Armageddon Rag Read online

  And there, against them, the others; a line, a rank, stiff and straight and martial. Against that stirring, moving, living mass, no motion at all. Blue uniforms. Helmets. Dark faces, faceless faces, legs braced, badges, dark oily guns snug in black leather holsters riding beefy hips. Faces like masks. Waiting. Clubs and violence and hatred barely held in check.

  Peace and love and law and order, ghosts, phantoms, dead now, gone, yet now they stirred again, somehow, somehow. Sandy could see them, could see the tension building, could see everything but the faces, the faces were somehow twisted, blurred.

  He moved between them, stumbling almost, into the middle of the street, turning around and around, remembering the way it had been. He was in that ragtag army, he knew, wearing a marshal’s armband, trying to keep order. And Maggie was in there too, up front somewhere, shouting things, chanting, her nose still straight, unbroken. And the others, all the others.

  Sandy moved toward the still army, the blue army, the army that waited silently, its rage held in check. Faceless shadows in dark uniforms, eyeless, mouthless, the sticks and the guns somehow more vivid than anything else about them. He stood in front of them. “No,” he said, and the whole rank turned their heads slightly to stare at him, and he felt the weight of all those eyeless blank inhuman stares. “No,” he said again. “Don’t do it, you can’t do it. Don’t you understand? This is where it changed. Peace, that’s all they want, that’s all. McCarthy. They’re kids, that’s all. Working within the system. They want the convention to listen. That’s why they are here. They still believe, really they do, don’t mind the flags, the Cong flags, all that shit, that’s not where it’s at. Listen to me, I’m in there, I remember, I know how it was. We worked so hard, and we won, the peace candidates, Gene and Bobby, they won all the primaries, every damn fucking one, and they still don’t listen. Don’t you see? When you charge them, when you start hitting, it changes, it all changes. You harden them. They stop believing. It all gets worse and worse. This is the last chance, the last moment before it all changes. Let them pass! Dear God, let them pass!” But the shadows had looked away from him now, the shadows no longer listened. Sandy found that he was crying. He held up his hands in front of him, as if he could somehow restrain the charge to come, repress the violence that he could feel building and gathering all around him. “They’re not your fucking enemy!” he screamed, at the top of his lungs. “We’re your children, you assholes, we’re only your goddamned children!”

  But it was too late, too late, suddenly he heard the whistles and the sound of running feet, and a flying wedge of blue shadows came racing down Balbo and smashed into the stirring, chanting army of the young, and it shattered and broke, and then the other lines were moving forward, and way behind, flanking, the masked faceless shadows of the Guard spread in a great enveloping pincer, pinching them in, gathering them together, pressing, and it all disintegrated into chaos, knots of phantoms struggling together, running, faint screams adrift on the wind from the past. Briefly came a moment of calm, the forces pulling back, and Sandy heard the marshals again, shouting, talking to their squawk boxes. “People are getting hurt,” they were yelling, and yelling too about the medical center, and kids in white medical armbands were kneeling over the victims, all bloody and battered. Some of the banners had fallen, and lots of faces were red now, red with blood, red with fury, red with a rage that would build for years. “Keep it cool,” the marshals were saying, and Sandy saw himself, so goddamned achingly young, wearing a jacket even, all Clean for Gene, dark hair messed now but once carefully combed, so bewildered, it wasn’t supposed to be like this, the belief was already going, the faith that elections meant something, the anger was coming instead. “Keep it cool,” he called, such a young voice, like all the other marshals’. “Lots of people are hurt, keep it cool,” and more, but then the words were drowned out, swallowed up. He heard the chant again, echoing down all the years. Ghost voices, hundreds and thousands of ghost voices, joined together in a great cry. “The Whole World Is Watching, the Whole World Is Watching, the Whole World Is Watching, the Whole World Is Watching, the Whole World Is Watching.” Over and over and over and over, louder and louder and louder and louder.

  And then the small truce shattered and splintered, like a mirror hit by a bullet, the mirror that captured the face of a generation, so when it splintered that face became distorted, fractured, never whole again. The blue shadows came racing forward, and in the wind of their wild charge the candle of sanity was blown out for years. The clubs were lifted and came cracking down, and battle was joined. They hit everyone, anyone, those who were chanting and those who were silent, those who taunted and those who begged, those who hit back and those who ran and those who cringed away. They clubbed the kids and the old ladies and the operatives in business suits, the marshals and the medical staff, the injured in the streets and the crazies spitting, the ones with press passes held up as futile shields, the ones behind the cameras, the cameras themselves, the men and the women and the boys and the girls, if it moved they hit it, and the world disintegrated into screams and rushing feet and fists and the crack of nightsticks and the crunch of shattering bones. In the center of the intersection, Sandy stood with his hands at his sides, watching it happen again, his hands curling into helpless fists. The ghosts rushed all around him, and one plunged right through him, and he had the awful sick feeling that it was he who was the phantom. He saw his younger self shouting into a walkie-talkie, saw it knocked from his hands, saw the nightstick descend, saw himself run, ducking, weaving. Maggie staggered past, pale blood trickling from her broken nose, her blouse ripped, grinning and holding aloft a nightstick that she’d snatched somehow. They surrounded her and took it away, and Sandy watched the clubs swing, and she vanished. The whole world was watching, he thought. He looked up, and in the lighted windows above the street he thought he could see faces, rank on rank of faces, looked down on the carnage swirling and shrieking through the streets of that toddling town below. And above the buildings were the stars, a million million stars. Sandy stared at them, and as he did each star became an eye. The sky was full of slitted yellow eyes, cold and malevolent eyes, eyes drinking in the riot in the night. More than the whole world was watching.

  “No!” Sandy screamed. He cringed away, covered himself with his arms, shaking.

  How long he stood like that he could not say. But finally the fear passed. He lowered his arms reluctantly. The stars were only stars. He could see Orion. The night was cold, the wind was blowing, and the streets of Chicago were empty.

  Of course they were empty, he thought. They had been empty all along. Years had passed, and all the things he had seen were gone, dead, scattered, half-forgotten.

  Wearily, he walked back to the Hilton, alone, hands deep in his pockets.

  He took the room key from the desk clerk. They had moved him to the seventeenth floor. The room was virtually identical to the one he had fled, yet somehow it did not feel the same. Sandy found he could not sleep. He pulled up the shade on his window and sat looking out over the lake, until dawn first started to lighten the eastern sky. Then, suddenly, he was very tired. He undressed and went to bed.

  He had forgotten to leave a wake-up call. When he finally awoke, it was almost three in the afternoon, and the events of the night before seemed like a bad dream. Sandy was sure it had been nothing but one long nightmare until he yanked open the room door and stared at the room numbers. He was on the seventeenth floor. He closed the door again and leaned back against it, frowning. He had been pushing himself much too hard, he decided; too little sleep, too many miles.

  An ice-cold shower washed away the blurred memories of the night before, and Sandy emerged determined to put his personal ghosts behind him and get on with the business at hand. He slipped into a clean pair of jeans and a thick sweater, and looked up the address of Lark Ellyn’s agency in the yellow pages. It was a quarter to four when he left the Conrad Hilton. The agency was up on Michigan Avenue. Rather t
han worry about parking, Sandy took a cab.

  Ellyn’s office was on the top floor. The reception area had thick carpeting, comfortable chairs, and a pretty dark-haired woman behind a big walnut desk. She looked as though she’d been born for an environment like this; Sandy couldn’t imagine her in any other setting. “Mr. Ellyn, please,” he said to her.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Nope,” Sandy replied. “He’ll see me, though. I’m an old friend.” That was maybe stretching it a bit, but still…“Tell him it’s Sandy Blair.”

  “If you’ll kindly have a seat.”

  Lark Ellyn emerged from the agency’s inner labyrinth a few minutes later. He was very different, and very much the same. Instead of jeans, tee shirt, and vest, he wore a three-piece brown suit and a striped tie. The headband was gone, the mustache was gone, and the hair he’d once tried to wear in a white boy’s imitation Afro was now razor-cut and blow-dried. Yet the man inside the new uniform was unchanged. Short, trim, with an angular face, a pinched nose, healthy chestnut hair and thin eyebrows. His walk was the same too, and from the instant he entered the room he projected a self-conscious intensity that Sandy remembered very well.

  When he spied Sandy, he put his hands on his hips and smiled. Lark Ellyn’s smile had a faintly mocking edge to it. It was a sharp, superior sort of smile, and he’d always used it just before he said something critical or cutting. Sometimes he just smiled and said nothing at all, but the effect was the same. The smile was supposed to let you know that the criticism was all in fun, that Lark didn’t really mean it. Well, he did and he didn’t; Sandy had figured that out a long time ago. Facing that smile now, Sandy remembered how and why it was that he and Ellyn had never gotten along.

  “Blair,” Ellyn said. “This must be my lucky day.” He looked Sandy up and down. “Putting on a little weight, I see. You look like hell.”

  “It’s good to see you too,” Sandy said, rising.

  Ellyn crossed his arms against his chest. “Can I do something for you?”

  “Not particularly,” Sandy said. “I was in town working on a story, and I thought I’d look you up. Maggie suggested it.”

  “Maggie Sloane?”

  “No, Maggie Thatcher,” Sandy snapped. “Of course Maggie Sloane. Hell, Lark—”

  “Steve,” Ellyn corrected quickly. “Look, I’m almost done for the day. Why don’t you have a seat and wait a few minutes while I wrap things up, and then we can go out for a drink.”

  “Fine,” Sandy agreed. He settled back into his seat and picked up a magazine.

  By the time Lark Ellyn reemerged, Sandy had read all the interesting articles and several that weren’t. “Sorry to keep you,” Ellyn said when he reemerged, leather briefcase in hand. “Something came up that couldn’t wait. I’m on a big account at the moment. Billing a cool million and a half. Have to keep the clients happy.” He led Sandy toward the elevators. “So you’re working on a story, you say? Still a yellow journalist, then?”

  “Actually, I’m a yellow novelist now,” Sandy said as Ellyn punched the button. “I’ve published three books.”

  The elevator doors opened. “Hey, real good,” Ellyn said as they entered. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen them. They keep me pretty busy around here, and I don’t have time to keep up with pop literature. You know how it is.”

  “Hell yes,” Sandy said. “It’s a thankless task anyway, keeping up with pop literature. You’re lucky you’re out of it.”

  Ellyn raised a thin dark eyebrow and smiled. “Same old Sandy.”

  Sandy grinned right back at him. “Same old Lark.”

  That put a damper on the Ellyn smile. “All right, Sander, cut it out with the Lark stuff. It’s Steve now, unless you’d prefer Mr. Ellyn.”

  “Not me, boss,” Sandy said.

  “I took enough ribbing about my name when I was a kid. I don’t want any more. I have a position to maintain around here. Everyone thinks my first name is Lawrence. My friends call me Steve. You understand, Blair?”

  “No Lark?”

  The smile returned. “You got it.” They arrived at the lobby. “Now that we’ve got that unpleasantness out of the way, what say we go on over to Rush Street and get ourselves a drink. There’s a place called Archibald’s that gives you two-for-one during happy hour.”

  “You want to go to a Rush Street bar?” Sandy said in a bemused tone. “Everyone knows the Rush Street bars are full of stewardesses, secretaries, and middle-aged account executives in three-piece suits.”

  “Too classy for you, Blair?” Ellyn said.

  “Lead on,” Sandy said.

  The bar was sandwiched in between two other bars, all of them crowded. It was a narrow place, full of ferns and people who seemed to know one another. Ellyn called the bartender by name and waved to three women at a table in the back. He and Sandy found stools up by the window that looked out on the street. Sandy ordered a beer; L. Stephen Ellyn ordered a gin and tonic. They each got two. “This round is on me,” Ellyn said.

  “If you want a fight, you’re looking at the wrong guy,” Sandy said. He took a sip of beer from his stein.

  Ellyn removed his tie and stuffed it in his pocket, then undid the collar button on his shirt. His eyes had the same intensity that Sandy remembered from a long time ago. “It has been a long time, Blair.”

  “About a decade.”

  Ellyn nodded, smiling. “Can’t say I’ve missed you much.”

  Sandy grinned.

  “Now,” said Ellyn, “this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you all about my life, and you’re supposed to tell me all about yours. Then after we are both suitably bored, we order a few more rounds of drinks and get into the part about the good old days and all the crazy things we did. I tell you the news about the people I’ve kept in touch with that you barely remember, and you return the favor. We get thoroughly sloshed and walk home arm in arm, and as we part we promise each other fervently that this time we will keep in touch. We don’t, of course. Maybe I send you a Christmas card. You, being a hippie, don’t believe in Christmas cards, so you don’t reciprocate. You get crossed off my list and we never see each other again. One of us reads an obit for the other in the alumni newspaper a few years down the line.” He smiled. “That’s the script, right?”

  “Doesn’t sound like you like your part much,” Sandy observed.

  Ellyn smiled his mocking smile and took a healthy swallow from his gin and tonic. “Sentiment bores me. So call me a cynic.”

  “You’re a cynic,” Sandy said agreeably.

  “I see your wit’s just as sharp as it was when we were both sophomores at Northwestern,” Ellyn said. “I hope you’ll spare me the accompanying wisdom.”

  “Wisdom?”

  Ellyn made a sharp, impatient gesture with his left hand. “You know, Blair. The friendly concern over what has become of me. The patronizing put-downs of my lifestyle. The glib little digs about selling out. The jokes about gray flannel suits. The appeals to my youthful idealism. All delivered with an air of condescending wonderment about the way I’ve changed and punctuated by repeated fervent assertions that you can’t believe I work in an ad agency, that you can’t believe I live in Wilmette, that you can’t believe I own stock and real estate and wear a suit and drink in Rush Street singles bars, you just can’t believe it, not me, not Lark, not Mister Radical of 1968.” He raised one sardonic eyebrow. “You see, Blair, I know it all already, so let’s both save some time and not go through it again.”

  “Do I detect a faint note of defensiveness in the air?”

  “Wrong,” Ellyn snapped. “I’m not the least defensive about the choices I’ve made. I’m just bored by all this, Blair. I’ve gone through the whole waltz with your friend Maggie, and she wasn’t the first. It’s an old tired song. Golden oldies were never my style. So skip it, even though it pains you. I know that was why you came.”

  “So that’s why I came,” Sandy said. “I was wondering.”

  “Only
because you didn’t think things through. You never did. You saw Maggie, right? And she talked about me. So all of a sudden you show up on my doorstep, looking like some refugee from a peace demonstration. For the first time in ten years, you want to see me. Why else? Because you wanted to smirk, Blair. Because you wanted to feel superior, in your own juvenile bubbleheaded way. We were never that close. It wasn’t friendship that sent you my way, pal. Not only are you an airhead, you’re a transparent airhead.” He sat back and swirled his gin and tonic lazily, smiling at his big finish. “Well?”

  Sandy finished his first stein, picked up his second, and lifted it to Ellyn in salute. “You’re good,” he said.

  “What?” said Ellyn. “No heartfelt denials?”

  “Nah,” Sandy said, considering it carefully. “There’s a little bit of truth in what you say. Hadn’t even realized it myself, but you’re right. I always knew you were a jackass, but you used to disguise yourself well. I was sort of looking forward to seeing you in full jackass regalia.”

  Ellyn grinned in victory.

  “I guess I thought you’d be abashed,” Sandy continued. “By all rights, you ought to be. You’re a walking cliché, La—Steve. The purebred counterculture sellout. An ad agency! Really, how trite can you get? You know, I half expected that you’d try to cop a plea that you’d gone underground to help the revolution.”

  “I do help the revolution, I do,” Ellyn said with his sly smile. “Just last year I handled a revolutionary new underarm deodorant.”

  “You’re even stealing my lines,” Sandy said with rueful admiration. “You’ve got it all down pat, don’t you? Blast ’em out of the water before they even get the tarps off their guns.”

  “You sound a little shaky, Blair. Want another drink?”

  “No,” Sandy said. He slumped back in his seat, and regarded Ellyn dourly while he signaled for another round. Sandy suddenly felt very tired. “Put away the knives, Lark. I’m not up to it today. I had a rough night. Just enlighten me, OK? What happened? How did Lark become L. Stephen? I’m curious.”