Casey Jones didn’t answer. Instead, he turned to stare at his train, which had reached the far end of the industrial park before someone stopped its backward acceleration. The Steam Roller’s furnace burst. The entire engine compartment spat flames out the windows, curling up to lick the smokestack. He could see people swarming on the train, grabbing crates of food from the dining car, tearing the neat black-and-red sides to pieces.
“My train,” Casey Jones said dully. “My train.”
Todd gripped his arm. Blood still flowed from the wound on Casey’s shoulder; Todd’s own hands felt raw. “Come on, we can’t do anything to help it.”
“What are we going to do now?” Casey asked. “Where do we go?”
Todd secured the cowboy hat on his head as they started to run. “We make our way to Pasadena. Let’s find the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We’ve got a job to do there.”
Chapter 61
The curled paper sign said ALTAMONT RACEWAY with a black-and-white checkered racing stripe along the bottom. Someone had tacked it up at eye-level on a creosote-stained utility pole, but it had not survived the weather well.
As they tramped across the grassy hills, Iris wondered how long it had been since the speedway had actually hosted public races. The enclosed area was surrounded by loose, rusty barbed wire with occasional signs declaring, POSTED NO TRESPASSING.
Iris, Jackson Harris, and Doog stopped against the fence, looking down at the oval racetrack, the stacked bleachers on either side, the gray wood and peeling white paint of the announcer’s stand. Harley, the teenaged street kid from Oakland, clambered between the barbed wire; one of the prongs snagged his t-shirt, and he cursed.
The silent emptiness was disturbed only by the wind blowing across the dry grass. “This place is spooky,” Harley said.
“A racetrack isn’t much good after the petroplague,” Doog said in his slow voice.
At first Iris had thought Doog was just plain ponderous, or maybe even slow in the head, but his mannerisms came from a completely unhurried personality—not lazy, just not willing to rush. He chose his words before he spoke them, and then said exactly what he intended to say. Jackson’s wife Daphne kept insisting he was worthless, but Iris didn’t think so. Iris watched, and Doog did as much work as the rest of them. He just moved at his own speed.
Doog had a full beard streaked with premature gray, making it look like tufts of raw wool poking out from his chin. His face was saturnine, with crinkles around the eyelids; he wore full-moon spectacles like John Lennon. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his dirty shirt.
“Well, the racetrack is good for something now,” Jackson Harris said. “Let’s check it out, see how some music might sound.” He pulled the barbed-wire strands apart for Iris and Doog, then he swung his own legs over.
Harley sprinted ahead through the summer-dry grass over the rise to the edge of the stands. A couple of the heavy wooden bleachers had collapsed from age.
Iris pointed to them. “We’ll need to repair the seating.”
“Yeah.” Harris nodded. “But we’ll have time. It’ll take a while to get everybody here. It would have been nice to hold the concert on the Fourth of July, but’s that’s next week. Let’s be more realistic and shoot for Labor Day.”
“Good idea, man,” Doog said.
“Yeah,” Iris agreed. “That’ll give us time to bring in some musicians and try to patch together some instruments.”
Harley called from the top of the rickety bleachers. “Do you think there’s any stuff left in the refreshment stand?”
“Go ahead and look,” Harris called.
Harley delighted in smashing open the boarded-up windows. Around them, the sun pounded down on the speedway. Within view up in the hills they could see the empty lanes of the interstate highway, pointing aimlessly in the direction of LA.
Iris tried to picture what a concert would be like in this place. In the next couple of months she would throw herself entirely into the project… if only to keep her mind off Todd.
After walking out in anger, he still hadn’t come back after four days. She knew deep down that he had gone south with the steam train. Now, in a world with only harrowing alternatives for long-distance travel, she wondered if he might never come back.
Doog and Harris were both calling this event “the Last Great Rock ‘n Roll Concert.” Iris had tried, but there was nothing inside Todd Severyn that would make him understand how the concert was just as important to the heart of the people as laying electrical power lines or a heroic quest to deliver satellites that would probably never make it to space.
Todd didn’t care about her type of music. He didn’t dislike it, but rock ‘n roll just didn’t affect him the way it touched her and Harris and so many others. She supposed she would feel the same if Todd had an obsession to hold the last great Country & Western concert. But there was just something depressing about music that glorified old dogs, cows, and pickup trucks….
“We can probably use the speedway’s PA system,” Harris said pointing to the metal horn speakers mounted on poles around the track. “Maybe we can get some of the closet geniuses at Livermore to rig up some amps. Then we’ll get power running out here from the windmills and pipe it through those big speakers.”
“It’s gonna sound like shit,” Doog said.
Harris slowly shook his head. “Man, it’s been so long since I’ve heard loud music, right now even Barry Manilow would sound good!”
Doog sat down roughly on one of the bleacher seats, which creaked beneath him. “Man, then it is the end of the world.”
Iris stifled a laugh and watched the two men.
Harris sat down next to Doog. They waited in silence for a few moments. Below them Harley rummaged around inside the refreshment stand. He didn’t seem to be finding anything, but it sounded like he was having fun.
Harris finally shook his head and set his scruffy chin in his hands. “It feels so right to be having this here. Kind of like redemption, you know. To make up for the last concert.”
They both stared at the opposite bank of bleachers as if watching crowds screaming and cheering for the band.
“Yeah. Remember? The Stones didn’t play until nightfall,” Doog said. “The show opened up at ten in the morning. Santana, I think, then it was Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Creedence Clearwater Revival.”
“No way!” Harris interrupted. “Creedence never played the Altamont! It was Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, then the Stones.”
“I thought the Dead were there.”
Harris put his head in his hands as if he could not believe the stupidity of his friend. “Jeez, you’re all mixed up! The Grateful Dead suggested to the Stones that they hire the Hell’s Angels for security. They didn’t come here themselves.”
Iris watched them, amazed. This appeared to be some sort of ritual. “Were you guys actually there?” she said, “at the Altamont concert?”
“Doog was,” Harris said.
“No I wasn’t.”
“You always talked like you were!”
Doog just shrugged.
Iris looked out at the empty stadium, trying to imagine how it must have been, listening to ghostly echoes of music and cheers and screams of pain echoing through the hills. That had been ten years before her time.
Doog said, “They paid the Hell’s Angels $500 worth of beer to work security, so the Angels went around bashing peoples’ heads in with sawed-off pool cue sticks.” Doog looked at Iris with an ironic grin. “Mick Jagger got punched by some fan as the Stones tried to make it to the stage.”