Very Last Gig!
(August 10-13, 2017)
20: If Anything Could Ever Be this Good Again
9:37 PM, August 12, Woodstick:
Love God's turn on stage rocked. He left the oldies and the rockabilly ballads in his van and belted out hard-rocking songs, all recent, all new to the crowd. There were "One Step" ("Babe, you turn me up to eleven / One step more, we're both in heaven"), "Forevermore" ("You said come spend one night with me / We'll wake up in eternity"), and "Psyche Me Out."
All of them were high-energy thrill rides. All of them had everybody in the audience up on their feet. Well, everyone but the heavy lady sitting six rows behind Wendy, Dipper, Teek . . . and Mabel.
Evidently she didn't rock that way.
But one good thing, the music made Mabel's mood soar. When Love God was right at the edge of the stage, three Security men keeping anyone from rushing forward, he all but walked a tightrope along the edge, and when Mabel was air-punching to his beat, he noticed her, winked, and pointed a finger at her as he rasped the lyric, "It's you that makes me dream!"
Ungrammatical, but what do you ask of a rock lyric except that it seems to make some kind of sense at the time and it fits the tune?
"Don't care for this guy personally," Wendy confided to Dipper in the short interval when Love God was wiping his face, "but he knows how to rock."
He was holding hands with her. –You rock my world, Wendy!
And don't you forget it, Big Dipper!
"You want me to bring it down a notch?" Love God bawled to the crowd.
"Yeah!" yelled at least a couple thousand voices.
"Heck with that, baby!" he shouted. "Let's really RO-O-CK IT!"
The lead guitarist stared a Flamenco-style riff, then changed up with no warning to something the Eagles might have been proud to play, and then the whole group started a runaway-freight tune as Love God knelt, cradling the mike, and broke into "I Fell in Love Tonight" ("I fell in love tonight, that's right, that's right, I'm gonna see it through, 'cause I fell in love with you!").
It didn't matter that not everyone could understand every word. The amplified beat got into their bones, the music, a little sinister but high-soaring, lifted their emotions, and they loved it.
Which, for Love God, was rather the point of it all.
At the same time, inside the Woodstick business office:
"You look like crap," Stanley told his brother.
Hunched in the chair, his eyes red, his chin bristling with more than five o'clock shadow, Stanford said, "I feel like it. Too little sleep, too little food. What time is it?"
Stanley told him. Then he picked up the phone. "Hey, Sheila, where are you? Good. You locked up yet? OK, look, here's what I need: bring two coffees and three roast-beef-on-rye sandwiches. Get 'em from Chunky's, I trust him. Yeah, three booths down from the mobile Shack, they don't close for another twenty minutes. Yeah, that's fine, thanks." He hung up. "Sheila's bringin' us some food. You still like roast beef on rye?"
"Fine," "Stanford said.
"It's on the way. So what's this big deal you have to report?"
"Dipper told me about the mirror—"
"I was here, Brainiac, I know about the mirror. So?"
Stanford sighed. "I think I've deciphered the glyph."
Stanley nodded. "Deciphered the glyph, that's great. Yeah, glyphs gotta be deciphered. Congratulations, Poindexter. What's that even mean?"
Grinning weakly, Stanford said, "I think I know what entity we're up against. It's a demon. It's a bad one."
"So who is it?"
Stanford had taken out his phone and pulled up the photo of the soap drawing. "Do you see it?"
Grunting impatiently, Stanley said, "I see something that could be gang graffiti. What is it, Sixer? Just tell me, I'm the dumb one!"
Shaking his head, Stanford assured his brother, "You've got brains. We just don't think alike, that's all. This is a clue to a verse from the Bible, the New Testament. I tracked it down to the book of Matthew: 'No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.'"
"OK, I can see the two masters and the man and the 'don't do it' circle with a no-no sign," Stanley said. "Now that you mention it, anyhow. But—so what? What does it mean?"
"It's a clue to the demon's name," Stanford said. "Mammon. The word is symbolic of wealth, but from old tradition, it's also the name of a fallen angel. In Milton's Paradise Lost, he's called 'the least erected Spirit that fell from heav'n.' He's the one who led the others to build the fortress of Pandemonium, the home of all the demons."
"Uh-huh," Stanley said, fighting to keep his eyes from glazing over.
"In Book 2 of The Faerie Queene—you've read that, haven't you?"
"Oh, I read a little of it every night!" Stanley said. "That was sarcasm, Ford. What the heck is the fairy queen? Sounds like a Disney movie!"
"No, no, it's an epic poem by Edmund Spenser, published in—never mind. In it Mammon is a character, a demon who falsely calls himself 'the greatest god under the sky,' the source of all wealth. He tempts people to sin by appealing to greed."
"Don't look at me like that. I swear I never met the guy," Stanley said.
"Well—anyway—all right, I'm tired and I have to get a little sleep, but tonight I have to look up ways of fighting the demon of wealth. Somehow I suspect that Woodstick is tied up in all of this, and it ends tomorrow night. We don't have much—"
The door opened, startling both brothers, who half-rose from their chairs.
But it was only Stan's wife Sheila, carrying a cardboard tray with two coffees, half and half in those little plastic cups, and packets of sugar, along with a white paper bag.
"What's wrong with you two?" she asked. "You look like you were expecting a ghost."
"Not quite," Stan said, stepping from his chair to take the tray, set it on the desk, and kiss her cheek. "More like a demon, but you just saved us. 'Cause no demon would dare come in when we got an angel with us."
Stanford's eyebrows shot up.
But a smiling Sheila put her arms around her husband and kissed him.
Stanford Pines made a mental note: I will never fully understand women.
At the same time, twenty-one miles outside the Valley:
Wilmer Gunzell was no longer the young guy who could walk thirty miles with only bathroom stops. He wasn't old. You could trust him, he was still three years short of thirty, though hard times, tough times, had chiseled his features until you might have thought him a lean weather-beaten farmhand closing in on fifty.
He plodded on. Whenever a farm truck came rumbling past, he thumbed, but nobody even slowed down. He hadn't eaten since the day before, had only had coffee that morning—it seemed so long ago—while Bratsman ate his way through two breakfasts.
Wilmer could theoretically eat, he had a little money with him, but in the direction he was heading there were no gas stations or convenience stores until you reached the outskirts of Bend, and that was still miles away, and besides, he didn't even know that.
He left the road whenever he could climb down an embankment to a rushing stream, cupped his hands, and drank, hoping that nothing had polluted the water. He always washed his face, too. Cold water could, for a time, take the place of sleep.
Somewhere in the dark he plodded along a straightaway that stretched far ahead. He saw lights coming toward him.
Crossing the empty highway meant surrendering thirteen or fourteen hard miles.
But then, he had no destination, and in thirty minutes a car could cover more ground than he'd managed in twelve hours. It meant going back toward Gravity Falls, but on this highway there wasn't anything much past Gravity Falls for maybe twenty, thirty miles, and odds were that the vehicle wasn't heading toward the Falls at all, so—
He took the chance and crossed the center line, then stood on the opposite shoulder. The car was coming on fast and no doubt would blast right past him, and Wilmer would cross the highway again and in an hour or so try to find a place where he could pile up some brush in a kind of shelter, creep inside, and try to sleep.
To his surprise, the car—he could tell from the lights it was a car, not a truck, bus, or motorcycle—slowed. He tried to look harmless, hooked his thumb up, and magic happened.
The car pulled off onto the shoulder. The passenger window rolled down as if by magic. A lazy voice said, "Climb in."
He hustled. "Thanks, Mister," he said.
"Buckle up."
"Yes, sir."
He couldn't make out the figure behind the wheel very well. Tall guy, thin, wearing dark clothes, wearing glasses. "Don't call me 'sir,'" his benefactor said, but he didn't sound angry.
The seatbelt clicked. The driver pulled back onto the highway. "If you're hungry, there's a bag with a couple of hamburgers in it down beside your feet, and a cup of coffee in the cup holder. I got them but decided I didn't want them. You're welcome to it."
On the verge of declining, Wilmer caught the scent of food. "Thanks," he said. He moved his feet and heard the rustle of the bag. Two small burgers inside, nothing special, just the basic MacDougalds' fare, but they were fresh and hot, and he devoured them in less than a minute. The coffee had cream and sugar, exactly the way he liked it. "Thank you, Mister," Wilmer said gratefully. "I can pay you—"
"Not necessary. Just put all the wrappers and the empty cup in the bag. Where are you going?"
Wilmer finished the coffee and put the trash into the bag. "Anywhere."
"Oh, then I could stop and let you out right now," the man said. "Seriously—but what's your name?"
Wilmer thought for maybe five seconds. "Walter Ganwell." One of his fellow convicts had once advised him, "You got to make up a fake name, make up one that kinda rhymes with or sounds like your own. Easier to remember."
"Walter," the driver said. "I'm John Cash. No relation."
Wilmer chuckled, though it wasn't all that funny. Something worried at his mind, though. "Mr. Cash," he said.
"Seriously," Cash continued, as if there had been no interruption, "what's your goal? I can't just drive for the horizon. We'd never make it."
"I just . . . want to get away," Wilmer said, feeling more and more nervous.
"Have you broken the law?" Cash asked.
"No. Not this—no," Wilmer said. "There's just—a place I don't want to be anymore."
"If you don't have a place to go, at least tell me where you don't want to be. That's a start."
The voice clicked. "Are you a policeman?" Wilmer asked. "Or a Security man?"
The driver laughed at that. "Me? Oh, hell, no. I'm just a random man driving a Dodge Challenger SRT."
Wilmer relaxed a little. The voice was reminiscent of the Security guard who had rousted him, but—not the same. It had one of those unplaceable accents, maybe-Boston, maybe-London, what did you call it? He'd once seen an Internet video about that kind of speech, "Why Do People in Old Movies Talk Funny?" Oh, yeah, the guy in the video called it a mid-Atlantic accent. That was it. The driver, Cash, sounded like an actor in a 1930s movie, maybe the hero, maybe the suave villain. Not at all like the Security guy.
"Nice car," Wilmer said.
"Just got it recently. A 2015 model. They call it the Hellcat."
"Well, sir—I mean Mr. Cash—where are you headed?"
"I haven't made up my mind. Are you running from something, Walter?"
"More from someone," Wilmer said. "My old boss."
"Mm. He hard on you?"
"Yeah," Wilmer admitted. "He wants me to do stuff that—that I don't want to do. It's wrong."
"I know how you feel," Cash said. "I work for a boss from hell, myself. What does this fellow want from you? You can tell me everything."
"He wants me to kidnap a girl for him," Wilmer said. And he started to talk. Funny, but somehow after the ride was over, he had absolutely no memory of just what he said—he could remember talking, but no details.
Nor did he remember their making the turn or their driving beneath the illuminated WELCOME TO GRAVITY FALLS sign.
Or Mr. Cash stopping the car. He could remember opening the door and hearing Mr. Cash wish him luck.
"That dark-blue Lincoln in the staff parking lot," Cash said. "It isn't locked. Just get in the passenger seat and wait. He'll be along in twenty minutes."
"OK," Wilmer said, as if it had all been his idea.
He went to the car—a vintage auto—and turned to wave.
Mr. Cash and his Hellcat were gone. Yet he hadn't heard the engine rev up or the crunch of gravel—or had he?
Wilmer didn't know. He opened the door—unlocked, as promised—and hesitated for a moment.
A wisp of song flitted through his mind: Open up, I'm climbing in.
He sat in the car, in the dark, and waited for whatever was going to happen.
At the moment, the guys of Sev'ral Timez had twenty-four hours and three minutes to live.