Passionately, the two strains merged. The answering drums of the Buena Salidan irregulars for a moment, in fact, overwhelmed the amplified blare of Project Rock’n’Roll’s incredible drone. A collective grin, like a virus, spread among the ranks of assembled drummers.
Tidbits had grown a livid red. This whole campaign had come off like some hack job. Everyone had agreed; the research had all pointed to a resounding success for the project. His knuckles whitened as he twisted up the gain, and the entire platform shivered. He swiveled his head to check the gauges and found himself looking into the barrel of Carlo Shlemmer’s 1911. Beyond that, loomed the face of Wanda Ases.
Six feet behind the Colonel’s shoulder, sitting oblivious to all but the churning sea inside himself, sat Major Brian S’pense. Wanda Ases took aim and began to pull the trigger. And even as he shouted a warning to the hapless S’pense, Colonel Tidbits was involuntarily pulling himself out of her line of fire.
She would probably never know that, for his part, S’pense was already in heaven. Out of the jungle sweats and desert boredom that had always characterized his waking life, Brian S’pense was wakening into an exciting new plane. His body perhaps lay shattered by an assassin’s fierce bullets, but his inner self, caught on the ferocious upsurge of drum-beats, had risen three hundred feet into the air.
Meticulously, like tiles, the beats that issued from those tremendous loudspeakers fitted tightly together with the rising answer from the gathered tribes. The waves of sound converged in the center of the dell, mixed and locked together in a helical column that S’pense rode like a rocket.
Maybe the preening Colonel Tidbits now found himself witness to a horror for which his expensive education had failed to prepare him. And maybe that was real blood, soaking S’pense’s uniform a shiny black; maybe the gun had fallen and maybe Wanda’s nightmare still refused to end, if even she’d expected it to. For Brian S’pense, the world had become a fuzzy warm sensation.
What was this incredible elevating light? And who were those shimmering faces gathered out across the field? And what was that rustling among the curtains at the corner of his eye? And wasn’t that them: Uncle Sam’s Band? Arming themselves with instruments, taking their places on stage like four empirical horsemen? With the colors draining from his vision and the spatial envelope of his aural perception expanding into an acoustically perfect hall of cosmic proportions, and the sound of the drums and the music rising to fill its every cubic inch; what room could be left for the transmission of pain impulses?
Gone was the animus, the bitterness, the resentment he’d held, like heirlooms, all his wretched life. Gone was the list of retributions, of vengeances planned, of paybacks for insults and offenses tallied archly and often against everyone he’d ever met. Melted together in a warm sunny froth that wasn’t what the Colonel had planned; and wasn’t what the Salidans, themselves, had wanted, but something else. That meant the end of one kind of life and the beginning—for some—of another.
Some thing that in its coming had changed them all. Had brought them together in this place and had fused them together into one. Indian and gringo, the horrified Colonel Tidbits and the weeping Wanda Ases, the submerged Carlo Shlemmer and the disaffected Reihnold Speck, who, even as he trudged hopelessly away from all the noise and antic human waste, still could not rid himself of the insistent rhythm that had infected his own soul.
For Brian S’pense, the door that had never before opened, suddenly did. And behind it were the faces of people he knew. People he trusted. People whom, sometime long ago, he’d grown to love. And who of them all would have believed that he, Brian S’pense, could come to love Rock’n’Roll so very much?
— The End —
Main image composite:
Reaching for the sun image: Photo by Jonas Ferlin from Pexels.
Solar flare (unmodified): NASA.