Read Online The Totem 1979 by David Morrell - Free Book Online

people always pick at. What we want to know is what came out of all that.”
    “You could have saved yourself a trip. I’ll tell you what came out of all that. Nothing. That’s what came of it.” “Well, that’s a statement in itself.”
    “Hey, wait a minute,” Parsons said. “Do you have that tape recorder on?”
    Dunlap nodded. “Turn if off.” “But what’s the matter?” “Turn the damned thing off, I said.” Dunlap obeyed. “But what’s the matter? Listen, radicals back then are running corporations now. Either that or writing books about how wrong they were. Entertainers who dropped out and went to China are out hoofing on the stage again. Everything has changed. It’s a different world. What’s so wrong to talk about that? All the communes are long gone as well. But then none of them was quite like this. None of them had so much money, so much talent and ambition, coming out here from the coast, buying all that land and setting up to start a brand new country: Brook Farm in our century.”
    “Yes, and Brook Farm went to bust, and so did this,” Parsons said.
    “But what’s so wrong to talk about it?”
    “Look, you didn’t come here just to see the difference. You came here to start that trouble once again.”
    Dunlap didn’t understand.
    “It’s common knowledge how the town put pressure on them,” Parsons said. “How the freaks came through here in their long hair and their costumes, dressed as Superman and God knows what all, turning kids to dope, standing on the corner, howling, blowing kisses. How the town refused to tolerate them, wouldn’t sell them food or clothing or supplies, wouldn’t even let them in the city limits, tried to find a way to get them off that land. How one rancher had his boy run off and went up there to get him, went a little crazy, pulled a gun and shot a guy. There’s a lot of memory yet in town about that. There’s a lot of feeling. I don’t want you going around and making people ugly once again. Either that or guilty. I don’t want you writing so this town looks like the nation’s asshole. We had lots of that before. Writers coming in and making trouble, sympathizing with those freaks. You tell me how things have changed. Well, one thing hasn’t. Reporters like an underdog, and the way the town reacted to those freaks, there wasn’t any question who the reporters sided with. My guess is you’ll be doing just the same.”
    “But really I’m not here for that,” Dunlap said. “I just want to see the difference.”
    “Will you mention what went on back then? How the town reacted?”
    “Sure. I guess so. That’s a part of how things changed as well.”
    Parsons shrugged. “All right, then, there you have it.”
    And they looked at one another, and they waited.
    The buzzer sounded on the intercom. Parsons touched a button.
    “Don’t forget you chair a council meeting in an hour,” a woman’s voice said.
    “Thank you.”
    Parsons took his hand off the intercom, leaning back.
    Christ, Dunlap thought. He isn’t just the newspaper’s owner and the editor and maybe owner of a half a dozen other places too. He’s the goddamned mayor. Dunlap tried to think of how to smooth things. “Look,” he told him. “You know just as well as I, there are two sides to a story. Back in nineteen seventy, everything was polarized. The straights and the longhairs. The hawks and the doves. One group acted one way, and the other did the opposite. The thing to do is talk to people in the town and get their version of the story, then to talk to people in the commune and get their version too.”
    Parsons shrugged. “There’s no one out there now.”
    “What?” Dunlap straightened in surprise. “Nobody told me.”
    “Maybe two or three are still there. If they are, it’s news to me.”
    Dunlap stared at him.
    “Of course, there are ways to track the others down,” Parsons said. “The names are all on file. If you’ve got the time.”
    Dunlap went on