“Enough of this Sixties crap!” he said. People applauded again. “Tonight, this first and last performance, we’re calling ourselves Lizard Level!”
Then Abram hit the keyboard in the opening trill of “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” for emphasis, then they slammed into “Proud Mary,” Creedence’s version, and the place became a blur of flying bodies, drumming feet, swirling clothes. The band started a little raggedy, then got it slowly together.
They launched into the Chambers Bros.’ “Time Has Come Today,” always a show stopper, a hard song for everybody including the Chambers Bros., if you ever saw them, and the place went really crazy, especially in the slow-motion parts. Then they did one of their own tunes, “The Moon’s Your Harsh Mistress, Buddy, Not Mine,” which I’d heard exactly once in two decades.
We were dancing, all kinds, pogo, no-sweat, skank, it didn’t matter. I saw a few of the hotel staff standing in the doorways tapping their feet. Andru hit that screaming wail in the bass that was the band’s trademark, sort of like a whale dying in your bathtub. People yelled, shook their arms over their heads.
Then they started to do “Soul Kitchen.” Halfway through the opening, Craig raised his hand, shook it, stopped them.
“Awwwww,” we said, like when a film breaks in a theater.
Craig leaned toward the others. He was shaking his head. Morey pointed down at his playlist. They put their heads together. Craig and Abram were giving the other two chord changes or something.
“Hey! Make music!” yelled some jerk from the doorway.
Craig looked up, grabbed the mike. “Hold it right there, asshole,” he said, becoming the Craig we had known twenty years ago for a second. He leaned against the mike stand in a Jim Morrison vamp pose. “You stay right here, you’re going to hear the god-damnedest music you ever heard!”
They talked together for a minute more. Andru shrugged his shoulders, looked worried. Then they all nodded their heads.
Craig Beausoliel came back up front. “What we’re gonna do now, what we’re gonna do now, gonna do,” he said in a Van Morrison post-Them chant, “is we’re gonna do, gonna do, the song we were gonna do that night in Miami. . .”
“Oh, geez,” said Bob, who was on the dance floor near Sharon and me.
Distressed Flag Sale had gone into seclusion early in 1970, holing up like The Band did in the Basement Tapes days with Dylan, or like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys while they were working on the never-finished Smile album. They were supposedly working on an album (we heard through the grapevine) called either New Music for the After People or A Song to Change the World, and there were supposedly heavy scenes there, lots of drugs, paranoia, jealousy, and revenge, but also great music. We never knew, because they came out of hiding to do the Miami concert to raise money for the family of a janitor blown up by mistake when somebody drove a car-bomb into an AFEES building one four A.M.
“It was a great song, man, a great song,” said Craig, “It was going to change the world we thought.” We realized for the first time how drunk Craig really was about then. "We were gonna play it that night, and the world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we were the ones that got changed, not them. Tonight we're not Distressed Flag Sale, we’re Lizard Level, and just once anyway, so you’ll all know, tonight we're gonna do ‘Life Is Like That’.”
(What changed in Miami was the next five years of their lives. The Miami cops had been holding the crowd back for three hours and looking for an excuse, anyway, and they got it, just after Distressed Flag Sale made its reeling way onstage. The crowd was already frenzied, and got up to dance when the guys started playing “Life Is Like That” and Andru took out his dong on the opening notes and started playing slide bass with it. The cops went crazy and jumped them, beat them up, planted heroin and amphetamines in their luggage in the dressing rooms, carted them off to jail and turned firehoses on the rioting fans.
Everybody knew the bust was rigged, because they charged Morey with possession of heroin, and everybody knew he was the speed freak.
And that was the end of Distressed Flag Sale.
It was almost literally the end of Andru, too. What the papers didn’t tell you was that, as he was uncircumcised, he’d torn his frenum on the strings of the bass, and he almost lost, first, his dong, and then his life before the cops let a doctor in to see him.)
That’s the history of the song we were going to hear.
Notes started from the keyboard, like it was going to be another Doors-type song, building. Then Craig moved his fingers a few times on the guitar strings, tinkling things rang up high, like birds were in the air over the stage, sort of like the opening of “Touch of Grey” by the Dead, but not like that either. Then Andru came in, and Morey, then it began to take on a shape and move on its own, like nothing else at all.
It moved. And it moved me, too. First I was swaying, then stomping my right foot. Sharon was pulling me toward the dance floor. I'd never heard anything like it. This was dance music. Sharon moved in large sways and swings; so did I.
The floor filled up fast. Everybody moved toward the music. Out of the corner of my eye I saw old Mr. Stoat asking someone to dance. Other teachers moved towards the sound.
Then I was too busy moving to notice much of anything. I was dancing, dancing not with myself but with Sharon, with Bob and Penny, with everyone.
All five hundred people danced. Ginny Balducci was at the corner of the floor, making her chair move in small tight graceful circles. I smiled. We all smiled.
The music got louder; not faster, but more insistent. The playing was superb, immaculate. Lizard Level's hands moved like they were a bar band that had been playing together every night for twenty years. They seemed oblivious to everything, too, eyes closed, feet shuffling.
Something was happening on the floor, people were moving in little groups and circles, couples breaking off and shimmying down between the lines of the others, in little waggling dance steps. It was happening all over the place. Then I was doing it—like Sharon and I had choreographed every move. People were clapping their hands in time to the music. It sounded like steamrollers were being thrown around in the ballroom.
Above it the music kept building and building in an impossible spiral.
Now the hotel staff joined in, busboys clapping hands, maids and waitresses turning in circles.
Then the pattern of the dance changed, magically, instantly, it split the room right down the middle, and we were in two long interlocking linked chains of people, crossing through each other, one line moving up the room, the other down it, like it was choreographed.
And the guys kept playing, and more people were coming into the ballroom. People in pajamas or naked from their rooms, the night manager and the bellboys. And as they joined in and the lines got more unwieldy, the two lines of people broke into four, and we began to move toward the doors of the ballroom, clapping our hands, stomping, dancing, making our own music, the same music, more people and more people.
At some point they walked away from the stage, joining us, left their amps, acoustic now. Morey had a single drum and was beating it, you could hear Andru and Craig on bass and guitar, Cassuth was still playing the keyboard on the batteries, his speaker held under one arm.
The street musicians had come into the hotel and joined in, people were picking up trash cans from the lobby, garbage cans from the streets, honking the horns of their stopped cars in time to the beat of the music.
We were on the streets now. Windows in buildings opened, people climbed down from second stories to join in. The whole city jumped in time to the song, like in an old Fleischer cartoon; Betty Boop, Koko, Bimbo, the buses, the buildings, the moon all swaying, the stars spinning on their centers like pinwheels.
Chains of bodies formed on every street, each block. At a certain beat they all broke and reformed into smaller ones that grew larger, interlocking helical ropes of dancers.
I was happy, happier than ever. We moved down one
jumping chain of people. I saw mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, dinosaurs, salamanders, fish, insects, jellies in loops and swirls. Then came the beat and we were in the other chain, moving up the street, lost in the music, up the line of dancing people, beautiful fields, comets, nebulae, rockets and galaxies of calm light.
I smiled into Sharon’s face, she smiled into mine.
Louder now the music, stronger, pulling at us like a wind. The cops joined in the dance.
Up Congress Avenue the legislators and government workers in special session came streaming out of their building like beautiful ants from a shining mound.
Louder now and happier, stronger, dancing, clapping, singing.
We will find our children or they will find us, before the dance is over, we can feel it. Or afterwards we will responsibly make more.
The chain broke again, and up the jumping streets we go. joyous now, joy all over the place, twenty, thirty thousand people, more every second.
As we swirled and grew, we would sometimes pass someone who was staring, not dancing, feet not moving; they would be crying in uncontrollable sobs and shakes, and occasionally committing suicide.
BEARS DISCOVER FIRE
Terry Bisson
“Bears Discover Fire” was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and appeared in the August 1990 issue of Asimov’s, with an illustration by Laurie Harden. It was the first of several sales that Bisson has made to Asimov’s, and would prove to be one of the most popular stories ever published by the magazine, going on to win the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Locus A ward, and our own Readers ’ A ward that year, an unprecedented feat. A relatively new writer, Terry Bisson is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels such as Fire on the Mountain, Wyrldmaker, and the popular Talking Man, which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 1986. His most recent book is the novel Voyage to the Red Planet, released in 1990. He lives in New York City.
Here he offers us a gentle, wry, whimsical, and funny story—reminiscent to us of the best of early Lafferty— that's about exactly what it says it's about. . . .
* * *
I was driving with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher’s son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since, as the old-fashioned one in my family (so they tell me), I fix my own tires, and my brother is always telling me to get radials and quit buying old tires.
But if you know how to mount and fix tires yourself, you can pick them up for almost nothing.
Since it was a left rear tire, I pulled over left, onto the median grass. The way my Caddy stumbled to a stop, I figured the tire was ruined. “I guess there’s no need asking if you have any of that FlatFix in the trunk,” said Wallace.
“Here, son, hold the light,” I said to Wallace Jr. He’s old enough to want to help and not old enough (yet) to think he knows it all. If I’d married and had kids, he’s the kind I'd have wanted.
An old Caddy has a big trunk that tends to fill up like a shed. Mine’s a ’56. Wallace was wearing his Sunday shirt, so he didn’t offer to help while I pulled magazines, fishing tackle, a wooden tool box, some old clothes, a comealong wrapped in a grass sack, and a tobacco sprayer out of the way, looking for my jack. The spare looked a little soft.
The light went out. “Shake it, son,” I said.
It went back on. The bumper jack was long gone, but I carry a little 4 ton hydraulic. I finally found it under Mother's old Southern Livings, 1978-1986. I had been meaning to drop them at the dump. If Wallace hadn’t been along. I’d have let Wallace Jr. position the jack under the axle, but I got on my knees and did it myself. There’s nothing wrong with a boy learning to change a tire. Even if you’re not going to fix and mount them, you’re still going to have to change a few in this life. The light went off again before I had the wheel off the ground. I was surprised at how dark the night was already. It was late October and beginning to get cool. “Shake it again, son," I said.
It went back on but it was weak. Flickery.
“With radials you just don’t have flats,” Wallace explained in that voice he uses when he’s talking to a number of people at once; in this case, Wallace Jr. and myself. “And even when you do, you just squirt them with this stuff called FlatFix and you just drive on. $3.95 the can.”
“Uncle Bobby can fix a tire hisself,” said Wallace Jr., out of loyalty I presume.
“Himself,” I said from halfway under the car. If it was up to Wallace, the boy would talk like what Mother used to call “a helock from the gorges of the mountains.” But drive on radials.
“Shake that light again,” I said. It was about gone. I spun the lugs off into the hubcap and pulled the wheel. The tire had blown out along the sidewall. “Won't be fixing this one,” I said. Not that I cared. I have a pile as tall as a man out by the barn.
The light went out again, then came back better than ever as I was fitting the spare over the lugs. “Much better," I said. There was a flood of dim orange flickery light. But when I turned to find the lug nuts, I was surprised to see that the flashlight the boy was holding was dead. The light was coming from two bears at the edge of the trees, holding torches. They were big, three-hundred pounders, standing about five feet tall. Wallace Jr. and his father had seen them and were standing perfectly still. It’s best not to alarm bears.
I fished the lug nuts out of the hubcap and spun them on. I usually like to put a little oil on them, but this time I let it go. I reached under the car and let the jack down and pulled it out. I was relieved to see that the spare was high enough to drive on. I put the jack and the lug wrench and the flat into the trunk. Instead of replacing the hubcap, I put it in there too. All this time, the bears never made a move. They just held the torches up, whether out of curiosity or helpfulness, there was no way of knowing. It looked like there may have been more bears behind them, in the trees.
Opening three doors at once, we got into the car and drove off. Wallace was the first to speak. “Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said.
When we first took Mother to the Home, almost four years (forty-seven months) ago, she told Wallace and me she was ready to die. “Don't worry about me, boys,” she whispered, pulling us both down so the nurse wouldn’t hear. “I’ve drove a million miles and I'm ready to pass over to the other shore. I won ’ t have long to linger here.” She drove a consolidated school bus for thirty-nine years. Later, after Wallace left, she told me about her dream. A bunch of doctors were sitting around in a circle discussing her case. One said, “We’ve done all we can for her, boys, let’s let her go.” They all turned their hands up and smiled. When she didn’t die that fall, she seemed disappointed, though as spring came she forgot about it, as old people will.
In addition to taking Wallace and Wallace Jr. to see Mother on Sunday nights, I go myself on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I usually find her sitting in front of the TV, even though she doesn’t watch it. The nurses keep it on all the time. They say the old folks like the flickering. It soothes them down.
“What’s this I hear about bears discovering fire?” she said on Tuesday. “It’s true,” I told her as I combed her long white hair with the shell comb Wallace had brought her from Florida. Monday there had been a story’ in the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Tuesday one on NBC or CBS Nightly News. People were seeing bears all over the state, and in Virginia as well. They had quit hibernating, and were apparently planning to spend the winter in the medians of the interstates. There have always been bears in the mountains of Virginia, but not here in western Kentucky, not for almost a hundred years. The last one was killed when Mother was a girl. The theory in the Courier-Journal was that they were following I-65 down from the forests of Michigan and Canada, but one old man from Allen County (interviewed on nationwide TV) said that there had always been a few bears left back in the hills, and they had come out to join
the others now that they had discovered fire.
“They don’t hibernate any more,” I said. “They make a fire and keep it going all winter.”
“I declare,” Mother said. “What’ll they think of next!” The nurse came to take her tobacco away, which is the signal for bedtime.
Every October, Wallace Jr. stays with me while his parents go to camp. I realize how backward that sounds, but there it is. My brother is a minister (House of the Righteous Way, Reformed), but he makes two thirds of his living in real estate. He and Elizabeth go to a Christian Success Retreat in South Carolina, where people from all over the country practice selling things to one another. I know what it’s like not because they’ve ever bothered to tell me, but because I’ve seen the Revolving Equity Success Plan ads late at night on TV.
The schoolbus let Wallace Jr. off at my house on Wednesday, the day they left. The boy doesn’t have to pack much of a bag when he stays with me. He has his own room here. As the eldest of our family, I hung onto the old home place near Smiths Grove. It’s getting run down, but Wallace Jr. and I don't mind. He has his own room in Bowling Green, too, but since Wallace and Elizabeth move to a different house every three months (part of the Plan), he keeps his .22 and his comics, the stuff that’s important to a boy his age. in his room here at the home place. It’s the room his dad and I used to share.
Wallace Jr. is twelve. I found him sitting on the back porch that overlooks the interstate when I got home from work. I sell crop insurance.
After I changed clothes, I showed him how to break the bead on a tire two ways, with a hammer and by backing a car over it. Like making sorghum, fixing tires by hand is a dying art. The boy caught on fast, though. ‘‘Tomorrow I'll show you how to mount your tire with the hammer and a tire iron,” I said.
“What I wish is I could see the bears,” he said. He was looking across the field to I-65. where the northbound lanes cut off the corner of our field. From the house at night, sometimes the traffic sounds like a waterfall.
Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite Page 24