to the Negro. “We’re looking for this girl,” he explained.
The Negro scarcely glanced at the photo before handing it back. “What do you want with her?” he asked.
“Her mother hired us to bring her home,” Chip said.
“Oh, shit!” the girl with the bells cried. And before Flint could even glance at his younger brother to see if he’d been disturbed by that ugly word (or if, as Flint hoped, he was mercifully unfamiliar with it), she added, “What are you guys? Pigs?”
As an angry murmur rose from the rest of the group, Flint wondered how to respond. Clearly, neither he nor his two companions were livestock. It’s true that Jelly Roll had sometimes been called a pig by their peers, especially the time when he’d scooped up four donuts during Nutrition period when Mrs. Tallow the cafeteria lady turned her back. But what that might have to do with bringing Lucy home he couldn’t imagine. Luckily, he was saved from having to formulate a response by the Negro.
“Wait a minute!” the flamboyantly clad youngster cried. “I recognize you guys. You’re the Burly Boys! And your chum must be Jelly Roll Horton!”
“Who?” the girl with the frizzy hair asked.
“Chum?” said the boy with the moccasins. “What kind of bullshit word is ‘chum’?”
“Yeah!” the guitarist named Catfish cried. “It is the Burly Boys! Man, I thought they looked familiar!” He turned to the frizzy-haired girl. “Haven’t you heard of them, Polly? They’re boy detectives and stars of innumerable lively adventure stories, packed with mystery and action.” For some strange reason, he cackled piercingly.
“Sorry,” the girl addressed as Polly said. “All I ever read was the spine-tingling Nancy Reagan mysteries.” Then she laughed too.
“So you’re saying they are pigs?” the boys with the funny glasses said.
“Yeah, but…” the Negro started to say.
“Man, I don’t care if they were your heroes when you were a kid,” the boy with the funny glasses said. “A pig is a pig.” He turned angrily on the Burlys. “What is it with you guys? You may not be over thirty, but it sure seems to me you belong on the other side!”
“What other side?” Chip asked.
“God,” Polly said. “They’re like…like totally out of it!”
“Yeah, now that I think about it, they were that way in the books, too,” Catfish said musingly. “But hell, I was still in that ten-to-fourteen year old bracket when I read them.”
The boy with the funny glasses was undeterred by the interruption. “The other side, man. The over-thirty side. Haven’t you heard of the generation gap?”
“The what?” Flint asked.
“Oh, man,” Polly said.
“The generation gap,” the boy with the funny glasses repeated. “The war with the straights. Don’t you know the straights hate us, man?”
“Hate who?” Chip asked.
“The hippies, man. Who the hell do you think I’m talking about?”
The word fell like a bombshell among the Burlys. The very same term had been used by Siddhartha Schwartz—the boy who had seduced Lucy Diamond’s mind—to describe himself!

Flint, older and in tighter rein of his emotions, was the first to recover his voice. “Why do these ‘straights’ hate you?” he asked.
“Because of how free we are,” Catfish put in.
Flint mulled that over for a moment. “You mean they hate you for your freedoms?”
“Golly,” Chip cried. “That sounds like the way a bunch of dusky foreigners would feel about America, not how Americans should feel about their fellow citizens!”
“You got that right,” the Negro said. “Only it don’t ever seem to work that way.”
“So what are you going to do if you find this girl?” the persistent boy with the funny glasses demanded. “You gonna drag her home against her will?”
“But what if she wants to go home?” Chip cried. “What if she’s been brainwashed or something?”
The group broke into loud guffaws. Flint was about to argue their cause when he suddenly realized that Jelly Roll was nowhere to be seen. They’d been so rapt in the incomprehensible conversation that they’d hadn’t noticed their chum’s departure.

“I think he took off with Katie,” Catfish said, having noticed his unease.
Flint glanced around and saw that the girl who had first approached them was missing as well. Seizing the opportunity to extricate themselves from the group, the boys walked to their motor bikes and as unobtrusively as possible pushed them to the far side of the campground.
“Sufferin’ sardines!” Chip cried, when they were out of earshot. “Do you think she kidnapped Jelly?”
“She didn’t look strong enough to have done that,” Flint said.
“Then maybe she brainwashed him!”
“I don’t think she had enough time to do that either,” Flint said.
“Then what…”
Suddenly there was a thrashing in some bushes beside the road, and a moment later Jelly Roll came bounding into view, a huge grin on his face. But that wasn’t what caught the boys’ attention. Around his chubby head, their chum sported a garland of flowers!
 “Like it?” Jelly Roll asked. “Katie made it for me!”
“Are you okay?” Flint demanded.
“Okay? Are you kidding? She told me I was groovy!”
“Groovy?” Chip asked. “Is that supposed to be a good thing?”


“I should hope so!” Jelly Roll said. “When she said that, she kissed me on the cheek!”
“Well, I’ll be a baboon’s butler!” Chip cried.
The boys laughed uproariously. Partly in relief that their friend was unhurt, partly in utter stupefaction.

* * *

Just before noon of the following day they crossed the state line into California. To their enormous relief, the place looked no different than the rest of the country. After all the warnings they’d heard about the state, they hadn’t known what to expect. But all they saw were snow-capped mountains and pine trees and telephone poles. The cars they passed looked like ordinary cars and the people in them like ordinary people, and nowhere was there a hammer or sickle to be seen.
But the deeper they penetrated into the state a number of changes became apparent. The number of hitchhikers, for one. Where they had been numerous before, they constituted a veritable army now. And their attire, it seemed, had became increasingly more outlandish the closer they drew to San Francisco, as if the mere proximity of the city exerted a fey influence on all who drew thither. Then they began to see vehicles that were far from ordinary. Volkswagen vans painted all the colors of the rainbow. Enormous motor bikes with flames and skulls decaled on the fuel tanks, ridden by bearded men in leather and denim. And strangest of all was a school bus driven by a hatchet-nosed individual with a wild gleam in his eye. The Volkswagen vans they’d seen paled in comparison to the variegated day-glow colors that had been splashed on its sides. A hole had been cut in the roof and a man who looked nothing like a student sat atop the bus, playing a guitar and shouting a song at the top of his lungs. When they had passed the bus and glanced over their shoulders for one last look at this outrageous spectacle, they saw the word FURTHUR had been painted in the slot where an ordinary bus would have stated its destination.

Despite the misspelling, the word resonated with the boys. They might have traveled much further in terms of miles in their careers, but they felt like they’d never before put so much distance between themselves and home.
For a while they’d convinced themselves that the “hippies” they’d met at the campground were crazy. No city on the planet could be as bizarre as the San Francisco the youngsters had evoked. How could any municipality—a conglomeration of buildings and people—be a happening or a trip? And what in the world was a summer of love supposed to be? Was the city to host it? Was it like the World Series or something? Then they’d started seeing all the strange vehicles converging on their destination, and they’d begun to wonder again. Even Jelly Roll, who had been inexplicably charmed by their hosts of the evening before, seemed uneasy.
“Something’s happening here,” Flint said. “What it is isn’t exactly clear.”
Even as he spoke the words, an unsettling feeling of déjà vu came over him, as if he’d heard them somewhere before. The words seemed to summon up a melody, a slow but compelling rhythm, and the rise and fall of firelight in his eyes. Then his analytical mind snapped on the truth like a trap on a rat: he had heard those words sung by the hippies last night! And now they haunted him, as no other campfire tune, not even the tragic My Darling Clementine, ever had. He posited that there might be some strange power to this new music, some hypnotic effect crafted into the tunes and cryptic lyrics by the foreign masterminds who had most likely concocted it, in order to weaken a young man’s resistance to malignant influences. Flint vowed then to be vigilant against all music played by hippies and made a mental note to explain all this to Chip and Jelly as soon as they stopped.
But as they pulled into a service station near a little town called Fairfield, the pendulum of Flint’s emotions swung wildly once more. Suddenly everything seemed normal again! The station was part of a roadside service area called the Nut Tree, and in it was everything that made motoring along America’s highways and byways such a fulfilling experience: the inexpensive gasoline, the genial pump attendants, the clean restrooms, the bountiful fruit stand, the ample acres of parking, the gift shop with windows festooned with locally themed pennants and ashtrays, the fleet of station wagons stopping to disgorge their cargoes of laughing, tow-headed youths. There was even a Nut Tree Restaurant, with a banner proclaiming, “Try our delicious fruit pies!”
Jelly Roll wasn’t the only one who was nearly beside himself with relief at the sight. They’d polished off the pickled tongue they’d found at the bottom of the hamper for lunch, and that had finally exhausted Aunt Hortense’s bounty. It was now two in the afternoon, three hours since they’d had their last meal, and a slice of pie and a cold glass of milk in homey surroundings sounded like a slice of heaven to the weary trio.
The pie, although not as good as their aunt’s, was still delicious, the milk was ice-cold, and their fellow patrons might all have come from Balmy Bay, so clean-cut and wholesome they appeared.
“Whew!” Flint said. “Now this is what I call a ‘return to normalcy’!”
“No kidding!” Chip said. “You sure have a way with words, big brother!”
“I can’t take credit for it,” Flint said. “That belongs to former President Harding!”

Then he added with a sharp look, “Say. Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten what you learned in Miss Talcum’s History class!”
Chip gave his brother a playful punch on the arm and said, “Heck, how dumb do you think I am? I’m just ribbing you! Isn’t that what younger brothers are for?”
“They sure are,” Flint said with a grin. “Unfortunately!”
The brothers laughed uproariously, their moods entirely elevated by the pie, cold milk, and normalcy. But when they looked at Jelly, expecting him to be laughing along, they were shocked to find him looking embarrassed. As the attractive young waitress came by to refill their milk glasses, he seemed almost to be trying to shrink beneath the counter.
“Jesus Christ, guys,” he muttered. “Do you have to be such goons in public?”
Flint’s face darkened at that. Nothing was quite going as it usually did on their adventures. “Something’s hap…” he heard himself saying, but he snapped his lips shut before the words were entirely out of his mouth. He reminded himself again to banish all the songs he’d heard last night from his mind.

Then he stood, put down a five dollar bill to cover their lunches and desserts, and announced to his brother and chum that it was time at last to confront San Francisco.


That's it for the adventures of the Burly Boys right now—but we'll let you know when they're on the road again!