A Rainbow in Kentucky

For Independence Day Emily wanted music. Jen wanted crafts. Olivia said a Rainbow Gathering was the perfect compromise.

They found information online. The national gathering was somewhere in the Daniel Boone National Forest. The exact location would be finalized during something called Seed Camp before the official gathering began.

As long as they arrived by July 1st or 2nd, they figured they would be on time.

A few days before leaving, they checked the website again. Seed Camp, it said, was on Forest Service Road 195 near Dog Slaughter Falls. From there, travelers would follow signs and markers deeper into the forest.

Jen borrowed her aunt’s split-window Volkswagen bus for the trip. The paint had faded to a dull sea green years ago, and the passenger door only opened from the inside, but the stereo still worked and the curtains still slid across the windows.

They drove the interstate past train yards, farms, and an old rundown coal mine. The rolling green hills. The white wooden fences. Horses grazing lazily in the afternoon sun.

“Let’s take the byway,” Jen said and turned onto the off-ramp.

Hours later, after driving on dirt and gravel roads with no cell service, they decided to head back to Corbin.

The sun was setting when the gravel road dissolved into dusty dirt.

They made a U-turn.

When they hit pavement again, they thought they were finally heading out, but the blacktop narrowed, broke apart, and turned back into dirt.

Emily held her phone toward the ceiling.

“We must’ve missed the turn,” she said.

“We’ll see it this time,” Jen said, spinning the wheel of the old Volkswagen bus and clicking on the headlights.

No one spoke as they continued down the gravel road.

“There,” Olivia said suddenly, pointing at a paper sign stapled to a tree.

192.

Jen slowed down. A few hundred yards past the sign, she turned onto an old paved road that curved through the forest for miles.

Thirty minutes later it turned to gravel—Emily started crying.

“Maybe we should stop for the night and camp,” Olivia said.

“No,” Jen said immediately. “Let’s just find town.”

Nobody argued with her.

Jen turned the bus around. Gravel popped beneath the tires as the headlights swept across the trees.

A few minutes later, before the road gave way to dirt again, headlights appeared ahead of them.

Jen slowed and pulled onto the shoulder.

The pickup truck that passed them was rusty and covered in mud. A man wearing a cowboy hat and a blonde woman sat in the cab. Four shirtless teenagers crowded the truck bed.

One of the boys leaned over the side and smiled as they rolled past.

Emily turned around to watch the taillights disappear.

None of them mentioned that the truck had come from the direction they were trying to leave.

A few minutes later another set of headlights appeared around the bend.

“Maybe we should stop and ask them for directions,” Emily said.

“Depending on what they look like,” Olivia said.

Jen laughed softly, though none of them were relaxed enough for it to sound natural.

The vehicle that approached was a newer SUV. Two boys around their age sat in the front seats. Even from a distance they looked clean-cut and harmless. A girl with dark hair sat in the back seat with her knees pulled against her chest.

Jen slowed the bus.

“Okay,” Olivia said. “Them.”

The SUV pulled onto the shoulder beside them.

For the first time in nearly an hour, Emily felt herself unclench. She would later remember that feeling more clearly than anything the boys said.

The passenger leaned out the window.

“What are y’all doing way out here?”

“We’re trying to find the Rainbow Gathering,” Olivia said.

The girl in the back seat glanced toward the driver and whispered something to him.

All three girls exchanged a quick look.

The driver smiled.

“Oh Jesus,” he said. “You don’t want that.”

The passenger laughed. “Bunch of dirty hippies living in the woods pretending it’s 1969.”

“No toilets,” the girl in the back added quietly.

“No showers,” the passenger said. “Everybody cooking canned beans over campfires with food stamps.”

“Sharing lice and venereal disease,” the driver said.

Jen laughed despite herself.

The tension inside the bus loosened slightly.

The boys introduced themselves. The passenger and the girl were brother and sister. The two boys played in a band together and were heading back to a Fourth of July party at their house.

“There’ll be food,” the driver said. “Beer. Music. Indoor plumbing.”

“Electricity,” the passenger added solemnly.

“A spare bedroom,” the girl in the back said.

Emily noticed she still hadn’t smiled.

After the SUV pulled ahead, the three of them sat quietly inside the idling bus.

“I still think we should just find town,” Olivia said.

“Town could be another hour away,” Jen replied. “And these people seem normal.”

Olivia looked through the windshield toward the SUV’s glowing brake lights.

“That’s exactly what worries me.”

Jen laughed. Emily could tell she was already imagining music, cold beer, showers, and real beds.

Nobody mentioned the possibility that the boys might be dangerous. At their age, danger still belonged to strangers in movies and men old enough to be their fathers.

Olivia rubbed her eyes.

“What if we just stay there tonight?” she finally said. “Then tomorrow we can still go to the gathering if we want to.”

Jen smiled immediately.

Emily didn’t.

A few moments later Jen followed the SUV deeper into the woods.

They followed for another twenty minutes, deeper into the hills.

The paved road narrowed to cracked asphalt, then gravel again. They passed no houses. No mailboxes. No lights except the red glow of the SUV ahead of them moving through the trees.

Finally they turned onto a dirt driveway.

The property was small and fenced in, carved awkwardly from the surrounding forest. A weathered trailer sat near the center beneath a tall floodlight buzzing with insects.

The driver was already waiting outside when they parked.

“Told you.” He smiled. “Civilization.”

Inside, the trailer smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, bleach, and something fried earlier in the evening. The radio played classic rock softly from another room.

The boy led them down a narrow hallway.

“You girls can stay in here.”

The bedroom at the far end of the trailer was completely empty.

No furniture. No boxes. No clothes.

Just pale carpet and freshly cleaned walls.

Emily noticed the smell immediately. The room smelled sharply of disinfectant, as though someone had spent the afternoon scrubbing it.

“Works for us,” Jen said.

The boy nodded and disappeared back down the hallway.

The girls spread their sleeping bags across the floor.

Through the thin walls they could hear the others talking quietly in the living room, the words disappearing beneath music from the radio.

Emily stayed awake the longest.

By then, even she could no longer explain exactly what felt wrong.

The girls woke up to the aroma of bacon and sausage on the grill.

“Let’s leave after breakfast,” Emily said before she climbed out of her sleeping bag.

“Tomorrow’s the Fourth. If we still want to go,” Olivia said through a yoga stretch. “We won’t miss anything. Where’s Jen?”

Emily pulled the shade up. “Outside flirting with Michael. Shirtless, apparently.”

Olivia perked up. “Really—how do you know that’s Michael?”

Emily laughed. “Well Sue’s gonna be mad as hell if that’s Jimmy.”

They left their bags on the floor and closed the door behind them. Jimmy was tuning his guitar on the couch, and they could hear the sink running in the kitchen.

“Sue’s in there if y’all wanna eat something,” he said and took his guitar outside.

Olivia felt him watching them when they walked past the door. She wasn’t sure if she liked it or not.

“Don’t be shy, have some homemade sausage with biscuits and gravy,” Sue said and turned off the faucet. “Your friend already ate, so have as much as you want.”

➰ ➰ ➰ ➰

Outside, the heat stuck to them like wet fabric. The grass around the trailer had been burnt yellow by the sun, and the red dirt driveway shimmered beneath the light. Somewhere deeper in the woods, cicadas screamed without pause.

Jimmy sat on a crate beneath the awning with his guitar across his lap, lazily picking through the same progression over and over again. The melody drifted through the yard in fragments.

Emily slapped her thigh hard.

“God damn it,” she muttered, looking at the smear of blood on her palm.

Sue glanced over from under the awning. “Well,” she said lightly, “now we know who tastes the best.”

Nobody laughed immediately.

Sue smiled anyway and turned back to Jimmy’s guitar.

Olivia walked over toward Jen, who stood beside Michael near the bus.

“What’re y’all doing?” she asked.

Jen brushed hair from her face.

“Michael says his bandmates are coming up later.” She grinned. “Apparently you two are really gonna hit it off. They’re both single.”

Emily looked toward the tree line. “You don’t still wanna go to the gathering?”

Jen hesitated.

“Even if we did,” she said, “we can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

Michael crouched beside the front tire and pointed beneath the bus.

“See that?”

A dark stain spread through the dust below the axle.

“Looks like y’all lost your acorn nut somewhere on those roads last night.”

“The bus won’t start,” Jen said.

She still believed the situation was awkward rather than dangerous.

Jimmy stopped playing for a moment.

Nobody spoke.

Then he started picking at the strings again.

“Their friends’ll be here soon,” Jen added quietly.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “My uncle John’s a mechanic. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

He wiped his face with a red bandanna before shoving it into his back pocket.

Emily suddenly became aware of how far they were from anything.

Not just town.

Everything.

➰ ➰ ➰ ➰

Two more couples showed up an hour later. Sue and the other girls disappeared into the trailer leaving the three of them by the bus.

The boys were building a makeshift stage out of an old flatbed and an army tent.

The Rainbow Gathering had been Olivia’s idea, and she was starting to regret it.

“Well Emily, it looks like we’re at least gonna get a concert out of this,” she said, watching the boys work. She turned towards Jen.

“What’s up with you and Michael?”

“He’s hot—I like him.”

“He’s hot—I like him,” Emily repeated dramatically. “Speaking of hot, the sun is brutal.”

They paused—listening to what sounded like fireworks off in the distance.

“Nice,” Emily said, emerging from inside the bus wearing her bikini. “I’m gonna lay out.”

They agreed, and joined her on some towels by the bus.

A few minutes later Sue yelled something about lunch.

They didn’t move.

CRACK BANG BANG BANG

The sound of fireworks split the sky above them.

All three of them sat up at once and blankly stared upward.

Everyone else was laughing.

Years later, Olivia would still remember the sound the fireworks made over the trees, though she would never again be certain they had actually been fireworks.

Lunch was hamburgers and hot dogs, washed down with cold beer.

The afternoon sun was high in the cloudless sky and the temperature crept like a thief above a hundred.

Another car arrived, then two more and a van. The group had grown to about a dozen teenagers, three or four adults in their twenties and early thirties, and a few small children.

A little boy wearing a diaper was playing with the hose in the driveway.

Jimmy was sitting on the edge of the flatbed drinking a beer.

Michael and Jen drifted off somewhere.

A small group had gathered around a fire pit in front of the stage.

Dogs barked and howled somewhere in the woods.

Emily was sitting with the side doors open in the bus.

She heard a vehicle pulling into the driveway.

She stuck her head out and saw a rusty pick up truck. She recognized it right away.

She quickly leaned back, hoping they didn’t see her.

The pick up rolled to a stop behind the bus.

She heard the doors squeak open and shut, and footsteps crunching around in the dirt.

She held her breath.

“Don’t scare her this year,” a man with a deep southern accent said. “Not before the fireworks.”

Then, “yee haw.” And, “yes sir.”

“We’ll get ‘er done right, Daddy,” another boy said.

“You always scare ‘em,” the deep voice continued. “We don’t wanna be playing hide and go seek.”

“Yeaaah, finally,” a woman said. “I love you boys.”

“Let’s go have some family fun!”

Emily ducked down and watched six shadows—one wearing a cowboy hat—slide across the yard as they moved toward the party.

➰ ➰ ➰ ➰

The sun went down slow and red through the tree line, pulling the shadows out long across the yard until the dark swallowed everything at once.

Someone had built a fire in the pit. The smoker was going and the smell of charcoal and pork drifted through the humid air. Olivia found Emily near the tree line and pressed a cold beer against her arm without saying anything.

They walked back together.

Jimmy and Michael were playing guitars near the fire, trading lines back and forth. Sue and Jen sat close enough that the music was clearly meant for them. Jen had stopped looking like she wanted to leave.

Emily drank her beer and watched the fire. It cracked and hissed.

The man in the cowboy hat was sitting across the pit from her. His face moved in and out of the light as he talked — shadows crossing it, then the orange flicker of the flames — and he was looking at her in a way that wasn’t quite looking at her.

He was talking about deer hunting. About field dressing. About how you rendered the fat and ground the meat and got the casing from a butcher if you knew one, or made do if you didn’t. His hands moved the stone along the blade with a sound like something being counted.

Emily stared into the fire.

Behind her, two voices she didn’t recognize were talking about tattoos. About picture frames. About what fit inside one and what didn’t.

She took a long swallow of beer. She didn’t turn around.

The two couples from earlier in the morning.

She noticed them first — the way one of the girls leaned into her boyfriend’s ear, the way he listened without taking his eyes off the fire. A moment later all four of them drifted into the shadow between the flatbed and the fire pit and stood close together, speaking quietly.

One of the boys walked over to Michael and Jimmy. He said something about needing to get going before it got too late. There were handshakes and see-you-laters and the small comfortable sounds of people who knew each other.

The girl came back through the light on her way to the car.

She looked at Emily.

She didn’t say anything. She just moved her eyes once toward the cars and raised her chin slightly, the way you might signal someone in a crowded room.

Emily understood.

She thought about standing up.

She didn’t.

Car doors closed. Engines turned over. The headlights swept through the trees and were gone.

Emily stood up anyway. After.

“What are you doing?” Olivia said.

“Nothing.” She sat back down.

Across the fire, the man in the hat smiled—showing his teeth.

A boy she didn’t recognize came through the dark carrying paper plates. He might have been fifteen. He held one out to Emily and one to Olivia without saying anything. On each plate sat a sausage, pale and pink, still steaming.

Emily took hers.

Olivia looked at her plate, then at Emily.

She took a bite.

➰ ➰ ➰ ➰

The dynamics around the fire shifted. Michael and Jen drifted off together, then Sue and Jimmy.

Olivia decided she didn’t want to be left alone.

Jimmy had handed his guitar to one of the guys from lunch earlier. Olivia moved next to him and listened to him play.

“I forgot your name,” she said.

“Tommy.” He smiled.

She smiled back.

Emily looked around the fire. Shadows moved across faces she didn’t know.

A couple of fireworks whistled somewhere overhead.

An older blonde woman pulled her shirt off and started hopping around the fire. Three or four teenage boys fell in behind her, circling.

Emily slid back from the light. She kept moving until the darkness covered her, then stood up quietly. She wasn’t sure if anyone noticed. She decided it didn’t matter.

She walked fast to the bus, climbed in, pulled a towel over herself, and closed her eyes.

The moonlight came through the windows pale and thin, and the sounds were ones she didn’t have names for. She lay under the towel and shivered until sunrise.

Years later, Olivia would remember the exact moment Emily stopped laughing at the jokes.

➰ ➰ ➰ ➰

Michael and Jen were sitting beside the smoldering fire pit when she climbed out of the bus. Somewhere in the trees an owl called once and went quiet.

Some fireworks popped far away.

Emily sat down. She didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Something doesn’t feel right,” she said finally. Her voice broke. “I think I need to leave.”

“Hey.” Jen moved closer. “Nobody wants you to leave.”

“That’s right,” Michael said. He was looking at the ashes. “Uncle John and May were up half the night talking about you.”

Emily looked at him.

He didn’t look back.

Neither Jen nor Michael believed themselves cruel.

“I’m going to take a walk.”

Jen said her name.

Emily turned off the road and into the trees.

Behind her she could hear voices, then the dogs — the ones that had been barking somewhere in the woods all evening — and she ran.

➰ ➰ ➰ ➰

The End