Chapter 1

The summer that I was fourteen my parents took an Alaskan cruise, the first vacation they'd had alone together since my brother Jeff was born four years before me. Jeff, now eighteen and in college presented no problems. He was left at our house in Seattle for the three weeks of my parent's departure (at least my parents thought this would present no problem. Have you ever seen the movie "Risky Business"? A similar drama was taking place at our suburban home during my parents' absence, but that, as they say, is another story). Mom and Dad however, were not about to leave me to my own devices while they were on the ship, nor would they allow my brother to watch me. The solution it was eventually decided (without my input I can tell you) was to send me to stay with my Uncle John and Aunt Mary who lived in the Northern California town of Wheaton.

Wheaton is a rice farming community in California's Central Valley. It has a population of 1100. It's the kind of place where the main mode of transportation is a mud-splattered pick-up truck (American made of course) with a shotgun rack mounted behind the seat. It's the kind of place where the height of social activity is church on Sunday, getting drunk on Saturday, and going to meetings at the Grange hall on Wednesday. It's the town where my father grew up before he escaped into the Army and an assignment in Vietnam at eighteen. I once overheard Dad say that Vietnam had been an improvement.

Uncle John owned a five-acre spread on the outskirts of this lovely community. Though he and his family grew vegetables and kept cows, they did no commercial farming with their land. Uncle John was Wheaton's Baptist minister. My last name is Benton as, obviously, is my father's and Uncle John's. In the town of Wheaton the name Benton is synonymous with the clergy. It was tradition for the first-born son of each generation to enter the ministry and eventually take over the First Baptist Church of Wheaton. My old man was the second born son of his generation. He once told me when he was drunk that he thanked the God that he didn't believe in anymore that he'd not been born first. As you can imagine, the pressure on the first-born was enormous. After leaving, or escaping, Wheaton and after being discharged from the Army, my father took up residence in Seattle, eventually finding his way to the Seattle Police Department where, at the time of this tale, he was a lieutenant in the patrol division.

I hadn't been to Wheaton since I was ten. My father and Uncle John had had a minor falling-out that year on the subject of how he and my mother were raising my brother and I. Uncle John thought it was a crime that we weren't being sent to church and Sunday school to learn the word of the Lord. Dad advanced the opinion that forcing a child to attend church and especially Sunday school were a form of mind-control; forcing beliefs upon someone while they were still too young to decide upon a matter for themselves. As you can imagine, Uncle John hit the roof over this opinion. Some angry words were exchanged and we left a week early that year. For another year the two brothers did not communicate with each other in any way. Eventually however, things cooled down and they began to correspond with each other, though very carefully, once again. The yearly trips to Wheaton, however, did not resume and I thought I'd seen the last of the place. And then Mom and Dad had found themselves in need of a babysitter for three weeks and a phone call was placed to Uncle John. Uncle John said he would be glad to keep me.

I protested of course. I don't think my parents quite understood the horror I was feeling at the thought of being sent there all by myself. Uncle John would make me go to church. I'd have to say grace. I'd have to listen to endless lectures on the subject of God and the bible without hope of my father's kind voice telling John that maybe the lad has heard enough of that for now. It would, in short, be in a kind of living hell. My protests were futile. I was told that I was going, period and that furthermore, I would be under Uncle John's rules and would do what he told me to without problems. I would attend church as required (he'd even bought me a suit), I would say grace when asked, without any smartass comments, and I would do whatever chores I was assigned around the farm. I was told it would be a great "learning experience". As it turned out, that's exactly what it was.

My plane landed at Sacramento Airport on the First of August that year. I walked off the PSA 727 and into the jetway where I was greeted by Uncle John himself and his oldest daughter Rebecca, who was the same age as I. Uncle John looked pretty much the same as last time I'd seen him. He'd put on a few pounds and was a little grayer around the temples but that was about it. Rebecca, on the other hand, had changed considerably. The last time I'd seen her she'd been a tall, gangly, awkward girl with terminal shyness. Now she'd plumped up to the pleasing proportions of a farm-girl. Her hips were full, her breasts were healthy in size, pushing against the conservative button-up shirt that she wore. Her hair, which had been almost blonde four years before had darkened to a mousy-brown. It was pulled back in a ponytail. Her knee-length skirt revealed shapely legs peeking below. I found myself feeling a sexual stirring within me as I gazed upon her. I felt no shame about this. After all, I was fourteen years old. I felt sexual stirrings when I looked at boxes of soap.

Uncle John greeted me, shaking my hand warmly and spiriting me off to the luggage carousel to collect my bags. Shortly after this we were in his Ford F-150 heading north. I sat in the front seat and Rebecca sat in the back. I remember feeling slightly guilty that Rebecca had been banished to the uncomfortable back of her own family truck. Uncle John, I would come to realize, made a firm distinction between those of the male and those of the female sex. Rebecca said little on the trip back, as did I. The conversation on the ninety minute trip was dominated by my Uncle who repeatedly told me how great of a time I was going to have staying with a Godly family and how much I was going to learn. I braced myself for an unpleasant three weeks.

For the most part things went just the way I'd predicted they would. I was forced to go to church each Sunday and listen to my Uncle deliver the word of the Lord. I was forced to say grace each night and afternoon at dinner and lunch. I was made to say evening prayers before bedtime. I was subjected to endless lectures on God and the bible and the heathen life I was being exposed to in the "evil city". I did chores each morning until my hands bled, my muscles cramped, and my back ached. But there was one bright spot in all of this: Rebecca.

For the first three days she didn't talk too much to me. She seemed to be watching me, trying to figure me out. When she wasn't doing this, she was reading something. A voracious reader was Rebecca, as was I. I'd happened to glance into her room once and saw that, like mine, every spare square inch of storage space was taken up by books of all shapes, sizes, and subjects. It began to occur to me that Rebecca and I had a little in common. I found myself wishing she would warm up to me a little, if only just to give me someone my own age to talk to.

On my fourth day I got my wish. After chores and lunch Rebecca asked her father's permission to go ride her horse. He gave it absently, which was his manner with her and then she asked if I might like to go along on David's horse. David was her older brother who was currently off at some school somewhere learning, surprise surprise, how to be a minister. John seemed to think about this for a moment, much longer than he'd considered Rebecca's request, and then said he thought that would be fine if it was okay with me. I quickly agreed, even though I'd never been on a horse by myself before in my life. I was desperate to escape from my prison for a little while.

Once out of her father's jurisdiction, Rebecca became an entirely different person. She took me out to the barn and pulled out two horses. While teaching me how to saddle, the first thing she said to me was, "Please, call me Becky. I like that name a lot better. Just don't use it in front of Mom or Dad."

"Okay," I'd replied and she smiled, the first smile I'd seen her offer.

She gave me the basic course on horsemanship, her manner chatty and relaxed now, and we shortly took off on our ride. She led me off of their property, through the neighbor's property to a horse trail of sorts along the Feather River. As we rode we talked of inconsequential things, warming quickly up to each other. She asked me what it was like to live in Seattle. She'd never been to a large city before. I told her about my mundane life there and she seemed fascinated. We then talked of books that we'd both read and this took up the bulk of our conversation. We'd hit upon what were both of our interests. In that first two-hour ride we became friends, smiling, giggling, comfortable companions with each other.

After the first one, our after-chore rides together became a routine. We stayed out longer each time and talked more comfortably to each other as the days went by. On, I believe it was the sixth of our rides, while we stopped the horses beside a small stream to let them rest and we ourselves sat against an oak tree, she revealed one of her secrets to me.

She had her back-pack with her and she was fidgeting with it nervously, as if full of indecision. Finally, she said, "Kevin, can I show you something?"

"Sure." I shrugged. "What do you got?"

She gave me a weak smile and then hesitantly reached into her backpack. She pulled out a plastic baggie and unrolled it. It was full of a green, leafy substance.

I'd seen marijuana before of course. One did not go to school in Seattle without seeing it from time to time. I was shocked however both by seeing the drug in Becky's possession and by seeing the amount that she had. Her bag contained at least an ounce.

"Where did you get that?" I asked, open-mouthed.

Becky smiled. "I grew it."

"You grew it?"

"Yep," she told me, pride evident in her voice. "It's amazing what you can learn how to do with books from the Wheaton library." She chuckled. "It's a good thing Dad doesn't know that book is there. He'd have a shit-fit and make them burn it."

"I guess," I said, using an expression I'd picked up in my time in Wheaton.

"I have a couple of plants in the back corner of our field, behind the corn where Dad or Mom never go. I learned how to cultivate it and take care of it real well." She winked. "It's some killer shit."

"Jesus Becky," I said, uttering a swear that would have earned me a stern, half-hour lecture from Uncle John had he heard it.

"You ever smoke it before?" she asked.

"No," I told her honestly. My father had given me lectures on the dangers of marijuana, punctuating them with horror stories of his exposure to it at work.

"You wanna try some?" she asked next.

"I don't think so," I answered. "I heard it'll get you addicted, or turn you into a heroin addict."

Becky scoffed at this. "That's just what they want you to think. I've been smoking it for almost a year now and I'm not an addict. And I don't take heroin either. Or even think about taking heroin. All it does is gets you high. Makes you feel good all over. Let's you think. C'mon, give it a shot, you'll like it. If you don't, you never have to do it again."

I considered for a minute and then finally decided. What the hell? "Okay," I told her. "Maybe I'll try a little bit."

"Bitchin," she said, reaching into her bag again and pulling out a can of Pepsi. She opened the can and then poured its contents out onto the ground, making a fizzing brown puddle. She then began twisting the popping tab in her hands, trying to remove it.

"What are you doing?" I asked her, puzzled.

"Making a bong," she explained. "Something to smoke it out of. A soda can is the best thing. It smokes good and is disposed of easily."

"Oh," I said, not getting her at all.

She dented the side of the can about an inch and then reached into her pocket and pulled out a folding knife (in Wheaton, everyone carried a folding knife). She used the knife to poke a series of small holes where she'd dented the can. She then made a larger hole near the base of the can. She held up her creation for my perusal. "You see?" She smiled.

"Kind of," I told her.

She opened up the baggie and withdrew a healthy pinch, which she placed in the dented portion of the can. Keeping the pile of pot carefully upright, she reached in her pocket again and pulled out a disposable lighter. "Now watch," she told me. She flicked her bic and applied the flame to the pile of pot, putting the hole in the can where a person would normally drink to her lips. She began to suck, the pile of pot flaring to life to my fascination. She drew deeply and then removed her thumb from the hole on the side and continued for a moment. "Mmmm." She smiled through pursed lips. After a moment she exhaled a plume of smoke. "Now it's your turn," she said, reaching into the bag again.

She instructed me through my first hit, which caused me to cough violently. By the third hit, however, I had gotten the hang of it. I think we took a total of six apiece before she crumped up the can and tossed it and stowed her baggie back in her backpack.

"When will I be high?" I asked her innocently.

She smiled knowingly. "You probably already are," she answered, "and you just don't know it yet."

While I puzzled over this cryptic statement I started staring at the horses. They were placidly drinking water out of the slow-moving stream. I watched their fat, long tongues lap at the liquid and began to marvel at this. They were drinking stream water. Becky had told me on our first ride that I should never drink the water out of the streams. It had germs and organisms in it that would make me violently ill ("you'll shit your asshole out", is how she'd put it). So why was it that the horses could drink with impunity from the same stream? Did they possess some sort of super-immune system that mere humans weren't capable of? And look at the size of them. They were at least ten times my weight, yet they let me ride unprotestingly upon their backs. Why? If they wanted to, they could toss me off in an instant and stomp me to death. How was it that this animal had evolved to allow a human being to ride upon it? And then there was the stream they were drinking out of. What was its origin? It probably, I figured dreamily, came out of the mountains and fed into the Feather River which fed into the Sacramento River which fed into San Francisco Bay which fed into the Pacific Ocean. The water would then drift out to sea, be evaporated into a giant cloud which would then drift over California and rain the water down upon the mountains to be, eventually, put back into this same stream.

"Whoa," I whispered, in awe of the thoughts I was having. Things I'd never considered before were suddenly making perfect sense in my mind. I followed this trail of thoughts into the subject of geology. After a period of intense speculation, I figured out why the center of the Earth was molten. It had to do with the incredible pressure from above mixed with original heat from when the Earth was first formed. You add in the miniscule amount of heat transference as a result of...

The sound of giggling interrupted me just as I was about to come to an exciting thesis in my mind. I looked over at the sound and saw Becky staring at me in amusement, holding her hand over her mouth. "You're stoned, aren't you?" she asked.

I stared at her for a moment, realizing that she was right, and started giggling too. She hadn't been kidding, it was a very pleasant sensation. "Yep," I finally answered. "I do seem to be stoned."

We broke up for nearly a minute before returning to a normal, such as it was, conversation.

"So my father," Becky said, "has been feeding you all of his bullshit about God and the bible."

I nodded. That was definitely not a deniable point. "Yep," I answered.

She smiled cynically. "You buy all of that shit?"

"Well..." I started, not wanting to talk ill of her father in front of her.

"It's okay," she said. "Believe me, you're not gonna offend me. I think all of that God shit and organized religion shit is just a bunch of mindless crap."

I stared at her, flabbergasted, amazed that she would talk such a way about the beliefs her parents held sacred.

"Sometimes I wonder," she continued, "if my father even believes all of that shit. I mean really. All of mankind evolved from Adam and Eve four thousand years ago? All of humanity wiped out in a great flood except for Noah's family? And that Ten Commandments crap." She spit contemptuously into the dirt. "That's nothing but a load of horseshit, obviously put in there as a form of mass behavioral control."

"Wow," I said, unable to think of anything else to say. For a fourteen-year-old, Becky was very articulate, though crudely so. If the church knew that one could form such opinions as hers by mere reading, they would have banned books a long time ago.

"So do you believe any of that shit?" She asked.

I looked at her, noticing that she was really sort of pretty. Her face was plain but was unmarked by pimples as so many faces of her age bracket were. She had thick glasses perched on her nose but the eyes behind them were a shade of deep blue, the color of the ocean. The skin of her neck looked soft and I wondered what it would be like to kiss it. How would it feel against my lips? Against my tongue? My eyes dropped to her breasts, which were bulging from beneath her T-shirt. They were pleasantly plump and they jiggled as she rode her horse. I'd heard of girls getting turned on and even coming from horseback riding. Had Becky ever experienced such a thing? Had she ever...

"Hello?" she said, interrupting my lecherous train of thoughts.

"Huh?" I said dumbly, staring at her.

She giggled. "I said, do you believe any of the shit my father spouts?"

"No," I answered truthfully. "I don't. It doesn't make any sense."

She smiled. "You think just like I do," she told me. "C'mon. Let's go ride for awhile. We gotta stay out until this shit wears off."

After that day a new routine was established. We would finish our chores as quickly as possible and then saddle up the horses for a ride. Once we were beyond the sightline of the farmhouse, we would dismount and break out the Pepsi can. We would then ride to some secluded spot, usually the streambed, and talk.

Our conversations were fascinating, the sort I'd never experienced with anyone else. We talked of God, of religion, of UFO's, of the government, of nacho cheese chips. It didn't matter, we sat and bullshitted by the streambed about anything and everything like the best of drinking buddies. I'd never met anyone in my life as easy to converse with as Becky.

One evening, in my second week there, just as we were finishing up the dinner dishes, the telephone rang. Aunt Mary answered it, listened for a moment and then handed the phone to Uncle John. He listened, nodding and offering some consoling words to whoever was on the other end. He said that they would be right over and hung up.

"What is it John?" Mary enquired, her eyebrows spiking up excitedly. She was a voracious gossip and delighted in each tidbit that her husband, by virtue of his profession, was able to provide her with about their fellow townspeople.

"It was Mrs. Wilson," he said sadly, shaking his head. "She just got a telegram from the government."

"Yeah?" Mary prodded eagerly.

"Her boy was just killed over there in Beirut. Apparently some Palestinian machine-gunned the bus he and his squad were riding in. Three of them were killed. Tommy was one of them."

"My goodness!" Mary exclaimed, feigning shock. "That poor woman."

"She wants us to come over and help her through this," John said. "I told her we'd be right there."

"Of course," Mary replied. "Let me fix my hair real quick."

"Don't worry about your hair woman," John commanded. "Mrs. Wilson doesn't care what you look like. Let's go."

She seemed about to say something to him but thought better of it. Instead, she turned to Becky and I. "Rebecca, Kevin, you two finish up this kitchen and then clean the rest of the house. Don't forget to feed the dogs."

"Yes Mom," Becky muttered, handing me a dish to dry.

"And get yourselves to bed at a decent hour," John added.

"Okay Dad," Becky said and then she cast a mischievous wink at me, a wink that silently said to me, "watch this", before turning to her father. "Dad, why did that man shoot Mrs. Wilson's son?"

"Because he's a pagan," Uncle John answered immediately. "An infidel who is blind to God's path and who is bent on destroying our way of life. He'll be judged harshly come the rapture."

"Oh," Becky, who seemed to be suppressing a smile, answered.

In a flash, they were out the door. As I dried the last dish I heard the sound of the F-150 firing up and then pulling away.

"Can you believe that crap?" Becky scoffed once they'd gone. "Bent on destroying our way of life. Jesus. It's just a bunch of mindless people fighting a mindless war over some worthless piece of dirt. Doing the same thing the human race has always done." She smiled at me, her demeanor instantly changing to cheeriness. "Let's go get stoned."