The Armageddon Rag

  He could almost hear Sharon’s derision. “How Sixties,” she’d say. “The valiant underdog fighting alone for justice,” she’d say. “You read too many issues of Spider-Man as a kid,” she’d say. “I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you that maybe you’re wrong,” she’d say. “Hell, no. Not Sandy Blair, boy crusader, on the side of the angels. You’re never wrong. Your hat is as white as driven snow, right?” He’d heard it all before. He couldn’t argue with her. But he didn’t care.

  Sandy took out his notebook. After the notes on Slozewski and Maggio, he’d written “Faxon” on a blank page, and underlined it. Now, beneath it, he added “Edan Morse,” with a question mark after the name. He chewed on the end of his Flair for a second, then, impulsively, added three more names. He’d seen Maggie and Lark, after all. He might as well hunt up Slum and Bambi and Froggy, make a clean sweep of it. They were all a piece of this, too. Maggie had provided him with an address for Bambi Lassiter; the alumni office could lead him to the others.

  Satisfied, he tucked the notebook away, got up, and methodically started to pack. All of a sudden his weariness had evaporated. All of a sudden he was restless, and anxious to hit the road again. Tank up with coffee and drive all night, he thought, tossing clothes into his suitcase.

  Before he left, he glanced in the mirror. He needed a shave. Badly. He rubbed the stubble under his chin. And grinned. What the hell, he thought. It would be interesting to see how he looked in a beard again, after all these years.

  NINE

  It was twenty years ago today/

  Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play

  The phone was only inches from his pillow. When it rang, it screamed, a merciless trilling loudness. Sandy shuddered out of sleep and lurched for it, and succeeded only in knocking the receiver to the floor. He pulled it up by the cord. “Yeah?” he said.

  “Four-thirty, sir. Your wake-up call.”

  Sandy muttered something unintelligible and hung up. He sat up unsteadily, cradling his head in his hands. Four-thirty, he thought. Faxon was insane. The motel room was black and chilly. Sandy wanted nothing so much as to curl up under those warm blankets once again. Instead he pushed himself to his feet and headed for the shower.

  It was a short shower; he couldn’t get any hot water. The cold helped a little. When he’d dried himself and emerged, he was almost half awake. The coffee shop wouldn’t open for hours, but fortunately the Albuquerque motel had a few amenities, even if hot water was not among them. He made himself a cup of instant coffee on the plug-in unit above the sink and stirred in the powdered creamer that had so thoughtfully been provided. He sipped the coffee slowly. By the time he’d finished, it was ice cold. Even hot, it was a strong candidate for the worst coffee he’d ever had in his life. But the caffeine restored him to some semblance of humanity.

  The knock came as he was buckling on his jeans. “One sec,” Sandy called out. He yanked a shirt over his head quickly and tucked in the ends while opening the door. Peter Faxon was leaning casually against the door frame. “Be with you in a minute,” Sandy told him. “I just have to get some shoes and socks on. I’m not usually functioning at this hour. Normally I rise at the crack of noon.”

  “No rush,” Faxon said. He stepped into the room to wait. The years scarcely seemed to have touched him. His hair was still long, though the blond braids had given way to a kind of Prince Valiant shag that framed his long cool face. Sun-bleached and golden and straight, Faxon’s hair seemed even finer and paler than Sandy remembered. His bangs came to just above his startling green eyes. He had tiny lines around the corners of those eyes now, from squinting into the sun too much, and the deep, dark, layered tan of a man who has spent a lot of time outdoors. He looked trim and fit in a blue chambray work shirt, old patched jeans, and crooked denim cap. A big turquoise-and-silver buckle adorned his intricate, handmade belt. With his blond, All-American good looks, Faxon seemed like the sort who’d be more at home singing surf rock or cowboy ballads than the hard-driving rock of the Nazgûl. He fooled people that way. Faxon had never quite seemed to belong with the others, but the truth of it was that he had been the group’s creative brains: a consummate musician and a brilliant songwriter.

  Sandy pulled on his boots, rose, and offered his hand. “Thanks for seeing me, anyway,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to come down to Albuquerque for me. Just hope I’m coherent enough to ask some decent questions. Like, for starts, where are we going, and why?”

  Faxon smiled. “We’re going up on the West Mesa,” he said. “Come on, we’re running late.”

  The parking lot was eerily still in the vague predawn light. A faint chill was in the air, and the barest breath of wind. Faxon walked around to the driver’s side of a big red-and-white Blazer. Sandy climbed in next to him, uneasily. “The West Mesa?” he said, as Faxon flicked on the headlights and backed out.

  “Don’t worry,” Faxon replied, “the guy with the gun is long gone.”

  The streets of Albuquerque were almost deserted at this time of the morning. There was a battered Ford pick-up about a block behind them that Sandy noticed when he turned to see dawn starting to break over the Sandias to the north and east, and once they glimpsed another car at an intersection, but that was it. Everything was empty, hushed, yet somehow very alive as well. As dawn broke, the street lamps and headlights seemed to fade. It was a strange, intoxicating hour.

  They were headed west, out of the city. After a while, they began to climb; houses became few and far between. The street lamps went out. Faxon turned and turned again, on to roads that became progressively smaller. Sandy looked back and saw the same pick-up behind them. As he watched, its headlights went out. “You’re being followed,” he said.

  “I know,” Faxon said, smiling. “My family.”

  Sandy was confused, though a bit relieved. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They were up on the West Mesa itself now. The land was flat and dry and dusty. Dirt roads ran through wide, desolate fields, shorn and empty, and between barbed-wire fences. Vegetation was scarce; some pinyon, a few juniper, stubby little cacti. Dry brown tumbleweeds blew across the road. Faxon ran them over nonchalantly. The Blazer kicked up a cloud of dust as it went, obscuring the pick-up behind them. Sandy looked out the window, remembering. This was where it had happened. Somewhere in this desolation, a sniper had lined up Patrick Henry Hobbins in his crosshairs, and it had all come to an end. Here: this was where the music had died, where the dream had turned into nightmare. But none of it looked familiar. The landmarks had been the trailers and the stage, set amid a sea of sixty thousand people. All gone. All that remained was untouched high desert emptiness, with no way to tell where anything had been.

  Faxon made a sharp right where two dirt roads met, and ahead of them Sandy saw that the shoulder was lined by about a dozen cars and trucks. In the field to their left, something big was stirring, rising. For a brief, surreal moment, it looked as though the ground itself was heaving up in some vast wave, about to spit forth the mother of all gophers. Then it became clear. It was a balloon. A big blue-and-white balloon with a checkerboard pattern, lying on its side on the ground, filling and fluttering as he watched.

  Faxon pulled off the road and parked behind another four-wheel drive. The Ford pick-up slid in behind him. Sandy was watching the balloon. Its gas burner was roaring, and a cluster of people were gathered around it, holding the bag. They didn’t hold it long. All at once the bag, nearly full now, lurched up and righted itself, shaking most of them off. Two men climbed into the basket, and the others let go. Slowly, with infinite languorous grace, the balloon ascended into the morning sky, drifting off until it was only a small blue dot in the distance. It was gorgeous.

  Faxon brought his family over and introduced them. His wife, Tracy, was tall and slender and tanned a deep brown. Straight brown hair fell to the top of the wide concho belt that held up her jeans. Her hand was small and cool when she took Sandy’s. “I’ve
enjoyed your books,” she said. The little boy, Christopher, looked about six or seven, though Sandy was a poor judge of children’s ages. He had a mop of light brown hair and a lot of rambunctious energy. He stood still barely long enough to nod curtly to Sandy; then he was running off across the field to help with a second balloon, a big patchwork-quilt patterned balloon that had just started to inflate. The older child was a girl, Aurora, about thirteen, gangly and as blond as Faxon himself. She wore a Star Wars tee shirt, a denim jacket, and the look of benign indifference that all adolescents seem to reserve for adults who intrude on their little world.

  When all the introductions were done, Faxon clapped Sandy on the shoulder and said, “And now we put you to work.”

  “Work?”

  “Why do you think I brought you? C’mon. Give a hand with the Flying Eye.” He led Sandy to the back of the pick-up. Tracy and Aurora had already started in. There was a big wicker basket, a huge fan, and the balloon itself, the gas bag all folded up, yards and yards of it. It appeared to be mostly red. All of it had to be unloaded and moved across the field to an empty spot that Christopher had already staked out for them. Faxon told Sandy what to do, and they set to work. Others showed up to help. Everybody seemed to know everybody, except for Sandy. They were all very friendly. They talked a lot about the wind. The breeze seemed mild to Sandy, but a couple of the balloonists were talking as if it were a hurricane, and thinking twice about going up.

  Peter Faxon did not try to launch immediately. Once the Faxon balloon was spread out on the ground, he squinted into the wind, shrugged, and went off to help some of the others who had arrived earlier. Sandy was drafted, too. The launching procedure seemed to require a big ground crew, and it was all for one and one for all. Sandy soon caught on to the procedure. The balloons were opened on the ground, fold by fold; the basket was laid on its side in position and attached, the propane burner and tanks were locked in place. Then the ground crew grabbed hold of the sides of the bag, clutching tight to the nylon fabric and the ropes, while one or two men opened the mouth of the balloon and revved up one of those big fans and blew some air inside. When the fan was going the fabric would heave and ripple and puff up, and when it had inflated sufficiently, the pilot would kick in the gas burner, which would cough once or twice and then roar and send a long blue-white tongue of flame licking up inside the interior of the balloon, heating the air trapped within. Now Sandy understood the concern about the wind. As the bag inflated, it had a tendency to shift, struggling against his grip almost as if it were a living thing, pulling and then pushing, wiggling around in the wind. The ground crew had to hold it still; if the balloon should lurch too much to the side so that the flame from the burner actually touched the fabric, they’d have a disaster on their hands. Once, as they struggled to get up a big pumpkin-colored balloon with jack o’ lantern markings, it seemed for an instant as though just that was going to happen, but everybody dug in their heels and somehow they stopped the movement. The pumpkin suddenly pushed up from the ground and stood on its basket, the flame firing straight up. Two pumpkin-auts clambered aboard, the ground crew let go, and the balloon began its ascent, leaving Sandy with rope burns across his palm and some kind of cactus thorn in his foot. He bent down and pulled it out.

  Fortunately, the wind had died considerably by the time it was their turn, and Faxon got his Flying Eye launched almost without incident. “You’ll be riding this time,” Faxon said to Sandy. “Stay near the burner with me.” There was a small bit of trouble when the burner refused to ignite on cue, but Faxon soon got it working, and everything went as before. Except this time, when the balloon popped up, Faxon was standing in the basket, waving to Sandy. “C’mon.”

  Sandy hesitated, looking up. Faxon’s balloon was a livid scarlet. He could see how it had gotten its name. Rendered across the long, pleated vertical panels, twice as big as life, was a familiar eye insignia that Sandy recognized at once. The Eye of Mordor. Sauron’s emblem in Tolkien’s trilogy.

  Everybody was yelling at him. He glanced around and saw that the Flying Eye was moving with the wind, pulling at the people who were trying to hold it down, like a big round dog pulling at its leash. “Come on!” Faxon was yelling again, waving. Sandy ran to him. Faxon clasped his hand and someone else put a big hand on his ass and shoved, and before he quite knew it, Sandy was in the basket beside Faxon, the ground crew had let go of them, and they were rising. The gas burner was a dull sizzling roar, but the balloon ascended so smoothly that it scarcely seemed to move at all. It really seemed as if they were standing still, while somehow the ground fell away sharply underneath them.

  “What about Tracy and the kids?” Sandy said to Faxon, raising his voice to be heard over the burner.

  “Chase crew,” Faxon bellowed back. “They’ll follow us in the truck. You can’t exactly steer these things. We’ll need them when we come down. Oh, don’t worry, they’ll get their turns. It’s not as if they’ve never been up. They’re all old hands. We’ve been taking the Flying Eye up once or twice a week, weather permitting, for something like five years.”

  Sure enough, Sandy could make out Tracy Faxon and her kids down below, climbing into the pick-up. They took off down the dirt road, more or less trailing the balloon’s windblown course. But the Eye was climbing higher and faster, and the pick-up soon became a very small dot indeed. You could see the whole West Mesa from up here; the brown bare fields, the crisscrossing dirt tracks, the other balloons laid out far beneath them like brightly colored toys. Sandy glimpsed only one of the balloons that had preceded them, the jack o’ lantern, way out to the east now, over the city of Albuquerque. Where the rest had gone to he couldn’t imagine.

  “Now you see why I had to roust you out of bed so early,” Faxon was saying. “The early morning is the best time to go up. Usually there isn’t much wind to fight, and the sun hasn’t had the chance to pound against the ground and start sending up thermals.”

  “I thought thermals were good,” Sandy said.

  Faxon shrugged. “For sailplanes and hang-gliders, sure. They rise on the hot air. But balloons fly because the air in the envelope is hotter than the air outside. If you get caught in a thermal, you lose the temperature differential, and your lift. Which means down, down, down.” He still had the propane burner going; they rose higher and higher. They were well above the orange jack o’ lantern now, and drifting out over the edge of the West Mesa, caught in a gentle wind. Faxon reached up and shut off the burner.

  The silence was startling. Sandy had not expected it to be so quiet. It was almost unreal, so serene and peaceful that it seemed as if he were caught in a dream. “I can’t even hear the wind,” he said.

  “We’re part of the wind now,” Peter Faxon said with a smile. “So you don’t hear it. Don’t worry, everyone reacts the same way. You still want to be back in bed?”

  “Oh, no,” Sandy said. “This is great.” He placed his hands gently on the side of the basket, half-afraid he’d tip them over and out if he rested his weight against it, and gazed off over the city crawling beneath their feet. The streets were starting to fill up with traffic now; Albuquerque sprawled in all directions, and the sun was brilliant on the mountains to the east. “It reminds me of LA.”

  Faxon bent to the cooler in the bottom of the basket, took out two sandwiches in wax paper, and offered one to Sandy. “Ham and egg,” he said. “Breakfast. Actually, Albuquerque will be LA in ten or twenty years. Except the smog will be worse. The Sandias hold in the pollution, and they get terrific inversion layers in winter when everybody decides to light up his fireplace. And the place grows. They haven’t learned a thing. It’s a pretty ugly town, a real Taco Bell and Chicken Delight jungle, and it’s going to get worse.” He shrugged. “We live up in Santa Fe, which is much better. Less of a Chamber of Commerce mentality. The only problem with Santa Fe is that it’s getting too fashionable. Too many people like me moving in.” He smiled and took a bite from his sandwich.

  “Why do you
like living out here?” Sandy asked between mouthfuls of ham-and-egg-on-whole-wheat. “It seems a little strange, you taking up residence so close to the place where…”

  “…where Pat got killed?” Faxon smiled. “I’m not afraid to say it. It’s been a long time.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just sort of happened. When the West Mesa concert was over, we all had to stay around for a while. There were inquiries, inquests, all kinds of things. And I was in pretty bad shape. Tracy and I lived back in Pennsylvania then, had a nice old farmhouse, and a kid on the way. Aurora. But after what happened, I just couldn’t stomach the idea of going back and picking up that life.”

  “They say you freaked out after West Mesa.”

  “The phrase is a little too gratingly trendy for my tastes, but the sentiment isn’t far from the truth,” Faxon said with a small frown. “I guess I had a breakdown of sorts. It was a pretty damn traumatic experience, Sandy. Pat Hobbins and I had been friends since we met in the fourth grade, back in Philadelphia. He beat up an older kid who was trying to steal my lunch money. Which was pretty funny when you stop to think about it, because he was something like a foot shorter than me. I was a bookworm, though, and Pat was tough. When you’re a pint-sized albino in a lower-middle-class Italian neighborhood, you learn to fight, or else. Anyway, he was my oldest and best friend. We were practically brothers. I was looking at him when it happened. One minute he was so alive, radiating such energy it was incredible. Sixty thousand people were out there, hooked up to him somehow. And then it was like his head exploded. I was behind Pat and to his right. The shot came from the left, diagonally. To this day, I swear I felt it pass right by my head. I was spattered with Pat’s blood. There are still stains on that white leather jacket I used to wear, the one with all the fringe. And then I was kneeling and I had Pat in my arms. I don’t remember going to him, but I remember holding him, numb, looking out over the darkness, expecting another shot, watching the riot start. He died in my arms. Kind of. I mean, he was dead by the time I got to him, I guess, in a medical sense. The whole top of his skull was gone. But I could still feel his heart beating, and he was still warm, still bleeding, and he even moved a little, so it was like he was alive.