by John Boyd
Late Sunday afternoon, September 5, Ward went alone to the oak knoll, taking a truck tire, a length of heavy rope, and a tightly capped bottle of gasoline wrapped in a T-shirt. He laid the bottle of gasoline among the boulders and swung the tire from the massive center trunk of the tree. After removing the guard rail, he could get a running start down the gravel path and launch himself, dangling by his shoulder from the tire, far out over the chasm to swing safely back onto the rocky knoll on the far side of the oak.
Finally he swung back onto the gravel path, hooking the rope over a protuberance on the east-running limb of the oak, and dangled the tire over the path. With a discus swing, he hurled the guard rail beyond the bushes and slope of the canyon wall to the bottom, forty feet below.
Walking back to the ranch house, Ward heard the girls singing as they marched up from their last rehearsal. In the pink sunset, their song filled him with peace and a warm nostalgia. They were singing an old Army song, “Violet Time,” and their voices rang in lark notes over the meadows of Malibu.
Labor Day dawned bright and clear from a mild Santa Ana breeze rolling in from the high deserts, a wonderful day for brush fires.
After a leisurely breakfast alone, Diana had to leave early for last-minute inspection of costumes. Ward signed a check on his Western Avenue bank to Freddie for one dollar. To the check he stapled his final statement:
For musical services rendered $500.00
Less agency commission 50.00
450.00
Less overcharge for room, board and services previously billed to Miss Frost 449.00
$ 1.00
Ward put the check and the statement in an envelope which he tucked into a gray suit in his wardrobe, then took all his documents relating to Albert Atascadero below and put them in the side bag of his motorcycle.
At nine, dressed in a dark blue business suit, wearing his auburn wig and dark glasses, Ward went down to the shell, carrying a typed roll of orders for the Patriots and a list of songs for Freddie. If he got past the first crucial moments with the High Wheeler, Ward knew he would not be recognized, for he planned to project an image that would completely mislead Freddie.
He intended to assess punitive damages as well as financial; in Ward’s continuing dialogue with the young, it was imperative that Freddie be taught that honesty was the best policy, at least until one learned to cover his tracks.
Mustangs, dune buggies, hot rods, and Karmen Ghias of the pushers were already trickling into the parking lot. A few dealers were standing around before the shell. From the Daisy Chain, Ward recognized Won Lee, né Manuel Sanchez, from his Chinese robe. Lee was a connection and he was discussing the market with Henry Green, a dealer in imported gage, bedecked in a bright green dashiki beneath his green-dyed Afro. Little Mama knew them all and she would finger them for the Patriots, who would thus gain a monopoly on the festival trade.
Promptly at 9:30 Freddie’s lavender Cadillac nosed over the crest and stopped in the parking lot. At the distance, almost half a mile, the bass fiddle on Freddie’s back resembled a bale of cotton, but in ten minutes Freddie and his two fellow members of the Untannables were breaking out of the trees and swinging over the greensward to where Ward waited on the stage of the shell.
Ward didn’t wait for them to get within speaking distance before he was shouting, “Where are the banjos? You have no banjos! Which of you is Freddie?”
“Here, sir.”
“Mr. Alexander, here… You’re supposed to play early American traditional music, minstrel songs, and spirituals.”
“But, Mr. Ward said…”
“Mr. Ward! Mr. Ward! Where that gigolo of Miss Frost digs up you cheapies for a thousand bucks a show I’ll never know. Did he tell you to submit a repertoire?”
“Yes, sir.” Clambering onto the stage, Freddie extended a hand-lettered list of songs; “Feeling Groovy,” “Hound Dog,” “Snow Bird”… Ward glanced at the list, obvious distaste approaching near-apoplexy.
“This is all wrong. The theme of the festival is the development of rock, and you’re to represent its crude beginnings. Your repertoire wasn’t supposed to infringe on the dialectics of rock harmonics. You dig me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I figured Ward for a botch, so I prepared a list. Run through these thirty songs and select fifteen you can play.” Ward handed him his list. “You’ll notice the list runs pretty heavily to spirituals to show the historical development of soul. But the arrangements are up to you, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can take an old favorite, say, ‘Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,’ and give it the warm McKuen touch. Here, ‘Birmingham Jail’ would predict the Gollenberger and Stein format to show the development of protest songs… You could solo ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ on the cello, using three strings, with a random plunk on the bass in the manner of that great artist Glamorgan.”
In a staccato voice, he shot suggestions and admonitions to the trio, with Freddie listening and nodding his head. Ward ended the tirade on an order.
“Gentlemen, I must hear ‘Sweet Afton,’ first, and make me hear the Scottish burr and smell the heather. I have this thing about Scottish girls.”
Waiting for “Sweet Afton,” Ward stood on the greensward listening to the struggle on the stage, shaking his head occasionally or kicking the grass in disgust, as the trio pooled its knowledge to recall the notes of the tune. When they began, Ward listened to the first four bars.
Holding up one hand for silence, clutching his hair with the other, he ran onto the stage crying, “No, no. On the fourth measure, Freddie, just before the coda, give me an interval of glissando on a subdominant chord.”
“Like this, sir?”
Freddie fingered the frets and strummed a riffle that deftly excluded the bass string. For all Ward knew, it was a perfect glissando on a subdominant chord, but he was shouting.
“No. No. No. That’s African soul. I want Scottish soul. Give me more burr in that diminuendo, not a Glasgow staccato but an Edinburgh lilt. I’ll stand right here until I smell the heather.”
After fifteen glissandos, Ward still couldn’t smell the heather.
“Listen, fellows,” Ward feigned desperation, “maybe I can help the tempo by alternating the volume on the amplifiers. Take the earphones, Freddie, and I’ll try to talk you into a synchronic pattern from the sound control booth.”
From the air-conditioned control booth, Ward continued the harassment, his disgust mounting as the amplifiers sent the sounds caterwauling over the grounds. Before the stage, the pushers were backing off, getting closer to the grove, but the amplifiers hedged them in.
“Look, Freddie,” Ward finally conceded. “Maybe Scottish evades you. Try a little African Scottish, a burr with a boogie-woogie beat…”
As Ward spoke, his earphones picked up a distant roar, growing in volume, becoming a rumble, which cast a terrifying double image onto his memory. Crouched in a snowy foxhole, he had heard the sound, before, in the Forest of Ardennes when the Tiger tanks of a German Panzer division had rolled toward his position.
“Hold it, Freddie.”
A glance toward the skyline reassured him. Only a trickling vanguard of music lovers were coming over the ridge. Reassured, he turned back to his sound equipment, but the rumble was growing. He cast another glance toward the ridge.
Over the saddleback a motorcycle appeared, then another, and another, moving slowly in ceremonial procession. The long black line was snaking over the crest and down the approach road. Chilled by apprehension, Ward watched, counting, as the line swung toward the eucalyptus grove, fourteen Patriots dressed in black. In the lead he saw Big Papa stroking his huge Schweinjaeger, and on the seat behind him, her platinum hair flowing from beneath the azure of Ward’s crash helmet, sat Little Mama.
Two hours ahead of schedule the Patriots had arrived, and the sound of their coming shook the hills. Coming early to stake out their claims to the pot trade.
Ward felt the anxiety of a man helplessly wounded as a python slithered toward him when the head of the line coiled out of the eucalyptus grove and swung south. Following instructions from the guard the Patriots would swing around and park at the ceremonial racks set fifteen yards below the privies and above the throne of the Queen of the Malibu Love Festival.
Diana’s orders detailing guard procedure for the Brahms and Beethoven promenades were in the desk before him, but it would take courage to walk up the hill and hand the orders to Big Papa.
Forcing a casual tone, Ward said into the phone, “Freddie, you’d better go back to your original repertoire. I’ll turn off the amplifiers so you can practice without being too conspicuous, but never again, please. No more music. The fire next time.”
Ward reached into the drawer before him and pulled out the official scroll, but his eyes were on the Patriots, circling now on the final leg of their entrance. In goggles with black helmets, black jackets, black boots, all they needed was a death’s-head insignia on their lapels and Ward’s conditioned fear of Nazi storm troopers might have overwhelmed him. But they had forgone the straw that might have broken his will to fight. Instead, they wore tiny decals of the American flag on their dress helmets.
With orders in his hand, Ward left the booth and walked across the stage, as marked by his Establishment dress as they by their uniforms. Warning himself against the truncated stride that might have betrayed him as the pussyfooter, he moved with the easy nonchalance of a Central Avenue black on Saturday night.
Above him the line was moving behind the racks, peeling off one at a time, and Big Papa was already parking in the position of honor at the far right of the line. At eighty yards the maximum leader looked formidable to the man who walked down the steps and up the graveled walk of the peace symbol toward the dismounting line of Patriots.
Only Little Mama had seen him in full light, Ward remembered, and she had been high. The Barber knew in detail the shape of his head, but the Barber’s lambency had flickered so swiftly over his skull that he doubted if the Barber could recognize it again without a phrenology chart. Still, he was twice vulnerable and as he ascended toward the line of men waiting impassively by their motorcycles, dark blue star-spangled billy clubs hanging from their belts, he felt again his old Normandy Landing Syndrome, the tongue-fuzzing dryness of mouth, the kidney pressure, the keying of fear to resolution.
To Ward’s left stood the officers, gold stars gleaming above their jacket pockets. Brazos was the two-star, now, but Arms, not the Barber, was the new one-star. The Barber stood in the ranks, next to Arms. Apparently he had suffered the fate of experts in any bureaucracy. He was too gifted to be promoted.
Now images from his memory, triggered by the line of troops, came to Ward’s aid. Once more he was a Ranger captain commencing inspection. Unconsciously his musculature made adjustments. He drew in his stomach, squared his shoulders, set his face in officious lines, and contracted his sphincter. Fifty yards from the troopers and inwardly counting cadence, Ward stepped smartly from the yoke of the peace symbol doing a right oblique away from the leader’s end of the column. His military pace alerted the Patriots and he caught a visible stiffening, a surreptitious dressing to the right.
Striding directly toward the left pivot man, a lard-bottomed Patriot with the hip spread of a female, Ward found him repugnant before he got within nose shot. The man’s eyes were blue gimlets buried in a ball of dough from which jutted a thin, aristocratic nose as out of place on the face as a yacht’s prow on a garbage scow. Sweat oozing from his fat streaked the dirt on his skin, making him look greasier than the oil-splattered motorcycle he stood beside. A blond fuzz which could have been removed with one swipe of a depilatory grew above his lip. Ward had seen mustaches grown with more authority by old maids.
Stenciled in flaking yellow above the pocket of the Patriot’s jacket Ward could read the name “No Balls,” and suddenly he was fighting to conceal his astonishment. These thirteen bulls and one heifer were letting a steer run with their herd. Ward’s kick had done it. The toe he had planted three months ago had borne this bloated fruit. Beneath the dewlap jowls and flatulence of No Balls were hidden the once patrician form and features of the two-star, Ball Bearing.
Down the column Ward walked, slapping the rolled orders against his thigh in the manner of a British officer with a swagger stick. Slowly his eyes traveled from top to bottom of each Patriot and flicked a glance at each machine. They were all there, Sprocket, Razor, Hoot Owl, the Loon, Lefty, Muffler, Breeches, Drain Oil, Crotch Job, the Barber, Arms, and Brazos, and then Ward came face to face with Big Papa.
Face to face but not front to front. Big Papa had taken a step forward, swiveling on his hips with his left thigh foremost, guarding his crotch. Ward halted before the barrier but his eyes continued their inspection of Little Mama. She wouldn’t recognize him. The bemused smile and vacant eyes beneath his crash helmet told him that. Dolores was flying so high she needed an oxygen mask. But for a split second Ward’s gaze lingered on the pneumatic outthrust of her breasts.
Then he was clicking his heels and handing Big Papa the scroll.
“These are your orders with the schedule for the exhibition of the groupies. Permit no spectator to pinch or stroke until the promenade in the nude commences. Prior to the program there will be an election by acclamation of a Festival Queen, who will be seated on the throne.”
Big Papa didn’t unroll his orders. He handed them to Brazos, who handed them to Arms, who handed them to the Barber.
“We brought the queen with us.”
“Reposing special trust and confidence in your ability to judge feminine pulchitrude, I then hereby cancel the acclamation of a queen and install your choice on the throne.”
“What’d he say, Barber?”
“I don’t know, Big Papa, but it sounded like a compliment.”
Ward spoke to Big Papa, “Before the festivities commence, move your men among the crowd and confiscate all pot or hard stuff. When Miss Aphrodite comes on stage, clear the gravel paths and station your men according to the written procedure. Permit no premature grouping before the Bach processional. Understood?”
“You dig him, Barber?”
“Got him.”
“The queen will be crowned with a golden crown during the first promenade.”
“She’s got her crown,” Big Papa rumbled.
“Want a golden crown, Big Papa,” Dolores mumbled.
“Nobody touches your head but me, Little Mama.”
Big Papa was wrong, Ward thought, as he saluted, did a left face, and strode back to the shell. Little Mama would get her crown and more besides, for her world lines had once again swung Ward into her orbit. He had never felt such affinity for a female.
Propelled by pneumatic thrusts, he tripped lightly onto the stage, calling, “Back to the earphones, Freddie.”
Once more in the sound control room, Ward flicked on switches, setting the amplifiers for a maximum interference, and said, “Once more to the repertoire, Freddie. Ah, one, ah, two, ah, three… Hit it.”
But no sounds caterwauled from the amplifiers. Instead, Freddie’s voice came over his earphones. “All right, Al. When are you going to quit this she-it and play ball?”
“Freddie, how’d you know it was me?”
“When you cakewalked across the stage after you left Dolores. What’s this all about?”
“You’ve been assessed punitive damages for an overcharge on my rent and board… So, we can knock it off, Sherlock, and I’ll take you to lunch.”
But Ward was talking to an embryonic lawyer.
“Where’s your old man with my bread?”
“He’ll be here at two-thirty.”
“Make sure he is,” Freddie chuckled. “Those crackers out front are looking for a blond-haired pussyfooter who owes them a crotch job.”
CHAPTER TEN
Ward and the trio lunched in the east wing amid a twitter of females, and Freddie recalled his encoun
ter with the FBI. “That Culpepper kept smelling my Aqua Velva and jerking my Afro.”
After lunch, the trio returned to work and Ward went to the penthouse office, which he had to himself since Diana was assembling the rejuves for the grand march to the pavilions. He called and reserved a seat on the five o’clock flight to San Jose and then dialed Ester to arrange for her to pick him up at the airport and to permit Cabroni’s wiretap to record his conversation.
Ester bubbled with the latest news. She had flown to Stockholm, where she had “wired” him into the Nobel Committee. Carrick dropped by occasionally to see her and to talk over his problem. He had approved Ward’s request for a lower research grant, which Ward had expected, but Carrick’s problem interested him more because it seemed similar to Diana’s. “His psychiatrist says he doesn’t want to make love or war,” Ester said. “He wants to make money.”
Finally she asked, “How’s Mexico?”
“I’m on my way home, but I’m dropping by Ruth Gordon’s Adorable U Beauty Ranch, at 2:30, just to say hello.”
“You’re supposed to have done away with her,” Ester said accusingly.
“In a way I have,” he assured her, knowing Ester and Cabroni would read different meanings in his remark, “but I’ll be at the San Jose airport at six. Can you meet me?”
“Love to. I’ve been longing for a little domestic peace ever since you left. But, darling, don’t get any more underwear. I found a deal on boxer shorts and bought you two dozen pairs.”
So she had brushed off Cabroni and gotten a bodyguard in the bargain. Clever woman, Ester, Ward thought, as he hung up.
And he couldn’t find a better wife, as his recent experiences had taught him. Any husband who stepped out on his wife was a fool for compounding his original error.
His call should get Cabroni to the ranch by 2:30.
Ward showered and shaved for the second time today, carefully combed his wavy blond hair, buffed his fingernails, and put on his denim jeans, the pink suede shirt, and his boots.
