The Five

ONE

Death of a Band

ONE.

Nomad decided he would have to kill the waitress.

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How he would do it, he didn’t know. But it would have to be done soon, because in another minute he was going to go off like that dude in The Thing whose alien blood bubbled and shrieked under the touch of a hot wire. His neck was going to grow six feet long and spikes would shoot out of his arms before he tore the room apart. The waitress was cheerful and talky. Nomad hated cheerful and talky. He wasn’t a particularly good guy, nor a very bad one. He was a musician.

Besides, he wasn’t worth a damn before noon, and here he was at ten in the morning sitting in a booth at a Denny’s restaurant just off I-35 at Round Rock, about twenty miles north of Austin. Everything was too bright for him in here. Everything was yellow and red and the sun was blasting between the blinds of the east-facing windows. His sunglasses helped a little, but underneath them his eyes were tired. And now here came the fucking waitress again, her third swoop past in as many minutes. She was an old hippie chick somewhere in the human wasteland of her late forties, he figured. She looked like she’d been somebody’s groupie, back in the day. She was too thin and too old to be wearing her copper-colored hair in braids like some kind of Pippi Longstocking wannabe. She was bringing the coffee pot, she in her goldenrod yellow uniform, smiling, a big-toothed goddess of breakfast. Her nametag said Hi I’m Laurie.

“Oh, my God,” Nomad said, to no one in particular.

“Fill ’em up?” Laurie asked, coffee pot poised.

There were various noises of assent. “Thanks,” Mike said, when his cup was brimmed, and then Laurie answered, “No problem,” and Nomad looked at the ketchup bottle as a weapon of murder because she’d just stepped on the nuts of one of his worst pet peeves. Where that damned No Problem had started he didn’t know, but he wished he had two minutes in a locked room with the sonofabitch who’d first said it. Like a waitress or waiter was saying Oh it’s no problem that you’re asking me to do something that I’m fucking paid to do, and that is part of my job description, and that if I didn’t do I would be kicked in the ass out the door by whoever pays me to do it. Oh no, it’s no problem at all.

Then Laurie took a long look at all of them, at Nomad and Ariel and Terry in the first booth and Mike and Berke in the one just behind, and she gave a lopsided little grin and came up with the familiar question: “Are ya’ll in a band?”

Nomad, whose given name was John Charles, did not rate breakfast at the top of his daily needs. Some of the others liked it. Mike and Terry did, especially, and had wanted to stop here before they headed up to Waco. Usually they stopped at a barbecue joint just outside Austin called Smitty’s, where the one-eyed ex-Marine cook put eggs and beef hash in a blender with hellacious homemade hot sauce and called it a Texas Tornado, but Smitty had closed up shop at the first of the summer and so Denny’s got the vote. They had never been in here before and had never met Laurie, but of course she knew. Probably because if there were thirteen hundred and fifty-two guitar players in Nashville there had to be fourteen hundred and sixty-three bands in and around Austin, so seeing musicians sitting in a Denny’s was no biggie. But more clues were the bracelets of green vines and music notes—the opening bars of ‘Amazing Grace’—tattooed around Ariel Collier’s wrists, or maybe Terry Spitzenham’s soul patch and shaved skull, or Mike Davis’s heavily-tattooed arms, or Berke Bonnevey’s silver nose ring and in general her do-not-fuck-with-me attitude, or Nomad’s own shoulder-length black hair, sunglasses designed to shut out the world, and his dark demeanor.

Take all that together and you had either a band or a freak show, and some would say there was very little difference.

“We are,” Ariel answered, and she offered the waitress the encouragement of a direct gaze and a smile, which Nomad had known was coming because Ariel—sweet, simple child—could never turn her face from a stranger.

“What’s your name? Your band’s name, I mean?”

“The Five,” Ariel said.

There was just the briefest of pauses, and then Laurie wrinkled her brow and cocked her head to one side as if she’d missed part of that. “The five what?”

“Aces,” Mike mumbled, into his coffee cup.

“Asses,” Berke corrected.

But Laurie’s attention was still on Ariel, as if she knew Ariel was probably the only person in this group who wouldn’t steer her into a ditch.

“Just The Five,” Ariel said. “We wanted to keep it easy to remember.”

“Oh, yeah. Like the Fab Five, right?”

“Fab Four,” Terry spoke up. The sunlight sparked off his round-lensed wire-rimmed glasses, which were suitably Lennonesque. “That was the Beatles.”

“Right, right.” Laurie nodded, and again she swept her eyes across the assembled Five, in all their glory of an early-morning saddle-up and an impending ride into the great unknown. “How come there are six of you?” She motioned with the coffee pot toward the place next to Berke where the sixth member had been sitting until about ninety seconds ago.

“He’s the manager,” Ariel replied.

“The slave driver,” Mike said. “Keeper of the keys and the money bags.”

“The boss, huh?” Laurie asked. “Well, I guess everybody’s got to have one.” She caught sight of another customer flagging her down for a refill, and she said, “’Scuse me,” and moved away.

Terry started back in where he’d left off on his pancakes. Berke worked on buttered toast and a glass of water. Mike ate his scrambled eggs, Ariel sipped her apple juice and Nomad parted the window blinds a fraction so he could peer out against the glare into the parking lot.

The Little Genius was out there, talking on his cellphone. George Emerson by name, road manager, sound mixer, crisis mender, argument mediator, bean counter, and what have you. He was standing by their van, a battleship-gray 1995 Ford Econoline, three doors, with a U-Haul trailer hooked up behind. He was intent on his conversation, and he’d lit a cigarette. Nomad watched him, as he talked and smoked. George was five feet, six inches tall, had curly light brown hair—losing it on the crown a little bit, to be honest—and he wore horn-rimmed glasses and his usual button-down pale blue short-sleeved shirt and chinos. God only knew why George wore brown loafers with shiny pennies in them. Maybe it was for the shock effect. George was strolling back and forth now as he talked, trailing a plume of smoke. Not only was he a little genius, he was a little locomotive.

I think I can…I think I can…I think—

“Ya’ll playin’ here tonight?”

Laurie had returned, toothy and bright and braidy. She had posed this question to Ariel, who said, “We were at the Saxon Pub last night. Tonight we’re at Common Grounds in Waco.”

“Ya’ll are from around here, then?”

“Yeah, we’ve been living here…how long, Terry?”

“Years and years,” Terry answered.

“Our tour’s just started up,” Ariel said, in anticipation of Laurie’s next question. “That was the first show.”

“I’ll be. What do you play?”

“Guitar. And I sing some.”

“Oh, I would’ve known that,” Laurie said. “You’ve got a nice speakin’ voice.”

Nomad had let the blinds go and was drinking his bitter black coffee, but he was thinking about George and the cellphone and the smoke signals in the air.

“My daughter plays the guitar,” the waitress went on. “Just turned sixteen. She sings, too. Any advice I can pass along?”

“Stay sixteen,” Berke said, without looking up.

“Move to an island,” Mike offered, in his low raspy growl, “where agents and promoters are shot on sight.”

Laurie nodded, as if this made perfect sense to her. “One thing I’d like to ask, if I could. Then I’ll leave you guys alone. I’ve seen…like…musicians on stage do this.” She transferred the coffee pot to her left hand, balled up her right fist and did the heart thump and then the peace sign. “What’s that mean?”

Nomad studied her through his dark glasses. She was probably five or six years younger than she looked. It was the hard Texas sun that aged the skin so much. She was probably a little dense, too. Happy with her lot in life, and dense. Maybe you had to be a little dense to be truly happy. Or oblivious enough to think you were. He couldn’t help himself; he said, “Bullshit.”

“Pardon?” Laurie asked.

“It means,” Ariel said evenly, “solidarity with the audience. You know. We love you, and we wish you peace.”

“Like I said: Bullshit.” Nomad ignored Ariel, who likewise ignored him, and then he swigged down the rest of his coffee. “I’m done.” He slid out of the booth, put a buck down on the table, and walked out of the Denny’s into the hot sunshine. In this mid-July of 2008, the fierce heat was unrelenting, day after day. Drought scorched the land. The air was hazy and carried the acrid tang of a brush fire, maybe from the next county. But where was George? The Little Genius was not standing beside the Scumbucket, which was the name Mike had given their van. Then Nomad saw a wisp of smoke rise up and waft away, and he walked over to the edge of the parking lot where George was sitting on a low brick wall, still involved with his cell conversation. Or, really, George was just listening, and taking a drag off his cigarette every few seconds as cars and trucks blew past on the long straight corridor of I-35.

Nomad quietly came up behind him. George must have felt the presence of a black aura because he suddenly turned his head, looked right at Nomad, and said, “Hey, listen. I’ve gotta go, I’ll call you back, okay?” His phone buddy seemed hesitant to give it up, so George said, “I’ll let you know tomorrow. Right. Early, before ten. Yeah. Okay, then.” He put his phone away in its small clipcase on his belt, and then he drew the cigarette in as if it were oxygen to an air-starved man and spewed the smoke out through his nostrils.

Nomad said nothing. Finally George asked, “They ready yet?”

“No.”

George continued to watch the passing traffic. Nomad sat on the wall a few feet away from him without being asked, because it was a free fucking country.

They were both wearing their uniforms, Nomad thought. George’s was the uniform of the guy in control, the guy who met the accountants, if there were any accountants to be met. The guy who spoke to the banker about the loan for the new gear, if there was a banker and a loan and new gear to be had. Though George had three small silver rings in each earlobe, he still projected the conservative front, the voice of reason, the leash on these madmen and mad women who called themselves The Five. Nomad’s uniform was his Army-green T-shirt, his well-worn black jeans, his black Chuck high tops and his black glasses that cut the glare and shunned the world until he was ready to let any of it in. His was the uniform of the fighter, the rager against the machine, the take-no-prisoners bard and bastard. The teller of truths, if there were any truths to be told. As if he knew any real truths, which he doubted. But you had to dress the part of whatever play you were in, that was for sure.

He had turned twenty-nine two weeks ago. They’d given him dairy-free birthday cake and soy milk ice cream, since he was allergic to dairy. They’d taken him paint-balling. Everybody got a birthday celebration, that was part of the deal. Not a written deal, but one that was understood. Just as on stage, everybody got their time. Their appreciation, for what they did. That was an important thing, Nomad thought; to feel appreciated, like you meant something in the world and your life and work wasn’t just like a big busted-up truck spinning its tires in a mudhole. Like what you did mattered to somebody.

He was the good front man: six-one, lean and rangy, the hungry-as-the-wolf look. He could do the curled lip and the attitude as well as anybody on the knife and gun circuit. His nose had been broken in a bar fight in Memphis and he had a small scar on his chin courtesy of a thrown beer bottle in Jacksonville. He had been born in Detroit, and he had been down enough rough streets to know when to look over his shoulder and check what might be coming up on him from behind.

That was what he had decided to do now, with the Little Genius.

“Business call?” Nomad asked.

George didn’t answer, which told Nomad all he needed to know.

But in time—ten seconds, fifteen, whatever—George did reply, because he was a stand-up guy and part of the family. He said, “John, I’m thirty-three years old.”

“Okay.” That was no news; Nomad remembered George’s thirty-third back in April. “And?”

“Thirty-three,” George went on. “Ten years ago, I was ready to climb mountains. I thought I was going to have it all. You know?”

“Yes,” Nomad said, but it sounded more like a question.

“Ten years is a long time, man. In this business, it’s like dog years. And I’ve been on the road with somebody since I was twenty. First gig, with the Survivors out of Chicago.” George was a Windy City boy, born and bred. “They lasted about four months before they exploded. No survivors.” He didn’t pause to see if Nomad had cracked a smile, but that wasn’t going to happen anyway. “Then with the Bobby Apple Band, out of Urbana. Have I told you this before?”

“No.” There’d been many stories from George’s complicated past, but not this one. Nomad wondered if he’d been saving it.

“The band was lame, just frat boys really. Bobby Apple—Bobby Koskavitch—was a skinny computer geek at Illinois, but he could belt it like a fifty-year-old black dude raised on misery. I saw him lift the gigs on his shoulders and just fly with them. Just take off, and leave the band behind. He was in some other space and time, you know?”

“Yeah.” It was what every musician longed for: the rapture when nothing in the world mattered but the sound and it carried you away with a mindrush that was better than sex with sixteen women.

“They recorded two CDs in the drummer’s basement,” George said. “Solid songs, most of them original. Had some airplay on a local station. Swapped up musicians, people came and went. Tried a horn section for a bigger sound. But that force—the stage magic—in Bobby never translated.” Not an uncommon thing, Nomad knew. If you didn’t translate to CDs or mp3s or vinyl sooner or later the road would wear you out. “I mean, they had plenty of live gigs. We were making money, and Bobby was a trooper, and we had a few nibbles from A&R dudes but no bites. Then one day…he just woke up and asked me what town he was in, and he said he was going to do the gig that night at the Armory and to pay everybody up afterward, because he was going home. I tried to talk him out of it. We all did. I said, Keep going, man. Don’t give it up. I said, You’ve got a huge talent, man. Don’t walk away from it. But, you know, he was tired. He’d hit his wall. I guess I was tired too, because I didn’t try harder. I guess I figured…really, there’s always the next band.” George took another draw from his cigarette and regarded the burning stub as if figuring it was time to kill it. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. He went back to computer programming. Anti-virus shit. Probably mucho rich right now, laughing his ass off in Silicon Valley.”

“Maybe.” Nomad said, and shrugged. “Or maybe he lost his ass and wishes he was back in his old band.”

“You ever wish you were back in your old band?”

“Which one?” Nomad asked, his face impassive.

“The one that made you the happiest,” said George.

“That would be the current situation, so your question is null.”

George pulled up a pinched smile. “I didn’t realize how little it takes to make you happy.”

“This isn’t about me, or whether I’m happy or not, is it?” Nomad waited for George to speak again, but when the Little Genius did not, Nomad leaned toward him and said, “I do have eyes. I’ve got some sense. I’ve gone through enough bands to know when somebody’s got the wanders. So be brother enough to tell me the truth. Who’s making the offer?”

“Not what you think.”

“Tell me.”

A pained expression passed across George’s face. He took in the last of his cigarette, blew out gray smoke that scrolled away like a banner of mysterious calligraphy, and crushed the butt into the bricks.

“My first cousin Jeff, in Chicago,” George said, “owns a business called Audio Advances. They do the setups for auditoriums, town halls, churches…you name it. Mixing boards, effects racks, speakers, whatever they need. Plus training in how to run everything. He’s doing real well.” George stopped to watch a Harley speed past on the highway, its driver wearing a bright red helmet. “He needs a new Midwestern rep. He wants to know by ten tomorrow morning if I’m in or out.”

Nomad said nothing. He was sitting in the frozen moment, thinking that he’d had it all wrong. He was thinking that George was being hustled—courted, if you wanted to put it that way—by some other band. That the GinGins or the Austin Tribe or the Sky Walkers or any of a hundred others they’d shared a stage with had fired a manager and come to steal George away with promises of bright lights, choice weed and semi-conscious nookie.

But no, this was worse. Because it was the real world calling, not this fiction of life, and Nomad could see in George’s eyes that ten in the morning could not arrive too soon.

“Jesus.” Nomad’s tongue felt parched. “Are you giving it up?”

George kept his face averted. He stared down at the ground. Small beads of sweat had gathered at his temples in the rising heat. “What can I say?” was all he could find.

“You can say it, or not. You’re giving it up.”

“Yeah.” George nodded, just a slight lift of the chin.

“We had a good night!” It was said with force, but not with volume. Nomad was leaning closer, his face strained. He took off his sunglasses, his eyes the fierce blue of the Texas sky and intense with both anger and dismay. “Listen to me, will you? We sold some tickets last night! We rocked the house, man! Come on!”

“Yeah, we did okay,” George agreed, his face still downcast. “We sold some tickets, some CDs and some T-shirts. Made some new fans. Put on a tight show. Sure. And we’re going to do the same in Waco, and the same in Dallas. And after that, in El Paso and Tucson, and San Diego and L.A, and Phoenix and Albuquerque and everywhere else…sure, we’ll do fine. Usual fuckups and miscues, broken strings, sound problems, lights blowing out, drunks looking for a fight and jailbait looking to get laid. Sure.” And now George turned his head and looked directly into Nomad’s eyes, and Nomad wondered when it was that the Little Genius had hit his wall. On the last tour through the Southeast, when two clubs had cancelled at the last minute and they were left to scramble for gigs, to basically beg to play for gas money? Was it in that grunge-hole in Daytona Beach, under the fishnets and plastic swordfish, where drunk bikers throwing their cups of beer had brought a quick end to the show and the appearance of the cops was the opener to a collision between billyclubs and bald skulls? How about the Scumbucket’s blown tire on a freeway south of Miami, with the sick sky turning purple and the winds picking up and off in the distance a hurricane siren starting to wail? Or had it been something simple, something quiet and sudden, like a gremlin in the fusebox or the death of a microphone? A floor slick with beer and vomit? A bed with no sheets and a stained mattress? Had George’s wall been made of gray cinderblock, with sad brown waterstains on the tiles overhead and the grit of desolation on the tiles underfoot?

Maybe, just maybe, George’s wall had been human, and had been one too many A&R no-shows at the comp ticket counter.

Just maybe.

“Like I said, I’m thirty-three years old.” George’s voice was quiet and tired and small. He squinted against the sun. “My clock is ticking, John. Yours is too, if you’ll be truthful.”

“I’m not too fucking old to do what I love to do,” came the reply, like a whipstrike. “And we’ve got the video! Jesus Christ, man, we’ve got the video!”

“The video. Yeah, we’ve got that. Okay. We’ve had videos before. Tell me how this is such a magic bullet.”

Nomad felt anger twist south of his heart. He felt the blood pounding in his face. He wanted to reach out and grab George’s shirt collar and slap that blank businessman’s stare away, because he wanted his friend back. But he stayed his hand, with the greatest effort, and he said in an acid voice, “You’re the one who wanted the video the most. Have you forgotten?”

“I haven’t. It’s a good song. It’s a great song. And the video is great, too. We needed the visual, and it’s worth every cent. But I’m not sure it’s going to change the game, John. Not in the way you’re thinking.”

“Well hell, how about telling me that before we spent the two thousand dollars?”

“I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know,” George said. “Everything’s a gamble, man. You know that. Everything’s just throwing dice. So we’ve got the great song, and the great video. And I’m hoping for the best, man. You know I am. I’m hoping this tour is the one that lights the jets. But what I’m telling you now is that this is my last time out.” He paused, letting that register. When Nomad didn’t punch him or go for his throat in one of his infamous white-hot supernova explosions, which was what George had feared might happen when John heard it, George said, “I’m going to go for the rep job with my cousin. Until then, I promise—I swear to you, man, as a brother—that I will perform my duties exactly as always. I will jump when I need to jump, and I jump upon any sonofabitch who needs to be jumped. I will take care of you guys, just like always. Okay?”

There was a few seconds’ pause, and then the person who’d come up behind them spoke: “Okay. Whatever.”

George did jump a little bit, but Nomad kept his cool. They looked around—taking it easy, neither man showing surprise nor any hint of what they’d been discussing—and there was Berke, who offered them her own expression of absolute detachment. She wore faded jeans and a wine-red tanktop. She was twenty-six years old, born in San Diego, stood about five-nine, had short-cut curly black hair so thick it was a struggle to pull a brush through it, and eyes almost as dark under unplucked black brows. On the right side of her neck was a small vertical Sanskrit tattoo that, she’d told them, meant ‘Open To The Moment’, though her persona suggested more of a deadbolted door. She had sturdy hands with the strong fingers of the French farmers who swam in her blood. The veins carrying it were prominent in her forearms and wrists, blue channels beneath the white flesh. She was the drummer. Her arms were tight and sculpted, leaving no doubt her profession demanded physical exertion. She was a ‘brickhouse’, as Mike liked to say, due to good genes and the fact that she laced up her New Balances and ran a few miles every chance she got.

“Hey,” Berke said, “Ariel wants to give our waitress a T-shirt.”

George stood up, fished the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to her. “Tell her no free CDs. Got it?”

Berke retreated without comment. A couple of boxes of T-shirts and CDs were in the U-Haul trailer, along with the gear. In sizes of Small, Medium, Large and ExtraLarge, the T-shirt was red with a black handprint splayed across the front, fingers outstretched, and the legend The Five printed on the palm in a font that looked like embossed Dymo plastic label tape.

When Nomad put his sunglasses back on and got to his feet, George asked, “How much do you think she heard?”

“I don’t know, but you should tell everybody before she does. Were you going to wait until the tour was done?”

“No.” George frowned. “Jesus, no. I was just…you know…trying to figure things out.”

“I hope they are figured out.”

“Yeah,” George agreed, and then he walked back to the van with Nomad following. Everybody else had already climbed in through the passenger door on the right side of the van except Ariel, who was coming across the parking lot from the restaurant.

“Those aren’t freebies,” Nomad told her, as George went around to get behind the wheel.

Ariel gave him a look that reminded Nomad of how the teachers in high school had regarded him just before banishing him to the office. “One giveaway won’t break us. It’s for her daughter. And you didn’t have to be rude.”

He climbed up into the shotgun seat beside George, who had retrieved the keys from Berke by way of Terry. Berke was sitting way in the back, with Mike; Terry was sitting behind George, and Ariel slid into the seat next to Terry. It was the usual arrangement, and only varied according to whose turn it was to drive. Jammed into every other available space were the suitcases, duffle bags and carry-alls of six individuals. George started the engine, switched on the air conditioning that stuttered and racketed and smelled of wet socks before it settled more or less into a hum, and then he pulled out of the parking lot and took the ramp back to I-35 North.

They were due at Common Grounds in Waco at three o’clock for load-in and sound check. It was Friday, the 18th of July. On a Friday night, the show would start about ten, give or take. First, though, they had the thing with Felix Gogo, up north of Waco. The instructions had been given by email to George: turn off I-35 onto East Lake Shore Drive and keep going west until he reached North 19th Street, turn right at the intersection and go past Bosqueville on China Spring Road about six miles, couldn’t miss the place.

As they continued away from Round Rock, Nomad was waiting for George to come out with it. The Scumbucket rattled and wheezed across the flat landscape, passing apartment complexes, banks and stripmalls. Passing huge low-roofed warehouses with immense parking lots. Passing farmland now, cows grazing out in the distant pastures that seemed to go on forever.

Nomad was thinking that George might have changed his mind. Just in the last few minutes. That George had decided he wasn’t going to give it up, no way. Give up the dream? After all the work they’d put into this? No fucking way. Nomad felt relief; George had decided to stick to the plan, no matter what lay ahead on what was—as always—a journey into the unknown.

And then, from the back of the van, Berke said casually, “Guys, George has something to tell us. Don’t you, George?”

TWO.

To his credit, George didn’t let the question hang. He had no choice, because only a few seconds after Berke asked it, Mike hesitated in plugging in the earbuds of his iPod and followed it up: “What’s the word, chief?”

A good drummer and bass player were always in sync, George thought. They put down the floor the house was built on. So it ought to be even now, one playing off the other.

But before he said what had to be spoken, before he opened his mouth and let the future tumble out of it, for better or for worse, he had an instant of feeling lost. Of wondering if he was advancing toward a goal or retreating from one, because in this business—in any of the arts, really—success was always a lightning strike away. Yeah, he would do fine as the rep selling audio units on the road. He would get to know the products so well he would know what the client needed before he eyeballed the venue. But was that going to be enough? Was he going to wake up one night when he was forty years old, listening to a clock tick and thinking If I had only stuck it out…

Because that was the sharpest thorn in this tangled bush where the roses always seemed so close and yet so hard to reach, and everybody in the Scumbucket knew it. How long did you give your life to the dream, before it took your life?

“I have nothing,” he said, which he had not meant to say and wished he could reel back in, but it was gone. He could feel John Charles watching him from behind the sunglasses with those eyes that could bore holes through a concrete block. Everyone else was silent, waiting. George shifted in his seat. “I mean…” He didn’t know what he meant, and he was letting the Scumbucket wander over into the left lane so he corrected its path. “I’ve been doing this too long,” he said, and again confused himself. But he had the wheels in control now, and his direction was set. “This is my last time out,” he went on. “I told John, back at the Denny’s. I’m giving it up.” And there it was, the confession of…what? Shame, or resolve? “I’ve got a job,” he said. “I mean, a new job. If I want it, which I do. In Chicago.” He glanced quickly into the rearview mirror and saw that everyone was watching him but Berke, who gazed solemnly out the window. He was aware that he was looking at not just one band but a couple of dozen. Mike alone had played bass in six bands, most of them workmanlike, just solid craftsmen plying their trade, but one—Beelzefudd—that had shown flashes of brilliance and had opened for Alice Cooper on tour in the fall of 2002. It passed through George’s mind that if anybody had paid their dues, these guys had, in bands like Simple Truth, Jake Money, The Black Roses, Garden Of Joe, Wrek, Dillon, The Venomaires, The Wang Danglers, Satellite Eight, Strobe, The Blessed Hours, and on and on. And because of that long list of experiences, they would know only too well—as he did—that people came and went all the time, due to burnout, exhaustion, frustration, drug addiction, death, or whatever. It was just life, cranked up to eleven.

He told them about his cousin Jeff, and Audio Advances, and his intentions. “But I’m telling you like I told John,” he added, into their silence, “I’m not bailing on you.” He didn’t think that sounded exactly right, so he tried it again. “I’m not leaving until the tour’s done. Okay? And even then, I’ll stick until Ash finds a replacement.” He hoped he could keep that last vow, because the Chicago job needed him by the middle of September. ‘Ash’ was their agent Ashwatthama Vallampati, with RCA—the Roger Chester Agency—in Austin.

“Well, damn,” Mike said when George was done. It was stated flatly, more of an expression of surprise than of opinion.

“Listen, man, I was going to tell you—tell all of you—further down the road. I wasn’t going to throw it at you, like, the last night or something.”

“You’re sure about that?” Berke asked, without turning her face from the window.

“Yes, I am. I want the tour to be a success. Got it? I wouldn’t have pushed for the video if I hadn’t.” George glanced over to get John’s reaction, but Nomad was staring straight ahead, watching the road unspool.

Nomad had decided to neither help George nor hurt him. This was George’s choice. George had to live by it.

Another silence settled in. Then Mike broke it: “Sounds like a plan. I wish you well, bro.”

“Same here,” Terry said.

George was so relieved he almost swivelled around to thank them, but as there was a black-and-white Texas State Trooper Crown Victoria parked over on the right where it could clock the passing traffic he thought it would not be in the best interest of the band. “Thanks,” he said. “Really.”

“You’re wrong, George,” Ariel suddenly told him, and the cool clarity of her voice popped his bubble.

“Wrong? How?”

“About having nothing. You have the Scumbucket. And you have us, too.”

“Oh. Yeah, right. That’s true.”

“Yeah, we’ll come to Chicago and move in with you,” Mike said, and George caught his lopsided grin in the rearview mirror. “Get a house with a big basement.”

“Home theater with a candy counter,” Terry suggested.

“Popcorn popper,” said Ariel.

“Automatic joint roller,” Mike continued. “We’ll have to come see you, man, because in a couple of months you’ll forget we ever existed.”

“Besides,” Ariel said, “it’s not like you couldn’t come back, if you wanted to. I mean…if things didn’t work out, you could come back. Right, John?”

Nomad wanted to say Leave me out of this, but instead he thought about it for a few seconds and replied, “Probably not as our manager. By then, Ash would’ve found somebody else for us. I’m not saying it couldn’t be worked out, but…who knows?” Ariel must not have liked that answer, because she didn’t say anything else. “But George could get back in the game, sure,” Nomad added. He figured he ought to lighten things up, before the cloud he felt he was under rained on everyone else. After all, he was the leader of this band, so he should act like a leader and buck it up. “Hey, we’re putting the cart in front of the horse, aren’t we?”

“Before the horse,” Ariel corrected.

“That’s what I meant. George isn’t gone yet, we’ve got a tour ahead of us, we’ve got an awesome video and song to promote, and anything can happen. So we go from where we are. Right?”

“What he said,” was Mike’s affirmation.

“Yes,” Ariel answered.

There was no response from Berke. Nomad looked back to see her curled up on her side of the seat, her head against the tan-colored cushion and her eyes closed. “Berke?” he prompted.

“What?” She didn’t bother to open her eyes.

“Anything to say?”

“I’ll wait for the written exam.”

Nomad knew there was no use in pushing Berke for an opinion. When she wanted to disappear, she went deep. She closed her eyes and submerged into a realm no one else was able to follow. The word “loner” had been created with Berke in mind, but Nomad respected that, it was cool. Everybody needed their space. The only thing was, Berke’s seemed to be so empty.

The highway stretched on between fenced-off fields in various shades of brown, with stands of bony trees here and there but nothing much to speak of except a few houses and barns in the distance. The route would take the Scumbucket past the small towns of Jarrell, Prairie Dell, Salado and Midway, then through the city of Temple and into Waco. The sky was bright and hot now, heat waves shimmered on the pavement, and dead armadillos drew the circling crows that dove in to tear off a swallow before the next tractor-trailer truck could scatter the feast.

“I’ve got something to say,” Terry announced, when they were about three miles past the Prairie Dell exit.

Nomad turned around to look at him. There had been an unaccustomed note of urgency in Terry’s voice. That wasn’t like Terry; he could be excitable, sure, but he was usually calm and measured, as precise in his speech as in his playing.

Terry adjusted his round-lensed glasses, pushing them back up his nose with one finger. The air-conditioner was working all right, but Terry’s face looked to be damp, and his full round cheeks—“chipmunk cheeks”, Ariel called them—were blotched with red. His light brown eyes, slightly magnified by the lenses, appeared larger still, and his shaved skull was shiny with a faint sheen of perspiration.

Nomad’s first thought was that Terry was having a heart attack, though Terry was in reasonably good shape except he was a little chunky and he had the beginnings of a potbelly, but he was only twenty-seven. Still, the sight of Terry in obvious distress unnerved him. He took off his shades, and there was a rasp of tension in his voice when he said, “Hey, man, are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m okay. I just… I don’t want you to blow up at me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because,” Terry answered, and he blinked rapidly a few times as if he feared being struck, “I’m leaving the band too. After this tour.”

Beyond Terry, Berke had opened her eyes and sat up straight. She reached over to Mike, who had slid down in his seat and put his iPod on Shuffle, and pulled out the nearest earbud. He frowned at Berke and said, “What the fuck…?” but her attention was directed up front and he knew she wouldn’t have disturbed him for no good reason.

“Oh my God,” Ariel said, more of a breathless gasp. “Why?”

George glanced at Terry in the rearview mirror but did not speak; he figured his revelation had spurred Terry to make his own, and it was best he keep his mouth shut.

Terry looked agonized. He searched Nomad’s eyes for the red candles of rage before he spoke again. “I was going to tell you last night. After the gig. But…we did so fine…and you were so up, man. I…thought I’d wait a while. But I swear I was going to tell you before—”

“What are you talking about? Have you gone fucking crazy?” Nomad’s voice was angry and full of grit, but inside he just felt scared. If The Five had a retro/rock/folk vibe—as the promo materials from RCA said—then Terry Spitzenham supplied the retro component. Terry was the keyboard player who had his mind in 2008 and his heart somewhere in the mid-sixties, a time he lamented missing. He was particularly into the organ sounds of that era, the soul-stirring rumble of the B3, the high keening of the Farfisa, the gravelly snarl of the Vox and all their thousands of different voices. On tour he played a Hammond XB2 and a Roland JV80 with a tonewheel organ sound card, and he carried the Voce soundbox and enough effects boxes to generate whatever tone he could imagine. Terry could make his instruments scream, holler, growl or sob, as the song required. He could fill up a room with an immense throbbing pulse, or back it down to a nasty little chuckle. Nomad couldn’t imagine The Five without Terry’s keyboards, without his distinctive style and energy propelling everything forward. It was just goddamned unthinkable. Nomad had to draw a panicked breath, because he felt like all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked out of the Scumbucket. “No,” he said, when he could find words again. “No way you’re pulling out.”

“Can I explain myself?”

“No way you’re pulling out,” Nomad repeated. “You go, the band goes.”

“That’s not true.” Terry was speaking carefully. His tongue were testing every word for sharp edges. His armpits were damp under his blue-and-purple paisley shirt, one of many vintage shirts in his wardrobe. “I go, the band changes. Can I explain myself? Please?”

“Yeah, we’d like to hear it,” Berke said. “Are you going into business with George’s cousin, too? Well, shit, how about me being the California rep? Just show me where to sign.”

“Cut it out, let him talk,” Mike told her, and she made a noise of disgust and curled up again in her seat.

Terry glanced at Ariel, whose dark gray eyes were wide with shock. “Jesus,” Terry said, with a quick nervous smile that hurt the tight corners of his mouth, “I didn’t kill anybody. I made a decision, that’s all.”

“What, a decision to kill the band?” Berke countered.

“A decision,” Terry said, focusing his attention on Nomad, “to go into business for myself.” When no one spoke, he forged ahead. “Not my own band, if that’s what you’re thinking. I need a break from this. I’ve been at it a long time, John. You know I have.”

Nomad did know. He and Terry had been together in the Venomaires—a tough ride—for over a year, and then in The Five for the last three. Terry had been through a half-dozen bands before the Venomaires, had gone through a divorce last summer that had weighed heavily on him during their Southeastern tour, and had had a brief flirtation with OxyContin before his band-mates helped him close the door on that dangerous romance.

Looking into Terry’s face, Nomad thought he might be seeing his own. Or Mike’s, or George’s, or Berke’s or—if you got past the blush of youth that was still fresh on her cheeks—Ariel’s too. They were all tired. Not physically, no; they had strength enough to keep pulling the plow all right, and they would do their jobs and be professional, but it was a mental weariness. A soul weariness, born from the death of expectations. There were so many bands out there, so many. And so many really good ones, too, that were never going to get the break. Everybody could record CDs on the little portable eight and twelve-tracks these days; everybody could put up a half-assed video on YouTube, and make a MySpace page for their creations. There was just so much noise. How did anybody ever get listened to? Not just landing on a playlist as more noise, but listened to, in the way that people put down their cellphones and tuned out the fast chatter of the world for a minute and actually heard you? But there was so much noise, so much chatter, and faster and faster, and so much music—good and bad—going out into the air, but for all the purpose it served—all the worth it had—it might just as well be played on low-volume continual loops in elevators, or as background buzz for shoppers.

“Can I explain?” Terry asked.

Nomad nodded.

“I want to go into the vintage instrument business. I’ve got some money saved up, and my dad says he’ll help me with a loan.” The way Terry said it—a rush of words, an outpouring, a release—told Nomad that this decision had been working on him for a long time. Maybe it had begun as a passing thought, way back when they were with the Venomaires. Maybe it had just evolved over the years until it had grown wings and purpose, and now it was big enough to fly Terry away.

Terry went on, obviously relieved to rid himself of what he’d been keeping. His plan, he said, was to go back home, to Oklahoma City. To set himself up there in a business that would buy old keyboards in any condition—vintage Hammond organs in their many variations, aged Farfisas, Rhodes pianos, the Hohner keyboards, the Gems, Kustoms, Cordovoxes, the Elkas and the Ace Tones, the Doric and Ekosonic lines, and other proud ancient warriors—and bring them back to life. He already had most of the manuals, he said, and he’d always been good with fixing the vintage keyboards in his own collection. He thought he could repair just about anything that came along, and if he couldn’t find the parts he could make them. These old keys were collector’s items now, he said. They were a dying breed, and really most of the makes and models had died when disco boogied in. But there were those who wanted to either find instruments they’d played on as teenagers in garage bands or repair the ones moldering in the basement, he said. And he’d begun hearing some of them on new songs, too. He believed he could start an Internet search service for musicians or collectors looking for a particular electric keyboard, he told them. Some of the details had to be figured out yet, but he thought it would be a good start.

When Terry was done plotting his future course, Nomad didn’t know what to say. He saw a billboard up ahead on the right, as they neared the outskirts of Temple. It showed from the waist up a trim Hispanic man with a silver mustache and thick silver muttonchop sideburns; he was wearing a black cowboy hat, a black tuxedo jacket, a black ruffled shirt and black bolo tie with a turquoise clasp, and he was smiling and pointing to the legend Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White. Over his head were the big words, in red, Felix Gogo Toyota and next to that Temple…Waco…Fort Worth…Dallas. At the bottom of the overcrowded ad were the words “Walk In, Drive Out!”

“So,” Terry prodded, “what do you think?”

Nomad didn’t answer, because he was pondering the many ways a band could die.

He’d seen nearly all of them. The war of egos that ultimately exploded, the simmering resentments that built up over time, the quick flare of anger that hid exhaustion at its heart, the hard and final bang of a door slamming, the parking lot scuffle, the on-stage implosion, the rehearsal walk-out, the accusations of betrayal as cutting as the death throes of a marriage, the silence that screamed, the guitar flung across a motel room like a flying scythe, the fist into the wall and the broken fingers, Black Tar and Buzzard Dust, Twack and Shiznit, New Jack Swing and all the other combinations of heroin, crack, meth and whatever could be cooked, smoked, inhaled or injected.

Nothing was pretty about the death of a band.

He was staring into space, his eyes unfocused, but he thought he was looking into an abyss. Sure, they could go on without Terry. Have to find another keyboard player, if that’s the way they wanted to go. But Terry provided a sound integral to The Five, ranging from raw and rowdy to the swirling of psychedelic colors to a dark bluesy wail that particularly complimented Nomad’s own rough-edged, smoke-and-whiskey singing voice. Sure, they could go on without Terry. But it wouldn’t be The Five anymore, not even with another keyboard player. It would be another band, but not this one.

And Nomad realized he would mourn this death, maybe more than any other. When it was running on all cylinders, The Five was tight and clean and everybody had their space. Everybody had their job to do, and they did it like professionals. They did it with pride. And though the life was tough and the money not much to speak of, the gigs could lift you up. There was nothing like being in the groove, like feeling the energy of the audience and the heat of the lights and the pure electric heart of the moment. It was so real. But more than that, Nomad had thought—had hoped—that The Five was going to find a way through the wall, that this band of any band he’d ever played in was going to get the record deal. Was going to get the moneymen behind it, with their engine of promotion and contacts and open doors.

Johnny, spoke the old familiar voice somewhere deep inside his head, there’s no roadmap.

He could still see the little crooked smile surface on his father’s mouth, and those blue eyes shining like Beale Street neon at midnight.

“Well,” Terry said, “don’t everybody speak at once.”

Nomad knew what the silence was saying. Everyone was thinking the same thing: after this tour, when they trekked west through Arizona into California and came back through New Mexico to do a last show in Austin on the 16th of August, little less than a month away, The Five was finished.

“You can find somebody to fill my place.” Terry proved he could read minds, if he had to. “It’s not like I’m the one and only.”

“I can’t believe this.” It was Ariel’s voice, still hushed with shock.

“I can think of five or six keyboard players right now,” Terry went on. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s not the end of the band.”

George gave a faint noise, something between a sigh and a grunt, that only Nomad caught.

“You have anything to say?” Nomad asked him, more sharply than he’d intended, but George shook his head and concentrated on his driving.

“That’s a great big load of hot mess for us to wade through,” Berke said, and if anybody could sound more acerbic than Nomad, she took the prize. “Fucking great.”

“Hold on, now.” Terry turned around to face her. “I can be replaced. Look, there’s nobody who’s so all-that they can’t be replaced.”

“What are you going to do when you get tired of cleaning the cobwebs out of little plastic keyboards? Get a gig at the Holiday Inn bar? You going to put out your tipbowl with the five-dollar bill in it? Start playing Billy Joel requests?”

“Don’t knock Billy Joel,” Terry cautioned.

“I’m knocking you. Thinking you can walk away from music and be happy about it.”

“I’m not walking away, I’m—”

“Repositionin’,” said Mike, which caused Terry to shut up because it sounded good, or at least better than what he was fumbling to get out. “Yeah, I get it.” Mike nodded and rubbed his chin. There were scrolled tattoos on the knuckles of each finger. “Repositionin’. Seems to me like everybody ought to reposition from time to time. Shake things up, see what falls out.”

Berke scowled and was about to say something back to him, and maybe it would have been What the fuck do you know about it but in fact Mike Davis did know a whole hell of a lot about repositioning so she let it slide.

Nomad figured that for every bright star and flaming asshole in a band, there were a dozen Mike Davises. The solid guy, the workman. The man who steps back out of the spotlight to play, because he doesn’t like the glare. Mike was thirty-three years old, stood about five-ten, but he was a small-framed guy—skinny, really—who looked like he was always in need of a good meal, though he ate like a grizzly bear just out of hibernation. He was tough and weathered and wiry in the way that said do not mess with me for I will take your fucking head off and use it as a planter. Nomad had seen Mike stare down a murder clique of drunk football players from the University of Tennessee, in a dismal little club in Knoxville, and something had passed between Mike and those three mouthy, swaggering young men—something dangerous, some message between animals—that warned them off before they made a very bad mistake. Maybe it was the long beak of a nose, the cement slab chin always stained with stubble, or the dark brown eyes hollowed back in a chiselled face that generally betrayed no emotion. He nearly always won in their poker games on the road, because it was like trying to read the expressions of a crab. He had shoulder-length dark brown hair that was showing streaks of gray at the temples. He would say he’d earned it, and more, for all he’d been through. Eight bands that Nomad knew of, and probably more Mike didn’t care to talk about. Two ex-wives, one in Nashville and one with their six-year-old daughter in Covington, Louisiana. Mike had been born just up the road from there, early Christmas morning, 1974, in Bogalusa. His life had been anything but holy.

It was the tattoos on his arms that people saw first, and those either scared the shit out of you and made you keep your distance or entranced you into approaching nearer, if you dared. He wore sleeveless T-shirts to show off his sleeves. Moby Dick rising from the sea was the first art on the knob of his right shoulder, and on the left was the grinning freckled face of a boy who Mike said was his older brother Wayne, killed eighteen years ago in a lumberyard accident. His first bandmate. Played a mean Fender Telecaster, Mike said. Blue fire, like a cut diamond. The Tele, not the brother. It was also there, underneath the boy’s face, angled like a bowtie gone awry.

Nomad had always thought that people carried worlds within them. Whatever they had experienced, whatever they saw or felt, whatever joys or sorrows, those things could never be exactly duplicated by anyone else, so everybody carried their own world. In Mike’s case, the tattoo artists—more than a half-dozen, in often jarringly-different styles—had depicted his world on his arms. From shoulders to wrists, it was all there in vibrant ink of many colors: faces of women and men copied from photographs, a variety of bad-ass or sorry-ass cars and—as Mike put it—pick-me-up trucks, numbers that had some meaning for him, a whiskey bottle here, a burning joint there, the bars of a cell, a long country road, a skull spitting fire, bass axes he had loved or lost or pawned, a white dog, a black dog, a devil, an angel, his little Sara’s face, the names of the bands he wanted to remember which did include The Five, declarations such as Trust Is Earned and Live Before You Die and everything in a progression from the past to the present, shoulders to wrists. Everything, as well, underlaid by a phantasmagoric deep blue star-speckled background against which the trails of fiery red and yellow comets passed between the artwork. It had occurred to Nomad, as it surely must have to Mike, that he was running out of room.

Moby Dick? The first book Mike had read that he liked. Actually, he’d stolen it from the Bogalusa Public Library when the librarian said he was too young to check it out. He’d rooted for the white whale to make it out alive.

“Right,” Terry said when it seemed safe to speak again. He was talking directly to Mike. “Repositioning is just what I’m doing.”

“Why shouldn’t we pull over and let you reposition your butt on the side of the road right now?” Berke asked, in her charming way.

“Because,” he answered with great dignity, “I’m in it just like George is. For the tour. I’m going to do what I’ve always done. Nobody’s going to say I’m slacking, don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it,” Ariel was saying, and Nomad thought he’d never heard her sound so hurt before. “It’s over when you go, Terry. Nobody can step in for you, no matter who it is.”

“I don’t know about that,” George offered. “There are—”

“I think you ought to shut up,” Nomad interrupted, and George’s mouth closed.

“Fucking tell him,” Berke said.

“Plug your lava-hole too,” Nomad shot back.

“Happy happy joy joy!” said Mike, with a gravedigger’s cackle. “Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, bro!”

Nomad put his fingers against his temples and slid down in his seat. The air-conditioner was racketing, but was it working? He put his right hand against the nearest vent. A weak breath of cool air, but not cold. Hadn’t George taken the Scumbucket in for a road check last week, like he was supposed to? That low, grating hum—sounded to him like an E minor chord strummed on a cheap Singapore guitar—seemed to have amped up in volume, and it was going to drive everybody batshitty by the time they reached Waco. Bastard was already screwing up on his job, and they were hardly out of the gate.

“So,” Terry said with a quaver in his voice, “Does everybody hate me now?”

God, it was going to be a long tour.

The last tour, with this lineup. Maybe the last tour with any of them together, because once a band started unravelling the emperor got naked real quick.

The thing is, he was the emperor. He’d never asked to be. Never wanted to be. But he was, and that was it.

He realized, as he listened to the hum from the dashboard and felt the oppressive silence at his back, that this shit could tear the band apart before they even finished up the weekend. At best, they were in for heavy weather. What could he do right now—right this fucking minute, while it counted—to show them he was still the emperor, and that The Five was still a band until he said it was not?

He found something amid the chaos, and he latched onto it.

< >

“Nobody hates you. I ought to, but I don’t. I guess everybody has to do what they think is right,” he said. “And I’m thinking we ought to write a new song.”

No one else spoke.

“A new song,” Nomad repeated, and he turned around to gauge the response. Berke’s eyes were closed, Mike was staring vacantly out his window, and Terry was polishing his glasses on the front of his shirt.

Only Ariel was paying attention. “What about?”

“I don’t know. Just something new.”

“What’s your idea?”

“I don’t have any ideas. I’m just saying, we ought to write a new song.”

“Hm,” Ariel said, and she frowned. “You mean pull something out of the air?”

“No.” Nomad understood Ariel’s question, because this wasn’t the way they worked. Most of the original songs The Five played—tunes like ‘The Let Down’, ‘Pain Parade’, ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, ‘Another Man’, and ‘Pale Echo’—had been written jointly by Nomad and Ariel. Terry had written a few more, both alone and with either of the two lead singers. But the way they worked was that Nomad or Ariel would come up with an idea and start kicking it around with each other, and it might go somewhere or stall and die, you never could tell about songwriting. The others would be asked their opinion, and for ideas on tempo or key, or Terry might come up with an organ motif or solo. Mike was quick to come up with an inventive bass line, and he might go through a few variations before he settled on what he wanted to offer. Berke supplied the core beat, the fills and embellishments, and sometimes she went for what was asked of her and other times she kicked it and went off in an unexpected direction. However it worked—and sometimes it was hard to say exactly how it worked—the result was another song for the set, though from beginning to end of the process might be anywhere from a couple of days to many weeks.

“Not just something out of the air,” Nomad continued. “I’d like everybody to think about it. Put our heads together.”

“Our heads?” That had brought Berke out of her sham sleep. “What do you mean, ‘everybody’?”

“I mean what I said. I think we all ought to work on a new song, together. Not just Ariel and me, but the whole band. Start with the words, maybe. Everybody does a few lines.”

Mike’s thick eyebrows jumped. “Say what?”

“We all contribute to the lyrics. Is that so hard to follow?”

“Hell yes, it is,” Mike answered. “I ain’t no poet. Never written a line in my life.”

“Me neither,” Berke said. “That’s not my job.”

“Can I speak?” George asked, and in the space that followed he went on. “I think it’s a good idea. I mean, why not at least try?”

“Yeah, I’m glad you think so,” Nomad told him, “because you ought to contribute to the song, too.”

“Me? Come on! I’m the last man in the world who could write a song!”

“Have you ever tried?”

“No, and that’s because I can’t. I know sound, but I am completely unmusical, man.”

“But like you said, why not at least try?”

Before George could respond, Berke said, “Okay, we get it.” Her voice carried a patronizing note that made Nomad think he ought to have punched her in the face a long time ago, and been done with it. “You’re looking for some way to keep us together, right? Keep our minds straight for the tour? What is this…like…busy work for the soul or something?”

“Maybe it is.” His throat felt constricted like it did when he had an allergic reaction, which was why he stayed away from all dairy. “Or maybe it’s a productive thing for people to get their heads around.”

“Good try, bro,” said Mike, “but I know my limits.”

“Yeah,” Berke agreed, “me too. And it’s not going to make me forget. Look, even if we all sat down in a circle around the campfire and wrote another ‘Kumbaya’, we’re still going to know it’s over. I mean, really. With George and Terry out, we’re not who we were anymore. Yeah, we can find another road manager and audition for a keyboard player, but…” She paused, and in that instant of hesitation Nomad thought he saw pain disturb her features like a ripple across a pond that held its secrets deep. Then it was gone, leaving Nomad with the impression that he was not the only one who’d already begun to mourn a death.

“It won’t work,” Berke said quietly, and she looked at him with what might have been sadness in those dark chocolate eyes. In contrast to that, a quick and nasty smile flashed across her mouth. Nomad thought she was torn up inside, just like himself, and she didn’t know whether to cry or curse. But Berke was Berke, and so she said, “Fuck it” before she turned her gaze away.

THREE.

For a while they didn’t seem to be anywhere, and then suddenly they were where they needed to be.

< >

“Must be the place,” George said, as he pulled the Scumbucket and the U-Haul trailer off China Spring Road into a parking lot. They had passed through a nondescript area north of Lake Waco and the Waco regional airport surrounded by scrubby fields and scabby warehouses. He’d been directed by email from Felix Gogo to look for the red-and-yellow Delgado Cable van, and there it was, sitting next to a shiny black Toyota Land Cruiser from which the sun radiated like a blazing mirror.

“Watch out for glass,” Terry warned. Jagged bits of it glittered on the heat-cracked pavement. Not only that, but broken beer bottles lay scattered about, and one of those under a tire would not only sound like a roadside bomb in Iraq going off but might lame their ride.

“Jeez.” Berke was not impressed. “I thought we were going to a studio.”

“Well, the guy evidently knows what he’s doing.” George eased the Scumbucket up next to the pristine Land Cruiser. He could imagine the Toyota saying to his van, in snobbish car-language, Have you ever heard of something called a wash? He cut the engine, put it in Park and pulled up the handbrake, and then he sat looking at what might have been a small stripmall before a meteor the size of a freight train must’ve crashed down onto it.

Nomad was thinking that a plane had arrowed in, short of the airport’s runway. Blackened walls testified to fire. Windows were broken out and red metal roofs sagged. Here and there, on remaining sections of gray cinderblock, were the elaborate black and blue swirls of gang symbols. Looked to him as if two gangs had fought over the turf, and nobody won. But then he realized the place may never have been actually finished, because nearby stood two abandoned Port-A-Potties and beyond them, back where the thicket boiled up, were pieces of machinery that appeared to be part of a cement-mixing truck. A pile of old tires lay beside those, and a few beatup garbage cans full of burned lumber. Rags and other bits of trash hung in the brush like a hermit’s laundry.

“This can’t be it,” Nomad said, but George was already getting out. Heat from Hell’s oven rolled into the Scumbucket. And here came the hermit himself from one of the crooked doorways. He was a chunky Hispanic dude, a kid really, maybe nineteen or twenty, and he was wearing a baggy pair of brown shorts and a white T-shirt damp with sweat. His arms were crisscrossed with tats and his scalp was shaved except for a black stripe going back along the middle of his head. Nomad thought they were about to get jumped by a cholo until he saw the light meter hanging on a cord around the guy’s neck.

“Hey, man,” the dude said to George. “We’re almost set up.” He motioned with a thumb toward the doorway from which he’d just emerged, and he continued to the cable company van to fish something out of the back.

“Ohhhhkay,” Mike said, mostly to himself. “Let’s do this.”

They climbed out of the Scumbucket. Sweat immediately popped from their pores. Their shadows were ebony on the bleached pavement, and as Terry, Mike and Berke followed George through the doorway Nomad stopped to wait for Ariel.

“Careful,” he told her, because the broken glass had crunched ominously under his own sneakers. Where the others had gone was in relative darkness. He felt her hand grasp his arm, to steady her path over the glittering rubble. He thought this place looked like a fucking warzone, and why they’d come here to do the interview instead of a comfortable air-conditioned studio was beyond him.

“Listen,” Ariel said, when she got up right beside him. “I like your idea about the song. I think it would be good for everybody.”

“Yeah.” He hadn’t said anymore about it since they’d been south of Waco.

She still had hold of his arm, and she was stopping him from going any further since she wanted a moment with him. “I’ve got some ideas in my notebook. Fragments, really. But maybe we can find something to start it off?”

Ariel and her notebook, Nomad thought. It was decorated with glued-on gemstones of a dozen colors. Some of her song ideas began with a single word, or a descriptive line, or a question to herself. He’d never looked inside her notebook, but he knew how she worked. He was the fiery energy of a song, the hot red anger and the will to fight. She was the ocean depths, the cool blue mysticism of the currents, the surrender to the inevitable will of the tides. He presented a snarl and a fist; she offered a smile shaded with sadness and an open hand. She was twenty-four years old, of medium height and slender build, and she’d been born in Manchester, Massachusetts, just up the coast from Boston. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair in curly ringlets that fell across her forehead and down around her shoulders like, Nomad thought, a heroine in one of those Victorian novels who is doomed to fall in love with the callous cad. She dressed in that fashion, too: lace-trimmed blouses, lacy-puffed sleeves, fine etchings of lace on the necks of her T-shirts and sewn on the cuffs of her distressed jeans. Not that he knew a whole hell of a lot about Victorian novels, but he knew he hated them from high school English.

Ariel was pretty, in that old English way. Or maybe it was Irish; the scatter of freckles across her nose and the pale cream of her skin made him think of that country the green soap was named for. She did smell nice, he couldn’t deny that. Sort of a faint honeysuckle aroma, caught sometimes when they were working close and she leaned past him. Everybody had a smell, of course. Take Berke, who smelled of friction.

But the thing that stood out particularly about Ariel Collier—leaving aside the fact that Nomad was grudgingly aware she left him in the dust on acoustic guitar, and her voice was a beautiful mezzo-soprano tessitura (which, she said, she’d learned when her parents had paid for operatic singing lessons)—was that the color of her eyes changed. Depending on the light, or her emotions, they could be gray from dove-to-dark, or show hints of sapphire blue, or sometimes display just faintly the sea-green of shallows where the reef almost touches the surface. He knew she was the baby of her family, with an older brother and sister, the former a corporate attorney in Boston and the latter a saleswoman with a yacht brokerage firm in Fort Lauderdale. Her father was an investment company executive. Her mother sold real estate. She was the baby of this family too, but she was no child to the hardships—challenges?—of the musician’s life. Neal Tapley, the leader of the band she’d been in before she joined The Five, had driven his car off a county two-lane south of Austin and launched into a stand of trees at a speed, the police later said, of a hundred and thirteen miles an hour. Which surprised everyone who followed Neal and his band The Blessed Hours because Neal was a genuinely decent guy except for some bad choices involving crack cocaine and 3rd Street loan sharks, and nobody had ever figured his old Volvo clunker could get up much over sixty.

Hell of a guitar player, Neal had been. Another world, gone down in flames.

“Yeah,” Nomad told her. “We ought to find something to start with.” But he wasn’t sure they could, and he heard his own uncertainty. He wasn’t sure it was such a good idea, after all. What was the point? But directing everybody’s mind to a new tune would give them a task to focus on, and pushing them to do what they’d never done before—a song with lyrics written by everyone, even the ones who thought they couldn’t write—might ease the feeling of dissolution that could rip any band apart. And there was another reason: Nomad hoped, deep in his heart, that with such a song that was a testament to The Five in the band’s darkest hour Terry would decide to stay, and George might find his own inner poet—however bad it turned out to be—and decide that he too was not ready to walk away.

Could, would, should…

Shit.

“Comin’ through, man,” said the tech dude. Nomad and Ariel stepped aside to let him pass carrying a coil of bright orange electrical cable, a can of Sherwin-Williams paint and a paintbrush.

“Little too late to be remodelling this dump,” Nomad said, but the guy didn’t respond on his way into the building. The darkness swallowed him up.

Nomad followed Ariel in. Once over the threshold he removed his sunglasses. The air was sweltering in here, in a rectangular room with a dirty concrete floor and gang graffiti spray-painted across every area of drywall that wasn’t punched full of holes. Or shot full of holes, because it looked like guns had been at work in here. There was no furniture. A piece of metal tubing dangled from the ceiling and hung down to the floor like the cock of a giant robot. To emphasize that image, a few used condoms were stuck to the concrete. Over in the left corner, a garbage can overflowed and on top of the mess was a Shipley’s Do-Nuts box. Good combination, Nomad thought: the tagbangers had sex first, got their blood sugar up with the doughnuts, and then finished off with a Glock orgy.

On the floor, off to the right, was a portable Honda generator mounted on a handcart. It was one of those super-quiet deals, rumbling like a cat getting scratched. Orange and yellow cables were hooked up to the generator, and snaked across the floor through another doorway about midway back and also on the right.

George appeared. “Back here, guys.”

They went through the door, watching their step on the cables, and into a smaller room that was no less defiled. The others were in there already. Many impressions crowded in on Nomad: more graffiti and bullet holes, and places where it looked as if machetes had hacked the drywall; the sunlight streamed down through several bullet holes that had punctured the roof; the rear wall had been scorched shiny black by fire, and upon it was pinned a large clean American flag; cigarette butts, crushed beer cans and other trash littered the floor, but areas had been cleared to accomodate the tripod legs of two floodlight stands, their illumination powered by the generator. The tech dude was plugging in a plastic fan on a waist-high stand with the cable he’d brought, and a second young guy with a brown beard and a suffering expression had opened the paint can and was brushing bright blood-red over the gang symbols. Two pro camcorders outfitted with lights and microphones were situated on the floor, protected from the nastiness by virtue of sitting atop their individual Delgado Cable yellow canvas bags.

“We’d better do this quick,” said the man who turned the fan’s control knob up to Fast with a thick brown hand adorned with three diamond rings. He angled the breeze up into his face. “Fucking warm in here, huh?” When no one answered, he looked at them from under his black cowboy hat and scanned them all except for George, who stood beside him. “I’m Felix Gogo,” he said. “But you already know that, huh? Seen my show before?” He answered his own question. “‘Course you have. Who hasn’t? I can tell you the numbers, week-by-week. Always going up. Amazing how many people tune in, late nights. Fuckers can’t sleep, they’re all worried and shit. They can watch me, I make them happy.” He grinned, showing a blast of white teeth that had to be some dentist’s dream house. “Hey, amigos! You get happy too, huh?”

Happiness, Berke thought, was different things to different people. She saw the glint of his eyes and some accusation came at her like a bullet, and then he’d swept his gaze past her and she stared at the American flag on the flame-licked wall and wondered whose god they had offended to wind up here, on such a happy day.

Felix Gogo, whose real name—according to Ashwatthama Vallampati—was Felix Goganazaiga, was obviously not only one of the biggest Toyota dealers in central Texas and the metroplex, and not only saw himself as the central Texas and metroplex late-night cable TV show Dick Clark—check that, make it Ryan Seacrest—but he had more than a passing familiarity with the term “photoshopping”. He was about twice the width he appeared to be on his billboards. Black could not make slim he who would not lay off the enchiladas. He was maybe in his early fifties, with the same thick silver muttonchop sideburns and the silver mustache. Besides the black cowboy hat, he wore the black tuxedo jacket, the black ruffled shirt and black bolo tie with a triangular topaz clasp. On the jacket’s right lapel was an American flag pin. Topside he was camera-ready, but bottomside was casual: he was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, gray anklet socks and a pair of expensive Nikes. He had spindly legs for such a hefty dude, Mike noted. Gogo’s gut would’ve made a decent tractor tire.

“Can I ask a question?” George sounded timid in the presence of such celebrity. After all, the half-hour Felix Gogo Show had been an eleven o’clock Friday night—rerun, two-thirty Saturday afternoon—event for over ten years. It was on Delgado Cable in Austin, Temple, Waco and the metroplex. The guy had run music videos and interviewed hundreds of bands. He’d also interviewed stars such as William Shatner and Jenna Jameson, and there was still a video on YouTube of a shell-shocked Sandra Bullock watching a possibly inebriated Felix shimmy to Rod Stewart’s ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ back in 2002 on the studio set. There were the Gogo Dancers to keep things lively between segments. He was a showman and a character and a very rich man, and above all he seemed real happy.

“Go right ahead, George.” Gogo spoke with the sincerity of a new best buddy. Nomad figured George had either talked to him by phone before the directions had been emailed, or George had shaken Gogo’s hand and introduced himself just a minute or so ago.

“I’m wondering…how come we’re not in the studio? I mean…isn’t this—”

“A hellhole, yeah it is,” Gogo agreed. “Well, the main studio’s in Dallas. See, the thing is, I had my crew here scout a location. Find just the right place, suitable for your band. The interview, I’m saying. This was going to be the first stage of an office park, huh? New subdivision up the road. It went bust, and no more office park either. Then the bangers moved in. I wanted to find a place that went along with your video. Did I not succeed?” Before George could answer, Gogo said to the wall-painter, “Hey Benjy, just do from yay-high to yay-low. We’re doing close shots, none of that area’s going to light up. And we don’t want to suffocate on the fumes, okay? Let it drip some, get that bloody look.”

“Sir,” said Benjy, obediently brushing.

“I tell you what, put that poster up there. Just stick it up right there next to the bullet holes and fling some paint on it. Kinda put it at an angle.”

Benjy dutifully crossed the room and retrieved from one of the canvas bags a crumpled and wrinkled The Five poster, which showed their faces—all as serious as sin, couldn’t have a musician smiling, that would be instant death—with the signature black handprint in the middle. Nomad knew Ash had sent Gogo a press kit, with their pictures and bios and shit, when he sent the video. “Angle it like so,” Gogo directed. Benjy pushed the poster up against the wet paint as he was told. “Okay, fuck it up some,” said Gogo, and Benjy flung droplets of red paint across it. “One more time. Yeah, there you go. Art for the artists,” Gogo said.

“We’re ready,” the tech guy with the skunk-shave hairdo announced. He’d been shifting the floodlights around and checking his meter, and now everything was as he wanted.

“Let me tell you how we’re going to do this.” Gogo took a black handkerchief from an inner jacket pocket and wiped the sparkles of sweat from his cheeks, even though the fan’s air was fluttering his bolo. “We’re going to get you placed, and then I’m going to gab with you for about a minute in front of this wall,” and here he indicated the red-spattered poster and the bullet holes. “Then we’ll move you back there,” a nod toward Old Glory against the shiny burn, “and gab for about two more minutes. That’s your spot, three minutes. You really get more than that, ’cause remember, we’re showing the video in between the backdrop changes. George, how about introducing me around real quick, huh?”

“Hey…can I ask something?” Nomad spoke up, before any introductions could be started. He didn’t wait to be invited. The heat, a solid prickly thing, was making sweat itch the back of his neck and trickle down his sides. Gogo stared at Nomad blankly, as he put his handkerchief away. “I’m not getting what this place has to do with our video.”

“I’ll tell you, then.” Gogo didn’t miss a beat. His tone was flat and his eyes were still blank, as if he were conserving all his energy for the interview. “I watched your video, okay? Very technically well done. Who shot it for you?”

“Some film students at UT,” George answered.

“The actors were students?”

“Yeah, but we hired local actors too.” It was amazing how quickly a video project could eat up two thousand dollars, if you really wanted it to look pro: the costumes, the props, the smoke pots and blank ammo, the special effects and the editing work. In the end, as they were running out of cash, George sold an old reel-to-reel tapedeck he had in a closet, Nomad tapped the account that held the money he earned as a house-painter, Mike ditched an axe on eBay, Berke gave an afternoon of drum lessons to teenage wannabees at the Oakclaire Drive YMCA for twenty bucks, Ariel played for change several days running on the UT campus, and Terry donated from his gig giving piano lessons at the Episcopal Student Center on 27th Street.

“And it was shot where?” Gogo asked, still staring at Nomad. “Looked like some kind of abandoned building, about as fucked up as this one.”

“An apartment complex,” Nomad said, getting the point. “Turned into a crackhouse. A few days away from the wrecking-ball.”

“There you go, huh? I wanted the interviews to have the same kind of backdrop as the video. Wanted it to be edgy. See, I even found you some bullet holes, so you should be grateful. They’ll look good in the shot, won’t they, Hector?”

“Yeah, muy bueno,” said Hector.

“Okay, then. Christ, I’m melting. Introductions, Georgie. Who does what?”

George did a quick job of the intros, because it was obvious Gogo wanted to get to business. That was fine for everyone else, because they were all sweating and miserable in this mean little room. Then Gogo said, “Ready,” the two techs got their camcorders, switched on the cam lights and checked the volume settings on the microphones. The generator’s low drone in the other room wasn’t loud enough to kill anything in here, and Nomad figured it helped the vibe.

“Okay, everybody move against this wall. Watch the paint…what’s your name again?”

“Ariel.”

“Wet paint, Ariel. Scruffy, move to your left about a foot. We want the poster to show.” Mike obeyed without comment. “How’s it look?” This question was aimed at the techs, who were peering through their rubber-rimmed eyepieces.

“Tall dude needs to shift to the right,” Hector said, and Nomad moved. “That’s got it. I think we’re set.”

“Count it down,” Gogo directed. He turned off his personal fan.

“In five…four…three…two…one.”

“I’m here,” said Gogo with a dazzling smile and forceful emphasis, speaking into Benjy’s camcorder, “with the Austin-based band, The Five. These guys have just started their new tour, and they’re bringing us a look at their fresh redhot video. The song’s called ‘When The Storm Breaks’. We’ll get to that video in just a minute, but first…you know…heh heh… I’ve got to ask a question.” He turned his attention to the band. Benjy’s camcorder stayed on his face, while Hector’s was pointed at The Five. Nomad was aware of being at the center of bright light and black shadows. “Take a look at that poster,” Gogo said. “Give us a tight closeup on that, Hector.” Obviously, the techs were not only the crew but also part of the cast. “Okay, this is my question: which one of you is the thumb?”

There followed a few seconds of deafening silence. Nomad thought it was probably the most asinine question he’d ever heard. Their first minute was ticking away. He said, “I don’t know who the thumb is, but I can be the middle finger.”

“Cut it,” Gogo told the techs. The lights on their camcorders went dark. Gogo scratched his chin and smiled without warmth. “Listen,” he said, “let’s understand that I’m the host, huh? I’m going for some humor. I’m not challenging anybody to a big dick contest. Now, to be honest with you, I’m doing this for Roger because he’s a decent guy and he’s sent me a lot of business. So save your attitude for the stage, and we’ll all go home happy. Count it down,” he told Hector.

The camcorders lit up again. “In five…four…three…two…one.”

“I’m here—right here, wherever we are—with the Austin-based band, The Five. These guys have just started their new tour and we’re going to get a look at their video, ‘When The Storm Breaks’, in just a minute, but first I want to remind you to check out our Weekend Special Deals coming up, see what Felix Gogo can do for you, doesn’t have to be just the weekend, we’ve got deals every day of the week, walk in, drive out, and remember, my friends, sometimes good guys don’t wear white.” He’d been speaking directly into Benjy’s lens, and now he looked at the band and gave an expression of exaggerated astonishment as if the light-washed figures had suddenly materialized before him like floating spirits. “There are five of you!” he said, clownishly. “I don’ know what I wass es-pectin’!” He gave a big grin into the lens, put an index finger against the side of his head, lolled his tongue out and staggered like the village idiot, and Nomad just clenched his teeth and looked down at the trashy floor.

Ariel laughed, but it was all nerves. Beside her, Terry wore a frozen smile. His eyes were hot and sweat glistened on his scalp.

“Take you a long time to come up with that name?” was the next question. “Ariel?”

“No,” she answered. “Not really.” She felt herself trying to recoil from the lights, but there was wet red paint on the wall at her back.

“We thought about The Four, or The Six,” Berke suddenly said, her voice calm and controlled, “but for some reason it didn’t seem right.”

“Duh!” said Gogo, with another fanatical grin into the camcorder. “See folks, you think my job iss heeesey? We got some great minds in here tonight! Okay, somebody set up the video. You went to Iraq to shoot this, right?”

“It’s about the war,” Nomad managed to say.

“Song’s called ‘When The Storm Breaks’, by The—” Gogo held up his own hand, palm out and fingers spread, for Hector’s camcorder to focus on.

“And cut,” Gogo said. He walked a couple of steps to turn the fan back on, and he took the black handkerchief from his inside jacket pocket and mopped his face and did not give a glance at George, who stood about three feet away.

Gogo lifted his double chins to catch the breeze. “Have you people ever done a fucking television interview before? Pardon the truth, but you are slow. Benjy, get me some water.”

“I don’t think we got our full minute,” Nomad said.

“What?”

“I said,” Nomad repeated, “that we didn’t get our full minute.” He came forward, brushing between Ariel and Terry. George was shaking his head, warning him: no…no…no. Nomad stopped, but he had no intention of backing down. “You used our time for a commercial. That’s not right.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Gogo said, as he took the bottled water that Benjy had brought him from one of the bags. He uncapped it, drank but did not offer any liquid relief to anyone else. “This whole show is a commercial. What’d you say you called yourself? Nomad? Okay, when you get the Nomad Show on cable, you can do what you please. Until then, the Felix Gogo Show is the name of this one, and I do what I please. Somebody fucks up, or acts like a moron, or doesn’t appreciate the humor…” He shrugged. “There’s the door. We can shut this down right now.” He turned to George. “You want to shut this down right now, George? I can go sell some cars, huh?”

The tech guys were waiting to see how this turned out before they moved the floodlights. George looked from Gogo to Nomad and then back again, and he lowered his head and said, “Nobody wants to shut it down.”

Still the tech guys waited. Gogo drank about half the water. Then he recapped it with a flourish, victor of this particular battle. “Okay,” he announced, and the tech guys started working again.

Nomad caught Berke’s gaze. Her eyes were slightly narrowed. She was asking him, Do you believe we have to put up with this shit? He didn’t want to, anymore than she did, but they needed this. Even though the show would run too late to put anybody in the audience at Common Grounds, it and the Saturday afternoon rerun would bring people into The Curtain Club for their Saturday night gig in Dallas.

“Do you want to talk about the video?” Gogo asked them. “Or do you want to talk about your tour?”

“The tour,” Nomad said, after a quick questioning glance at the others.

“Fine with me. That video’s going to be about as popular around here as a cactus sandwich covered with turd sauce. But that’s just my opinion. Okay, I want you all standing in front of the flag.”

The band was in place (like mannequins in a store window advertising a small and hollow version of patriotism, Nomad thought), the floodlights were on, the camcorders lit up, the countdown done, and Felix Gogo got on the right track by mentioning their gig at the Curtain Club in Dallas’ Deep Ellum. Doors at eight-thirty, other gators on the bill the Naugahydes, the Critters, and Gina Fayne and the Mudstaynes. Gogo asked Mike about the tattoos, and Mike said they were a history of his life. Gogo asked Ariel how long she’d been a musician, and she said she couldn’t remember not hearing some kind of music and wanting to write down what she heard. Gogo asked Terry what his favorite song was that The Five had done, and Terry said it was a tough question but he probably had two favorites that were very different from each other and displayed their range: the slithery ‘This Song Is A Snake’ and the hard-edged ‘Desperate Ain’t Pretty’, which they sometimes did as an encore. Gogo was a fly, landing here and there, long enough to start an itch, quick enough to slip a swatter.

Then Gogo looked directly at Nomad and asked, “You guys have been together three years, right? So how come you don’t have a record deal?”

It sounded so sincere and sincerely interested, but Nomad knew they were having a big dick contest, after all, and Gogo had just pulled Nomad’s jeans down to show the shrivelled little member that hung there.

In his allotted time, Nomad could not explain that Don Kee Records in Nashville had gone belly-up a month before their first CD was supposed to be distributed. He could not explain that their slick A&R rep with Electric Fusion Records in Los Angeles had been caught screwing the money-man’s wife in a hot tub, and thus not only was Slick kicked, but every band Slick had picked was kicked. Nomad could not explain, in this happy moment, that the music business was a devastated landscape and that the sale of CDs fell every year and bands were fighting to survive on gigs that at best put a hundred dollars in the pot to be divided, but then again Gogo already knew this, and what was truth to working gators in the industry could sound like sour grapes to the paying audience. Anyway, Nomad decided, desperate ain’t pretty.

He pulled up an easy smile. It was probably one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do because it felt so hideously, rottenly false, and he said, “We’re working on it,” which he’d heard many others say when they were sliding down the tubes.

“Well, good luck with that,” said Gogo. He looked at Terry again. “Where you going after Dallas?”

“We’ll be at the Spinhouse in El Paso on Friday night, the 25th. After that, we’re at—”

“So I guess your fans can find you on the web, right?” Gogo interrupted.

“Uh…yeah. And we’ve got a MySpace page.”

“Good enough. I want to give you a great big Gogo thanks for being here tonight, and I know you guys are heading for great things.” He grinned into Benjy’s lens. “And speaking of great, my friends, let’s take a look at these great Weekend Special Deals. Felix Gogo Toyota makes it eeeeeasy to walk in, drive out any day of the week. Comin’ at you right now.” He pointed his finger into the lens and made his eyes pop and he pursed his lips as if trying to kiss the customer—or, at least, the customer’s wallet.

“And out,” said Hector.

The camcorder lights were switched off. Gogo mopped his face with his handkerchief again. “We’re done,” he said to no one in particular. “We’ll edit it this afternoon. Check it out tonight, see what you think.”

“We’re working tonight,” Nomad reminded him.

“Catch the rerun, then. Whatever. Fuck it.”

The tech guys were unplugging. Ariel, Berke and Mike had already gone out as soon as the cams had darkened. Gogo left the room, followed by George, Terry and Nomad. Outside, in the parking lot, the air was only a few degrees cooler than the stifling room but at least there was the stale breath of a breeze. Gogo got on his cellphone and stood next to the Land Cruiser; the interview was finished, the favor to Roger Chester done, and what more was there?

“Thanks,” George said as he went around to get in the Scumbucket, but Gogo stuck a finger in his free ear and concentrated on his conversation.

“I haven’t had so much fun,” Berke told Ariel as they climbed into their seats, “since the last time I puked on my boots.”

“You’re makin’ me hungry,” Mike said. “Anybody want a hamburger? We passed a McD’s up the road.”

Nomad was about to get in when Gogo closed his cell and said, “Hey! You! Nomad, come here a minute!”

Nomad’s first impulse was to show him he really could be a middle finger, and a double middle finger at that, but he walked the few paces to where Gogo stood next to the Land Cruiser. The black cowboy hat was cocked to one side. Gogo watched him warily, animal to animal.

“The promo stuff I got from Roger says you wrote that song,” Gogo said. “You and the girl.”

“The song for the video?”

“Yeah. The anti-American anti-war shit.”

Here we go, Nomad thought. He steeled himself for an argument. “I don’t think it’s anti-American.”

Gogo looked at the ground and pushed rubble around with the toe of a Nike. “You don’t? You think it says something worthwhile? Something noble? You trying to make some kind of political statement?”

“It’s a song,” Nomad answered.

“Let me tell you.” Gogo stared into Nomad’s eyes, and there was something about his expression that was at the same time both angry and weirdly fatherly. “I’ve seen bands come and go. Seen the bigshots and the blowhards pass through by the dozens. And they were all talented in some way, yeah, but talent’s no big thing. Shit, talent’s a piss-poor third to ambition, and ambition is second to personality. So I’m going to give you some free advice, huh? Don’t get into political shit. Don’t stir up anybody’s water. You’re an entertainer, that’s what you do. I interviewed The Rock a couple of years ago. Remember when he was a wrestler? His motto was ‘Know Your Role’. That’s what I’m saying to you. Know your role, and you might get somewhere.”

“Where would that be?” Nomad asked.

“Not in the crapper, which is where ninety-nine percent of you people end up. Listen, you’ve got a good voice and a good presence. I like you. I’m just saying, the reason blacks rule music these days is because their songs are about fun and sex. The guys sing about getting bling and finding fresh pussy, and the girls sing about getting bling and cutting the nuts off the guys who screwed them over, huh?” Gogo waited for that point to sink in. “White musicians are singing about angst and the cruel world and how nothing’s any damned good. What’s the fun in that? Who’s going to dance to that beat, huh? Now you want to be fucking political. I’m telling you, don’t go that way.”

“Maybe I don’t have a choice.”

“What, because you’re such an artist? Because you’re going to teach the world to sing? Yeah, right.” His face got up closer to Nomad’s, and Nomad could feel the heat coming off it. “Everybody’s got a choice. And if you’ve got any brains, you’ll know your role. Comprende?”

Nomad didn’t answer for a few seconds. He was feeling his own heat. “I think I’d better go,” he said.

“One more piece of free advice,” Gogo offered. “Ditch the dyke.”

Nomad turned his back on the man, and he walked to the Scumbucket where his family was waiting.

FOUR.

The McD’s that Mike had mentioned was about two miles back toward Waco along East Lake Shore. It was connected to a gas station, but it did have a drive-up window. George gave the orders: two cheeseburgers, Coke and double fries for Mike; a burger and a Coke for Nomad, and the same for himself. The others didn’t want anything. They hadn’t done much talking since the interview. The Scumbucket’s air-conditioning continued its off-key humming, the sun beat down mercilessly upon the hood and windshield, the sky was almost white with heat, and all was not right with this world.

They were waiting for their order to come up at the window. Berke took a drink from her bottle of tepid water. “I’ll bet he screws us over. I’ll bet when we see the segment we won’t even recognize ourselves.”

“I don’t want to see it,” said Ariel, picking the silver polish off her fingernails.

“It’ll be okay,” George told them. “He won’t screw us over. It was a favor for Roger, remember?” As if he knew Roger Chester well enough to call him by his first name.

“I’m sick of rude mechanicals,” Terry said, frowning toward a distant field where cattle searched for shade. “They run the world.”

“Yeah, but it’s the only world we’ve got.” Mike was watching for the sack of burgers to appear. “Have to live in it, bro.”

Nomad had his sunglasses back on. He offered no comment. He felt worn out, his energy sapped by the heat, and it was hardly noon. Before they headed over to Common Grounds they were due to check in at the Motel 6 in South Waco. Two rooms, three and three, at forty dollars each. If they didn’t sell enough T-shirts and CDs tonight, they’d already be behind the curve.

The chow came. George handed the stuff out and started off, turning right on East Lake Shore. Distractedly, Nomad put the Coke on the seat between his legs and started unwrapping his burger.

“So what’d he talk to you about?” George asked.

“Nothing.”

“Had to be something, man.”

“I guess he was warning me. Us, I mean.”

“Yeah? About what?” Terry asked.

Nomad took a bite of his sandwich. “About knowing our—” Roles, he was going to say, but just as he swallowed he caught the tang of the melted cheese tucked under the meat and smelled it and he looked at the sandwich and saw it in there, yellow and gooey. He realized the guy at the window had screwed up the order, because his burger was wrapped in white paper and not yellow. It was down his gullet now, too late to spit it up, and he knew one bite of cheese was not going to lay him low, it would just cause his throat to itch, but it was one more thing to deal with and he yelled, “Shit!”

Startled, George hit the brake. Nomad grabbed for his drink, the plastic lid popped off, and suddenly his seat was awash in Coca-Cola.

“What is it?” George asked, steering toward the shoulder. “What the hell…?”

“Fucking shit!” Nomad shouted, as he crushed the offending hamburger in one hand. “Let me out! Stop the van, let me out!”

“Cool it, bro!” Mike said, his mouth full. “Come on!”

“Out!” Nomad repeated, and this time it was almost a shriek. He felt Ariel’s hand on his shoulder and he shook it off, and he realized as if looking down on himself in a dream that he was cracking up, he was about to fly to pieces, he had been blindsided by a fucking cheeseburger but that wasn’t all of it, no, not by a long shot, he was about to flail out and hurt somebody and he had to get out of this van…RIGHT…FUCKING…NOW!

“Okay, okay, okay!” George steered the Scumbucket off onto a dirt road that led into a thicket of pines and scrub-brush. Before George could stop, Nomad was out the door, Coke dripping from his crotch and the seat of his jeans, and he threw the balled-up burger as far as he could with an effort that he knew his shoulder was going to feel tomorrow morning.

This is a comedy, he thought. A comedy of errors, large and small. A guy standing on a dirt road in wet jeans, his fists clenched at his sides, his feet stomping the dust, rage in his heart and nobody to fight. It should be funny, he thought, and worth a real laugh on down the line.

Only he did not laugh, and in the next instant the tears welled up hot and blinding in his eyes and his chest shuddered with a sob.

He had to get away. But to where, he didn’t know.

Just away.

“Hey, John!” George called from the van. “We’ll get it cleaned up, man! No biggie!”

But Nomad, who had always thought his given name of John Charles made him sound incomplete, began to walk away along the road as if he were really going somewhere. He briefly took his sunglasses off to wipe his eyes; what a way to blow an image, he told himself. Big tough bad-ass reduced to a snivelling pussy. He was aware that the Scumbucket was following right at his heels, like an ugly dog begging for attention. A banner of dust floated up into the air behind the U-Haul trailer, and above the dark pines the sky was milky-white.

“Come on, John,” George said. “Shake it off.”

Nomad kept his head down. He kept walking. Space was what he needed. He needed to find a place to curl up and think. His heart was hurting. He kicked at his shadow, to get it out of his way. With George and Terry leaving, the band was done. It would be only a matter of time before the center could not hold. Know your role, he thought.

My clock is ticking, John. Yours is too, if you’ll be truthful.

Behind him, George tapped the horn, but Nomad did not look back.

He was following this road for which there was no roadmap. His father had been right. It was the musician’s path. His father had been right, even on the night of August 10th, 1991, when John Charles had seen him shot to death outside the Shenanigans Club in Louisville, Kentucky. And so rest in peace, Dean Charles and the Roadmen.

Know your role.

Someone tell me what that is, he thought. Someone. Please. Someone please please tell me where I fit, and where I am going.

Because I am lost.

“John?”

The voice had startled him. He hadn’t heard her get out of the van, but Ariel was walking at his side. He kept his face averted from her.

“It’s okay,” she told him. She tried to take his hand.

“I don’t need you,” he said, and he pulled away.

She blinked back her hurt. She knew from experience that sometimes pain must suffer alone, but she kept walking beside him.

A bell began to ring.

It was a crisp sound, the ringing of bright metal. Not the low, sad tolling of a funeral bell, but a calling.

Nomad and Ariel came out along the road through the pines, and there before them was a wide field that held some kind of shoulder-high plants. Not a pot field, as was Nomad’s first thought. It was more of an arrangement of thickets. And from among them people were emerging, as if answering the call of the bell. Nomad saw that all of them wore hats, some wore netting around their faces to keep away the bugs, and all wore gloves and carried baskets. A berry field, Nomad decided. He could see the dark berries in the baskets. Blackberries, most likely. Patches of the field were brown, but most of it thrived even in this ungodly furnace.

It was a small farm community, tucked away back here behind the trees about a hundred yards off the main road. Not so much a town as a Joadville, Nomad thought. Something straight out of The Grapes Of Wrath. Maybe fifteen yards from where he and Ariel stood the dirt road curved toward a building that looked to be made out of tarpaper and green plastic siding, with a wooden cross painted gold up over the arched doorway. In front of this building a large-hipped Hispanic woman with gray hair bound by a red bandana was holding a bell and methodically swinging it back and forth. Around her, other women were setting out platters of tortillas, beans and enchiladas onto a table under the shade of a huge oak tree. Before the church, on the sparse grass, stood a well made of brown stones.

It was lunch time, Nomad realized. They were calling the workers in from the field.

He saw on the far side of the church a dozen more tarpaper shacks and structures protected by the shade of other oak trees. The buildings were made of what looked like things wealthier people had cast aside: patio tiles, water-stained awnings, sheets of corrugated metal and plasterboard, multicolored chunks of glass melted together to make windows. Little concrete statues that maybe had once been lawn ornaments in some other world decorated the plots of dirt: a rabbit with one ear cracked off, a greyhound looking around as if in search of its lost hind leg, a cherub with arms ready to fire the arrow but for the missing bow and hand that had gone with it. Nomad wondered if there wasn’t a dump somewhere nearby, where the people here found what they needed. A few old pickup trucks and cars stood about, sharing the indignity of rusted fenders and sun-cracked skins like the rough hides of alligators.

Nomad watched the figures in sweat-soaked hats and clothes coming out of the blackberry brambles. Even in this heat, most of them wore long-sleeved work shirts to ward off the thorns. He didn’t know how they could bear it. He would’ve been crawling out on his knees. A chocolate-colored dog came trotting closer to Nomad and Ariel, followed at a distance by two other mutts. It stopped short, splayed its legs and greeted them with a series of ear-splitting barks that went on until one of the women spoke to it chidingly and threw out a tortilla for the dogs to tussel over.

Other than that, no one seemed to pay the two intruders much attention except for a passing glance, followed by a comment or a shrug.

“We’d better go,” Ariel told him.

“In a minute.” He was waiting for his jeans to dry out a little more, which wouldn’t take too much longer in this heavy heat.

“Everybody okay?” Mike walked up on the other side of Nomad. “John, you past your fit?”

“I’m past it.” His fit had been eclipsed by this scene of hardship. Nomad knew that things were rough, with his personal disappointments and the band breaking up and all, but at least he didn’t have to labor in a blackberry field and live in a shack. Maybe he was heading that way, but not yet. He glanced back and saw that George had stopped the Scumbucket and had come around to the passenger side. George was using a towel from somebody’s bag to mop up the seat. Terry had gotten out too and was walking toward Nomad, shaking his head and showing a wry grin.

Someone came out of the field and crossed the road in front of Nomad. He felt himself being examined. When he returned the attention, he saw it was a slender young girl with long, glossy black hair. On her head was a raggedy old wide-brimmed straw hat. The small buds of her breasts were visible under the open workshirt and sweat-wet gray tee beneath that, and she wore sun-bleached khakis with patched-up knees. On her feet were dusty sandals. Before he could catch her face, she had looked away; all he was left with was an impression of penetrating eyes in a pool of shadow.

He watched her take her basket of blackberries to one of the pickup trucks and give it to a man who dumped its contents into one of several smaller flat plastic containers. She said something to the man, who smiled and showed a silver glint of teeth. Then she removed her stained leather gloves and shrugged off her workshirt and put them on the ground, and she passed by the table that held the platters of food and also a supply of paper cups that one of the other women had brought. She went to the well, where she cranked the handle that pulled up the pail. She took a ladle from a hook and dipped it full. Instead of drinking it, as Nomad had thought she would, she turned around and filled the offered paper cup of an older, sweat-drenched woman who had followed her out of the brambles and had likewise given her blackberries to the man at the pickup truck. The girl spoke and touched the woman’s arm. The woman’s heavily-lined face smiled, and she nodded at the comment and went to get her food.

Then the next person, a white-haired older man who displayed thick, tattooed forearms after he’d removed his own workshirt, came forward with his offered cup. The girl filled it, and she leaned forward and said something and patted his shoulder, just a quick light touch, and when the man turned around to go get his lunch Nomad thought he could see a boy looking out from the wrinkled face.

“We’re good to go!” George called, wringing the towel out on the ground. Two children about seven or eight years old were standing beside him, monitoring his progress. Their arms were crossed over their chests and their expressions as serious as any lord of the domain.

But Nomad was watching the procession. Between thirty and forty people had come out of the field. They were all ages, from early teens to elderly. All of them were burned dark by the sun, and all of them walked with a weary step until they reached the girl at the well, whose smile and touch seemed to revive them in some way Nomad could not understand.

Their day was most likely only half over. When their lunch was done, they would go back into the brambles. Maybe they kept at it until all the containers were full. Maybe they’d been at it since sunrise. Nomad figured the berries would be driven to a farmer’s market, or to a winery, or somewhere to be processed into jelly or jam. It was a hard day’s work, in anybody’s book. He thought, watching the girl and the people who filed past, that she was giving them more than just the water. A pat on the shoulder here, a touch on the elbow there, a leaning-in, a nod, a comment that urged a laugh. Maybe her real offering was human kindness, he thought, which also quenched thirst.

He knew that, in her own way, she was giving them the strength they needed to keep going.

And the thing was…the thing was…she didn’t pause in her work to get her own drink, though she was surely parched and thirsty like all the others. She had decided she was going to give everyone else their water first, and she would be the last to take one for herself.

Maybe it was just a small sacrifice, on this brutally hot day. Maybe it didn’t mean much, really, but a sacrifice of any kind wasn’t something Nomad saw very often.

“Let’s saddle up, people!” George said, about to climb behind the wheel.

“You guys ready?” Terry asked.

“No,” Nomad answered. “I’m not ready yet.”

He was fascinated by the scene before him. How the girl—maybe fifteen or sixteen?—picked everyone up as they came past her. It seemed so effortless for her, and so important. Everyone got a few seconds of undivided attention. They were not rushed along. Most of them carried their own canteens, or half-empty water bottles pushed into pockets of work-aprons, but it was clear that they wanted—needed, maybe—water from the girl at the well.

He was struck by the desire to see her face. He had the feeling that if he did not see her face, he might never again have the chance. And then he asked himself what the big deal was. It was just a young Hispanic girl in a floppy straw hat giving people water. So what?

But he wanted to see her face, because he had the feeling that he would see in it a beauty he had forgotten existed.

“Will you dumb-asses move it?” Berke had gotten out and was standing next to the Scumbucket, one hand on her hip and the other holding her own bottle of water, which had about two good swallows left in it. The children had retreated a few paces. “You want to get heat stroke?”

“We’re coming,” Ariel said, but she did not leave Nomad’s side.

And then the last person got his cup filled and went to join the workers who sat on the ground under the oak tree talking with each other and eating their lunches, and the girl at the well dipped her ladle into the pail and looked directly at the band members.

She held the ladle toward them, offering a drink.

No one moved or spoke for a few seconds, and then Mike said, “Well, shit, I’ll get me some if she’s givin’ it out.” He walked forward.

“It might not be clean,” Ariel warned.

Mike said, “Hey, I was raised on well water. Didn’t stunt my growth too bad.” He nodded a greeting to the women who’d brought the food and cups, and took one of the cups from the table. Then he walked to the well, said, “Buenos dias,” to the girl and held out his cup. Nomad saw the girl say something to Mike as she filled it, but it was spoken so quietly Nomad could not hear. Mike swigged the water down and came back to the group.

“It’s cold,” he said. “She says to tell you everybody’s welcome, and not to be afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” Nomad asked. He watched the girl, who seemed to be waiting for them. She still had not taken a drink herself.

“I don’t know. That it’s not clean, I guess.”

“I think we’d better stick to bottled,” said Ariel.

“Hey, we’re cooking over here!” Berke came closer. “What the fuck’s wrong with you guys?”

“Let me wash my mouth out,” Nomad said.

He took Mike’s cup and approached the girl.

She dipped the ladle anew and held it out for him. He could not make out her face in the shadow of her straw hat, only the shape of a face. As he got nearer, he took off his sunglasses so he could see what she looked like, but even then he only caught the shine of her eyes.

And then within reach of her he abruptly stopped, because something that was not fear but was very close to fear had shot through him and he was stunned by the intensity of it. He could go no further.

She was staring at him, from the shadow pool beneath the ragged straw hat.

The ladle was still offered, and from it a few drops of water fell to the dirt.

It seemed to Nomad that, yes, he was thirsty, and he wanted to get the taste of that cheeseburger out of his mouth but—as crazy as he felt it to be—he thought there was a price to be paid for accepting, and he feared knowing what that price might be. He was focused entirely on her, still trying to distinguish the hidden details of her face, but he could not. He felt also that she was focused entirely upon him too, and it terrified him even more. Her attention seemed to be almost a physical thing; he imagined he could feel it probing around in the innermost parts of himself, mind and soul, as if he were a puzzle to be figured out, or a walking Rubik’s Cube to be assembled. But it was more than that, too; it was like a stranger rummaging through your dirty laundry, or getting too close to the box of porn DVDs up on the closet’s shelf behind the folded-up hoodies.

She didn’t speak. She only waited, and it seemed she had plenty of time.

He felt the sweat oozing from his pores. Well, who wouldn’t be sweating in hundred-degree heat? He said to himself No, I am not going out into those thorns. Because that’s what he thought she was asking him to do. There’s a trick to it, he thought. Always a fucking trick to everything, because nothing is free. If he took that water from her, he would have to go out into that field and labor like a zombie, and maybe he hadn’t looked hard enough, maybe those people he’d imagined were needful of her strength and grateful of her kindness were only stupid fucking zombies, and at one time or another all of them had simply been passing by on the road of their own lives until she’d lured them here and given them drugged-up water that blasted their brains and put them to work in the brambles. Made them want to go back, even when they were out. Made them happy with their misery. It was crazy what he was thinking, because she was just a kid, she was nobody to him, he could swat her down with one hand if he had to. And her sacrifice was false too, because she probably was the type who always had to be the center of attention, like Madonna of the junkyard or something, and so all this deal of standing at the well and giving to the others was a self-serving sham. He hated falsehood, even more than he hated bad waitresses. Nothing is free in this world, he thought. Not even a cup of water. And now all sounds were becoming muffled, as if from a great distance, and everything around them—the church, the well itself, the other structures, the trucks and cars, the dogs and children, the people underneath the oak tree—shimmered in the heatwaves and began to blur and melt together like the chunks of multicolored glass that made up the windows of the tarpaper shacks.

Oh no, he thought. Not me.

He took a backward step.

Everything came into sharp focus again, and all the sounds—dogs barking, the kids yelling at each other as they played, the voices of the workers talking under the tree—returned in a jarring crash. The girl was still staring at him, and as he stepped back another pace he crumpled the paper cup in his fist and let it drop to the dirt.

“What’s wrong with you?” Berke asked as she passed him. She went to the girl, offered her the nearly-empty bottle of water and asked in Spanish, “Would you fill that for me?” When it was done, Berke came back with the cool bottle pressed against her forehead and she went past Nomad as if he were invisible.

George was standing between Ariel and Mike, bright beads of perspiration on his face. “Hi, how are you?” he said to the girl. “Guys, we shouldn’t be bothering these people. Let’s go, man!” This last entreaty was directed at Nomad.

“Did you see that?” Nomad asked them. His voice, upon which he depended so much, sounded like a cat being strangled.

“See what?” George frowned. He looked over Nomad’s shoulder at the girl, who had turned away to refill someone else’s cup.

“What happened just then.”

“Um…” George gave Mike a brief glance. “Listen, you ready to hit it?” Berke and Terry were already walking back to the van.

“I saw what happened,” Ariel said, giving him her patented look of disapproval. “You left your trash on the ground.” She walked to the crumpled cup, picked it up and took it to the girl at the well, who held her hand out and accepted it in her palm. “¡Perdón,” Ariel said. Even if she hadn’t taken Spanish in both high school and college, life in Texas had a way of teaching you the language. “El tiene maneras muy malas.” An apology for Nomad’s bad manners.

The girl angled her head to one side, and Ariel caught a glint of ebony eyes in a dark face with a flat, broad nose. It was a face that might have been carved on ancient stone in a Mayan jungle, except for the outbursts of teenaged acne on both cheeks.

“Gracias, senorita,” said the girl, and then she added in English with a heavy accent, “You are very kind.”

“I just try to clean up the mess,” Ariel answered, which she realized she had been doing, one way or another, for most of her life. She saw the girl look past her. Ariel followed her line of sight to track the others who were returning to the Scumbucket. Nomad was backing up as if he feared being jumped from behind.

“You have a long journey,” the girl said, a statement instead of a question.

“Yes.” The U-Haul trailer spoke for itself. Ariel felt the need to add, “We’re musicians, on tour.”

Her eyes were on Ariel again, and she gave a broad, warm smile that made Ariel want to move in closer, to bask in it. Her teeth were white, but she needed braces. “Oh!” she said. “What is your…” She paused, seeking the correct word. “Place?”

“I play guitar and I sing.”

“I also like music,” the girl said. “Very happy.”

Behind Ariel, George tapped the Scumbucket’s horn twice. Come on, come on!

Ariel thought that this life she’d chosen—or that had chosen her—was like what they said about the military: hurry up and wait. But everyone else was in the van now, she was the one holding things up, and she ought to go.

A movement caught Ariel’s attention, and when she looked toward the blackberry field she saw the dark shapes of crows circling, circling, and then darting in to steal the fruit. They were coming in faster and faster, from all directions of the compass. Some of the other workers were already standing up, putting their workshirts back on. The labor had to be finished, or the crows would take the rest.

< >

Ariel returned her gaze to the girl. She said, “Adiós.”

“I wish you safe travel,” said the girl, and she frowned in search of translation for her next remark but settled on “y a valor cuando usted lo necesita.”

“Gracias.” Ariel figured the expression of care probably went back in the girl’s family for generations. She turned around and walked away from the girl and the well, away from the tarpaper-covered church and the hopeful houses, away from the shade of the oak tree and the sun-scorched field of blackberry brambles, away from the past into the future.

But first there was the Scumbucket and the rest of the crew. Ariel got into her seat, George backed up being careful not to plow the trailer into a tree, and in another couple of minutes they were pulling away from the road in a plume of dust and onto the pavement of East Lake Shore again.

“Some life they’ve got,” Terry said. “Not much of a place, was it?”

“Maybe they came from a worse one,” Berke said. “You never know.”

Nomad hit the dashboard with the flat of his hand, to try to silence the troubling hum.

“You’re going to break it,” George warned.

“Thing needs to be killed,” Mike said. “Put out of its misery. Didn’t you get it checked last week?”

“It’s putting out cool air, man, that’s all I know.”

“Barely cool,” said Berke. “We can hardly feel it back here.”

Nomad swivelled around to face Ariel. “What did she say to you?” When Ariel paused, taken aback, Nomad continued in an aggravated tone: “She was talking to you. What did she say?”

“Just…stuff. She said she liked music.” Ariel shrugged. “I told her we were musicians.”

“Were musicians.” Berke’s voice was hollow, an intonation of doom. “I like that.”

“She was weird,” Nomad said. “Anybody else feel it?”

Nobody spoke for a few seconds, and then George asked, “Weird how?”

“I don’t know.” Obviously, no one else had shared his jolt of vertigo or the first stage of heat stroke or whatever it had been. He wondered if he ought to have a physical when they got back to Austin. Check his brain for a tumor, maybe. He’d read about shit like this.

“You’re on the ball today, bro,” Mike told him. “Anybody’s actin’ weird around here, it’s you.”

“Oh,” Ariel remembered. “It’s not weird, really, but she did say something kind of interesting. Right when I was leaving.”

“What was it?” Nomad asked.

“She said, ‘I wish you safe travel, and courage when you need it’.”

“Nice,” said George. “Could be a song in that.”

“Hm.” Ariel considered it. “Could be.”

Nomad turned around, facing the road again. He slid down in his seat. Jesus, he thought, I hope I don’t have a fucking brain tumor. That had been a way-freaky minute right there. Shake it off, he told himself. Get the focus back, and jack yourself up.

One thing about what he’d seen back there, he thought, was that he ought to cast aside his pissy self-pity and concentrate on where he was and what he had. Things might be bad, things were not as he wanted them to be, but at least he was moving, he was on the road, he was going somewhere. The apartment he shared in Austin with two other working musicians had cable TV and good air-conditioning, and though he slept on a futon on the floor it was his own space, which suited him just fine. He was doing something he loved, something he felt had worth. He wasn’t trudging out under the burning sun and tearing himself up in a bramble patch. Hell, no. There were lots of things to be thankful for. And they had the tour going on and the video, and Felix Gogo might have been a shit but it was okay, it was the plug for the Dallas gig that counted.

Things could be worse, Nomad thought. And who knows? Either George or Terry could change their minds. Both of them could. Nothing was written in stone. So it was wait and see, but in the meantime just try to put everything else aside but what was really important: the music.

In about two hours, they’d be going through their sound check at Common Grounds. It was a long, somewhat tedious process that was absolutely vital to run a show, because it ironed out potential problems. During the actual gig, there would be different problems from those ironed out by the sound check. It was worse than Murphy’s Law, it was Finagle’s corollary to Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Hi, guys. Thanks for coming out tonight, and we hope you enjoy the BZZZZZZPPPP.

This life made Spinal Tap look like a Bergman film.

Behind Nomad, Ariel leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She had a mild headache, from the heat. In her mind she saw the crows circling over the blackberry field, and the workers standing up to go in again, and the sun beating down from the pale sky and the shadow of the girl at the well lying across the ground at Ariel’s feet.

You have a long journey, she heard the girl say.

Yes, Ariel answered. And then she was aware of the shadows of the crows on the ground as well, circling above them, and more and more, gathering together into a darkness, more and more, from all directions of the compass, and thickening the sky in their whirling eager hunger.

Courage when you need it, Ariel thought, and she opened her eyes because she imagined she could hear the vibration of black wings around her, about to fall upon her like an ebony cloak.

But it was just the Scumbucket’s rumble and hum.

Just that, and nothing else.