The Armageddon Rag

  Sandy had met him only once, for that long-ago Christmas visit, but once had been enough. His memories were vivid. Butcher Byrne had been tall and wide, with iron-gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses. His bearing was rigor-mortis-erect. He smoked a pipe, and claimed to carry a knife inside his heavy black boot. He favored khaki bush jackets with belts and pocket snaps and strange little colored ribbons. Sandy suspected that he had epaulettes on his undershirts. His voice boomed and echoed like artillery fire, and he brooked no interruptions. He had four Dobermans outside and a big black German shepherd inside and all of them were attack-trained. He had five sons, Slum being the third in the succession, and would have liked to attack-train them as well. He had no daughters, but he did have very firm opinions about the female role in society. He had very firm opinions about most everything, in fact, but his favorite topics were war, politics, and writing. Sandy made the mistake of mentioning his literary aspirations, and for two days he received Butcher Byrne’s Famous Writers’ Course. The heart of the course seemed to be how well Butcher’s books sold, and how much royalty money he collected. “I cry all the way to the bank,” he told Sandy, eight or nine times, while dismissing his bad reviews. He was just a “storyteller,” Butcher said. Forget about that “art” stuff. “A crock of human excrement,” he said loudly. Despite the fact that Butcher could describe the way human brains looked on a wall after being splattered by a rifle bullet, the word shit was not in his vocabulary, and was not heard in his home.

  Given Butcher’s character and the nature of home life in what Sandy had promptly dubbed “Fort Byrne,” it was no surprise that Jefferson Davis’ rebellion, when it came, had taken him all the way to Slumhood, and made him the antithesis of everything his father stood for, and the embodiment of everything his father loathed. What was surprising was that Slum would return here, to Fort Byrne, after all the bitterness and all the renunciations. The last Sandy had heard of him, Slum had been a draft exile in Canada, back around 1973 or so.

  Hands shoved deep into his pockets, Sandy crossed the street and started up the drive, keeping a wary eye out for Dobermans and wondering whether Butcher had mellowed or whether Slum had somehow changed into a kind of ghastly echo of his father. The Dobermans did not appear. Maybe it was too cold for them; there was a real snap in the air, and most of the trees were bare now. Sandy climbed the porch, past the jockey statue, and pressed the doorbell, half-expecting the chimes to play Charge! A raucous buzz was all he got.

  There were no servants. Never had been. Butcher could easily have afforded servants, but he had a deep distrust of what he called “inferior genetic material,” and wouldn’t allow any in his castle. The youth who opened the door had a face that gave Sandy a start. It might have been Jefferson Davis Byrne himself, as he had looked that first day Sandy had seen him behind the wheel of that red Corvette.

  Sandy remembered that Jeff Byrne very well. A tall, skinny, gangling sort, all elbows and knees and awkwardness, always bumping into things and knocking them over. Life in Butcher’s shadow had left him quiet and deferential, and apology always on his lips. Shy and painfully insecure, he sported a crew cut, a hundred wide ties, and lots of double-breasted sports jackets. He studied very hard for fear his grades would be poor, and took Rush Week in dead earnest, terrified that he’d fail to pledge a good fraternity.

  Then Maggie had gotten hold of him, and the change had begun. She’d been seeing Jeff even before she started going with Sandy; in fact, they’d met each other through her, and for a year or two they’d managed to share her attentions without rancor or jealousy. But Maggie had done more than take Jeff Byrne’s virginity; she’d given him some self-confidence for the first time in his life, and planted the seeds of his revolt. Once started, the metamorphosis snowballed, and Jeff seemed to change into Slum as fast as Lon Chaney, Jr., changed into the Wolfman.

  In October he went to his first foreign film, and ate Chinese food (or “gook slop” as Butcher so endearingly called it) with Maggie afterward. In November he went to hear a radical speaker, and smoked his first marijuana cigarette. In December he signed a petition against the war, and took part in a student power rally.

  By February he had quit his fraternity. By March he had a beard growing, and his hair was getting wilder and wilder. He never trimmed the beard or cut the hair as long as Sandy knew him. Eventually the beard became a gnarled red-brown thicket covering half his chest, while his hair stood out a foot from his head in all directions. His bangs hung down across his face and his whiskers crept up his cheeks so that you could scarcely see a face there, just a tiny little mouth smiling gently and two bright blue eyes behind a hirsute veil.

  In April Maggie taught him to sew, and he sat down and made up his Slum Suit, sewing all of his neckties but one into a weird crazy-quilt knee-length poncho of a hundred different colors and patterns. He was very proud of it; he said he’d taken his neckties, a symbol of repression, and made them over into a bright and flagrant flag of freedom. Just about the time Butcher Byrne was paying his staggering income taxes that year, his son donned his amazing poncho. He wore it every day for the rest of his college career. The lone necktie he had saved—a skinny electric-blue tie on which he hand-painted the words “Souvenir of Guam”—he wore loosely tied around his neck, the ends wildly uneven.

  In May he bought a block of hashish the size of a cornerstone and gave free samples to every guy in the dorm. It made him real popular. In June he told Butcher that he wasn’t coming home for the summer, painted his Corvette green and purple and wrote FUCK LBJ on its hood, and took off with Maggie for a summer on the road.

  He returned in the fall riding a red-white-and-blue motortrike, with Maggie sitting behind him. He had flowers threaded through his beard and a faded porkpie hat on top of his head, and he was Slum, then and forever. Still quiet and gentle, he liked to sit in his room and eat endless trays of hash brownies that he baked himself. He bought three kittens (Butcher said cats were “fairy pets”) and named them Shit, Piss, and Corruption. He hired a couple of guys to go to his classes and take his tests. He burned all his boots and his feet got hard with calluses and crusty-black with dirt. He smiled a lot and laughed uproariously at TV sitcoms and got fat from all those brownies, so that his Slum Suit bound tight around his belly. And that was what he’d been like, in December of sophomore year, when he took Sandy home to meet Butcher. The expression on Butcher’s face when they sailed up the drive on Slum’s motortrike had almost made the week of rancor worthwhile.

  “Yes?” asked the kid in the doorway. “What can I do for you?” Sandy realized he’d been standing there dumbly, staring. The kid was about seventeen or eighteen, in an alligator shirt and designer jeans, and he looked so much like Jeff Byrne had once looked that it hurt.

  But it wasn’t Slum, of course; it was a brother, the youngest brother. “I’m Sandy Blair,” he said. “I was a good friend of your brother Jeff, in college. And you’re… Dave, is it?”

  “Doug,” the youth corrected. “I don’t remember you.”

  “You were pretty young the last time we met,” Sandy said. “Four or five, maybe.” He remembered an energetic boy with a loud voice and a lot of toy guns. Doug, yes, of course the name was Doug. Douglas MacArthur Byrne. He’d owned a huge water gun shaped like a tommy-gun, and he used to like to hit Sandy and Slum in the crotch so it’d look as if they’d wet their pants. “Is your brother here? I’d like to see him.”

  “Jeff?” the kid asked uncertainly.

  “Yeah. He’s the only Byrne brother I know.”

  Doug looked uncertain. “Well, I don’t know.” He frowned. “Well, I guess you should come in.” Ushering Sandy inside, he led him through a foyer to a large, stiffly formal sort of room full of gun racks and trophy cases. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll get Jane.”

  Sandy had no idea who Jane was. Maybe Slum’s mother, he thought. He had met her, of course—a plump little mouse of a woman with faded blond hair and frightened eyes—but as he recalled it, h
er name had been “Mrs. Joseph William Byrne,” or sometimes just “Mother.”

  While he waited, Sandy wandered around the room, which reminded him a bit of a museum or a war memorial. Above the fireplace was the centerpiece: a long, wide slate mantel absolutely covered with Butcher’s trophies, forty or fifty years’ worth. Shooting trophies, military medals on black felt, testimonial plaques from various lodges, dog show awards, and no less than three citations as “Father of the Year” from something called the Patriotic League: 1954, 1957, and 1962. On the wall above the trophies were Butcher’s degrees and a big oil portrait of the man himself, circa World War II. He wore a captain’s bars, and bombs were exploding in the terrain behind him, while Messerschmitts screamed overhead. Sandy wondered how many Messerschmitts they’d had on the Georgia army base where Captain Joseph William Byrne had actually spent all of his war years, according to Slum.

  There were no literary prizes among Butcher’s trophies, but the bookcases built into the wall on either side of the hearth were jammed with his novels, each of them hand-bound in black leather.

  Elsewhere in the room, each of the Byrne sons had his own portrait and trophy case. The eldest son, Joseph William Byrne, Jr., had won almost as many trophies as Dad. His portrait showed a fortyish man with a hard, seamed face, wearing a uniform and oak leaves. He was career military, Sandy remembered. Across from it was a case done up all in black, full of personal effects as well as prizes, including a few scraps of uniform. The portrait was black-bordered and showed a young man wearing a green beret and squinting into the sun. Robert Lee Byrne had been one of the first Americans in ’Nam, and one of the first casualties as well.

  Doug’s trophy case was packed with baseball and basketball prizes. The fourth brother, George Patton Byrne, was more of a football player. His portrait showed him in West Point gray.

  Slum’s case was almost empty. A row of honor roll pins, two small chess trophies, and even one pathetic plastic victory cup for winning a three-legged race at a VFW picnic in 1957. His portrait had obviously been painted from a high-school graduation photo.

  He was staring at it when he heard footsteps. “Hello,” a woman’s voice said. “You must be Mister Blair. I’m Jane Dennison.”

  She wasn’t Slum’s mother, that was for sure. She was a slender, brisk, handsome woman of about thirty-five, with short brown hair and nails trimmed to the quick. She gave Sandy a peremptory handshake and led him to a chair. Then she sat opposite him, crossed her legs, and said, “What can I do for you?”

  “Damned if I know,” Sandy said. “I want to see Slum. Jeff. That’s what I told Doug, and he went and fetched you.”

  “I see,” she said. “Why do you want to see Jeff?”

  “No special reason. We’re friends. We go back to college. I was traveling through and thought I’d see how he was doing. What’s the problem here? And who are you? A housekeeper, Slum’s girlfriend, what?”

  She pressed her lips together primly. “I am Jeff’s nurse,” she said. “Mister Blair, you claim to be Jeff’s friend, but you have obviously been out of touch with him for some time. Might I ask you when you last saw him?”

  “A long time ago,” Sandy admitted. “It was either ’72 or ’73. Up in Canada.” He remembered the visit well. Slum had been in exile for almost two years at that point. Having dropped out of college at the beginning of his junior year, he’d lost his draft deferment, and his efforts to get conscientious objector status had been denied, though they had caused Butcher to disown him. “I ain’t gonna shoot no one,” Slum had said stubbornly. “I used to get sick when Butcher made me shoot deer when I was a kid. He even made me shoot this cat I’d brought home with me once, and I wet my pants. I sure as hell ain’t shooting no people.” And so he’d hit the road for Canada. Maggie had thrown him a big farewell party, and hundreds of friends had come to see him off. He’d sat on a raised platform under a HELL NO, SLUM WON’T GO! banner, beaming, and they’d given him a standing ovation. Froggy had jumped up on a table and toasted him as one of “the real heroes of this war” and “the gutsiest member of the Byrne clan.”

  Slum wound up in a farmhouse in Nova Scotia with three other American draft exiles, and when the Hog sent Sandy up that way to cover the baby seal slaughter, he’d taken some time off for a visit. He’d liked the friend he’d found up north. The beard and the wild hair were still there, but he’d traded in his Slum Suit for plain denim work clothes, his fat had turned to muscle, and his dopester phase was obviously behind him. One day Sandy had helped him shingle a roof. He remembered the deft, agile way Slum had handled himself, the way he drove a nail with three sure swift hammer blows while Sandy needed a dozen and usually bent the sucker, his simple pride in doing a good job. He had seemed robust, very self-assured, growing and happy. Sandy had left with the promise to visit again, soon, but of course he never had.

  “Canada,” Jane Dennison was saying. “Well, that was quite a long time ago, Mister Blair. Jeff returned from Canada in March of 1974, when his mother died. He wished to attend the funeral. Of course, the authorities were watching for him, and Jeff was apprehended and sent to prison for draft evasion. He spent just over two years in a federal penitentiary, and I’m afraid the experience was a shattering one for him. He has had severe psychological problems ever since.”

  “What kind of problems?” Sandy demanded. He was suddenly angry. Angry at the nurse for laying the bad news on him. Angry at Slum, for not writing, not trying to get in touch. Damn it, he could have helped, could have mounted a campaign in the Hog, could have done something. Most of all he was angry at himself for falling out of touch and letting all this happen behind his back.

  “Chronic depression,” the nurse said, “and episodes of psychotic violence.”

  “Violence?” Sandy said. “That’s impossible. Slum was as gentle a soul as I ever knew.”

  “I assure you, Jeff is as capable of violent behavior as anyone. He has been institutionalized twice, Mister Blair, and has received a full course of electroshock therapy, but his problems persist. So you see, under the circumstances, it would not be in Jeff’s best interests for you to talk to him. While he is happy enough much of the time, he is easily disturbed, and I’m afraid that seeing you would be most likely to touch off an episode. I’m sure you don’t want that.”

  Sandy stared at her. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m his friend. He’ll be glad to see me.”

  “Perhaps part of him will, but another part will be badly upset. You represent the very period of life that he most needs to forget, the period in which he first began acting irrationally and assumed the identity of ‘Slum,’ as you call him. It would be much better for him not to be reminded of those years.”

  “Those were the happiest years of his life,” Sandy said. “This doesn’t make sense to me. I want to see Slum.”

  “The fact that you continue to call him by that nickname tells me that you cannot be trusted to speak to him,” she said stiffly. “If you were truly his friend, you would understand that.”

  “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

  Jane Dennison uncrossed her legs and stood up. “I do not intend to sit here and listen to a layman question my professional competence. I’m afraid I cannot permit you to see Jeff. Doug will show you out, or perhaps you can find the way yourself?”

  Sandy stood up and faced her, scowling. “Yeah,” he said, “I can find the way, but I sure as hell don’t intend to. Not until I see Slum, or Jeff, or whatever the fuck you want to call him.”

  “That is not your decision to make, Mister Blair, it is mine, and I assure you that you will not change my mind with vulgar language. Must I have you evicted?”

  “Yeah, I guess you must,” Sandy said sharply. He stalked past her, quickly, out into the foyer, and looked around as he heard her hurrying after him. Upstairs, he thought. The bedrooms were upstairs, and that was where he’d find Slum. He darted to the wide curved stair and bounded up the steps two at
a time. Down below he heard Jane Dennison calling loudly for Doug. “SLUM!” he shouted, moving down the corridor and opening doors as he went. The thick carpet absorbed the sound of his voice, and he had to shout louder. “SLUM! Where the fuck are you? SLUM!”

  All the way at the end of the hall, a door opened. A tall, painfully thin man in tennis clothes stood there blinking. He was beardless and shorn and looked older than his years. “Sandy?” he said wonderingly. “Is it really you, Sandy?” His face, long and hollow-cheeked, broke into a tremulous smile. “Sandy!” He beamed.

  Sandy took two quick steps, stopped, and almost stumbled. Slum’s appearance hit him like a physical blow. The severity of his face. The faded, watery look of his eyes. The very gauntness of him. And his clothes. Tennis clothes. White clothes. So very white. The dream, Sandy thought, with a tremor of sudden irrational fear. But then Slum came toward him and hugged him fiercely, and the moment passed as Sandy found himself hugging back as hard as he could.

  “You look…” Sandy started. He was going to say, “good,” but he found he couldn’t stomach the lie. “…uh…different,” he finished.

  Slum smiled warily. “I know that, Sandy,” he said. “Come on.” He led him down the hall to a large bedroom full of light and settled into a lotus position on the floor while Sandy sat in an armchair. “How did you get past Butcher?” Slum asked.

  “I didn’t see Butcher. Just your brother Doug and some dragon lady who calls herself Jane Dennison. She didn’t want me to see you. I pushed past her and came up anyway.”