Skeletons (36 page)

For a startled moment when I looked at the bed, I saw
Reesa's
form lying there, but actually all that lay on the blood-dried sheets was dust, hers and the baby's.

I walked to the bed, bundled the sheets up, and carried them downstairs with me.

When I passed the wolf, he kept a discreet distance behind me, following me to the top of a hill overlooking the silver distance and the town behind me.

I opened the sheets and let the dust fly out into the dark, lonely, beautiful night.

"This night belongs to you,
Reesa
and my child," I said.

The dust rose up on the light wind, spread, and settled to the earth. If I closed my eyes, I could see
Reesa
and my growing son standing silver in the moonlight, smiling at me. When I opened my eyes, they were gone, but in my heart they were still there, would always be there.

Suddenly a kind of burden lifted from me. For the first time I saw that
Reesa
had been right. Those other masks I had worn had not been masks at all, but lives. I had been
Jayavaram
, and Ho
Vei
, and
Mongkut
, and Peter Sun, and even George Wong. I had been all of them, and all of them had been me. I was who I was, and not a series of play-actor's masks. If I had been a patriot, and assassin, and student and peace activist, and even a murderer, that was who I was. The names were all me.

For the first time in my life I knew who I was.

"I am
Kral
Kishkin
," I said to the night, which was now
Reesa
and my child. "That is who I am. I will not forget, and I will not flinch. I will follow the road that is laid before me, and always I will remember you, and always I will remember what I am. You gave this to me. You gave me myself."

Suddenly, so strongly that I had to close my eyes, the vision of the coffee-skinned girl walking toward me through a field arose before me. Ever east she beckoned me, and she opened her mouth to speak

And then the vision was gone.

The silver night stood silent and perfect around me. Jack came to stand beside me, and let me bury my hand in his coat.

"It's time for us to go," I said.

We walked down from that hill to the cottage at the edge of the village, and at that moment, in the silvery cold night, with the wolf named Jack curled asleep in the seat behind me, I kicked the snow track into life, and left that place behind, and headed east.

The Great fu-
ing
White North.

I mean, I've been in better places. Anywhere else, in fact. The forest is something you look at, and piss in, before you go back to the real world. I mean, I'm all for saving the wilds. Why not? They're not good for anything else, right? I remember a Vomits song we were working on for a while, went something like:

Green stuff

Can't get enough (of that)

Green stuff

I love grass (and that)

Green stuff . . .

'Course, we weren't talking about Sierra Club—type nature, per se, but what the hell.

And speaking of
hell
it hasn't been
all
that, since Bobbie baby was smart enough to bring along the mobile studio. Since I've hooked up with the Vomits again on the road, we've been able to mix a few cuts along the way, when we haven't been hiding in the woods or diving for cover from strafing Apache helicopters.

I mean, Bobbie must have been into some bad shit down in California. Won't talk about it, actually he doesn't talk about much of anything anymore. The man looks pale, even for a
skel
.

I mean, one day here we are, parked in the
friggin
' Great Something or Other Forest, real "Twin Peaks" type place, summer's ending, bear shit to the left of me, bear shit to the right of me, tall trees, fresh air that makes you want to smoke a carton of cigarettes just to balance things off, and I'm in the studio with Randy Pants and Brutus Johnson, and we're actually getting somewhere for the first time since this little caravan left Cal, and
whammo
, here comes this Apache zooming over like a movie stunt plane, and off go the bullets, and ol' Randy, he just takes one right through the neck, right through the side of the mobile studio, while he's got his mouth open, hitting that beautiful high C of his.

And . . . poof, the bastard turns to dust and is gone.

Me and Brutus stop what we're doing and look at the little camp chair Randy was sitting on, and there's only a pile of powder sitting there now, and it's not singing any high C.

"Clean that up, will you?" Brutus says as he dives under the foldout table holding the two-track tape deck. And damned if a nice line of bullets doesn't punch through the side of the studio at that moment, tat-tat-
tattat
, and out the other side, leaving two level lines of holes.

"Room under there, Brute?" I say, but he pushes me away. He's pretty wrecked, anyway. Has been, every since we started the Great Caravan. In fact they all have been, the whole bunch of
skels
who linked up in northern Cal for this Fun Trip to Freedom. Jimmy
Klemp
, the illustrious Vomits drummer, put it best when he said, "Running for our
friggin
' second lives, man."

Not Randy Pants, not anymore.

I hear the Apache make a cranking turn and then it strafes us up again on a third pass. Outside, there's lots of yelling and screaming, and little
pffft
sounds like the
skels
make when they dust themselves.

"Slide me that weed, will you?" Brutus says calmly, pointing to the baggie of grass that's an inch closer to me out in the middle of the floor.

"Fu you," I say, and he scowls.

Suddenly his scowl turns to howl.

"My guitar!"

And there's his Stratocaster, leaning calmly against the wall of the camper studio, as the next line of chopper rounds slices into the wall six inches to its left, straight through its neck, and six inches to the right.

We both watch as the neck teeters, then falls forward, bouncing on its still-strung strings.

"Bad news," I say, sliding out to get the weed and pulling it toward myself.

"
Ohhhhhhhh
hhhhhhhhhh
!” Brutus wails.

For a moment I feel his grief, because there was money to be made with that guitar.

"Hey, man, there's always the Fender."

'The Fender!" He snorts in disgust.

But the next moment there isn't a Fender, because the next Apache round cuts deep and low, just over our noggins, and dices right through the case holding Brutus's backup, which he uses when he wants to sound real sloppy or Ventures-like.

I hear the boing-boing sound of popping strings, and know much isn't left.

"What in hell am I going to
do
!" Brutus wails.

"Hey, don't worry, we'll get another one. Plenty of guitar stores in Canada. Maybe even Alaska. Hey," I say, snapping my fingers but still staying close to the floor of the camper, "didn't Big Moe move to Anchorage after that drug bust in seventy-three?"

His eyes light up a little. "Yeah . . ."

"I'm sure he's still there. Didn't Bill
Varley
from the Frogs see him up there a couple years back?"

Brutus is getting his personality back, he's rolling himself a joint now. "
Oooo
, yeah . . .

'That solves it,” I say. "
Moe'll
fix you up with a new
Strat
. In the meantime we'll work on that acoustic—"

But then the Apache make a final pass, cutting a bullet right in front of my nose, and right into Brutus's Gibson acoustic, making it go
twong
!

Brutus sighs.

"We didn't have a lead singer, anyway," I say.

"Bullshit.
You'll
sing," Brutus says, "and we'll be in Anchorage in four days."

The weed must be very powerful, because I find myself nodding, saying, "Sounds good to me."

So I become the lead singer of the Vomits. Luckily the rest of the boys, Jimmy and Barney, made it through the Apache raid and the short battle following, in which the fat bitch Noreen, Bobbie's secretary-bouncer, bit the dust, ha-ha. Some of the other dudes who have hooked up with us, corporate biker types, real homburgs, also go down, stepping on their own claymores or getting shot up by the inadequate force the powers that be have sent against us. By now there are thousands of us, and the real U.S. Army boys pull off only because they consider us not much of a threat right now, and, we hear, they have a large, last-ditch-type stand of humans to face somewhere in Washington State.

So we reach Anchorage, and Moe's shop is still there, though Moe himself looks like he got dusted, a big pile of the stuff behind the counter, undisturbed, he was a big guy, his feathered Aussie hat on top of the pile. But though Moe is gone, his guitars aren't, and Brutus has a Christmas-morning-type day, picking four or five out. In the end he goes with a
Strat
, a National acoustic, and an old Les Paul he finds in the back of the shop, under a bench, that's never been opened. How's that for serendipity? The ol' bag of bones nearly dances over that one.

Which, to put it mildly, is a good thing, because it gets ol' Brutus
hepped
up for a little idea of mine, a nugget of fun that's been growing like a barnacle in my head for the past month or so, and which I very much want to pull off now:

WOODSTOCK II!

And . . . Brutus can be so enthusiastic that soon the idea has taken on a life of its own. Even Bobbie
Zick
, man of the worldly mind, comes back down from
politicsville
to
musicland
and gets into it.

"Maybe it would be a way to rally the troops, old boy," he says, rubbing his bony little chin, sitting behind his makeshift desk in his trailer.

"Maybe, indeed," I say, smiling.

"All very secret, of course," Bobbie goes on. "There are lots of deadheads, freaks, old hippies, and such in this part of the world now." I can almost see the little gears in Bobbie baby's head working. "Thousands more, I'd suppose. Makings of an army, almost. If we were to arrange weaponry, plenty of drugs, plenty of booze, and then organize these people . . ."

Bobbie smiles, pats me on the back.

"Go to it, old boy," he says.

We both walk away smiling from that conversation.

So the
Lonetree
Music Festival, as it becomes known, named after the single runt tree in the middle of the massive abandoned strip mine we pick for the shindig, pulls into high gears with you know who at the helm.

And I'm having a kick, man! I mean, there're musicians in them
thar
hills! For the next few weeks, by day I roam the woods and hills with a
skel
escort, by night I slip off alone, with Bobbie's blessing, to find the shy ones, the ones holed up in caves, in mines, under rocks, like I find Richie Valens. He's drilled himself into a shag quarry and is squatting in there like a tick, surrounded by guns. I'm scared to go in there, even with a flashlight.

And speaking of scared, you should see Elvis when he literally rolls on top of me, down from the top of a hill he's taken over. There's a cabin up there, pigsty-land, wrappers and empty food boxes all over. Out back there's a Hostess truck banged into a tree, the back thrown open.

"You
drove
that up here?" I say.

"You bet, son. Man's gotta eat" He looks at me, and I gotta say he's one of the few
skels
who look better if you just admire the bones: I mean, this guy's shadow form is grotesque-o, rolls of fat, at least six chins, he needs a haircut, his sideburns are about to meet at his neck.

"By the way . . ." he drawls.

"I haven't got any food. But . . ." I tell him about Mama Cass, holed up a mile away with piles of the canned hams I sent her, she got the food but I don't think she got the joke, not that I've tried to approach her, I remember the last time we met—and Elvis is mine.

"And plenty at the concert, Elvis. Anything you want."

"Twinkies?
Sno
balls?" He waves at the open empty back of the truck, sadly.

"Anything you want."

He shakes my hand. "I'm yours, son." As I walk away he stops me. "You think ol' Mama Cass is the marrying kind?"

And there's more. Jim Morrison does make it finally from France, but is incoherent, screaming only for "Bud! Bud!" He's unable to tell us how he got here. Bobbie gets him holed up with cases of beer, and soon he's writing new songs. The Big Bopper bops in. But then I hit a snag, which is no snag to me, but I keep forgetting that Bobbie is a
skel
.

"No humans," he says.

"But Bobbie, we're talking Bob Dylan!"

He shakes his bone head. "They won't go for it.”