The Five

TWO

Are you my pet

FIVE.

The night has taken Jeremy Pett. If there really is a Beast, he is in its belly, and he is already half-digested.

He lies naked in warm water, stretched out as much as he can in the stark white bathtub. The soles of his feet are pressed against the tiles, which are the color of wet sand. The water holds him around the torso, across the stomach, and up under his chin. He has gone days without a shave, and his face feels heavy. How many days? He’s not sure, because time has turned on itself. It has become spasmodic, at times sluggish and then frenzied. Sometimes it seems as if hours crawl, and sometimes they whirl away like ashes in a hot wind. He believes it to be Friday night, because the movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe was on cable like the schedule said. He watched it, for maybe the fourth or fifth time, because he could relate to it; he used to have the dvd, but he gave it away to somebody, he can’t remember who. Somebody borrowed it and never brought it back. But he can relate to it, to the man in the arena, the bloodied man, the man forsaken and cast aside, betrayed, yet the warrior spirit never broken. Never broken, because of his sheer willpower. The TV is still on in the other room, and shadows dance in its cold blue light.

Jeremy Pett takes another two Tylenol tablets into his mouth, and washes them down with another drink from the bottle of Nyquil. Those would be tablets number five and six. The extra strength kind, 500 milligrams each. He has read on the Internet that 7000 milligrams might put him over, but he’s a big guy, fleshy. Weighs about two-thirty, stands a little over six feet. He’s not sure exactly how many tablets and swigs of Nyquil he would need to do the job, but he’s not going that way. He just wants to feel sleepy, wants the warm blanket to start to cover him over, and when that happens he’s going to pick up the box-cutter that lies on the edge of the tub, near his right hand. He will start with the left wrist. He wants to watch himself bleed out, wants to test that willpower of which he’s so proud. It seems to him like a good way for a warrior to go out, quietly, under the blade.

He is making the choice to go. It’s done. The fork has been stuck in it. Tonight he is travelling to the Elysian Fields. Through the walls he can hear noises in the other apartments around him: the gurgle of a toilet being flushed, the hollow bass beat of music. They seem to be sounds from a different world, one that he no longer is connected to. His apartment is on the second floor. Number Eight, the Vanguard Apartments, southeast Temple, Texas. It is an area of abandonment, both of houses and people, where angry young men cruise in thugged-out rides looking for a reason to defend their territory. There always seems to be a pall of gray smoke in the air, and gunfire at night brings the shrieks of police cars. The one-bedroom apartment with its small kitchen has been cheap, and it’s been comfortable enough though the carpet has smelled funky, especially in winter when the damp mist curls up against the bricks outside. But even so, the time has come to leave. He takes two more Tylenol and another drink of the Nyquil, and he waits. He’s getting sleepy now, starting to feel the warmth creeping in, numbing his brain. That’s what he wants most of all: an end to the echoes of the haunted house inside his head.

His stomach growls. I’m hungry, he thinks. But when did he last eat? A few hours ago? I ought to get up and get me some potato chips, he thinks. He believes there is still most of half a bag in the pantry. What would a few potato chips hurt?

But no, no…just lie still. You’ve had your last meal, boy. Chicken pot pie from the freezer. Microwaved as pretty as you please, but not much taste. He sure would like a few potato chips, just for the salt. But the warmth is creeping in, everything is getting dull and hazy around the edges, and he decides he is fine just where he lies.

He wonders who will find him, and when. It will most likely be Mr. Salazar, the manager, and Jeremy regrets that because Mr. Salazar has always been nice to him. Cut him some slack, went to bat for him with the realty company the last two months. Brought him a sack of tamales on the fifth of January, the day Jeremy turned thirty. Mr. Salazar has a crown of white hair and a heavily-lined face and a cigarette cough, and he says it’s one hell of a world, amigo, when a hero like you has to live here like a dog in a cage.

But Jeremy has smiled at Mr. Salazar’s kindness and answered, Well sir, I’m really no hero, and I’m just passing through.

Jeremy knows where the heroes are. He knows where the dead ones are buried, and where the ones who still breathe sit watching the sun rise and the sun go down. He knows all about the heroes, yes sir, and he knows he is not one of them. But thank you, sir, for thinking of me in that way.

He went to the hospital to see Chris Montalvo this week. He has gone every week since he moved to Temple from Houston, early last year. He always goes on Wednesdays. He recalls the day he went this week, because it was the day he put the unpaid bills and the Cancellation Of Service notices in a stack and decided he had gone far enough, he was not going any farther, and he ought to start making his plans. So then after he visited Chris he went to the pharmacy and got his pills and his Nyquil, and he went to the Wal-Mart Supercenter on 31st Street and bought the box-cutter. Then it was just a matter of when.

As he lies in the tub getting sleepy, drifting away from the world, Jeremy thinks of Chris at the hospital. The building with all the flags out front, on Veterans Memorial Drive. He thinks of the attendant wheeling Chris in, into the room with the wide windows where the morning sun streams through the blinds, and as always Jeremy leans down to his buddy and he sings in a soft whisper to the side of Chris’s head that is not crushed inward, “Nice day for a white wedding.”

< >

That never fails to make Chris smile, as much as he can.

It was what Chris always said when they went out on a mission, the two of them out there in the dust and heat against a world of ragheads for who knew how long, until the bullet was sent. Nice day for a white wedding. And Chris was awesome, because he could really snarl it just like Billy Idol. So, sure, Chris recognizes it, and he recognizes Jeremy too, and Jeremy dares anybody to tell him his buddy doesn’t.

In his life Jeremy has loved only a few people. He has loved his mother and father in Nevada; he has loved the young woman and the little boy who smile at him from the framed photograph he has propped up against the sink, to look at as he passes over; and he has loved Lance Corporal Chris Montalvo, his spotter. People outside the Glorious Green Machine couldn’t understand the kind of love he has felt for Chris. And that’s okay, because it’s a private thing, something he wouldn’t talk about with anyone except another Marine. Only someone who’d been there would understand it, the way you love your brother in the Corps, the way you depend on each other, you watch each others’ backs, you eat the same dust and smell the same blood and hope it’s always Johnny Jihad who’s lying there emptying out like a broken bottle. Once you hear the roar of hell with your brother at your side, and feel the fire lick your face, you are one person, indivisible, because that is the only way you are going to survive it.

So after things went wrong in Houston, Jeremy came to Temple to be near Chris, to go visit him every Wednesday and lean down to say Nice day for a white wedding and get that faint flicker of recognition. Maybe nobody else can see it, but Jeremy can. Any maybe Chris can’t talk, and won’t ever talk again, and maybe he just sits in the chair staring at nothing, but Jeremy knows his buddy—his friend, his loved one—is aware of him, in that room up high over the boulevard of flags. And he knows there was a reaction—just a movement of a corner of Chris’s mouth, as if forming a reply—when Jeremy told him what he was planning to do, that it was time he was going to find Karen and Nick, and that the doctors here were good people, they knew their jobs, and they would always take the best care of him. I’ll see you on the other side, Jeremy had said. I’m gonna go on ahead, and scout it out for you. Okay?

Jeremy had hugged Chris before he left, and he thought of how frail Chris was, how the bones felt as thin as a child’s beneath the papery flesh. Chris had been such a strong guy, with the neck of a bull. Had played linebacker in high school, and had liked to work alongside his Dad on his father’s vintage 1973 Pontiac Firebird. It was an incredible and fearsome thing, how quickly a human being could be wrecked. Jeremy had to stop in the men’s room to wipe his eyes with a paper towel, but then what he had dreaded was done and he was all right with leaving Chris, it was okay. He believed in God, and he believed that God was okay with it too.

He takes a long, deep breath, and releases it as a sigh. The pills and the Nyquil are working, sinking him deeper. He knows the box-cutter will hurt, at first, but he has been through pain and it has to be done. He is sorry, though, that Mr. Salazar will have to deal with the mess. With a heavy hand he picks up the blade. He places the cutting edge against his left wrist, where the life flows. He wishes he’d lit a candle or something for the moment, because the bathroom’s white light is way too harsh. He pauses a few seconds, the blade’s edge pressing into his flesh; this is where the old life ends, he thinks, and whatever’s next for me is about to start.

Help me across, he says to the woman in the picture, and then he pushes the blade into his wrist—a sharp, hot pain, but not too bad—and the blood wells up and trickles down his forearm, and he watches in a kind of hypnotic wonder as it drips into the water. He is creating his own crimson tide. He bites his lower lip as he presses the blade deeper, and then he begins to drag it across his wrist toward the veins, and he keeps his eyes on the picture of his wife and son because soon he’ll be meeting them on that road that reaches the Elysian Fields, just as Maximus was reunited with his family at the end of Gladiator.

But Jeremy’s hand suddenly stops, before the veins are severed. He pauses in his path to suicide, as the blood trickles down along his forearm and drips and drops into the water.

Something at the end of the hallway, in the other room, has demanded his attention.

In the chair that Jeremy had pulled up before the TV to watch the movie, a figure is sitting. It seems to be a man whose head is turned toward him, but whose face is a shifting mass of shadow. A hand is upraised, a finger crooked: Come here, is the instruction.

My God, Jeremy thinks, and maybe he’s said it out loud. For the angel of death has arrived at Number Eight, the Vanguard Apartments, southeast Temple, Texas.

Come here, the instruction repeats.

“Give me a minute,” Jeremy says, his voice slurred and hollow against the tiles. He intends to finish what he’s started, and he’s not really afraid of the death angel because in one way or another the death angel has been with him, riding shotgun, for a long, long time. So he says, “One minute,” just to make himself clear.

But in the space of time it has taken Jeremy to speak, the death angel has created for itself the face of Chris Montalvo, complete with crumpled skull and childlike eyes that gleam in the TV’s light, and the finger beckons Jeremy to come with an urgency that cannot be delayed.

Now, Jeremy knows he’s got a lot of Tylenol and Nyquil in his system, and he knows the blood is running freely down his arm, and he knows his head is not right and his time is running out, and he knows this visitation is not really Chris Montalvo but maybe a costume of Chris Montalvo worn over a figure fearsome for human eyes—even blurred and cloudy human eyes—to behold, but still…it wants him to get out of the tub and come in there. It wants him, right now.

“Shit,” Jeremy says, because it seems like such an inconvenient moment. It seems that for him to stand up and walk along the hallway into that room would be like rolling out of a bunk on the darkest oh-dark-thirty of his life, or reaching up and pushing away from a grave the stones he has nearly finished covering himself with. It seems like the hardest thing he could ever imagine doing, on this final night, yet with a gasp of breath, a strain of muscles and a wobble of belly fat he sits up, puts the box-cutter on the soap dish, and in a slosh of bloody water he steps out of the tub onto something resembling solidity.

Halfway along the hall he stumbles and crashes into the wall, and leaves a red streak there under the framed fake-oil painting of a desert scene that must’ve been the previous tenant’s eBay Special. His knees nearly buckle; he is staggering back and forth, on his uncertain journey from bathroom to chair where the figure with Chris’s face is sitting. He thinks how out of breath he feels, how lost he seems to be in this sack of skin. Use it or lose it, he thinks; five years ago he could run three miles in a little over eighteen minutes, do one-hundred crunches under two minutes and swim five hundred meters like Aquaman. Only thing super about him now was his appetite for junk food and the size of the junk he left in the toilet.

Oorah, motherfucker, oorah!

He makes his tortured way into the room. There the creature who occupies the chair turns its constructed Chris-face away from him toward the TV screen, and Jeremy hears a man’s voice speak.

“It’s about the war.”

He looks at the screen, and sees there a dimly-recognized figure dressed in black and wearing a black cowboy hat looking back at him. “Song’s called ‘When The Storm Breaks’, by The—” A hand is held up in front of the camera, palm out and fingers spread, and what appears to be an electric-blue flame ripples around the fingertips.

A few seconds of darkness appears, with small type down on the bottom left: “When The Storm Breaks” and underneath that, The Five.

Then what might be a flash of lightning or a camera’s flash pops, and as a drum beats and guitar chords start growling, the scene changes to a herky-jerky handheld camera and what could be five or six or seven soldiers in full battle-rattle are advancing down a street between broken concrete walls. The color is washed-out, grimy, the sick pale yellow of Iraq. But it’s not Iraq, and these fools aren’t soldiers, because Jeremy instantly sees that some of them are wearing imitation desert pattern MARPAT camo and others are wearing imitation desert pattern ARPAT camo. So they’re stupid fucking actors with pretend gear, and they’re not any good anyway because they don’t move with the caution of knowing your head could be blown off at any second, they’re all twisting around and looking every fucking whichaway, a picture of chaos instead of control. Meat for Mookie, Jeremy thinks. Come right on down the street like that, old ladies, and get your asses handed to you.

The scene jumps to a band set up in the street: long-haired punk playing lead guitar, bass player with tattooed arms, skinhead fucker with glasses playing a piano or something on metal legs, hippie chick with reddish-blonde ringlets working a white guitar and another chick with short-cut curly black hair pounding the shit out of a drum kit, the cymbals flashing in the sun. Then it goes up close to the punk’s face, right up in his angry baby blues, and he sings like a half-drunk black man whose throat has been worked over with a razor:

“I was walking on a street under a burning sun,

Put my visor down, thumbed the safety off my gun.

Heard a rumble, might be thunder in the sky,

Might be cannons or an F-18 fly-by.”

Visor, Jeremy thinks. His lip curls. Guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Now intercut with the singer’s face and glimpses of the band are scenes of a house and some young dude’s father showing him an old picture of a soldier, and in the background an American flag is flying from the front porch.

Then the punk goes again:

“I was raised to think my blood’s red, white and blue.

I was raised to do what I was told to do.

Somehow in all that time I never did ask why,

It’s the young men like me who go to kill and die.”

Yeah, well, shit, Jeremy thinks. Get a clue. He believes he needs to sit down, his knees are weak and his stomach feels like it’s got fish swimming in it.

With an explosion of drums, bass and guitar that sounds like a freight train crashing through a building, the scene goes to the face of one of the soldiers on the street and Jeremy sees it’s the kid from the house, and now the herky-jerky shit goes wild because ragheads are shooting from windows and smoke curls up and the supposed soldiers run into another building except for one who goes down on his belly and jerks his legs like he’s hit, and the singer goes:

“When the storm breaks and the rain falls down,

And the mighty laugh with a hollow sound,

We got money for oil, you got battles to fight,

And the heroes come home in the dead of the night.”

Jeremy realizes the chair is empty. As he sinks into it, he is aware that the disturbed air around him smells like the hospital.

He doesn’t know a whole lot about music, but this isn’t bad. It’s got a strong beat. It sounds muscular and hard-assed. The guitars sound like bands of sharp steel flying through the air. There’s a firefight going on between the buildings, and then there’s a blast of flame and tendrils of black smoke whirl up and that, right there, looks pretty real. Then another of the good guys gets shot and claws at his throat and Jeremy leans forward because the shadows in this part are dark.

Everything stops but the drums, and over their thud and rumble the punk growls:

“This was somebody’s child, this was somebody’s dream,

I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”

And a second time, while the drums speak:

“This was somebody’s child, this was somebody’s dream,

I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”

The music swells again, the bass and the guitars come up and so does a trembly organ part that is half tough snarl and half sad murmur. The young guy who’s the hero of the video has somehow lost his helmet, he’s got blood on the side of his face, and around him lie the bodies of his brothers. And then the singer goes:

“I’m not saying this world will ever get along,

Not saying everything is right when it’s so wrong,

But I do believe that war makes some men rich,

And too many of them love that wicked bitch,

When the storm breaks, and the rain falls down…”

And now the young dude has lost it and broken cover, and wild-eyed he crosses the street alone and kicks in a door and nobody’s in there except a figure on the rubbled floor who looks up at him, and the camera shows that it’s an Iraqi kid maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who lifts his arms and crouches against the wall as the soldier raises his rifle and takes aim.

“We got money for oil,

You got battles to fight,

And the heroes come home in the dead of the night.”

The camera backs out of the room and the soldier staggers from the doorway with an expression of shock on his dust-white, blood-streaked face, and he throws his rifle down and begins to run along the street in the direction he came from.

“This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,

When the storm breaks,

This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,

When the storm, when the storm, storm breaks,

This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,

When the storm, when the storm, storm breaks, yeah when it breaks,

This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream…”

And then the music stops and the punk’s face fills the screen and he sings, in his husky razor-burned voice: “I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”

Fade-in to what Jeremy realizes now is the Felix Gogo Show. He’s seen this a few times, has seen Felix Gogo up on the billboards. Felix Gogo is standing with the band—The Five, is that what they call themselves?—in a room of bright light and black shadows, and behind them on the wall is an American flag. He says they’re going to play at the Curtain Club in Dallas on Saturday night. As Gogo asks them questions, their names come up underneath their faces. Mike Davis talks about his tattoos, and then the camera briefly shows Berke Bonnevey but she doesn’t say anything, and Ariel Collier starts answering a question about how long she’s been a musician, and suddenly the screen breaks apart into multicolored squares like the cable’s about to go out, but the audio’s still going and through a hiss of digital distress he hears the hippie chick say, “I wanted to be a musician so I can tell the truth.”

“What truth?” Gogo asks, a distorted shape on the tormented screen.

“Like this,” she answers, and there’s a weird echo: this…this…this. “The truth about murder,” she says, her image washed-out in a mosaic of pallid green squares.

Then the screen comes back like it ought to be, everything’s fine, and Jeremy sees that Terry Spitzenham is speaking but now the audio is down and nothing is coming from his mouth. The screen ripples and breaks apart again, goes completely to black. The audio lets loose a burst of static and then picks up and the guy is saying, “…what this war’s about is training killers, just a training ground for murder. You know how many kids have been killed by our so-called heroes?”

“Don’t go there,” Jeremy says numbly, to the black screen. “Don’t you go there.”

“Ashamed,” says another voice, crackling with static. “They should all be ashamed, and they all deserve to suffer.”

The picture reappears but everything is gray and ghostly, and the ghostly image of Felix Gogo says in a voice that sounds high-pitched and indignant, “So you want to make people believe our soldiers are shooting kids over there? That for everything they’ve done for this country, every sacrifice they’ve made, you’re making them out to be child-killers?”

Another spirit image flickers in the gloom. Suddenly the picture clears and the singing punk is standing there with a fake smile on his face, and underneath it is the name Nomad—what kind of fucking name is that, anyway?—and he says, very clearly, “We’re working on it.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Felix Gogo replies, and the way he’s said it makes Jeremy know that if Felix had a gun he might have shot that long-haired, smirking bastard on the spot.

Jeremy loses the rest of it, because he’s seen all he wants to see yet he does not have the strength to turn the set off. Where’s the remote, anyway? In the kitchen, or the bathroom? A wave of weary sickness washes over him; he smells his own blood, leaking from the blade-cut on his wrist, dripping into a dark circle on the tan carpet. Now that, he thinks, is going to be one bitch to explain to Mr. Salazar.

Wait a minute, he tells himself. Hold on. I’m leaving tonight. Going back in there and finishing what I started.

Yet he does not get up. Nor does he even try.

It occurs to him, somewhere far back in his brain like a distant voice shouting for him to put it in gear and move, that he ought to get this wound bound up while he can still walk.

This is a weird world, he thinks. When you try to climb up a ladder, it breaks underneath you; but when you decide to jump off a cliff, a hook comes out of nowhere and grabs your miserable ass.

He doesn’t fully understand this song and video, or why the death angel wanted him to see it. Death angel? Whose death? His, or…

He thinks the song was about rich men who never go to war making money off war, or maybe even starting wars to make money. Duh. Who didn’t already know that? And nobody cared, even if they did know it. It was how the world worked, and so what? Like, maybe, it was news back in the days of the Civil War or ancient history. Yeah, and like that band wasn’t trying to make some money off the war, too? Make me laugh.

But that crap about the storm breaking, and somebody’s child and burying it and everything. Maybe that was talking about what was going to happen when the soldiers came home, and started thinking about…what? Doing the jobs we were trained to do?

Jeremy can feel the sweat rising from him like a hot mist. He feels sick to his stomach, he knows he’s going to have to puke here real soon, and it is going to be an effort to get to the bathroom before his own storm breaks.

You know how many kids have been killed by our so-called heroes?

“What do you know about it?” he asks the TV screen, which by now has gone into another segment in which Felix Gogo is behind his desk in the studio, chatting up some huge-boobed Hispanic actress who sits on a red sofa shaped like a pair of lips.

The thing is, the video didn’t actually show the soldier shoot the boy. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. All Jeremy knows is that every block was a battleground. Especially in Fallujah, after the Blackwater dudes got waxed. If Jeremy had been the soldier in that video, he would’ve shot the boy. Damn straight. You shoot at me, I take you down. Then again…where was the boy’s weapon? Maybe he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened. A casualty of the mission, no big whoop. You just put your head down and kept going.

So you want to make people believe our soldiers are shooting kids over there? That for everything they’ve done for this country, every sacrifice they’ve made, you’re making them out to be child-killers?

We’re working on it, that punk had said.

Jeremy lowers his head and closes his eyes, very tightly. An old rage has begun to awaken, and he thinks that if he had those lying scummy pieces of shit right here, he would wax them all, one after the fucking other. Just to shut their lying mouths.

And someone standing behind his right shoulder leans forward and says, in a bitter whisper that conveys both sarcasm and challenge, Are you my pet?

Jeremy’s head comes up and he looks around, but no one else is there. It was what his old Gunnery Sergeant used to say to him, when Jeremy’s lungs heaved from miles of uphill running, or when he was crawling through the mud in full gear, or doing the endless pushups, or whatever else the Gunny threw at him. Are you my pet? Translation: guy with a pussy last name ain’t gone be no pussy, not in this man’s Corps.

He can’t wait any longer. He hauls himself up, staggers, crabs sideways, collides with the TV, gets his knees turned the way he wants to go, and starts for the bathroom. The hallway becomes the twisting corridor of a carnival funhouse he thinks he remembers going to as a kid, but this is no fun. Another collision, this time with the wall, and then he gets into the bathroom and falls to his knees in time to throw up about eighty percent of his troubled freight into the toilet, the other twenty percent going onto the floor.

After it’s over and done and his retching has settled down, Jeremy struggles to focus on his wound. He is too tired to do much about it, and maybe he needs a few stitches but it looks to him as if the blood is crusting over. He can hear the old man in the apartment below knocking on the ceiling with what is likely a broom handle. Probably freaking about all the noise, thought his bathroom was about to cave in. The knocking stops after a few seconds, and Jeremy slowly gets up off the floor, turns on the sink tap and splashes cold water into his face. He wraps a towel around his left wrist. He blinks heavily, looking at the blood-stained water in the tub, the rivulets of blood on the white porcelain, the mess on the floor.

A job well screwed, he thinks grimly.

There will not be a journey to the Elysian Fields tonight. There are some things he has to think about, to get straight in his head. He takes the picture of Karen and Nick with him as he totters unsteadily to the bedroom. He flips on the overhead light. He places the picture on the bedside table, and then he takes his Remington 700 rifle with its attached Tasco scope from the closet and he lies in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling, with the weapon cradled across his chest.

This is my rifle, he thinks. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me.

Since his honorable discharge, Jeremy has been through the jobs of construction worker, roofing man, yard workman, building supply warehouse security guard, mall security guard, video store clerk, car wash attendant, 7-Eleven clerk, and for the last four months garbage man until he was laid off two weeks ago because of cutbacks in the city budget.

It has become clear to him, before this night, that the task he is best suited for involves the tool that lies against his chest. The question is: how does someone use that talent—his God-given talent as a Marine Corps sniper—in the world beyond the battlefield? But this night, and the appearance of the death angel wearing Chris Montalvo’s face, has made him think his task is not finished. And that video he saw has made him think he might have an answer to the question.

A hit man.

He could be a hit man.

People needed them, to get rid of their problems. Governments and corporations needed them, to make sure secrets stayed secure and enemies were silenced. Battered wives needed them, to get rid of abusive husbands. There were plenty of movies with hit men in them, doing the necessary thing. Where did they come from? The military, most likely. They were men just like him, trained to set up the target and send the bullet. One shot, one kill. Why not?

Maximus in Gladiator was a hit man, really. Trained for war, betrayed by his superiors, bloodied but unbowed, the man in the arena sent out to kill or perish.

That’s me, Jeremy thinks. I can do that.

He has his rifle and a .45 automatic he bought for personal protection. Plenty of ammo for both of them, right up there on the closet’s shelf. The Remington is not very different from the rifle he used in Iraq. The sight isn’t as powerful, but at the shooting range up north of Temple he could still hit a target at five hundred yards, on most days. He has some money, not a whole lot, but he has a valid credit card. He has his dark blue pickup truck, banged and dented and seven years old but it can still get him where he wants to go.

All he needs to start his resume is a target.

Or targets.

Five of them, maybe.

If he hit them all, he could write his own ticket. In Mexico, maybe. God knows they could use his talent down there, against the drug lords. Because if he was a hit man, he would only want to work for the right side. And this band…this bunch of punks going on television talking about how United States of America soldiers are killing children in Iraq, about how they should be ashamed and suffer for what they do in the line of duty, just following orders, and sacrificing their futures and the futures of their wives and sons…they are throwing shit on the memory of Chris Montalvo, and every good man who puts his life on the line over there.

That band is definitely on the wrong side.

He thinks he needs to sleep now, to let himself rest. He thinks he might go to the pharmacy in the morning, get some disinfectant, gauze and bandages to tend to his wound. He might go eat a good breakfast at the Cracker Barrel on General Bruce Drive. He might head over to the library, go to the Internet room and look up The Five’s website. Check them out, check out their tour dates. Come up with a plan. He thinks he might take his guns and the rest of his money and his credit card to Dallas, to where that band is playing tomorrow night. Scope them out, so to speak.

A hit man could make a lot of money these days. But first he would have to show any potential employers how good he was at the job. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough experience already.

That band…with their lies…they shouldn’t be allowed to spread their poison. Sure, it’s a free country, God bless it, and everybody could have their own opinion, but this…this goes beyond free speech into hate.

We’re working on it, that bastard had said.

It is enemy action, clear and simple. It is a cancer that destroys from within.

Lying still and quiet, Jeremy suddenly knows he has found a reason to live.

He closes his eyes, listening to the thrum of blood through his veins.

And when the quiet, sarcastic challenge in his head whispers Are you my pet? Jeremy does not hesitate in his answer.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I am.”

SIX.

Nomad saw that they had left a porch light on for him. He wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. He got out of the cab on the dark suburban street and paid the driver. The cab pulled away from the curb. It was on the weeping side of three o’clock. In fact, that was the name of a song Ariel and Terry had written for the CD The Five had recorded last year.

On the weeping side of three o’clock,

I walk alone down the city block,

I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t care,

’Cause I know when I go home you won’t be there.

Had kind of a Loretta Lynn feel to it, made a little jumpy and strange by a pulsing B-52s-type Farfisa sound. Or it might have been something Joe “King” Carrasco and the Crowns could have recorded back in the mid-’80s.

Anyway, it was that time on Sunday morning.

The thing about Sunday mornings, Nomad thought as he walked toward the porch steps of a small house in this southwest Dallas neighborhood, is that they followed Saturday nights. It was quiet except for a dog barking maybe a couple of blocks away. The breeze was soft and the moon, just past full, shone down through the trees. The Scumbucket and trailer were parked in front of the house, across from a playground where this afternoon he’d watched Ariel on the swingset. He’d been standing at a window, just watching. He knew she’d tried to get Neal Tapley off the pipe. He knew also that she had cared for Neal in a dangerous way, had let herself be too drawn into his trials and tribulations. She had cared too much for him, is all. People broke your heart, if you let them. If you got too close, and cared too much, you were just asking for it. He had seen too many bands destroyed in the aftermath of what passed as attraction, or need, or love, or whatever you wanted to call it. So as long as he was the emperor, there would be none of that in this band. No matter if you were sleeping in the same room, or in the same bed, and you were together more often than you were not, and you liked the way somebody smelled and you liked their smile and their voice and something about them spoke to the things you were not but wanted to be.

There would be none of that in this band.

He went up the steps, opened the screened door and was careful not to let it slam behind him. He hoped the front door was not locked; if it was, he’d be sleeping on the floor out here instead of on the floor in there. He’d find out in another few seconds which it was to be.

Five hours ago, he’d been in a totally different scene.

The boom and echo of his electrified voice over the heads of the Curtain Club audience: Hi, guys. Thanks for coming out tonight, and we hope you enjoy the show.

A quick flurry of drums from Berke, then into the kick-drum tempo at one hundred and twelve beats per minute, a hiss of hi-hat and the first chord, a monstrous D, crashed from Nomad’s tobacco-colored Stratocaster. Ariel met him on the F chord and slid with him to the G on her glossy white Schecter Tempest. Mike took the bottom with his fire-red vintage 1978 Fender. Terry hung back, waiting. Many in the audience knew what song they were hearing, they knew it from the beginning chords because it had been on The Five’s first, self-titled CD, and so they put up a shout as Nomad got up next to the microphone and sang it in his roughest, darkest snarl with a crimson spotlight in his face:

“Drivin’ south down Main Street, I was takin’ it real slow,

But in my pimped-up candy-colored ride, how slow could I go?

Saw the lights flashin’, heard the siren start to blow,

Didn’t know it then, Lady Law was gonna lay me low.

Bad cop,

She was a bad cop,

She said I was top of my class at bustin’ bad boy ass,

She was a bad cop!”

Everytime Nomad sang the words “Bad cop!” their fans in the crowd shouted it back and swigged their beers, a ritual of sorts for this particular song that had started during their first tour. How those things began was anybody’s guess, but Nomad glanced at Ariel and nodded with satisfaction because the wave of energy was lifting him up. Multicolored lights played over him, the different heats of blue, yellow and bright orange. The surface of the microphone on its stand before him glinted and flared as if made of exploding stars. He looked out upon his world.

“Now lemme tell you, officer, I think you’re mighty fine.

She said whoa there, boy, I’m smellin’ seven different kinds of wine.

And if you think a silver tongue’s gonna save your sad behind,

Step out here right now, and you walk this crooked line.

Bad cop,

She was a bad cop…”

They were the second band on stage tonight, coming up after the Critters. Following their forty-five-minute set would be local favorites Gina Fayne and the Mudstaynes, and headlining at midnight were the Naugahydes, from Los Angeles, had a record deal with Interscope, had a song in the new Adam Sandler flick, and who sprawled around in the Green Room as if they owned it. Nomad used to be able to wear tight leather pants too, when he was twenty. Let them have their moment.

“You sure do look good, you sure do fill out your blues,

Now baby, I’m swearin’ it, I haven’t had that much booze.

She said, stop talkin’ while you can, you got a lot to lose.

Get down on your knees and count to ninety-nine by twos.

Bad cop,

She was a bad cop…”

The beams of yellow and blue lights crossed in the air above the audience. Everybody was standing, some holding up cameras. Nomad didn’t care if so-called unauthorized videos got onto YouTube. There was a party going on; it was all good. Maybe most of the people here had come to see the headliners, but for right now The Five was front and center, it was their time to show their stuff. Berke’s drums were pounding the room, and then Terry started playing an organ tone that began as high-pitched and beautiful as a cherub’s voice and suddenly dropped as low and nasty as the fevered gibberings of a meth-charged demon.

“Bad cop!

She was a bad cop!”

On the heels of the opener, Terry started up the pulsing Vox-toned intro to one of the ’60s songs he’d brought in, ‘Your Body Not Your Soul’ by the Dutch band Cuby and the Blizzards from 1968, and Nomad launched himself at it as Berke’s Ludwigs thundered at his back and spinning red lights descended from the ceiling. It was another fan favorite, suited to Nomad’s persona and voice, and he could rip the motherlovin’ shit out of it. Ariel stepped out front just after the chorus to demonstrate that her white Schecter Tempest could shred up a storm. The band moved on into the next song on which Nomad and Ariel shared lead vocals, a slow tempo bluesy tune titled ‘Called Your Number’.

“Called your number,

Nobody was there,

Loving you is leading nowhere.

Called your number,

Won’t you answer please?

Or cut loose this pain that is holding me.”

It ended with a primal scream of guitars, Nomad and Ariel playing in harmony and then at dissonance. Next up was ‘When the Storm Breaks’, which Nomad introduced as their new video from their third and latest CD, called Catch As Kukulkan, on sale at the back with the other merchandise. “I hope we can get everybody out of the warzones and bring ’em back home,” he told the audience as he stood in the white spotlight. He was going to let it go at that, but he couldn’t. “Bush and Cheney are fucking liars, man,” he added, and braced for the impact. Most in the audience whooped and hollered what Nomad took to be agreement; some were silent, and maybe too drunk already to disagree. Then Berke started the beat, Mike came in with the bass and they powered into the tune. It got a pretty good response, which Nomad appreciated since the song was so different from what they usually did.

At the set’s midpoint, Nomad and Ariel stepped aside for Berke to do her drum solo that became a duel with Mike’s bassline, and Terry brought the organ growling in to battle with both of them. This display of musical chops always went over well, and Nomad noted that Berke’s female fans—also fans of Gina Fayne, an outspoken citizen of their Nation—were exuberant in their dancing over on the left side of the stage.

Nomad had read an article on Yahoo once that said Finnish scientists had run a test on a rock band to see how strenuous the work was. They’d found out it was as tough as being a manual laborer for the comparable amount of time. The job of being a guitarist and lead vocalist was like digging a ditch or moving furniture; the drummer worked as hard as a bricklayer, and the bass player’s exertions were similar to those of a butcher. The body temperature went up to a hundred degrees, beads of sweat popped, and the pulse varied between one-hundred-twenty-eight and one-hundred-forty-four beats per minute. As the show wound down, he was feeling every bit of that and they still had the last number and encore—if the crowd wanted one—to do. They finished their regular set with ‘Desperate Ain’t Pretty’, which was a high-octane rocker that ended with a furious rolling blast of toms and cymbals from Berke, then they went off-stage for a couple of minutes to let the stew boil. When they returned and took their places, Nomad thanked the crowd for their response, reminded them that The Five CDs and T-shirts were on sale at the back, and then he intoned into the mike: “The universe is permeated with the odor of kerosene”, which was the opening of the second retro song that Terry had brought in, ‘The Blackout of Gretely’ by the garage rock band Gonn from 1966. It was a dinosaur-stomping earthquaker that Nomad sometimes feared could send a club crowd out into the street in a riot, if they were drunk enough. The song finished up in a dirty fuzz of distorted guitars, Nomad shouted, “Thank you, Dallas, and party on!” into his microphone, Berke threw the drumsticks into her throng of admirers, and The Five abandoned the stage for the next band’s setup, leaving the club’s crew to move their equipment to a holding area.

They were backstage in a dressing-room for only a few minutes, chugging down bottled water and hitting the tray of raw vegetables and three pepperoni pizzas, one without cheese, before George came to the door. “Great show, great show!” he told them, which if he said he meant. “Hey, John! There’s somebody out front who wants to talk to you.”

“Later,” Nomad said, settled in a folding chair with cheeseless pizza between his teeth.

“Yeah, well… I told him you’d be tired, but he says he’s got to hit the road. Drove a couple of hundred miles just to see you, he says. He’s asking you to sign six CDs and four T-shirts.”

“Later,” Nomad repeated. He frowned when George didn’t leave. “Come on, man! Give me a break!”

“Six CDs and four T-shirts,” George said. “Won’t take long.”

“Send the guy back if he’s so eager. We’ll all sign for him.”

“I already asked him. He says you have to come out there, and he just wants you.”

“What’s the dude’s story?” Mike was sitting with his bootheels up on the pizza table. “Sounds weird.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Nomad said to George, countering his last statement. “I’m eating right now, tell him to wait.”

“You should go ahead,” Ariel told him. She was sitting next to Terry, both of them on folding chairs, and Berke was slumped over on a wooden bench, kneading the tight muscles at the back of her neck. “Maybe he runs a fan page.”

“All I know is, it’s money,” George said. “And it wouldn’t hurt any of you to come out of the cave and meet your fans.”

“This isn’t a meet-and-greet,” Nomad reminded him. He realized George wasn’t going to leave without some kind of compromise. “Okay,” he said, raising his hands in surrender, “give me five minutes.”

“I’ll tell him.” George started to leave but caught himself. The staff handled the merchandise sales in the larger clubs like this one, true, but it might help if the band just walked out to the counter for a couple of minutes. “Listen,” he added, “you’d better pray the day never comes when nobody asks you for an autograph. I mean it.” He left before any further comments could be thrown at him.

Nomad let seven minutes go past, and then he stood up and said, “Okay, let me go do this.”

“Nice to be the chosen one,” Berke told him. “He’s probably a freak, got a doll in his bed with your face on it.”

“Look who’s talkin’,” Mike said.

Nomad went out of the room, down a short flight of stairs and through a door past the burly black-clothed security guard into the main part of the club, where knots of people were standing around talking and drinking, waiting for the next band. Instantly he was seen, recognized and shouted at, toasted with uplifted beer cups, focused upon by a half-dozen cellphone cameras, slapped on the shoulder, high-fived, all of it. Some girls rushed toward him, grinning, while their dates stood back at a distance. Nomad kept moving, even as the path before him began to close up. This was why he didn’t particularly like to come out into the audience area after a show in a large venue, and why really very few musicians did: you never knew if somebody’s drunk girlfriend would try to grab your ass, and the equally drunk boyfriend would start swinging on you, or some high-flying cowboy type decided he didn’t like all the attention you were getting and he wanted to see if you were really as tough as you thought you were, or some nutjob had decided you’d stolen a song he wrote in a dream and he wanted to let you and everybody else in the club know about it, or somebody clung to you like you were made of superglue and started telling you how great you were and how there’ll never be another voice like yours and could you please listen to this homemade CD that’s got some kickin’ shit on it, or…well, you just never knew. All those things had already happened to him, and more.

He saw George standing back by the counter where the merchandise was being sold. Keeping tabs on the action, for sure. A hand grabbed Nomad’s shoulder and he turned around to bump fists with a wild-haired dude in a Kings Of Leon T-shirt. Then he was through another group of people who smelled like they’d taken a bath in beer and George said, “The guy’s over here,” and led him past three girls who looked as if they wore their dresses spray-painted on, all in different shades of red.

Suddenly Nomad was right up in front of a big, bulky dude with close-cropped brown hair and a long, unshaven jaw. The guy wore baggy jeans and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt with white stripes. His eyes were sunken in, almost as if he’d just awakened from a heavy sleep. In his arms was a green plastic bag.

“Here he is,” George said. Nomad didn’t know which one of them he was speaking to.

“Hi,” the guy said.

“How’s it going?” Nomad asked, aware that the three girls were coming up on him from the right. Two blondes, neither of them natural in hair color or boob-size, but the girl in the middle with auburn hair was the real hottie.

“Good, real good,” the guy said. He blinked furiously, as if he was really nervous or he really needed glasses. And then he abruptly stepped aside and the thin woman who was standing behind him said, “John Charles!” She smiled, but only one side of her mouth worked very well. “Go Shamrocks!”

Shamrocks? he thought. East Detroit High School? Those Shamrocks? He had no idea who this person might be. She was a small, emaciated woman maybe in her mid-thirties. She leaned on the support of one of those curved metal walking-sticks with a black rubber tip that old people hobble on in hospitals. A bright, cheerful purple scarf was wrapped turban-style around her head, and fixed at the front with a gold-colored pin in the shape of a butterfly. Chemo, Nomad thought, because she had no hair. Her cheekbones and chin were so sharp they looked about to break the skin. She wore shapeless jeans and a white peasant-blouse top. A pink sweater was draped around her shoulders.

“I know you don’t remember me,” she said. “I’m Cheryl Buoniconti. I mean, I was. I’m Cheryl Capriata now. This is my husband, Ray.”

“Heard a lot about you.” Ray shook Nomad’s hand. “You put on a great show.”

“Thanks.” Nomad felt as if he’d been knocked to the floor and he was still trying to get up. He’d gone to school with Cheryl Buoniconti, grades six through eight at Oakwood Middle School and then freshman and sophomore years at East Detroit. They were the same age. Cheryl and her family had moved away, summer before the junior year. The Cheryl he’d known had been a flirt, in fact one of the group called the Flirty Four, had been a whiz at math, a reporter on the school paper, had been—in all honesty—really kind of a snooty bitch who’d looked down on the hoods, thugs and sad-ass cases John Charles had hung with.

“Thank you,” Cheryl said, “for coming out here. I don’t do so well getting around in crowds.”

“No problem,” Nomad answered, and nearly choked when he heard himself say it. “Uh… Cheryl. Jesus. Do you live in Dallas?”

“No. We live just east of Shreveport. In Minden. Ray teaches algebra at the high school. I…I mean we…follow you on your webpage. Your band, I mean. Well, we don’t exactly follow you, this is the first show we’ve been to, but…”

“We keep up,” Ray said, helpfully.

“We do keep up.” Cheryl smiled again, and this time Nomad saw a trace of the flirty teenaged girl way down in her dark brown eyes. But only a trace, and too quickly it was gone. “And we’re not the only ones. I’m on Facebook with a lot of people from East Detroit.” She mentioned several names, most of whom Nomad recalled as being in a different, higher atmosphere than himself. “Everybody’s rooting for you. I remember that talent show when we were freshmen. When you got up on stage with your band. What was their name?”

“The Unwanted,” Nomad said.

“I remember thinking you were going places. I remember thinking I wished I could find something as important to me as music was to you. But I guess I found it. Can I show you a picture of our daughter?”

“Absolutely,” Nomad said.

From his wallet Ray produced a picture of a girl eight or nine years old. She had her mother’s dark brown eyes, she wore her hair in bangs across the front, and she had an open, confident smile.

“That’s my angel,” Cheryl said. “Her name’s Courtney, she’s just turned nine.”

“Awesome,” Nomad told her, and it seemed to him that everybody needed an angel, of some kind. He returned the picture to Ray.

“I had to leave that summer before we were juniors. My dad lost his job at the Firestone plant. I didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye to my friends, we just came down to Louisiana to live with my Uncle Burt for a little while, I thought we were going back after the summer. You know?”

“I guess that was tough,” Nomad said, because he could tell it was important to her not only to explain this to him, but to get a response.

“Well…it was, but… I know it wasn’t like…what happened to you, in the sixth grade. To your dad. I remember my folks talking about it. Listen to me, I sound like my mom chattering away in line at the Publix. Would you sign those for us? Ray, have you got the pen?”

“I do,” said Ray, who brought from his pocket a silver permanent marker.

Inside the green bag were the CDs and the T-shirts. As Ray handed the first CD over to be signed, Nomad looked at Cheryl and asked, “Do you want my real name or my stage name?”

“Whatever you want to put. I’m just so glad to see somebody from East Detroit way down here. We had a good time, didn’t we?”

“We did,” he said, and he signed John ‘Nomad’ Charles. He wondered how long Cheryl had been sick, or what her prognosis was. He didn’t want to ask, but she looked bad. At one point, as Nomad did the signatures, he heard Ray quietly ask her, “You all right?” and she said, “Oh, yeah.” Ray put his arm around her, to steady her, and Nomad kept on signing.

The last T-shirt he signed, he put Go Shamrocks! under his name.

“Can we get a picture?” Cheryl asked, and Nomad said that was fine, as many as she wanted. As Ray took the shots, Nomad put his arm around Cheryl’s frail shoulders and his face against hers. He was aware of the three girls coming up right beside him to take their own pictures with the ever-present cellphone cameras. They began to laugh loud and drunkenly, to jostle him with their shoulders and their hips and he told them as politely as he could to step back, that they were crowding him, and one of the fake blondes called him a dumb fuck and the other fake blonde put up the middle finger right in his face and the first fake blonde took a picture of it. But they moved off and away into the crowd, and when Ray finished up the pictures Cheryl said, “I brought something for you,” and she reached into a pocket of her jeans and put into Nomad’s hand a small piece of clear quartz crystal. He instantly recognized it as a type of crystal people carried when they were into natural healing.

“Thanks,” Nomad said. “I appreciate you coming to the show.”

“We wouldn’t have missed it for anything. We can’t stay, though, we’ve got to get back home tonight. I’ll put the pictures up on Facebook. I know lots of people would love to see them. And if you ever come through Minden, we’re in the directory. Under Raymond Capriata.” She spelled the last name. Then she squeezed his hand with her thin fingers, and she smiled up at him. “I’m so happy to know,” she said, “that somebody from East Detroit High School is living out their dream. Most people aren’t able to do that, John. And I am proud to say I knew you back in the day.”

Nomad nodded. Back in the day. His bitter sense of sarcasm welled up, and he wanted to ask, Which day was that? The Tuesday when Quince Massey and two of his dickwads jumped me from behind in the parking lot, and when they were done they threw me into a garbage dumpster and slammed the lid shut? Or the Friday the booger-smeared note was left in my locker telling me that if I even looked at Sofia Chandrette again I could kiss my nuts goodbye? How about the Saturday, when I saw the knife in Quince Massey’s hand outside the Olive Garden and I hit him as hard as I could in the throat and put him in the hospital and the police came to my house to arrest me for battery? Yeah, back in the day.

But he did not ask these things, because by the time they had happened Cheryl was down in Louisiana, and maybe even then the cancer was a small darkness in her body.

Instead, he leaned forward and kissed Cheryl on the cheek, and he said, “You take care, okay?”

“I will.” She had turned a little bit pink. A flash of flirty came up, very suddenly, from the depths of the soulful eyes. “Nomad,” she said, and then her husband took her free hand and helped her through the crowd. She walked with a slow, careful step and she depended on the metal stick, and Nomad was struck by how very young all the other people in the room seemed to be, how young they moved and talked and looked, though by years they were not so much younger than Cheryl, nor so much younger than himself. He felt like twenty-nine had become the new fifty. But Cheryl was going home with her husband at her side, and a daughter when she got there. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

When he turned away, he was shoulder-grazed by a big dude in a dark gray hoodie who kept going, on his way out the front door. Nomad started to say, Where’s the fire? but he had the mental image of somebody hearing him and shouting Fire! out of drunken mischief or plain stupidity and that would not do. So he kept his mouth shut, a guy came up to him, said, “Fuckin’ mighty show, man!” and flashed a camera in his face, and Nomad sought out the Little Genius, who had returned again to monitor the merchandise sales.

George was not only keeping count of the sales, but was tracking other numbers on his cellphone. “Hits on the new video,” he told Nomad. “Three hundred and thirty-eight on YouTube, three hundred and sixty-one on MySpace, four hundred and twenty-six on the webpage. Not bad, it’s still early.”

“How many times have you watched it?”

“A few. Not many. You work everything out with those people? She told me she’d gone to school with you, wanted it to be a surprise. Was it?” George looked at him over the rims of his glasses.

“It was.”

“You want to sign some T-shirts while you’re over here?”

“I’m on my way to over there,” Nomad said, and entered the main room where in a few minutes, give or take, Gina Fayne’s band was going to start playing. He caught sight of Berke at the center of a group of five or six women down front, laughing and chatting each other up, and he noted—as he always did when he saw Berke mingling with her sisters—that a couple of them had shoulders like Longhorn tackles, were grim-lipped and fearsome in appearance while the others never failed to be hot enough to melt a steel dildo. It had to be the idea that they didn’t need men that was such a turn-on, Nomad thought. Maybe it was the fact that unless they were going for the butch style they never overplayed their sexuality like straight women sometimes did. Nomad had seen Berke in the company of some stunning women who made you want to, as Mike had put it, “try and cry”. It was the way they looked at you, too; either lingering, their eyes cool and remote, as if to dare you to cross an invisible line, or they sliced you up with a few quick glances and cut your throat with a knife-edged half-smile.

“Hi,” said the girl who stood next to his left elbow. She was holding a beer and she leaned in closer, because of the noise. “Sorry they acted like assholes.”

It was the auburn-haired girl who’d been with the two fake blondes. She looked to be about twenty or so, had light green eyes and a cute pug nose and the tattoo of a blue star on her right shoulder. “You’re in that band that just played,” she said, as if she wanted to make sure. Her eyelids were a little heavy. Maybe she’d been hitting more than just the beer tonight.

“Yeah,” Nomad said.

“You wanna go somewhere?” she asked, and she held up a set of car keys that had a silver Playboy rabbit head on the chain.

The thing about being in a touring band was, people didn’t realize what a grind it could be. They didn’t realize that the only glamor in it was manufactured. They didn’t realize that most of being on a tour was the miles and miles and hours and hours of travelling, and if not that then the waiting. There were three things that made the grind bearable: the actual gig, which could be either Paradise or Pandemonium; the frequent use of somewhat illegal but naturally-growing substances to ease the flow of electric energy given off by the Paradise so that one could sleep that night or the following day, or to lighten the self-anger or rage at one’s bandmates following the disaster of a Pandemonium.

The third thing?

Nomad was looking at it.

“Sure,” he said, as it had been said so many times before. “What about your friends?”

“Fuck ’em, they’re bitches,” the girl slurred. “And it’s my car, anyway.”

“Okay, but I think I should drive.”

“Yeah,” she said, and she gave him the keys, and it was that easy.

During the three hours that followed, Nomad was in an apartment off Amesbury Drive in North Dallas. There was evidence of a female roommate and a second bedroom with a closed door, but nobody came out of it. He smoked some weed with the girl, whose name was Tiffany and who worked somewhere at the Galleria doing something, he never could figure it out, and they made some margaritas in her blender and she showed him her collection of Barbie Birthstone dolls lined up on a shelf, they were real expensive she said and the only one she didn’t have yet was Miss Opal of October, and then she asked him if he wanted to take a shower. He recalled that Ninja Warrior was on TV when he said he thought that was an awesome idea.

When they were wet and soapy Tiffany asked him if it would be a big deal if she got her video camera and took some clips in the bedroom, that it got her hot all over again to watch the replay and anyway she liked to be directed. Nomad, who had already seen the dolphin tattoo leaping up from the pink cleft between her thighs and had thought Another fucking Flipper, just shrugged his shoulders. This was not a first. In fact, years ago he’d considered bringing along a black mask to situations like this. More than once, a girl had gotten her friend to hide in a closet with a videocam. The techno thing was becoming ridiculous, it was like people couldn’t survive without having some gadget near at hand. But there was no time for a rumination over the future of a civilization addicted to either porn or the electronic capture of special moments, because Tiffany was on her knees.

They progressed to the bedroom, where Tiffany proved to be an experienced participant and also a loud one, as she announced to her neighbors, the city of Dallas and most of north-central Texas how rough she wanted it, and in what orifice. Either her neighbors were deaf or they just rolled over in bed and said, “Oh, that’s Tiffany being Tiffany,” because nobody banged on the wall. Tiffany wanted to do things that would’ve made her Barbies blush, but Nomad hung in there. But as Tiffany thrashed about on top of him, he had the disturbing image of Ariel on stage, bathed in blue light, playing her acoustic guitar and singing,

This song is a snake, winding through the woods,

It’s full of bitter venom and it would bite you if it could.

This song is a snake, coiled beneath the bed,

And if you love another girl there it will rattle by your head.

“Harder, harder, harder!” Tiffany shouted, but he could still hear the rattle.

When all was screamed and done, they slept. Then Nomad awakened when the man was standing next to the bed.

“Who are you?” His voice cracked. He grabbed the sheet and pulled it up to his chin like a naughty fop in a British sex comedy. But it wasn’t funny, because this kind of scene was why his father was dead. Nomad was ready to fight for his life if the guy pulled a gun.

The dude was skinny, had a mass of tangled blonde hair and wore glasses. He had good musical taste, though, because he was wearing a black T-shirt with the symbols on it, in white, from Led Zeppelin’s Zoso album. He was also either drunk or high, from the frozen grin on his face and the way he couldn’t keep from drifting side-to-side. “Tiffany?” he said, shaking her starry shoulder. “Come on, Tiff, talk to me. Okay?”

She was wiped, and she muttered something into her pink pillow and swatted at him as if he were a tsetse fly. He kept on pleading for her attention like a sad child.

Nomad decided it was time to pull on his drawyas and get out. He slid from the bed, got dressed in a hurry, but careful not to make too much noise in case the punk went ballistic. Before Nomad could get out of the room, Tiffany sat up, rubbed her eyes and started talking to the guy. It was one of those do you really really want another chance and why should I give you one conversations, made totally bizarre when Tiffany seemed to remember Nomad was there and she said, “You can use the phonebook in the kitchen…call a cab.”

“What’s the address here?”

She shook her head, unable to process the numbers, and the Zeppelin fan who obviously had apartment key privileges said without looking at Nomad, “Just tell ’em the Zone apartments on Amesbury Drive. They’ll know the place.”

Nomad just bet they would. He remembered passing a twenty-four-hour Arby’s near the entrance to the apartment complex, and when he called the cab company he said he’d be there waiting. He went out the door to the sounds of Tiffany’s voice whiplashing the guy and the poor sucker nearly sobbing.

Rock’n roll, baby!

So it was that Nomad approached the door of the suburban house on the weeping side of three o’clock. He tried the doorknob and found it was, sensibly, locked against people like him. He was about to turn his thoughts toward curling up on the porch when the door cracked open and a familiar face peered out.

“Hey, bro,” Mike whispered. He opened the door wider. “Heard a car pull up, figured it was either you or Berke.”

“Berke? She’s not here?”

“Must be a good party they’re havin’. She and her friends left not too long after you went off with your chiquita. George saw you go. Watch it!” Mike warned, because in the dim light coming from a hallway he saw that John had almost stepped on Terry, who was wrapped up in a sleeping-bag on the carpeted floor. A few feet away from Terry, Ariel was also in a sleeping-bag. George was on the sofa since he knew the guy who owned the house and had worked it out for them to spend the night here.

Nomad saw that a backyard light was on, and that the sliding glass door that led out was partway open. “You sleeping outside?”

“Nope. Woke up a while ago. I was just sittin’ out there, thinkin’.”

“Sounds heavy.”

Mike shrugged. Ariel suddenly stirred and lifted her head, and she looked groggily at the two figures, squinting to make out who it was. “John?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Some of us are asleep,” she told him, and then she returned to her slumber.

Nomad thought that all fucking decent citizens were asleep at this hour, and everybody else was just thrashing around in their cages.

< >

“Hey,” Mike whispered, “you want a cigarette?”

Nomad nodded. He followed Mike out through the glass door and slid it shut. Out back, in the glare of a pair of security floodlights mounted on the underhang of the roof, a few concrete steps led down to a fenced-in area with a small lawn. There was a picnic table, a playhouse meant to look like a wilderness fort, and a kid-sized plastic pool decorated with decals of smiling seahorses. The family who owned the house had two children, both under ten. They were sleeping in a back room, safely away from the scummy musicians. In fact, their father had been a roadie a few years ago, had travelled with some bands who were successful enough to need roadies and actually pay them money, but that was then and now he was the manager of an AMC theater that he was proud to say had sixteen movie screens.

On the picnic table was a coffee cup that Mike had been using for an ashtray. Beside it was his pack of smokes, his Zippo lighter bearing the logo of the New Orleans Saints, a small notebook with a green cover, and a ballpoint pen. By the light of the floods, Nomad saw three or four butts in the cup. He knew that Mike was waiting for Berke to come home, or what for the moment served as home.

“She can take care of herself,” Nomad said, and realized this was a remark he’d made several times in the past, on occasions just like this.

And Mike’s answer was the same, too: “Oh yeah, I don’t worry about her, bro.”

They sat at the table, one on either side. Mike offered Nomad a cigarette, took one for himself, and he lit both of them up with the Zippo.

Nomad blew smoke into the night air. “You guys hang around much longer?”

“Not much. Caught about half of Gina Fayne’s set. Tight band, and she’s got some pipes, I swanee.”

“Yeah.” She was compared to Janis Joplin on the Mudstaynes’ website. Maybe not so much roughness in her voice, but she was only twenty. Nomad heard she was catching up to Janis in the department of drinking and drugs, and he hoped somebody wasn’t stupid enough to let her try heroin to complete the picture. He glanced at the pen and notebook. “You writing something?”

Mike frowned, as if this question was improper. “Just playin’ around.”

“With what?”

“My dick,” Mike replied, which meant it was not to be talked about any further. He smoked his cigarette some and listened for the noise of a car pulling up out front. That dog started barking in the distance again and another answered, but otherwise the neighborhood was Sunday-morning silent. “Nice house they got here,” he said. “I like that pool. Hot night, you could curl up right there.”

“Yeah,” Nomad said.

Mike drew on his cigarette, exhaled and regarded the little red glow, as people will. Then he reached out, trying not to be so obvious about it but being obvious all the same, and slid the notebook away from Nomad about four or five inches. “Did you know,” he said, “that Berke’s stepdad died last month?”

“Huh? No, I didn’t.” Nomad smiled thinly. “Hey, she only talks to you, man.”

“Heart attack. Had one about ten years ago. He had a pacemaker, took high blood pressure pills and all that, but the ticker got him. You know they weren’t too close.”

“I know she doesn’t talk about him very much.” Floyd Fisk had been his name.

“Yeah, well, the only reason I know is that she told me her mother called her. From San Diego. Said Floyd left her something he wanted her to have. The dude must’ve felt his time runnin’ out, or maybe he was just gettin’ ready. But Berke says he left a letter…like…stipulatin’ his wishes and shit.”

“What’d he leave her?”

“She don’t know. Her mother don’t know, either. Whatever it is, it’s in three big sealed-up boxes in their garage. Letter said only Berke’s supposed to crack ’em open. Anyhow, her mom wants her to come pick ’em up.”

The Five were scheduled to play at the Casbah in San Diego on August 1st, a Friday night, opening for The Mindfockers and the Mad Lads. Nomad said, “Whatever,” because that just seemed like a suitable, neutral comment.

They didn’t speak for a while. Their cigarettes burned down. The dogs quietened. Mike shifted on the bench seat and said, “I’ve been thinkin’. You know that place with the blackberries? Somethin’ wasn’t right.”

“What?” Nomad had heard him well enough, but the statement took him by surprise.

“Wasn’t right,” Mike repeated.

Damn straight it wasn’t, Nomad thought. He’d been rubbing his skull for two days, searching for the swelling of a tumor. Could you even find them that way? He didn’t know.

Mike took another draw on his cigarette, almost burning it to his fingers. In the glare of the floods, the pictures on his arms moved with the shifting of his ropy muscles. “Ever picked blackberries?” he asked, and Nomad shook his head. “Second time I ran away from home, I found work on a farm. Fella grew blackberries, one of his crops. Well, I remember the season ended up…oh…last part of June, first week of July at the latest. I mean, they’re like…kinda fragile. The berry, not the fuckin’ thorns. But they need a lot of rain, and this heat should’ve shrivelled ’em up to nothin’. I’ve been thinkin’…wonderin’, I guess is the right word…how there could’ve been any blackberries at all in those brambles, it bein’ so dry and so hot. Get me?”

“No, not really,” Nomad admitted. “Maybe they were…like…resistant or something.”

“I think they were just wild blackberries,” Mike said quietly. “Growin’ when they shouldn’t be.”

“Yeah.” Whatever, Nomad almost said, but that might sound like disrespect and you did not, no way, no how, want to throw a diss at Mike Davis.

“That girl at the well,” Mike went on, after a short pause, “spoke to me.”

Nomad nodded. He recalled what Mike had relayed from her: She says to tell you everybody’s welcome, and not to be afraid. “You told us.”

“Not that.” Mike turned his head slightly, and through a haze of smoke Nomad caught the sharp glint of the deep-set dark brown eyes aimed at him, like the first quick display of a weapon that had best not be ignored. “To me,” Mike said. “Just to me. In English.”

Nomad was almost afraid to ask, but Mike was waiting. “What was it?”

“She said…welcome.” Mike started to crush his dying cigarette in the cup, but he took from it one more pull. “And… I could tell… I could…” He made a small gasping noise, and suddenly Nomad saw wetness bloom around Mike’s eyes, and he looked away and Mike looked away and it was a shocking moment, really, for both of them.

“I could tell,” Mike continued, when he got his voice steadied, “that she meant it.”

Nomad didn’t know what to say, so he made the wise decision and remained silent. He stared at the pool, at the surface of the still water.

“Do you know,” Mike said in a distant voice, as if asking himself the question, “how many times somebody has said that to me, and meant it? How about…that was probably number one? I’m used to being thrown out of places, bro. At least, they fuckin’ try to throw me out. And someplaces I say, okay, I’ll go easy, and other places I say, let’s see you make me. Like that all my life, John. Ever was, ever will be. Except that girl…she was like…glad to see me. Does that make any sense to you?”

“I can’t say,” seemed like the reasonable response.

“One thing I do know is that I can tell when somebody’s shittin’ me or not, and right now you can’t figure out what the hell I’m talkin’ about, because she was just a little Mexican girl passin’ out water, and what of it, and you kinda think I’m dumb to begin with, and that’s where we’re at. Right?”

“I don’t think you’re dumb,” Nomad said. “Where’d you get that idea?”

Mike blinked slowly and crushed what was left of the cigarette into the cup. “Because,” he answered, “I am dumb. Oh yeah, I’m good with the bass axe. I do my part. I’m a pro, whatever that means. But as far as smarts take me, I’ve pretty much been hitchin’ rides for a long time.”

“I don’t think anybody who read Moby Dick when he was a little boy can be dumb, do you?”

“Oh. That.” Mike nodded. “It was more about the stealin’ than the readin’. I figured if I could make myself get through a book that size, and understand it, I could…” He stopped abruptly and took another smoke from the pack. “I could be as smart as Wayne was,” he said, as he fired up the Zippo and lit his cigarette.

Mike’s dead older brother, killed in a lumberyard accident. The boy’s face was tattooed there on his left shoulder. Nomad said nothing; he just waited.

When it came, Mike’s voice was hushed and sad. “Wayne was everybody’s golden boy. Star football runnin’ back, A-student, popular…he was the bomb, bro. Gonna go to college. Scholarship lined up to McNeese State. And then he got a summer job at the yard. Same kind of job kids have been doin’ there for years, summer after summer. A chain came loose, a safety gear that was supposed to lock up didn’t catch, a load of timber fell…all she wrote, as they say. Only he didn’t die for a while, he was busted and broken and they tried to put him back together in the hospital but he just…kinda gave up, I guess. He never came to all the way, but I mean…he wasn’t gonna be able to fuckin’ walk, his spine was so tore up. That was a bad day, that one was. I loved my brother. He was gonna be the kind of man who turns out to be a good dad. You know? The dependable one.”

“Sure,” Nomad said.

“You mind if I talk about this?” Mike asked, his eyes narrowed. “This is on me tonight. You mind if I talk?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean…yeah, go ahead.”

“It ain’t pretty,” Mike said.

“Well, neither are you,” Nomad told him, and he saw Mike give a grim smile that did not last very long but at least was there for a few seconds.

Mike smoked and thought for a little while. Then he said, “See, he covered me. I just coasted in his shadow, and nobody ever had any expectations or shit for me. He made it easy for me to slide on by. But without him bein’ around, my folks…they grieved for him, let’s put it that way. They grieved for him, and they grieved for him, and they grieved for him, and our house was a fuckin’ pit of grief, just seemed like the lightbulbs went out of the lamps one after another, and nobody put any new ones in. It wasn’t long before I was hatin’ him, and what he’d been, and I felt like they hated me, too, because I was the dumbshit brother, I was the pothead, the troublemaker, the musician. When they looked at me—wasn’t too often—I knew they were seein’ what was left. Wasn’t gonna be no football star in our house anymore, no smart honor roll student, and no McNeese State graduate either. No sir, that bird had flown. And I knew that I had to get away from that house and those people, so I could love Wayne like I used to. So I could think of him like a mountain holdin’ up the sky, with the clouds in his teeth. My big brother.” Mike took a drag and blew smoke from his nostrils like the exhalation of a dragon. “And he would have been the first one to tell me to go. So I went. Came back a couple of times, when I ran into trouble. But then I left one night, to get away from the hate and the hollerin’, and I got a ride on the highway with a black dude about a hundred and twenty years old, in a righteous old gold Cadillac with tailfins. He told me his name was Grover McFarland, and he was on his way to New Orleans from Montgomery, Alabama, to play in a blues festival. But he said he went by the stage name of Catfish McFarland, because he could play bass so deep he could just lie right there at the muddy bottom and grin.” Mike himself grinned at that memory. “He was a drunk, cheated at cards, had two wives at once and had shot a preacher in Pascagoula in 1959. But that sumbitch, rest his soul, was not a liar. At least not about playin’ bass.” He touched one of the guitars tattooed on his right arm. “This one was his, the best I remember it. The one he taught me on. He called her ‘Elvira, Mistress of the Darkies’.”

Mike looked up suddenly, toward the street. “You hear a car?”

Nomad listened. “No,” he decided. “She’s not back yet.”

“That girl needs a good girl to look after her,” Mike said. “Drives me crazy sometimes.”

Nomad had finished his cigarette and put it out in the cup, and he wanted to stand and stagger off to get a few hours of sleep before they loaded up to go to El Paso. Their gig wasn’t until Friday night, but they might as well get on the road and have a few days to lie around a pool somewhere. He hoped the T-shirt and CD sales had made them enough money for a friendly neighborhood Motel 6. But he didn’t go, because he felt that Mike still needed him.

“I never thought about playin’ music for a livin’,” Mike went on after a short pause to strain an ear for the car that was not there. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a vet. I liked animals, I always got along with ’em. But you have to know math, chemistry…all that. I wasn’t smart enough. Even my teachers told me I wasn’t…and then the woman at the library, behind that desk, said…you’re a little boy, you’re not smart enough to read that big ol’ book. She said, go put it on the red shelf over there, and you get yourself a book you can actually read. And then she said… wait a minute, wait a minute…you’re Wayne Davis’s brother, aren’t you? Oh, is that book for him?”

Mike leaned his head forward and closed his eyes for a few seconds, and Nomad again looked away, at some invisible thing in the distance.

“It’s a good word, huh?” Mike asked. When Nomad didn’t respond, Mike said, “Welcome. It’s a good word.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Good place to start, maybe.” Mike didn’t elaborate on what that meant, and Nomad didn’t want to push him. There was too much pain out here to be pushed.

At last, Nomad said, “I’d better hit it.” He waited for Mike to answer, “Okay,” before he stood up, just as a matter of courtesy.

A few steps toward the house, and Nomad turned back and said, “You don’t have to wait up. You ought to—”

“I’m fine,” came the reply. “Right where I am.”

“’Night, then,” Nomad told him.

“Mornin’,” Mike corrected.

Nomad went up the steps, opened the sliding glass door, entered the house on quiet cat feet and slid the door shut behind him, and in the backyard Mike put the cigarette between his teeth and reached for the notebook and pen.

SEVEN.

Westward went the Scumbucket and its U-Haul trailer, following I-20 across the sunburnt landscape toward El Paso.

Everybody was present and accounted for. A red pickup truck with an International Gay Rodeo Association sticker on the back window had delivered Berke to the house just after seven o’clock. She’d climbed into a sleeping bag and hadn’t budged until ten-thirty, which was why the Scumbucket hadn’t gotten on the highway until noon. But they had plenty of time, it was all good.

“Three hundred eighty-two on YouTube, four hundred and six on MySpace, four hundred and fifty-four on the webpage,” George announced, checking the video hits numbers on his cell. “It’s early, man, still early.” He was glowing today, freshly-showered and wearing his khakis and a crisp lemon-colored short-sleeved shirt. He felt like a million euros. Part of it was that he was so glad and relieved to have told everybody what his future plans were, and that they were past that, no hating going on, no name-calling or spiteful shit. Jeff in Chicago was good with the timeframe, no problem there. The Curtain Club gig had brought in three hundred dollars and change, a pretty decent haul. He felt like he wasn’t leaving them in the lurch; he felt like something solid was in the making, something that was going to take The Five to a new place. The video had been expensive, sure, but he’d heard a lot of comments about it last night, and anything that got people talking was good. Media was the key. Once you got the media interested, that was half the battle right there. Which was why he was okay with them spending money on a few days in a motel in the Paso, because they had an interview set up with the Times on Tuesday afternoon, six minutes on the KTSM morning show on Wednesday, a drop-in visit on KTEP’s local radio talkshow on Wednesday afternoon, and on Thursday afternoon an appearance at Freaky Frontier Comics, Books and CDs on Pebble Hills Boulevard. You had to get the media shine, had to get the people interested and the talk going. So, yeah, he thought he was going to be able to leave them in a better place than when he came aboard, and that was important for him to believe.

Terry was behind the wheel. The iPods and the Gameboys had come out, each to their own to make the time pass. Terry drew George and Nomad into a discussion of which Who rock-opera was better, Tommy or Quadrophenia, with George going for the pinball wizard and Terry and Nomad for Jimmy’s four personalities. Then they curved into talking about famous one-hit wonders, of which Berke thought the most obvious was The Knack and ‘My Sharona’, a song she remembered hearing over and over again at a bowling-alley birthday party when she was ten, about thirteen years after the song was first recorded. They realized they were getting into dangerous country, because Terry had an encylopedic knowledge of old dead bands and at any moment he could set off on a journey across what Berke called the Moldy Territory.

With eyes aflame behind his Lennon specs and passion rising in his voice, Terry would say that for sure bands like Kings Of Leon and Badly Drawn Boy and Band Of Horses were awesome, no doubt, but until you heard the Montells doing ‘You Can’t Make Me’ or the Humans’ ‘Warning’ or ‘Real Fine Lady’ by the Warlords you didn’t know the fire and fever of pure garage rock. You didn’t know what raw power could sound like in music. If you didn’t move to ‘Dinah Wants Religion’ by The Fabs, or ‘L.S.D.’ by the Pretty Things, the coffin lid might as well be closed because you were one dead motherfucker. And then Terry would get onto the subject of “the rock star”, who in his estimation could only be Phil May of the Pretty Things, and to see him in his finest sneering form there was a video of ‘L.S.D.’ on YouTube, the vid faded and gray and old and amateurish, but when Phil May in his striped Mod jacket glances past the camera and swings his long black hair away from his face and seems to chew the words to tatters before he spits them out, you know you have seen The Star.

According to Terry.

As the Scumbucket rumbled on and the air-conditioning hacked and wheezed, the highway speared straight between land colored both yellow and brown, with occasional stands of trees holding onto their faded green like desperate misers onto money, surrounded by thorn-bushes and waist-high scrub and dirt as dry as gunpowder. They passed Abilene around two-thirty. Ahead of them heatwaves shimmered and the pavement glistened like gray liquid.

“Weird bands,” the Little Genius said, introducing another round of debate.

They came up with several. Uncle Fucker, described as “psychobilly country music on crystal meth”, was Nomad’s pick. Ariel said she’d seen A Band Of Orcs play in San Francisco; they were a heavy-metal band who dressed as Lord Of The Rings-style orcs, complete with battle armor and fearsome makeup. George said he thought ArnoCorps was pretty weird; they mostly did songs based on Schwartzenegger action movies, and they dressed the part. Berke mentioned Empire Of The Sun, with their off-the-wall costumes and strange but compelling electropop warblings. Mike had his eyes closed listening to his iPod, so he had no opinion.

“The 13th Floors,” Terry said.

“We’re not talking about prehistoric,” George reminded him. “Current bands only.”

“Don’t care. The 13th Floors. And I’ll say that the 13th Floors could blow us and every band we ever heard of off any stage anywhere.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Berke said. “Moldy Territory-time.”

“Maybe.” Terry glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. “But show me another band who actually created their own instruments. Show me another band who came up with such awesome sounds. And then they wrote songs from them that no other band in the world could’ve written. Show me—”

“Show me any remaining remnant of the 13th Floors,” George interrupted, “except some warped LP in a collector’s storeroom. Maybe they’re legends, but those guys are long gone. How about we keep the discussion to working bands?”

Terry didn’t reply for a few seconds. Then he asked Nomad, who sat shotgun, “Would you hold the wheel a minute?” When Nomad did, Terry dug the wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. “You guys know the name Eric Gherosimini?”

“Sure,” George answered. “He was the keyboard player and front man. Flying high on acid all the time, wasn’t he? And he vanished after the band split in… I don’t know the year.”

“1968,” Terry said. “November.” He brought a many-times-folded piece of paper from his wallet, passed it back to George and then took the wheel again. “You want to read that out loud?”

As the others looked on, and even Mike opened his eyes because he sensed he was missing out on something, George quickly scanned the paper. “Shit,” he said quietly. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Read it.”

“Terry,” George read, “I don’t have a computer out here but I went to the library in town. I looked up your band and I watched your videos. I found a CD in a store. There’s some groovy keyboard shit on it. If you went to all the hassle to find me, and you want to hear her so bad, come see me. Not the best host, I can’t put you up, but I’m working on something real. Like you to hear some of it, get a young ear. If you’re coming from Albuquerque, follow 66 west for thirty-two miles, you’ll see a road on the right with a sign to—” He blinked and looked up. “These are directions to Eric Gherosimini’s house?”

“You got it. He signed at the bottom, didn’t he?”

“I’m not following this,” Ariel said. “Who are we talking about?”

“The 13th Floors were—” George began, but Terry stepped on him: “I’ll tell it.”

Terry reached a hand back and waited for George to return the letter. Then he said, “The 13th Floors were together from 1965 to 1968. They did three LPs on the Polydor label and had a couple of singles that sold okay but didn’t set the world on fire. If you can find those LPs now, and they’re in good shape, you could make a lot of money. The 13th Floors did experimental rock, acid rock I guess you’d call it. They used weird effects, wrote off-the-wall lyrics and they made instruments out of things like gourds and metal pipes. Eric Gherosimini played a Rhodes piano, a Vox organ and a Mellotron, and he was always tinkering with them, taking them apart, rebuilding them, putting them together with parts from other keyboards. But George is right…the band played stoned most of the time. They were heavy acid hitters. It got to where they were hard to work with. They dropped gigs left and right. Their drummer jumped out the window of a Holiday Inn in Bathesda, Maryland—”

“Go, drummer!” said Berke, with a fist pump.

“—and he landed on a woman in the swimming pool and broke her back, and that was about the end of their road. They split and just merged with the giant whirlpool, man. Just got sucked down the drain, and gone.” Terry shrugged. “But their stuff started showing up as samples in the ’80s. Record collectors shot their LP prices up. A few critics who’d never heard of them got interested, and all of a sudden they were ranked with Procul Harum, Cream, The Doors…bands like those. Only stranger. Somebody found a fragment of a home movie in color of them doing a gig in Oakland in ’68, a couple of months before the breakup…and on it, Eric Gherosimini was playing a white keyboard that nobody could identify. Vox? No. Rhodes? Mellotron? No. Too bad the fragment had no sound. But I think it must have been a keyboard he’d built from pieces of other instruments. I’d heard about it, it was kind of a rumor that floated in and out among the LP collectors. The keyboard was never on any record, there’s no evidence it was ever used in any gig other than Oakland. But he had a name for it. Or, a name for ‘her’, I mean. Lady Frankenstein.”

“Wait a minute, hold on!” George said. “If this is really the guy, how’d you find him?”

“Last year I was talking with one of my piano students at the Episcopal Center. We were just shooting the bull, and we started talking about old bands. This guy’s only twenty, but he knows his retro. So he asks if I’ve ever heard of this band and that band…and I say yeah, yeah, and then he hits me with the fact that his grandfather was a roadie out on the West Coast in the mid- to late-sixties, that’s how he got his interest. Then he hits me with the fact that Grandpa was not only a roadie, but was selling magic mushrooms, hash, acid and whatever to the bands he was working with. This dude was like…their Doctor Feelgood, man. So Grandson says Grandpa got busted in ’67 getting high with a guy named Nate Cleave, that they were good buddies and they still kept in touch.” Terry saw by the gas gauge that they’d better start looking for a station, because the needle hovered just above the E.

“Nate Cleave was the bass player for the 13th Floors,” Terry continued. “Now he’s Dr. Nathan Cleave, a professor of Astronomy at the University of Florida. I didn’t find that out until later, but I figured I could start with Grandpa. I pleaded my case with Cleave, told him why I was so interested, and he said he knew where Eric Gherosimini was but the dude was a hermit, he didn’t want visitors. Didn’t have the Internet, didn’t have a cellphone. Finally he said he’d write him for me. Snail mail, to a post office box. It took a few months, but back in May I got that letter. Inviting me to come see him. Me.” Some emotion got in his throat and tightened it up. “Man, this is like the Holy Grail to a keyboard player. One of the greatest acid rock keyboard players ever is inviting me to come see an instrument he created. It’s like…the legend of legends. That’s why I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go see it for myself.”

“Okay, I get that,” Nomad said. “But what’s so special about it?”

“It sings like a woman’s voice,” Terry answered. “And more than that. Dr. Cleave says it was built to be like…a mood ring of instruments. Says somehow Gherosimini engineered life into it, that the tones change depending on your mood, on the state of your mind. He says it spooked everybody out, but the few times he heard it played no two people could get the same sound from it. And we’re talking early tech, guys. Like primitive, before the big synthesizers that came along. I want to hear it. Just hear it, that’s all.”

A silence fell. The Five was scheduled for a gig at Staind Glass in Albuquerque on Saturday, the ninth of August. George figured, as he knew Terry already had, that if this visit to Eric Gherosimini was going to happen, it would probably be the following day, Sunday the tenth. And then Ariel broke the silence by saying, “I don’t think that’s all, Terry. I think that more than anything, you want to play it.”

Terry nodded. “Yeah,” he replied quietly. “That would be the truth.” He saw a Shell gas station over on the right, at the next exit. “Gas time,” he said, and took the ramp. As he left the highway, he noted in the sideview mirror that the dark blue pickup that had been behind them for many miles also took the exit. Terry turned again to the right at the end of the offramp; the pickup turned to the left, and drove away across the overpass.

“Get me somethin’ to eat,” Mike said, stretching forward so his back cracked. He had removed his earbuds and had heard most of Terry’s story. “Terry,” he said as the Scumbucket pulled up to the pumps under a yellow plastic sunshade, “it’s been a long time since ’68. I hope Lady Frankenstein don’t turn out to be a snaggle-toothed hag that couldn’t hum for her supper, bro.”

Terry didn’t respond; he was thinking of something Dr. Cleave had told him over the telephone, in one of their early conversations: I’ll have to caution you that sometimes the past is best left alone. But…if you really want me to write him…if you really do… I will.

It was time for bathroom breaks and for getting replenished with soft drinks or coffee, candy bars, popcorn or whatever was available in the station’s store. The place was painted yellow with red trim around the windows. Out in front was an ice machine and next to it a gizmo with a hose and nozzle to dispense air for fifty cents. Written on the plate-glass window in white soap-chalk were prices for sixpacks of various beer brands, liters of Coke and quarts of motor oil. There was a stack of tires for sale, though there was no garage facility. George had the credit card they used for gas, so he started pumping while the others stretched their legs, used the bathrooms around back or went in to buy something.

The station was being run by a heavy-set Hispanic woman and her teenaged son, who wore a black baseball cap bearing the purple Nine Inch Nails logo. Nomad bought a bottle of water from the cooler and drank half of it down as he walked back and forth alongside the Scumbucket and trailer, from shadow to searing sun and back again. The heat today was a beast, probably a hundred degrees in the shade. Ariel emerged from the station with a bottle of cold water and also an Almond Joy candy bar, which melted in its wrapper before she could eat both pieces. As she came over to join Nomad, she saw a Texas Highway Patrol cruiser slide up to the pumps opposite the Scumbucket, and a trooper got out.

Inside the station, where the air-conditioning rattled as much as the Scumbucket’s but worked at least twice as well, Terry bought a Coke and Butterfinger, and behind him Mike was ready with a ginger ale, a half-dozen glazed doughnuts and a bag of beef jerky. At the back, Berke had decided she didn’t want coffee and was making a choice among the brands of bottled tea in the cooler.

She had had an interesting night. After her drumkit was safely packed up in the trailer and the Mudstaynes’ set had ended, she’d gone off with some friends from Dallas and some friends of friends, two girls who knew Victoria Madden from Victoria’s Inkbox tattoo parlor in Austin. They were numero uno fans of the Mudstaynes, and they were going to a party at this other girl’s condo up in Highland Park, and later on Gina Fayne was supposed to drop by. So, since Berke was always open to the moment, she had climbed into the back of a cream-colored Mercedes CLK-350 convertible and, jammed in with sisters who smelled of Miss Dior Cherie and Amber Romance, went racing with the moon.

The party was full-on by the time Berke got there, maybe sixty women strong. Little lights twinkled in the indoor trees, candles burned where they wouldn’t get knocked over and burn holes in the Persian rugs, Gina Fayne snarled from Bose speakers, the scent of weed swirled around, Cosmos and Appletinis were poured into glasses with Glowstick stirrers, and caps popped from bottles repping a dozen microbreweries. Berke watched a fashion parade of beaters and plaid board shorts dance past. Somebody put a girly gangbang video on the TV, but it was hollered off. Second up was some gay male porn, again shouted off. The next time Berke glanced at the flatscreen, somebody had put on 13 Going on 30, and it was the part where Jennifer Garner starts doing the “Thriller” dance. That seemed to strike the right chord.

Berke was hit on almost continuously, by one or two or three at a time. She knew it was her cut guns, mostly. And though she was always open to the moment and had no problem instigating things, sometimes she just liked to find a place to sit, drink a beer, and observe. So she got a seat on the brown leather sofa, fashionably distressed, and watched the drama unfold. With sixty—and more coming in every few minutes, it seemed—lesbians in one condo, the alcohol flowing and the grass freely available, lethal drama was inevitable. Berke figured there had to be at least two hundred and twenty-four personalities in the place, and half of those would be derranged or embittered in a way that just saying “Chi Ku!”—swallow the bitterness—could not soothe. It might start with a rupture between two dyke-a-likes, or over the noise and music you’d hear somebody shout “I am Switzerland!” which meant war had been declared or a peace treaty broken and the girl in the middle was trying for diplomacy. A liplock might be attempted, an avoidance or pushaway countering it, and then the anger would uncoil like somebody’s black snake. Or, on the other hand, a successful public liplock and tongue massage might be for the benefit of an ex, show her she’s not the only game, and Berke had seen an ice-bucket dumped over firehouse-red curls due to that particular twist of the stiletto-heel.

It was a very entertaining show, this show after the show.

Berke noted that there were lots of young chicks in here. Like nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. Some really beautiful girls. Carried themselves with style and attitude. But everybody was looking for something, and hardly anybody knew what it was. Sex? Sure, but that was just the flesh-deep layer. It was hot flesh, it was freckled and moon-white, it was tanned and smooth, it was ebony and lustrous, it was young and soft and pliable. It was why everyone was here, it called the sisters together, and many would say this was what life was all about, this was the whole picture, this was the reality and essence of sex and domination and at the end of the night a last tender kiss or a caustic comment thrown like a slap. But, Berke thought, hardly anybody here really knows what they’re looking for…which puts us right where straights are.

Maybe it was to hang on to something as long as you could. Youth, beauty, coolness…whatever. Maybe it was about power over other people, making them dance to your tune. Striking back at people, for past indignities and pain. Whatever that thing was that you needed to find, sex was just the outer skin of it.

Sitting on this sofa, watching the bodies go past and the games be played out, Berke thought of a card her father had sent her. Not Floyd fucking Fisk, but her real father, Warren Bonnevey. It had been sent to her on the eve of her first gig, when she was seventeen. Its colors were faded, it was spotted with yellow and looked like it dated from the ’50s. On the cover were feminine-looking bees with long eyelashes flying around a hive. Where it had said Congratu-lations On Your First Job, the word Job had been marked out and Gig written in.

And inside, the verse had been:

Congratulations on your new position,

I know it’s just what you’ve been wishin’.

I’d like to say a whole lot more,

But that’s what cards like this are for.

Try and try,

Grow and thrive,

You’ll be the busiest bee in a honey of a hive.

Only the last line had also been marked out, and written in her father’s hand was: Remember no one here gets out alive. Love, Warren.

Strange, yes. Unsettling, for sure. But then again, her father was insane.

“Hi, I’m Noble,” said the darkly-tanned woman with blonde-streaked hair who held a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale in one hand and offered the other out toward Berke. She was maybe twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Had very beautiful green eyes, a confident voice. Wore a black tank top, slim-leg jeans and brown, scuffed cowboy boots. Nothing sparkly about her. Good enough.

Berke shook her hand, and when Noble asked if anybody was sitting next to her, Berke said no, she was welcome to park it.

“Hey, lemme ask you somethin’.”

Berke turned from the cooler and her perplexing choice of bottled teas. Mike had come up behind her, clutching his ginger ale, box of doughtnuts and bag of beef jerky, which he’d already broken into. “Go,” Berke said when Mike hesitated.

Mike glanced toward the door. Berke saw that a state trooper had just entered, a young very clean-cut looking Hispanic guy, and he came straight back to the cooler and got himself a bottle of apple juice. He nodded at them, Mike said, “How’s it goin’?” and then the trooper took his drink to the counter and started a conversation in Spanish with the woman, whom he seemed to know pretty well.

“What’re you gettin’?” Mike asked her.

“I don’t know. Is that what you wanted to ask?” She knew it wasn’t; he always approached things sideways, like a crab.

“Ever try the V8 Fusion stuff? The tropical orange is good.”

She looked him in the eyes, because he seemed awfully nervous. “What’s up?”

Mike watched the trooper leave. Except for the woman and the boy, they were alone in here. “Hey… I was wonderin’…have you thought anymore about that song idea?”

“John’s idea,” Mike explained. “You know, what he said. About everybody writin’ words to a new song.”

“Oh, that bullshit.” Berke gave him a thin smile. “The Kumbaya song, right?” She decided to give the tropical orange a try, and reached into the cooler for it.

“Well…yeah, okay…but…you know, maybe it ain’t such a bad idea.” Mike followed her to the counter. “I know what he’s gettin’ at, but—”

“Busy work, that’s what he’s getting at,” Berke interrupted, as she put her money up.

“Yeah, but…” Mike glanced out the window, through all the backwards soap-chalk words and prices written there. The fuelling was done. George had paid at the pump and was probably in the bathroom. Terry was getting back into the Scumbucket; it was Nomad’s turn to drive. Nomad and Ariel were standing in the shade, a distance apart. The trooper had raised the cruiser’s hood and looked like he was pouring water from a red plastic pitcher into the reservoir for his windshield-wash fluid. “Maybe it’s a good idea,” Mike said. “You know, to keep everybody together.”

“We are together,” she reminded him, and pocketed her change. “How could we be on tour and not be together?”

“Together…like…not gettin’ pissed at each other. Not blamin’ each other for the breakup. Like on the same wavelength or somethin’.”

Berke had been about to go out the door, and now she stopped and stared at him very carefully, as if searching his face for a third eye. “Maybe I am pissed,” she said.

He shrugged. The shrug said maybe he was pissed too, deep down, but repositioning was a fact of the musician’s life. Take it or leave it.

“And who says we’re breaking up?” Berke went on. “So George and Terry are leaving. We’ll replace them and we’ll keep going.” Before Mike could respond to this wishful thinking, she narrowed her eyes. “Wavelength?” she asked. “What are you now, a pop psychologist?”

She again started to push through the door, and a little heat rolled in but Mike stopped her by saying, “I’ve started writin’ a song. I don’t have a whole lot of it, but… I was kinda hopin’ you’d take a look at it, before I showed it to anybody else.”

Berke was silent. For a few seconds she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her face revealed no emotion—her barrier against the world, and everything that was in it—but her heart was touched. She thought for a quick fleeting instant that she might tear up, but no way she was going to let that happen. The truth was, she loved Mike Davis as much as she could love anyone. They were a team, the backbone, the foundation, the rhythm twins. He gave her a rough elbow to hold onto, and she gave him a punch in the ribs to show she needed it. They had clicked from the very first, if clicking meant the sharing of fart jokes and beer from the same bottle. And now here he stood, asking her to do this for him. It was important to him, she could see that in his eyes. Before I showed it to anybody else, he’d said.

But she was who she was, and even this could not be made easy. “You’re not falling for this song-writing crap, are you? Tell me you’re not that stupid.”

He smiled, but the corners of his mouth were tight. “Maybe what I’ve written is no good…likely it’s not…but nobody ever asked me to write words before. Yeah, I know it ain’t what I do. What I’m supposed to do, I mean. But who says I can’t give it a try?” He saw the flicker of derision in her faintest of half-smiles and he picked up his tempo like a double thumb slap. “If it was to be okay, and maybe start off a new song everybody could be part of…then I’d be doin’ a good thing for the band, right? And…hey…you could maybe add your part, too.”

“We’re not the writers.” Berke’s voice was low and patient, as if speaking to a small child or a dog. “John, Ariel and Terry are the writers. I have no idea—none, nada—about how to write song lyrics. Come on, let’s hit it.” She went out, with Mike following right after her.

The trooper had lowered his hood, and with a squeegee was washing a layer of dust from his windshield that the malfunctioning fluid reservoir had failed to clear.

“Please,” Mike said.

Berke had only taken a couple of strides from the door. Once more she stopped, because she realized there was a time to play the game of cruelty and a time not to be afraid to be kind. And this definitely, undeniably, was that.

She faced him. “Okay,” she said with a sigh, “show me what you’ve got.”

“In my back pocket. The notebook.” Cradling his ginger ale and snacks, Mike turned around so she could get to it. “Listen, really… I appreciate it. But keep it to yourself, okay? For right now, I’m sayin’.”

“Right.” She was having trouble getting the green notebook out. With jeans that tight, his balls must be either the size of raisins or swollen up like apples. “Jesus! How do you get these damned things on?”

“Just pull.”

“Hard ass,” she commented, and then the notebook came free. The effort of it caused her to stagger away from him a few feet.

Something hit the window between them.

There was a sharp high crack, and suddenly a hole appeared next to the soap-chalk dollar sign of the price on a Budweiser sixpack. Berke saw it, and Mike saw it, and they watched as silver creepers spread across the glass from the edges of the hole. Then Mike turned his face toward Berke, to ask her what the hell just happened, and Berke saw a second hole appear as if by magic—fucking wicked magic, she thought in an instant of slow-motion shock—in Mike’s forehead about an inch above his left eyebrow. The left temple bulged outward, as if a fist had struck it from within, his mouth remained open in what he’d been meaning to ask Berke, and at his feet the bottle of ginger ale burst like a bomb against the concrete.

Mike was aware of a great pressure in his head, and suddenly he was falling away from Berke, falling away from the Texas heat, falling away from the Scumbucket at the pumps and his friends who waited there, falling backward in time.

It was the damnedest thing. He was falling backward as if on a reverse rollercoaster, a fast trip, a breathtaking trip, and there was nothing he could do but fall. And in this falling, this ultimate repositioning, he possessed a life in rewind. He passed through a whirlwind of bands and gigs and smoky clubs; he went back past a table full of whiskey bottles, back past a jail cell that smelled of swampy August; he passed his daughter Sara, and he thought to try to touch her cheek, or her hair, or her shoulder, but too late, too late, she was gone; he went back past bad-ass cars and sorry-ass cars and pick-me-up trucks, and bass axes of many colors; he passed a white dog and a black dog and the face of Grover McFarland watching him with stern disapproval under a yellow lamp; he fell backward past many faces, many shadows, through a place of darkness and despair, and then in what seemed the last light of summer, the sad light, the light of saying goodbye to all that was, a hand with freckles across the back of it reached out of nowhere and grasped his hand, and a familiar voice said, very clearly: Gotcha.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

There was a second or two of silence, while Berke stared at the fine mist of blood that reddened the air where Mike had been standing. She saw that he’d dropped the doughnuts, but he had clamped hard to the beef jerky. His left eye had turned a vicious shade of crimson, and blood had begun to trickle from the hole in his head.

Even as Berke made a noise—a scream, choked sob or anguished moan, whatever it was she couldn’t hear it—the young trooper was running toward her, and when he saw the wound in the fallen man’s head and the bullet hole in the window he drew his own Sig Saur .357 semi-automatic service pistol. His eyes were wild; he was well-trained, yes, but two bullets from the blue had a way of turning anyone’s Sunday afternoon a little chaotic. He shouted, “Everybody on the ground!” as he made a rotating scan with the pistol held in a double-handed firing grip. Nomad took a step forward, and the trooper levelled the pistol at him and yelled, “I said on the ground now!” because he didn’t know who had a gun or not, where the shots had come from, or really what the shit was happening. So Nomad dropped, Ariel dropped, Berke fell to her knees beside Mike’s body and, numbly, grasped his arm to shake him conscious, and alerted by the noise George came out of the bathroom pulling his pants up. “Get down! Down!” the trooper commanded behind his weapon. George went down, holding his arms out in a posture of surrender.

“You! Out of the van!” the trooper shouted at Terry, who immediately slithered from it and lay spread-eagled on the pavement. When the woman who ran the station emerged, with the boy behind her, the trooper told her in Spanish to get back inside, and she was trying to tell him that a piece of flying glass had hit Carlos and he was bleeding from the chin. Then she saw the body on the concrete and she backed up and the boy with the gashed chin gawked and started taking pictures with a cellphone camera.

“Get down! Get down! Get down!” the trooper hollered, his voice ragged, as he advanced on Berke with his pistol aimed and ready.

She was shivering. There were tears in her eyes, and she couldn’t seem to draw a whole breath. But it occurred to her, in a blank cold place beyond the horror, that she ought to tell him disco was dead.

And so too, she realized, was her buddy, her rhythm twin, her rough elbow to cling to.

She lay down beside him, on the hot pavement, and suddenly she was aware of a breakage within herself, a rupture, a failure of a weak seam that had never before known such pressure. She began to weep quietly at first, and then began to openly and brokenly sob as she had not cried since she was a girl too young to keep a cold lid on her cup of pain.

Her friend was dead, and dead too was The Five.

Dead, dead, deader than dead.

EIGHT.

George stared at the black telephone. Your basic landline, no nonsense here.

“Nine to get out?” he asked, and the chunky detective, the guy who was always wearing the cowboy hat, nodded. The second detective, a foxy Hispanic woman in her mid-thirties with manicured red fingernails and eyes like pools of bittersweet chocolate, was watching him from her chair across the table.

George punched the nine, got the outside line and then dialed the rest of the number. He made a note of the time from the clock on the white plaster wall. They didn’t want him to use his cellphone. They were going to sit in here and listen, and George figured the call was going to be recorded. The detectives were smalltown, but there was nothing soft or lax about them; they were interested in all the details, even what George was about to say. They made him as nervous as hell, and he hadn’t even done anything.

The number rang in Austin. On the third ring, Ash’s machine answered and left the usual message: I can’t pick up right now, but after the tone leave a yadda yadda yadda. George had realized before that Ash had a little bit of a lisp, but it was very pronounced on the machine.

“Ash, it’s George,” he said when the tone sounded. “If you’re there, pick up.” He waited a couple of seconds. “I mean it, man. Really. Pick up like right now.”

There was a click and Ash was there. A problem? Ash wanted to know.

“Listen,” George said. And something about his voice made Ash repeat the question, only now in his firmest big boy agent inflection. “Mike Davis…” How to say this? Just the truth and nothing but. “Mike Davis has been shot,” George went on. “He’s been killed. He’s dead.” Like it had to be repeated. There was utter silence from Austin. “It happened about a hour and a half ago, a few miles east of Sweetwater. We’re at the police station right now. In Sweetwater. Wait, wait, wait,” George said, when Ash started asking questions so fast the clipped Indian accent was getting in the way. “Let me tell you. We were at a gas station. Mike and Berke were talking out front and all of a sudden…a bullet got him in the head.” God, that sounded weird! Like something from any number of action flicks, but when it was real it was stomach-churning. George had already taken his turn at puking in the bathroom. “They say he was probably dead…like…right then.” Ash started throwing more questions at him, rapid-fire, and the truth was that George had always had difficulty understanding him and now everything sounded like a freaking mashup of English and Hindi.

“About an hour and a half ago,” George said again, because he caught that question. “Yeah, yeah…everybody else is okay. I mean…we’re mindfucked, but we’re okay.” He paused, trying to grasp what Ash was asking. “No, they didn’t catch anybody. They think…” He looked across the table at the woman. “Can I tell him?”

She nodded.

“They think maybe it was an accident. They don’t know exactly yet where the bullets came from, but they’re thinking it was from some woods across the highway. Yeah, I said bullets. There were two shots. They think maybe somebody was in there shooting a rifle, just dicking around.” The detectives had told George that the little cluster of thorny scrub-brush and trees, maybe sixty yards wide on the other side of a cinderblock building where truck engines were repaired, drew shooters after what they called ‘varmints’. There were rats, gophers and snakes in that mess, and kids with rifles shot it up. The repair shop had been closed, so nobody had seen or heard anything, and likewise from a few ramshackle old houses over there. “No, right now they have no idea who it was,” George said.

The deal was, though George felt no need to say this, the detectives thought it might be an accident just from the distance involved. The repair shop was two hundred yards on the other side of I-20 and the varmint woods was another hundred and fifty yards, at least. So it looked like an errant, careless couple of shots—high-velocity, for sure, but that wasn’t so unusual, they said—that had carried right across the highway.

“They’ll know more later,” George said. “They’ve got cops swarming all over the place.” When the Scumbucket had pulled away from the pumps, following the car the two detectives were in, the gas station had been secured with the yellow crime scene tape and it looked like a parking lot for police cars and paramedic vehicles. A slim yellow metal tube had been pushed through the hole in the window to show the angle of entry. What looked like a surveyor’s tripod with a monocular attached had been set up in line with the yellow tube, aimed at the varmint woods across I-20. Over there were more police cars. The cops were prying the first bullet out of the station’s rear wall. George assumed they would also remove the second bullet from Mike’s brain, but when the Scumbucket had pulled out The Five—ex-Five—had left their bass player under a sheet on the pavement. George had been glad to be leaving, because he’d seen a body bag being taken out of the back of a white truck and the way Berke was so torn up…it was for the best they were getting out.

“The thing is,” George went on, “they want to notify the next-of-kin. No, they want to do it from here. Right. So… I don’t have that information. I know his parents still live in Bogalusa, but…yeah, right. Would you do that?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to the detectives, “He’s looking it up on his laptop.”

They waited.

“You guys were on the way to El Paso,” the woman said, without expression. It had been explained to her, the whole story, and she’d already checked their website, but around the station she was called ‘the Digger’, with those long red spade-shaped nails. The title was on her coffee cup. She could not stop until she got to the bottom. They were a team: Lucky Luke and the Digger, known to the general public as detectives Luke Halprey and Ramona Rios.

“Yeah,” George answered.

“Going straight through, then,” Lucky Luke said, chewing on a toothpick.

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Emerson, I have to ask you…do any of you owe money to anyone here? And by ‘anyone’, I mean a person who might feel they’re not going to be repaid and may be…um…a little vindictive about it?” asked the Digger.

“No. Well… I don’t. Owe anybody money,” he clarified. “What’re you saying? That this was a ‘hit’? Over money? I thought you said it was an accident.”

It was Luke’s turn to clarify. “Might be an accident, that’s what was said.”

“How about drugs?” The Digger’s arched black eyebrows went up. “Anybody gotten on the wrong side of a dealer?”

“No! Hell, no! We’ve never played this area before. How would a shooter even know we were here?”

“That would my next question,” said the lucky one. “Did you stop at that station because maybe you had a meeting planned with somebody?”

“Think about that before you answer, Mr. Emerson,” the Digger cautioned.

“No. I mean…we didn’t have any meeting planned. Wait a minute…go ahead,” George told Ash, who gave him the number in Bogalusa. He relayed the number to the detectives, and Luke wrote it down on a notepad that advertised Big Boys Barbecue. Then came the moment that George had known was coming and that had to be done. “I guess that’s it,” he said, and when Ash didn’t respond George spoke with what felt like a stone sitting in his gut, “We’ll work out how to get Mike back, and then we’ll come on in.”

“We’d like you to stay here tonight,” the Digger told him. “Let us call around, just to check some things.”

“Stay here?” George asked, stricken by the thought of sleeping in a police station.

“A motel,” Luke supplied. “Get a good night’s rest.”

“Oh. Okay.” George turned his attention back to the matter at hand. “They want us to stay here tonight. And listen…you might as well start making the calls.” Ash said he would, and that he was so sorry for this senseless tragedy and there would never be another bass player like Mike Davis, and for George to tell everyone else how sorry he felt. “One more thing,” George said. “A woman from the local paper was here and asked us some questions. She said she wouldn’t file the story until the cops gave her the go-ahead. I just wanted you to know.”

Ash thanked him for that, then said he would immediately call Roger Chester.

“Are we done here?” George asked, and Luke told him the band members could follow them over to the Lariat Motel on East Broadway, get them checked in, and that there was a Subway nearby where they could eat dinner. Not said, but what George certainly felt, was that the detectives wanted to keep a rope around them and that the questions were far from finished.

He had his own questions. Who on this God’s earth would have wanted to kill Mike Davis? And in Sweetwater? No, it had to have been an accident. A kid in the varmint woods. Had to be.

< >

In another room, a TV was tuned to the Weather Channel. The four people who sat on the orange plastic chairs in this room pretended to be watching it. Nomad had always thought that the Weather Channel was a kind of Zen; it emptied your head with its colorful images and soothed your mind with the illusion of control. Right now they needed all the Zen they could get.

A policeman came through to ask something of Lucky Luke and the Digger. Berke, who sat apart from the others and was wearing Nomad’s sunglasses on her pallid face, sat up straight and called out in a strident voice, “Did you find it yet?”

The policeman, unnerved, looked to the detectives for help. The Digger said calmly, “We’ll let you know when we find it. I promise.”

Berke settled back in her chair. Her lips tightened. A weather map sparkling with sun symbols reflected in her glasses.

Nomad glanced quickly at Ariel, who sat a few chairs away with Terry on her other side. She was hollow-eyed and wan, and she occasionally made a catching sound in her throat as if awakening with a start from a very bad dream. Terry stared alternately at the television and at the floor, his eyes heavy-lidded behind his specs.

“We’re going to a motel,” the Little Genius announced. “Stay there tonight.”

“You take them over,” the Digger said to her partner, in a quiet voice. She took the Big Boys Barbecue pad with the phone number on it. “I’ll do this one.”

Nomad didn’t think he could stand up. To an outsider, he might have appeared the most composed of the shattered group. He might have seemed the least in shock, the most able to bear this tragedy and to rebound the fastest from it. But the outsider would have been criminally incorrect.

In the past ninety minutes, he had relived his own personal nightmare a hundred times over.

< >

Johnny, there’s no roadmap.

But.

It had been different that night. That August 10th, 1991. A Saturday, outside the Shenanigans Club in Louisville. Nearing midnight, and in a parking lot bathed in blue and green neon Dean Charles and the Roadmen starting to pack up the van after opening for the Street Preachers. John was a boy, a son, a fan. Dad was the bomb, the Killer. Played a gold-colored Strat that could cut through an arrangement like a razor through a hamhock. And sing…that man could wail. He was a bottle full of lightning. Up there on stage, front-and-center in the godly glow, all that power coming off him, all that energy and life. He was one of a kind.

And then out in that parking lot, when they saw the two flat tires on the van, the old blue cat sitting crooked on her paws, and somebody said, “Oh, shit,” and somebody else growled, “Motherfucker!” because John was one of them, he had heard it all, he was a veteran of the road even at twelve years old.

Dean had looked at his son and shrugged and grinned in that way he had of saying nothing in this world was such a big deal that it tugged you out of shape, you could always find your way back to the center of the cool world the musician lived in, and he said as he always did in such situations, “Johnny, there’s no roadmap.” Then he’d paused just a second or two, maybe thinking it over for the first time, and he’d said to his son with that slip-sided smile, “But…”

“I’m gonna end it now,” said the man who had just stepped out from his crouch behind a parked car, and Dean had regarded him only with mild surprise, as if expecting a visitor who was late in coming.

< >

John had been standing next to his father when the pistol in the man’s hand spoke. It had shouted into his father’s left ear, and John remembered how his father had winced at the loud noise, because his father had always cautioned John to guard his hearing, he only had one set of ears.

The pistol had gone off twice more as Dean Charles was falling, a whiff of gunpowder and a smell of blood in John’s nostrils, the boy falling back in shock, falling as his father fell, one to be called dead four hours later in the hospital and the other left behind to relive the moment over and over again.

“I have to find it,” Berke said, but to whom she was speaking was unclear. She hadn’t moved from her chair.

“It’ll turn up.” George stood over her. “Come on, it’s time to go.”

Nomad counted slowly to three, and then he got to his feet. As he followed the others out of the police station into the solid heat of late afternoon, he thought how ridiculous this situation was. How utterly fucking ridiculous. Two days ago he’d been burdened with the fact that The Five would end their last tour in Austin on the 16th of August—the Month of Death, as far as he was concerned—and then it would be back to putting another band together, another name, another vibe, another set of personalities—and here he was, here they were, on the real last day come way too soon. And Mike dead. Dead. He had experience with sudden death, yeah, but at least he’d found out later that his father, one of the wiliest tomcatters to ever sneak in a housewife’s back door, was responsible for a Louisville beauty-shop operator divorcing an out-of-work husband who owned ten guns. It would have made a farce, a black comedy directed by the Coen brothers starring George Clooney, but with blue contacts, and to complete the tragedy the man who had shot Dean Charles had walked about five yards away and shot himself under the chin, leaving behind two more children who would always feel an empty hole at their birthday parties. So as terrible as that was, it had made sense. But this…if he believed in God, which he did not, he would have heard the sound of cruel cosmic laughter, funny to no one else. Now he had to stop seeing Mike fall down over and over again in his mind, and he had to stop hearing Berke’s strangled scream or he was going to lose it right here on the Sweetwater street.

George took the wheel and followed the detective’s car. Berke sat way in back, by herself. The sunglasses stayed on. Nobody could look at anybody else. Nomad stared blankly ahead and silently chewed on his insides.

On the drive from the gas station into town, Berke had suddenly come out of her state of coma and cried out, “The notebook! I left the notebook!”

“Hold on!” George had said. He was already about to jump out of his skin, and this outburst had nearly started the rip along his spine. “What notebook?”

“Oh Jesus, oh Christ! I dropped it! I had it in my hand, I must’ve dropped it!” Berke sounded close to hysteria, which put everybody else nearer the edge. “Did you see it?” she asked Ariel, who shook her head. “We’ve got to go back!” she told George. “Turn around, we’ve got to go back!” The last two words had been almost a shriek.

“Take it easy!” Nomad had said. “We can’t go back right now!” They were following the two detectives, who might not have understood or appreciated the Scumbucket pulling off and turning around.

“You shut up!” Berke spat at him, her eyes enraged. “You fucking shut up!”

“Hey, hey, hey!” Ariel had turned around and grasped one of Berke’s hands, and Terry was trying to console her as best he could, but Berke wasn’t finished. She tried to jerk her hand away from Ariel’s, nearly spraining Ariel’s wrist, and she snarled, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” but Ariel kept hold of her and kept calmly repeating, “Settle down, come on, settle down,” until some of the fight-against-the-world went out of Berke. When it went it went hard. Berke’s shoulders trembled, she lowered her head so no one could see her face, and she began to weep—almost silently, but not silently enough. Through it all, Ariel did not let her go.

Nomad and George had exchanged quick glances. Berke Bonnevey, who made an art of detachment, was caught in the open with nothing to hide behind. No flippant remarks, no casual scorn, no big bitchin’ set of Ludwigs. Just her, torn open. Witnessing it was almost as much of a shock as the shooting had been.

In another moment Berke’s crying seemed to stop, because she sniffled and ran her free hand across her eyes. Nomad had said, “Here,” and that’s how she got his sunglasses.

At the police station, the story had emerged about the green notebook, which Nomad had remembered was on the picnic table next to Mike. “Something he wanted me to read,” Berke explained. “It was important to him.”

A call had been made to the scene, but Luke—maybe explaining the origin of his luck—reported back, “No dice. It’s not there.” Then, sensing Berke’s slow and painful retreat into the sanctity of herself, he’d offered, “It’ll turn up, though. When everything gets catalogued.”

Nomad had taken that to mean it might have been thrown in with Mike’s box of doughnuts and bag of blood-spattered beef jerky on the meat wagon, but he kept his mouth shut.

The Lariat Motel on East Broadway was small but clean, with a swimming pool behind a white fence and a sign that said Guests Only, Swim At Your Own Risk. The place had maybe a dozen rooms, all on one level. It was built to resemble a ranch house, with different brands burned into every door. George checked them in, got two rooms adjoining with free cable and complimentary Cattleman’s breakfast of biscuits and jelly with coffee or orange juice in the morning. Luke waited for them to take their bags in. Before he left he said he’d check back with them around ten o’clock that night.

They ate at the Subway, which was in a stripmall about half a mile away. Picked at their food, really, but they knew they had to get something down. Berke kept the sunglasses on, even past the point where the sun began to set. She ate half a small bag of chips. No one talked very much; it seemed somehow disrepectful to talk about any subject but Mike, and that subject could not be touched.

Finally, when everyone had eaten as much as they could and the time had come to go back to the Lariat for a night of quiet Hell and mindnumbing cable fare, Terry said, “John…”

…there’s no roadmap…

But no, Terry did not say that, as Nomad might have heard a ghost speak from a corner of the Subway where the sun had already left town.

Terry said, “What’re you going to do?”

“Going to do? When? Like in the next minute? Five minutes? A fucking hour from now?” He felt the heat rising in his face, and he saw Terry’s eyes widen behind the glasses and Terry shrank back a little from the table because the dynamite’s fuse had been lit. “Is that what you mean?”

“No, I just mean—”

“Then what do you fucking mean?”

“Sir!” said the middle-aged black man behind the counter. “Please watch the profanity.” He motioned toward a young couple with a little girl and an infant at another booth. Three sets of eyes were on Nomad.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Nomad said, to both the counterman and the other customers. The heat of anger became a blush of shame. He took a deep breath to get himself under control, and then he levelled his gaze at Terry again. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” he answered. “I’m going back to Austin tomorrow, and I’m going to go home and sleep for a couple of days. Then when I can think straight I’m going to call Ariel and Berke and see if they’re still in. If they are…and they don’t need to tell me yea or nay right now… I’m going to work with Ash to find replacements for you and for Mike. And for you,” he said to George, who sat impassively. George had a little dab of mustard on his lower lip. “Then we’ll go from there, with whoever works out. We’ll come up with a new name, we’ll start rehearsing, and coming up with some new material. If Ariel and Berke want to be in, fine. If not, fine. But I’m going to keep on doing what I do. So that’s my plan. What’s yours?”

Terry hesitated. He felt himself falter. He liked peace, liked for everybody to get along. He liked to be liked. He knew that if he came across as calm and measured, it was because nine times out of ten he was stealthily backing away from confrontation. It had been one of the hardest things ever to tell them he was leaving the band. How many weeks had it taken to get those words out of his mouth? And he might have gone many weeks more, if George hadn’t opened up first. One thing he truly feared, and he’d feared it since being in the Venomaires, was stepping into John Charles’s rage radar, of being the target of the anger he’d seen erupt way too many times. There had been some pretty hideous scenes between John and Kevin Keeler, before Kevin had suffered his mental breakdown on stage in Atlanta. But now Terry, who had thought Mike was one of the best bass players he’d ever heard and not only that but a real friend whom he would mourn in his own way, alone with one of his keyboards, decided that John was not going to blow up here in the Subway. There was no point to it; what was done was done, and even John Charles knew he couldn’t roll back time before some kid with a rifle had fired two stupid bullets.

“When we get back,” Terry replied, “I’m going to pack up my car and drive to Albuquerque. I’m going to visit Eric Gherosimini. After that, I’m driving home and take the loan from my dad. To start my business.”

Nomad took the last drink of his Coke. What could he say to that? It was a plan. He realized that Berke would probably be wanting to get to San Diego, to open those boxes her stepfather had left her. Another plan. The Little Genius had a plan too, the bastard. Nomad caught Ariel’s gaze from where she sat with George at the next table.

She said, “I’m still with you.”

Something about that, he didn’t know what it was, almost made him cry.

When they got back to the motel, twilight had deepened enough so the yellow neon sign out front was in its full glory. It was the kind rapidly disappearing from the landscape, an honest-to-God 1950s-style animated display of a smiling cowboy twirling a lariat over his head and then, in the next frame or step or whatever it was called in the neon sign lingo, twirling it around his boots. Ariel said she thought it should be in a book of photographs about motel signs, and Terry said maybe it already was, they should ask the manager. Yellow bulbs glowed in glass squares above every door. The Five had stayed in a lot of ratholes, a lot of dirty little motels where dawn brought forth a scurrying of disheveled women and sleepy-looking men to their separate vehicles of escape, but this place was all right. Nomad couldn’t help but wonder what Mike would’ve said about the lariat-twirling cowpoke. Looks like he’s aimin’ to rope hisself a big ol’ dick, bro.

Ariel and Berke took a room together. In the next room, a coin was flipped for the first elimination, and then the second coin flip pitting Nomad and George for the remaining bed earned George the small rollaway. But within a few minutes the door that connected the rooms was open and Ariel and Berke came in to watch HBO. Berke had removed the sunglasses; she looked like a swollen-eyed wreck, but she made a comment about George having to sleep on a baby bed that said she was coming back.

They weren’t in there more than half-an-hour, watching TV sprawled on chairs and beds like the members of any family on a road trip, when they heard a knock at the door. Not their door, it seemed, but the door to Berke and Ariel’s room, which was closer to the office. Ariel got up from her chair, drew aside the tan-colored curtain and peered through the blinds out the window.

“It’s a guy,” she announced. “I think…it’s the guy from today. The trooper.”

George opened their door. “Hi, can I help you?”

The trooper no longer looked so official, or so threatening. He was wearing dark brown trousers with freshly-pressed creases. Tucked neatly into the pants was a white polo shirt bearing what George recognized as the flag-and-eagle logo of the Penney’s American Living brand, since he owned a few of those himself. A brown leather belt and brown lace-up shoes completed the wardrobe. The young man’s combed hair was as shiny as fresh tar. No razor, not even the ones with four freaking blades, had ever scraped a chin closer. He looked like a nervous highschool kid but he must have been in his mid-twenties, or so George supposed.

“Um,” was the trooper’s first utterance, which did not bode well. Then: “Is the girl here? The black-haired girl?”

George almost said Who? But then he looked over his shoulder at Berke, who was the only female presence in the room with black hair, but to call her a girl was so very, very wrong. Just not feelin’ it. He said, “I think he wants to see you.”

“Me?” Berke stood up. Nomad was not the only one to note that she took a quick glance at herself in the mirror over the dresser as she passed it, and winced a little at what she saw.

“Hello,” said the young man, when she peered out. If her eyes were swollen, her face blotchy and she looked like a five-car pileup, which she knew she did, his boyish smile didn’t show he noticed or cared. “Um…how’re you doin’?”

“Better.”

“Good, good,” he said. “I wanted to tell you…tell all of you,” he prompted, and she moved away from the door and opened it wider so everyone could see him all neat and scrubbed in the yellow bulb’s light, “that I apologize for losin’ my cool out there. Wavin’ my gun around and hollerin’ at you. Not my best day.”

“Hey, not ours either,” George answered. “But you just did what you had to, we know that.”

“Yeah.” He looked down at the ground and moved some invisible grit with the toe of a shined shoe. “I’m supposed to keep things under control. Supposed to make sure nobody’s got any guns I can’t see. You know, you train for the worst…but when it happens, it’s so fast.”

“Did they find out yet who did it?” Terry asked.

“No sir, but they’re still workin’. They’re out in the woods right now, goin’ through it with searchlights.” His eyes examined Berke’s face again and then he said into the room, speaking to all of them, “One thing I’ll say…and maybe I shouldn’t say it, but maybe I owe you…is that they haven’t found the brass yet.”

“The brass? You mean the shells?” George asked. His interest in Cops had just paid off.

“Yes sir, the ejected casings. There should be two. They’ve found some old ones, but not what they’re lookin’ for.”

“So,” Nomad spoke up, “what does that mean? They haven’t found the right place?”

“They’re where they calculated the shots came from, but…” The young man shrugged, indicating that was as far as he could go. He once more turned his attention to Berke. “Um… I know this is kind of a bad time…but… I was wonderin’…just maybe…if you’d want to go down the street and get a beer. The place isn’t too far, I’d get you back in an hour, or…whenever you say. Just thought you might like to talk. But I’m sayin’… I know it’s a bad time, I was just wonderin’.”

The others in the room were riveted by this display of bravery. The trooper had come to ask Berke out on a date. At least a semi kind of date, of the beer-and-talk-in-the-dark-bar variety.

There seemed to be a common stillness of breath.

Oh, what tricks time could play. What a slow river the seconds could become, flowing down to the sandy sea.

At last Berke said, very firmly, “Thank you, but no.”

“Okay, then.” The trooper nodded, and maybe there was a shadow of disappointment on his close-shaved face but no harm was done. “I found this on the pavement,” he said, and lifted his right hand from his side in what might have otherwise been a gesture to offer a bouquet of flowers or a box of candy. “I think it’s yours?”

She looked at the green notebook, there in his hand.

“I got a radio call before I could give it to you,” he explained. “I probably was supposed to hand it over to the detectives, but I looked through it and it’s just your recipes.”

“My recipes?”

“Yeah. It is yours, right?”

“Yes,” she said, and accepted it. She realized that if he hadn’t wanted a date with her, the notebook might have ended up in a trashcan. “Thanks, I thought I’d lost it.” She opened it, and on the first page was a handwritten recipe for Sunshine Lemon Cookies. A woman’s hand, certainly not Mike’s. The next page had the instructions and ingredients for White Chicken Chili.

What a dumb-ass, Berke thought. Mike had taken the notebook from the kitchen of the house they’d stayed in last night.

“Some of these…have been handed down in my family,” Berke said, figuring the trooper needed a stroke or two. “I guess I took it out to write something, I can’t remember.” She turned the pages. Chickpea and Red Lentil Stew… Cornflake-Crusted Baked Chicken… Amy’s Favorite Coconut Cake. “Lot of love in here,” Berke told him. “Thanks again.”

“I’ll head on,” he said. “Sorry about your friend, and I hope I’ve helped a little bit.”

“You have.” She offered him a faint smile; she was thinking what must have sparked in his mind: I’ve got to try for any female who can cook this stuff up.

He said goodnight, Berke closed the door and locked it, and as she turned toward the others she thought to say to Mike, News to the Street! I’m a lesbian!

But Mike wasn’t there.

“What’s in the book?” Ariel asked.

“Recipes, just like he said.” Berke began to flip through the pages. Chicken dishes, stews, soups and cakes flashed past. It was only a few pages from the back that she found where Mike had been writing. “Here,” she said, and she read it to herself. I’ve started writin’ a song, Mike had told her. “The Kumbaya song,” Berke announced. “Looks like he started it.” She held it out for them to see.

The page was a mess. Things written and scratched out. Written and scratched out again. Girl at the well written there, crookedly. Welcome written there. Welcome written once more. The third time it became a doodle, with tiny eyes in the ‘o’ and a devil’s tail on the last ‘e’. The demon of creativity, hard at work in Mike’s mind; Nomad, Ariel and Terry knew that devil, very well. Another line written down and scratched out, the word Shyte!! scrawled beside it.

Then there was a line complete and unmarred: Welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it.

On the next page, there were two more attempts, two more scratch-outs and then: Write a song about it, just keep it under four minutes.

“That’s it?” George asked, peering over Terry’s shoulder.

“Girl at the well,” Terry read, and frowned. “Is that supposed to be a title?” He looked up at Berke. “What was he doing, writing a song about that girl?”

“I don’t know what he was doing. All I know is, before he…” Go on, she told herself. It’s done. “Before he got shot, he said he was writing…this, whatever it is. You know. The…” Kumbaya song didn’t sound right anymore. It was not respectful to Mike. “The communal song that John wanted everybody to write. The one I said was busy-work shit.” Berke started to close the notebook, but Nomad held out his hand for it and she gave it to him.

Nomad read it again, first and second pages. Ariel slid over, sitting on the end of the bed next to him. They read it together. He was aware of the warmth of her cheek, nearly touching his own. He smelled her, the soft honeysuckle aroma. Maybe he had walked across a field sometime in his life where honeysuckles grew in wild and tangled profusion, and maybe he had paused there to take stock of where he was going. Her cheek was very close to his own. They were about to share a cheek-kiss. And then Nomad pulled away a few inches, looked at her and asked, “Do anything for you?” The words, he meant.

She also pulled away an equal distance, and kept her eyes on the tortured paper. One corner of her mouth pressed tight, as it did when she was thinking. “I don’t know where he was going with it. But maybe…we could do something.”

“Guys.” George’s was the somber voice of reality. “We’re going home in the morning. Tour cancelled. All done.”

Berke flared up. “Maybe they want to write a song for his service. Maybe we should have a last show, for him. A benefit. For his daughter, at least.”

“We could do that,” Ariel said. Then, to George, “Couldn’t we?”

“Absolutely,” he answered. “I’ll run that by Ash first thing.”

Nomad returned the notebook to Berke. Welcome, Mike had said last night in the Dallas backyard. Good place to start. Nomad didn’t see any destination in those words, but Ariel and Terry might take them somewhere. Right now, all he wanted to do was go home to his own futon on the floor, curl up and leave the world until he either had to eat or had to…

It was going to be a bad night, in this motel with the lariat-twirling cowboy outside. They would probably all wind up in one room, piled around like ferrets in a cage, breathing and jumping and gasping in their ferret-like slumber. If anyone could sleep.

He did, well after midnight. Among his last thoughts before he went under was that somehow—for some reason—that girl at the well had gotten into Mike’s mind. Had planted a seed in it. Just as she’d been trying to get into his own. Making him believe he had a fucking brain tumor, when he didn’t let her in.

Oh no, he vowed. Not me.

Only he wasn’t quite sure what he was vowing against. And, really, he didn’t want to know. Whatever it was, he was too small for it.

About two o’clock, Ariel got up from her hour or so of sleep, put on her shoes, quietly unlocked the door, went outside and closed the door behind her. The neon sign had been turned off. East Broadway was silent, and stars covered the sky in a breathtaking panorama. By the yellow bulbs she saw that several more guests had checked in: along with the Scumbucket and trailer there was a white SUV, a silver or light gray Subaru and a black or dark blue pickup truck. The SUV had a New Mexico tag, the other two were from Texas. She noted on the pickup’s rear bumper a metallic sticker that said Semper Fi. She wanted to walk, to breathe the night air, to feel the soft breeze on her cheek like a lover’s touch. She started toward the swimming pool, and as she neared it she heard the quiet sound of movement in water.

Someone was in there, alone in the dark. Swimming back and forth, it sounded like. Not kicking, just pulling the water past them in a slow crawl. It seemed to her like a lonely thing, to be swimming back and forth in dark water under the canopy of night. She hesitated for a moment, listening, and then she decided to wander over that way, maybe to speak or maybe not, because she knew very, terribly well what it was like to be lonely.