The Kill Riff (6 page)

    

    

    "Most people, I think, believe if they stay flush during a given business year, then nobody really gives a good goddamn what the unemployment stats are or aren't," Burt had said. "Not if they're working. And honest. So, what of the unemployed? Who the hell are they? A lot of nerds who believed that college would hand them a career. Ex-housewives, seeking life beyond marriage. Ditch-digger types. Peter principle dummies who were shocked when somebody wised up and laid them off. Career industrial workers who find it beyond their capacity to believe that there is no longer a need for what they've been doing for forty years straight. A vast workpool has been driven to welfare, unemployment, loss of dignity. Now, consider this in light of the current administration."

    
Uh-oh,
Lucas thought. Burt rarely refused an opportunity to pontificate on matters political. Time to grit the teeth.

    "It's so big, so obvious, that no one sees it. A huge number of the unemployed are unskilled, urban minorities and poor white trash. They're on TV every time some politicians or celebrities do a fund-raiser, like that Hands Across America thing. 'Give us jobs, not food,' they say. And what happens when they get frustrated enough at not having jobs?"

    Lucas took the bait. There was no other way out. He was not normally a political person. "They liberate a few K-Marts, break bank windows, open fire hydrants, and kill a cop or two."

    "And the government is sitting back with folded hands, waiting for that day, waiting for the riots to commence. Because when they do, the Guard can be rolled in with plenty of justification. In one fell swoop, our urban centers can be put under martial law. That freezes the country. Without the connection between the cities and the manufacturing locuses, we're pretty goddamn helpless, aren't we? Then we'll just have to wait for our orders."

    During his tour, Lucas had spent several days in Qui Nhon, watching the aluminum capsules full of dead Americans come and go. Waiting for orders. It was not pleasant. The orders were too long in coming.

    "I almost said that was pretty farfetched, Burt. But then I stopped and thought about it. Nuts. But not so nuts."

    "You're dealing here with major-league lunatics. Guys for whom wars are fiscal solutions, manufactured to pull us out of equally manufactured economic 'depressions.' They're locked into the 1940s and can't escape. They hew to this good-guy-versus-bad-guy mentality, and if they point their fingers at their chosen bad guys long enough, with enough propaganda, they'll find they've got a whole country full of unemployed, largely illiterate cannon fodder-people who are just pissed and frustrated and emasculated enough to go for a violent cure-all."

    "I never pegged you as a sociologist."

    "I dropped out of college, remember? By the time the idiots in business administration had their degrees, I had a business."

    "And you were hurting." Burt's dedication had ultimately reversed that snag, however. "Maybe violence is the only solution-sometimes. Not TV violence; not a baseball bat in the face as a responsible editorial reply, not a contest of firepower and escalation. I mean violence as a final, horrible last resort. When no avenue yields satisfaction. When the drones and robots and nine-to-five mannequins lurch through one more day of colorless life by fucking you over."

    "Aha-go bomb the phone company. Bomb the phone company of your choice, that is." Burt laughed. "But who's to judge? Who decides?"

    "You do, when you know it in your heart. Can you buy something as nebulous as that?"

    "Depends. Maybe Rambo knew in his heart that he was right. If so, we're all in deep shit. You're a romantic, Lucas. That's not a slur; Jefferson, Franklin, Adams-those guys were all romantics. Idealists. So what the hell are you, a romantic, doing in the publicity business?"

    They paused, then recited the joke's answer in chorus: "Making a living, boy!" Commercial irony at its finest.

    "Those masonite doors on my office closet?" said Burt. "I always get masonite, so I can continue punching in the doors without breaking my hand when I get angry. I get angry a lot these days. I rarely try to check it anymore. It's a steam valve."

    "It's therapeutic," said Lucas.

    "Fucking-A. Vent thy anger,
O mad one
."

    "The shrinks have reversed themselves on that one, too. Now they say venting your anger does no good. That while you do express it by, say, punching your door, you never actually rid yourself of it. Which was what punching the door was supposed to have achieved in the first place. The anger stays with you, always. Kind of like herpes. Once you've got it, you've got it."

    "Are you telling me that you aren't cured?" Were they not friends, Burt would not have pushed it this far. "Do you hold that kind of anger inside? About Kristen, I mean."

    "Sure, I'm still angry. Useless death should anger any sane man. Cory took a ride on a big red roller coaster and fell off. She knew what she was doing, and did it to 'get' me. And it worked. Case closed. Kristen's death was… insane. Five hundred police there, and they were totally impotent. In an evening's entertainment, thirteen people get trampled to death. Thousands are bruised, lacerated, bloodied, their bones broken. The band is called Whip Hand. Yet nobody anticipates the break point between stage violence-which is sanitized, like TV fight scenes-and the real thing. What's the difference between a disaster like that and the riot mentality you predict, Burt? No, I haven't lost that anger. You never lose it. You deaden it, anesthetize it. We have to take refuge in knowing we're right. In your heart, like I said."

    "The ancient Christians felt the same way," said Burt. "A lot of folks with fish on their chests got eaten by lions. But even they got pissed off enough to lash out, the way Billy Budd did. Pow. The end."

    
Pow.

    

    

    Lucas reached into the cooler on the Bronco's suicide seat and cracked open a can of cold Pepsi. He nestled the can in his crotch as he drove. He was thinking of Buddy Holly.

    Holly had gotten chastised by the descendants of those Christians Burt had cited, for playing the devil's music, inciting young people to lewdness. Then came
Elvis the Pelvis
. God, how Presley had hated that epithet! They framed him from the waist down on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, so that the children of America would not be possessed by sexual demons. Black performers were a hideous racial threat to the same minds. Janis Joplin unveiled a lesbian bent… bye-bye, Janis. The music of the Doors had been on Lucas's stereo throughout Kristen's infancy. Then Jim Morrison shouted
"Ain't anybody out there gonna love my ass"
in Miami one preternaturally black night, and they busted him for dropping trou. Then Alice Cooper (AKA Vincenti Somebody-or-other in real life) cavorted with his snakes, hissed his lyrics about fucking the dead, was hung and decapitated onstage. This was after Black Sabbath had every pulpit pounder in the country up in arms. Ten years after Alice, good old Ozzy Osbourne took the rap for chomping the head off a dove. Gene Simmons of Kiss spit forth blood and fire. The sonic assault of punk juggernauted in and offended everyone. Explosions, raw butcher-shop entrails, skanking and slam dancing, and anything that could get a rise out of an increasingly jaded audience were dutifully noted by the watchers with unblinking lizard eyes. The kids didn't see the threat. All they saw were new invocations, new congregations, good clean fun, the music, with trappings that were an E-ticket attraction, a slide ride fraught with lots of disposable badness and terror. But Holly and Presley, Joplin and Morrison, and Keith Moon and John Bonham and Bon Scott and Sid Vicious were dead, dead for real. The audiences did not seem to understand that part. Kristen was dead. For real. To them it had all been part of the stage show. Another cheap thrill, another special effect. To read the hideously bland articles in the newspapers was to go oh, wow… and feel nothing.

    Lucas enjoyed the music. He preferred it loud. But the boom-box audio network wired throughout the cabin shell of the Bronco was silent as the vehicle gorged itself on the highway. It was not the music that fueled the anger inside him.

    Whip Hand's stylishly dangerous reputation was as pointed as a live grenade. It had preceded the band to the Civic Auditorium by months. Any moron could have seen disaster coming, if a mote of attention had been paid. And that was the problem: the shakers putting on this concert were not morons. They were consummate businessmen who knew that the profit margin for a party band like Whip Hand was in direct ratio to the number of warm bodies that could be packed into the arena. A standing-room-only floor would prove lucrative. Reserved seating alone would not have netted the promoters a sell-out show. Too boring; not enough window for action. Festival seating offered a fatter turnover. Just open the main floor to whoever can get there first, and they'll line up a hundred deep for the chance to rush the stage. Until the accident with Whip Hand, festival seating had been economical. Two dozen similar accidents spanned the country, but it took an even bigger name band-the Who-to nearly shut down the phenomenon entirely. When eleven concertgoers were crushed to death in Cincinnati, festival seating became a pariah gambit. The promoters could comprehend bad publicity, even as Lucas was sensitized to it by his occupation. To cover asses and provide the illusion of social responsibility, festival seating was banned. For a while, until the furor dissipated. But money talked; you could never shut it up for very long, and already selected events were backsliding. Now they called it "dance concert" seating.

    Lucas raced the sun along the coastline, into twilight. There had been no victory. More people would get killed. The anger never really left you.

    Then had come the toe-parade of Whip Hand's attorneys and the inevitable settlement offer. And the schmuck, Woodberry-or-Washburn, whatever his name had been.

    "I'm sure, Mr. Ellington, that you can appreciate the fact that the individual members of Whip Hand cannot in any way be considered culpable for this horrible tragedy." He was ten years Lucas's junior. His suit was dark blue, in accordance with Dress for Success. There was bogus sympathy in his dead eyes. "Off the record, I hate this… this sterile write-off whenever someone… uh, loses their life."

    "You talk like this happens all the time," Lucas said. He was not looking at Woodberry-or-Washburn and had said it through clenched teeth.

    "I have a daughter." He said it as though leaking a state secret.

    "How old?"

    "Sixteen months. Nevertheless, I hate to think-"

    "Think what you like, Mr… whatever." Lucas's convictions were as unstoppable as the tides of the ocean. "The real reason you are cluttering up my office today is not because you feel simpatico in the matter of my dead daughter. You are here in a misguided attempt to prevent me from appealing my case, because it would inconvenience you. You have come to offer me a financial incentive persuant to my withdrawal." He warred with something inside himself, almost won, and continued. "I am quite close, as we speak, to shoving those stupid designer wire rims up your ass, folded double." Lucas had already unnerved Woodberry-or-Washburn with his icy manner, and now that things were thawing the younger man got flustered and scrambled to save face.

    "Really, Mr. Ellington, I don't see how threats…" He detested dealing with such emotional nincompoops. He resented the amount he had been authorized to offer Lucas. It was obscenely high. "In the matter of compensation, my clients-"

    Lucas stood bolt upright behind his desk. His chair was propelled violently backward and crashed into the wall. All commotion in the outer office ceased. His hands gripped the lip of the desk whitely.

    The lawyer jumped up involuntarily, fumbling his briefcase and nearly falling over the divan behind him. Papers scattered like huge snowflakes across the floor. His face was red. There was raw sweat on his upper lip.

    "My buddy Ace, the Legal Chickenhawk, was kicking the shit out of recalcitrant insurance companies when you were still pissing your didies. Rolff got meaner with age. You just got stupider. Rolff has advised me not to appeal for reasons that seem sane to me. I have no use for your filthy fucking money. It has my daughter's blood on it. But Rolff is going to cost you guys more than you can comprehend. Much more than your prepared ceiling. And that's fine with me, too. Now get your ass out of my office before I spoil your promising young career."

    Exit the schmuck.

    Woodberry-or-Washburn never heard Lucas repeat the single word to himself: "Compensation."

    

    

    Now Lucas was rolling up fast on a laggard Datsun long-bed pickup with a racy camper shell. He let it grow in his windshield. Montana plates, a CB whip antenna dawdling in the slipstream of air. It was laden with camping gear, straining along. The tailgate was brown with road dirt. Lucas blinked his headlights once, then blew past at a hundred per. They ate his dust, not blinking back. He thought he saw the driver give him the finger in the purple dusk.

    He had purchased the Bronco outright, for cash on the tabletop. Fully equipped, winch and all. There was cash to burn. So much for the rioting minorities Burt had droned on about. Locally, it was a fat time. Nothing else mattered. He could loan money to friends in need. Wasn't that one of the purposes of life, to keep one's friends from harm?

    Yeah, and wasn't another purpose of life to destroy one's enemies? After staying fed and paying the rent? And seeking out beauty in the world? Even if one was called a romantic by a Visigoth like Burt Kroeger?

    The Datsun dwindled in the semidarkness, shrinking to twin dots of light in the rearview.