Armageddon Rag Page 8

  “Yeah,” said Sandy. His voice sounded vaguely goofy, but he went on anyway. “Yeah,” he repeated. “For me, too.” Maggie was like a breath of fresh air from the past. For three frustrating days he had been fighting the obstinancy of Jersey cops, trying to tie up the fire story that Jared had demanded for Hedgehog, and having acrimonious talks with Sharon courtesy of Ma Bell. He found he needed Maggie’s smile.

  “Come on in,” she said, moving aside. “We eat soon. Still like lasagne?”

  “My fourth favorite thing in the world,” Sandy assured her. “Comes right after books, sex, and pizza.” He followed her inside. The place was smaller than the one she’d had five years ago, the last time he’d visited, but then she no longer had roommates to contend with. A beat-up old sofa, a large floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and an antique buffet dominated the cramped living room. In a corner by a narrow window looking out on an alley there was a comfortable-looking recliner with two cats on it, a huge fat Siamese and a smaller orange short-hair.

  “Ho Chi Minh?” Sandy said, surprised. The Siamese opened one eye and peered at him suspiciously.

  “None other,” Maggie said. “He’s old and crotchety as hell, but he hangs in there. The new guy is Orange Julius. Chase ’em off and sit yourself down while I get us some wine. We got a lot of catching up to do.”

  The cats protested loudly as Sandy evicted them from the recliner and settled in. Maggie went out to the kitchen and came back shortly with a bottle of Chianti and two glasses. He held while she poured. Then she sat on the floor, crossed her legs, sipped the wine, and smiled up at him. “So,” she said, “how’s your love life?”

  Sandy laughed. “You come right to the point, don’t you?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Why the hell not?” She had hardly changed at all, Sandy thought. She was wearing faded jeans and a loose white peasant blouse, beneath which her breasts moved freely. She’d never worn a bra as long as Sandy had known her. That had been one of the first things he’d noticed when they met, way back in 1967. It had turned him on enormously. Maggie had never been a classical beauty. Her mouth was a bit oversized and somehow a little lopsided, especially when she smiled, and her nose was large and still crooked where it had been broken by a cop’s nightstick during the ’68 Democratic convention. But she had nice green eyes, and a generous mass of reddish-blond hair that always seemed windblown, even inside, and more animation to her than any woman Sandy had ever known. Maggie had been the first great love of his life, as well as the first lay, and sitting there in her living room looking down at her, he realized suddenly that he had missed her enormously.

  “My love life,” he mused. “Well, I’m living with someone. I think I wrote you about her.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “You know me and letters.” Maggie was a notoriously lousy correspondent, bad enough to defeat all of Sandy’s efforts to keep in touch. Not only did she never answer letters, she lost them, and couldn’t recall whether or not she’d ever gotten them. “Was this the dancer?”

  “No. That was Donna. We broke up a couple of years ago. This is the realtor. Sharon.”

  “Right,” Maggie said. “You did write me about her. Hell, the letter’s around here someplace, I guess. So you moved in together, huh?”

  “We bought a house, believe it or not,” he replied. “I had some money from a book, and Sharon convinced me I’d do better buying real estate than sticking it in a bank. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He sipped his wine. “Now I’m not so sure, though. It’s going to be messy if we break up.”

  “Hmmm,” Maggie said. “That doesn’t sound optimistic. You been having troubles?”

  “Some,” Sandy said, vaguely. He felt a bit awkward. Maggie had always been his best friend as well as his lover, and even after they’d gone their separate ways he had always found it easy to confide in her, but it had been a long time since he’d seen her, and it felt a bit like betrayal to tell her too much about his fights with Sharon. “Maybe we can work things out,” he said after a hesitation. “I hope so. I mean, she’s a good person and all. Very bright, very competent. Very much into her career. Only lately, well, we haven’t been communicating all that well.” He made a face. “A lot of it is my fault. The writing hasn’t been coming well lately, and I’ve been kind of…I don’t know, restless, I guess. Moody. Until this story came along, anyway, and Sharon hates the idea of this whole Hedgehog gig.”

  Maggie finished her wine and climbed to her feet, then extended a hand to pull Sandy out of the recliner. “You’re going to have to tell me all about it, you know. I’m dying to know how Jared got you in bed with him again, after what he did. But let’s talk about it over your fourth favorite thing in the world.”

  They ate at the kitchen table, but it was covered with a real honest-to-goodness tablecloth and the dinner service actually matched, prompting a comment from Sandy about how things changed, and a sly smile from Maggie. One thing hadn’t changed at all; she still made a mean lasagne, very spicy, heavy on the cheese and tomato sauce. Sandy had lunched on a plastic cheeseburger somewhere along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and he attacked the food with a vengeance. Maggie kept the wine glasses full of Chianti from the wicker-covered bottle in the center of the table. In between bites, Sandy regaled her with the whole Nazgûl story, from Jared’s phone call right on through. He found that he was eager to lay it all out to someone, and Maggie had always been a great listener.

  The story and the lasagne were finished about the same time. Sandy pushed his plate away and gave a theatrical groan. “God,” he said, “I’ll never eat again.”

  Maggie smiled. “So go on. Are they holding Gopher John for the arson, or what?”

  Sandy shook his head. “He’s cleared on that. It turns out the place was badly underinsured, and it doesn’t make sense to burn down your own money-losing business unless you’ve got it covered. But it was arson. They turned up traces of kerosene and plastic explosive. Only Slozewski wasn’t responsible. Hell, I could have told them that much. If you’re going to torch your own property, you hire a pro, and he does it in the wee hours, so nobody gets hurt. Not when you’re open and packed. The final death toll was seventy-nine, and twice that number injured. Slozewski is clear of the arson charge, but he’s still in deep shit. They might bring him up on criminal charges on account of those fire doors’ being locked, and the families of the kids that died are suing him for millions. I feel sorry for the guy. I’m convinced it wasn’t his fault. I saw how much that place meant to him.”

  “You really think it was some nut out to get the Nazgûl?”

  “Sure looks like it, don’t it? Hobbins at West Mesa, Lynch murdered two weeks ago, and now this? Damned if those cops in Jersey would listen, though. Parker was more reasonable. I think I’ve got him half-convinced. He said he’d get in touch with cops in Santa Fe and Chicago, try to keep an eye out for Faxon and Maggio, for whatever good it’ll do.” He got up from the table. “Want help with the dishes?”

  Maggie dismissed them with a wave. “Dump them in the sink and let ’em soak. They’ll keep. You won’t.”

  They took what was left of the wine back to the living room, and Maggie lit a couple of candles instead of turning on the lights. This time they both sat on the couch. Ho Chi Minh came over and hopped into Maggie’s lap, where he settled himself with a proprietary disdain. She stroked his cream-covered fur as they talked, but he was too proud to purr.

  “I’m going on to Chicago from here,” Sandy said. “Maggio lives down in Old Town and plays weekends for some sleazo bar band. Maybe he can tell me something.” He hesitated, then plunged ahead. “And I’ve got another idea too, one I wanted to ask you about. When was the last time you heard from Bambi Lassiter?”

  Maggie gave him a sharp look and a smile. “Oh,” she said, “maybe a year or so back. I got the letter around here somewhere.” She gave a vague wave toward the bookcase, which was stacked full of ratty paperbacks, and Sandy peered at it and noticed for the first time that she had
letters and envelopes and various other random papers stuck in among the books, some lying on the shelves, others doing duty as placemarks. “What do you want with Bambi?” she asked.

  “I tried phoning her, but my number is six years old and useless, and I’ve got no leads to track her down,” Sandy said. “Bambi always had contacts with the real underground, and I’m hoping she can put me in touch. I’ve got a hunch.”

  “There’s hardly any underground left,” Maggie pointed out. “Why would they be involved?”

  Sandy shrugged. “Don’t know. But they found plastic explosive in the Gopher Hole, remember? That’s enough to make me suspicious. It can’t hurt to check it out.”

  “I suppose not,” Maggie said. “I’ll hunt around for that letter before you leave.” She carefully evicted Ho Chi Minh from her lap, kicked off her slippers, and stretched out, laying her feet in Sandy’s lap. It was done without a word being exchanged, an old and familiar and comfortable sort of motion that took Sandy right back. He put his hand on her foot. She had never been much of one for wearing shoes. There was a thick ridge of callus on the outside of her big toe, and a pad of it, hard and leathery and starting to crack, all along the underside of the foot itself. He traced it with a finger, took her foot firmly in hand and began to massage it. His fingers remembered. Maggie sighed. “Jesus, I love that,” she said. “You were the best damn foot-rubber I ever had, Sandy.”

  He smiled at her and kept up his ministrations. “We all have our talents,” he said. Then they fell quiet. Ho Chi Minh came back and hopped up on the couch and settled in again on Maggie’s stomach. Finally he began to purr as she stroked him. Maggie sipped wine from time to time and stared off at the candle flames with a small crooked smile on her face. And Sandy rubbed her foot and fell to thinking.

  “You’re looking pensive,” Maggie observed at last.

  “Remembering,” Sandy said. He shifted his attentions to her other foot.

  “Remembering what?”

  He smiled. “Oh, other days, other apartments, other foot-rubs.” He paused and reached for his wine glass and held it up briefly in front of the flame before he took a sip. “I remember when wine parties at your place meant drinking Boone’s Farm out of Flintstone jelly glasses,” he said. “And sitting on the floor, too. You didn’t have any furniture except that black bean-bag chair that Ho Chi Minh used to spray on all the time.”

  “I had cushions,” Maggie said. “Made them myself.”

  “Cushions,” Sandy said. “Yeah, right. I was never any damn good at sitting cross-legged. My feet always went to sleep. I was worse at eating off a plate balanced in my lap. Got food all over me.”

  “It didn’t stop you coming,” she pointed out.

  “No,” Sandy said fondly. “No. It didn’t.” He pointed. “No bookcase then. Just old boards and those cinder blocks that Froggy and me swiped from that construction site for you. And maybe half as many paperbacks. And that big cable spool you kept saying you were going to strip and stain and turn into a table. And all your posters.”

  “You didn’t mention my mattress in the back room,” Maggie said. “Haven’t forgotten that, have you? We balled on it often enough.”

  Sandy grinned. “Mattress?” he said. “What mattress?”

  She gave a snort of disdain. “I remember how you used to read us whatever you were working on, and afterward we’d talk about it.”

  “The criticism was unduly influenced by Boone’s Farm,” Sandy said. “I won’t forget those arguments with Lark, though. I was never radical enough for him. Whatever I read, he’d just smile and say it was competent bourgeois entertainment, but he couldn’t see how it would help the revolution any.”

  Maggie gave a sudden whoop of delight. “Shit, I’d forgotten that. You’re right. Good old Lark. You know what Lark is doing these days?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” Sandy admitted.

  Maggie’s grin was so big it threatened to crack her face clean in half. “Look him up when you’re in Chicago to see Maggio,” she urged. “He’s in the book. Look under L. Stephen Ellyn.”

  Sandy felt his mouth drop open. “L. Stephen Ellyn?” he said dumbly. Lark Ellyn had always been perversely proud of his first name, no matter how much gender-confusion and kidding it caused. Sandy had ragged him about it when they first met, and Lark had told him coolly that his namesake was a creature of song and beauty, gifted with the ultimate freedom of flight, and that therefore Lark was an appropriate name for a man committed to love and freedom, whereas Sander meant “defender of mankind” or some such bullshit, with all the militarism and sexism that implied. Lark was real big on the symbology of names. “L. Stephen Ellyn?” Sandy repeated. “No, c’mon.”

  “Really,” Maggie said. She held up a hand as if to swear. “L. Steve is a real comer in the ad world, too. Account executive.”

  Sandy stared at her. Then he giggled. Helpless, he giggled again, then burst into laughter. “No, no,” he muttered, “it can’t be, c’mon, it can’t,” but Maggie just kept insisting, and Sandy kept on laughing. “L. Stephen Ellyn, oh, no, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, you can’t tell me… no!”

  That was the start of the real silliness. After that, they made jokes about L. Stephen Ellyn for ten minutes or so, and drank some more wine, and started singing old songs in horribly off-key voices, and drank some more wine, and somehow got onto old TV theme songs, and worked through Superchicken and George of the Jungle and most of the Warner Brothers westerns and Car 54, Where Are You? before getting sidetracked by too much wine and Tombstone Territory.

  “Whistle me up a memory,” Maggie was singing uncertainly, though loudly. “Whistle me back where I want to be. Dum dum, something something Tombstone Territory!” she finished with a flourish.

  Sandy felt a bit dizzy from the wine, and what she was singing seemed very profound and terribly, urgently important. “And where do you want to be?” he demanded suddenly.

  Maggie stopped singing, refilled her glass, grinned at him. “Huh?” she said amiably.

  “Where do you want to be?” Sandy said again. “Do you know? What kind of memories are we whistling up? Where they going to take us?” He ran his fingers through his hair, confused by the sound of his own voice. “I’m drunk,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. I just…I dunno, it’s confusing. What happened, Maggie?”

  “Huh?” she said. “Happened? To what? Tombstone Territory?” She giggled. “It got canceled, Sandy.”

  “No,” he snapped. “To us! What happened to us!”

  “You and me, honey?”

  “You and me,” he repeated, “and Bambi Lassiter, and Jared Patterson, and Gopher John Slozewski, and Jamie Lynch, and Froggy, and Slum, and Jerry Rubin, and Angela Davis, and Dylan and Lennon and Jagger and the Weathermen and the Chicago Seven and William Kunstler and Gene McCarthy and the SDS and…and L. Stephen Ellyn, for Chrissakes! What happened to us all? To everybody?” He waved his arms wildly, in a great all-encompassing motion that took in the hopes and dreams and demonstrations, that took in riots and assassinations and candlelight parades, that took in Bobby Kennedy and Donovan and Martin Luther King, that embraced Melanie and the Smothers Brothers and the hippies and the yippies and the Vietnam War, that swept across the memories of a turbulent decade and the destinies of a whole generation of American youth, and that nearly knocked his glass of Chianti off the arm of the sofa. He recovered and caught it just in time.

  Maggie moved over and put an arm around him. “Time happened,” she said. “Change happened, love.”

  “Change,” Sandy said bitterly. “Maggie, we wanted change, that was what it was all about. We were going to change the fucking world, weren’t we? Shit. Instead the fucking world changed us. It changed Lark into somebody named L. Stephen Ellyn, and it changed Jared into a rich asshole, and it changed Jamie Lynch into a coffin and Gopher John into a pin-striped suit, and I ain’t even sure what it’s changing me into, but I don’t like it. I don’t like it!”

  Maggie hugged
him. “You’re shaking, honey,” she said softly.

  “The wine,” Sandy muttered, but he knew it wasn’t so. “Fucking wine has me sick but they say there’s truth in wine, you know. Truth. Remember truth? It was real big in the Sixties, along with peace and love and freedom. What did we do with all that stuff, Maggie? It’s like we all forgot, forgot everything we were, everything we stood for.” He sighed. “I know, I know, it’s all past now. We’re grown up, we’re getting old. But I tell you, Maggie, we were better then.”

  “We were younger then,” she said with a smile.

  “Yeah,” Sandy said. “Maybe that’s all. Maybe I’m just going through a mid-life crisis, right? Mourning my lost youth. Sharon thinks so.” He looked at Maggie stubbornly. “I don’t buy it, though. It’s more than that. I remember…I remember, hell, I know things were shitty then, we had the war, and racism, and Nixon and old Spiro, but you know, we also had…I dunno… like, a kind of optimism. We knew the future was going to get better. We knew it. We were going to make it so. We were going to change things around, and we had the youth, right, so time was on our side. We knew what was right and what was wrong, and we knew who the bad guys were, and there was a sense of belonging.” His voice got quieter as he spoke, winding down of its own accord. “It was the dawning of the goddamned fucking Age of Aquarius, remember? When peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars. Only peace and love sort of went out with bell-bottoms and long hair and miniskirts, and I sure as hell can’t tell who the bad guys are anymore.” He grimaced. “I think some of them are us.”

  “Hey,” Maggie said, shaking him gently. “Lighten up. It isn’t so bad, honey. So it’s not the tomorrow we dreamed about. Things never turn out the way you think they will. We did change it, Sandy. We stopped the war. We changed the colleges and we changed the government, and we changed all the rules about men and women and love and sex. We even got rid of Tricky Dick, finally. So it’s not the Age of Aquarius. It’s still different than it would have been without us. And better.” She leaned over and kissed him quickly on the end of the nose. “Think of it like this: if it hadn’t been for the Sixties, the Fifties would have gone on and on forever.”