“I won’t! This is my house.”
“You want me to leave? Because I’ll leave,” said Stone.
“Thank you,” Megan said. “After you have ruined my life.” And she walked out of the room.
We waited in silence until Sara and I got up to collect the dishes.
Stone told us to sit down.
We sank back into our seats.
“This is a tragic situation that did not have to happen,” Stone repeated in a hurt voice. “Nobody would have had to get messed up with wild horses if it hadn’t been for Herbert Laumann. He is the oppressor. He is the United States government. Megan has a right to be angry. A lady is dead who didn’t have to be.” He was good. Low-key and light on the rhetoric. You could feel him gathering up the fractured energy left in the room, wrapping it ever so piteously around himself.
Hours later, Megan was gone and Stone roused the household — Sara, Slammer, and me.
“We’re gonna have some fun,” he promised. “Gonzo political action.” Now, miles away from the lost farm, we are squeezed into the white truck, and Dick Stone is singing Otis Redding: “They call me Mr. Pitiful. That’s how I got my fame—” He keeps switching songs, genres, decades. Inside his head must be some crazy mix of rhythm and blues and screaming black-leather motorcycle metal. In a fraction of a second that goes on for eternity, he can hear Blue Oyster Cult expanding like the day of reckoning since 1975.
“Music is consciousness; it never dies,” Stone proclaims. “Music exists forever, somewhere in the universe.” “If it never dies,” Slammer apes, “where was it born?” “In a thirty-twoer laced with windowpane.” Dick Stone grins.
Rewind.
We are forty minutes outside Portland. Real time. It is way past the midnight hour, and this, in the grand saga of injustice and revenge, is what Dick Stone has been given: two kids passing a joint as if they are on a lark, the boy running his mouth about his wicked life, the poor little rich girl without a clue; and the pretender, the eager stranger with wild dark hair and shifty eyes, slouching in the seat beside him.
But he is pleased with the discipline of his rock ’n’ roll commando unit. Under his leadership, they have put together a goody bag of plastic squeeze bottles you would use for catsup, now filled with hydrofluoric acid; cans of red, white, and blue spray paint; a video camera; and Molotov cocktails made with the bandit’s signature Corona beer bottles.
For no discernible reason, he jerks the joint from Slammer’s mouth and flicks it out the window.
“What the fuck?” The boy laughs uneasily.
The bandit punishes him with silence.
Sara is all of a sudden in a fit of giggles, rolling on her back in the rear seat, long, thin arms and legs kicking out at funny angles.
“You’re a little butterfly.” Dick Stone looks in the rearview mirror. “Just like Megan, back in the day.” It was Megan, he tells us, who shared that thirty-twoer of psychedelic malt liquor in the Civic Auditorium down in San Jose, when BOC was at the height of their satanic debauchery; the concert from which he never came back. Like the apparition of young, idealistic Megan (aka Laurel Williams, the environmental scientist at Berkeley), Sara, he intones, is a butterfly who alights on your hand, revealing magic yellow granules of powder on its wings. Why would such a vision be given to you?
Meanwhile, the new one, Darcy, keeps to herself, staring at the suburban night. Dick Stone smiles at some reverie and rolls his window down, dropping an arm out of the truck, letting the cigarillo hang, wasting good Dominican smoke as a rush of air tears hot embers off the tip, leaving a trail of extinguishing sparks. It satisfies him, like pages burning in time.
“Hey now,” says the boy, “what’s
Stone turns his head very slowly toward the boy. His graying stubble looks Halloween raspberry in the cold red intersection light.
“Don’t…do…that.” He accelerates, but not too fast.
“I really feel like slapping someone right now.” Slammer pounds a fist hungrily. “I really feel like getting into a fight.” Dick Stone ignores him.
“That’s what I mean!” Slammer agrees, as if the old dude had said anything. “There’s two chicks in the car, know what I’m saying?” “I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“We should hit ’em.” The boy is pointing and alert. “McDonald’s, man.” The drive-thru is bright as an alien spaceship. There is a line of cars.
The bandit asks, “Why?”
“Babylon profits by killing animals,” Slammer chirps. “Why not?” The bandit sighs. “It’s a cliche.”
I guffaw. He cocks an appreciative eye. He loves Darcy for being a little rebel, and right now, stoned as the rest of them, Darcy loves him.
Sara sits upright in the backseat. “McDonald’s is too corporate. Too big.” Slammer scowls. “You’re a freak.”
The bandit makes a U-turn and heads out of town.
“Sara has a point,” he instructs, and pulls out a well-worn piece of rhetoric: “Evil needs a face.” The road becomes a country lane, no lights. The houses are spread farther apart. Only by slowing down and scanning the fences caught in the hard white headlights do we notice a small metal sign that says THE WILKINS. Stone turns down a road that bisects a pasture and leads to a newly constructed four-bedroom home with a spindle-post porch — just the kind of hypocritical western touch that ticks the bandit off.
He pulls off the road, beneath a stand of juniper trees, and cuts the lights.
“
“Who are the Wilkins?”
“Our friend BLM Deputy State Director Herbert Laumann’s in-laws. The government whore is mooching off the grandparents now.” Because someone destroyed his house and his kid is still in the hospital.
My stomach tilts with the sickening recognition that old obsessions die hard.
Slammer whispers, like he’s seen a prophetic city: “Babylon.” Beneath the dashboard the prudent bandit has mounted a sophisticated scanner that picks up encrypted radio signals used by law-enforcement agencies. He fiddles, listens to the static. Nothing threatening on the airwaves.
The bandit holds up the bag of tricks. “Who wants it?” Slammer: “Me!”
Perversely, Stone hands the bag to Sara instead, watching the disappointment grow once again in Slammer’s face. But then, another whiplash turn of mood, and he offers the boy a Colt.45 pistol.
Like the scenario in undercover school, reality shifts to a perilous key. A screaming siren wakes me from this loopy daze. The kid is armed.
Slammer handles the gun. “What am I supposed to do?” “Figure it out, genius.” Stone gives me the video camera and unlocks the doors. “You have three minutes. Go.” We scamper down the driveway, past a couple of bicycles and a redwood tree house with swings, along a path to the backyard. A raccoon darts from the shadows. The yard is open, no cover. We hunker against the garage wall.
Sara, indignant: “Why’d he give
You can see the weed shining through Sara’s huge eyes. “He wants you to shoot Laumann?” “Let’s do it.” Slammer pushes unsteadily off the wall.
I grab his arm. “No! They have an alarm system,” I say, pointing to random telephone wires.
But Slammer is hyped. “Two more minutes! All we’ve got!” Absurdly, he gets on his belly and combat-crawls across the lawn. Seems like a plan, so I follow. Sara’s behind us, dragging the bag of tricks. This is good. We’re leaving loads of evidence — footprints, fibers off our clothes. Then the lights go on and figures appear in the downstairs windows.
“Freeze!” Slammer hisses.
