Music of Pain Fic: Ballad of Ira Hayes, Part 1 of 4
For the Music of Pain Ficathon
Post NFA, Xander, Gen, PG for casual profanity
Based on "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", Lyrics here
Xander Harris is the creation of Joss Whedon and was embodied for many years by the actor Nick Brendon; I'm merely trying to follow their lead in writing this "what if Xander had to get off 1-5 at Washington Exit 111."
The resemblance of characters in this piece of fiction to any person living or dead is strictly a matter of ethnographic observation; Ira Hayes is the only real person who really did what I said he's done. None of the other people upon whom various waitresses, cooks, fishermen and farmers are based could ever meet Xander, who is a fictional character. Ipso facto all characters in this story are fictional.
Parts 2 and 3 will be posted Wednesday and Thursday, perhaps even both on Wednesday, God willing and I don't have any more acausal power outages. Now! With beta input!
Part 1
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.
It’s been a while now that he’s just kept running. He’d kept it together in Africa, found slayers where nobody else could find them. More than half the time, found them too late: sick with malaria or AIDS; married with a couple of kids; taking care of younger siblings, both parents dead or just disappeared; maimed in body or mind or both by some power-mad asshole who thought stealing children from their homes and making them into killing machines was a way to achieve political power. Kept it together until the pinging of the slayer call went silent, and then came back to America to rest. Fell apart then, but did it at carefully selected times and places so when the morning came he could find all the pieces, wedge them back together, and go on moving across the landscape until he needed to fall apart again.
Everyone else was in Europe; but Europe was just another nowhere to him; his friends were no longer his definition of home, and after a few years in the great strangeness below the Sahara he’d ceased to value novelty. His home town was at the bottom of a crater, but there was a whole country full of Toys R Us and Starbucks and multiplexes, McDonald’s and Wal-mart, and that stuff was as close to home as he was ever going to get.
Except when he looked at it for too long, the flatness of his vision made it all look empty and dead, compared with the crowded public life he’d gotten used to: barber’s chairs out in the street, screaming arguments over everything and nothing- that turned out not to be arguments at all when he got the hang of the language, just conversations about the trivialities of life, at the top of the speakers’ lungs. Flat and empty and clean and dead, and he’d get up with a hangover and find the nearest Asian grocery (learning quickly to stay to the edges of the country where he could find Asian Groceries, or at least to stay sober and travel fast until he found “Quong Phat Market” or something like that in the yellow pages) for ginger chews and instant miso soup with leeks, eat ginger and drink soup and piss every couple of hours until his head was clear and his eyes could scan the landscape again without the sight of the horizon making him nauseated. Then he’d use the Council’s platinum card to gas up the car and head out again.
The card was a leash, but he was OK with that- the leash had been part of his life for such a long time, call the number in London at 20 Hours Universal Time on the first day of every month, check in as well and whole or by OO hours on the second, the card would be deactivated and Willow would be after him with the kind of locator spells that hurt when they connected. So he’d call, and whoever picked up would say “Xander?” in a voice of eager friendliness. It was always a familiar voice, usually Giles but often Willow, sometimes Andrew or Dawn, rarely Buffy, once or twice Faith. That had been a little weird and a little exciting, both times: gave him something to think about when he jerked off, instead of doing it with his mind as flat and empty and dead as the motel parking lot.
Not that he wanted Faith. Not that he wanted anyone. Not even Anya, any more. After a while he’d stopped aching for her and then there’d been nights in Africa when he lay in the back of his Rover, inside the mosquito net tent that clipped to the headliner, cooling air flowing in through the barely open windows, and thought about going back to California and finding Cordelia. He thought of taking her out for drinks and talking about old times and seeing if any of the juice that had been there in high school was still flowing. Then one first-of-the-month call, it had been Willow he’d been talking to, and he questioned, offhand, if anyone had heard from Cordy. She was quiet for so long he could hear sleet beating against the windows of the Council building, and then Willow started to cry and told him Cordelia was dead, had been in a mystical coma for months before she died, since before Sunnydale fell into a hole. And that was the last thing that had any curve or contour or pulse in his mind, gone, just more flatness.
__/|^|\__
Every once in a while, the phone call would include a carefully worded request, “While you’re in the neighborhood” which was how he found out that (from the perspective of London) Roanoke, Virginia and Cleveland, Ohio were next door to each other. Not that he had any particular reason to stay in Roanoke, and Cleveland was just as good a place to go next as anywhere else. There was a Hellmouth there, sure, but it turned out that it had never been as attractive a vacation and retirement spot for evil as Sunnydale, probably the climate, and except for one Watcher, working undercover as a curator of sheet music at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it didn’t need a constant guardian.
Turned out that the strange disturbance the Watcher had heard reports of was a bleached-blond vampire, down on his luck and about four bottles short of a six-pack, huddled down on the Hellmouth and crying about slaughter in Los Angeles, and where the hell has he been between now and then? Fighting down the impulse to stake Spike and put him out of his misery (because chances are he’d be back on the Hellmouth, whole and crazy, by the time Xander drove out of town, the cat who always came back), Xander and the watcher got a potion down him to put him into a deep sleep long enough to be air freighted to London, bunged up in a fancy steel coffin; shipped him off to the Council be dealt with: another wounded hero in the battle against evil.
It wasn’t ironic enough to be funny, Xander thought.
And then he gassed up his car and set off west on the interstate, the humidity of an oncoming Midwest summer and the sick smell off Lake Erie making him homesick for saltwater beaches.
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He’d gotten reservations to stay at a big new casino resort out on the Washington coast, because Ocean Shores was the closest ocean beach to Cleveland if you drove I-90 all the way west, and then headed for the Pacific. Calling ahead for reservations from a motel in Billings, Montana, and intending to drive straight through, he was eighty miles from his destination when he just couldn’t stay awake to drive another mile. There had been construction on every road he chose, and then a wreck at Ft. Lewis. He pulled off I-5 at the first exit with a “Lodgings” symbol on the information sign and pulled into the parking lot at the King Oscar Motel (after grabbing a Double Whopper with Cheese Meal at the Burger King right next door) four hours after he’d thought he’d be at the beach.
It was pretty much like any other Interstate off-ramp retail development, notable only for the surpassingly ugly red neon hawk at the truck stop across the road: Big Lots to Safeway with a bunch of stuff (hey, Starbucks!) in between, Walgreens kitty-corner from Riteaid; Burger King, Taco Bell, no, Taco Time- must be some local variant- Dairy Queen and McDonalds, Wal-mart, Ruby Tuesdays, and the multiple gas stations, a Quicki-Lube, and a big flat bulldozed area with a sign that said “Coming Soon” and a bunch of other stuff he couldn’t quite read although he thought he recognized a Home Depot logo. Nothing to distinguish it from any other place he’d been in the past four days, or the past six weeks, or the last year, and he smiled with bemusement when the night clerk told him that the only place left that night was the top-floor luxury view suite. He laughed to himself, contemplating a better view of the red neon hawk, and took his sports bag upstairs fully expecting to leave in the morning and never see the place again.
He showered and went to bed without closing the drapes, hoping the sun would wake him up early enough that he could get on the road before the traffic got bad. It was a bad decision for a man who took comfort in flatness and repetition. The next morning the sun rose as it should and woke him up as he’d planned, but when he sat up in bed, reaching without thought for the TV remote to provide his morning diet of CNN and wondering again why the bed wasn’t angled to face the television, he looked straight out the window and across fifty miles of air to a white and blue volcanic peak with a tricorn top; and was struck with the need to see it for a few days more, at least. Maybe even go walking up into that snow.
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It didn’t take long, all told, to settle in to a rut. He’d intended to take off to Mt. Rainier National Park that day and then get on the road to the beach again, but he hadn’t made it past any of the bridges that marked the county line in his attempts to get there. The first try he followed dead reckoning and got himself completely lost, coming at dusk in a town named “Rainier” which, he discovered, was still more than sixty miles from the mountain and only about seven from the motel where he’d slept the night before. Then the rain set in, and neither the mountain not the beach seemed very attractive, so he set out looking for a cheaper motel room, further from the freeway, and somehow ended up in a place called “The Golden Gavel” two blocks from the State Capitol building and walking distance from the headquarters of K Records, which he thought was sort of impressive in its own way.
The second attempt, begun when he woke up on a brilliantly sunny morning, ended when he merged onto the freeway with an optimistic outlook and Keith Urban blasting on KMPS and was blind-sided by an H2 changing lanes at 70mph. His leased car was totaled and he got strapped to a backboard and taken to the emergency room, where they asked a lot of questions about his missing eye and other scars and looked with suspicion at his insurance card and wouldn’t release him until there’d been all sorts of insurance crap faxed from London.
The hassles over the wreck felt as if they took forever; the Hummer driver’s insurance company tried to blame Xander for the collision, saying his lack of vision on the left side caused the accident. He had to take a driving test with an insurance examiner, in a car equipped with the same extra mirrors his old lease car had, to prove he could drive safely. On top of that he was in the middle of a lawyer-on-lawyer tag-team-cage-match: the Hummer’s driver was a lawyer, and had a lawyer, and her insurance company had a lawyer, and the Council’s insurance company had several lawyers. The Council hired a local lawyer to represent Xander in court, a lawyer who drove a Civic Hybrid and did a lot of pro bono work for environmental causes. She (the town had a lot of girl lawyers, Xander noticed) rummaged around the internet and found out a bunch of stuff about short drivers and big SUVs and impaired sight lines and had the good luck to pick up a piece of gossip: remarks the Hummer driver had made at a Republican fundraiser about how people who couldn’t get out of her way in time deserved to get run over.
The case was settled out of court, and Xander finally fell apart and drank his way from bar to bar the afternoon after the papers were signed, then took a bus to the apartment he’d rented- the cheapest one he could find with a view of The Mountain- and lived on miso and ginger chews for two days.
When he woke up on the third morning he picked up a map at the Visitors’ Information Center by the Capitol Building, and drove up to Paradise and walked half a mile or so up the trail toward the peak, but he had to leave before dark to get back home and get cleaned up and go to work.
__/|^|\__
Andrew was a little disappointed when Xander called from the same place for the fourth month in a row, almost four weeks after the court case had ended and long after the smart bets had all said that the next time he called it would be from New Guinea or even Africa again. He was aghast when Xander gave him a home phone number and a work number and told him he’d be staying in town at least until next spring.
Part of the surprise was because Giles had picked up his secure direct phone at work a month or so after the H2 had crashed into Xander’s Taurus and been startled to hear Xander making an unscheduled call. He’d been taken aback by what Xander asked him for: funds for first and last month’s rent, and a damage deposit on a six-month rental contract, and a cash advance equivalent to two months of his usual Platinum Card charges.
“Giles, I’ll keep calling in, I promise, but I’m tired of Willow being able to look at my charges and know what I’ve been buying. The last time I talked to her I got twenty minutes of cross-examination about my mental health because I’d bought a boxed set of Johnny Cash CDs. I need some privacy, for God’s sake; it’s not like I’m in the Sudan any more. You aren’t going to need to be able to trace me by my room charges.”
“Why there, in particular, if you don’t mind me asking? Why not wait until the suit is settled and then rent a place somewhere more centrally located, or even keep traveling and fly back for the trial?” Giles sounded only mildly interested, and Xander could tell the question was more a way to keep the conversation going than a sign of worry. He didn’t want to tell him about The Mountain, though, or about how strange it seemed to be standing in the middle of a carnival crowd and look up and see a bald eagle cruising over the Ferris wheel. So he just said something mostly true about not wanting to have to mess around at airports any more than he had to, and since the last time he’d talked to Giles they’d spent a lot of time trading airport security horror stories, Giles laughed and the topic was dropped and the next morning there was a wire transfer of $8000 from the Council’s American funds, and that was that.
Xander didn’t tell Giles about his job, either, and he didn’t tell Andrew any more than the number. It felt weird, a little, to find himself working as the night manager at the same truck stop restaurant with the ugly red bird neon sign, one of the first things that he’d seen in a place that was beginning to feel familiar in the way nothing had since Sunnydale. The restaurant had good soup, though, and he’d taken to coming in on rainy evenings until one night the place was empty except for a bunch of high school kids eating french fries and ice cream sundaes at midnight and talking about a play they’d just finished performing. Xander was just walking up to the cashier’s station when something in the way the cashier was standing made him stop and make a slow survey of the entry hall. There, under the stairs to the glass-walled manager’s office, was a man in blue jeans, a green sports jacket covered with NASCAR patches and a baseball hat. Nothing out of the ordinary about him, except that the cashier was looking at him with an expression that told him she expected the guy to be big trouble, and fast.
He wasn’t even aware of scoping out the tactical situation and putting himself in position to intercept, but when the guy stepped out from under the stairs and pulled a silenced 9mm pistol from under his coat, Xander knocked him off his feet before either of them were really aware what was happening. The pistol was in Xander’s hands before both men hit the ground, and he had the clip out and in his front pants pocket, and the guy’s arms immobilized before the cashier could start to scream.
After what he’d been through in Cote d’Ivoire, let alone Sunnydale, it hadn’t seemed like a big deal, and after the cops showed up and got the guy (who was after the cashier, her ex-husband or boyfriend or something) he gave them the “I’m just traveling through, no permanent address, work for a UK-based private security service” story. He showed them the papers that called him an industrial security consultant and gave them the London drop-box address he’d never had to use while he was in Africa, hey, that’s funny, and since the guy with the gun had several warrants out and was wanted for escape, there wasn’t even a question that Xander would be called as a witness.
The next time he showed up for soup, though, the night manager came over to his table and brought an extra coffee cup and asked him if he’d be interested in working from midnight to eight in the morning four days a week, full benefits. It was right after the wreck, and Xander was feeling antsy at the idea of having to stay in town for long enough to straighten things out with the licensing people and the insurance companies and not having anything to do except drink and read comic books and watch TV, and a job at a place where he’d walk out every morning and have the possibility of seeing that Mountain seemed as good a break as he was likely to get. It was something to do- run the cash register when the place was full of long-haul drivers (who came and went in waves and kept the waitresses too busy to come to the desk) keep drunks and high school kids from getting beer, make sure the bathrooms and bus stations were clean, take deliveries from the produce people and the bread people, keep some pretty simple books.
And schmooze with the fishermen, who came in at five in the morning and ordered huge breakfasts on their way home from pulling nets. It took him a while to realize that they were Indians; he was a California boy through and through, and if he thought of their race at all he assumed they were Mexicans. One morning, though, one of them turned around and he saw the back of a jacket that said “Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission River Fisheries Enforcement” and his head felt as if a whole lot of spinning gears were coming together in new ways.
There was one old dude who was particularly chatty, came in later than the people with fish scales on the cuffs of their shirts, but sat with them, stuck around until the end of Xander’s shift most days and then, when The Mountain was out, often was stopped at the corner of the building right in the place with the best view.
The third or fourth time Xander got there and nearly bumped into the old guy, he turned and said “So, you like our Mountain, do you?”
“Not like anything I’ve seen before. Well, a little like Kilimanjaro, I suppose.”
“You’ve been to Kenya? Amazing place, isn’t it?”
Xander tried not to be surprised; all sorts of people went all sorts of places. “Yeah, Kenya and Tanzania both. I worked there for a couple of years, traveled all over.” Nearly died. Nearly killed myself. “You been?”
“Yeah, went over for a conference on Environmental Imperialism a few years ago; was mostly an excuse to go see Ngorngoro Crater, all those wild animals. Hell of a lot better than watching them on Channel 9. Liked the food in Europe better, though, and the weather. Too damned hot in Africa, worse than Arizona, even.” The old dude looked from under his white eyebrows, nodded, and turned to go. Xander watched his fuzzy grey braid swing back and forth as he walked away and saw him get into the Jeep with “Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission” on the door and head out toward the main drag into town.
_/|^|\_
The phone call when Willow freaked out about him buying Johnny Cash cds had wakened in Xander knowledge that had long lay dormant: having his own money made him free in the same degree that using the Council’s credit card made him captive. He was making plenty of money to pay his bills, and he’d actually put almost all of the extra money Giles had sent him into his new bank account- a national chain. He’d spent a few nights staring at the beer swirling in his half-empty bottle and thinking about banks, and finally decided that the marginal increase in difficulty finding him through his bank records if he put his money in some obscure local branch wasn’t worth the hassle of having to wait for the bank to open in the morning if he decided in the middle of the night that he was ready to leave town.
He wanted things, though, It had been a long time since he could have a lot of music or videos...dvds, crap, everything’s on dvd now, nobody has videos anymore... and then he thought about the money and the freedom and decided he’d just pretend he was too broke to go out and get good stuff, and started going to garage sales instead.
The whole time the court case dragged on was prime garage sale season. One Sunday, scrounging through a bunch of home-made video tapes that were a dime apiece or a dollar a grocery sack full, a nice lady with a tight denim coat and a long suede skirt (who made the hair on his neck raise a little the way it did when he was around Willow after she had done a spell) told him that the next Saturday was the most amazing sale: a big senior citizen community getting rid of what she called “stuff the heirs weren’t interested in” and if he got there early he could probably get all sorts of media. Then she laughed and said “I feel like telling you to go there as soon as it opens and buy all the weird vinyl to keep it out of my husband’s collection, but I don’t suppose you’d be interested.” They smiled at each other like old friends, then she leaned over and picked up a tape off the pile and said “Here, if this is what it says it is, you have to buy it. Greatest country music concert ever!”
He went home that night and started running the tapes through the TV/VCR/DVD he’d bought on the council’s card. He was pretty sure Willow wasn’t going to get all wigged out because he’d bought a TV, probably would if he didn’t. He’d decided he wasn’t going to get cable, and then found out that even though his crummy apartment didn’t have AC or reliable water pressure, it did have the two things he wanted most: a view of The Mountain, and free cable service. After a week, though, he had come to the conclusion that there were maybe three things he wanted to watch every week, and that left a whole lot of time when he needed something else to keep him from thinking. So he paid the connection charge to get hooked up to cable modem for online games and downloadable porn, and started looking for cheap videos and dvds at used bookstores and garage sales.
The first weekend he’d gotten garage sale tapes, half of them were home-made porn: mostly a threesome of two homely women and a guy with a beer gut. He considered sending them to the landfill but then he remembered his first introduction to EBay, back when he and Anya were always looking for cheap entertainment. They’d never bought any of the porn they found online but when she had checked the auction prices she’d been enthusiastic about making a video and selling it. It had taken weeks to talk her out of the idea. These, though, were strangers, over the age of eighteen (maybe a little too much over the age of eighteen) and it took him exactly no time to decide to open an EBay account and start some auctions. The money was a nice little bump to his bank account balance.
These latest tapes were all off-air recordings, mostly at fast speed; he’d picked up what looked like most of the third season of Farscape and some random Deep Space Nine, and a quick check showed him they were what they were labeled to be, and watchable. Score!
The tape the woman at the garage sale had handed him was a higher-quality one, and had big red letters saying DO NOT RECORD OVER! and “An All-Star Tribute to Johnny Cash.” Xander smiled; he could remember lying to Cordelia about being sick, so he could stay home and watch this when it was first broadcast. He’d still missed a lot of it because somehow the word had gotten to Willow that he’d said he was sick, and and Xander was having to make up symptoms to her and walk the line between being not well enough to go to a scoobie meeting and yet not sick enough that Willow would go into her chicken soup delivery mode. Before he knew it, a half-hour of the show was gone. By the time the call was over his parents were bickering over Wyclef Jean’s inclusion in the show, and it was pretty useless to try and get back to being lost in the music. His dad had never gotten into the idea of taping shows off the television, and somehow every time the show was rerun he was busy being kidnapped by drunken vampires or working double shifts at the Sunnydale Pizza Palace.
He pushed the tape into the VCR, hit “play” and held his breath. There was a long blank leader, and then the end of a program and some commercials and then there he was, the Man in Black, playing the opening chords to “Ring of Fire.” Xander hit “rewind” until the tape went back to the last commercial, stopped the tape, and went over to his crummy little kitchen, got himself some microwave popcorn and a bottle of MGD and then settled down in front of the television with a linty cotton blanket over his lap, ready to make up for something he’d always missed.
He got to see the Wyclef Jean bit, which he found pretty weird; he was glad that Sheryl Crow wasn’t weird, and that she played rhythm guitar and accordion pretty well. And then there was something he didn’t know was coming, and Kris Kristofferson started singing a song about a “crazy drunken Indian or the Marine that won the war” and Cash and Willie were singing with him and it was great, man, really great, and since he was on his third beer and it was his day off anyway, he watched that song four times to get all the words. Well, he wasn’t really trying to get all the words, just the name, the guy’s name the song was about, and he popped another beer and listened to the song again and wrote down “Ira Hayes” and then fell asleep during the big ensemble piece at the end of the show. The next thing he knew it was morning, and he’d been dreaming about The Mountain and the old guy with the braid down his back, and the inside of his mouth tasted like dog shit.
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Part 2
Julia, whew
Post NFA, Xander, Gen, PG for casual profanity
Based on "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", Lyrics here
Xander Harris is the creation of Joss Whedon and was embodied for many years by the actor Nick Brendon; I'm merely trying to follow their lead in writing this "what if Xander had to get off 1-5 at Washington Exit 111."
The resemblance of characters in this piece of fiction to any person living or dead is strictly a matter of ethnographic observation; Ira Hayes is the only real person who really did what I said he's done. None of the other people upon whom various waitresses, cooks, fishermen and farmers are based could ever meet Xander, who is a fictional character. Ipso facto all characters in this story are fictional.
Parts 2 and 3 will be posted Wednesday and Thursday, perhaps even both on Wednesday, God willing and I don't have any more acausal power outages. Now! With beta input!
Part 1
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.
It’s been a while now that he’s just kept running. He’d kept it together in Africa, found slayers where nobody else could find them. More than half the time, found them too late: sick with malaria or AIDS; married with a couple of kids; taking care of younger siblings, both parents dead or just disappeared; maimed in body or mind or both by some power-mad asshole who thought stealing children from their homes and making them into killing machines was a way to achieve political power. Kept it together until the pinging of the slayer call went silent, and then came back to America to rest. Fell apart then, but did it at carefully selected times and places so when the morning came he could find all the pieces, wedge them back together, and go on moving across the landscape until he needed to fall apart again.
Everyone else was in Europe; but Europe was just another nowhere to him; his friends were no longer his definition of home, and after a few years in the great strangeness below the Sahara he’d ceased to value novelty. His home town was at the bottom of a crater, but there was a whole country full of Toys R Us and Starbucks and multiplexes, McDonald’s and Wal-mart, and that stuff was as close to home as he was ever going to get.
Except when he looked at it for too long, the flatness of his vision made it all look empty and dead, compared with the crowded public life he’d gotten used to: barber’s chairs out in the street, screaming arguments over everything and nothing- that turned out not to be arguments at all when he got the hang of the language, just conversations about the trivialities of life, at the top of the speakers’ lungs. Flat and empty and clean and dead, and he’d get up with a hangover and find the nearest Asian grocery (learning quickly to stay to the edges of the country where he could find Asian Groceries, or at least to stay sober and travel fast until he found “Quong Phat Market” or something like that in the yellow pages) for ginger chews and instant miso soup with leeks, eat ginger and drink soup and piss every couple of hours until his head was clear and his eyes could scan the landscape again without the sight of the horizon making him nauseated. Then he’d use the Council’s platinum card to gas up the car and head out again.
The card was a leash, but he was OK with that- the leash had been part of his life for such a long time, call the number in London at 20 Hours Universal Time on the first day of every month, check in as well and whole or by OO hours on the second, the card would be deactivated and Willow would be after him with the kind of locator spells that hurt when they connected. So he’d call, and whoever picked up would say “Xander?” in a voice of eager friendliness. It was always a familiar voice, usually Giles but often Willow, sometimes Andrew or Dawn, rarely Buffy, once or twice Faith. That had been a little weird and a little exciting, both times: gave him something to think about when he jerked off, instead of doing it with his mind as flat and empty and dead as the motel parking lot.
Not that he wanted Faith. Not that he wanted anyone. Not even Anya, any more. After a while he’d stopped aching for her and then there’d been nights in Africa when he lay in the back of his Rover, inside the mosquito net tent that clipped to the headliner, cooling air flowing in through the barely open windows, and thought about going back to California and finding Cordelia. He thought of taking her out for drinks and talking about old times and seeing if any of the juice that had been there in high school was still flowing. Then one first-of-the-month call, it had been Willow he’d been talking to, and he questioned, offhand, if anyone had heard from Cordy. She was quiet for so long he could hear sleet beating against the windows of the Council building, and then Willow started to cry and told him Cordelia was dead, had been in a mystical coma for months before she died, since before Sunnydale fell into a hole. And that was the last thing that had any curve or contour or pulse in his mind, gone, just more flatness.
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Every once in a while, the phone call would include a carefully worded request, “While you’re in the neighborhood” which was how he found out that (from the perspective of London) Roanoke, Virginia and Cleveland, Ohio were next door to each other. Not that he had any particular reason to stay in Roanoke, and Cleveland was just as good a place to go next as anywhere else. There was a Hellmouth there, sure, but it turned out that it had never been as attractive a vacation and retirement spot for evil as Sunnydale, probably the climate, and except for one Watcher, working undercover as a curator of sheet music at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it didn’t need a constant guardian.
Turned out that the strange disturbance the Watcher had heard reports of was a bleached-blond vampire, down on his luck and about four bottles short of a six-pack, huddled down on the Hellmouth and crying about slaughter in Los Angeles, and where the hell has he been between now and then? Fighting down the impulse to stake Spike and put him out of his misery (because chances are he’d be back on the Hellmouth, whole and crazy, by the time Xander drove out of town, the cat who always came back), Xander and the watcher got a potion down him to put him into a deep sleep long enough to be air freighted to London, bunged up in a fancy steel coffin; shipped him off to the Council be dealt with: another wounded hero in the battle against evil.
It wasn’t ironic enough to be funny, Xander thought.
And then he gassed up his car and set off west on the interstate, the humidity of an oncoming Midwest summer and the sick smell off Lake Erie making him homesick for saltwater beaches.
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He’d gotten reservations to stay at a big new casino resort out on the Washington coast, because Ocean Shores was the closest ocean beach to Cleveland if you drove I-90 all the way west, and then headed for the Pacific. Calling ahead for reservations from a motel in Billings, Montana, and intending to drive straight through, he was eighty miles from his destination when he just couldn’t stay awake to drive another mile. There had been construction on every road he chose, and then a wreck at Ft. Lewis. He pulled off I-5 at the first exit with a “Lodgings” symbol on the information sign and pulled into the parking lot at the King Oscar Motel (after grabbing a Double Whopper with Cheese Meal at the Burger King right next door) four hours after he’d thought he’d be at the beach.
It was pretty much like any other Interstate off-ramp retail development, notable only for the surpassingly ugly red neon hawk at the truck stop across the road: Big Lots to Safeway with a bunch of stuff (hey, Starbucks!) in between, Walgreens kitty-corner from Riteaid; Burger King, Taco Bell, no, Taco Time- must be some local variant- Dairy Queen and McDonalds, Wal-mart, Ruby Tuesdays, and the multiple gas stations, a Quicki-Lube, and a big flat bulldozed area with a sign that said “Coming Soon” and a bunch of other stuff he couldn’t quite read although he thought he recognized a Home Depot logo. Nothing to distinguish it from any other place he’d been in the past four days, or the past six weeks, or the last year, and he smiled with bemusement when the night clerk told him that the only place left that night was the top-floor luxury view suite. He laughed to himself, contemplating a better view of the red neon hawk, and took his sports bag upstairs fully expecting to leave in the morning and never see the place again.
He showered and went to bed without closing the drapes, hoping the sun would wake him up early enough that he could get on the road before the traffic got bad. It was a bad decision for a man who took comfort in flatness and repetition. The next morning the sun rose as it should and woke him up as he’d planned, but when he sat up in bed, reaching without thought for the TV remote to provide his morning diet of CNN and wondering again why the bed wasn’t angled to face the television, he looked straight out the window and across fifty miles of air to a white and blue volcanic peak with a tricorn top; and was struck with the need to see it for a few days more, at least. Maybe even go walking up into that snow.
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It didn’t take long, all told, to settle in to a rut. He’d intended to take off to Mt. Rainier National Park that day and then get on the road to the beach again, but he hadn’t made it past any of the bridges that marked the county line in his attempts to get there. The first try he followed dead reckoning and got himself completely lost, coming at dusk in a town named “Rainier” which, he discovered, was still more than sixty miles from the mountain and only about seven from the motel where he’d slept the night before. Then the rain set in, and neither the mountain not the beach seemed very attractive, so he set out looking for a cheaper motel room, further from the freeway, and somehow ended up in a place called “The Golden Gavel” two blocks from the State Capitol building and walking distance from the headquarters of K Records, which he thought was sort of impressive in its own way.
The second attempt, begun when he woke up on a brilliantly sunny morning, ended when he merged onto the freeway with an optimistic outlook and Keith Urban blasting on KMPS and was blind-sided by an H2 changing lanes at 70mph. His leased car was totaled and he got strapped to a backboard and taken to the emergency room, where they asked a lot of questions about his missing eye and other scars and looked with suspicion at his insurance card and wouldn’t release him until there’d been all sorts of insurance crap faxed from London.
The hassles over the wreck felt as if they took forever; the Hummer driver’s insurance company tried to blame Xander for the collision, saying his lack of vision on the left side caused the accident. He had to take a driving test with an insurance examiner, in a car equipped with the same extra mirrors his old lease car had, to prove he could drive safely. On top of that he was in the middle of a lawyer-on-lawyer tag-team-cage-match: the Hummer’s driver was a lawyer, and had a lawyer, and her insurance company had a lawyer, and the Council’s insurance company had several lawyers. The Council hired a local lawyer to represent Xander in court, a lawyer who drove a Civic Hybrid and did a lot of pro bono work for environmental causes. She (the town had a lot of girl lawyers, Xander noticed) rummaged around the internet and found out a bunch of stuff about short drivers and big SUVs and impaired sight lines and had the good luck to pick up a piece of gossip: remarks the Hummer driver had made at a Republican fundraiser about how people who couldn’t get out of her way in time deserved to get run over.
The case was settled out of court, and Xander finally fell apart and drank his way from bar to bar the afternoon after the papers were signed, then took a bus to the apartment he’d rented- the cheapest one he could find with a view of The Mountain- and lived on miso and ginger chews for two days.
When he woke up on the third morning he picked up a map at the Visitors’ Information Center by the Capitol Building, and drove up to Paradise and walked half a mile or so up the trail toward the peak, but he had to leave before dark to get back home and get cleaned up and go to work.
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Andrew was a little disappointed when Xander called from the same place for the fourth month in a row, almost four weeks after the court case had ended and long after the smart bets had all said that the next time he called it would be from New Guinea or even Africa again. He was aghast when Xander gave him a home phone number and a work number and told him he’d be staying in town at least until next spring.
Part of the surprise was because Giles had picked up his secure direct phone at work a month or so after the H2 had crashed into Xander’s Taurus and been startled to hear Xander making an unscheduled call. He’d been taken aback by what Xander asked him for: funds for first and last month’s rent, and a damage deposit on a six-month rental contract, and a cash advance equivalent to two months of his usual Platinum Card charges.
“Giles, I’ll keep calling in, I promise, but I’m tired of Willow being able to look at my charges and know what I’ve been buying. The last time I talked to her I got twenty minutes of cross-examination about my mental health because I’d bought a boxed set of Johnny Cash CDs. I need some privacy, for God’s sake; it’s not like I’m in the Sudan any more. You aren’t going to need to be able to trace me by my room charges.”
“Why there, in particular, if you don’t mind me asking? Why not wait until the suit is settled and then rent a place somewhere more centrally located, or even keep traveling and fly back for the trial?” Giles sounded only mildly interested, and Xander could tell the question was more a way to keep the conversation going than a sign of worry. He didn’t want to tell him about The Mountain, though, or about how strange it seemed to be standing in the middle of a carnival crowd and look up and see a bald eagle cruising over the Ferris wheel. So he just said something mostly true about not wanting to have to mess around at airports any more than he had to, and since the last time he’d talked to Giles they’d spent a lot of time trading airport security horror stories, Giles laughed and the topic was dropped and the next morning there was a wire transfer of $8000 from the Council’s American funds, and that was that.
Xander didn’t tell Giles about his job, either, and he didn’t tell Andrew any more than the number. It felt weird, a little, to find himself working as the night manager at the same truck stop restaurant with the ugly red bird neon sign, one of the first things that he’d seen in a place that was beginning to feel familiar in the way nothing had since Sunnydale. The restaurant had good soup, though, and he’d taken to coming in on rainy evenings until one night the place was empty except for a bunch of high school kids eating french fries and ice cream sundaes at midnight and talking about a play they’d just finished performing. Xander was just walking up to the cashier’s station when something in the way the cashier was standing made him stop and make a slow survey of the entry hall. There, under the stairs to the glass-walled manager’s office, was a man in blue jeans, a green sports jacket covered with NASCAR patches and a baseball hat. Nothing out of the ordinary about him, except that the cashier was looking at him with an expression that told him she expected the guy to be big trouble, and fast.
He wasn’t even aware of scoping out the tactical situation and putting himself in position to intercept, but when the guy stepped out from under the stairs and pulled a silenced 9mm pistol from under his coat, Xander knocked him off his feet before either of them were really aware what was happening. The pistol was in Xander’s hands before both men hit the ground, and he had the clip out and in his front pants pocket, and the guy’s arms immobilized before the cashier could start to scream.
After what he’d been through in Cote d’Ivoire, let alone Sunnydale, it hadn’t seemed like a big deal, and after the cops showed up and got the guy (who was after the cashier, her ex-husband or boyfriend or something) he gave them the “I’m just traveling through, no permanent address, work for a UK-based private security service” story. He showed them the papers that called him an industrial security consultant and gave them the London drop-box address he’d never had to use while he was in Africa, hey, that’s funny, and since the guy with the gun had several warrants out and was wanted for escape, there wasn’t even a question that Xander would be called as a witness.
The next time he showed up for soup, though, the night manager came over to his table and brought an extra coffee cup and asked him if he’d be interested in working from midnight to eight in the morning four days a week, full benefits. It was right after the wreck, and Xander was feeling antsy at the idea of having to stay in town for long enough to straighten things out with the licensing people and the insurance companies and not having anything to do except drink and read comic books and watch TV, and a job at a place where he’d walk out every morning and have the possibility of seeing that Mountain seemed as good a break as he was likely to get. It was something to do- run the cash register when the place was full of long-haul drivers (who came and went in waves and kept the waitresses too busy to come to the desk) keep drunks and high school kids from getting beer, make sure the bathrooms and bus stations were clean, take deliveries from the produce people and the bread people, keep some pretty simple books.
And schmooze with the fishermen, who came in at five in the morning and ordered huge breakfasts on their way home from pulling nets. It took him a while to realize that they were Indians; he was a California boy through and through, and if he thought of their race at all he assumed they were Mexicans. One morning, though, one of them turned around and he saw the back of a jacket that said “Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission River Fisheries Enforcement” and his head felt as if a whole lot of spinning gears were coming together in new ways.
There was one old dude who was particularly chatty, came in later than the people with fish scales on the cuffs of their shirts, but sat with them, stuck around until the end of Xander’s shift most days and then, when The Mountain was out, often was stopped at the corner of the building right in the place with the best view.
The third or fourth time Xander got there and nearly bumped into the old guy, he turned and said “So, you like our Mountain, do you?”
“Not like anything I’ve seen before. Well, a little like Kilimanjaro, I suppose.”
“You’ve been to Kenya? Amazing place, isn’t it?”
Xander tried not to be surprised; all sorts of people went all sorts of places. “Yeah, Kenya and Tanzania both. I worked there for a couple of years, traveled all over.” Nearly died. Nearly killed myself. “You been?”
“Yeah, went over for a conference on Environmental Imperialism a few years ago; was mostly an excuse to go see Ngorngoro Crater, all those wild animals. Hell of a lot better than watching them on Channel 9. Liked the food in Europe better, though, and the weather. Too damned hot in Africa, worse than Arizona, even.” The old dude looked from under his white eyebrows, nodded, and turned to go. Xander watched his fuzzy grey braid swing back and forth as he walked away and saw him get into the Jeep with “Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission” on the door and head out toward the main drag into town.
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The phone call when Willow freaked out about him buying Johnny Cash cds had wakened in Xander knowledge that had long lay dormant: having his own money made him free in the same degree that using the Council’s credit card made him captive. He was making plenty of money to pay his bills, and he’d actually put almost all of the extra money Giles had sent him into his new bank account- a national chain. He’d spent a few nights staring at the beer swirling in his half-empty bottle and thinking about banks, and finally decided that the marginal increase in difficulty finding him through his bank records if he put his money in some obscure local branch wasn’t worth the hassle of having to wait for the bank to open in the morning if he decided in the middle of the night that he was ready to leave town.
He wanted things, though, It had been a long time since he could have a lot of music or videos...dvds, crap, everything’s on dvd now, nobody has videos anymore... and then he thought about the money and the freedom and decided he’d just pretend he was too broke to go out and get good stuff, and started going to garage sales instead.
The whole time the court case dragged on was prime garage sale season. One Sunday, scrounging through a bunch of home-made video tapes that were a dime apiece or a dollar a grocery sack full, a nice lady with a tight denim coat and a long suede skirt (who made the hair on his neck raise a little the way it did when he was around Willow after she had done a spell) told him that the next Saturday was the most amazing sale: a big senior citizen community getting rid of what she called “stuff the heirs weren’t interested in” and if he got there early he could probably get all sorts of media. Then she laughed and said “I feel like telling you to go there as soon as it opens and buy all the weird vinyl to keep it out of my husband’s collection, but I don’t suppose you’d be interested.” They smiled at each other like old friends, then she leaned over and picked up a tape off the pile and said “Here, if this is what it says it is, you have to buy it. Greatest country music concert ever!”
He went home that night and started running the tapes through the TV/VCR/DVD he’d bought on the council’s card. He was pretty sure Willow wasn’t going to get all wigged out because he’d bought a TV, probably would if he didn’t. He’d decided he wasn’t going to get cable, and then found out that even though his crummy apartment didn’t have AC or reliable water pressure, it did have the two things he wanted most: a view of The Mountain, and free cable service. After a week, though, he had come to the conclusion that there were maybe three things he wanted to watch every week, and that left a whole lot of time when he needed something else to keep him from thinking. So he paid the connection charge to get hooked up to cable modem for online games and downloadable porn, and started looking for cheap videos and dvds at used bookstores and garage sales.
The first weekend he’d gotten garage sale tapes, half of them were home-made porn: mostly a threesome of two homely women and a guy with a beer gut. He considered sending them to the landfill but then he remembered his first introduction to EBay, back when he and Anya were always looking for cheap entertainment. They’d never bought any of the porn they found online but when she had checked the auction prices she’d been enthusiastic about making a video and selling it. It had taken weeks to talk her out of the idea. These, though, were strangers, over the age of eighteen (maybe a little too much over the age of eighteen) and it took him exactly no time to decide to open an EBay account and start some auctions. The money was a nice little bump to his bank account balance.
These latest tapes were all off-air recordings, mostly at fast speed; he’d picked up what looked like most of the third season of Farscape and some random Deep Space Nine, and a quick check showed him they were what they were labeled to be, and watchable. Score!
The tape the woman at the garage sale had handed him was a higher-quality one, and had big red letters saying DO NOT RECORD OVER! and “An All-Star Tribute to Johnny Cash.” Xander smiled; he could remember lying to Cordelia about being sick, so he could stay home and watch this when it was first broadcast. He’d still missed a lot of it because somehow the word had gotten to Willow that he’d said he was sick, and and Xander was having to make up symptoms to her and walk the line between being not well enough to go to a scoobie meeting and yet not sick enough that Willow would go into her chicken soup delivery mode. Before he knew it, a half-hour of the show was gone. By the time the call was over his parents were bickering over Wyclef Jean’s inclusion in the show, and it was pretty useless to try and get back to being lost in the music. His dad had never gotten into the idea of taping shows off the television, and somehow every time the show was rerun he was busy being kidnapped by drunken vampires or working double shifts at the Sunnydale Pizza Palace.
He pushed the tape into the VCR, hit “play” and held his breath. There was a long blank leader, and then the end of a program and some commercials and then there he was, the Man in Black, playing the opening chords to “Ring of Fire.” Xander hit “rewind” until the tape went back to the last commercial, stopped the tape, and went over to his crummy little kitchen, got himself some microwave popcorn and a bottle of MGD and then settled down in front of the television with a linty cotton blanket over his lap, ready to make up for something he’d always missed.
He got to see the Wyclef Jean bit, which he found pretty weird; he was glad that Sheryl Crow wasn’t weird, and that she played rhythm guitar and accordion pretty well. And then there was something he didn’t know was coming, and Kris Kristofferson started singing a song about a “crazy drunken Indian or the Marine that won the war” and Cash and Willie were singing with him and it was great, man, really great, and since he was on his third beer and it was his day off anyway, he watched that song four times to get all the words. Well, he wasn’t really trying to get all the words, just the name, the guy’s name the song was about, and he popped another beer and listened to the song again and wrote down “Ira Hayes” and then fell asleep during the big ensemble piece at the end of the show. The next thing he knew it was morning, and he’d been dreaming about The Mountain and the old guy with the braid down his back, and the inside of his mouth tasted like dog shit.
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Part 2
Julia, whew