The Gorgon Festival

by John Boyd

  At ten minutes to one, he laid out his gray suit, shirt, matching tie and socks, and a pair of shoes. Regardless of his presence or absence, Diana’s horological ethics would hold her to the programmed schedule, and he didn’t wish to make an appearance on the grounds until ten minutes into the Brahms Fourth. His experiment was scheduled to start a little later than Diana’s.

  Ward took his auburn wig below and stuffed it into the side bag of his motorcycle with the Atascadero identification papers. From the store room he removed the papier-mâché queen’s crown and six inches of dynamite fuze he had salvaged from a blasting project. He lashed the crown to the fender rack and taped the fuze to the top of the gas tank of the motorcycle, inserting one end into a percussion cap which he stuck inside the gasoline tank.

  Clearly revealed as the boy who, in trust and friendship, had first pussyfooted into the parking lot of the Daisy Chain, Ward rolled his machine onto the parking lot, jumped astride it, and coasted down the approach road to the bend where he swung into the grove, following his plotted path which exited behind the restroom. Below he could hear Brahms, played with Diana’s metronomic skill, rising over wolf calls and whistles. From rehearsals, Ward could tell by the music he had almost five minutes before the advent of the forties.

  Crouching low with Little Mama’s crown, he parked behind the restroom and sprinted to the line of Patriot motorcycles, where he paused to scout downslope. Through a bright golden haze over the meadow, he saw the two lines of Grecian shepherdesses, flinging poppies left and right, had split at the yoke of the Y and were moving toward the perimeter of the circle. All Patriots were on station, pacing back and forth inside the restraining ropes, their star-spangled clubs at the ready.

  A shirtless boy slipped under the rope as Ward watched and made a lunge at a blonde thirty-eight, but before a finger could touch a thigh, Sprocket, patrolling the area, moved with the speed of a riot policeman to club the youth to the ground. The whomp of the club could be heard by Ward. Waddling over at top speed, No Balls dragged the body off the path.

  Hypnotized by the parade, few spectators noticed the clubbing or another by the Owl on the opposite extender of the Y. Two spectators leaped at the same rejuve in Arms territory and were dispatched with a zap-zap. Then Brazos got three and Ward distinctly saw the sadist, Barber, club a youth who merely leaned too far over the ropes.

  The lines of nymphs were beginning to weave around the obstructions. Big Papa had made an error by assigning only No Balls to the clean-up detail. Bodies were accumulating faster than the eunuch could drag them from the path.

  But Ward could not be too critical of Big Papa’s planning when suddenly faced with an error of his own. The forties began to emerge from the tents, throwing their poppies in the style of shot putters and the quantum jump in the crowd noise was much greater than the arithmetic progression between breast sizes. Hooees, wolf yells, and whistles threatened to drown out Brahms. On the one hand, Ward wondered hopefully whether the sound signified that his obsession was the common lot of males, and on the other he was sickened by apprehension. The noise could destroy his plans by raising the decibel level higher than any he might generate from Dolores.

  Now was the moment, and the moment might have come too late.

  Ward stepped before the throne and leaned near the ear of the bemused queen gazing on her subjects below.

  “Coronation time. Come, Little Mama, and get your golden crown.”

  He backed away from her, standing with his heels almost to the edge of the dais, and held high her crown, its gilt gleaming and its glass rubies and emeralds glittering in the filtered sunlight.

  Without removing Ward’s helmet, regal in her euphoria, Dolores rose from the throne, her breasts heaving as if her lungs were there. She saw the blond hair, the pink suede shirt, and desire in his gray eyes. Her lips formed a phrase he read, “BMW 280… Wow.”

  Then she was floating toward him, her arms spread for a lover’s embrace, her smile dimpling, and Ward’s resolution wavered. In trust and in the joy of reunion, she came to him, and in an innocence that left her crotch unguarded. His nature revolted against the rejection of any woman offering the ultimate gift of womanhood, but coldly planned policy and the noises below demanded that he kick the gift-bearer in the gift.

  Patriotism found the spur to his weakening resolve. The decal of Old Glory, still adhering to his azure helmet, was scratched and dirty. His left leg tensed. His right leg pivoted free.

  Dolores was drifting closer.

  Suddenly an insight struck him. A ritual kick should be sufficient; a fillip of contempt for her femininity would spare his chivalry, strike a blow for country, and rid him, symbolically at least, of breast obsessions. His offense to the girl’s ego would release a scream of indignation loud enough to draw attention to his deed.

  With a swift but soft uncoiling Ward’s leg stroked out and up. His toe, held rigid, landed as lightly as a dove in a dovecote.

  Instinctively the girl clamped her thighs, but his boot was there, and her unaccustomed action threw her backward, screaming, as Ward was catapulted forward. The crown went tumbling as he threw out his arms to break his fall. Chest over breasts, they fell, and Ward bounced upward to his feet again, rebounding from a resilience suspiciously like that of silicone, to barely escape her embrace.

  Dolores’s continuing screams were squeals of delight.

  Though free to flee, Ward held his position out of chivalry and from expediency. Arching over her mammoth heavings, Dolores’s squeals keened unnoticed to the crowd below. A few spectators on the upper fringes did, indeed, look back, but only in passing wonder at such a strange hang-up to have in one’s bag. From the sounds, it was easy for the viewers to assume that he and Dolores were merely doing their thing.

  In a sense, Ward knew they were correct. Looking backwards, prancing in mark time, he knew he was hooked in a figurative sense, and her breasts had done it.

  Then, that which had almost destroyed Ward’s plans saved them.

  When E-44 emerged from the pavilion, a silence of awe and reverence fell over the multitude. Between the notes of Brahms, the shrieked urgings of Little Mama were clearly audible. “Faster, Little Papa. Faster.”

  Suddenly the cry of the Loon quavered over the crowd, “That pinko’s back, Big Papa, and he’s pussyfooting Little Mama.”

  The alarm from the Patriots’ lookout was Ward’s cue for an exit, but gallantry bade him stay.

  “Brazos, Arms, front and center.” Rage lifted Big Papa’s voice into thunder. “Crotch Job, man your chains.”

  The last bone-chilling order freed Ward from all claims of gallantry. This was no time for pussyfooting. Ward bounded toward the girls’ John with Little Mama’s plea trailing him.

  “Come back, Little Papa.”

  Well, inconstancy was the better part of romance, Ward thought, leaping into the saddle, but to two things men were constant ever.

  He gunned the BMW 280 from behind the washroom and throttled down, describing a series of slow figure-eights below the margin of the trees. Watching, he saw the Patriots detaching themselves unhurriedly from the crowd, and he knew the patterns he wove with his motorcycle had slowed their haste. Prior research done unobtrusively along the Sunset Strip had explained the patterns. His figure-eights were a challenge to a game of hare and hounds.

  Conventions of the contest were rigid. The chase did not begin until the leader of the hounds dropped his arm, and wherever the hare led, the hounds must follow on pain of being branded “chicken.”

  Twenty yards below Ward, the Patriots sauntered toward their machines. Farther below, two lines of shepherdesses wound unnoticed along gravel paths, tossing poppies to a crowd that had turned to look up the slope. Farthest below, the tiny figure of Diana bent over her piano, oblivious to all save her schedule and the metronome beating in her head.

  “He’p me with my ballast, Arms,” Papa called.

  Arms came and the two men lifted Little Mama, limp from spee
d and satiety, to the rear seat of the Schweinjaeger and strapped her where she lolled, dream-lost and smiling.

  All Patriots stood beside their hogs, now, facing toward Ward as they pulled on goggles and gauntlets and cinched the straps of their crash helmets. They faced Ward but did not look at him, in a dismissal both contemptuous and Calvinistic, as if his fate were settled, preordained, and no power of the law or social agencies could prevent or even delay the inevitable crotch job.

  “Patriots, start your engines!” Big Papa’s order rolled down the line and the sound of motors shivered the now purple haze over the meadow.

  Big Papa’s arm was raised as he glanced down the line and Ward, on the downslope of the segment of a circle, was watching the arm. Ward timed his start perfectly. As he swung into an upslope segment of his weave, looking over his shoulder he saw the arm drop.

  The chase was on.

  As if scorning suicide Ward gunned his BMW 280 straight toward the trees, splitting a distance between two eucalyptuses so narrow that scales from both trunks were brushed away by his Levis. Swerving among the boles, dipping below projections, along a course he had rehearsed for weeks, he cleared tiny gullies over concealed embankments and arched over protruding roots on inconspicuous stone bridges. Leaves shook from the sound of his passing, but the roar behind him diminished.

  Angling into the approach road on the bight of its southward bend, he gunned toward the ranch house at ninety, slowing as he neared the parking area and skewing to a halt where the footpath to Lover’s Leap commenced.

  Ostensibly as a gesture of contempt, Ward, who hadn’t smoked since the Surgeon General’s Report, paused and lit a cigarette as he waited for the hounds to clear the trees.

  Big Papa’s powerful and ballasted Schweinjaeger broke first from the grove, its driver looking right and left until he spotted prey up the slope.

  “Rabbit, one o’clock high!” he yelled as other Patriots emerged onto the road.

  Ward took a deep draw from his cigarette, touched it to the fuze on his gas tank, and flipped it downhill as he straddle-walked his vehicle onto the hikers’ trail and started in “low.”

  The hounds, plus bitch, could not head him off at the pass because the field between was clustered with boulders and dense with chaparral. They had to follow him.

  Ward drove slowly along the winding gravel lane. Behind, he heard Big Papa cut in his supercharger and he knew the entire pack had cleared the woods. He glanced back and saw them hit the gravel at a full seventy, driving with superb skill, as he, using the broken-wing technique of a quail, pretended to pick his way along the lane.

  Keeping an eye on them in his rear view mirror, he drove with one hand, loosening the cap on his gas tank and losing another twenty yards in the maneuver. When the leader was a mere thirty yards behind, Ward, in apparent panic, gunned his vehicle forward and hit the banking turn into the feeder ravine at fifty. Out of sight, he coasted, braking to forty for the curving run to the precipice. This speed for this curve at this banking angle had been calculated beforehand. Balancing his machine, he prepared for the trick he could not rehearse.

  He hit the straightaway and threw his feet to the handlebars, guiding with his heels and balancing atop the seat. Ahead, eight feet from the ledge, the truck tire dangled from the knob of the overhanging limb and the opening in the tire seemed no larger than a pinhole as he aimed his right forearm at the aperture and the motorcycle hurtled toward the precipice.

  Braced for an arm-wrenching tug, a shoulder separation, or even death in a possible fall, he jabbed his right arm through the tire and clamped his left hand around his wrist. The rope had slack enough to permit him to run straight before swinging into the arc of the rope and the tire’s resilience absorbed the shock.

  Ward rode his Molotov cocktail over the precipice, but as the machine dropped to the canyon floor to splatter into a mounting ring of fire he was making a lazy half-circle in the sky. On the far side of the oak knoll, he landed on his prepared spot with less shock than he remembered as a parachutist at the Arnheim Drop.

  Holding his tire in the crook of his arm, he watched the mouth of the feeder ravine.

  Whoosh!

  Big Papa came first. His shaft-driven Schweinjaeger shot from the ledge to plummet into the chasm, Little Mama clinging behind. Her platinum hair, flying from under Ward’s azure helmet, reminded him of the wings of a butterfly, fluttering high. Before Big Papa whomped into the brush and rocks below, Arms and Brazos, following, were airborne above their maximum leader. Then in order they came: the Barber, Breeches, Crotch Job, Drain Oil, Lefty, the Loon, Muffler, the Owl, Razor, Sprocket, No Balls, and an unidentified fellow traveler on a green Triumph.

  Some fell with receding screams of terror terminated by the crunch of crushed metal, but the last crunch did not end in silence.

  From forty feet above, Ward heard the harrooom of runaway motors, the wham and whoosh of exploding gasoline tanks, an occasional scream from a reviving survivor, and the crackle of burning brush. He marveled at the adaptability of nature. Chaparral was a scrub conditioned by fire; it burned quickly and it was germinated by flames which broke open its seed pods.

  With the additional gasoline spraying the canyon walls, Ward doubted if he would have to use his conventional Molotov cocktail cached earlier, until he noticed that the rotundity of Arms had let his body roll down the canyon, clear of the flames which were mounting the draw. Arms sat looking groggily at a broken forearm dangling from the elbow he held before him. If Arms revived enough in time to act, he could escape down the canyon.

  Ward rolled the T-shirt, inserted it into the bottle, let it saturate, lighted it, and hurled the lire bomb. Smoke from its wick scrawled a crude series of O’s through the air, such as those from a child’s penmanship exercise, as the bottle arced down the ravine to explode ten yards below the befuddled Arms and ensure him an invitation to the Patriots’ barbecue.

  Looking down on the holocaust, Ward realized the scene would appear gruesome to anyone, other than a Vietnam veteran, who lacked scientific objectivity, but Ward was a veteran of the Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen generation and this was merely a warm-up for another scene he was dreading to watch.

  Because he was a war veteran and a scientist Ward was almost shocked by an improbability.

  As the growl of motors diminished under the crackle of flames, a figure emerged from the pit, climbing hand over hand and dragging a maimed leg behind, grasping at shrubbery, roots, projecting rocks, finding handholds where none should have been. Incredibly, the man was keeping ahead of the fire line. As he climbed upward, Ward recognized behind the dirt and blood the face of the Barber, whose arms apparently held superhuman strength as well as artistry. Even granting that the fire gave him extra impetus, Ward felt the struggle was a tribute to the young man’s survival instinct. The Barber was a sadist, but he was tough.

  As he climbed nearer, Ward heard him crying, “Hellup, hellup,” with a hoarse yelping quality to his voice which gave Ward pause until he identified the correlative sound—the barking of a seal.

  Ward had provided for such a contingency. He hoisted the boulder he had placed under the oak—it was almost as large and fully as round as the Tom Watson watermelons grown on his father’s farm—and set it nearer the edge of the precipice. For a moment he studied the lie of the boulder. The Barber was climbing fifteen yards beneath an overhang which obstructed the roll, but there was another obstruction to the right and below the overhang protecting the climber.

  Ward moved the boulder approximately fourteen centimeters to the right of its original location and waited a moment for the Barber’s climb to bring him to an invisible X Ward drew on the cliff face. Then he shoved the boulder off the ledge.

  As he had calculated, the granite ball caromed off the right ledge and dropped toward the Barber. The Barber’s mouth was open to bellow “Help” when the boulder scored a perfect strike on his head, strangling the cry with his teeth and collapsing jawbone. Probably h
is mandible was driven into his tonsils, but the force of the blow became an academic consideration when the Barber fell backward to join his fellow members of the Orange County Patriots’ Motorcycle Club and Self-immolation Society.

  Ward stood for a moment brushing the dirt off his hands and studying the flames. Confined as it was within the walls of the ravine, the fire could have been extinguished at the moment by a single borate bomber, but it would be an hour before such measure could be taken.

  Ordinarily, Ward detested the fad words of the intelligentsia. Next to “dialogue,” used without reference to the dramatic arts, he disliked the current vogue for “eschatology,” used outside church ritual. Looking down, he felt no regret for the mass suicides; rather, a satisfying awareness of final things, the emotions of eschatology in their true sense.

  Not one of those boys could have made it alone in a competitive economy; they simply were not Establishment material. The only immediate meaning their deaths held for society would not be apparent until the winter rains came to the re-seeded watershed. Above their charred calcium, the tufts of rye grass might grow a little greener.

  Ecologically, Ward felt an abiding sense of accomplishment. Weighed non-contemporaneously, these deaths would benefit all successive generations. A source of pollution had been removed from the flow of evolution.

  Remembering a line from Euripides, Ward quoted it aloud as a requiescat for the Patriots, “Of strong things find you not any as strong as the strings of fate.”

  Those below had eaten of the lotus of violence and each had been foredoomed by his short time-horizon. They had lived on the perilous edge and had dropped over the edge, together. Once each had had a separate rendezvous with death, at midnight on some flaming mattress, at some highway patrol’s disputed barricade; a few would have ended as greasy periods below exclamation points drawn on concrete in burnt rubber. Now Ward, their deus ex machismo, had twisted the strings of their fate into a single knot of brotherhood eternal.