The Armageddon Rag

  It drew no blood, but it hurt about a hundred times as much as the blow from Butcher’s shotgun.

  FIFTEEN

  Home, where my thought’s escaping/

  Home, where my music’s playing/

  Home, where my love lies waiting, silently for me

  By the time he left Denver, headed northeast on 1–76, the left side of his face was swollen and aching. If he was lucky his beard would disguise the worst of the discoloration, but the pain would just have to be borne. It wasn’t too hard. His anger helped. He was mad enough so that hurting became just another goad to his rage. His thoughts were fevered; thunderclouds that filled his head with black fantasies and impossible plans.

  He crossed the flat emptiness of eastern Colorado scarcely seeing it, conscious only of the miles rolling by, the cold wind outside, the blare of the radio, and of his anger. He drove fast, driven by his rage and feeding it with speed. Daydream became a low-slung bronze bullet in the passing lane, shooting past cars, trucks, wobbling U-Hauls, swerving right only when some slower-moving speeder blocked the left lane. The speedometer crept up: seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five. And Sandy, fuming, pushed her still faster, and thought of Butcher Byrne. He was full of wrath and full of schemes. He would hire lawyers, get Slum free. He would talk Jared into exposing Butcher in the Hog. He would write nasty reviews of Byrne’s books. He would do something, anything, everything. It was an outrage, a crime. Slum might be helpless, but Sandy wasn’t. He would get justice.

  The road became a white-line blur; and somehow that fed the fantasies. Behind the wheel of Daydream, he had power. He could taste it, feel it, see visible proof of it all around him as he passed everything in sight. There is something about a fast car that does that. With a steering wheel in his hands and an accelerator under his foot, even the world’s biggest loser becomes briefly competent. In a world that so often frustrated one and left one feeling helpless to change anything, do anything, affect anything, the car was still subject to one’s will. A tank of gas, an open highway, and a box full of tapes was enough to give Sandy an illusion of confidence, to make him feel effective.

  But the mood broke up near the Nebraska border, where I-76 fed into I-80. Gas was running low by that point, and the Denver oldies station that Sandy had tuned to had disintegrated into static. The interstate swung around in a long wide curve; Daydream took it at just over eighty, hugging the road. And then Sandy saw the police car up ahead. But it was too late; they’d radared him already, and one of the cops was waving him over.

  He screeched to a stop on the shoulder, rolled down his window, and accepted the ticket in a sullen silence. The cop looked a bit concerned as he handed back the license. “You OK, Mister?” he asked. “You don’t look too good.”

  Sandy touched the side of his face. It hurt. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Guess I could use an ice-pack, though.”

  The cop nodded. “And slow it down.”

  He stayed just under sixty all the way to the next rest stop, where he pulled off. A full tank of gas for Daydream, and some ice for his face—the pudgy waitress took pity on him—while he drank three cups of coffee and ate half a slice of blueberry pie. It was getting dark outside while Sandy lingered, and as the daylight faded his righteous anger was fading too.

  It was all a delusion, he thought. You speed along, confident, competent, and they stop you. They are always waiting down the road somewhere, with lights and sirens and guns, always waiting to stop you, and there’s nothing you can do about it, no matter how many Burt Reynolds pictures you’ve seen. And there was nothing he could do about Butcher Byrne either. He could hire a lawyer, and Butcher would hire a better one, a whole battalion of them, and Butcher could win. Justice didn’t mean anything in the courts. He could spring Slum loose violently, and Butcher would have him arrested. He could write something, and get sued for libel. What the hell was the use? The power was all on the other side.

  The ice helped his bruised face, a little. He couldn’t finish the pie, but he had the waitress fill his thermos with hot black coffee, and he bought a jumbo bottle of No-Doz in the shop next to the restaurant. Sandy swallowed a handful after he’d settled back into the driver’s seat. He hunted up and down the band but couldn’t find a decent radio station. It was all country-western and religious stuff. Finally he gave up in disgust, rooted through his box of tapes, and slammed some Doors into the tape-deck. Then he turned on his lights—the Mazda’s concealed headlights rose up out of the hood like machine guns popping out of James Bond’s Aston-Martin, and there were times when Sandy found himself wishing they were machine guns—and pulled back onto the highway.

  Nebraska was even flatter and more boring than eastern Colorado, and it went on forever and forever. I-80 was heavily traveled, but Sandy paid little attention to the other traffic. This time he stayed in the right-hand lane, cruising at or just above the legal limit, depressed, lost in thought, high on caffeine and low on hope. Jim Morrison was asking someone to light his fire, but Sandy felt as though his own fire was out for good. The trip, the story, everything seemed to have turned to ashes in his mouth.

  The Butcher Byrnes of the world went on and on, and sometimes they seemed to win all of the pots. Slum went to prison, got raped, got tortured with electroshock, and Richard Nixon went free to live out his days in comfort and luxury. The Watergate conspirators wrote books and made fortunes on the lecture circuit, but Bobby Kennedy was still dead, would always be dead.

  Just before he’d gotten himself hit, he’d called Butcher an evil man. The hell of it was, he couldn’t even be sure of that anymore. Butcher no doubt figured Sandy for the evil one. Edan Morse said that Jamie Lynch deserved execution. Others would say the same of Edan Morse. Sandy saw their faces up ahead of him, dim visions in the night, drifting between the road and the stars, just beyond the reach of his headlights. Other faces seemed to join them: friends, enemies, public figures, crowding and jostling one another. Gutless Jared Patterson, who’d sold out friends and principles for a buck. Rick Maggio, fat and bitter, hurting so much he had to pass on the pain to those around him. Charlie Manson and Richard Nixon, arms wrapped around each other; was one any better or worse than the other, really?

  He saw them all. The young Guardsmen at Kent State faced off against the SLA. The soldiers at My Lai danced with the Alfies. The well-dressed gentlemen from Dow Chemical who made their nice profit from napalm deplored the actions of the ragged black scum who burned down the ghettos during blackouts. The pushers, the assassins, the slumlords, all the faceless little men and women who thought that good and evil didn’t apply to them, the ones who were just getting by, the ones who read their Bible and did the work of the Lord, the ones who had to be practical, the ones who took orders, who only worked here, who were just carrying out company policy. And their reflections, their opposites, the ones who lived for a cause and died for a cause and killed for a cause, who were blind to the gray of human souls and the red of human blood. Once Sandy had been able to tell them apart, the good guys and the bad guys; now they all looked alike to him.

  He drove on. Watched the stars, watched the road, watched the faces. He hurt. Ahead of him, the faces seemed to come together, melting into one another, writhing and shifting as they coalesced. The Dow men and the slumlords and the Kent State Guardsmen fused into one vision, teeming. Nixon marched in front of them, side by side with Butcher Byrne. The SLA and the looters and the pushers formed a second army, with Manson and Edan Morse at its head. Jared Patterson hesitated and went right; Rick Maggio wavered and finally floated left. The armies blurred and shifted, and finally there were only two faces, only two, staring at each other: Edan Morse and Joseph William Byrne. They seemed as distinct as night and day, as white and black. And then, a heartbeat later, Sandy found that he could not tell them apart at all. The same face, he thought. They have the same face.

  Nebraska went on and on. Semis rumbled past him, the wind of their passage shaking Daydream like slaps from some insolent giant
. The sky was empty but for a million stars looking down on him like a host of yellow eyes, watching, weighing. Jim Morrison sang on. Jim Morrison had died for our sins, like Joplin, like Hendrix, like Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon. Like Patrick Henry Hobbins. Jim Morrison was singing about the end.

  Sandy pulled over on the shoulder and let the traffic scream past while he fumbled in his glove compartment for some aspirin. He found the bottle, shook out two tablets into his hand, then another two. He dry-swallowed the four of them, harsh and powdery in the back of his mouth, with a taste like crumbled brick. Then he took another couple No-Doz, washing them down with a mouthful of coffee from his thermos. The coffee burned his mouth, and his head was buzzing from all the caffeine. He slammed through the gears quickly as he pulled back onto the road, trying to build speed fast as he slid into the traffic once more. A big tractor-trailer, coming up quickly, didn’t think it was fast enough; the driver sounded his air-horn angrily and blinded him with a flick of his brights before finally shifting over to the passing lane. “You fucker!” Sandy shouted after him, but his windows were closed and the truck was gone already.

  The Doors tape had started to repeat. Sandy hit the eject button and popped it out.

  “Good move, Blair. I was getting tired of that. Besides, you were dating yourself.”

  Sandy glanced over. In the dimness of the passenger seat: a mocking smile, a raised eyebrow. “Lark?” he said.

  “Steve,” the other corrected. “You got to change, Blair. Times change, people change. Give it up.”

  “Like you?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “You’re a phony, Lark.”

  “What a joke! I’m not even real and you’re telling me I’m a phony! And the name is Steve.”

  “I liked you better as Lark,” said Sandy. “Though I never liked you much even then.”

  “That’s because I was always smarter than you. Of course I was a fake. You think the world gives a gold-plated shit about sincerity, Blair? You’re no better than me, and no worse. You can’t do diddly-shit in this world, Blair, and neither can I. So why tear ourselves up about it? Get drunk, get laid, get rich. He who dies with the most toys wins.”

  “Fuck off, Lark.”

  “Steve. Where do you think you’re going, Blair?”

  “Home. I’m going home.”

  Lark laughed at him. “Sucker. You’re the one who’s supposed to be the big-shot writer. You can’t go home again, Blair, you ought to know that. You got yourself a hot-shit sports car, but that only means you’re going nowhere fast.”

  Sandy reached over toward the passenger compartment. It was empty, except for the box with all his tapes. He pulled one out at random, pushed it into the tape deck. Simon and Garfunkel.

  Time, see what’s become of me, they sang.

  “See what’s become of all of us,” Sandy said aloud.

  “Sander m’boy, that’s your problem,” Froggy replied. “You have seen, and it hasn’t exactly made your day, has it? Hasn’t warmed the cockles of your heart?”

  “My heart does not have cockles,” Sandy said.

  Froggy made his wet, rude noise. “Quit trying to be funny. Around me you’re just another straight man, and you know it.”

  “Lark says to give it up.”

  “Misery loves company, as someone unbearably trite said once. And you’re talking about Lark. This is a lad who used to tell every girl he met that romantic love was just a bourgeois plot to distract us from the revolution. Then he’d bitch because he never got laid.”

  Sandy smiled. “Still. He’s right. What can I do, really? Can’t change the goddamned world. Can’t do anything to help Slum. I don’t think I’ve been much help to Jamie Lynch, either.”

  “Detectives seldom are. Didn’t you ever notice that whenever Charlie Chan set out to solve a murder, six more people were dead before he found the killer?” He laughed. “You want to win all the time? No way. Nine out of ten sweet things what I invited to plunk my magic twanger preferred to slap my smiling face. How do you think I got this nice rosy complexion? Slaps, Sander m’boy, hundreds and millyums of slaps!” Froggy rolled his eyes. “But the tenth, ah, the tenth. Moist lips and heaving bosoms, laughter and strawberry wine, poetry and potato chips, and such ankles, such ankles, my friend! There’s always a tenth out there, a secret tenth with genitals cleverly concealed beneath her clothing, with lust in her heart, willing to put the spaghetti in her hair if only someone will ask. That’s what life is, Sander m’boy—the search for the secret tenth.”

  “My cockles aren’t warming, Froggy. Butcher Byrne is no secret tenth. If you ask him to put the spaghetti in his hair, he’ll shoot your fucking head off.”

  “Froggy the Gremlin could handle him,” said Froggy the Cohen.

  “A rubber puppet in a kid’s show. Canceled. Gone. Forgotten.” Sandy’s voice was bitter.

  Froggy gasped in horror. “Don’t say that! He’ll live forever in the minds and hearts of his countrymen. Froggy was magic!”

  “I don’t believe in magic,” Sandy said.

  Bambi Lassiter sighed with gentle disapproval. “No. You don’t believe in anything. That’s the cause of your pain, Sandy. You shut out the light that might illuminate your life, you refuse to accept. You question everything, reject everything. It will be your downfall. The time is coming when you will have to believe, believe or go mad. You know that, Sandy. You’ve tasted it already. In Chicago. In Denver. Slum was just as you’d dreamed him, wasn’t he? White. Gaunt. Screaming.”

  “Coincidence,” Sandy said, “or else…I don’t know, I knew he was living at home with Butcher, somehow my subconscious must have made the assumption…”

  “You’re reaching, Sandy. The world is larger than your mind can grasp. Sooner or later you’ll have to admit it. Strange things are afoot.”

  “Fucking A,” Sandy said.

  “You know what’s happening, Sandy. Deep inside, in some primal instinctive way, you understand. You can see the shape of it already. It’s true. It’s true, Sandy. But you won’t understand consciously until you accept that it’s possible. And you have to understand. You know that, too. There are choices to be made. Important choices.” Her voice faded to a whisper and was gone.

  Slum was hovering in front of the car, floating in a lotus position between the beams of the headlights, receding as fast as Daydream plunged toward him. He was wearing his Slum Suit, old and tattered now, and he had two kittens in his lap and dandelions behind his ears. His smile was full of reproach. “You left me alone,” he said. “I almost beat him, almost made it. I only needed a little help, and you weren’t there.”

  “I didn’t know,” Sandy said in an agonized voice.

  “Too busy with your own life, I guess. You let me down.”

  “Slum, I’ll hire lawyers, I swear. We’ll get you away from him somehow. Froggy will help out, I know it. And Maggie. We love you.”

  “Not enough,” said Slum, with a hapless shrug. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to get on your case. Only it’s too late now. I knocked it over, and it broke. I’m sorry, it was my fault. I broke it. Only it was my mind, Sandy, it was my mind, and now it’s too late.”

  “Slum!” Sandy shouted, as the figure began to waver and fade.

  “It’s too damn late,” Slum said, and as he did all his hair fell out and curled up in sudden smoke, and the colors faded from his Slum Suit, and he was gaunt and pale-eyed with a machine gun in his hand, giggling. He laughed and sprayed the windshield. The bullets hit and shattered, and Sandy cringed.

  It had begun to rain. Freezing rain.

  A winter’s day, in a deep and dark December, Simon and Garfunkel sang. I am alone.

  “No,” Maggie said. He felt her gentle touch on his arm. “You have Sharon. Go back to her, love. That’s what it’s all about. You’re not a rock, you never will be. You hurt, you love, you care. Go home and cry for Slum and remember him like he was and love him. It’s all you can do.”

  “It
’s not enough,” Sandy said.

  “No, it’s not,” Maggie said. “It never is. That makes you angry, doesn’t it? Makes you want to cry, huh?” Her hand went to his knee, a light phantom touch that brushed the inside of his thigh. “That’s why I loved you, Sandy. You could cry for the things you couldn’t fix.”

  “And all this time I thought it was my bod you were after.”

  She laughed. “That too. We had a groovy thing going.” Or was it the tape deck that said that?

  “Does it have to be past tense? Cleveland isn’t too far off 80. I could stop. We could—”

  Something light and cool on his lips, silencing him. “No, love,” she said. “I wish it could be. But we’re past now. Like history, huh? We blew it somehow. Your visit was lovely, but there are too many ghosts between us. We’d only spoil what we had once. Let it die. Go home to your Sharon and love her.”

  Sandy looked over. Maggie was half-transparent, and her face was wet with silent tears. “You’re afraid,” he said wonderingly. “You were never afraid of anything.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been hurt too much, Sandy. I’m not the girl I was, love. I don’t want to hurt anymore. Don’t push.”

  Her tears brought the pain back, sharply. He felt moisture gather in the corners of his own eyes. “You were the best of us all,” he said. “You touched us, changed us, led us. You had so much spirit, so goddamned much love. Joy. You always had joy. They couldn’t put it out. It made me crazy, inflamed Froggy, infected Slum, lit up everyone around you. And it’s gone now, isn’t it? I felt it that night in Cleveland. Tears and desperation. Loneliness. You, of all people, lonely. And worse, too wounded to break free.”

  She shrugged. “I tend my garden.”

  “Candide,” Sandy said.

  “So I’m not original. Sue me. Oh, don’t look so sad, love. Please. It’s just time, and a little hard luck. Maybe if I had it to do over again things would come out better, huh? For you and me? But I don’t. Maybe they’d come out worse, anyhow. The wounds don’t heal, Sandy. Leave the scabs alone. Go back to your realtor in Brooklyn, and do your best. That’s all any of us can do.”