Armageddon Rag Read online

  But afterward, when they were leaving, Tracy Faxon insisted that Sandy ride up in the cab with her, while Peter and the kids balloon-sat in the back. “Peter’s upset about something,” she said to Sandy when she’d gotten them back on the road toward Albuquerque. She had very cool dark eyes. “What did you talk about?”

  “The Nazgûl,” Sandy said.

  “I see,” Tracy said. “No wonder.”

  “I’m sorry if I upset him,” Sandy said. “I didn’t mean to bring back bad memories.”

  Tracy looked over at him with a shrewd smile. “I think it’s the good ones that bother him,” she said.

  “Peter says he doesn’t miss those days.”

  “He says that to me, too,” she said. She kept her eyes on the road. “He says it a lot. Methinks my darling doth protest too much. He’s never stopped writing, you know.”

  “No,” Sandy said. “I didn’t know.”

  She nodded. “He has trunks full of songs and notes. At times he wanders around the house with stereos playing in every room. All the old songs, his old songs. I was pleased when he got your call. So was Peter.”

  “You want him to play again?”

  “He’ll never be happy until he does,” she said. “I love him. We’ve been through a lot together. I want him to be happy.”

  There was nothing to say to that. Sandy sat there thinking. They did not speak again until Tracy pulled the pick-up into the parking lot of his motel, and Sandy climbed out. Then she leaned across the seat. “Nice meeting you,” she said. “I’ll look forward to reading your article.”

  The kids ignored him, but Faxon jumped down from the tailgate of the pick-up and shook his hand. “Remember what I said,” Sandy told him, “even if you don’t believe it. Be careful.”

  Faxon’s eyes looked strangely furtive. “I’m always careful,” he muttered, as he climbed back into the truck.

  Sandy found himself thinking about those words as he reentered his darkened motel room. The drapes were still closed, and it was cold inside. Sandy pulled them back and let the sun in. He sat on the edge of his bed, pulling off his boots and reflecting that maybe Peter Faxon was a little too careful these days. The image of that trunk of unsung songs would not leave his mind. Patrick Henry Hobbins had not been the only victim of West Mesa, Sandy thought.

  He lay back on the bed, his hands behind his head, and the lines of a song occurred to him.

  Well, he came back from the war zone all intact

  And they told him just how lucky he had been

  But the survivor has a different kind of scar

  Stillborn dreams and no more hope

  Hooked on booze or hooked on dope

  The survivor has a different kind of scar

  Yeah, the survivor has a different kind of scar

  “The Survivor,” from Music to Wake the Dead. A nasty song, Sandy thought. Never a big hit, but strangely prophetic when you considered that Faxon had written it in 1971. He remembered the way Patrick Henry Hobbins would deliver the final line, staring out into the audience with a frozen rictus of a smile, hesitating just long enough while Gopher John’s drumming sent kind of a tremor through the crowd, and then singing, in a voice turned oddly black and cold, Hell, there ain’t none of us survived!

  TEN

  Mystic crystal revelation/

  And the mind’s true liberation

  On the map, it was only a short distance from the interstate to the Golden Vision Earth Community. Driving, it seemed considerably longer. The road began as a respectable two-lane blacktop, rapidly got narrower and narrower, turned first to gravel and then to dirt and finally to very rocky, bumpy dirt. Daydream didn’t like it one bit. Neither did Sandy. Toward the end, he was shifting constantly as he bounced up and down hills and over canyons and arroyos and dry creek beds. It looked cold and dusty and desolate out here, although he had to admit that the mountains were gorgeous. He couldn’t imagine anyone actually living amid this harsh, unforgiving starkness. Sandy had started to think that maybe he was lost, and was even considering trying to turn back, when he finally came to the turn-off; an even narrower dirt track marked by a big rural mailbox covered with astrological signs and a small hand-lettered board that said GOLDEN VISION.

  He turned sharply and climbed a steep, windy mountain road. Daydream protested and tried to remind him that she was a sports car, not a four-wheel drive, but Sandy persisted.

  Tucked neatly into a high, narrow valley with mountains rising sharply on two sides, the Golden Vision Earth Community was a sprawling sort of place dominated by a low ancient adobe house, stucco crumbling from one corner to reveal the dry bricks beneath, and a tall wooden windmill, gray and weathered, its vanes making a ratchety sound as they turned. A second, smaller house, roofless and windowless, faced the main one across a courtyard of hard-packed brown dirt, and in the center of that yard stood the biggest teepee that Sandy had ever seen. The leaves had turned on the aspens that covered the mountainside, making the whole expanse seem golden indeed.

  Sandy pulled into the yard and parked next to an old olive-drab Jeep. Nearby a blue VW mini-bus sat up on cinderblocks, surrounded by weeds and obviously long expired. When he climbed out of Daydream, Sandy could see that a large section of the south wall of the smaller adobe house had been removed. Two men and a woman were at work on it, installing long clear panes of glass. They were surrounded by adobe bricks, by a wheelbarrow of cement, by wood and hammers and nails and glass-cutting tools and putty. Two of them glanced up briefly at Sandy and went back to what they were doing. The third, a husky black man with a beard and a bald head, came walking over. “Can I help you?” he asked in a deep voice.

  “I’m looking for Bambi Lassiter,” Sandy said. “She’s an old friend of mine.”

  The black man nodded. “In the teepee,” he said. He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped some sweat from his forehead before going back to work.

  Sandy ambled over to the teepee and hesitated at the entry flap, wondering how you were supposed to knock on one of these things. As he was hesitating, the flap came open and a rush of small children emerged, running and yelling. Sandy stood aside and let them pass and went inside. “Bambi?” he called.

  The interior was dimly lit by light filtering down from the smokehole above and fragrant with the smell of incense. A big black potbellied stove stood in the center of the teepee, surrounded by an astonishing amount of old, battered, comfortable-looking furniture. Ragged carpet remnants in a dozen different colors covered most of the dirt floor. It all felt more spacious than Sandy would have guessed. Two women were sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking. They were both small and dark, with black hair. One of them wore jeans and a man’s flannel shirt in red and blue. The other one wore a loose brown dress with a wide white collar. One wore sandals. One was barefoot. One was sewing. One was pregnant. They both looked up at Sandy. “Bambi?” he repeated uncertainly.

  The pregnant one suddenly broke into a beatific smile, stood up, and came toward him with open arms. “Sandy Blair,” she said warmly, hugging him with enthusiasm. The top of her head barely came up to his chin, but she was surprisingly strong for such a small woman. Sandy hugged her back, a little more tentatively.

  When they broke apart, Sandy saw that the other woman had gotten to her feet and come closer. She was slightly taller than Bambi and very wiry, her black hair worn in two long braids. “This is my sister Fern,” Bambi said, confusing Sandy momentarily, since he knew Bambi had been an only child. “Fern, this is Sandy Blair, from college. You know. I’ve told you about Sandy.”

  Sandy held out a hand. Fern took it with both of hers and held it very gently, but firmly. “The writer,” she said. “Yes, I can feel it. You have very creative emanations.”

  “Oh,” Sandy said. He grinned weakly, wondering when Fern was going to give him back his hand. Finally she let go.

  “It’s good to see you,” Bambi said. “Come, let’s sit. I get tired easily these days.” She touched her stoma
ch. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Sure,” Sandy said. “It’s a little chilly out there. Tea would be lovely.”

  “Fern,” Bambi said, “could you make some for us?”

  Fern nodded and smiled and left the teepee.

  “She has to go to the house,” Bambi explained. “It’s very comfortable here, but not as complete as we would like. But it’s only temporary, until we’ve finished installing solar panels in the other building.”

  “Solar panels?” Sandy said. “They looked just like big windows.”

  Bambi smiled. “Passive solar,” she said. “It’s very harmonious.” Pregnancy seemed to agree with her. She looked very content, and much changed from the Bambi Lassiter that Sandy had known in the old days. In college Bambi had been a short, pudgy, painfully sincere girl, the kind that is always being described as having a great personality. She had been quick to cry and quick to gush and quick to fall in love. She owned more stuffed animals than any other six people that Sandy had ever known. But she had been Maggie’s roommate freshman year, and through Maggie she had met Sandy and Lark and Slum and the others, had gotten involved with politics, and then with drugs, and then with sex. Over the years Bambi had changed very dramatically, without ever really changing at all; somehow she became promiscuous without becoming less romantic, became radical without becoming less naïve, had gotten involved with violent revolutionaries of the bomb-making sort without ever giving up a single stuffed rabbit. To Sandy, Bambi Lassiter never quite made sense.

  But the woman she had grown into, sitting cross-legged and very pregnant a few feet from him, smiling, seemed much more together. She looked older than she should; her face had a lot of lines and wrinkles, sun lines and wind lines and laugh lines, but it was a good old, somehow. Her hands rested on her knees, palms up, and Sandy could see the calluses. She carried the weight of her child a lot better than she had ever carried the weight of the Hostess Creme-filled Cupcakes to which she had been addicted in college (not Twinkies, never Twinkies, only the chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white icing and the creme inside). Bambi looked a little scuffed and worn, but more alive than he had ever seen her. “You look good,” Sandy told her.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I feel good. I’m at peace, Sandy. I’ve found a very good life here.”

  “I was a little surprised when Maggie told me where you were. I didn’t know that there were any communes left.”

  “We’re still here, as you can see,” Bambi said. “True, most of the new age communities founded back in the Sixties are gone. Too many of their members were never really sincere about alternative living. Of course those people don’t work out. The communities that are left, like Golden Vision, are made up of people who are really truly committed to a new kind of life. We’re much smaller than we were ten years ago. Once, before I came, I understand this place had thirty adult members. Now we’re down to eight, plus the children. But we all love each other, and Golden Vision is very stable now. It’s a wonderful place for children.”

  “I see,” Sandy said, gazing at Bambi’s stomach. “Will this be your first?”

  She smiled. “My second,” she said. “I have a four-year-old son named Jason. He left just before you came in.”

  “He nearly knocked me over,” Sandy said. “Energetic.”

  “And imaginative,” Bambi said. “All the children here are very creative. We don’t have any television here, and we don’t bring in newspapers. We make most of the toys for the kids ourselves. Nothing plastic is allowed. Nothing dangerous. Nothing sexist. And no toy weapons of any sort.”

  “Comic books?” Sandy asked.

  Bambi shook her head. “Good books,” she said firmly.

  Sandy was bemused. “A whole tribe of kids with no idea who the Amazing Spider-Man is?”

  “Children don’t need violent power-fantasies. Not when they have love and music and nature. We’ve built a healthy, harmonious, nonviolent, noncompetitive environment for them.”

  “What happens when they reach school age? Don’t they have trouble relating to less-sheltered peers?”

  “We tutor them at home,” Bambi said. “Jana has a teaching certificate and Herb has a Ph.D. That seems to satisfy the state, though we have had some hassles. But we get by.”

  “Sounds like you have most everything here,” Sandy said.

  “We’re almost self-sufficient,” Bambi said proudly. “We grow about half of our own food, all organic. No meat, of course. Golden Vision is strictly noncarnivore. What we can’t grow, we buy in town. We need so little money that it is easy to make do. Everyone helps. Fern sews and does embroidery and she and Herb make our teas. Ray is a handyman. All sorts of people bring things up here for him to fix. He and Mitch do odd jobs in town, too, gardening and construction and things like that. Jana makes pots and little ceramic statues that we sell to tourists. Lisa does aura balancing and gives massages. She gets people from all over the state. Ed makes bracelets and torques and rings. He’s very good.”

  “And you?”

  “I do most of our baking and I take care of the kids,” Bambi said. She broke into a wide smile. “I’m also a beekeeper.”

  “Bees?” Sandy was incredulous.

  “Five hives now,” Bambi said. “The best honey you ever tasted. All organic. Never heated and never strained, full of vitamins.”

  “You used to run screaming out of the room when a roach crawled across a wall ten feet away,” Sandy said.

  “Of course I did. I grew up in a little tract house in River Forest. My mother got hysterical if we had insects on the lawn, let alone inside the house. I thought all bugs were dirty and disgusting.” She laughed. “I learned better here at Golden Vision. We’re very close to nature. And bees and ants and spiders and even roaches are part of the harmony, the ecology, just as we are. A piece of fruit isn’t any less good just because some bugs have eaten part of it, you know. I’d rather have a worm in my apple than have poisonous pesticides sprayed all over it.”

  “I’ll pass on both,” Sandy said. He looked up as Fern reentered, carrying a ceramic teapot and three handmade mugs on a big wooden tray. The tea service had roses hand-painted all over it. There was a pot of honey, too. “This is my tea and Bambi’s honey,” Fern said as she set down the tray. “In case you like to sweeten your tea. But it doesn’t really need it.”

  “We don’t use refined sugar,” Bambi added. “It’s poison.”

  “I don’t use it either, generally,” Sandy said. What he did use was Sweet ’n Low, as sort of a futile gesture at watching his waistline, but he decided not to mention that.

  The tea was hot and fragrant, heavy with the scent of mint and cinnamon and some kind of flower. If he asked, Fern would no doubt tell him just what kind of flower. He didn’t ask. He just sipped and smiled. “Good,” he said.

  “We’ll be eating soon,” Bambi said. “Would you like to take dinner with us, Sandy? Lisa is cooking tonight. She’s a lovely cook.”

  “Sure,” Sandy said. “Thanks. I appreciate the hospitality. You know, Bambi, you don’t seem very surprised at me turning up like this.”

  “Maggie sent me a card and mentioned that you’d asked for my address.”

  Sandy grinned. “Maggie wrote? I’m flabbergasted.”

  “She said you might see Lark, too. How is he?”

  “L. Stephen Ellyn has a big car and a big house and a six-figure salary and a three-piece suit, so he tells me. He also has all the alcohol that money can buy. And he’s mature. He’s become so damned mature he’s in imminent danger of turning into Walter Cronkite.”

  Fern was staring at him over the lip of her mug. She put it down on the tray and said, “You sound terribly bitter, Sandy.”

  “Fern has good perceptions about people,” Bambi said. “But I can feel it, too. Are you so unhappy? I’ve been going on about Golden Vision, but you haven’t said anything about your own life. Tell me about it.”

  Sandy looked at her uncomfortably. Even thoug
h Bambi was sitting there practically oozing earth-mother empathy, she was not Maggie by any stretch of the imagination, and he found he had no great desire to bare his heart to her. Besides, he didn’t even know what was in his heart to bare. “My life is OK,” he said. “I’ve had three novels published and I’m working on a fourth. I own a house in New York and I live with a nice, sharp lady named Sharon Burnside. She’s very pretty and she’s good in bed and she makes more money than I do. My work is more fun than fucking a monkey.”

  “No,” Fern said. She touched his hand lightly. “I can sense pain in you, Sandy.”

  “I’ve driven more than two thousand miles in the last couple of weeks,” Sandy said. “My back is killing me, I have a permanent road buzz, I’m sick to death of cheeseburgers, I haven’t been able to get anything but country-western on the radio since Kansas City, and my jockey shorts are too tight. Yes, I’m in pain. You would be, too.”

  Fern frowned. “Lisa could balance your aura for you,” she said. “You’re so tight, so full of tension and contradiction. And I can sense a blackness about you, Sandy.”

  “Those jockey shorts,” Sandy said. “I haven’t done a laundry since Chicago.”

  Fern stood up. “I’m sorry if I made you hostile. I was only trying to help. I’ll leave you alone with Bambi.” She smiled with resignation and left.

  Bambi was studying him. “Do see Lisa,” she said.

  “My aura is fine,” Sandy snapped. “I don’t want it balanced. I’m used to it being all crunched up and crooked. So is Sharon. She loves my aura. If I came home with somebody else’s aura, she’d never recognize me. Probably kick me out of bed, too.”

  Bambi shook her head. “Why must you always make fun?”

  “When I was growing up, my mother said I was just a smart-mouth. I prefer to think of myself as delightfully droll.”

  “Your jokes are a kind of aggression, Sandy. You ought to realize that by now. When you feel threatened you lash out by turning your sense of humor on whatever you can’t understand. You mock instead of accepting. You surround yourself with a shell of what you imagine is wit.”