The Armageddon Rag

  “After that, well, I just fell apart. I wanted to go home to Tracy, but I couldn’t face the thought of seeing my house again, the house where I’d entertained Pat so often. The idea of performing again made me physically sick. So I just rented a motel room and holed up, and for two weeks I drank beer and watched television, wouldn’t answer the door except for room service, ignored the phone entirely.

  “Tracy saved me. She came out to me when she couldn’t reach me by phone. When she saw the way things were, she sold the house in Pennsylvania and bought one in Santa Fe, and moved me in. She took care of me. Then Aurora was born, and we both had to take care of her. The responsibility was good for me. I couldn’t face the past at all, but Tracy had gotten me to a whole new place and a whole new kind of life, and it helped. I started to function again. Tracy suggested naming the baby Patricia, for Pat. I wouldn’t hear of it. I knew I couldn’t take it. I was the one came up with Aurora as a name. For the dawn. A new beginning and all that. I loved the kid. I loved taking care of her. After a while I loved Santa Fe, too.

  “So that’s how it went. West Mesa is the place where we launch our balloon. The other… well, I don’t dwell on that.”

  “You seem pretty much recovered now,” Sandy said.

  “Well, it’s been a long time,” Peter Faxon replied. He stared off toward the mountains as the wind pushed them along, his green eyes unreadable. “Five years ago, you know, I wouldn’t have seen you or talked to you. I secluded myself for a long time. Living for my family. By the time I was ready to do interviews again, no one was much interested anymore.” He turned and looked at Sandy with a thin quirky smile. “So what was it you wanted to talk about? Lynch?”

  Sandy nodded. “That, and other things.”

  “Jamie Lynch and I corresponded a few times a year on business matters,” Faxon said calmly, “but other than that, I’d had no contact with the man since Pat’s death.”

  “I’ve talked to Maggio and Gopher John,” Sandy said. “Gopher John hated Lynch. Maggio claims he liked him. What’s your attitude?”

  “Mixed,” said Faxon. “Jamie Lynch was a rotten bastard in a lot of ways. But he was the rotten bastard who gave us our break when no one else would. He screwed us with his contract, but we were eager to be screwed when we signed it.”

  “Who do you think killed him?”

  Faxon frowned. “I thought they got the guy who killed him? Some lumberjack or something?”

  “They’ve made an arrest,” Sandy said. “But I don’t think they have the murderer.”

  “All I know is what I read in the papers,” Faxon said. “If the lumberjack didn’t do it, I don’t know who did.”

  Sandy decided to change tacks. “Do you ever miss the old days with the Nazgûl? The fame, the money, all of it?”

  Faxon gave him that quirky smile again, half-amused and half-sad. “For a long time all that was just a nightmare I was trying to escape, trying to forget. Even when I finally came to terms with it, it all seemed unreal. As if those years had been one long feverish dream. No, I don’t miss it. Even when I was living it, I was always a bit uncomfortable. You commented on that yourself, Sandy, in that last piece you wrote on us for the Hog. I was the misfit of the group, you said. I didn’t quite seem to belong, either in the Nazgûl or in rock. And you were right. Pat and Rick and Gopher John, each of them plunged in, in his own way, but there was always part of me that hung back, judging. Too intellectual, I guess. Maggio would say I was too scared. Maybe I was. The groupies always seemed bizarre to me. The drugs and the drinking seemed repugnant. The fame was a kind of insanity. The money, well, the money was nice, but I’m not hurting. We made lots and lots when we were performing, and I was smart enough to invest it well. Besides, I wrote virtually all the Nazgûl material, and I kept the publishing rights. Lynch might have taken us with the performance and recording contract, but I was adamant about keeping my songs. They were mine, and they still are. And now they support me. ‘Napalm Love,’ ‘Elf Rock,’ ‘Blood on the Sheets’… any one of them brings in enough each year to pay the bills.”

  “What about the music?” Sandy said. He thought he knew, before he asked, what the answer would be.

  And sure enough, Faxon’s smile grew wistful. “The music,” he said. Peter Faxon might have been a misfit in the rock world, but he was also the creative heart of the Nazgûl and their sound. He was the most versatile musician among them. Most of the time he played the bass, but on various Nazgûl tracks through the years, he’d switched to keyboard, to alto sax, to Cajun fiddle, once even to French horn. He could double for Hobbins on rhythm guitar. He could sing too, though his vocals were never in a class with Hobbins’ or Maggio’s. Most of all, he could write songs. “Yes,” he said quietly, in the deep lingering silence of the sky, the ground creeping past far below them, the wicker basket creaking gently as he leaned back against it. “Yes, I do miss the music. It’s part of me. It always will be.”

  “You were never tempted to get back into it?”

  “In the early days, the thought seemed obscene to me,” Faxon said. “But later… well, I considered it. The idea came to me that I ought to get together a new band. A studio band, strictly. I couldn’t stand the idea of touring, but I thought I could write some new material, get together some class performers, and cut an album. Then I looked around the rock world, and I knew it would never happen. The music had changed. I turned on the radio and it was all disco. Every song sounded like the song before. The lyrics were sappy and dull and endlessly repetitive. I tried to write songs about people. About life and love and pain. About politics and ideas and right and wrong. My music was ambitious, too. I liked playing around with new sounds. And I listened to that radio, to a top-forty station that had once played every Nazgûl track as soon as we cut it, and I knew there was no room for me anymore. Hell, I know I wrote some crap in my time. I’d be the first to admit it. But I tried. I wrote music to wake the dead; what they want now is stuff that’s good to dance to. The lowest common denominator.” He smiled grimly. “No thanks. A Peter Faxon comeback album would have sunk without a trace.”

  “But not a Nazgûl reunion,” Sandy pointed out.

  “Reunions never work,” Faxon said. “Look at Peter, Paul and Mary. Look at the Moody Blues. The Beatles were smart. If they’d ever gotten back together, it would have been feeding time for rock critics at the zoo. You can’t win in that situation; if you change your sound radically, everyone says it’s not as good, and if you don’t, they say you’re stagnant and repetitious. And if you just play the old songs instead of doing new ones, then it’s nostalgia, not music. You know the Rick Nelson song, ‘Garden Party’?”

  Sandy knew it. “If memories were all I sang,” he said, “I’d rather drive a truck.”

  “Exactly,” Faxon said. “Or in my case, a balloon.”

  “When I talked to Maggio in Chicago, he insisted that a Nazgûl reunion was going to happen real soon now.”

  Faxon frowned. “Rick is an addict.”

  “An addict?” Sandy said. “I knew he was hooked in the old days. I thought he’d gotten clean.”

  “It’s not just drugs. He has an addict personality. He’s weak. He gets hooked on anything. He can’t stop himself. He’s poor because he got hooked on credit cards and spent away everything he had. He’s fat now because he got hooked on food when he couldn’t afford drugs anymore. He’s still hooked on little girls. And he’s hopelessly addicted to dreams, in this case to the pipedream that we’re going to reassemble and it’s all going to be like it was. No way. In fact—”

  “What?”

  “I’ve never told anyone this before,” Faxon said, “but I guess enough time has passed to admit it. The truth is, the Nazgûl were pretty close to busting up when West Mesa did the job for us. I doubt we would have lasted much longer in any event.”

  That was a shock. “Why?” Sandy said. “You were hotter than ever.”

  “Our music, our sales, sure. But inside we were ice
cold, all eaten up by jealousy and dissension. Three of us had just about agreed to dump Maggio. He just wasn’t reliable anymore. He was strung out or flying ninety percent of the time, and his playing had gone to hell. Gopher John was chafing to get out from under Lynch’s thumb, and I sort of agreed with him. But I was the big problem. I was all set to walk. I wanted to break with Pat once and for all. I think that was why I took his death so hard. It was guilt. Part of me wanted to be rid of him, you see. And then my wish came true.”

  Sandy was baffled. “I don’t get it. You were just saying how close you were with Hobbins.”

  “Like brothers,” Faxon said with an ironic twist of the mouth. “You ever heard of sibling rivalry? By West Mesa, I was furious with Pat. My ego was in an uproar. He was taking my band away from me.

  “I thought of the Nazgûl as mine. I was the leader, the driving force. I taught Pat how to play that guitar of his, back in eighth grade. In high school, I found Rick and a couple other kids and got together a band to play dances and weddings and stuff. We called ourselves Peter and the Wolves. Later on, it was Peter and the Werewolves. Pat Hobbins was just another Werewolf; I was the star. When the Tolkien trilogy got hot and everybody started calling Hobbins ‘Hobbit,’ I read the books and decided that we’d become the Nazgûl, but I didn’t think that changed the pecking order any. I still thought I was the leader. I was the one who decided to cut Tony Regetti and take on Gopher John on drums. I wrote all our material. Until we signed with Lynch, I even did our bookings. It was my band. Except that it wasn’t, not by the end.

  “The thing was, Pat Hobbins had something I didn’t. On stage, I was a competent, versatile performer, but that was all I was. Pat was… electric … hell, nuclear even. God knows, I was better looking than him, and I knew more about music than he ever would or could, but Pat could do things to an audience that I only dreamed about. Sex appeal, showmanship, charisma… whatever it was, he had it.

  “I’d stand there and play my bass, sing my background vocals, put everything I had into my songs, and still remain trapped in his shadow. Up front, Pat would strut and pose, grinning, sneering, moving every damn second of every damn set. And singing! As a rhythm guitarist, he was indifferent at best, the weakest musician in the Nazgûl, but he could sing! He was part demon and part angel and all genius. And that was the problem.

  “He dominated the Nazgûl. He knew it; everyone told him so. Of course, it went to his head. You can’t blame Pat. He was a kid. We all were. He started joking around about carrying us. He suggested we rename the group Patrick Henry Hobbins and the Nazgûl. I suggested Peter Faxon and the Nazgûl instead, and he laughed. He threw a fit when I gave Rick the lead vocal on ‘Ragin’ ,’ said I did it to spite him. And he was partly right.

  “Yes, I know, it all seems pretty petty now, but it was deadly serious back then. And afterward.” Faxon paused and looked pensive. The balloon had lost some altitude. He turned and ignited the gas burner; a hissing, roaring gout of flame spit out, and a moment or two afterward, the Flying Eye lifted. Faxon kept the flame on.

  “Afterward?” Sandy prompted. Loudly.

  Faxon turned back to face him. “Even when Pat was dead, I could not accept the fact that he’d been the star. I mentioned where the shot came from, the angle of the bullet. I still swear it passed close by me. For years afterward, I told my theory to Tracy and anyone else who would listen…I believed firmly that the sniper had been aiming for me, and had only hit Pat by mistake when he strode into the path of the bullet. It made a certain amount of sense. I was usually stationary, while Pat was constantly moving, an impossible target. And I was the one to blame for all that subversive, suggestive music. By all rights, I should have been the victim.”

  “Another reason for your retirement?” Sandy suggested.

  Faxon nodded. “I had no desire to be the second Kennedy. Yet, in a way, I was upset that I’d lived. Pat’s death made him a martyr, seemed to confirm him as the star. I was convinced that the assassination had been politically motivated, and I wanted to believe…no, needed to believe… that I was the one who’d needed silencing. Here I was, the Jesus of the rock age, saying all these wise and dangerous things in my songs, and the fools had gone and nailed up one of my apostles in my place. Didn’t they know that I was the one who should have died for their sins?” His mouth twisted down ruefully. He turned away sharply and shut off the burner. The silence of the sky wrapped itself around them once again. They had gained considerable altitude and were drifting south and east.

  Sandy found himself at a loss for words, rendered awkward by Faxon’s confession. “And now?” he said, finally.

  Peter Faxon rubbed the back of his neck. “I got over it. Now I know the assassin wasn’t political after all. Just another crazy in a world of crazies. It was a random act, and any of us could have played the victim’s role. Pat just drew the short straw. And it’s over, for good and all.”

  Sandy’s lips felt dry. “No,” he said tersely. “It isn’t.”

  Faxon looked at him sharply. “What does that mean?”

  “You know Lynch died on the anniversary of West Mesa. What you don’t know is that the killer cut his heart out over the concert poster, while Music to Wake the Dead was on the stereo. I don’t know what that means, but it means something. And I think the arsonist who torched Gopher John’s place ties in, too. It’s not over. Something is going on.”

  Faxon frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I. Yet. I think you’d better be careful, though. I think you might be in danger.”

  Faxon laughed. “Come on! Who’d want to hurt me? I’m a family man, well on my way to being a boring old fart.”

  “Slozewski laughed too,” Sandy said. “A couple hours later, the Gopher Hole was in flames.”

  Faxon scowled. “I went through years of paranoia and fear, looking over my shoulder for assassins. I’m finally out of that place. You want me to go back.”

  “Somebody has a grudge against the Nazgûl.”

  “I’m not part of the Nazgûl,” Faxon insisted. “My life is Tracy and Aurora and Christopher, not Pat and Rick and Gopher John. I’ve practically forgotten about the Nazgûl.”

  “Oh?” said Sandy. “Then how come this balloon has the Eye of Mordor painted on its side?”

  Peter Faxon leaned back against the side of the basket and crossed his arms. His mouth was suddenly tight, and his clear green eyes looked away, deliberately. “All right,” he said after a pause. “All right.” He sounded vaguely petulant.

  “Have you ever heard of Edan Morse?” Sandy asked.

  Faxon did not answer. The land rolling past below them was getting progressively more empty as they floated south of the city. “I’m going to bring us down a little,” Faxon said, “start looking for a landing spot.” He vented some air from the side of the balloon, and they began to sink in a series of small, bobbing increments.

  “Edan Morse,” Sandy repeated insistently.

  Faxon turned to face him. “A promoter of some kind,” he snapped. “I got a letter from him once. Big plans for a Nazgûl reunion, for a comeback tour.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  Faxon grinned. “My wastebasket has the Eye of Mordor on it, too,” he said. They had lost considerable altitude by then. Fifty feet off the ground, and drifting, the balloon seemed to be moving a lot faster. They floated over houses and roads. Sandy could see people below stopping and craning their necks to watch as the Flying Eye went by. Once it looked as though they were going to blow right into a power line that ran along the side of the road, but Faxon gave the balloon a short blast from the gas burner and they hopped over the threatening wires as neatly as you please. Then he vented more air. They passed thirty feet above a gas station, and out over a wide open field, brown and bare in the New Mexico sun. Sandy glimpsed a familiar Ford pick-up on the road that ran past the station.

  “Hold on,” Faxon said. “We’re coming down.” He maneuvered the balloon as adroit
ly as he used to pluck his bass. The ground was suddenly moving very fast indeed, and the bottom of the basket thumped against it and bounced. Faxon grabbed a red line and yanked and the balloon above them seemed to sag and then collapse. They went dragging along the ground as the envelope deflated. Sandy felt his teeth jar together, and he lost his footing briefly.

  And then they were stopped, and the Flying Eye was just a wicker basket and a vast expanse of limp red nylon once again. Faxon was grinning. “Congratulations,” he said. “You just survived your first balloon trip.” He had a bottle of champagne in the cooler. He had just finished opening it when the chase crew came roaring up, huge clouds of dry dust flying from the wheels of the pick-up. They made Sandy kneel and they rubbed dirt in his hair, claiming that it and the champagne were all part of some strange balloonists’ ritual. Then they drank, and loaded the Flying Eye into the truck, and drank, and laughed, and drank, and had lunch right there on the tailgate. The cooler was full of sandwiches and potato salad and cole slaw and pickles, and when the bottle of champagne had been killed, there was Dos Equis, and cans of fruit juice for the kids. It was a nice lunch.