Songs_of_the_Satyrs

by Aaron J. French

  “So you want me to call you Pan, then? Really?”

  “That is the name I was given, so yes.”

  “Well then, Pan, you can call me Keith.”

  Keith felt warm and calm; the bed felt soft underneath; the blanket, heavy on top of him. The fire whisked at the chill in the air with dark orange flames, comforting in their mild heat.

  Pan smiled at him from across the shack, then turned and pulled out a small velvet bag from a cabinet next to the fireplace. When he turned around Keith could not hold back a small laugh. From the bag, Pan produced a set of old wooden pipes.

  “Well you certainly look the part now, I can’t argue with that.”

  Bringing the pipes to his lips Pan began to softly play a song that penetrated every molecule of Keith’s body. The small shack swooned around him, the world slowly turning on an axis centered over his heart. Everything focused on his chest, every bit of every thing tied to his core. A giddy laugh slipped from his lips, flesh tingled, hair stood on end, and Keith drifted down into a deep sleep, knowing it was indeed Pan playing this music of the ages for him.

  Putting his pipes away, Pan looked down into the fire. It was perhaps the last time he would play his beloved music. The chatter of birds across the roof was joined by the clatter of small hooves on his porch. Wildlife, sparse as it was this high in the cold mountains, had come to his song—as they had come for millennia.

  Tossing one last log on the fire to hold over until morning, now just a few hours away, Pan settled down into his straw bed in the corner of his final home.

  Tomorrow he would tell his story. Then he would be free.

  ***

  Keith woke to the smell of baking bread. Pan was nowhere to be seen, and he wondered if last night had in fact been some twisted dream. That smell just under the sweet baking bread, the faint animalistic scent, told him it might’ve been real. But when the ancient god clomped into the shack with a load of firewood, there could be no more question about the reality of the situation.

  “Good morning, Keith. I trust you slept well? How’s your head?”

  Keith felt his scalp bit by bit under his shaggy black hair, exaggerating the movements. “I feel great.” He stood and stretched, then dug in his bag for his notebook and mini-recorder. “When shall we start the interview?”

  “Relax. Although time is of the essence, we do have enough to enjoy some bread and coffee first.” Pan dropped the firewood, brushed his hands on the coarse hair of his legs, and pulled a dark loaf of leavened bread from a cubby above the hearth. “Fine by you?”

  “That looks wonderful, and coffee sounds great, yes. I’m just going to set everything up.”

  “As you wish.”

  They shared the warm bread—a fine loaf with dates and thick crust—and the dark, aromatic coffee. Pan stoked the fire and Keith tested his recorder as snow-laced wind kicked against the windows.

  “I’ll be recording everything and taking notes as needed.” He depressed the record button on his mini-recorder and leaned toward it. “Somewhere in the mountains east of Keshem, Afghanistan, I’m speaking to Pan, the Greek god. He is approximately six feet tall, with dark wiry hair. Two horns, smaller than those depicted throughout the ages. And his lower half is that of a goat. Pan has called me here to tell a story, one he insists humanity must hear.” Keith looked up. “Does that about cover it?”

  “Yes, it does, thank you.” Pan smiled, and Keith returned the gesture.

  “Okay, I’m ready when you are.”

  “Then we begin. You’re familiar with the three-day festival that occurred in New York State in 1969, Woodstock, correct?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I was there. It was supposed to be about peace and love, two things that are important to me, as you may know.” Pan sat down across from Keith. “It turned out the brown acid was not as bad as they had said. It was Andrew Allison that was the bad trip.

  “The sixties saw the creation of a more independent woman, and from that independence a whole cultural movement was born. By the time August of nineteen sixty-nine had arrived gender, race, religion, income, power, or sexual preference didn’t matter anymore. From the Port Huron Statement to Tim Leary preaching ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out,’ the arc of change in consciousness and connectedness was astounding. The rampant bourgeois hyper-consumerism, repressive thinking, traditional outlooks, and growing rifts between the haves and have-nots were becoming a thing of the past. Revolution was happening, and individual empowerment bringing forth a truly humane, human culture was underway.”

  Pan got up from the table and poked the fire with a long iron rod. Sparks flushed up the chimney. “But listen to me. I sound like some sentimental fool waxing about the good old days.”

  “I brought plenty of tapes.”

  Pan nodded and took his seat again.

  “So anyway, there I was on Saturday, somewhere between Sly and the Family Stone and The Who—incidentally, I still don’t understand why either band was at Woodstock. But let’s not digress.

  “Taking a break from people-watching, I ran into our friend Andrew Allison. Old Andy was considered a square in the parlance of the times, someone who couldn’t get his mind outside the box society had put him in. What mattered most to him, in order, were his car, the career waiting for him at his father’s law firm once he passed the New York bar exam the following spring, and the 3.8 million dollars he knew he would inherit after his grandmother passed away. She was on the way out too; it would be a matter of weeks, maybe days, before she succumbed to the brain tumor that had turned her into a blathering idiot.”

  “Did you know Mr. Allison before Woodstock?”

  “I knew his type. The sixties in America was my time in the New World, you might say. Men like Andrew were projects of mine, they needed to be of the time, not just pass through it unchanged.” That Pan felt some kind of emotional tie to this Andrew Allison was not lost on Keith.

  “You might be wondering what a guy like Andy was doing at Woodstock. So was I that fine summer evening. It wasn’t the music or the revolution. It was one thing and one thing only that brought him to that field in upstate New York. Same thing that makes men do damn near everything from wage wars to earn wages. God’s gift to Man. I love some of the names you’ve come up with over the years: furburger, cooter, muff, the old pink taco. Whatever men want to call it, pussy is the great manipulator. When you look up the definition of manipulate, your dictionaries say ‘to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one’s purpose.’ Do you know of any women out there who can say they’ve never used their pussy in an artful or unfair way to get something they wanted?”

  “Not personally, no.” Keith shared a laugh with his host, like two regular guys talking in a bar.

  “Where was I?”

  “You were talking about Andrew.”

  “Yes. Andy at Woodstock was as out of place as tits on a turtle, as they say. Now isn’t the English language a beautiful thing? I mean, it can be so descriptive. For communicating what is going on in a person’s heart or mind, I don’t think there has ever been a better language. There I go again. I’m a bit preoccupied these days . . .”

  Keith leaned into the recorder. “I should add that, earlier, Pan mentioned being hunted and that his time is growing short.”

  “Yes, but back to the story you came to hear. With his close-cropped hair, well-defined muscles, and bright white teeth, Andy was better suited for the polo field than Yasgur’s back forty. But Misoula Robinson was a hard thing to talk out of an idea. See, Misoula was a tall, dark, and very sexy waitress at a jazz club Andy frequented. Most of the regulars and employees at Parlay’s Lounge thought Andy was a narc, but Misoula hadn’t judged him. At first he didn’t give her a second look. She was a negro after all and for some reason Americans thought very poorly of blacks. If only you humans had known back then that you all came from the same stock, if you traced it back far enough.

  “Misoula was drawn to Andy, went out of
her way to get his attention, and eventually she started to worm her way into his head. She was as forbidden as that apple Eve plucked down in the garden, maybe even more so if Andy wanted to keep his name and birthright of wealth and power. Eve ended up in a pretty bad place after all, right?

  “A few heavy-petting rounds in the alley behind Parlay’s, followed by late-night rendezvous in her fifth-floor apartment in the Village. Andy tried pot for the first time, drank gallons of Mateus, and watched Misoula’s hips sway as Miles ran the voodoo down. I love Miles’s music, it is similar to mine. Very similar.

  “The exotic smell of her sweat . . . and her dark foreign skin. She was enchanting. When Misoula said Andy should drive her and two of her friends upstate for that hippie music festival, there was no way he could say no.

  “So flash forward to Saturday. Our good friend Andrew was three hits into his first acid experience, loving every psychedelic minute. Released from the pressures of his family, Andy was cutting loose. Misoula was happy to see her white buck following her down the path of enlightenment. Despite her airs of free thinking, sex, and society, she had a drive deep inside her to make something of herself.”

  Pan stood up and paced across the small shack several times before continuing.

  “As our players assembled in a small grassy field beyond the stages and crowds, an idea started to form in my head. What if these were the new children of Eden? What if, with a little help from their friends, as old Joe sang, a real change could start right there?”

  Keith interjected, “The sexual revolution was long underway. What else were you interested in?”

  “Love, man! It isn’t just about sex with me. Humans always think it is, but really I’m all about love. Love for yourselves, for those around you, for the world you inhabit.” Pan’s ears twitched and a big smile crossed his face. “So there I am watching Misoula and her two friends, Karen and Selma, and the man of the hour, Andrew Allison. For once in a long while I have a little faith in what a few kids like them could achieve. So I start playing my song and sure enough those kids start stripping off what few clothes they were wearing to dance among the cattails and high grass. The night animals circled the field, as they often do when I play my song, and joined in the festivities. It had been a long time since I found enough motivation to play my music. I was on fire that night.

  “Fornication wasn’t my idea, but it sure was what my music was meant for. Man, woman, beast, they all engaged in the procreation of their kind, with my tune as the rhythm behind their hips. I was caught up in it as much as anyone else, tail twitching in time to their undulating hips, breath blowing hot over sweet Syrinx.”

  Pan glanced over to where his pipes were stored. “I never noticed him in that field, that badass motherfucker who had something else in mind. When that old slanderer got an idea in his head there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.” He looked around his small shack seeming to wish for someplace to go. “I thought I was kin, but in my heart I knew I was no kin of his; he had used me before. Sure, you stupid humans confused me for him all the time . . .”

  “It’s the horns,” Keith said, rubbing his own scalp.

  “The horns.” Pan leaned over and grabbed the two curled horns perched above his ears. “So I have horns and that subterranean cocksucker has horns too. That doesn’t mean we’re related, you dig?” His nostrils flared with a huff, and he stopped to collect himself before continuing.

  “There I was getting down when Satariel started laying down his own unrighteous groove. Let me tell you, when Mr. Cifer gets rolling, stand back. He’s one bad mamma jamma. My dream dissolved and his took over from there. Karen and Selma didn’t pick up his intentions right away, but Misoula and Andy did. I saw it in their eyes, glowing like some irresistible fire.” Pan leaned onto the table, close to the recorder, and Keith leaned away from him.

  Pan was seething, but there was something else too.

  Keith wrote down one word: guilt.

  Pan leaned back and closed his eyes. “That was how it all started. My intentions weren’t for the whole damn planet to go off the fucking reservation, man. I wanted that love, that groove, that last chance boulevard to become their chosen path. I felt like the Bard’s Hamlet in that field, watching those four kids pick up what that deceiver was laying down. Alas, poor Humans! I knew them, Horatio.”

  Pan sprang out of his chair. “I may have let the boogey man in, but those four invited him to sit down and stay a while. And so he did. But you already know that, don’t you? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You ask all the time, how did it happen? Where was the wrong turn that ended in the fucked-up world you’re living in now? Killing yourselves with your proud looks and lying tongues, hearts devising wicked plots as fast as your feet run into mischief. Hell, you know the rest of those seven deadlies, and you know how they weigh on every one of you forsaken sheep.

  “I’ve been watching the whole damn world go right down the drain. That world I love so much, all the creatures great and small, all the lovely plants, and all those fantastical creations you dismissed as fable, those were the first to go, as blind greed and lust stole your imagination.”

  “So, are you blaming yourself for letting . . . well, I assume you’re talking about Satan, right? For letting Satan take control of humanity?”

  Pan was silent a long time.

  Keith couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The half goat, half man Greek god of antiquity was taking the blame for turning humanity into a bunch of self-righteous, greedy murderers.

  “Those four kids sucked up every last drop of the Angry Man’s song, hook, line, and sinker, as they say. The rest is your history, the reason you’re all in the predicament you’re in.”

  “But how can four people have caused all the problems which have been visited upon humanity since the summer of 1969?”

  “They weren’t just four regular people after that night, don’t you get it? They were sycophants, toadies, minions of the devil, fucking kiss-asses to the universe’s biggest asshole. When Satan is driving the tour bus, you’re a fucking rock star. Anything can happen.

  “So those kids, led by Andrew Allison, fueled by the devil himself, and initially funded by Andy’s 3.8 million dollars bequeathed to him by his dead grandmother, changed the course of America. And we all know: as America goes, so goes the world.”

  Pan had a wild look in his eyes, and for the first time Keith was sure about the creature’s identity.

  “Those kids left Woodstock before the moon set that night and the screws began to turn. The girls worked on pushing babies out, little incarnated spawns of the devil, and sired some of the most successful land developers, bankers, lawyers, ad men, and corporate executives the world has ever seen. Thirteen total, when all was said and done, and no I’m not going to tell you their names.”

  “What do you mean you’re not going to tell me the names?” Keith leaned forward and clicked off the recorder. “Without names how can you expect me to check up on anything?”

  “Without the names, Keith, you’ll be protected. Just tell the story, that will be enough. You can guess who those rotten spawn are anyway, and so will those who read this story.”

  “And then what, Pan? What do you think will happen?” Keith stood up.

  “We’ll get to that later. Turn that thing back on please.”

  Keith set the tape in motion again.

  Pan nodded and continued.

  “While all this was going down, Andrew was investing and making millions, funding weapon manufacturing, despots and madmen, medical and pharmaceutical research—you know those pills baby boomers are popping like candy to make it through the day for whatever ailment du jour? You can thank Andy for them.

  “He had all those big-time icons of the age off’d too: Hendrix, Joplin, Lennon, Elvis, Morrison, the list goes on and on. It was all part of the plan that started when the Deceiver laid hands on that loon who orchestrated the Tate and LaBianca murders. See, that rat bastard had though
t old Charlie was going to be his son to walk the earth. But crazy is as crazy does. Charlie got the ball rolling against the whole revolutionary movement with those killings in California, and as Andy worked his possessed wonders on the icons of that era the dream faded faster than a sheet in the sun.”

  Keith had to hold back a laugh: it sounded ludicrous.

  Pan settled down into his straw bed and let out a sigh. He looked like a tired old animal, laying down for the last time. When he glanced up at Keith, his eyes were distant. “Here is the thing though, man, are you ready? Are you really sure you can handle this?”

  “That’s why I came, to hear this story.”

  “I may have started the party, but Satan’s plan never would have worked if dang near every last one of you hadn’t wanted it to work. If you hadn’t had that seed of greed and lust growing in your guts, the world would be a different place. If you had managed to really, truly give a shit about your environment, about the resources given to you, about your fellow fucking man, that rat bastard’s plan never would have worked. Andy and his long line of progeny and partners would’ve just been another group of assholes in the history of mankind.”

  Pan leaned forward, his face twisted into a mask of distress.

  “That’s the thing with the devil. He knows just what to serve up, just the right ingredients to make you belly up to the chow line and eat his shit. You’re here though. Maybe you’re the one who can bring this whole ship back around a hundred and eighty degrees.”

  “I’m just a reporter, Pan, a journalist. Not a revolutionary. And to be honest, I don’t think people want to change. Is there anything happening right now that is all that bad or all that new?”

  “Oh it’s happening, Keith, and it is getting worse. I have to have faith in Man, now more than ever. My time is almost up and we’re getting close to the end of the story. Don’t leave me wishing I had done more. I can’t have that be my last thought.”

  “They don’t have faith in you anymore. You’re just a myth, an old dusty story.”