Passing Through the Flame (57 page)

“I’m telling you you’re a free agent, Paul,” Beck said. “You can do what you want. You can spend as much money as you want to. You can succeed or fail. You’re on your own.”

“With a fag leading man who can’t act and wants my body and a pathetic fuck film star!” Paul said angrily. “Some free agent!”

“Those are the parameters,” Beck said. “You can can’t change them, but nothing says you can’t transcend them.”

“That’s heart-warming; that’s really heart-warming!”

Beck’s cock was fully hard now; the tip of it was no more than three inches from Paul’s navel. “It’s the nature of the game, Paul,” he said, running the tip of a finger lightly along the length of his organ. “Believe me, it could be worse.”

He smiled a reptile’s smile that filled Paul with dread, yet at the same time Paul experienced a curious sense of freedom. Fuck you, Jango Beck! Fuck you, fuck this whole project, fuck everyone involved with it! Spend as much money as I want? Do whatever I want? All right, buster, you named it! I’ll show you what a free agent is, I’ll make the movie
I
want to make, and to blue blazes with everything else.

Beck turned slowly, almost pirouetting, circled back to the headboard of the water bed, picked up a phone, turned to face Paul again. “I’m going to call my playmates back again now,” he said. “Care to stay for a little relaxation? I guarantee you, they’re both utterly depraved.”

“You play your games,” Paul answered, “and I’ll play mine.” He backed toward the elevator, pressed the stud in the frame. When the elevator arrived, he nervously stepped into it, and by the time the door slid shut behind him, his armpits were rank with sweat, he was trembling slightly, and there was a sickly fire in his loins.

For a small savage core of him was insisting that since his life had entered unknown waters, since he was boarding his own ship of night, he should have gone all the way, called Beck out, and celebrated his grim new freedom with a sacrament of forbidden flesh.

Frank Bellows took a final drag on his cigarette, dropped the butt, and ground it into the gray, splintery wood of the ranch house porch with the heel of his boot. “Man, I’ve seen squads of shitheads before,” he said, “but nothing like this.”

Chris Sargent peered sourly across the dry brown ranch yard at the latest batch of recruits. There were about twenty of them, sitting on the ground about fifty yards away around two Volkswagen buses, smoking joints and passing around two jugs of cheap red wine. Pulaski had brought this bunch down from Berkeley; when Coleman brought down the San Francisco group, the “revolutionary strike force” would be complete. They were a skanky-looking lot, there was no getting around that, but Pulaski swore up and down that there weren’t any junkies in this bunch, unlike that first mess he had shipped down. You had to draw the line somewhere, even in an operation like this.

“This isn’t the Nam, and these guys aren’t supposed to be turned into combat troops,” Sargent said. “Try to remember that, Bellows.”

“How could I forget it?” Bellows said sarcastically. Sargent half expected him to spit for dramatic emphasis, and once again he congratulated himself on the wisdom of taking Bellows along on this mission. Here on the Bradshaw Ranch, he was a grousing, sullen pain in the ass, but he was firmly under control. Left with the main operation in Mexico, he would be a constant challenger of McCracken’s delegated authority, and if he got a few of the men to side with him, the whole operation could go to pieces. The temptation to take McCracken along as second-in-command here had been great, but it was much more important to leave the Mexican operation firmly in the hands of someone he could turn his back on.

“Let’s go greet the heroes of the people,” Sargent said, walking down the short flight of rickety stairs and across the bare baked earth of the ranch yard. As they neared the group of street rats, Pulaski, who had been leaning against one of the buses, got to his feet, and a few of the recruits followed his lead. Most of them, though, sat there smoking their free dope and looking sullen. The thought of leaving guns in the hands of this crew for any length of time made the back of Sargent’s neck itch. These dudes looked as if they would frag their own grandmothers just to relieve an hour’s boredom.

Sargent stopped about ten feet away from the nearest men. Bellows positioned himself to Sargent’s right and a half-step to the rear. “On your feet!” Bellows barked, in a fair imitation of a lifer sergeant.

Another dozen or so of the recruits stood up. Five guys were still sitting there defiantly, sucking on joints and engaging in a staring contest with Bellows.

“What the fuck is this, the Army?” grunted a red-eyed longhair with five days’ growth of black beard.

“Anybody who doesn’t like the way this outfit is run can walk out of here,” Sargent said. “Anyone who doesn’t like the way this outfit is run and won’t walk out of here will be carried out of here.”

Sullenly, the five remaining men got to their feet.

“That’s better,” Sargent said. “My name is Chris, and I’m running this show. To answer your question, no, this isn’t the Army, and it’s not going to be run like the Army. There will be no Mickey Mouse. There will be no ranks. There will be no saluting. However, this outfit
will be
run tightly. You will notice that myself, Pulaski, and Bellows here are wearing army shirts with corporal’s stripes. This does not mean that we are corporals. It does, however, mean that you will follow our orders. You will follow the orders of anyone wearing such a shirt. In time, perhaps some of you will be issued corporal’s shirts.”

“Hey, this dude is talking like a pig,” someone shouted. “What kind of revolution is this?”

“Right on!”

Sargent remained silent and let them grouse and curse and threaten for a good two minutes. This group was typical of the material he had to work with; a little better, since supposedly the junkies had already been weeded out.

He now had about a hundred and twenty recruits, and Coleman’s final batch would put it at about a hundred and sixty. Each group received a week’s training—such as it was—and was then dispersed. Two days before the festival began, the whole force would be assembled together for the first time for final briefing and coordination training. If we start with a hundred and sixty, we’ll probably be down to about a hundred and twenty by then. The rest will evaporate. We may have to make some of them evaporate.

The men muttered and talked among themselves and shuffled their feet, waiting for Sargent to say something, to take up the challenge, to try to assert authority so that they could dispute it. Sargent stood silent and immobile until the talking died away into confusion, until all eyes were on him, waiting for him to speak, to break the silent tension.

“I hope you’ve made the point to yourselves,” he finally said. “Which is that no revolution, no military action, can proceed without some kind of leadership. Without leadership, you could stand here jerking yourselves off all day, and nothing would happen. Now is there anyone left here who thinks we can accomplish our objective without leadership? If so, he had better get his ass out of here right now.”

No one moved or spoke.

“Very well,” Sargent continued, “you all know why you’re here. We are going to seize control of Sunset City, and we are going to do it with a coordinated plan, the details of which will not be revealed to you until forty-eight hours before the festival begins, for obvious security reasons. You will receive one week’s training here, starting today. You will then be dispersed to pads throughout Los Angeles, where you will be kept fed and stoned until you are recalled here. You’ll have to get laid on your own. Are there any questions, before I turn you over to my associate, Frank Bellows, who will attempt to turn you into some semblance of a strike force?”

“Yeah, what about guns?”

“Right on!”

“When do we get our guns?”

Now
there
was a ticklish question, one that Sargent hadn’t settled in his own mind. To arm a hundred and sixty crazies like these with pieces and then turn them loose at a rock festival would be a guarantee of disaster. The force that took the stage would have to have M-16’s, but he had already decided that that force would consist of himself and his Green Mountain Boys, with only secondary support by recruits. Obviously some of the diversionary forces would have to be armed, but no more than one man out of three, and only with cheap pistols with a limited supply of ammunition. And
definitely
only at the last minute.

“You will be armed forty-eight hours before the festival,” Sargent said, leaving the question of armed with
what
ambiguous. “However, all of you will receive training with pistols before you leave here, and you will be taught some elementary karate blows.” He grinned at them wolfishly. “Nothing fancy, just enough to enable you to protect yourself in a mob scene and kill a pig with your bare hands if you have to.”

“Right on!”

“Yeah, man!”

Sargent laughed as the sullenness evaporated, at least for the moment, into a little shouting, fist waving, and dumb-ass bravado. Christ, you’d have to be out of your tree to give these characters serious weapons. Gun fodder is about all they’re going to be good for.

Fortunately, that’s all that they’re going to have to be good for.

Feeling loose and easy, Barry Stein tooled his Karmann Ghia off the freeway and up into the barren semidesert foothills of the San Bernandino Mountains. The sun was high, the sky was a brilliant Southern California blue, the Sunset City action was rolling along in high gear, and the girl beside him was rosy with the sweat of their first ball together. It was like his favorite fantasy out of one of those Yugoslav resistance movies: the guerrilla leader going up into the mountains with his partisan lover to meet the troops.

Ruby Berger smiled at him, a good tough smile, maybe even a little frightening. There was something nice about being with a woman who you had suddenly found could scare you a little, who came at you, if not from out of nowhere, at least with a sudden rush. It reminded you that sudden change was really still possible; it seemed a good omen for the Sunset City coup.

They had been having a Revolutionary Action Committee meeting in Stein’s crumbly old house in Topanga Canyon. The house was a five-room single-story affair built around the big central double room, an eat-in kitchen linked to the living room by an open archway. All the other rooms were odd-shaped wings added to this central T at different times by different owners, so that the whole house was a series of expansions of the original basic wooden shack. Perhaps because the big double room was both the historical and architectural core of the house, people gravitated toward it, and the three of them soon ended up rapping around the varnished picnic table in the center of the kitchen over cigarettes, joints, and cups of instant coffee.

Ivan was in an expansive mood even for him; he was looking forward to his moment in the spotlight with an upfront throbbing ego, and he was doing everything he could to ensure that the spotlight would be as bright as possible for his moment of glory. He had leaked vague mutterings to
Time
,
Newsweek,
and the AP that something really newsworthy was going to happen at Sunset City, so that there would at least be heavy coverage by the print media, even if there was no way around Beck’s ironclad ban on television news teams. Pacifica Radio would be taping what went on during the seizure of the festival—no way Beck could manage to keep out simple cassette recordings—and they had agreed to let their tapes be used for general release as soon as they had aired them.

“All we have to do is hold our ground for a day,” Ivan said, waving his hands and blowing pot smoke. “Beck won’t be able to hide what’s going on; the whole country will know that Sunset City has been seized as a liberated zone, that it isn’t just a riot at a rock festival. We’ll have enough public opinion mobilized behind us so that they won’t dare send in the National Guard. They’ll have to go through the courts, and Owen can stall them around until we raise the money to buy the property we’re squatting on.”

“We could sell posters to raise the money,” Ruby said. “Big pictures of you in a skintight Uncle Sam suit jacking off onto a full-length mirror.”

“I’ll autograph the first one to you, Ruby,” Ivan said sweetly. “You can roll it up into a dildo and think of me when you relieve your frustrations.”

“Can we save our hostilities for the enemy?” Stein said tiredly. They’ve been going at each other since this whole thing started, he thought. Maybe they should just have a grudge fuck and get it over with.

“I’m sorry, Barry,” Ruby said. “I know this whole media trip is necessary, and I know Ivan is the only one we have who can pull it off. But I just wish he didn’t enjoy playing superhero so much. It’s a gross male chauvinist trip, it’s what we’re fighting against, and here we are using it, and him digging it.”

“Would it make you feel better if I pretended it was a drag?” Ivan said. “If I bitched and moaned about what a noble sacrifice I was making, how displaying my ego offended my revolutionary consciousness?”

“I’d throw up,” Ruby said.

“Well, there you are. I am what I am, and I’m not bullshitting you about it.”

“You’ve made your point,” Ruby said sourly.

“Let’s stop being so negative,” Stein said. “Ivan’s got his end of things going well, and you’ve done a great job lining up Movement support and keeping so many different groups hanging together.”

“You’re
the one that’s holding things together, Barry,” Ruby said, her assertive voice as close to softness as it ever got. “You promoted us the Bradshaw Ranch, you’re the guy that’s trusted by the Movement groups that don’t trust each other, and you’re the guy that keeps Ivan and me from killing each other.”

She looked at Stein with frank admiration, and in that moment, she suddenly seemed more attractive to him, bathed in feedback from his own ego. Her squarish face looked strong, rather than unfeminine, and he noticed that her lips were in fact full, even sensual. She may not be particularly good-looking, but she’s a heavy woman, and she thinks
I’m
heavy. That thought did not displease him.