Politically ambivalent, morally indignant, Reinhold Speck sucked back a gasp as he saw the latest band of warriors. He diddled the focus of his field glasses and then rubbed his eyes. For almost two full days they’d been straggling out of the jungle, whooping and singing and settling into a loose kind of bivouac that now ringed the gringos’ entire installation.
It wasn’t the certain prospect of violence represented by the horde that irked Speck. Rather, it was their squalor, their noise and the fact that they’d brought with them women. He didn’t see any proper reason for crusading freedom fighters to disport themselves so wantonly on the eve of their greatest battle.
At the first sign of mobilization, Speck had radioed back to Shlemmer for interpretation. It was only then that he learned that Shlemmer had packed up and abandoned their camp in the mountain. Nobody now knew where Shlemmer, or Wanda Ases for that matter, had gone.
Speck had to acknowledge the possibility that he’d been duped; although he couldn’t begin to guess the reasons why. And now the evil plant he’d helped to nurture in this strange, but fertile soil was about to come to fruition. Who knew in this wilderness; who knew what kind of monster another hour might bring?
While they all had stayed reports on harmless paper, this whole revolutionary dream had held his imagination. But now that the vast machine had been impelled somehow to motion, Speck found himself really dreading the horror he was about to witness.
He remembered the first time like it was yesterday. He remembered the shame and the desperation when he realized again the second time. And every time after, as he held the tatters of his self-respect in his hands, Speck would remember the vow he’d made if once, then a hundred times: “Whatever I must do in this life, to protect my soul and the souls of all brothers and sisters; let this not happen again.”
Wanda Ases felt the beginning congestion of a cold settle into her lungs. She shivered and cast a fleeting wonder as to what other jungle organisms might have found in her a fecund niche in which to propagate themselves. She perceived that Carl was studying her and rebuffed him with a shrug of contempt.
“I don’t understand what’s gotten into you,” he said at last, testily. “I thought you were happy here.”
“I just want to go home,” she insisted, “All right?”
He slammed the jeep into first as they bumped down the dry creek bed that served them as roadway. He felt the seconds ticking away from him and knew, somehow, that all his carefully laid plans were coming into completion this very moment without him!
“If it’s because I haven’t been spending the time…” He began.
“It’s not.” Wanda hissed. “It’s not you. It’s not anything. Why does there have to be a reason. Why can’t I just be homesick? I want to go home.”
“Where is home, Wanda?” he asked her then. “Where have you been in the last twenty years that has really felt like home?” She answered him with silence and they drove on that way for another hour; down out of the mountains and across the flood-plain toward Aletosa and the airstrip there.
Although the forces had been gathering steadily for quite some time, there had been, as yet, no actual sign of outward aggression. Just a lot of unruliness and horseplay. Speck switched his attention to the installation and what seemed like an increase in activity behind the scenes of that stage.
It certainly seemed as though something was about to happen. All the technicians had hustled themselves away from the gigantic platform, with the last to leave sweeping cables and loose hunks of packing off to the wings. From the East, a caravan of trucks had bored, at dangerous speed, through the ring of Salidans laying siege. Speck soon noticed a group of important looking officers making their way toward the Gringo’s office.
Just then he caught a flash of glinting metal at the fringes of his vision. He turned the field glasses back up the hillside and made out the image of a jeep careering down from the jungle. Speck shifted his position and refocused the lenses. When he recognized Shlemmer as the driver and the American woman, Wanda Ases, as his passenger, Speck muttered a disgusted oath and pulled himself to his feet.
The Lord had called him to action in Buena Salida, and dutifully he’d followed. Then the devil, in the form of the gray and genial man called by some Venango and by others, who seemed to know him better, Shlemmer, had lured him away. So that now, with the light suddenly breaking over his head, Speck found himself possessed of a clear vision.
He looked down on the mercenary Americans and the profligate Indians, the imminent battle and the festering wound they’d all carved on the face of this jungle. And the jeep plunging crazily toward the assembled mass like an ardent arrow into the balloon of some ripe heart.
And Reinhold Speck heard the voice of the Lord calling him in a quiet, but commanding voice; speaking words he could almost comprehend. And as he strained to listen, a peal of drums like rolling thunder shattered the peace and signaled the onset of Project Rock’n’Roll.
Main photo: Crowd at Altamont Speedway, 1969, by Bill Owens.