SIX
The Last Song
THIRTY.
“Guys, we want to thank you for being here tonight,” said Nomad into his microphone.
They had come to the end of their show at the Vista Futura, in Austin on Saturday night, the 16th of August. It was a packed house in this club, another black box on the knife and gun circuit. People had been turned away when the doors closed. It had been advertised as a free concert for those who came wearing a The Five T-shirt, which meant they’d been to another of their gigs or had bought the shirt off the website. All ages were welcome. It was approaching midnight, and it was nearly done.
Nomad stood cradling his Strat in a cone of clear white light. At his side, a few feet away, was Ariel with her acoustic Ovation. Behind them was Berke, at the center of her Ludwigs. Amazingly, only her snare and a floor tom had been damaged in the trailer. She was a firm believer now in styrofoam cubes and color-key labels.
Tonight there was no bass player, and there were no keyboards on the stage. It was just the three of them, and they’d had to improvise and fill in and do what they’d needed to do, but they were professionals and the show must go on.
But not, as Nomad had realized, on and on and on.
He looked out at the small lights of cellphone cameras. Some people had brought video rigs and set them up, but the space was tight. It was okay with the band that the whole concert was filmed. Put up on YouTube. Used to show the grandkids what grandmom and granddad did back in that long-ago summer of 2008, before musicians played everything in the air on virtual instruments.
It had been a quiet show. Nomad had done a couple of hot movers but his heart really wasn’t in them, and they didn’t sound so hot without Terry’s keys swirling in and out. Tonight belonged to Ariel’s voice. It belonged to her acoustic guitar, which she played with the precise passion of someone who wants not only to be clearly heard, but to clearly speak.
“I guess everybody knows, this is our last show.” He held up a hand, palm outward, when the predictable moaning and groaning came from the audience, but they knew it already and they were just doing what they thought the band expected. It was like a heart thump that went into a peace sign.
“The Band That Will Not Die!” someone shouted, over on the right.
“Yeah!” another voice hollered, and then the crowd erupted into whoops and whistles and whatever they needed to do to express themselves, and Nomad waited until they were done until he smiled out at all the faces revealed by the reflection of stage lights and said, “Thank you.”
He cleared his throat. “We lost three of our friends last time out,” he said. It was the first he’d spoken of this tonight. There’d been a brief introduction from the MC, and then The Five had started right into ‘When The Storm Breaks’. The songs had gone past with just a brief intro from either Nomad or Ariel between them. He didn’t make any jokes about limping around like an old man, because his sprained right ankle was still bothering him though it was taped up under his jeans. Ariel said nothing about her slightly purpled nose. Neither did Berke offer any explanation about the bass guitar pin she wore on one lapel of her black jacket, and the keyboard pin on the other. The news stories had told everything, to everyone who wanted to know. Nancy Grace had done her interview and so had Greta van Susteren. Berke had done a telephone interview with Rachel Maddow on her radio show and was going to be featured in The Advocate next month. She would go again to the obvious tag the press wanted: Deranged Iraq war veteran stalks rock band, is killed in the New Mexico desert, hi ho.
That was the line they had pushed, with True’s help.
The magazines and newspapers and networks and bloggers had emerged by their multiple thousands. Even Wally was a celebrity who found reporters hammering on his trailer door. Wally on his motorcycle, coming upon what appeared to be a wreck in front of the old Pure station that had once served the community of Blue Chalk, and then the people staggering out to the road, and all that blood.
Eric Gherosimini had been discovered by one of those tenacious door-knocking reporters. Rediscovered. The genius of the 13th Floors, one of the most influential acid-rock bands of the ’60s. Justin Timberlake said he’d been looking for him for years, to get permission to re-do a song in modern style. Lily Allen said she had all his old shit in a box in her closet. Eric Gherosimini announced through a spokesman that he was moving to Jamaica.
But not before he left a boocoodle of money to the University of Oklahoma to offer music scholarships at the American Organ Institute in the name of Terry Spitzenham.
They specialized in maintaining the tradition of the magnificent pipe organs that were played in churches, cathedrals and in the grand movie theaters, the kinds of keyboards most people never knew still existed.
George called them from the hospital when they were being interviewed by remote on MSNBC. He was doing some therapy now, he said. He was out of the woods. He was home free. He sounded strong. Nomad took the opportunity to ask him, on the air, why he wore pennies in his loafers, and George said that was easy to answer: for good luck.
“This is our last show,” Nomad repeated to the audience. “We have one more song to do.” He had to pause for just a few seconds, and Ariel wanted to touch his shoulder but she stayed her hand. He was a big boy now. “This will be the last song,” he said. “We’re not going to do an encore. It’s late, and from the looks of some in this crowd it’s past your bedtime. Kidding,” he said to the exaggerated boos, but he really wasn’t. “This song is one we wrote together on the road, all of us adding some lyrics. Ariel’s going to sing it, and it’s called ‘New Old World’. Thanks again, guys.” He stepped back, so Ariel could be front and center, and the audience applauded and waited as Berke started a steady beat, smack on 126 beats per minute, relying on the dark voice of the bass and the bright snap of a hi-hat.
Ariel strummed the intro on her Ovation. She was dressed tonight more funky than lacy, because she wanted to try something different. She had on a pink blouse, black jeans and a sleeveless blue vest with large red and pink polkadots. She wore a blue porkpie hat, tilted jauntily to one side on her strawberry-blonde ringlets. She had made the decision that it was time for her to start having fun at this, her calling. She thought there’d been enough pain, and now it was time to let some pleasure in. Starting with her closet full of hippie duds. She would always go vintage, but she needed more and brighter colors. Like the song said, some things do change, and they change with you.
She began on the A chord. The song had a triumphant sound. It suggested just a hint of strut. It bore in its bones the strength of English ballads and smoldered with the earthy heat of Tejano. At its heart there was a touch of Soul, but at its heart of hearts classic rock ’n roll.
She sang in her warm, full voice.
“Welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it.
Write a song about it, just keep it under four minutes.
Got to figure what to keep, what to leave behind, and like life it’s never easy.
I wish you safe travel, and courage when you need it,
I wish you safe travel, and courage when you need it.
You’ll need it. Oh, you’ll need it.
Won’t you move my hand, please tell me what to write.
I’m sitting here like a candle on the darkest night.
I’ve got my hot flame, got my flicker on, but where am I when my light is gone?
I wish you safe travel, courage, you’re gonna need it.
I wish you safe travel, courage, you’re gonna need it.
Gonna need it. Oh, gonna need it.”
There had been a meeting in Roger Chester’s office.
It had been yesterday afternoon, up on the fourth floor in the gray building on Brazos Street. The Five had cancelled their Friday night gig in Dallas. They’d stayed with True in the hospital in Albuquerque until his wife could get there. The Albuquerque FBI had been very helpful. They’d arranged for the contents of the wrecked U-Haul trailer to be truck-shipped to Austin, they’d taken care of Terry’s body and brought Jeremy Pett in from the desert where he’d died, and The Five had flown from Albuquerque to Austin courtesy of Roger Chester’s checkbook.
“I want you to look me in the face,” said Roger Chester, sitting behind his desk in his office with a picture window onto The Live Music Capital Of The World at his back, and Ash sitting elegant, composed and expressionless in a brown leather chair to his left. “I want you to look me right here,” he said, pointing with one hand, two fingers, into his own dark brown eyes slightly magnified by the tortoise-shell glasses. “And tell me why Ash says you won’t do a reality show.”
Nomad, Berke and Ariel were all sitting together on one brown leather sofa. Before them was a glass-topped coffee table with magazines on it like Money, Texas Monthly, Billboard and of course the People with them in a small box at the upper right. Nomad wished Berke would put her black high-heeled boots up on it and sweep the magazines aside, but she didn’t. His gaze kept being drawn to the huge horns on the bighorn sheep head mounted on the panelled wall between the picture window and the ceiling. If something like that fell, it could knock a man’s brains out.
“Don’t everybody talk at once,” Roger Chester said. He glanced at Ash. “How come they’ll spread it out thick to you, but to me it’s as thin as a spick’s wallet?”
Nomad almost said Mr. Chester ought to ask his pal Felix Gogo if his wallet was so thin, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Okay, I know you’ve been through some heavy…” Chester hesitated, seeking the right word for a man of his standing. He settled on, “Shit. Everybody knows it was rough. And I absolutely think you ought to take some time off. I guess you’re shell-shocked. Well, who the hell wouldn’t be? Right?”
“Exactly,” Ash agreed.
“But we have to talk about your future. We have to get serious about it. We have to strike while the iron is hot.”
Berke shifted her position. Nomad thought for an instant that she really was going to put up her boots and knock the magazines off, but the moment passed. He couldn’t help it. He had to say, “That’s a term used in branding cattle, isn’t it?”
Roger Chester peered at him over the rims of his glasses. “Oh, mercy!” he said. “Mercy me and Johnny Jehosophat! What’s your problem?” His voice not only took over the room, it nearly broke the picture window.
No problem, Nomad almost answered, but it would be a lie and that phrase could still send him into a rage thinking about a crazed waitress in Tucson. “We’re breaking up,” Nomad said. “Tomorrow night’s the last gig.”
“Yeah, I heard that from Ash.” Roger Chester drank from a coffee mug with a UT logo. “Didn’t listen to it, though. Didn’t listen, because it didn’t make any goddamned sense. You’re telling me you’re calling it quits, after all you’ve been through, all the shit, all the work, and now you’ve got network TV people interested in following you around with cameras and broadcasting your life to the world, and publishers wanting to do quickie books that ghost writers will write for you, and promoters crying out for you all over this country and in three foreign lands, and record deals hanging from money trees ready to be plucked, and you’re calling it quits. Quits,” he said to Ash, as if the suave fellow from New Delhi had forgotten his clipped English.
Ash just shrugged and smiled, showing some front teeth that Nomad thought would look so pretty on the floor.
“We need time,” Ariel spoke up, “to decide what we want to do.” She started to say Sir, but her lips would not let it through.
“And we definitely no way want to be in any fucking reality show,” said Berke.
“Oh, is that beneath you? That’s what this is about? You think it’s crass?”
“I think it’s unnecessary,” Nomad said. “We all do.”
“Do you think making money is unnecessary? Hm? Because that’s what it would be. A whole big truckload of money. Plus super exposure, an opportunity to promote new songs and CDs, maybe a tie-in to a televised concert special, and—” He slapped the edge of his desk. “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe I’m having to spell all this out! Look, you’re on top right now! You’re somebodies, instead of the nobodies you used to be. Your powder’s hot and you’re about to make one hell of a flash.”
“Yeah,” Nomad said. “Flash. That’s kind of what I was thinking, too.”
“Is there some cryptic meaning to that, or will you enlighten me?”
“I’ll ask you a question.” Nomad stared across the desk into the man’s eyes. “Can you name one song we’ve ever done?”
“‘When The Storm Breaks’,” said Ash.
“Not you. I’d like Mr. Chester to answer that. Any song titles come to mind?”
Roger Chester stared back. He took a drink from his coffee mug.
“Any lines from any of our songs?” No response. “How about CD titles?” Nomad asked. He raised his eyebrows. “Anything?”
In the Vista Futura, on the Saturday night stage in a shaft of yellow light, Ariel sang.
“You might be in a place where the old skin won’t fit.
You might feel as worthless as a cup full of spit.
Well some things don’t change, you know they never do,
but some things do change, they change with you.
In this old world.
In this tough old world.
In this hard old world.
In this old world.”
And now Berke’s drums strengthened in volume, the cymbals spoke with their shimmering voices, and Nomad stepped forward to lay down a solo with his Strat. The solo was loose and easy, almost with a bluesy vibe. It sounded like something that might have spilled onto the rainslick street from a club where the sign said One Night Only. Dean And The Roadmen.
He was nervous, not because of the solo—he had that knocked—but because the verse he’d written was coming up next, and because deep down he feared this song.
“One CD title,” Nomad had said to Roger Chester, in the fourth-floor office. “I’ll give you the first two words of our newest CD. Catch As—”
“I don’t need to know,” the man across the desk replied. “That’s Ash’s job.”
Nomad nodded. The way Roger Chester had said that spoke volumes.
“Do you even like music?” Nomad asked.
There was no longer any need for pretense. “Not your kind, no. Not particularly.”
“Do you like any kind?”
“Listen, don’t get smart. My grandfather started this business, friend. Started it from a travelling caravan of country singers who played places you people wouldn’t piss in. And my grandfather was the barker, standing in the back of a pickup truck hollering through a megaphone. Bringing in the customers from the fields and the barns, and charging them a little money for a lot of entertainment.” His voice was making the glass rattle. Nomad thought it was just a matter of time before the bighorn sheep had its revenge.
“Ohhhhh, now I get it,” Roger Chester said, his eyes gleaming. But not in a good way. “Ash, take at look at these three. You know what you’re looking at?”
Ash must’ve thought it was a trick question, because he refrained to commit.
“Arteests,” said the big voice. “I run into them occasionally. They go out to change the world and make grand statements, and they wind up living in their cars and playing on the street corner for lunch money. Well, can I tell you something?” He waited, but not very long. “Nobody gives one good fuck about art. About messages. It was true in my grandfather’s day, and it is for hell sure today. People want to be entertained.” He stressed that word with three distinct syllables, as if his guests had never heard it before. “They don’t care what music says. They don’t even listen. They want to go out to a bar on the weekend, have fun, drink some beer, maybe meet a girl or guy, and you know what you are to that? Background noise.”
Berke put one boot up on the table.
Roger Chester glanced at it, but he was a mouth in motion now, a speeding fireball of truth, and he’d decided he was going to give these people what they’d asked for.
“This business is about money,” he said. “Not art. Fuck art. Unless I can make a lot of money from it, and then I say ‘Bring me more art!’ But the profit on selling messages to people is mighty paltry. If it can’t be branded, and packaged, and promoted, and sold to a demographic, as far as I’m concerned, friend…it doesn’t exist.”
It was the second ‘friend’ that almost sent Nomad over the edge. But he held himself back. He held himself. He put his hands on his knees and gripped hard, and he tried for a tight smile but it emerged as a grimace. He had nothing against entertainment. Entertainment was fine. The Five’s material was mostly party band stuff, feelgood rockers or ballads, but still…to be told they had a boundary, a line they were not supposed to cross, a box they were supposed to be happy and glad and pleased not to ever climb out of. That seemed like a kind of death, in itself. The death of experimenting, the death of the noble failure from reaching too high. The death of caring whether what you did was good or bad. You just wanted to get paid, and to go home to your big TV, because nothing was more important than the cash.
“Mr. Chester,” Nomad said, “you don’t know anything about our music, do you? But it’s the same as it’s always been. A month ago…you’re right, hardly anybody knew us. We were working, and we had fans, but—”
“You weren’t going anywhere. I’ve seen your numbers.”
“Right,” Nomad said carefully. “So…what’s changed? We’re suddenly famous and all these people want a part of us—and you want to push us into everybody’s living room and iPod—because two of our members are dead? And one was put in the hospital? What about the music? That’s the same. We work, and we work, and we try our best, and we can’t get anywhere unless we trade on the deaths of our friends?” His voice broke. He thought the rest of himself would fly to pieces at any second. “You didn’t do these things for us before. That’s not right. We agree on this, sir. The Five is done, because if we’re ever successful again we want it to be for our music, not because of tragedy.”
“John.” Roger Chester let the name sit out there like an egg being fried. He smiled; it went away; he smiled again. “Nice speech, but pointless. Let’s say you three walk out of here today, mad as hornets, and you decide that’s it with this agency. You decide to fire me, for trying to make you lots of money and be very successful. Well…the thing is… I run this show. Not just me. Others like me, everywhere. See, we kind of guard the gate. We look for musical talent, sure. Got to have that. But there are lots of folks with musical talent. Then we look for the pretty people, or the people with something quirky about ’em. The people with attitude and personality. Something the mass audience would buy. We look for the rebels, or we create ’em. We line up the critics and the mentions in the magazines. We water grass, not weeds. So if we’ve let you in and you don’t click, if you don’t have the amount of sales we’re looking for, if it’s just not right, then…we kind of push you toward that gate again. And we’ll hang with you for a while, but if it looks to us like our time can be used more productively…then we have to push you out the gate, and we hope you do real well in the future. So you can walk out of here, but where will you go? Oh, I forgot the Internet! Like you can ever make any real money, or a real career, off half-assed bloggers and low-rent CD pressers.”
Roger Chester took a long sip of his coffee.
Then another long sip.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
Nomad’s solo was finished. It was echoing off along the black walls. Ariel stepped to her microphone again, and sang.
“So welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it,
It’d be a poor old world, described in just four minutes.
You got to get out there, see what’s in it, don’t let life make you crazy.
I wish you safe travel, courage, you can find it.
I wish you safe travel, courage, you can find it.
Was the old world,
Today the new old world.
Was the old world,
Today the new old world.”
And then the drums quietened again, to the beat of the bass and the snap of the hi-hat, and Ariel sang softly, as if reciting a children’s rhyme.
“Try and try, grow and thrive,
Because no one here gets out alive.
Try and try, grow and thrive,
Because no one here gets out alive.”
Sitting on the brown leather sofa with Berke and Ariel, Nomad thought of the plight of Ezra’s Jawbone, and the men in the suits saying that the awesome rock opera Dustin Daye, which followed no model nor copied any current sound, was no good because it lacked a single the kids would buy. And they made the members of Ezra’s Jawbone think they had failed, when it was the suits who couldn’t hear the music.
Nomad knew. It was partly why the man’s speaking volume was so loud and uncontrolled. “You have a tin ear,” he told Roger Chester. “Your hearing’s fucked up. So you wait for someone else to say music is worthwhile, it has value, and then you rush around and gladhand people and say you knew it all along. Maybe you’re afraid, because you have investors who are looking for quick money, and you can’t—won’t—support anything but the sure thing. But you make more money with the sure thing, right? The comfortable thing? So if you don’t like music anyway, if you don’t see the value in it beyond money, then how can you lose? And there we are…one day nobodies, the next day as sure a thing as you can get. Because tragedy struck, and we got some attention.”
“Sounds like a golden opportunity to me,” said Roger Chester.
“How you got yourself in control of people who really care about music, I have no idea. And you,” Nomad said to Ash. “You’ve got your ears up your butthole.”
Roger Chester took his glasses off and wiped the lenses with a white hankerchief. He still wore a slim smile. “All I can say to that is, we’re talking about the age-old war between business and art. Correct? Friend, business won that war a long time ago. And if you don’t already know that to be the truth, then…” He put his glasses back on, the better to see the face of the vanquished. “Welcome to the world,” he said.
Nomad told Berke and Ariel that he thought it was time to go. They all stood up, and then Roger Chester went a buttkick too far.
“I guess this means your friends died for nothing.”
Nomad stared at him across the desk. One month ago he would have thrown himself at the man, no matter who the fuck he was or how old he was, and he would’ve made that mouth regret its lips. He would’ve folded this man up at the joints and made him smile where the sun did not shine.
But not today.
He said, “You know where to send the checks.”
“I certainly do, Mr. Charles. Minus our fifteen percent commission, and minus expenses for travel, various promotional considerations and extra expenditures as specified in the agreement. I certainly do.”
They started out of the office. Before the door closed, Roger Chester said, “You’ll be back.”
On stage, Nomad couldn’t help but wonder what this song would’ve sounded like with Mike’s bass thumping at the bottom, and Terry’s keyboards floating in and out like golden smoke. They were almost done, it was almost finished, and Nomad still feared this song because he didn’t understand it, not the why of it, and he didn’t know what was going to happen when the last note was played.
Ariel, her mouth up close to the silver microphone, repeated the rhyme once more.
“Try and try, grow and thrive,
Because no one here gets out alive.”
Then the drums came in full-voiced again, Berke put her muscle into it, Nomad launched some soaring lines into the multi-colored air, and Ariel finished it out with an impassioned cry.
“Oh yeah, from this old world,
Could be a new world.
Could be a new old world.
Could be a new world,
Could be a new old world.
Might be a new world.
Just not the same old world.
It was the old world,
Today the new old world.
Might be a new world.”
And she let the last line stretch out until her opera-trained voice roughened and rasped and held on to its control by the thickness of a thinned-out vocal cord.
“Just not the same old world.”
They approached the end, a few seconds away. The music began to quiet, and with one last sweep of electric guitar like a sword through the air Nomad was done, and Ariel went out with the same progression that had opened the song, and Berke hit the bass and snapped a hi-hat, and it was over.
As far as Nomad could tell, nothing changed in this old world.
The audience cheered and clapped, the cameras flashed and the videos were captured, the cries instantly went up for more, Berke threw her drumsticks into the crowd, Nomad said, “Goodnight, and thank you,” and he unplugged his Strat and walked off with it. Ariel followed him, and then Berke. The house lights came up, saying the concert was done. Recorded music spilled from the speakers, the voices of some other band. The audience, nearly all of them wearing The Five T-shirts, began to file out in small groups. They were happy; it had been a good show.
Thor Bronson came backstage. He wore a white suit and his Five T-shirt. His tan glowed and his hair was lemon-yellow. Hanging on his arm was a blonde fox who could’ve been his teenaged daughter, and she was dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl and kept a BlowPop in her mouth. Nomad figured that Thor was now tapping the porn dolls. “You’re one cheap sonofabitch,” Nomad told him, referring to the fact that Thor had saved himself ten dollars by wearing the shirt, and Thor said that now the little prissy motherfucker had time on his hands he ought to come out to Cali and kick it with him. Nomad said he’d think about it, and Thor said don’t think, do. He said he was staying at the Driskill, going to meet some studio people and party for the next few days, catch some Texas sun, hear some new bands, and he said that if Nomad didn’t come visit him he would roast a pair of balls over a campfire and though he was not gay he would eat them on a slab of Texas toast with habanero sauce.
“Okay,” Nomad said.
True and his wife passed Thor and his pony in the doorway to the Green Room, and Nomad thought that if the old world didn’t crack itself wide open on that one, we were solid for the next few thousand years.
True and his wife sat in the Green Room with Nomad, Ariel, Berke, the Vista Futura’s owner, a couple of guys who ran Internet fan sites, a sound tech, and the old bearded dude who wore a beret and owned Play It Again, Man, which was a vintage vinyl and CD store out on West Anderson Lane. He’d wheeled in a handcart bearing two big boxes full of The Five CDs he was wanting to get signed, in silver marker, by the remaining members. A few other people came in and out, to meet-and-greet and take pictures. Someone, a kind soul, brought cold beers to the band. Two silver markers ran dry. The old dude supplied more from his massive backpack that smelled slightly suspicious to True. Sewn into the stained fabric was the depiction of a big marijuana leaf. True’s wife, a small-boned, attractive woman named Kate, kept glancing uneasily at the bearded dude, who had the habit of staring at people, herself included, and not blinking his bulbous eyes for what seemed to her minutes at a time. He also had the habit of getting up, pacing around the room a few times, and then sitting down again in his chair with his legs crossed under himself Indian-style. She whispered to her husband that she didn’t think that man was from earth. But True didn’t say anything. He had a bandage over his right eye. His elbow was aching under the cast, and it was time they were getting back to the Radisson because they had an early morning flight home.
“Better head in,” True announced. Ariel hugged him, and Berke came up stone-faced and sullen, and he didn’t know what she was going to do. She balled up her fist and hung it in the air and he gave her one of those fist-bump things and then she grinned at him like the dumbass he was and she hugged him too.
“Glad it’s not me having to sign all those,” True said to Nomad, motioning with his good hand toward the boxes.
“Yeah,” Nomad said. “Managers get off easy.”
True nodded. He looked at Kate and saw her staring at the bearded man and the bearded man staring back at her, a battle of the X-ray eyeballs. “Do you have a card?” True asked Nomad.
“A car? I’ve got a car.”
“A card,” True corrected. He had one of those in his left pocket, ready to give Nomad, and he took it out. “A business card, with your phone number on it.”
“Oh. No, I don’t have one of those.” Nomad accepted the card, which had True’s office number and extension on the front, and on the back, in scribbly left-hand-written ink, his H.P. number.
“You should. People need to know how to get in touch with you.” True knew that if he ever did want to get in touch with Nomad, he had the whole network of the FBI behind him as his White Pages. “Why’d you think I said ‘car’? Are your ears ringing?”
“No, it’s because nobody ever asked me if I had a card before.”
“You might think about some kind of ear protection. All of you need that. You know, your hearing is very important.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that.”
True stared at him. “You’re a little asshole,” he said, but he couldn’t do it straight-faced, he couldn’t keep the smile from creeping in.
“Yeah,” Nomad said. “I’ve heard that too.”
“You owe me some money, by the way. For certain dental expenses and mess cleanup on damage done at a Greek restaurant in Tucson, and the less you know about that the better. But I’m going to collect it from you someday. By then you’ll be rich enough to pay me back.”
“Maybe.” Nomad shrugged. “We’ll see.”
“Well,” True said, “better head in.”
Nomad’s heart ached. He put his arms around Truitt Allen and pulled him close, and True said, “Watch the elbow,” but his voice cracked when he said it. Kate stepped away a few feet, and the old bearded dude blinked and aimed his eyes at the silver-signed CD in his lap, a picture of The Five standing against a statue of one of the descending snakes on the pyramid of El Castillo at Chichen Itza, a washed-out purple-tinged glow of light all around them, and the title in dark purple lettering Catch As Kukulkan. The old dude had no way of knowing it was all computer-generated and photoshopped—no way could they afford the trip to the Yucatan—and had come from a dream Ariel had after eating a Mexican TV-dinner that evidently did not agree with her. She’s been left with a compelling and somewhat frightening image of travelling through space and time on the back of a feathered flying serpent, Kukulkan the link between the gods and human nobility, the overseer of human sacrifice. The Catch As part came from the term ‘Catch As Catch Can’, which meant getting through a situation however you could, using whatever happened to be lying around that could help. It was just something she’d come up with.
“Keep it real,” True said to Nomad, a statement he’d been planning on saying at this moment because it sounded like something a rocker would appreciate.
“Real, cranked to eleven,” Nomad answered.
Which True couldn’t make heads or tails of, but that was okay. This was where two worlds, having converged for a brief time in a circumstance of necessity, now by necessity moved again into their separate orbits.
“Thanks for getting us through,” Nomad said, and that made sense enough, though True would have many nights to wonder if there had been any other way to get them through, and if somehow Terry Spitzenham didn’t have to be dead. But he would never forget Terry playing in that studio, the voice of Lady Frankenstein rising from the speakers, and Terry saying thank you for giving me time.
He knew, though, that Ariel was the one who’d really gotten them through, and he’d told her so. Standing up to Jeremy Pett and his rifle as she had was probably the bravest—or most foolhardy—act he’d ever witnessed in his life. There ought to be civilian medals for something like that, but as Kate would be the only person on earth to hear the whole story, or what Ariel had impressed upon him to be the truth as she understood it, an FBI Certificate Of Appreciation was the best he could get for her. It was the best he could get for the others in helping put an end, however tragic, to a dangerous individual who had been a brother Marine. But behind the scenes he could have John Charles’s money obligations taken care of and his record expunged. In his own case, he was to be awarded the FBI Star and the Medal of Valor at a ceremony next week.
< >
True felt honored to have known them all. He felt like one of them. After all, Ariel had told him she’d realized what the song was about from that off-handed statement he’d made. Just when you think there’s nothing new in this old world. She’d told him that after hearing those words, it was all clear to her. So part of him was in the song, too. He was a songwriter.
Sort of.
His wife took his left hand, because he was not moving and in his heart he wanted to stay until all the CDs were signed, every one, and the lights went out.
She led him from the Green Room, and when he looked back it was with the idea to tell them he planned to take up the guitar again when his arm was healed. But he let it go, because they needed to finish up their night and get home to bed, and so indeed did he.
THIRTY-ONE.
They were nearly done signing the CDs when a tall young man, maybe all of twenty, walked into the Green Room. He wore a The Five T-shirt under his red-striped jacket. He had long sandy-brown hair and gray eyes. He was handsome, but he was thin and angular and he had a darkly troubled expression. When Berke looked at him her first thought was that Gina Fayne, the new Janis Joplin and outspoken voice of the Nation, had died of too much life.
The young man’s name was Ben Rivington. He was the bass player for the Mudstaynes. He came right up to Berke, and he said, “Can I talk to you?”
“Shoot,” she told him, as she continued to sign the last two dozen.
He looked around at Nomad and Ariel, who knew who he was but didn’t exactly know him personally. Berke had never spoken to the guy in her life.
“I’d rather talk in private,” Rivington said.
“Okay,” Berke decided. “Let me finish these first.”
“It was a great show,” he told Nomad and Ariel. “I’m a big fan, have been since your first CD. I wanted to speak to you at the Curtain Club, but…you know…sometimes you get hung up. People get in your face. You know.”
“Do I ever,” said Nomad, signing away.
“I bought the shirt online.”
“Looks good on you,” Ariel said. She was wondering, as Nomad was, why this gator wasn’t playing somewhere tonight. Gina Fayne and the Mudstaynes were hot and hugely talented, they were young—the oldest being the twenty-two-year-old drummer XB4Y—and they had energy to burn. “I didn’t know you guys were in town. Did you have an early gig?”
“No,” he said. “I drove down from Dallas when I found out about this. Um… Gina’s not feeling too well.”
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s not well,” he repeated, his eyes haunted, and Ariel knew not to go any further. He watched Ariel sign her name on a CD and then reach for another. “You really came through the fire,” he said. “I don’t know how you survived it.”
“We were lucky.”
“I heard you were more than lucky. I heard you were…” He looked down, and Ariel waited for him to find what he searched for. “Blessed,” he said. “You’d have to be blessed to get through that. Does that sound fucking stupid?”
“No, not really,” Nomad told him. “I mean… I can handle that.”
“I liked that last song,” Rivington said. “The ‘New Old World’. It spoke to me.”
Ariel lifted her eyes to his. She could tell he needed something, a desperate need, and he would not have come here if he didn’t hope he could find it.
“After the gig, I was going to come back and speak but you had people on you, and I know how that goes. So I took off. Went to another club and had a beer. Heard another band finishing up. But that last song spoke to me. It told me to come back here. That part about, you know, changing things. That you’ve got to, like, step up to the plate if you want to get anything done. Take responsibility.” He grinned suddenly, like a shy kid, and he actually blushed. “Man, does that sound fucking dorky. Me saying it that way, not the song,” he corrected. “All props to the song, dudes.”
“Thanks,” Nomad said. He was still signing, but he was also listening very carefully.
“I believe a song can speak to a person. Like just jab a finger right in their throat, man, and say, like, ‘Yo, wake up!’ You know?”
“Got that right,” Nomad agreed.
“Yeah,” Rivington said with a kind of relief, as if an important bridge had been crossed.
They finished signing the last of the CDs. The bearded dude with the beret and the bulbous eyes gave them a million thanks and kissed Ariel’s hand and started to kiss Berke’s hand until he thought better of it. He pulled his handcart away to be unloaded. Everybody else was gone but the Vista Futura’s owner and the manager, who were clearing things up in the office and writing down orders for more beer. Berke’s drums had been loaded into the bed of her little black pickup truck, parked in the lot across the street. Nomad’s three guitars and variety of stompboxes were in his 2001 red Ford Focus, also waiting in the same lot. Ariel’s Ovation and her Tempest were packed in her silver-blue Corolla.
“Hey,” Berke said to Ben Rivington as they walked with Nomad and Ariel through the club toward the door, “whatever you want to say, you can say it in front of my friends.”
Rivington stopped. He was illuminated by the harsh light of the floods up at the corners of the room, the light of real life after the show is over and the fans have gone.
“Okay,” he said. “Gina’s sick. She’s on smack.”
No one spoke. Nomad remembered hearing that Gina Fayne was catching up to Janis in the department of drinking and drugs, and he’d hoped somebody wasn’t stupid enough to let her try heroin to complete the picture.
“She needs help.” He was speaking to Berke. “You know, she’s fucking crazy. She’s got all that voice, and the talent and the looks, and she fucking loves music more than anything, but it’s eating at her. It’s going to kill her, if she doesn’t get help.”
“Then get her help,” Berke said.
“That’s what the song said for me to do,” Rivington answered. “To come back here, and ask for you to help save Gina’s life.”
“Me? Why me?”
“We’ve got a tour to do starting in two weeks. Going to England. First overseas gig, it’s going to be a fucking grind. Gina’s being Gina. Taking her shit, climbing into a hole and pulling the hole in with her. And let me tell you, when she wants to go deep, she can go to a place nobody else can get to. But a few days ago Lawrence walked out.”
“Lawrence? Who’s that?”
“XB4Y,” Rivington said. “Lawrence Jolly. That’s his real name. He says he’s done with her shit, he’s already hooked up with the fucking Beastie Crew. That’s more his style, anyway. So our guy at PPK Management’s looking for a drummer, but…it has to be somebody with maturity. And road experience too, you know what I mean?”
Berke thought she did. She wasn’t certain she liked it either. “I’m only twenty-six.”
“Well…that’s like…older than everybody else. But I’m saying, we need… Gina needs… somebody she can count on. Somebody who, like, knows where she is.”
“And you think that would be me?”
Rivington shifted his weight from foot to foot. For a few seconds he didn’t dare meet the thundercloud where her face should be, and then he did.
“I was hoping,” he said.
Berke turned her head and gazed across at where Nomad and Ariel stood, within earshot but far enough away to show that, if she wanted to be, she was free.
“The really weird thing,” Rivington went on, “is that Gina’s from a conservative family, and she rebelled and all that, she threw her talent and…you know…herself in their faces, but she loves them. I think she needs her family. She just doesn’t know how to go home again.”
Berke stared at the floor for a long time.
“Can I buy you a beer somewhere? Sit down and talk about it?”
When Berke looked up, Nomad and Ariel saw a muscle clench in her jaw.
“If you or anybody else ever calls me ‘ma’am’,” she said, “I will knock some fucking heads together. Got that?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, very vigorously. “Sure.”
Berke turned her attention once more to her friends. She gave them a wicked smile that Ben Rivington could not see. “And I mean it.” she added.
“Understood,” said Rivington.
“You can buy me a beer,” Berke told him.
She cast one more look back at the darkened stage.
In the parking lot, she gave Nomad a high-five. She kissed Ariel’s cheek. “Call you guys later,” she said, maybe too brightly, as Rivington got into his Honda Pilot and started the engine. Then the brickhouse walked to her pickup, swung herself up under the wheel with easy grace, and she shot them a peace sign as she followed Rivington into her future.
Nomad and Ariel stood together, and alone.
“Cup of coffee?” he asked.
“I know a place I can get some silver needle.”
“Lead the way.”
< >
Kate Allen woke up when she realized her husband was not in the bed. It was dark in the Radisson room. She reached over to the table to find the lamp, but her husband said, “No need for that.”
He was sitting in a chair at the window, in his crisp blue pajamas. The curtains were open. The lights of the city still glowed and winked, and up in the night sky a plane was passing.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Late. Or early. Be dawn soon.”
“Is it your arm? Hurting you?”
“Oh, it hurts all right.” He had the cast propped up. She could see his profile against the glass. “But I’m okay. Just thinking, really. You go back to sleep.”
She knew he had a lot to think about. He’d told her of going to visit Jeremy Pett’s family in Reno. It was something he said he had to do. It had been a one day flight, there in the morning and back in the evening. He’d told her of going to the small house in a sad part of town, a place that he said had a sour smell in the air, a bitter burnt smell. He’d told her how Jeremy Pett’s father, a decorated Marine, had never once looked in his eyes as they spoke, even as Truitt had expressed his deepest sympathy and his deepest respect for a young man who had lost his way.
Jeremy Pett’s father had kept his right hand continually closed in a fist so tight the knuckles were whitened. Three fingers were missing from the left hand. Jeremy Pett’s father had been a Marine sergeant who’d served in Operation Desert Storm, in 1991. Jeremy Pett’s mother, Truitt had told his wife, wore a blank mask for a face, and when she’d very slowly moved around the room she seemed to be clinging to the walls, and once or twice she had appeared in a chair where she wasn’t sitting a few seconds before, or she was no longer standing in a doorway where his last glance in a previous instant had placed her.
She had perfected the art of becoming invisible.
“Thanks for comin’ by,” Jeremy Pett’s father had said at the door, his sunken eyes fixed on a patch of earth where no grass grew.
Kate lay with her head on the pillow, watching her husband in the dark. “I guess we could get to the airport early.”
He nodded, but it was a small movement. He asked, “Would you listen to something?”
She said of course she would.
“Stone Church,” he said. “It’s on my mind. Has been for a couple of days.” He’d told her all about that. The story Ariel had spun. It was disturbing enough to Kate, so he didn’t know how he was going to tell her the rest of it, about Connor Addison and all, but he felt as her husband and her best friend, he needed to in time. She was his best friend too.
“Stone Church,” he repeated. “Wouldn’t it be amazing? Just incredible? If someday, who knows when, thirty or forty people came walking down the road from Stone Church?”
And, he said, wouldn’t it be amazing if they were bruised and cut from climbing over chains and barbed-wire, and they wore old outfits that weren’t costumes, and they blinked in a sun that they’d forgotten they had ever seen before, because all their lives had seemed to be a bad dream? They walked down that road, on this far future day, and among them were an old doctor, and a big bear of a sheriff with a thin Chinese girl holding him up, and four Civil War hellraisers who had come to fight a skirmish and found another war, and a couple of prostitutes with French perfume still fresh on their throats, and rough men and their rough wives and children. And right in among them, right at the center, walked two young boys, a woman who had endured much, and a dazed reverend carrying the body of a little girl wrapped carefully in his coat.
“A bad dream, they thought,” said True from the dark. “A nightmare visit to a nightmare world. Like going to sleep in an instant, and waking up groggy, fogged, unable to figure out where you are. And that didn’t pass, it went on and on. And maybe they stayed together, trying to find a way out of their nightmare, and maybe the reverend had the most reason to keep going, to urge others to keep going too. He had the most reason, because even in his fog and despair he wanted to give his child a Christian burial.”
Wouldn’t it have been amazing, True said, if as those people struggled onward through a land that had no horizon and no compass, no sunlight and no moon, from the deeper dark a figure came forward, misshapen and diseased, and whispered through cracked lips, Follow me.
What kind of journey would that have been? From where to where? Across what unknown plains, across what desolate mountains and valleys writhing with shadows? And time had no meaning, there was no time. Some might have fallen away, or drifted off, or been lured to follow other paths, and they were lost. The figure had to keep the rest moving. Because the figure had found a way out. Not for himself. His life was done. For them, because they had not yet lived their full lives, and that was the crack in the glass.
How would they get out? In the same nightmare haze that had brought them there? Like a clap of thunder, jolting them awake in the middle of the night? Was there, far ahead, a thousand miles ahead, a small hole of light against the darkness, and they followed that like the eye of a candle?
Would they find themselves and their clothes dusted with red rock, as if they’d been reformed, squeezed through the walls of the mountain and remade on the other side? Would they find little glimmers of silver in their hair? And what might the reverend say to the misshapen figure on the last day, at the last instant before escape? What is your name?
And he might answer, in a voice from the depths of suffering: My name is—
“Stop it,” Kate said. “Really.”
True breathed softly. His elbow was hurting, but it would be better soon.
“Something like that,” he said, “would shake the foundations of the world.”
“Well, you’ve got a big imagination. I’ve always known that. When you retire, you ought to write the story.”
“No. I’ll just wait for it to happen.” True stared out the window, at the lights of humanity. Blue dawn was beginning to assert itself against the night. Interesting, he thought, to consider retirement. His injury would probably hasten it. And it might be good to go out as a big dog, with a big Medal Of Valor as his chewtoy.
“I’m thinking of a career in management,” he said.
Kate dared not ask what that meant. But she thought she’d go ahead and get up and take him to the IHOP out by the airport for one of his favorite meals: the syrupy pancakes, crumbled-up bacon and yellow-drippy eggs all mixed together.
She decided she was going to stop worrying so much about his heart.
At least, for one day.
< >
Nomad and Ariel were on the road. She had left her car at their last stop, a place to watch freshly-baked doughnuts ride along a conveyor belt, becoming sprinkled with sugar or cinammon or sparkling with fresh glaze at the end of the line. They had climbed into his Focus, which was a blood brother to the Scumbucket with its crumpled front fender, its scrapes along the passenger’s side, its dents and dings and bangs and bumps. He’d bought it cheap from another musician, with some of these imperfections already there, but he’d added a lot himself too. He realized now, as they followed the crooked headlights along a Texas road with the windows down and the pre-dawn air sweetened by night, that he probably could afford a new set of wheels.
It had been a full night, for sure. A mug of black coffee, not so bitter, and a cup of silver needle tea at a little downtown place called Selma’s, which had about a dozen tables and served great chocolate brownies, though Ariel declined to order one. They’d started talking there, about the song. Then Nomad had decided he was really hungry, so they’d met again at the Magnolia Café, and this time Ariel had ordered a veggie Reuben when Nomad asked for a hamburger, and please make sure there’s no cheese on it, and could the waitress make it, like, medium rare so it’s a little pink in the middle?
And the waitress had said, “You got it.”
They had continued talking about the song.
“So,” Nomad had said, as the late-night crowd ate and drank and the waitresses buzzed around, “what happened, then?”
“I don’t know that anything happened.” They’d been over this ground at Selma’s, but Ariel knew it was important for him to backtrack and go over it again, looking for what he might have missed.
“Something had to have happened. Really.” He put his elbows on the table and looked her square in her mystic eyes. His ankle was sore from standing and sore from driving, but if the day ever came that he couldn’t take a little pain, he would be ready to kick out of this strange old world. Which was definitely not new. Or was it? He didn’t know. According to Ariel’s belief, they’d been given the task of writing a song by a girl who was something other than human. They hadn’t asked for it, but there it was. Then, according to Ariel’s belief, Jeremy Pett had been given the task of stopping the song from being finished, by something he called ‘Gunny’. Or was Pett just totally insane? What about Connor Addison, and the nutbag in the trailer park?
Nomad wondered about that trailer, parked in the flat hot desert on the ‘angel line’ radiating from the north side of Stone Church, or Apache Leap as it used to be called. That dumb fuck, the so-called Navy electronics expert, couldn’t tell his angels from his demons. Nomad wondered if someone who—and this sounded like Ariel thinking—was able to pick up vibes and shit could stand in that trailer, in the room the nutbag had used as his comm central, and listen, or feel, or sense, or whatever, a quiet in the wires. Maybe a few scattered mutterings passed, like distant voices heard from a pirate radio station through a wallplug, just faintly there, or maybe a squeal of static that was not static at all but an ungodly voice raised in anger, and then drifting away in a whimper like a whipped dog. And maybe chatterings passed, like teeth being ground down to nubs, or a sudden “You!” jumping out, all fucked-up sounding and muddy, as if in recrimination for a battleplan defeated.
But, most of all, a quiet in the wires.
Maybe an ominous quiet. One that said there were other battleplans to be made, because it was a forever war.
It had been a bitch writing that song. Ariel had been adamant that he needed to write a verse. He wanted nothing to do with it. He feared that when it was done, and played as their last song, the whole of Vista Futura would be sucked down a cosmic drain—gurgle, gurgle, gurgle—to Hell, to Heaven, or to some dimension in between, and they’d have to be fighting off crows in the eternal blackberry brambles when they weren’t filling baskets for Jesus. He just had no idea what was about to happen.
You need to write a verse, Ariel had told him with fire in her voice. It came from you first, do you understand that? Mike started it, but it came from you first. You have to write a verse.
In the Albuquerque hospital where they were waiting for True’s wife to arrive, he’d looked at what she’d written, at the title she’d given it, and he’d asked, “What’s this about?”
“Don’t you know yet?”
He did, really.
It was about acceptance, he realized. Accepting who you are, within the limitations of a hard old world. It was realizing that sometimes things in the tough old world squeezed you, and crushed you, and drove you down into the dirt. But to survive, to keep going, you had to lighten yourself. To cast off things that no longer mattered, things that wore you down or weighed heavy on you. You needed courage to keep going, and sometimes you found it in yourself and sometimes in others. And it might seem hopeless, it might seem a fool’s path, and it was never safe travel even though an angel might wish it were so for you, and some things never changed, they never would, but nothing ever changed unless you believed they could.
And it was still the same old world as it had been yesterday. It was still a hard old world, a tough old world. It would always remain so. But it was a world that could not be described in just four minutes, with all its universe of good and evil, strong and weak, light and dark. It was the world, as it would ever be.
People lived and people died, and the lives of people were precious; their time to create and exist, live and love, was also precious. The song said, keep trying, keep living in the fullness of life, keep growing and creating, because no one here gets out alive. It was not a cry of fear; it was a declaration. You are here today, said the song. One tomorrow you will not be.
The song asked: Between those days, what will you do? Who will you become?
Could it be a new world, in this old one?
It could be.
Might it be a new world, in this old one?
That was for each person to decide. Travelling there was an inward journey, across an often fearsome land. The world within each person, the private world held deeply within. That was where the change happened, where a world could be made new in the midst of the old.
And that journey took all the courage you had.
< >
But for certain, Nomad thought as he sat with Ariel’s notebook in his lap, for himself it was not and would never again be the same old world.
That’s what it was about.
In the end, he’d repeated Mike’s opening with a variation, and added what he thought suited the song. He didn’t think his part was very good. He had listened to Ariel’s ideas about the music, the intro, the chord structure and the chorus. He’d given suggestions that he thought worked, but Berke didn’t like his idea about speeding up the beat, and Ariel thought he was wrong about some of the chord changes. He was deadset on throwing a B-sharp in there at a particular point, but she didn’t like that at all.
“Are we writing a fucking church song?” he’d asked in frustration. “We’re a rock band, guys!”
“It’ll come out well,” Ariel had told him. “When it’s finished. It will.”
“Okay, you finish it, then! Shit! I’m going out to get a smoke!”
But the deal was, he feared the song.
“What was supposed to happen?” he asked Ariel again, at their table in the Magnolia Café.
She shook her head.
“Do you have any opinion? I mean, what was it for? Yeah, I know what it’s about. Or at least I think I know what it’s about, but we don’t really know, do we? We’re not sure, are we?”
“No,” Ariel said, “we’re not sure. How could we be sure?”
“Maybe it was for Gina Fayne. Maybe it was for that guy to hear, and for him to ask Berke to help keep Gina Fayne from overdosing on smack. Does that make sense?”
She could tell he didn’t believe what he’d just said, but she answered, “Maybe it was.”
“Uh huh. Tell me, then: You think the angels are that bent out of shape about Gina Fayne’s heroin habit? You think they set up this whole thing to save Gina Fayne’s life, so she could go on and be the next Janis Joplin? And you think whatever wanted to stop us—to fucking kill us—wanted to make sure Gina Fayne never became the next Janis Joplin?” Nomad almost pounded his fist on the table. He held himself back. “No way!” He was getting worked up, he had to eat his hamburger and ease down again. “I don’t see the point,” he said. “I wish somebody would tell me what it is. Or was. How come that girl, that…whatever she was…just didn’t tell us what she wanted? What we were supposed to do. She could speak English. I mean, Jesus, I guess she could speak every language in the world, if she was what you think she was! So how come she didn’t just tell us?”
“Because,” Ariel said, “we would never have believed her. And how would you like to write a song knowing something we can’t understand—something awesome, John—is asking for a command performance? She did want us to write a song. We wrote the song she wanted.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes. And we wrote the song we wanted. It was as much for us, as it was for—” She stopped, because she couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Gina Fayne?” Nomad asked.
Ariel ate some of her sandwich and drank from her bottled water.
Nomad watched her. There were so many things he wanted to ask her about all this. One question was: Why us? Another was: Are those things in this café right now, only we can’t see them? And: Are they everywhere all the time, and when I’m sitting on the toilet I ought to be a little more modest? And, maybe the questions he wanted to ask the most: Do they know everything? What don’t they know? Do they sleep, do they eat, do they screw? Is everything around us a fucking illusion, the dream within the dream?
And, oh yeah, one more: Where do they come from?
But she was eating her Reuben, really getting into it, and Nomad thought she could answer those questions no better than he could, no better than they’d been answered since the beginnings of time by scholars, priests, philosophers and thousands of others.
They were not allowed to know.
Nomad figured it was like the cosmos. You could only go so far, thinking about how many stars there were, and space going on into eternity. Where were the walls of the box?
“I just want to make music,” he said, and Ariel looked at him over her sandwich and gave him a crooked half-smile, and before he could monitor his mouth the question jumped out of him: “Do you still need me?”
“What?”
“Do you still need me?” he repeated, and he answered it. “You really don’t. You’re ready to go out on your own. Maybe I was hard on you in Tucson, but I was telling you the truth. You could put your own band together. The Ariel Collier Band.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that sucks.”
“The Ariels. The ACBs. The Blue Porkpies. That’s a good one. I like that look, it’s cool. Okay, back to naming your new band. The—”
“Two,” she said, and she gave him the mystic blast.
“I’m out of this for a while,” he told her, averting his gaze. “I need some time. Just to think.”
“I need the same thing.”
The moment had come. It felt so natural now, so right to do this. The new old world, at this table in the Magnolia.
“You’re better than I am,” he said. “You’re a better guitarist, a better singer, and I know for sure a better songwriter. And you’re only going to get better still. I’m a party band type of guy.”
“‘When The Storm Breaks’ isn’t a party band song. You’ve written plenty of songs that aren’t.”
“You wrote all the parts that really said something. You wrote the parts that touched people. Their emotions, and all. I just hung on. You know what was driving me? Anger. At a lot of things, and I’ll explain if you want to hear it. Anger’s a tame word for it. More like fucking white-hot volcanic rage, which I guess you guys saw a lot of.” He took a drink of his Pibb. “You can only go so far on that. I figured out, when we started getting the big crowds and the media attention… I started losing my anger. I started feeling like…you know…we were a success, which is what the lack of was making me even more angry. Without that in me, what do I have? I’m not nearly as good as I need to be. I know that. So what do I have?”
“You are good,” she said. “Ask the fans if you are or not.”
“I’m not good enough,” Nomad said.
She sighed heavily and threw him a look of exasperation. “No one’s good enough! Everybody has to push, and push, and try to break through some kind of wall. I know I’m not good enough. But I hope—I plan—on being better tomorrow, or the next time out. You start from where you are. You’ve broken through a lot of walls. Yes,” she said when he made a scoffing noise, “you have. But maybe the next wall you have to break through will be with your talent, not your fists.”
He thought about that, and he progressed a step further into his own new world. “Will you help me?”
“What? Like, give you lessons? I can see that happening!”
“No,” he said. “Will you help me push myself?”
She looked at him across the table, across the half-eaten Reuben and the remains of a burger. It occurred to her that you might call this a ‘date’.
“Yes,” she said.
They sat for a while longer, until two young couples came up asking if they were who they thought they were, and Nomad wanted to ask Who do we think we are? but he was nice about it, he and Ariel had their pictures taken and the couples explained they wanted to get into the show at the Vista Futura but the doors closed, the fire code or something, and so they wound up over at Antone’s hearing The Crop Circles. Nomad picked up the check and paid it—My God, it really is a date, Ariel thought—and then they were out of the café and Nomad said he wanted to take her one more place and it wasn’t very far.
They watched the doughnuts file one after the other along the line. He ate a glazed and she ate a cruller. Then he asked her if he could tell her his story, about his father, and that he would like to drive as he told it, just drive, and keep driving toward morning.
They left the highway several miles out of Austin and followed the Texas roads. They passed towns waking up before the dawn. They passed dark fields and the lights of distant houses that seemed to be sitting on the edge of the world.
Nomad told his story, with the windows down and the pre-dawn air sweetened by night, and when he’d finished, when everything that needed to be said was said, Ariel leaned over and kissed him lightly, at the corner of his mouth, and she told him that yes, she did need him.
She needed the fighter, she said. She needed the rager against the machine. She needed the teller of truths, as he understood them to be. And if indeed some of his anger had dissipated, what had left him was self-anger, a crippling anger, directed at his own soul. She needed the man he was going to become, who dug deeply within himself, and pushed himself to create and to speak, to hear and to be heard, the man who said being just good was never enough. She thought she could love that man, if she didn’t already. And she told him never, ever, to forget that.
< >
Besides, she said, he was just such a sexy bastard.
They had to get some gas. At an intersection of four roads there stood a small station, lights on, a Mom-and-Pop kind of place. Looked like a miniature bunkhouse. Still a little swoony from what he’d just heard, Nomad pulled up to the pumps. Ariel got out to stretch her legs. The air was still and silent; it was turning blue, and the last of the stars sparkled overhead. Nomad was about to unhook the nozzle from the nearest pump when a man’s voice said, “No credit. Cash only. And here you pay up front.”
Nomad and Ariel found the source of that voice. An overhead bug light shone on a man sitting in a chair next to the front door. Beyond him, in the interior, were shelves of stuff: paper towels, bags of chips, motor oil, detergent and the like. A mini-grocery, too. The man wore a cowboy hat, a faded workshirt, jeans and boots. He held an acoustic guitar, had obviously been playing it when they’d pulled in.
“Pay up front,” he said again, his voice as harsh as dry wind. He strummed the guitar.
“I’ll want to get twenty bucks worth.” Nomad limped toward the man, taking out his wallet for the cash. He slowed down as he neared the cowboy, because though he couldn’t fully see the face beneath the wide shadow of the brim, he had the impression of looking at someone who was older than the hills beneath the hills. Someone fence-post lean and shaved-leather raw, someone who looked meaner than a broken bottle of five-dollar whiskey.
The cowboy continued strumming his guitar—it had a nice full tone—and then took the money in one sinewy hand.
“Get your gas,” he said. He began playing once more, a Tejano-flavored tune that Nomad did not recognize.
Nomad worked the nozzle. The gas flowed. Ariel walked a distance away. She lifted her face toward the fading stars, her hands on her hips. He thought she looked really hot in that outfit. He thought he might take her somewhere for breakfast. But he wasn’t quite sure where they were, and he didn’t see any signs.
“Sir?” he asked the man. “Where does that road go?” He motioned toward the intersection and the road that stretched east.
The guitar strumming stopped. Then it started up again, a slow, leisurely playing, all the time in the world.
“The road goes on,” the cowboy said.
Nomad felt a slight tremor pass through him, like something waking up deep inside.
“What say?” he asked.
The cowboy continued playing, some trills up and down the neck. Just showing off.
“Got some cotton swabs in there if you want to clean your ears out,” he said.
“John?” Ariel asked, coming nearer. “What is it?”
Nomad didn’t reply. He couldn’t speak.
It was the answer to a seventeen-year-old mystery. Maybe, too, it was a gift.
Johnny, there’s no roadmap…but…
…the road goes on.
If it was not an answer, it was as near as John Charles knew he would ever find.
< >
He smiled at Ariel. He felt himself smile widely. He felt a weight leave him.
It was a very good feeling.
“You okay?” she asked.
He nodded, and he replaced the nozzle when he was done. He closed the gas tank’s port. He stepped back and regarded his busted-up car as if seeing it in a new light.
“Sir?” he asked the cowboy, who kept his face lowered. “Do you have any spraypaint?”
“Cans of red, white, and blue. All out of red and white. Take your pick.”
Nomad chose the blue. He paid for it, said for the cowboy to keep the change, and then as the guitar strummed at his back he shook the can of paint, popped the top off, and sprayed four letters first on one side, under the driver’s window, and then on the other. Ariel stood beside him, incredulous, as the bright blue paint streamed down from the ends of the letters.
“You’re crazy!” she said, with a grin.
“I’m a musician,” he answered. That explained it all. His ankle was hurting him, not so badly but enough to want to rest it. He decided he needed some help. “Will you drive?”
“Sure,” she said, and she took the offered keys.
John Charles climbed into the passenger seat. Ariel Collier got behind the wheel. He suggested they drive east, toward morning. As they pulled out, the cowboy was still playing his guitar, and he never looked up from the strings.
John thought every ship needed two captains. One to take the wheel when the other got tired, or heartsick, or ever doubted their destination. Maybe the two captains of this ship would never know what the song was about, or who it was for. But maybe it was enough to know that it was out there, on fan web sites and on YouTube, and in the memories of the audience. The Five would be out there, too, on those videos and CDs. You just had to look to find them.
Still gigging, still alive, after all these years.
The Argo, blood brother to the Scumbucket, headed east toward morning.
The indigo light of dawn cast a transformation upon the earth. It created waves from sand hills and whitecaps from pale stones.
And somewhere ahead, it washed clean against a distant shore.
THIRTY-TWO.
She awakened to the sound of a guitar, drifting through the wall between them.
Her heart beat harder. What time was it? Quarter ’til four, by the alarm clock. She would have to be getting up in a few minutes anyway.
A guitar. Imagine that.
She switched on the bedside lamp. She stood up, wrapped her cotton robe around herself, and left her room to go to Jenn’s, which was two steps away.
The door was closed. She knocked.
The guitar playing immediately stopped.
“Open up!” she said.
There was a hesitation. She could feel Jenn inside the room, maybe sitting on her bed, staring at the door.
“I heard you playin’, hon. It sounded nice.”
Footsteps. Quiet ones. Jenn was light on her feet.
The door opened, and her daughter peered out.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Jenn said.
“Aw, baby! You don’t worry about that! I was glad to hear it.” And that, she thought, was the biggest fish that ever passed as a minnow. She saw that Jenn must not have gone to sleep last night. She was still wearing her jeans and the T-shirt she’d worn to the concert. Jenn looked tired, her brown eyes were a little hazy. “Were you up all night?”
“I’m okay,” Jenn said.
“Hm.” She glanced into the room, at the posters on the walls. It was a typical room for a sixteen-year-old girl. Jenn’s guitar, the old Washburn Joel had bought for her at the downtown pawn shop three years ago, was sitting on its stand next to the bed. “Well, then.” Did she dare to ask the next question? She did. “You want a little breakfast? An egg? Slice of bacon?”
Jenn was thinking about it. She had a way of compressing her lips tightly together when she was thinking. “Can I have two slices?” she asked.
“Comin’ up,” said the woman, and when she turned away from her daughter to go to the kitchen in the small house on Lancelot Lane her mouth trembled and tears had jumped into her eyes.
Jenn retreated into her room, but she left the door cracked open.
She picked up her guitar. She sat on her bed and played a little bit. Nothing special, just strumming some chords. Hearing the ring of the notes. They looked copper-colored, like her mother’s hair. She tried some hammer-ons and pull-offs, gradually picking up the speed. Those were okay, but her fingers were so stiff. She tried some tapping, again increasing the speed.
Ouch. That sounded like Pop Rocks dropped into a big bowl of mess.
Try it one more time.
No, she had a ways to go yet.
She returned to strumming, slowly, letting the copper orbs fly around the room and bounce off the walls. At least, in her mind they did. Some of them bounced off the posters. They evaporated in the air, after they were done singing.
She turned her head. She gazed past her ugly reflection in the mirror over the dresser to the cork bulletin board with pictures of herself and her dad on it. In those pictures, they were both playing guitars. She was fourteen, and he was still alive. In a corner of the board was a blue ribbon that said First Place Winner, Talent Show, Cedar Park High School, 2006.
Her eyes returned to the face of her father. He had been so handsome. A big man, and rugged. He had been an auto mechanic at the Felix Gogo Toyota dealership in Temple. He’d said there wasn’t an engine made he couldn’t fix. He’d driven fifty-seven miles there in the morning, and fifty-seven miles back at night. Every weekday for as long as she could remember. He had called her Birdy.
“Birdy,” he said, “the crows will fly.”
And that was exactly as he said it, the will pushed down like a thumb on a sore spot.
It was what he said to explain that bad things are going to happen, no matter how much you pray for them not to. No matter how much you ask God to save your father. No matter how much you cry in your room, and lie there on the bed thinking about how handsome he was, and how big and how rugged, before the cancer starting eating at him and shrinking him down. Those crows, they’re gonna fly.
“You know what, Birdy?” he said in the hospital room, with the afternoon light streaming through the window and those tubes up his nose. “Have to take me down in size some. So I can get through the Pearly Gates. Aw, honey, it ain’t nothin’. Come on, wipe your eyes. Laurie, get her a tissue. Listen, listen.” He gave her the stern look, the one that always worked. “Get yourself together. Mom tells me you’re not eatin’. Is that right?”
“Not hungry,” Jenn had answered.
“You better get hungry, girl. One thing for a big ol’ hoss like me to shrink down, and it’s another for a twig like you.”
“Dad,” Jenn had said, and her eyes had almost flooded out of her head.
And he was such a good guitar player, too. His hands were big, sure, but they moved so lightly on the strings. Together they sat on the porch, and they played songs like America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’, and Waylon Jennings’s ‘Luckenbach, Texas’, and his ‘Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys’. And so many, many others.
She was named after Waylon Jennings, who had taken the time to shake her father’s hand and talk to him like a regular person at a concert in Austin long before she was born. Her name wasn’t ‘Jennifer’, it was just ‘Jenn’. Jenn Stewart, that was her.
“Birdy,” he’d said one day in July on the porch, and this was just before he’d gotten sick, “you are a natural-born guitar player. And I swear, you’ve got lightning in those fingers. I can’t even do licks like those! Lord girl, you put me to shame!”
But that was his way of saying he was proud.
Her nickname, Birdy, came from him too. He said she could sing the birds out of the trees. Said she must be half-bird herself, to sing like that. That voice going up and up, right to the clouds. Up and up, right to God’s ear. You must be half-bird, Birdy. The other half’s an ol’ stinkbug! Ain’t that right, Laurie?
And her mother Laurie would grin and say, “Just like her daddy!”
Jenn had her father’s eyes, but she mostly resembled her mother. She was thin—much thinner now—and wiry, with the same copper-colored hair. She was a pretty girl—used to be—with high cheekbones and an elegant nose, again like her mother’s. That was a good thing, because many of the Stewarts and the Ingrahams had honkers. She could be funny, she had a quick wit and she liked to dance, but there was a side of her that had some of the hard earth of Texas in it. That side was serious and sometimes moody. That side didn’t go in for a lot of foolishness. An old soul, her mother called her when that side showed itself. Old beyond her years. That was the side that told her not to smoke pot or cigarettes, though her mother had admitted smoking pot herself back in the days when she was—and she said this with some pride in her voice—“kind of a hippie”. Jenn had tried beer at a party after the Crosstown Showdown, but she went back to her sweet tea.
Sometimes she wore her hair like her mother did, in braids. Today, though, it lay loose about her shoulders. It didn’t shine, though. It was dull.
She strummed the guitar some more, just trying it out again. Her fingers were not what they used to be. How long had it been since she’d brought this guitar out of its case in the closet? Three, four months? Half a year? Maybe so.
It had been a good concert last night at the Vista Futura. Her mom had told her about meeting The Five at the Denny’s, where she was a waitress.
You know what one of them said when I asked him what that thing with the fist and the peace sign meant? He said ‘Bullshit!’ His exact word. I almost pooted, tryin’ to hold back a laugh. But the girl was nice. She seemed kind. She’s the one who gave me the shirt.
Won’t you eat just a little dinner, honey?
< >
Jenn had seen them on television. She’d followed their progress, and in a way shared their tribulations. First off, the sniper shooting the bass player in Sweetwater. Her grandmother lived in Sweetwater, so it had riveted her attention. Then what had happened to their road manager in Tucson. And that Stone Church thing, and finally two deaths in the New Mexico desert.
It was a tragic story. She’d gone to their website, heard their songs and watched their videos. She thought they were very strong, very talented, especially Ariel Collier, and she thought Nomad’s voice was as good as Waylon’s. So when her mom had brought in a newspaper ad saying The Five was doing a last show at the Vista Futura, and all ages were welcome and you could get in free if you wore the T-shirt, well…
No, Mom, I can’t go. I just don’t feel like it.
Jenn stood up, returned the guitar to its stand, and looked at herself in the mirror.
That hateful mirror. That ugly, ugly mirror. It showed her that the crows will fly, even if you stay in your own room and stop going outside. They will fly if you stop eating. They will fly if you shun food, because at first the sight of it makes you think of your father throwing up his dinners and shrinking down to a sick, dying sack of bones, and you don’t want to eat, either, if he can’t. And then, later…you think…really… I want to be with him, and play guitars, and be a family like we used to be, and I love my mom with all my heart but I need my dad, and maybe if I get right to the edge…right to the very edge of slipping into a sweet sleep, he will come as a spirit, whole and well again, to tell me you better eat, girl, and I can let him know how much I miss him, and how since he’s been gone all the music is gone too.
But he never came. He never could get through.
They call it anorexia. The doctor said: anorexia nervosa.
Jenn looked at herself. She really was a twig, now. Half of a twig. A sprig. Her bones could be counted.
No, Mom, I can’t go.
Her mother had said she might enjoy it, if she let herself. Nobody was going to know her there, if that’s what she was worried about. I’ll pick you up when it’s over. Jenn, go.
That band had gone through so much. Had seen so much death and tragedy. Yet still they kept going. They were unstoppable. So maybe…okay, Mom, I’ll go.
She almost didn’t make it in. She’d been outside the club waiting with about eighteen thousand people, it seemed like, and had started talking to another girl her age whose mother had let her off. The girl, whose name was Diane, wore very thick glasses and had a kind smile. She was wearing a The Five T-shirt and she said she was their Number One Fan. She said her mother had brought her from Waco. Then the doors had opened up and the crowd had started rushing in, and everybody was moving forward in a mob and there stood a man counting people on a little metal clicker, and when Jenn got up to the door with Diane behind her some people had pushed Diane back to get in front of her, and Jenn heard the man call out to someone inside, “We’re about at the limit!”
So Jenn had reached a scrawny arm back through the surging crowd and caught Diane’s hand and at first pulled her through and then pushed her forward so she could enter the door first, because Waco was a lot further away than Cedar Park, and Jenn had a cellphone she could call her mother with and Diane had just been kind of let out on the street.
But they’d both gotten in. The doors had closed about six people after Jenn.
“Breakfast’s almost ready!” her mother called from the kitchen. “Orange juice? Milk?” It was a hopeful question.
Jenn stared at herself in the mirror.
She heard that song again.
The last song.
She heard the words I’m sitting here like a candle on the darkest night.
“Jenn, listen to me, now. Listen real close.” It was her father’s voice, speaking to her in the hospital room on one of the final days. “I don’t want you to get sick. Do you hear me? You have life ahead of you. Hear me? I want you to be somebody’s candle, Jenn. I want you to show somebody your light. I think, with your talent and your heart, that’s what you’re gonna do. But you can’t get sick. You can’t follow me. Do you understand that?”
She did understand, but it was something she couldn’t control now. The crows were flying, and they destroyed little birdies.
But that last song…
And the part Try and try, grow and thrive, because no one here gets out alive.
Her father’s voice once more, on maybe the very last day?
“Jenn,” he whispered. “My beautiful Birdy. Don’t cry, baby. Laurie, you don’t cry either. It’s all right. Do you think people get out of life alive? No, they don’t. That’s why you have to make every day…every minute…count. I love my girls. God bless you both.”
And hearing that line in the song, in the Vista Futura, had made tears bloom in Jenn’s eyes. Had made them trickle down her cheeks, until Diane had looked at her and said maybe Jenn ought to be the Number One Fan, if that song moved her so much.
Jenn had thought—had known—that at last, her father had found a way to get through.
It had been a good song. A really, really good song. It had deeply touched her. It had spoken to her in a way she thought it could speak to no other person in the audience.
But she thought she could do better.
She looked at her posters on the walls.
There was Gwen Stefani, who Jenn thought was one of the most beautiful and talented women in the world. Gwen Stefani had a sweet heart. Jenn could tell that about a person.
There was a woman named Joni Mitchell, standing on a stage before a huge crowd with her arms upraised. A vintage poster, bought off eBay. These two women, on the CDs she owned, were separate and distinct talents. Both had fire and passion in their voices. Joni Mitchell wanted to get things done. She wanted to give a voice to people who had none. She wanted to speak clearly, and to clearly be heard. And to do that, you also had to clearly hear.
Gwen Stefani used her talent as an entertainer. To enthrall and delight, to dance to a beat, to have fun, to laugh and help people shrug off the worries of the world for a little while. To help them find strength when the crows came flying.
Jenn enjoyed them equally, as she enjoyed listening to all the many different musicians in her collection. But these two…these two separate and distinct talents, were the ones she went back to again and again.
She thought…if someone could merge them together, could meld them into one talent, one voice, a single personality. The seeker of truth and the joyful entertainer.
And both of them, the combination, writing songs from the heart.
What music that would be.
Jenn thought she maybe should eat some breakfast today. At least try it.
You couldn’t sing on an empty stomach.
You sure couldn’t dance on one, either.
“Milk,” she answered her mother.
“Alright, angel,” her mother said, and her voice was husky.
That last song, Jenn thought. It had spoken to her, in about as clear a voice as anybody could wish to hear.
Some things don’t change, they never do.
Some things do change, they change with you.
She looked again at the pictures of herself and her father, thinking about how much courage he’d shown when he was getting ready for his journey.
She thought she needed some too, for her own.
“Orange juice, too,” she said toward the kitchen. And added, “Please, ma’am.”
At breakfast, Jenn ate sparingly, like a bird, but at least Laurie thought it was a start. Just so long as she didn’t go into the bathroom and throw it up. Laurie asked her what she planned to do today, it would be another clear hot day, and Jenn said she thought she was going to mess around on the guitar, and she might call Noreen Velasco and Anna Cope and ask them if they wanted to bring their guitars over. It had been a while since they’d done that.
“Will you try to eat some lunch?” Laurie asked.
Jenn crunched on a piece of bacon. “Do we have any peanut butter?”
Laurie got dressed for work, in her Denny’s uniform. She would put on the tag that said Hi I’m Laurie when she got there. She put her hair in braids. She brushed her teeth. Thank the Lord Jenn don’t have my big ol’ choppers, she thought. The sun was about to come up.
She could hear her daughter playing her guitar again. Music was a beautiful gift.
She went in to say goodbye, and Jenn said, “Mom, I was thinking. Could I maybe start my lessons back?”
“I think you absolutely could. Absolutely.” Jenn had quit her lessons months ago. Jenn was good, very good, but she was the kind of person—or used to be, before she got so sad and sick—who always wanted to be better.
“Can we afford ’em? I could probably find a job at the mall.”
“Yes, we can afford ’em. And we’ll talk about that later. You just enjoy your day.” And don’t worry so much, Laurie almost said, but today she didn’t think she had to. She started to close the door.
Jenn said, “You can leave it open, Mom.”
“Okay.” Laurie listened to her daughter playing. Watched her hands moving on the strings. Sending music into the air. Who could say where it would go? “Love you,” she said.
“Love you, too,” said Jenn. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“You can leave a tip on the table,” Laurie told her, and she met her daughter’s quick smile with one of her own, and then she left the house with music in her ears.
On the way to the car, she thought that money was tight, it always was, but she would figure out how to get those guitar lessons for Jenn. It seemed very important to her, and it seemed very right.
Because for someone you loved, sacrifice was no problem.
For someone you loved, it was no problem at all.