Some time ago I challenged LL to write a short which included what he likes to call the "cheap red wine brigade," the Hog Farm, the Whole Earth Catalogue and their Clown. Or something like that. He swiftly wrote Solstice in Austin, which features a young woman who is picked up by the nefarious Carlos on the way to Austin and then dies, impaled on the Horned God's antlers(!) after getting herself in trouble on Beezer's bus. You can read it here. LL wasted no time suggesting I write a sequel, Equinox in Austin, and here it is. If you dislike tales of counter-cultural criminality and vice don't read on. All characters are, of course, entirely fictional.
Equinox in Austin
Or
Thou Shalt Not
Suffer A Witch To Live.
Hazey stumbled out of the
bathroom of the cheap motel and looked at Starhawk, lying big and bloated on
the bed, like a dirty whale. “Wake up!” he half-barked, half-slurred, giving
the grey haired woman what he figured was a playful tap on the head with a jug
of wine. He was drunk. Again. Starhawk groaned and cast a bloodshot eye at the wine.
“Bastard,” she said, snatching the jug and drinking deep. She’d been beautiful
once, years ago, back when Grace Slick was like a young Goddess and Hunter
Thompson could still write.
But Hunter had blown his head off
in Aspen a year or two ago and Grace was weird; fat and demented. Starhawk
didn’t look so hot either, that was for damn sure. An hour later Hazey was in
his stained clown outfit and Starhawk was driving, all the way to the Lone Star
State’s famous replica Stone Henge and their next gig, Equinox in Austin, laid on by the Hog Farm and Whole Earth Catalogue
Plc.
Starhawk’s wide ass filled the
seat, as she sat in a haze of smoke in the Yukon, getting high. They’d pulled
over to get something to eat at one of Austin’s many alternative high-end food
trailers; not cheap, but Hazey didn’t care, he’d ripped-off a wallet the night
before in some bar he’d gone to with Starhawk, plenty of cash. He passed her a $12
Gaia Burger, took a chug of wine and before long they were back on the road.
They couldn’t speak but they didn’t have to, there was nothing to say. An old
witch and a drunken old clown, running on fumes.
It wasn’t easy but they finally
found Barton Park as the sun was setting over the Henge, and were
waved on to the “Crone’s Tent” by a couple of tie-dyed freaks. “Weirdos,”
muttered Hazey; he was starting to come to. Starhawk snorted, she remembered
Hazey from the old days, when Kesey was around and everything was cool. Not
anymore, no Ma’am. “Get out of the damn car,” she snapped, and that’s what they
did, walking right out of the truck and into the tent. The air inside might as
well have been skunked and Hazey didn’t say no when an owl-faced man passed him
a pipe.
“Welcome back to Texas, Hazey,” uttered the Owl. Hazey exhaled, “Let’s not have a double-take on that freaking Solstice. What was her name, Cindy, Candy?” The Owl didn't seem to know, “Maybe it was Candy. But what happened to Beezer, and where’s Carlos?”
Hazey wasn't sure. Carlos had split
after Cindy, or was it Candy? had been found dead at the Austin Solstice,
skewered on the Horned God’s antlers. The cops had written it off as an “accidental
death” but everyone knew better. Word was that Beezer had gotten all weird when
the girl woke up in his bus and tried to make a getaway. Nobody blamed her,
Beezer was a two-bit skagg-head and Carlos was part of it too, somehow. They’d
both disappeared when the cops arrived. No one seemed to know where to.
“Yeah. Where’s Carlos. He left me with all these Whole Earth Catalogues to sell, what a deadbeat.” The Owl agreed. Sure, Carlos, what a loser. “So where’s Beezer?”“Who knows, man, he’s probably gone blue in someone’s toilet.”
A few hundred yards away, Carlos
and Beezer were sitting across from the Equinox sound-stage in the middle of
the famous Texan Henge, while a DJ played endless Orbital covers, Halcyon and on and on. But they didn’t
hear the music, they were intent on one thing, as much as they could be intent
on anything. Getting their money back. They’d panicked and ran when the cops arrived at
the Solstice, and didn’t have a chance to grab the bricks-full-of-cash rucksack
from Beezer’s bus.
But Carlos had caught a glimpse of Starhawk lifting the ruck over her shoulder as the squad cars arrived. Too late, it was gone with the witch and the Yukon. He nervously played with his Glock 17 while Beezer stared at the stage. Both were wired all to hell. “Where’s the freaking witch?” Beezer sucked on his teeth, “Soon, man, soon.”
Back in the Crone’s Tent, Starhawk shouldered her way past Hazey. She found him repellent. He’d always been a freak, oh yeah, for sure, but now he was just this degenerate old clown. And drunk, always drunk. Starhawk kicked an empty jug of Burgundy out of the way and moved into the inner-circle of the tent.
“Staaarhaaawk!” gushed a middle-aged woman in a priest’s collar. She was an Episcopalian who went by “Mo”, which was short for Mother. They hugged, the priestess wincing like the WASP she was at the unwashed smell of the overweight old hippy. She moved thankfully apart and brightly explained the night’s ritual to Starhawk.
Starhawk looked through lidded
eyes at Mo the beaming priestess, as she gushed about Mabon, and realized that
she hated her almost as much as she hated being the Crone at these dumbass
festivals. But she didn’t hate the rucksack full of cash which sat on the back
seat of the Yukon. That was her ticket out of the whole mess. Tonight would be
her last Croning, and then she was gone. For good. Bye-Bye Hog Farm, Bye-Bye
Hazey, Bye-Bye all of it, the whole low-rent deal, done and gone.
Starhawk
smiled at the thought and grabbed a big plastic cup full of cheap red wine from
a table where Hazey was making a fool of himself in front of a quiet owlish
looking guy. She followed Mo behind a partition in the tent to get changed into
her Hecate outfit.
Carlos and Beezer watched in the darkness
of the Henge’s massive stones, twitching with nerves and speed while Hazey
swerved onto the stage in his clown getup; red nose, goofy hat and a one-stringed
instrument, which he banged on to punctuate his lame old jokes. “Nobody for
President! HAR, HAR!” all the while gesturing big and swaying drunkenly to
polite applause from the few Austin hippies who bothered to listen. Before long
Hazey was in grand clown mode, “And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you... Mabon!”
The lighting rig dimmed to purple and orange as unseen drummers struck up a
beat. Then Mo was on-stage in a brown Fall cloak, to Call the Quarters:
“On this sacred night, as the veil between the worlds draws thin, let us invoke the spirits of the directions.
“From the East, I call the wind! Blow from beyond the veil. Blessed be! From the South I call Fire! Spirit-filled rapture! Blessed be! From the West the Dead call. I call Water! Blessed be! From the North I call the Earth! Into her we descend, blessed be!
“Demeter, Inanna, Kali, Tiamet, Hecate, Nemesis, Morrighan.
Bringers of destruction and darkness,
I embrace you tonight.
Without rage, we cannot feel love,
Without pain, we cannot feel happiness,
Without the night, there is no day,
Without death, there is no life.
Great goddesses of the night, I thank you!”
And Starhawk emerged, masked,
wearing black robes, Crone Hecate in person. As if on cue, Carlos and Beezer
began to move, pushing their way through the hot Texan night and the Austin
hippies. They reached the shadows to the right of the stage and there was Security,
a lanky Occupy Austin dreadlock with a walkie-talkie, blocking their way. “Hey,
guys!” he started, and was cut short by Beezer’s baseball bat. Crack. Bat on bone. No more security and
no more Croning, that had finished, to be replaced by pounding dance music. The
Equinox crowd were getting it on, right there at the stones of the Henge.
Backstage, behind the stones in an open-faced tent,
Rev. Mo was congratulating Starhawk, who was smoking something while trying not
to look at Hazey. He was getting sloshed on a box of Franzia and didn’t see
Carlos and Beezer cut round the corner. Neither did the women. If they had,
they’d have seen Carlos’ Glock and Beezer’s bat, coming at them fast and furious.
Carlos was first, and before you could say Hippy died at Altamont, he was on
Starhawk, pistol racked and yelling, “Where’s the money, bitch!”
Beezer batted Mo to the ground
for effect. She dropped. Hazey choked on his wine. Carlos was screaming, he had lost it long ago, “So maybe you didn’t hear me? Where’s the fuckin’ money!” Starhawk froze, mouth open, she
couldn’t speak, and Carlos raised his Glock. He was going to hit her and hit
her good. Beezer grinned, “Yeah! Hit her, hit the witch.”
From out of nowhere, an owl-faced man appeared at the tent’s entrance and drew his .460 S&W Magnum. He put
the Hi-Viz fiber optic foresight on Carlos’ head and squeezed the trigger,
which sent a 200 grain bullet, about the width of your thumbnail, speeding
towards its target at 2,300 feet per second, like a supersonic bomb. Carlos’
head exploded. A second shot tore out Beezer’s gut, knocking him back to the
wall of the tent in a spray of blood.
“That’s for Candy,” said the Owl, as he put a round through Starhawk, “Or is it Cindy? And by the way, she was my daughter.”
The Owl stepped over Mo, pistol
ready and aimed at Hazey. The clown puked and the Owl considered, for an
instant, maybe Hazey wasn’t worth the bullet. “Clown, you get a pass,” he said
as he lowered the big X-Frame revolver and shot Mo. “Thou shalt
not suffer a witch to live,” he informed the clown, and walked calmly out of
the tent towards the Yukon and his money. He had business to attend to.
Hazey stood in the tent, shaking,
as sirens cut the night and the Equinox danced on.
