THREE
Ballad of the Greek Potatoes
NINE.
When the sun was an hour old Berke was lacing up her running shoes, the black New Balances that had already taken her more than two hundred miles. Her oufit was spartan, meant to get sweaty. She tugged a black sweatband over the obstacle of her hair and got it positioned on her forehead. The streamers of sun coming between the blinds already carried a bite. This was going to be the hottest day yet, in a long summer of hot days.
The last time someone had died in her life, someone she’d cared about deeply, she’d gotten up from her bed the following morning, laced her shoes and gritted her teeth and gone out for a six-mile run. She didn’t know if she could do that today, but she was going to try. Everyone else was still asleep. She couldn’t believe that Mike wasn’t here this morning, stretched out on his back with his hands behind his head because he hated the feel of a pillow. She’d never asked him why, thinking it must’ve had something to do with the number of hicktown jails he’d been hosted in, and lice or ticks or bedbugs or something like that. She couldn’t believe she would never hear the rusty rumble of his voice again, and maybe that was the worst thing. He was really gone. He really, really was.
It looked to her as if she hadn’t been the only one whose night was tortured. The guys had wound themselves up in their sheets, and George had nearly worked himself off the baby bed. And Ariel? Ariel wasn’t in either room, or in either bathroom. She must’ve gone out walking, before the sun had even started to come up. Wherever she was, she wasn’t here.
Okay, Berke said to herself. Let’s get to it.
Out in the parking lot, she saw the three new arrivals: white SUV, silver Subaru, dark blue pickup. The air was still, and smelled of hot metal. There were a few cars on East Broadway, but only a few. Monday morning here wasn’t quite like Austin. She stopped next to the U-Haul trailer for about five minutes to do a few stretches—Hang Tens, Lunges and Flamingoes, holding each one for thirty seconds—and noted the movement of a windowblind, in the room the pickup truck was parked in front of. Somebody else was an early riser, or else they wanted to be first up for the Cattleman’s breakfast. She decided to go to her left and follow East Broadway toward the northeast. She would walk a little while first, work her pace up to running speed, and so she passed by the swimming pool beyond the white fence, and there was Ariel.
Ariel was lying beside the pool on a blue lounge chair. She was on her right side, facing away from Berke. Her knees were bent, her legs curled up beneath her. One shoe was on, the other lay on the cement beside the chair. Berke thought that Ariel’s neck was going to be stiff today, the way her head was turned and her shoulders hunched up. That couldn’t be comfortable. She thought briefly of going over and waking Ariel up, but she decided no, she wouldn’t; Ariel might have had a tough time getting to sleep, and maybe had found some peace out here alone in the dark. So Berke walked on, picking up her pace, faster and faster. About two hundred yards along the street she started her run, heading away from the Lariat at a steady clip.
The detective with the cowboy hat had called last night at ten o’clock sharp. George had spoken to him. Any word on who did it? They can’t say much right now, George had reported back. But they’re going to come talk to us in the morning. And that had been the extent of it.
Berke ran on, her breathing measured, everything easy. The red fireball was sitting two hands above the horizon, aimed between her jawline and her right shoulder. She passed the usual sights of any small town, in any American state: small businesses, parking lots, churches and strip malls. She passed the Subway they’d eaten at last night, and a half mile further on there was a Dairy Queen which she wished she’d known about because she did like ice cream. Then she came upon an area of small houses, and past that some car lots and places where cars and trucks were serviced, a litter of car hulks and tires and the like. In this area was where a man in a passing white pickup truck shouted, “Hey, muchacha caliente!” but she kept her head down and her pace unchanged. She was hot, that was true enough; she was sweating pretty good now, the sun searing her right side. A few cars and trucks passed by in both directions, and somebody else honked at her but she looked neither right nor left. She stared only at the cracked brown concrete one stride ahead, and that was how you got through any demanding run.
She was thinking of Mike, and how senseless it had been, and how much she was going to miss him. It was still unbelieveable to her, something from someone else’s bad dream. But so too had been the death of her running and rock-climbing bud, Melissa Cavanaugh, six years ago when Berke was living in Seattle and playing with the short-lived band Time Keeps Secrets. She had met Melissa at a coffee shop, a friend of a friend, and they’d immediately hit it off. Melissa had been a basketball player in college way down in Georgia, had been all-everything, an A-student, track star, student newspaper reporter, environmental activist, volunteer at a homeless shelter, lover of stray dogs and Kona coffee and The Clash’s Sandinista. So why was it that Melissa Cavanaugh, twenty-two years old and with a great future ahead of her in graphic design in the Emerald City, had tied a cord around a support in her closet of stylish but tasteful clothes and with the other end of the cord around her neck strangled herself to death on a Sunday evening?
There had been no sex between them, no kissing, no hand-holding. They didn’t talk about being gay, because in fact Berke was never sure Melissa was gay. She dated guys, and talked about how awful some of them were, and how some were really hot and fun but somehow…somehow…they weren’t what she was searching for. Berke figured that if Melissa was gay, she would find her own way to it, eventually. But they were good friends, and they enjoyed being together. My folks are so conservative, Melissa had said. And I’ve never disappointed them. I’d die before I’d disappoint them, they’re looking for me to be perfect at whatever I do, only perfection for our family, you can go back generations and see our accomplishments, our lists of awards and honors. You can’t disappoint a family of people who throw themselves at challenges and always win. You know?
Yes, Berke had said. I do.
I know you’re not very religious, but I thank God we met, Melissa had confided. We can talk about anything.
Except for that thing. The thing that was slowly killing her, and making her take notes in her mind of the strengths of different cords, and the perfect length she would need. Then when the time was perfect, and her mind perfectly fixed on this particular challenge, she had left this world because something in her could not abide the truth of her own heart, and she was too much the good girl to ever disappoint her family.
Berke had had no clue. Their last phone conversation, on that Saturday, had been about where they were going to eat pizza after they saw Rabbit-Proof Fence on Tuesday, their movie night. Melissa had said she was thinking about going down to Macon and spending a few days with her family. But everything had been bright, light, upbeat. Everything had been about the future, that blue-skyed place where all dreams come true and anybody can be who they want to be because This Is America. Melissa’s roommate had found the body, on Monday afternoon. There had been no note, no blame, no incrimination: just a silence, to endure the generations.
The sun was hotter. Berke quickly looked around to get her bearings. She was in an area of dry brown fields, rusted barbed wire fences, and distant farmhouses that appeared abandoned. A few scraggly trees reached up from the miserable earth. It was time to turn around and head back. She was coming to a dirt road ahead that snaked off to the left across a plain of weeds. The air smelled bitter, with the drifting scent of roadkill. She decided she would turn around at the road.
Berke had never doubted her journey. Given the choice between a dress and a flannel shirt, she was glad in plaid. Not that she hadn’t tried sex with guys, just to see what it was like. There had been three different guys, in three different states, in three different seasons. Three times, and three times only. Fuelled probably by alcohol or drugs, or maybe they were all mercy fucks. She couldn’t really remember many details except the rough hands that didn’t know what they were doing, the neanderthalic grunts that made her crush a laugh behind her teeth and at last—oh suffering Jesus, at long last!—the most godawful mess ever to scrawl across a bedsheet. You want to put that thing where? Uh uh, Bluto, my mercy’s used up.
She wanted nothing to do with those kings of artless sex, those preening princes who thought they were a gift to all women of every size, shape and color and who fell apart in whines, tears and rages at the sound of “No”. She did recall her three prizes as being ridiculously heavy, lying atop her like concrete suits. Their hairy backs and pimply asses…urk, she was going to have to stop thinking about this, or she would go over to the roadside and throw up.
She missed Melissa. She missed Mike, and she was going to miss him more as time went on. Maybe that was how the world worked, taking people you loved away from you with no warning, but if that was the best God could come up with She needed to rethink Her game.
Berke was almost to the dirt road. She looked along it and saw what appeared to be a haze of dust floating in the air, as if a vehicle had only recently driven that way. A sun-faded sign that used to be red, white and blue proclaimed Land For Sale. In the distance, a couple of hundred yards or so away and framed by skeleton trees, was a farmhouse the same color as the brown dry brush that surrounded it. The windows looked to be broken out, the chimney reduced to an iron pipe. But, oddly enough, a battered mailbox remained at the turnoff onto the dirt road, and on the mailbox was the name Sam Dodge.
She caught a quick flare of light from a front window. Sun on metal, she thought.
She heard a firecracker go off, not very loud of a pop.
Something zipped past her, a hornet or wasp, about level with her collarbone. She smelled the scorched air under her nose. She looked to her right and saw a plume of dust rising from the barren earth beyond a barbed-wire fence. And then it came to her very clearly that someone had just taken a shot at her, from the window of that house in the field.
Dodge, she thought.
She did better than that: she flung herself to the road and crawled into the weeds on the right. In a matter of seconds, her well-trained heart was pounding, her lungs gasped for air and a new bloom of sweat had burst from her pores.
Berke tensed for a second bullet. Her legs were still in the road. She pulled herself deeper into the weeds. When she looked toward the house again, she could no longer see it. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be seen. A rush of emotions wheeled through her mind, culminating in anger: who the fuck was shooting? Her New Balances, her knees and her elbows pushed against the ground; she crawled through the brush along the barbed-wire fence. Then there was something right in front of her face that she thought at first was a piece of discarded rope, but since when did rope have scales and alternating light and dark brown bands? She couldn’t see a head and she didn’t hear a rattle but suddenly the thing shot away from her as if it had been touched with a hot iron, and just that fast it slithered through the brush and was gone. She thought she had peed a cup’s worth in her lycra shorts.
She heard a car coming. She lifted her head as much as she dared. A pickup truck that might have been welded together from four or five other wrecked trucks of various colors was approaching over in the left lane, on its way into town. Two men were in the truck, their windows down, and in the back was a piece of machinery that maybe was an air-conditioning unit. On the driver’s dented door was Baumgartner Heating & Cooling with a phone number. In another few seconds the truck was going to pass by. She thought that if she got up and ran for the truck, whoever was in that house was going to have another chance to kill her. But staying here was not an option, and even a snake had that much sense.
When the pickup was almost between her and the house, she jumped up and ran toward it with her arms waving. “Hey!” she shouted. “Stop! Stop!”
The driver hit his brake and the truck skidded to a halt. He had a mop of gray hair and a gray mustache, and the red letters in a white circle on his sweat-stained brown shirt said his name was Roy.
“Can you give me a ride?” Berke asked. Her voice was shaking. “To the motel?” Roy and his partner, a thin Hispanic man burned nearly black by the sun, just stared at her. “The Lariat motel,” Berke explained. “I need a ride.” She glanced through the cab toward the farmhouse, but it looked only empty and forlorn.
“You need a ride?” Roy obviously was the type to deliberate at his own speed. “What’re you doin’ out here?” He took stock of her outfit. “You runnin’ in this heat?”
“Can I get in?”
Roy made a sucking noise with his lips against his teeth. His slow deliberation obviously also included sound effects. “Yeah,” he decided, “get on in.”
She edged around the truck. The Hispanic dude opened the door and scooted over. As Berke climbed in, the flesh on the back of her neck tingled in expectation of the bullet, but nothing hit it except a few gnats interested in her salt. She slammed the door shut, glanced again at the farmhouse and saw nothing move, no glint of metal, nothing. “Who lives there?” she asked.
“Land’s for sale,” Roy said. “Suppose it’s vacant. You a buyer?”
By the time Berke shook her head, Roy had put a boot on the accelerator and with a tired groan the patched-up truck rolled on toward town.
“You ain’t from around here, are you?” Roy asked, and Berke told him no, she was not. “Where you from, then?” Austin, Berke said, and added that she was going back to Austin today. “Big city,” Roy remarked, after which he began to tell her about the time he went to his sister’s wedding in Fort Worth, which was another big city but he didn’t care for big cities, he had been here in this town for all his life and made a good living, had a wife and three sons, one worked on an oil rig in the Gulf and boy howdy did that little rooster make a wad of dough.
Berke had stopped listening about the time she’d said she was going back to Austin today. She knew someone had fired a shot at her. She knew it. Had felt the bullet go past, had smelled it. But… Jesus Christ…why? A bullet fired from an empty farmhouse? Yeah, well, it must not have been so fucking empty. What had she done, gotten some trigger-happy hermit mad at her? But this was too weird… Mike getting shot yesterday, and now this…
Roy and the silent Hispanic stick-man were looking at her. She’d missed something. “What?” she asked.
“Did you fall down?” Roy repeated. “You’re dusty, I figured you fell down.”
“Yeah, I fell down.”
They were getting close to the Lariat. Berke’s fingers were on the door handle.
“Better be careful,” Roy advised as he pulled the truck into the parking lot. Berke saw that the guest list had thinned; the silver Subaru and the dark blue pickup were gone. “Fella got shot dead out on I-20 yesterday afternoon,” Roy said. “In the paper this mornin’. This is crazy times.”
“Okay. Thanks for the ride.” She got out while the truck was still rolling. The Hispanic guy raised a hand in farewell as Roy drove away. Berke was close enough to the swimming pool to see that Ariel was still lying on the blue lounge chair in exactly the same position she’d occupied about forty minutes ago. Berke opened the gate. She walked with long strides around the pool to Ariel’s chair and touched her shoulder.
“Hey, wake up,” Berke said. “Ariel! Wake up!”
Ariel’s eyes opened. She turned her head toward Berke and immediately made a noise of pain. She pressed a hand to the side of her neck. “Ow,” she said, massaging the cramped muscle. Her shoulder was stiff too; these loungers definitely were not meant to take the place of a bed, but it had been so nice out here, with the sound of the water and the panorama of the stars overhead. It was hot and bright out here now, though. Who was standing over her? She squinted to see. “Berke? What is it?”
“Somebody shot at me.”
“Somebody…what?”
“Listen to me. Wake up. Somebody shot at me, when I went out running.”
Ariel sat up, still working the offending muscle in her neck. She realized one of her shoes had fallen off during the night. “Went out running?”
Berke abruptly turned away and headed toward the room. Ariel was cute, smart, talented with lyrics and melody, a real trooper when it came to the grind, but before she got her bowl of granola and cup of silver needle tea in the mornings she could be as thick as a brick. Berke opened the door and went into the room, where George was sitting on one of the chairs staring at his cellphone’s screen. Nomad and Terry were still laid out on their beds, asleep. Berke felt the heat of fresh tears at her eyes, because Mike wasn’t there, and she wasn’t sure she was ever going to get past this tragedy.
“I got—” shot at, she was going to say.
But before Berke could finish her sentence, George said, “Amazing. This is just…awesome.”
“Listen to me. Okay? I got—”
“We sold one hundred and sixty-three CDs last night,” George went on. “That’s just figures for Catch. One sixty three,” he repeated, for emphasis. He didn’t have to tell her the CDs were ten dollars a pop, payable through PayPal. He consulted some more awesome numbers. “The video’s up to five hundred and nineteen hits on YouTube, six hundred and thirty-eight on MySpace and…get this…seven hundred and twelve on the webpage.” Behind his glasses, his eyes were shining. “Jesus!” he said. “What happened?”
“Yeah, great, I’m glad, but—”
“Guys!” George started shaking the others awake. “Get up! Come on, you’ve got to hear this!” They responded with snorts and snarls, like animals being dragged from their dens of refuge. “I mean it!” George almost shouted. “We made some fucking numbers last night!”
Nomad was the first to reply, his voice husky with sleep. “What the shit…?”
George’s cell buzzed. He checked the caller. It was Ash. “Yeah!” George said, and listened as Nomad and Terry fought out of the bands of bedsheets that had wrapped around them during the night. Nomad staggered off to the bathroom. “I saw the numbers, yeah,” George said. “What’s the deal?” He was silent, letting Ash speak.
“Somebody took a shot at me,” Berke told Terry. She didn’t know if he’d heard her or not, because he was fumbling for his specs on the bedside table. The door opened again, letting in a blinding burst of sunlight from which Ariel emerged, still working her neck.
“Oh. Okay, right.” George had eased down into the chair again. Something had changed in his voice; some of the happiness had evaporated.
“What’s going on?” Ariel asked.
“Somebody took a—” Berke stopped herself. She could still hear the sound of that bullet zipping past, but now the whole event seemed dreamlike, surreal, mixed up with the crack of the slug hitting the gas station’s window yesterday. She thought that the heat had gotten to her out in front of that empty farmhouse, or that she must be going crazy. Why would anybody be shooting at her? Did that make any sense? But had it made any sense that a bullet had hit Mike in the head and now he was lying stretched out on a slab somewhere?
“Really,” George said. It was a reaction to something Ash had just told him. “No, we haven’t seen it. Wow. That’s all I can say, man…just…wow.”
Berke put a hand to her forehead to see if she’d overheated. If anything, she felt clammy. Maybe she had overheated. Maybe she was going to throw up in another minute, because her stomach was roiling. This is like that syndrome soldiers have, she thought. That delayed stress syndrome deal. She felt cold sweat crawling on her cheeks.
“You okay?” Ariel asked. She’d heard Berke clearly enough outside—Somebody shot at me—and now Berke’s face had gone gray. She thought Berke was having a nervous reaction from yesterday, and who could fault her for going to pieces?
Berke rushed away to the other bathroom beyond the connecting door, where she turned on the tap, splashed water into her face and then, trembling violently, leaned over the toilet and wracked herself with a series of dry heaves audible at least two rooms away. Ariel followed to stand outside the door if Berke called for help.
“Hold it, wait a minute,” George told Ash. “Is she sick?” he called to Ariel.
“I’m fucking fine!” Berke shouted back through the cardboard door. “I’m fucking peachy-keen fabulous!”
“Who’s puking?” asked Nomad as he came out of the other bathroom, his eyes sleep-stung and squinty.
“We’re having an episode here,” George said to Ash. “Go on, I’m listening.”
“What the hell’s happening?” Terry asked of no one in particular, then he hauled himself up and went to the bathroom Nomad had just vacated. Nomad returned to bed and lay there on his back, staring up at the ceiling tiles and wondering if Mike’s daughter had been told the news yet. It was going to be a bad ride back to Austin, and not much to look forward to when they got there, regardless of his big plans from last night.
“Why are they calling it that?” The Little Genius’s question into the phone snagged Nomad’s attention. George was silent again as Ash spoke. Nomad propped himself up on a pillow, watching George’s facial expressions to get some clue of the conversation. “We’re supposed to hear from them this morning,” George said. “I guess they’ll tell us we can leave.”
Talking about the detectives, Nomad thought.
“So…what’s the deal?” At this question, Nomad’s ears again went up. “Better than what? Fifty percent?”
Berke and Ariel returned to the room, one with a hand pressed to her stomach and the other rubbing the side of her neck. In the bathroom, Berke had gotten down a couple of glasses of water and felt a little better. She was deciding whether or not to pursue this tale of the farmhouse shooter.
“Jesus,” George said. “Is he really serious?”
The toilet’s flush announced Terry’s exit from the bathroom. He looked quizzically at Nomad, who replied with a shrug.
George scratched his chin. “Can he go to seventy-five percent on the merchandise?”
“What’s he talking about?” Berke asked, but no one could respond.
Nomad didn’t want to say, but it sounded to him as if George and Ash were talking about a gig. He remembered, not without some bitterness, George’s voice of reason in the Subway last night: We’re going home in the morning. Tour cancelled. All done.
Well, it was morning, the tour was cancelled and The Five were all done. So what was this shit about?
“I hear you. I understand,” said the voice of reason. “I’ll run it by everybody. Yeah.” He nodded, as more instructions came through the digital air from Austin. “Okay, thanks,” he said, and put his cellphone away. Then he sat exactly where he was without moving, staring at the floor, as second after second ticked past.
“Are you going to make us guess?” Berke asked sharply, which was a very good sign.
“You would never,” George answered in a quiet, measured voice, “guess this in the proverbial million years.” He looked first at Nomad, then at the others. “Trey Yeager left a message for Ash last night. He wants us to keep the date at the Spinhouse.” Yeager was the Spinhouse’s booking manager, had been in the business for about thirty years at various clubs across the Southwest. “That’s not all. They want to bump us up to headliner. It’s a little more money, but Ash thinks we can get a way better percentage on merchandise.”
Nobody spoke, because they just didn’t know what to say. Then Nomad struck at the heart of the problem: “If you remember…we lost our bass player yesterday.”
“Yeah, there’s that. Ash says he can get Butch Munger to meet us in El Paso, or Trey can supply a local talent.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Berke said. “I’m not playing with a gator off the street!”
“Not Butch Munger!” Nomad’s tone was just as vehement. He was up off the bed and crouched like a fighter about to throw a right hook. “That bastard wrecked Hemp For Shemp last year!” Not only that, but Munger had a reputation for temper and had been arrested for breaking his girlfriend’s nose, charges dropped because she just loved him so fucking much.
“Guys?” said Terry.
“Look, it’s just the one show,” George said. “I know Munger’s rep, but he is good. And he kind of plays in Mike’s style—”
“Don’t you say that!” Berke came forward, crowding him, and George feared he was about to be torn apart by a ferocious lesbian. “Nobody plays like Mike! You hear it? Nobody!”
“Guys?” said Terry.
“Not Butch Munger!” Nomad almost shouted. “I won’t step on a stage with him!”
The telephone on the bedside table rang, a shrill A above high C. George reached carefully between Nomad and Berke and picked it up. “Yes? Oh, sure. We would like the Cattleman’s complimentary breakfast this morning, absolutely. Uh…that would be six. I’m sorry…that would be five. Just a minute.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Who wants coffee and who wants orange juice?”
“Orange juice,” said Terry, and then he added, “Guys, I can pick up the bassline.”
“Two orange juices so far,” George reported into the telephone.
“Coffee. Black,” Nomad said.
George paused with his ear to the receiver. “Yeah, that’d be great. Thank you.” He hung up. “She says they’re not real busy, so she’ll bring a pot of coffee, five cups and five glasses of juice.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Terry asked. “I can play the bass parts.”
George didn’t answer, waiting for Berke’s reaction. She looked down at the floor for a long time, as if pondering whether Terry was strong enough to carry Mike’s weight. Conflicting emotions fought on her face.
Then she lifted her gaze to George and said firmly, “That works with me.”
Nomad nodded. “Me too.”
“I can’t believe this! We’re going to go on without Mike?” Ariel’s was not the voice of reason, but a cry of bewilderment. “I don’t care if it’s just one show!” she said before George could respond. “Shouldn’t we…like…go home and…mourn him or something? It doesn’t seem right to keep on playing!”
“I think,” George answered, “you’re wrong about that. Let me tell you what’s happened, according to Ash. The story about Mike is in this morning’s newspaper here. It’s also in the Abilene paper. But last night it got picked up by the Associated Press and wound up on Yahoo in the news items. You know what the headline was? Sniper Kills Member of Touring Band.”
“Sniper?” Terry frowned. “Who said anything about a sniper?”
“I’m just saying what Ash told me. The newspapers reported it as a ‘rifle shot’. When it got on Yahoo, it became a ‘sniper’. Let me just tell you…a lot of people have seen that item on the web. So even though they called us ‘The Fives’ on Yahoo, we sold a hundred and sixty-three CDs of Catch last night. In one night.” The Little Genius waited for that to sink in. “We got some awesome numbers of hits, and I’ll bet if I looked at the numbers again right now they would’ve gone up…who knows how many. Ash had a call in to cancel at the Spinhouse, but they want us because suddenly we are newsworthy.” He caught Ariel’s pained expression and he didn’t dare even look at Berke. “Okay, I know it’s a shitty way to get some media shine, but why do you think all of a sudden they want us to headline? Huh?”
No one answered, so George plowed on. “Any media shine sells tickets. We can think of ourselves as great and sensitive musicians, or rebels without a cause, or raging flames of angry righteousness, or whatever…but all the business cares about is, do you sell tickets? Okay, what I’m saying is—and we don’t have to like it, but that’s life—we need to buckle up and act like professionals. If we can headline and get a good merchandise split from the Spinhouse, we go play there. Any disagreements with that?” There were no replies, but George had one more point to make. “You think Mike would disagree? After working his ass off so long, and now we’re invited to headline?” He directed the next question to Berke. “You think he’d say pack it in and go back to Austin?”
Berke was staring across the room, at the green notebook sitting atop the vanity. As far as she knew, Mike had never written a verse in his life, nor had he ever wanted to. Why suddenly now, just before he’d been shot dead by a…
…sniper?
“Mike would say go to El Paso and play the Spinhouse,” Berke answered, speaking more to herself than to the others. “He’d say…”
No one here gets out alive?
“…buckle up,” she went on, “but maybe not in those exact words.”
“It doesn’t seem right,” Ariel said, but her conviction was wavering.
“We play the gig, and we tear the roof off the place, and I say Mike’s family gets his cut just the same as if he were here.” George’s eyebrows lifted. “Everybody cool with that?”
They were, and Nomad spoke for them all: “Sure.”
“Then it is right,” George told Ariel. “Anything else would be wrong.”
To that, Ariel had no reply.
Their complimentary breakfasts came, the biscuits, the jelly, the coffee and the orange juice. The woman who brought the tray looked quickly around the room to make sure it hadn’t been trashed by this bunch, whom the police had told her were musicians, and she went back to her office relieved. There was no further mention of Mike as they ate, but Berke put the green notebook in her own bag for safekeeping. She had decided not to say anymore about her experience on the road; it was just too weird to kick around, and George might want her to tell the cops, and now she wasn’t sure of her own mind and she just wanted to get out of here. So she stayed quiet, and she went to the bathroom to take a shower and wash the dust out of her hair.
Around ten-thirty, with the sun up high and heat pressing against the window, the two detectives knocked at their door and came in to talk. Lucky Luke and the Digger both looked tired; it had been a long night and a hot morning in those scraggly woods, and neither luck nor digging had revealed more than they’d known before sundown. “I’ll tell you,” said Detective Rios as she and her partner stood next to the air-conditioner to catch a breeze, “that we haven’t found fresh casings on the ground where we think the shooter was positioned. So either we’re wrong about the location, or the brass was cleaned up. And that’s kind of puzzling, because it’s not something a kid in need of a course on rifle safety would do.”
“Where does that put us?” George asked.
“In between theories, until we find the brass or somebody tells us something.” Luke had his toothpick in his mouth and his cowboy hat sat on his head cocked a little to one side. “We may find the casings today, or they may be rattling around in the floorboard of junior’s ATV. Hard to say.”
That statement brought a flush of anger up in Nomad’s cheeks. “Hard to say? Our friend’s dead, and that’s all you’ve got?”
“Easy, man, take it easy,” George cautioned.
“See, this is our situation,” Luke went on, his voice unhurried. “Was it an accident, or was it intentional? Was it a kid out dicking around or a random shooting, with intent to kill? If that’s so, we’ve got a real problem.”
Berke knew now was the time to speak up, if she was going to; but the moment passed and she kept her mouth shut because she wanted out of this town right now and they would get all tangled up with something she wasn’t even positive had happened. The open road had never before seemed so inviting. Or so safe, for that matter.
“There are other possibilities,” Detective Rios said, focusing on Nomad. “Somebody with a grudge against the gas station’s owner. Or the oil company. We’re bringing in for questioning some people you might call ‘sketchy’. Got their guns and their anger issues. So we’ll see if that leads us anywhere.”
“Get the wrong person upset over any little thing, and that’s why we’ve got jobs,” Luke added.
“Sorry we can’t offer you more,” the woman said. Her voice carried a tone of finality. “You’re going back to Austin?”
“No, on to El Paso,” George told her. When she looked blankly at him, he decided to say, “We’ve got a gig there on Friday night, it’s a pretty good deal.”
“I guess you have to be dedicated to your music,” she said, but no one replied.
What the detectives had really come to say, the Digger went on, was that the family had worked out transfer of the body back to Bogalusa from the mortuary, and that if anything further developed the Sweetwater police department would be in touch with Mr. Vallampati at the Austin number George had given them. She said Mr. Davis’s belongings could be shipped from Sweetwater to Bogalusa at the UPS office, or that could be done in El Paso or wherever was most convenient. George said they’d do it in El Paso. He was thinking that he wanted to get on the road as soon as possible and that the bag of Blue Mystic weed in Mike’s duffel ought not to be in there when the family got his stuff.
“We’re very sorry about this,” Detective Rios said, speaking for both of them. “I hope we’ll have some news for you soon.” With that, their visit had come to its conclusion. The two detectives left, closed the door behind them, and George scratched the back of his neck and said as he had said so many times before in so many different motel rooms, “Let’s saddle up, people.”
They paid their bill, Nomad took the Scumbucket’s wheel because it was his turn to drive, Ariel rode shotgun with George and Terry in the seats behind, and in the back Berke sat next to an empty place.
They pulled out of the Lariat Motel’s parking lot, and beneath the scorching sun they took the entrance to I-20 West on toward El Paso. They were silent for a while, and then Terry began to talk about a particularly memorable gig they’d done last June in Myrtle Beach, it was a club right on the beach, and it was early evening with the breeze blowing salty off the sea and the light was soft and blue and the place was crowded, everybody appreciative and cheering for the songs and only rowdy enough to be fun, and in the brief quiet between numbers Mike had come over to him, leaned close and said, Bro, drink it up ’cause this is as good as it gets.
Yes, the others said. They did remember the gig. They remembered it very well. And everyone agreed that now that Terry mentioned it, it seemed like it was only yesterday.
TEN.
When White Wedding’ blasts from the speakers, Jeremy Pett allows himself a passing smile because he knows that he is in the right place.
“Are you a captain?” he asks the black-haired girl with the two silver bars piercing her nipples as she leans her head down to him (she smells like bubblegum and coconut suntan lotion, he thinks) and she returns the smile that she believes is for her and tells him he can call her anything if he’ll buy another beer. He says yeah, sure, and she goes away into the purple light that is edged with crimson. He returns his attention not to the other black-haired girl who is coiled around the pole ten feet from him but to a table over on the right side where he saw Gunny sitting a minute ago but Gunny is not there anymore. Gunny is a prowler, and can’t stay still very long. But Jeremy knows by now that Gunny is never far away, and this knowledge gives him comfort.
Damn straight, does he know! Gunny was all over his ass when he missed that first shot at the gas station. Jeremy could say it was a cold bore shot, he had no spotter to verify the range and the wind drift and maybe he had been unnerved when the trooper pulled in. He could say that he’d first taken aim at the lead singer, but the guy was walking back and forth from deep shadow into eye-zapping sunlight and that had thrown him off, and his second target—the guy pumping gas—had been obscured by the trooper’s raised hood, and then also there was the traffic on I-20 to consider and it wasn’t so easy to shoot between cars and trucks flashing past on a highway, but Gunny accepts no excuses. Then…oh Jesus, then…when Jeremy had heard someone walking past his door and looked out through the blinds thinking it was the old woman bringing his complimentary breakfast, but it was her, the drummer girl, all decked out in her jogging duds, and Jeremy had given some thought to the situation and decided he might could finish her off if the place and time were right, so he’d checked out, gotten into the pickup truck and actually passed her on the road looking for a shelter to set up his rifle and bipod. Maybe she would come this far, maybe not, but if she did he was locked and loaded.
It was another cold bore shot. The sun was in his eyes this time, too. That bullet couldn’t have missed her by half-an-inch. It must’ve burned the tip of her nose on the way past.
But oh, Jesus, did Gunny give it to him when he drove out of there and swung east on I-20. I thought you were supposed to be an expert, Gunny had said, quietly at first but with a nasty bite of rising rage. Supposed to be such hot shit at this. Killed how many ragheads over there?
“Thirty-eight confirmed,” Jeremy had answered, because he knew the count.
Great for you, Pett, but tell me this then…how many of ’em weren’t kids?
Jeremy’s foot had stomped down on the brake pedal and the pickup travelling at nearly sixty-five miles per hour had shivered and shrieked as if all the bolts were coming loose at once, and suddenly the truck was turning sideways and sliding, leaving smoking black streaks on the asphalt. He was aware of Gunny, the sarcastic shotgun rider, fading out to a gray presence. Jeremy thought for a second that he should go ahead and die, he should have died in the bathtub and this was just marking time, but then the survivor’s will—the Marine spirit, the gladiator’s fight, call it any of these—kicked in. He took hold of the wheel and fought to keep the truck from going over, a struggle that seemed epic but only lasted for a husky inhalation of burnt-rubber air. Then with a shudder and moan the truck gave its life back to him to control and it was slowing down, slowing down, its tires going into the weeds on the right-side shoulder…and WHAM came the burst of air and the indignant wail of a semi’s horn as the beast whipped past, followed by a white BMW whose driver shook his head in disbelief at Jeremy’s skill of four-wheel Mexican hat dancing.
Jeremy looked into the sideview mirror. No troopers yet, but they might be coming if they saw the dark pall of smoke rising off the treadmarks.
Drive, said Gunny, who was himself again. When Jeremy hesitated, Gunny said, Get your mind back where it needs to be. Drive.
He started off. The engine gave a rattle like a bagful of broken plates, but then everything must have fitted itself together again, God bless the American auto industry, and the pickup truck rolled on more lamb than lion.
The girl with the silver captain’s bars through her nipples emerges from the gaudy glare, bringing his beer. She has the tattoos of thorny vines and roses on both arms and a small sad teddybear on her belly beneath the navel ring. He pays her from his wallet of dwindling money and then she leans her head toward him again, the better to be heard over the thundering music—a rap song, somebody Jeremy doesn’t recognize singing about getting pussy twenty-fo’ seven—and as she asks if he wants a lap dance she reaches down to place a hand on his right thigh. But instantly Jeremy has intercepted the hand and turned it away, earning from her a puzzled look in the sparkling dark. “Maybe later, okay?” she prompts. Her accent is strange; she appears to be a mixture of Hispanic, black, and Asian. They all do, except for the one with the flame-red hair and the thin blonde with the ponytail.
He says maybe later without meaning it, and she goes away again. He drinks his beer-flavored water and checks his wristwatch to see that Wednesday night has turned into Thursday morning. He does not want the girl touching him because she might feel the lump in his pants, hidden by the folds of his extra-large black T-shirt. The crowd—was there ever a crowd in here?—is thinning out, but the pole dancer is still energetic and the music is loud enough to churn a brain into oatmeal. He is watching Miss Ponytail give a lap dance to a Hispanic man in a dark suit who was in here when Jeremy arrived about an hour ago. The man is maybe forty, forty-five or so, with a bald brown pate and gray hair on the sides. There is a little gray tuft up top that Miss Ponytail plays with as she gyrates her ass on his crotch. The man is sleepy-eyed and grins too much. His teeth are very white, and Jeremy wonders if he’s a dentist out on the town or visiting El Paso for a convention or something. Whatever he is, he likes to show Miss Ponytail his heavy wad of cash and she likes to lighten it for him, and Jeremy has been entertained by watching her set her lower jaw like a bulldog and scare off the other chiquitas who wander over behind their implants and try to score some of what he’s throwing down.
Pull off where you can see the highway, Gunny had said. It was not a request, it was a command.
Jeremy had bristled up. Had clenched his fists on the wheel and given the engine more gas. Yesterday he had killed one of the members of that band, he had shot at another one today and he wasn’t too happy with his record of one hit out of three bullets. The fact was, he wasn’t nearly as good as he used to be. Couldn’t even hit a slow-moving target at about two-hundred yards. Pitiful. But more than that…he couldn’t remember exactly why he had followed that van and U-Haul trailer from the club in Dallas, had parked overnight in some suburban neighborhood to keep watch, and when they’d left Dallas he’d gotten on the highway behind them, knowing they were playing next in El Paso from the schedule on their website. He couldn’t remember exactly why he needed to kill them, except for the fact that on that cable show they’d made some pretty vile comments and accusations about the soldiers in Iraq—which they hadn’t repeated during their show at the Curtain Club—and that maybe he was going to embark on a new career as a hitman for the federales in Mexico. Call it training, then. But still…what had they ever done to him, really? It wasn’t like lying in wait, hour after hour, for the enemy in Iraq. You knew then what your purpose was. You knew then that every bullet you sent would save the life of a brother, or maybe many lives. But this…he felt lost in his own mind.
You’re not lost, Gunny had said, but Jeremy hadn’t recalled speaking aloud. You’ve been found. Don’t you get that?
Maybe Jeremy shook his head; he didn’t know.
Pull off where you can see the highway, Gunny repeated. The voice was soft, caring, almost fatherly. Then we’ll straighten some things out.
Jeremy sped past another exit.
Gunny said, Oh, my. Don’t you know yet that without me you’re nothing? So…if you want to be nothing again, you can stop at the next gas station and let me out.
Jeremy stared straight ahead. In another moment he realized he was alone, because he could no longer see Gunny from the corner of his eye. Yet he knew he’d always been alone; what he saw and heard as the image of his gunnery sergeant from training school wasn’t there and had never been. It was something from within, just like when a lonely person starts talking to the mirror. He remembered some line from a movie, maybe he’d seen it on the base in Iraq, where the guy says you’re not crazy if you talk to yourself in the mirror, but if you answer back you’ve gotta be fucking nuts.
He thought his image of Gunny, just as regulation spit-polished, side-walled and crisply buttoned-up as the man had been in real life, had to do with perfection. Maybe it was how he himself had wanted to be…had planned on being, until things messed up. He could’ve been an instructor at the school, no doubt about it. He could’ve served a long and useful life in the Corps. Semper Fi, that’s what it was all about. So he knew that Gunny wasn’t there, could never really be there, but he would accept any part of Gunny he could get because it took him back to when he was somebody, doing something important in this world.
It occurred to him as he was driving eastward, about midway between Sweetwater and Abilene, that his fingers on the steering-wheel seemed longer than he recalled. The knuckles were thicker, too. He wasn’t excusing himself for those poor shots—no way, he was a professional—but his long fingers might have fouled up his trigger pull. It was something he hadn’t noticed until now, and it hit him like a small shock that he did not recognize his own hands. When he moved the fingers, they rippled on the steering-wheel like the legs of a spider touched by a hot needle. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw with a strike of terror that one eye was the wrong color, and then he started talking himself down, muttering and gasping things that had meaning for him, like grape popsicle and their daughter Judy and my name is Gladiator, my name is Gladiator, my name is Gladiator. Until finally his spider-fingered hands pulled the pickup off at the next exit and Jeremy stopped at a gas station to get a cup of coffee.
He left the truck parked at the far corner of the lot, its bug-smeared grill aimed toward I-20.
It is nearly one o’clock by Jeremy’s watch. In this pretend playhouse, with the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’ now cranking from the speakers and the flamehaired girl taking her turn on the pole, the Hispanic dentist has had enough beers, even of the watered variety, to be swaying in his chair. Miss Ponytail is always a tit’s touch away from him, guarding her gold mine. Jeremy has been to three other joints like this tonight. The first and second had a security guard out front, patrolling the parking lot, the third had floodlights and video cameras up on the corners of the building, but this one out in an industrial area is a windowless cinderblock slab designated by a portable sign on wheels to be Club Salvaje, Where The Wild Angels Play. There are lights in the parking lot, but they’re angled so they throw huge pools of black shadow amid the cars, SUVs and trucks. Up on the building itself are two video cameras aimed down at the front door, which might have been a problem except for the fact that Jeremy thinks they’re fakes because no red Record lights are showing. He thinks this joint is too cheap, too temporary, to afford a real video security system. The batteries for the false lights have probably burned out.
He needs money. He’s used his credit card too much as it is, for gas, food and motel rooms; it was on the critical list when he left Temple, and pretty soon it’s going to be shut down. If he doesn’t have enough cash, the police will be called and that won’t help him any. He was out last night, hitting some other strip clubs, spending his money on the crappy beer because they won’t let him sit in these places if he doesn’t buy something. But no opportunities had come up. He hasn’t eaten today, saving his last few dollars for tonight. He watches the Hispanic dentist, and he wonders where in the lot is the man’s car parked.
If you have any doubt about what you’re doing, Gunny had said when Jeremy was back in the pickup with a styrofoam cup of coffee and a Milky Way bar, know that you’re making a new life for yourself. You’re coming out of retirement. How does that feel?
Jeremy hadn’t answered, because if he did he would be talking to himself. His fingers were okay now, his hands back to what they were. He checked his eye in the rearview mirror and found that it too had returned to normal.
You’ve missed being useful, said Gunny. Being needed for a task. A mission. Being the go-to guy. That was everything to you, wasn’t it?
Jeremy slid down a little in his seat and watched the passage of traffic going east and west on I-20.
Everything, Gunny repeated. Well, you’ve got a mission again. Maybe you’re not as good as you used to be, but hey…who is? This time Gunny didn’t pause for a response. You’re still very talented. Very able. And you still enjoy the hunt, don’t you?
“Yes,” Jeremy said, before he could think not to.
They trained you and fed you and built you and set you loose. They created you to be what you are. What did they expect you to do, after they didn’t need you anymore?
“I don’t know,” said Jeremy.
But they do still need you. They need men like you to step up and defend the honor of every veteran who put their boots in that dust over there. Who left their families, and who came back changed from when they went. Who died over there, or who came back as good as dead, like Chris. You think anybody in that band ever fought for their country? You think they ever would? So they get up on their stage, on their platform, and make their accusations and their pronouncements, and play their music—which is shitty music, really—and people like them screw everything up until the flag looks dirty and fighting for your country looks like the act of a criminal. Are you a criminal because you carried out your missons? Does following orders make you a criminal?
Jeremy shook his head. No, it does not. Definitely not.
He wasn’t sure if he’d spoken aloud or if he hadn’t, but Gunny could hear him.
This is not just about that shitty band, Gunny said after a stretch of silence. Not just about smearing garbage on the memory of men like Chris. This is about you. Are you listening?
From Jeremy: I am.
Gunny said, This is your new beginning. You do this right—you be smart and careful—and you can live the dream. Every once in a while they bring you out of that white stone villa on the beach in Mexico somewhere, give you a target and you go hunting. You spend three or four days in the field, you send the bullet, and they heap praise and money on your head. And you perform a service for them, something they can’t do on their own. Something they have to keep off the books. Dangerous? Sure. Could you get yourself killed, or strung up by the heels and cut up so bad you’d want to die? Absolutely. But where were you on Friday night, Jeremy? Cutting yourself up, weren’t you? Living in misery and dying in sadness. So what do you have to lose from this point onward? And weigh that very carefully against what there is to be gained, won’t you?
That Gunny had a silver tongue, Jeremy thought as he stared at the highway through the waves of shimmering heat. That Gunny made everything sound so possible. No…inevitable would be the right word.
To get where you want to go, Gunny continued, you have to earn your passage. It’s not enough that one of them is dead. Not nearly enough. Think of them as being target practice. But don’t fuck up again, Jeremy. Do you hear?
“I hear,” Jeremy answered. He had a question to ask, and now was the time: “How many do I need to kill?”
I’ll tell you when to stop. Did you know that your candy is melting?
Jeremy looked down. The Milky Way, which he’d unpeeled from its wrapper, was oozing in dark sticky strands along his hand. When he looked to the right, he knew that Gunny would no longer be there; Gunny, after all, was a prowler and couldn’t stay still very long.
Gunny had come to him on Saturday morning, after the failed suicide of Friday night. It had been a slow insertion, much as a sniper might creep in yard after yard under a ghillie suit that resembled nothing more than a bed of dry grass and dead leaves. At first Gunny had been a faint image in the bathroom mirror, next a pallid shape against a sand-colored wall, then a quickly-glimpsed human figure standing in a corner, and finally a revelation of the death angel’s art, sitting in the chair where it had masqueraded as Chris the night before.
Jeremy had stared at Gunny, at the handsome sharp features and slightly-twisted mouth ready to snap out a command, at the straight-backed posture and slim wiry musculature in the ever-pressed uniform. Jeremy was more fascinated than fearful, more awed than afraid. He stood his ground in the dim room, and he said calmly, “You’re not real.”
Gunny’s eyes had just fixed on him, the direct gaze of a man who is supremely confident of his own physical power. Seconds passed, yet the mouth did not speak.
“Not real,” Jeremy repeated.
And then Gunny had smiled in that way Jeremy remembered; it was almost startling, like seeing a block of ice suddenly crack. It didn’t hold very long, and Gunny’s face settled back into its blank rigidity. Pett, said Gunny in the exact same voice Jeremy knew, I’m as real as you need me to be. Now don’t you have some work to get done?
Gunny had lingered there for a short while, but in the space of a ragged breath or a slow eyeblink the figure was gone and Jeremy was left staring dumbly at an empty chair.
He knew what he wanted, and he knew what he needed to do. He wanted to live, and he needed to prove he was still worth something to someone…even if just to the shade of Gunny. The work to get done: packing some clothes in a bag, putting his rifle in its carrying case, taking the ammo and his automatic pistol and everything he needed out to the metal storage box in the back of his truck. Then going to the library, checking the Internet for The Five’s website and writing down their schedule. The Curtain Club in Dallas tonight. El Paso next Friday night.
What was life, without a purpose?
Sitting in the truck facing I-20 with the melted candy bar all over his hand, Jeremy thought of something Gunny had just said: And you still enjoy the hunt, don’t you?
For a sniper, the hunt was everything. It was what you had trained so hard for. What you lived, ate, and breathed for. What you dreamed about, when you slept. And when you had known what it was like to hunt a man, and had lived through it and been victorious as many times as Jeremy had, there was nothing better. Not even peace.
So, for sure…he still enjoyed the hunt.
He knew exactly why he was sitting with his truck facing I-20. He was watching for their van and their trailer. Wouldn’t be hard to spot. He expected they would be leaving Sweetwater today before eleven o’clock, which was the Lariat’s checkout time. They would be travelling east, back toward Austin, where their website said they were based. He would wait for them, and follow when they passed.
He did enjoy the hunt.
When he was in the swimming pool, there in the dark, the girl had crept up on him.
“Hi,” she’d said, and he’d known who it was from her voice. Instantly he’d stopped his slow stroke through the water and glided over to the far side, where he’d hooked his elbows up on the concrete and hung there, his face hidden from her.
But she came nearer still, and after a few more seconds she’d said, “Lots of stars up there.”
He hadn’t answered. Wouldn’t answer. He had nothing to speak to her that his rifle could not say better. But it was so close on his lips, so close, for him to say bitterly, You think you know the truth about Iraq, bitch? You have no fucking idea.
After a while, when he’d realized the girl had walked away, Jeremy had gotten out of the pool in his wet Fruit-Of-The-Looms and gone back to his room, where he’d expected—or hoped—to find Gunny waiting for him, but the room had been empty. So he’d channel-surfed across a TV-scape of movies and infomercials and reality shows until he’d gotten weary of looking, but he’d slept with the Made In China remote control in his hand and the TV soundlessly displaying a world in constant motion.
At the center of the pulse of purple light and throbbing noise that passes as music, Jeremy watches Miss Ponytail and the Hispanic dentist. A guy in a wife-beater T-shirt and chinos, a dark-colored ball cap on his head and chains around his neck, comes over to say something to Miss Ponytail, maybe wave a bill at her for a lapdance, but she gives him a tight catty look and says something back and he shrugs and moves away in apparent rejection, heading into the further darkness. The Hispanic dentist grins wider, glad to be her one-and-only. He peels off some more money for her, and again she grinds his front yard with an expert ass.
On that Sunday Jeremy sat in his pickup truck watching I-20, the van and the U-Haul never went past. He’d waited until almost sunset, and then he’d decided he should drive back to the Lariat. Their ride was gone. Where were they? I think I left my cellphone by the pool, Jeremy had told the woman at the front desk. I was talking to a girl out there last night, she said she was a musician with a band. Did she check out?
This mornin’, came the reply. No, nobody found a cellphone anywhere.
Jeremy had thanked her and walked back to the truck.
He didn’t have to ask for Gunny’s opinion. He already figured they’d gone on to El Paso. Forward, instead of backward. Their website had said they were playing on Friday night at a place called the Spinhouse. He was surprised, because he’d expected them to pack up and go home.
It’s not enough that one of them is dead, he’d thought as he’d started off westward again. Not nearly enough.
He’d found a cheap little motel on the eastern edge of El Paso, had spent most of Monday sleeping and watching TV and had called the Spinhouse that afternoon. His question had been: Is The Five still playing there on Friday?
Yeah, the guy had told him. The Soul Cages start up about eight-thirty, The Five ought to be up around ten. It’s ten bucks before Friday, twelve at the door. Gonna be a good time, come on by.
Jeremy had said he would look forward to it.
Now, something has changed in the little play he is observing. The Hispanic dentist is leaning in, watching Miss Ponytail write with a pen on the inside of what appears to be a book of matches. Giving him her phone number? Setting up something more than a lapdance? Then she gives him a quick kiss on the cheek, a see-you-later kind of thing, and he stands up and staggers his way between the tables to the door. As soon as he’s out, Miss Ponytail slides herself down beside a heavy-set gray-haired man in a UTEP T-shirt and puts her flirt on at full beam, but by then Jeremy is on his feet and heading across the room. He tries to make himself invisible, a slow-moving nobody in no hurry to go anywhere, but the truth is that he’s tense inside, his stomach is roiling, and he’s not just a little bit scared of what he has to do.
He steps outside, lets the door close but stands tight against it for a moment. If someone else comes out in the next couple of minutes, he’ll need to scrub this particular mission. In the parking lot are eleven cars, pickups and SUVs including his own truck. Jeremy’s target is walking among the vehicles, heading toward the right. Jeremy has no more time to think about it. He takes two quick strides forward, crouches down alongside a red Chevy Tahoe and spends a few seconds listening to the hammer of his heartbeat. Then he creeps after the man, and as he moves he takes from his pocket what he didn’t want the stripclub girl to feel: a cake of heavy soap knotted up in a gym sock.
He peers up across a windshield and sees the Hispanic dentist standing beside a red Lexus, fumbling with his keys. Sweat is on Jeremy’s face; after all the times he’s set up shots with his sniper rifle, after all his association with violence and sudden death, he’s never assaulted and robbed anyone before and never dreamed in his life that he ever would. But the time has come, and he has to move right now.
The man presses a button on his keychain and the lights blink as the doors unlock. Jeremy starts to stand up and rush forward, swinging his makeshift cudgel at the back of the man’s skull, but before he can do that another figure suddenly comes out alongside Jeremy’s own truck, which is parked just across from the Lexus, and a voice says, “Hey, man, got a light?”
The Hispanic dentist turns toward the sound and weaves a little on his feet.
Jeremy waits, the sock gripped in his fist.
“A light, man,” says the guy with the wife-beater T-shirt, the dark-colored ball cap and the chains around his neck. He is holding out a cigarette.
The Hispanic dentist of course does have a light. He brings forth the book of matches Miss Ponytail just gave him, and as he offers it to the guy in the ball cap the third man in this drama, who wears a dark green knit cap and has shoulder-length brown hair, comes up behind the Hispanic dentist from where he’s circled around and delivers a vicious blow to the back of his quarry’s head with what Jeremy figures must be a blackjack of some kind. Before the man can fall, the two jackals are on him, and Jeremy watches them drag the body through a broken section of chainlink fence and down into a culvert on this side of a darkened warehouse with big trucks parked at the loading docks.
It has taken only a few seconds. Jeremy crouches down again and ponders the situation. A signal was passed from Miss Ponytail to the guy in the ball cap, for sure. The matchbook was given not to arrange a meeting, but to set up a robbery. Jeremy wonders if it’s the girl’s last night at this particular club, and if a police check might find other men were knocked out and robbed just before she pulled up her g-string and hit the road with her two buddies. Whatever, the problem is that Jeremy’s money is being stolen while Jeremy crouches here against the side of a Ford Explorer trying to figure out what to do.
Fuck this, Jeremy thinks, as anger sets in. I’m not letting them take what’s mine.
They’re going to be fast about it. Get his wallet and maybe his watch too, if it’s got any resale value. Hope the dumb fuck doesn’t have any gold teeth.
Jeremy knows he has three weapons: the soap in the sock, his Corps training, and the element of surprise. If he wants the money, he has to get the job done. So he moves forward, his teeth gritted, and when he reaches the broken section of fence he can see them down there in the culvert, one going through the man’s pants pockets and the other taking the watch off the right wrist.
One says something to the other, and the guy spoken to gives a short, wheezy laugh.
Before the laugh can end, Jeremy has slid down the side of the culvert and swung the soap-cake weapon against the side of the guy’s green-knit capped head. There is a very satisfying thunk like woodblocks hitting together. The laughing thief is not laughing any more. He makes a strangled sound and as the man falls Jeremy sees blood drooling from his mouth and figures part of a bitten-off tongue has gone down his throat. The thief in the ball cap looks up and freezes, but he proves to be faster than Jeremy would’ve thought because in the next instant he scuttles away from the body before Jeremy can swing at him; then he turns and runs like flaming hell along the culvert in the opposite direction.
At once Jeremy is after him, because if that bastard’s got the wallet then all this would be for shit.
The guy is fast, no doubt about it. Fear tends to speed the feet. But Jeremy is determined, and though he starts gasping for breath within the next ten seconds he can’t let the thief steal his money. He tries his hardest to overtake the man, yet he can’t quite get the boost of power his legs need. He is a very long way from his memory—fond, now—of running six miles in the rain at Camp Pendleton as fast as he could haul it.
If the Corps taught him any one thing, it was tenacity. It was stick to something until the something gives. The culvert keeps going on and on, but suddenly Jeremy’s tenacity pays off, because the thief breaks his rhythm and tries to scramble up the sloping side on the left to get out. He reaches up and grabs a handful of weeds, one basketball sneaker slides on the dusty concrete seeking a grip, and then Jeremy is upon him. A swing of the soap cracks against the thief’s left knee and buckles the leg. The guy says, “Oh man, oh man, come on,” in a boyishly pleading voice, and Jeremy figures he must be just a kid, really, but that doesn’t matter; this will be a night for the kid’s education.
Jeremy hauls the thief down by his neckchains, and when the kid turns and kicks at him with his good leg and hits Jeremy a glancing blow on the left ribcage it does not go well for him.
Jeremy avoids a fist, twists his body to deflect a knee to the groin, and then he hits the guy across the face with his cake of soap and there is a popping noise as a nose explodes. He swings again, hits him below the black streaming mass on his face and from the sound of it probably has claimed all of his front teeth. A third strike bangs into the guy’s shoulder, but by then the body is sinking down without resistance and the thief starts crying and puking at the same time there at the bottom of the endless culvert.
“Oh man…oh man,” the kid is saying. If Jeremy didn’t know what it was he wouldn’t recognize it as English.
Jeremy tries to speak. First he has to get his wind back. His ribs are going to be bruised tomorrow. He almost swings the weapon again, out of pure rage, but he decides the thief has had enough education for one night. “You got his wallet?” Jeremy asks.
“OhmanI’mfucked,” comes the garbled answer.
“His wallet, douchebag. Where is it?”
A trembling, bloody hand that has been clasped over a face unfit for public viewing digs into a pocket and comes up with a thin little piece of leather. Jeremy takes it. When he removes the money he realizes that this is not the Hispanic dentist’s wallet, but the thief’s own because he’s holding a measly trio of bills that he can’t make out in the dark.
“Where’s his wallet?” Jeremy demands. “The guy in the suit.”
But he’s lost his audience, because the kid has leaned back against the culvert’s side with both hands pressed to his face. Jeremy pats him down, finds some change in one pocket, a set of car keys in another. He keeps the change. The empty wallet goes into the weeds. Jeremy turns away and walks back to where the Hispanic man is still lying unconscious and the other thief is curled up on his side.
Beside the man’s right leg is the dropped wallet. It has a satisfying weight of cash, which Jeremy promptly removes. Somebody could make some money off all the credit cards in there, but Jeremy’s not that kind of player. He tosses the emptied wallet aside and then he kneels down and checks the man’s heartbeat. It’s strong enough; better a headache than a heart attack. The man begins to groan and stir, and Jeremy decides it’s time to make an exit.
First, though, he takes the other thief’s wallet and comes up with four bills. There are another two bills and change in the right pocket, along with a very nasty little length of black leather with a lead cylinder sewn up inside. He’ll count his money when he gets back to the motel.
He throws the bloodied gym sock with its weight of soap as far as he can into the night, and then he climbs out of the culvert, goes through the broken section of fence, walks to his truck as if strolling through an English garden, and drives away. He expects Gunny to be there, to say Good work or Nice job or something, but Gunny does not show. It’s okay, Jeremy thinks. Another thing they taught him in the Corps was the value of self-reliance.
On the drive back, through streets nearly empty, Jeremy has to pull over into a restaurant’s parking lot because a fit of shaking has come upon him and cold sweat has exploded from his flesh. He can’t get his breath, he thinks maybe he’s got a cracked rib and what is he going to do now? But he sits holding onto the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white, and when at last he takes a deep breath and sees he’s pulled up in front of a Popeye’s Fried Chicken joint he has to give out a broken laugh because God has such a twisted sense of humor. A mean streak, really.
He decides he’s all right. No cracked rib. Just the thrumming of violence through his nerves and the smell of blood up his nose.
In his motel room, under the light bar in the bathroom, Jeremy finds himself richer by three hundred twenty-eight dollars and seventeen cents. Not a bad night’s work.
He congratulates himself by buying a Dr Pepper and two bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips from the vending machines down by the office, and when at last he passes into a twilight sleep he feels well-fed.
ELEVEN.
At six o’clock on Saturday morning the Scumbucket pulled away from the La Quinta Inn on Remcon Circle in El Paso. George was at the wheel, Ariel sat in the front passenger seat, Nomad and Terry were behind them and Berke had her usual place. There was no joking around, no cutting comments flying back and forth; in fact, it was way too early to do anything but mutter. It had been a hard gig at the Spinhouse last night, a series of frustrations. Today they had about two hundred and eighty miles to travel before three o’clock. They were heading in a northwesterly direction up I-10 into New Mexico, and would follow it when it turned off almost due west for Tucson.
The call from Ash had come on Wednesday afternoon, about an hour after their interview on KTEP’s local radio talkshow. The Saturday night gig at Fortunato’s in Tucson was still open if they wanted it, he’d told George. And if they went that far, they might as well go on to San Diego and the rest of the venues, finish up the tour, but it was the band’s decision so if they needed some time to think about it they could let him know in the morning.
“How about the situation in Sweetwater?” George had asked as he lay on the bed in the room he shared with Nomad and Terry. This time, John Charles got the rollaway. “Did they find the shooter?”
There’d been no progress, Ash had told him. He said he had another call in to Detective Rios but was waiting to hear back.
George had thanked him, and when Ash had ended the call George said to his roomies, “We need to get Ariel and Berke in here and figure out what we’re going to do after the Spinhouse. We’re still on the schedule in Tucson and Ash is talking about us finishing the tour. What do you think?”
“Okay with me,” Nomad had said. “If everybody else says yes.” He’d lived in Tucson for two years in his early twenties, working at Budget Rent-A-Car at the airport and playing with a couple of bands that never got off the ground. It pleased him to go back to his old stomping grounds with some success under his wings.
“Me too,” Terry agreed, but what was foremost on his mind was getting to Eric Gherosimini’s house outside Albuquerque and seeing Lady Frankenstein.
“Let’s find out what they say.” George had reached back and knocked twice on the wall, and in a few seconds Ariel had opened the connecting door.
It had not been such a tough decision. They were professionals, and the show must go on.
That didn’t mean the show was going to go perfectly, or even well. As George drove the Scumbucket under the glare of a cloudless sky and between craggy brown mountain ranges, the band lay back in a silent reflection of the night before.
The Spinhouse had been packed, the merchandise and CDs had sold at a brisk pace, but the troubles had started when the lead singer of the Soul Cages—angry at being displaced as headliners for the night and not a little bit drunk—made a remark to Nomad backstage that a lot of Mike Davis’s fans were out there, they would’ve been smart to sell Beelzefudd CDs and T-shirts instead of The Five’s shit. Nomad had given him a glare that could melt glass, though he’d held his tongue and temper. He’d been in bands that had been knocked down from headliner status before, he knew what that felt like, but for two nickels and a cup of warm piss from a leper he would’ve punched the oh-so-groovy young fucker’s RayBans right off his face.
Then there was the show itself. Nomad had decided not to do the party song ‘Bad Cop’ and start it off with ‘Something From Nothing’, which rocked pretty hard but slowed down for a quieter chorus:
When things fall apart and the story comes to its end,
You have to make something out of nothing again.
Which was about the way they all felt.
Within a few minutes, Nomad had nearly put a foot through his malfunctioning monitor speaker before Ariel could calm him down. Her own monitor started going out during the third song, she couldn’t hear herself and she was drifting off-key and screwing up the rhythm too. George had huddled with the tech guy, a well-meaning aged hippie who had tripped over the fantastic light way too many times and as a result moved in slow-motion suitable for an alternate plane of existence, trying to make sense out of the tangle of cables and connections in the beatup mixing console. Everything had looked and sounded good in the light of day at sound check, but in the dark with six mirrorballs spinning at the ceiling, the noise of contained thunder from Berke’s drums, the hollering of beer-stewed fans and the speaker system throwing out shrieks and growls as it neared imminent overload and fuse blowout, the console revealed itself to be as addled and time-warped as its kaftan-clad master.
While George rode the sick console, Terry was trying to cover Mike’s line on the songs they’d agreed really needed the bass bottom, and he’d missed a couple of cues for his own keyboard parts. That was shocking in itself, because Terry never screwed up his parts; the realization came pretty quickly that he was trying too hard, and Nomad told him to concentrate on his usual job and forget the bass, which pissed Berke off because she thought it was disrespectful to Mike’s memory, like his part could just be thrown away and nobody would care.
But when the time came for Berke’s drum solo, at the midpoint of ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, she turned her anger into energy. With the opening blasts from her double crash cymbals the others knew to step back out of range. The stage was hers, and for almost three minutes she owned not only that platform but every ounce of turbulent air between the Spinhouse’s black-painted walls. She put her head down and became a machine, starting up a funk groove with kick and snare, complicating it with hi-hats, buzz rolling, double stroke hits, then breaking into a free-form conversation between the ride cymbal, the kick and the high crack of snare rimshots, speeding up and slowing down, speeding up and slowing down, slower, slower, now into a brassy click-clack clockwork of hi-hats with the kick drum thudding below them, adding a display of triplets and single stroke sevens and returning to a strutting funk groove in the tradition of her father’s soulful style before he lost his mind. With a brief shake of her head she waved Terry off at the two-minute mark when he came back onstage to add his keyboard part, and he drew away from the blue and red spotlights. Whatever she needed to say, she was determined to make it heard by her effort alone.
In the forty seconds or so that followed, Berke took her playing to the edge. She sat astride her throne at the center of a storm, and as her hands and her drumsticks blurred she went into a complex pattern between her floor toms, her snare, the kick and the sheet-brass Zildjian crashes. Nomad saw from his position the little lights of cellphone cameras sparkling out there in the dark. She was going so hard he thought she was going to destroy her kit, and as one drumstick snapped on the edge of the snare she reached into her holster of spares, drew another one out and kept going without missing a half-beat. Sweat gleamed on her face, her eyes were closed, she was a red-lit torch high somewhere in the drummer’s nirvana. The pitching hard-struck cymbals shimmered with blue and purple light, the black walls spoke back to her the thunder she was speaking, and the other members of The Five understood that furious wild language: I am somebody, I am here, I am somebody, I am here and I have earned this moment.
Dig it.
Berke pounded a military tattoo on the snare like a machine-gun burst, and then she suddenly raised her arms with the sticks clenched in her hands and there was only silence. In the next second it was filled by the applause and shouts of approval from the audience—which was a good thing, because many audiences didn’t give a shit about drum solos—but as the alcohol-fuelled admiration went on Berke did not lower her arms. The others knew: she was waiting for the low thump of Mike’s bass guitar to bring her back to the steady 4/4 beat of ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’. But it didn’t come, the seconds passed, and just as Nomad, Ariel and Terry walked back onstage Berke lowered her arms and picked up the song as if she’d been listening to her bandmate lay down the bottom like he’d done in nearly three hundred gigs across thirty-six states and five Canadian provinces.
From then on, Berke had returned to her role in The Five: the engine of rhythm driving the music forward, supplying the fills and an occasional quick display of flash just for the hell of it. But whatever the tempo, she was always where she needed to be.
When the show was over there came the people asking to get backstage, who were the same everywhere except for wearing different faces. First were the honest-to-God true fans, the ones who bought the CDs and merchandise and knew the songs, and they wanted to take pictures and say how sorry they were about Mike and to ask how Catch As Kukulkan was selling because that was great, man, really great, the best ever. Thank you for being here, they said, and they meant it. Then came the people who knew the Spinhouse manager or had connections with this or that local entertainment rag and just wanted to be seen going backstage, and from this group there might be comments about how absolutely fucking amazing the new Death Cab For Cutie CD was, or how they’d really come to see The Soul Cages but you guys were right up there, almost as good. In this group there would always be several hot girls looking for action with whomever they could snatch, and a couple of snaky guys wanting to see if the band “needed anything”, and usually one fugly bitch with bad breath and charcoal black around her eyes asking up in Nomad’s face why they weren’t as popular as some band like Ra Ra Riot.
Unlike the night in Dallas, The Five had packed up their equipment and driven back to the La Quinta Inn without any further distractions. They had gone to sleep like tired old geezers, because tomorrow—today, by now—was going to be tough.
They went through a McDonald’s drive-in at an exit about sixteen miles out of El Paso to get breakfast. Nomad insisted on opening the wrapper to check that his Egg McMuffin was cheeseless, as ordered, before they went on. Then George got the Scumbucket back on I-10, hauling the trailer, and on both sides of the highway the sun shone hot and glaring off the hard yellow earth stubbled with spiny brown vegetation and the sparse thin triumph of an ironwood tree.
Ariel unwrapped and ate one of the granola bars she’d brought along. She washed it down with a drink from her bottle of silver needle tea, and then she looked back and said, “Berke, can I see Mike’s song?”
Berke roused herself to activity, unzipped her travel bag and brought out the green notebook. She leaned forward to pass it to Ariel, but Nomad—his eyes obscured by his sunglasses—intercepted it before it changed hands.
Ariel waited while Nomad opened the notebook to the last few pages and re-read what Mike had written:
Welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it.
Write a song about it, just keep it under four minutes.
Nomad looked at all the scratched-out lines that had given birth to the surviving two. His eyes went to the Girl at the well written there, like a phrase of…
“Inspiration,” he said.
“What?” Ariel asked.
“Here. Where he wrote Girl at the well.” Nomad showed her, and Terry tilted forward to get a look at it too. “I don’t think that’s a title. I mean…it doesn’t have to be. I think it’s something he wrote down for inspiration.” He decided to tell them the rest of it. “Early Sunday morning, after the Curtain Club, Mike told me that girl spoke to him. Said ‘welcome’ to him, and it got to him because…” Nomad shrugged. “Because he said he felt like she was glad to see him. I guess he didn’t get that from his family very much. Maybe it’s why he started with that one word, out of anything else he could’ve chosen.”
“He wrote that because of the girl?” George asked, glancing at them in the rearview mirror.
“I’m just saying, I think he chose that word because she spoke to him. Because that’s what she said, and he got something out of it.”
“Or made something out of it, you mean,” Berke countered.
“Whatever. I know as much about this as you do.” He continued the notebook’s journey to Ariel.
There followed a few seconds of silence, during which Ariel studied the lines. George thought there was a lot of traffic on I-10 this morning, and most of it was passing him. The Scumbucket was pulling as hard as it could. He looked into the sideview mirror and saw behind him an array of tractor-trailer trucks, SUVs, pickups and cars all heading to points west.
“Kinda strange,” Terry said quietly. Today he was wearing one of his favorite vintage shirts, a psychedelic eyeshock of blue paisleys against an orange background. “You travel with a guy so long, but you realize there’s so much you didn’t know about him. I never knew Mike wanted to write a song.”
Berke took a drink of her bottled water before she spoke. “At the gas station…” Her voice sounded strained, so she stopped and tried again. “At the gas station, he said nobody had ever asked him to try writing. He said…if he started a new song everybody could be part of, it would be good for the band. I guess he liked your idea, John.”
Nomad didn’t return a comment. He was thinking about that girl. That damned girl with her ladle of well-water and her face hidden in the shadow of her raggedy straw hat. She was creepy, even now, even at this distance. He wished he’d never thrown his fit and gotten out anywhere near that place.
“Hey, Berke,” Terry said, and twisted around to look at her. “Have you ever wanted to write a song?”
“Never. It’s not what I do.”
“You could write a few lines. Add something to what Mike set down. We all could, and we could come up with…” He stopped, because he realized where he was going.
“The last song,” Nomad finished for him. His original idea had been for them to work on a song together to keep from falling into the squabbling that he’d seen poison the final weeks of many band’s careers. As the emperor of this band, to give them a common purpose over and above the grind of the gigs. And—a wild desperate hope—to change both Terry’s mind and that of the Little Genius by creating what Berke called, and maybe rightly, a ‘Kumbaya song’.
Now, though, the idea seemed more like creating a legacy for Mike, something that would go on without him. But something that he had been courageous enough to start, and for sure it had taken courage for Mike to step out of his comfort zone and put those words on paper.
Nobody wanted to be rejected, or laughed at, or thought a fool. Nomad knew that was what you risked when you threw yourself into the wilds of creation, where often you didn’t know where you were going but hoped you’d find the right path somewhere to lead you out. Nomad had been there many times, and so had Ariel and Terry. It was some scary shit, to feel lost in yourself.
But—bottom line—that was the life he’d chosen. Or had chosen him, he wasn’t sure which. Had chosen all of them, the same. Deal with it or not, make or break, do or die, the world still went on. Just as the world would go on without Mike.
“We should finish it,” Nomad said. “All of us, adding something.”
“All of us?” George frowned. “I already told you, I can’t write anything!”
“You can try. Mike did.”
“And the point of this is…?”
“The point is, you might think of yourself as a manager only, but I think of you as a pretty valuable member of this band. Until you pack up and leave, I mean. So because I’m the boss of the band, I say you contribute to this song. I don’t care what it is. Two or three lines, or two or three words. But this is going to be a group effort.” Nomad took off his sunglasses, the better to match stares with Berke. “If it’s our last song as the current lineup—and I guess it will be—then I want a part of everybody in the lyrics.” He had a sudden energizing idea: “We can play it at our last concert back in Austin. Last show, last song. How about that?”
“It won’t make any sense,” Berke said. “It’ll end up in fucking chaos.”
“Mike didn’t seem to think so,” he reminded her. “You said he told you it would be good for us.”
“Yeah, well, Mike isn’t here to tell us where he was going with it.”
“I have some ideas,” Ariel said, and everybody else shut up. Nomad knew he might be The Five’s leader and frontman, but Ariel was no doubt the band’s creative soul. “I was thinking…maybe…” After writing or co-writing nearly seventy songs with Blue Fly, The Shamans, Strobe, The Blessed Hours and The Five, she still always felt a little uncomfortable being in the spotlight of attention, as if she feared embracing it would open her to the hurt of it being taken away. “I was thinking,” she went on, because they were all expecting something, “that Mike might’ve been writing about the music business. The limitations, maybe. This part about keeping the song under four minutes.” They all knew every music producer wanted singles, which rarely tracked over three-fifty-nine. “See, he’s wanting to write a song about the world and everything in it, but he’s limited by the four minutes,” Ariel said. “Or…it might be a song about change, or choices.”
Everybody was still listening. Some loose flap inside the air-conditioner went thwack…thwack…thwack.
“Change,” Ariel continued, “in that he’s saying it’s impossible to write about everything in the world inside four minutes, so to make it fit…either the world itself has to be changed…or perceived in a different way…and that choices have to be made as to what to…wait, let me try something.” She opened her fringed-leather bag and brought out her pen, which wrote with purple ink, and her own gemstone-decorated notebook. She found an empty page, paused in thought for only a few seconds, wrote a line, scratched it out, wrote again, then another short scratch-out, after which the purple ink flowed without interruption. “Okay,” she said. “How does this sound as a next line?” She read: “Got to figure what to keep, and what to leave behind, and like life it’s never easy.” When she looked up, she found Nomad’s face. “Rough draft,” she said, and he noted that today her eyes seemed to be the blue where a continent ends at the mysterious deep.
Thwrip…thwrip…thwrip, spoke the air-conditioner.
“See?” Nomad said to George, and included Berke in his appraisal. “How hard is that?”
They declined to respond. Nomad slid his sunglasses on, Berke leaned back in her seat, folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes, Terry listened to his iPod and George whacked the air-conditioner with the palm of his hand to clear its congestion.
Ariel gave her attention once more to the song.
She thought it needed something here, after the like life, it’s never easy. Before you went into the second verse, it needed another line or two. Some other statement of choice, or change. Something short and decisive.
Whatever it ought to be, she couldn’t find it yet. But she had time. They all had plenty of time to work on it. Tomorrow…the next day…next week…it would come together, in time.
She closed both the green notebook and her own, and she put her pen away. She gazed out at the brilliant azure sky, the yellow earth blotched with browns and grays, the march of mountains across the horizon. I have come a long way, she thought. We all have…but me, especially me. She caught Nomad’s reflection in a trick of sun and glass. I love my family, she thought. I love them, just the way they are. What am I going to do without them?
Because choice and change were in the air. The choices of Terry and George to go their own ways, and change that could not be stopped. Already it had begun, with Mike’s death. John and Berke would try to put together a new band, with a new name, and she would stand with them but it would never be the same as it was now. Could never be. The same river can never be crossed twice, she knew. The flowing water has no memory of footprints.
When she closed her eyes against the glare, Ariel saw what she had left behind: a large two-story brick house with a wide green lawn and a curving driveway made of paving stones, and at the end of that driveway a white Jaguar and a dark blue BMW convertible. A house that was not a home, for inside it she had drifted from room to room like a passing shadow. In that house, among those people who had birthed her and raised her and sought to have influence over her, she had been insubstantial. They all fit together—father, mother, older brother and sister—because they spoke the same language, they measured wealth by the thickness of folding green and happiness by the size of the television screen (which happened to be a line from one of the first songs she’d written). They were always so busy. It had been a house of furious ambition, nothing could be still and calm, surely no time for the weakness of introspection. Life was a combat against competitors, a battle of shiny possessions and numbers in bank accounts, and that was the only life they knew.
But Ariel had been the strange one. The one who didn’t ‘get it’, as her father often said. The lazy girl with no ambition. The time-wasting daydreamer. Oh sure, she liked to write her stories and her poems, and pick on that guitar, but really…she’s so quiet, so passive, she can melt into a wall, you don’t know she’s there until you trip over her. Professional young men want vivacious girls, girls with charm and sociability. Well, there was always the hope that the girl would wake up from her lethargy, or her somnambulism, or whatever, and if she’s at all seriously interested in training her voice she’ll apply herself to the operatic disciplines. After all, Madame Giordano did say she has a malleable tone.
Her sister had been the closest to her in age, but six years can become a vast distance. Her brother, the Boston lawyer, rarely visited because their mother hated his wife, a situation that caused rancorous arguments between her parents since the girl was the daughter of one of Edward Collier’s partners. Ariel—christened ‘Susan’, but who’d taken that name from a British nanny who used to play guitar for her when she was a little girl—watched her parents descend into a pattern of chaos, a script of drinking and fighting that made her believe things had gone wrong between them years before she was born. It seemed to center around Ariel’s brother, Andrew. But nothing was ever solved in the uneasy calm after the turbulence, and Ariel came to realize at an early age that her mother and father both needed the other to flail them with recriminations, to atone for some secret guilt or acts of disloyalty.
Except for the presence of a number of nannies, she was alone for as long as she could recall. Alone in the deepest sense, alone as if she had been left in a basket at the front gate of this house within salt-scent of Manchester harbor and taken in by strangers who thought they could put their thumbprints upon a spirit. She had nothing against possessions, against the shiny and the beautiful and the faddish, but she did have something against becoming a slave to them.
Wasn’t there more to life than an existence, fevered by this year’s model and passion for a cellphone?
Wasn’t there?
She thought there was. Why she sought peace when her family revelled in chaos, why she valued books that told quiet, meaningful stories and were not written to encourage the application of Genghis Khan’s methods to modern business, why she heard music in the night breeze and saw poems on paper before they were written, she didn’t know. But she did, and what she’d told Felix Gogo was true; she couldn’t remember not hearing some kind of music and wanting to write down what she heard. Or, rather, capture what she heard, which was very often a difficult task because some tunes—like wild animals, or like John Charles for instance—resisted being put into neat small boxes for the pleasure of the public.
Ariel believed that a song was a living thing. It could burst into the world prematurely, ragged and half-formed, yes, but she thought the best of them—the most fully-realized, the most able to go the distance—grew slowly from a seed, gradually developing its heart and mind, over time becoming male or female in its attitude, its swagger or its contemplation. It grew skin lusty or lustrous, it preferred night or day for its rambles, it dressed itself in the leather or suede or gossamer of a million colors. And the ones she remembered being touched by when she was alone and lonely among strangers had some message to give to her. To her, even though it might have been written for a different generation, like ‘Wait For An Answer’ by Heart or ‘The Lady’ by Sandy Denny. They offered her some secret solace, some friendship like a hand on the shoulder, a whisper of I have been where you are, and now where are you going?
Or they gave her a rap to the side of the head, to say Wake up, girl, and get your ass in gear, because the thing that kills is a thing called fear.
Which was also a line from one of her early tunes.
She had been gone from that house and the people who lived there long before she left. It had taken a handsome young man she’d met when she was playing her twelve-string Gibson in the Starbucks on Church Street in Cambridge to actually cut the last ties that held her to her old life. He was starting up a band, had a couple of players together who’d paid their dues in other bands, they were calling this band Blue Fly, and did she maybe want to audition. And he wasn’t promising anything, he’d said, but they had some interest from guys who actually managed hot bands like Big Top and Adam Raised A Cain, so there was that.
Awesome, she remembered saying.
She thought it had been a relief to her mother and father, the day she’d told them she was quitting her job at Barnes & Noble in Brookline, that she was leaving the apartment she shared with two other young women, and that she was driving to Nashville with three ex-members of Blue Fly to start another band. She hoped she might get some session work there, too. She thought it had been a relief for her parents because they never once asked her to reconsider, or said that she was travelling too far from home, or that she wasn’t wise yet to the ways of the world.
Maybe her father was glad that at last she’d discovered her ambition, even if it was unfathomable to him as to how she would make any money; maybe her mother wanted to mourn in solitude the loss of years that no plastic surgeon could replace. Maybe they both too were alone, each in themselves; maybe it was a state of being for the Colliers of Manchester.
Whatever it was, Ariel could not help them, and so she put aside the thing called fear and went out to help herself.
That had been the spring of 2003. Her stay in Nashville had been little more than a year, working with the bands The Shamen and Strobe, before she’d headed to Austin with a new band who called themselves The Blessed Hours, and the rest was herstory.
The morning moved on. In front of the Scumbucket, the long gray stretch of I-10 baked and shimmered. They passed across the desert where it lapped up against truckstops and small towns built around cemeteries. Always mountains stood hazy against the horizon, the sky was cloudless and more white than blue as if the very color of heaven was burning away.
Since Mike’s death, a stop at the gas pumps to fill the Scumbucket’s tank brought everything back in terrifying detail. Berke would no longer leave the van, somebody else had to go get her bottled water for her and whatever else she wanted. Whoever was pumping the gas couldn’t help but look uneasily over their shoulder and scan the far distance, but what they were looking for they didn’t know. Everybody breathed better when the transaction was done and they were back in the Scumbucket pulling away, because the Scumbucket—ugly as it was, worn down and beaten up by the thousands of miles it had carried them—was their protection. But from what, no one could say.
Except for a twenty-minute creepy-crawl when traffic on I-10 was backed up by one of those situations where a car or a truck has broken down and everybody and their dashboard Jesus has to gawk at the wrecker, they made the Tucson city limits in plenty of time. Nomad had always liked Tucson when he’d lived there; it was a beautiful city, artsy-craftsy, bright Mexican colors, the San Xavier del Bac mission, the dry mesquite smell of the Sonoran desert, lots of golf courses drinking that precious water and lots of old people, sure, because it was a retirement haven, but there were lots of goths and metalheads in Tucson too. The University of Arizona kept the funk going. There was a pretty hot music scene, a healthy variety of clubs showcasing different styles, some very good and cheap restaurants and some way cool bars like the Surly Wench Pub and Snuffy’s. So in a way he felt he was back at his second home, though he didn’t care to revisit the grimy “musician’s special” apartment he’d lived in out on South Herbert Avenue.
Nomad had found them a way to save some money this time into Tucson, and he reminded George of the address and how to get there. They were staying for the night with the cousin of one of his old bandmates from Uppercut, which had lived and died within the space of six months, but the cousin was cool, he’d let them rehearse in his garage. The house was in a development northwest of the city. They got there without a problem, said their hellos to the cousin and his wife, unpacked their bags and had time to eat the ham sandwiches and taco chips that were graciously provided for their lunch. Then they turned around again and headed downtown, to the brown brick Fortunato’s on North Fourth Avenue, for their three-o’clock load-in and sound check.
The gear was unloaded, the check went well, management said the ticket sales were off the heezy, and everybody was in their groove. Their boxes of merchandise went into the same room where merchandise boxes of the other bands on the gig, The Yogi Barons and The Bella Kersey Band, were stored. The Five wasn’t on until around nine, so they climbed back into the Scumbucket and returned to the cousin’s house to grab a few hours of sleep, drink a beer or two, meditate over a candle, watch cage fight matches on cable and do whatever they needed to do to get up for the gig, each to their own.
Following a high-energy show by the Yogi Barons, The Five took the stage a little after nine and the pumped-up crowd gave a full-throated response to ‘Something From Nothing’. Without interruption the band went into ‘The Let Down’, another hard rocker opened by Ariel on her white Tempest. The gig was going like clockwork, everybody was loose and easy, the crowd was hollering when you wanted them to let loose and quieter when you wanted them to listen. Berke did her drum solo, cutting back on the time and the frenetics, and she allowed Terry to enter with his keyboard part when he was supposed to. Nomad broke an A string during ‘Your Body Not Your Soul’ but it was okay, he was playing for the angels tonight. Forty minutes later they did ‘When The Storm Breaks’, which earned a big positive, then they left the stage, waited for the audience buildup and returned to finish with a thunderous, wall-shaking version of ‘Blackout of Gretely’.
They met some fans backstage, had pictures taken, and did a quick question-and-answer with entertainment reporter Brad Lowell from The Daily Star, whom they knew from past trips through town. He praised their new CD, said he thought they were on their way to a breakthrough, and he would be the first to say I told you so. He touched only briefly on Mike’s death, but they couldn’t add anything he didn’t already know.
They settled in backstage to watch some of Bella Kersey’s band. They’d played several gigs with her before, and Ariel in particular was a big fan. Bella was in her mid-thirties, had long prematurely gray hair and the face of a serene earth mother, but she could kick out the jams and lay down some howling firepower with her cherry-red 1975 Gretsch Streamliner. The band was a family thing and they lived in Tucson; her husband played bass and her brother played drums. It was awesome to watch Bella work the crowd, her sultry voice soaring over the flaming chords. She punched the air with a fist and kicked it with a bright red cowboy boot. Then after a riotous rocker she went to her pedal steel and, bathed in blue light, did a slow, achingly-beautiful version of Shane McGowan’s ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’.
While Bella was playing, the Little Genius quietly said to Nomad, “I’ll go bring the trailer around.” He went out the stage door and back through the alley where the gear would be loaded.
The Scumbucket was parked in a lot on the next street over. Despite the tragic loss, George was feeling good about things. Anybody who might have been watching would have said he was walking like a man with places to go. The band had been hot tonight, very tight, the merchandise was moving, a check on the website said the CDs were selling now in the hundreds of copies, and the YouTube and MySpace hits were through the roof. Yeah, maybe it did have something to do with the kind of media shine that no band wanted, but there it was. Now there was the Casbah in San Diego to get ready for, and after that on Saturday the 2nd came the Big Show, the make or break, at the Cobra Club in Hollywood. The Sunset Strip, baby! What he had not told them—not yet, but he would—was that two A&R guys, one from Sonic Boom and the other from Manticore, were going to be in the audience. Supposed to be. Let’s hope.
He was going to leave them in good shape, with a future ahead of them. He owed them that much.
He showed his parking pass to the attendant on duty and walked across the lot, under the bright yellow security lights. He fished his keys from his pocket, unlocked the driver’s door and opened it, and he was thinking of finding a supermarket and buying a bottle of wine for their hosts when a hammerblow crashed into his right shoulder.
He thought that somebody had actually come up from behind and struck him, but when he spun around, gasping, no one was there.
George put his left hand to his shoulder. His shirt was wet. There was a hot throbbing pain, rapidly escalating. His shoulder felt knocked out of joint. He looked around, stunned. His glasses hung by one ear. It was getting harder to breathe; the breath had been knocked out of him, too. His heart… Jesus, it was really pumping…
He looked toward the attendant’s hut. Saw the blurred shape of the man sitting on a stool, watching the screen of a small TV.
It came to George’s mind to call out Sir, I need some help please.
But the words never left him, because another hammerblow hit him in the chest and he fell back against the Scumbucket. He tried to draw a breath but all he found was a gurgle of liquid. Something in his chest burned like a white-hot coal. He had to get it out, had to get rid of it, and he put both hands against his chest but he couldn’t reach what he needed to find, his fingers were wet, he couldn’t get his fingers deep enough. He clawed at his chest and he opened his mouth to shout for help but nothing came out, he no longer had a voice.
George staggered. His knees were giving way. He reached out to grab hold of the Scumbucket to keep him on his feet but it was no good, he was falling toward the pavement, and as he twisted and went down he saw in the last of his light his own splayed handprint dark against the battleship gray.
It was just like the logo on their T-shirt, except this one was melting in the warm Tucson night.
TWELVE.
“No, I don’t,” said Nomad.
He was weary and red-eyed. The video camera lights were not kind. Neither were the questions that came from behind them, and the one that had just been thrown at Nomad was John, do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?
“Dumb question, Dave,” the Hispanic police captain sitting at the table between Nomad and Ariel said. “Don’t you think we’ve been over this?”
“All for the public, sir,” Dave the reporter from Fox-KMSB answered. He flashed a thin and humorless smile. “Doing my job.”
“Miss…Bonneway, is it?”
Berke blinked heavily and directed her attention to the young woman who’d spoken. “Bonnevay. With a ‘v’.”
“Okay, got it. Am I hearing you’ve reported to Captain Garza that you were shot at by this sniper when you were in Sweetwater? After your bass player was killed?” The woman, blonde and sharp-featured and maybe twenty-two at the oldest, wore a nametag on the jacket of her beige suit that identified her as being a reporter from the Tucson Citizen.
“That’s right.” Berke had a blinding headache. She’d been sick to her stomach for the past two hours. “Yeah.”
“So can I ask if you reported this to the police in Sweetwater or not?”
“I didn’t, no. I thought… I wasn’t sure it happened.”
“Pardon me? You weren’t sure you were shot at?”
“Jamie, this isn’t an interrogation,” said the public information officer, a dark-haired woman in her mid-forties named Ann Hamilton. She was sitting at the end of the conference room table, beside Terry. Her demeanor was quiet but obviously she could pull up some steel when it was needed. “Miss Bonnevay has explained that to Captain Garza. Next question, please.”
The reporter from KVOA raised his hand, but the Citizen reporter wouldn’t yield. “I’m just thinking out loud, maybe, that we have a sniper on the loose here because the police weren’t properly notified in Texas. Am I wrong about that?”
“Let me answer,” said Garza, whose deep-set ebony eyes fixed upon Jamie Layne and had the effect of nailing her to her chair. He had a jaw like a brick and a pock-marked face and his voice sounded like gravel being churned into cement. “First off, we’re only starting our investigation. Where it’ll take us, we can’t say. Secondly, you’re assuming that Mr. Emerson was shot by the same individual who killed Mr. Davis, which is far from being proven. And, Jamie, tossing around terms like ‘sniper’ is not going to endear you to the police department, I can tell you.”
“It’s a little premature,” the PIO lady added, as a softener.
“Sir?” said the KVOA reporter. “Are you saying this was a coincidence?” It sounded ridiculous, the way he said it.
“I’m saying we have a young man who is fighting for his life.” Garza would not rise to the bait. His expression was Buddha-calm, if Buddha had been born the son of a Juarez cop. The hospital public relations rep had only a few minutes ago left this room on the first floor of University Medical Center, after telling the assembled group of reporters, camera crews and various techs that George Emerson had been delivered by ambulance at eleven forty-eight in critical condition, a little more than two hours ago, and was currently in surgery with two gunshot wounds, one to the right shoulder and one to the upper chest. “Until we have more to go on, we can’t draw any conclusions about anything,” Garza said.
“But they were long range shots, is that correct?” asked the black female reporter from, ironically enough, KGUN.
“I can’t comment on that.”
“Mr. Castillo says he didn’t hear any shots. He was right there when Mr. Emerson was hit. If they weren’t fired at long range, then—”
“Under investigation. No comment.” Garza pointed to the Daily Star reporter whose hand was up. “Go ahead, Paul.”
“Thanks. How about some background on Mr. Emerson? What’s his age, and where’s he from?”
The others looked to Nomad to answer, but Nomad just stared at his own hands clenched together on the table before him. He wasn’t feeling much like an emperor at the moment. He was feeling small and impoverished and lost again on the unmapped road. He was feeling caught between tears and rage and if he was to move his head one inch to the left he might start to weep and one inch to the right he might stand up and throw this fucking table over.
So he sat very, very still.
Terry cleared his throat. “George is thirty-three. He’s from Chicago.”
“Can I get a rundown of all your ages and where you’re from?”
“Old,” Nomad said when it was his turn. He wished he’d kept his sunglasses on, but Garza had told him to take them off when speaking to the press. Just grit your teeth and get through it, Ms. Hamilton had said. He could still feel the stiffnesss of dried stage-sweat in his red T-shirt. “Detroit city,” he added, without looking up or moving his head.
“I think we ought to wind this up,” Ms. Hamilton told the reporters after everyone else had answered the question. “You can imagine what these people are going through.”
“Captain, are you planning on asking the FBI to help the investigation?” It was the woman from the Citizen again.
“That’s not been discussed yet.”
“Sir? Let me rephrase a question,” said the Fox guy. “Does anybody at that table have any idea about why a sniper might be—might be—stalking your band?” He ignored both the abrupt birth of Garza’s fearsome scowl and the outstretched palm of Ms. Hamilton’s hand. “Or are we talking about music critics taking up arms?”
Nomad had had enough of this. His face impassive, he stood up and walked out the door behind Ms. Hamilton. Before he reached the elevators at the end of the hall, he was aware that three other people were walking with him. The police captain caught up with them and eased into the elevator just as the doors were closing. They began rising to the second floor, where they’d been given a private waiting area and a cop was on-duty to keep any reporters from intruding.
“As much as I don’t want to hear that word or see it in print,” Garza said before they reached their floor, “I know the media. They’re going to be talking about a sniper all over this town by sunup, so get used to it. When it goes on the Internet and the networks, it’s everywhere.”
“This is crazy.” Berke had dark purple hollows under her eyes. “Why would somebody be trying to kill us?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
The doors opened. The cop was on a sofa in a small seating area, facing the bank of elevators. He put aside his Sports Illustrated magazine and sat up straight as a display of vigilance. On the table beside him was a stack of magazines and a dark blue coffee cup bearing a red ‘A’ outlined in white. Garza nodded at him and walked with Nomad, Terry, Ariel and Berke down the long hallway past a nurses’ station to another door. He opened it for them and followed them in.
It was nothing special, just a room with a few gray upholstered chairs, a sofa, a couple of low tables and lamps, and a TV. On the cream-colored walls were framed paintings of sunwashed adobe houses and orange-tinted desert scenes.
“Okay,” Garza said as the bandmembers got themselves settled. “Now I guess all you can do is wait. Unless you want to pray,” he added. “If not here, there’s a chapel at the far end of the hall and take a right.”
“Thank you,” Terry said. He pushed his specs back up the bridge of his nose. “Um…we can leave and walk around, can’t we? If we want to take the elevator down to the vending machines? Like…we’re not under arrest, are we?”
“You can go wherever you please. Just remember that if the reporters are hanging around, they can get to you downstairs. But probably most of them are going back to the crime scene.” Garza checked his watch. “Which is where I need to be.” He moved toward the door. “Anything else I can do for you?”
Nobody answered, but then Ariel spoke up: “I’d like to know,” she said. “Where the shots came from. They were from long range, weren’t they?”
“Miss, I just can’t say. It’s true Mr. Castillo didn’t hear them. He didn’t see anybody else in the lot but Mr. Emerson. So…the only thing we’re sure of is that it wasn’t a drive-by. Other than that…” He let the sentence die. “We have a lot of work to do,” he finished.
“Thank you for doing what you can,” Ariel told him. Her eyes were swollen and had the shine of shell-shock.
“Yeah. Well, the trauma team here is the best in the country. That’s not just my opinion.” He glanced quickly at Nomad, who was sitting in a chair slumped over with his hands to his face. “Hang in,” he said, and then he left the room and shut the door behind him.
For a while no one said anything. At last Terry quietly breathed, “Wow,” which served to sum up their collective inability to grasp the fact that the Little Genius lay on an operating table with surgeons trying to keep him alive. Also, they were so tired they could hardly move. It was a bad dream, and at its center a worse one. How long George had been bleeding out on the ground before the attendant had seen him was still unknown, though the police thought it had only been ten or fifteen seconds. Still…ten or fifteen fucking seconds? While George had been down with two bullets in him, and one right in his chest near the heart? It was more than they could bear to think about.
The attendant—Castillo—had recognized the blue parking pass as being from Fortunato’s. Musicians parked their vans and trailers over there all the time, in a special area in the back. He’d called nine-one-one, reported a man down and unconscious and his chest covered with blood. About the time the ambulance and the first police cruiser had come screaming up, Nomad had walked out Fortunato’s stage door into the alley to see where George was, and when he heard the sirens he later told Ariel that he’d felt like a knife had ripped open his guts because he knew something very bad had happened to their friend.
At the hospital, Nomad had called Ash on his cell and had gotten the I can’t pick up right now, but—
“Pick up, you dumb shit!” Nomad had shouted into the cell. “It’s John Charles! Pick up!”
“Hey, hold on with that language!” There had been some hot spice in Ash’s heavily-accented voice. Little did he know how close he was walking to a burning crater in Hell. “Who do you think you’re talking—”
“Shut up and listen!” the emperor had commanded, and Ash had shut.
Ash was coming to Tucson, would try to get a flight out by afternoon or at the latest by Monday morning. In the meantime, he would make the call to George’s mother and father in Chicago. Ash had sounded stunned, and when he asked Nomad, “What is going on?” Nomad knew he was asking why two members of The Five had been cut down by bullets and to that there was no good or easy answer.
Nomad lowered his hands from his face. Terry was standing in front of him.
“Maybe we ought to pray for George,” Terry said, and he looked at Ariel and Berke to gauge their reactions. “Don’t you think?”
“I think we should,” Ariel agreed.
Nomad closed his eyes and shook his head and masked his pain with his hands again. Berke said, “I’m not what you’d call religious.”
“Can’t you be? For just a minute?” Terry asked, but Berke turned her face away. Terry went over and sat beside Ariel, and they grasped hands and put their heads together, and when Terry began with “Dear God,” Berke got up and left the room.
When their prayer was finished, Nomad sat back in his chair and rubbed his temples. If he’d only gone to get the van with George, he thought. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened. If only, if only…
“John?”
“What is it?” Nomad watched as Terry pulled a chair up in front of him and sat down.
“Don’t you believe in God?”
“No,” came the reply. “I believe in myself.” He saw his lamplit face reflected in Terry’s Lennon-specs. “God is a myth made up to keep people from freaking out about death.” Terry was silent, as if waiting for something else. “Listen,” Nomad said irritably, because Ariel was watching him too, in that expectant way she had when they were writing a song together and she was waiting for him to supply a line. “I want to rest. How about leaving me alone.”
“I’m just asking.”
“Don’t ask.”
Terry started to slide his chair back, and then he seemed to think better of it. He drew a long breath, as if preparing himself.
“What do you want from me?” Nomad asked, again on the verge of either anger or tears. “You want me to get down on my knees and pray for George’s life? You want me to promise I’ll be a good boy or some shit like that, so George will come out of that operating room alive?” He felt his mouth start to twist into a snarl. “It doesn’t happen that way. Praying to a myth doesn’t get it. Either he lives or he doesn’t. Okay? And anyway…if God wasn’t a myth, why should He care about George? Why should He care about anybody in this room, or this city, or on this fucking earth? Huh?”
“I don’t know,” Terry said, but the way he said it told Nomad that maybe Terry had already asked himself these questions, many times over.
“Damn straight you don’t know.” Nomad looked to Ariel for support, but she was staring down at the floor. “Nobody knows, and for damn sure those fucking preachers don’t know. So what are we sitting here talking about?”
Terry’s face was impassive. Whatever he had been preparing himself for, he was ready. He said, “Can I tell you a story?”
“What kind of story?”
“A true story. Something that really happened to me, in a church about—”
“Oh, shit!” Nomad interrupted, scowling. “Come off it, man!”
“Terry?” Ariel’s voice was quiet but firm. “You can tell me.”
Terry nodded, but when he spoke again he was still staring at Nomad. “In a church about forty miles northwest of Oklahoma City,” he went on. “A small town called Kingfisher. Did I ever tell you about my dad?”
Nomad didn’t speak. Ariel said, “You told us he has a furniture store.”
“Not just a furniture store. He’s the White Knight there. That’s his chain of stores. White Knight Discount Furniture. Two locations in Oklahoma City, and four other stores across the state. One in Little Rock and one in St. Louis. My dad’s loaded. I mean, his dad started the business, but he really made it go. He’s a hard worker. He puts his nose to that grindstone, man. But it takes its due from him, I can tell you. With that many people working for you, and jumping when you say jump…it makes you into a bully, always pushing for what you want. Which he was, when I was growing up. It was his way or the highway, know what I’m saying?”
“Everybody has it tough,” Nomad commented.
“Yeah, that’s right. Ever hear this: Be kind to everybody you meet, because everybody’s fighting some kind of battle?” Terry paused for a response, but Nomad made none. “My dad was fighting one. His dad was, and back and back. But the deal was…you never said ‘no’ to Clayton Spitzenham. The White Knight just wouldn’t hear it. So I was seventeen years old and I’d been taking piano lessons since I was ten, and I told my dad I wanted to be a musician because music just…spoke to me…it was like food to me. I said I wanted to make music. Maybe join a band, or start one. I said I didn’t want to go into the family business. But you think he listened to me? You think he heard me?” A bemused and slightly bitter smile moved across Terry’s face. “Don’t think so. He said I’d outgrow all that. He said, Terry, you don’t know your own mind. You don’t know what’s good for you. You look around yourself, he said, and you’ll see that everything you have comes from that business you seem to want to turn your back on. This is a family business, he said. You have to realize what your place is in this family.”
Know your role, Nomad thought, remembering Felix Gogo’s advice.
“We really went at it,” Terry continued. “I was sticking to my guns and my dad was making the plans for me to get a business education.” He shrugged. “Hey, maybe it would’ve been good for me. Maybe I would’ve come to it myself, in time, but it wasn’t what I wanted. But he was pressuring me day and night, cutting down my music, cutting me down…everything he could do to get me in the box.”
The dreaded box, Nomad thought. For an artist, it was the worst thing. The safe, predictable thing that can lead a creative person to boredom, drugs, insanity and early death. Wasn’t that the point of the box? To kill risk, which was the life and soul of creation?
“He said everybody needs furniture,” Terry said. “But the world can go on just fine without music.”
“Oh,” Ariel said, as if she’d been punched in the stomach.
“I told him that wasn’t a world I wanted to live in. Without music? Without…my food? I mean, it’s like bread and wine to me, and you know what I’m saying. But there was nothing I could tell him, because when Clayton Spitzenham makes up his mind, it’s a done deal. And I guess I could’ve left home, just hit the road and gone, but I didn’t want it to be that way.” Terry hesitated, and now he was staring past Nomad at a distant place, his eyes lit up with lamplight behind the round lenses. “I guess I wanted him to give me his blessing, because for whatever he is, I did love him. I do love him. But like that was ever going to happen. Then…something did happen. On a Sunday morning, in a church in Kingfisher. And nobody knows about this but my folks, I’ve never told anybody because it just sounds so…” He trailed off, searching for a word.
“Holy-rolly?” Nomad prompted.
Terry gave a faint smile. “No, not that.” He found his word. “So awesome,” he said. “Maybe scary-awesome. But it did happen to me, just as I’m telling it. See, this church was building a camp for kids. They were going to be buying furniture for the cabins and the main building, and my dad wanted to get the contract. So he loaded me up, I guess to show how great of a family-man he was that he would bring his son with him to church even though he never set foot in one in Oklahoma City and neither did my mom, and we drove there and went in. He wanted to be seen, and to gladhand people, but neither one of us knew anybody there. I mean, it was forty-something miles from our house. So we’re sitting there in the pew, about midway in, and it’s a nice big church, modern, still smelled new, and the pastor gets up front and says there’s a special speaker that day.”
Terry was silent for a moment, working his fingers together. “When it came time for the speaker,” Terry said quietly, “the guy stood up at the lectern and looked out at the congregation. I don’t remember his name, but I remember that he was just real ordinary-looking. Kind of flabby and going bald, and he was wearing a tan suit. It was late June, warm outside. So he said hello to the people, and cracked a joke or something, and said he was going to talk about some mission work somewhere. And all of a sudden…just like that…he leaned over the podium and I remember…he trembled. His eyes closed, and he trembled, as if he was about to pass out. I remember that people gasped. Then the pastor jumped up to help him, and some other men at the front stood up…but then…that man lifted his face. He opened his eyes, and he’d gone pale and he was sweating, and he said, ‘I’m speaking to Terry’.”
“Oh, right!” Nomad said, with a crooked grin. “Did he like…have one of those booming voices that made the walls shake, and sawdust fell from the rafters?”
“No,” Terry answered, his own voice still quiet and controlled. “It was the same as it had been before. Just the voice of an ordinary man. I’m telling you what happened, John. It’s no joke, and it’s no lie.”
They stared at each other, until Nomad’s mocking smile faded away.
“Go on,” Ariel urged.
“The man spoke my name.” Terry turned his attention to Ariel and then back to Nomad once more. “And, sure, maybe there were other Terrys in the church. I think there were maybe eighty or a hundred people in there, so there could’ve been other Terrys. And he never looked at me, he just seemed to be staring at the back wall. But then he said, ‘Don’t be turned aside. Music will be your life’. And let me tell you guys…when you hear that from a stranger in a church you’ve never been in before…far from your home…what you feel is fear. The awesomeness came later. Right then, I just wanted to put my head down and hide, because I was afraid.”
Terry waited for that to sink in. From Nomad there was no sign of interest or emotion. “He didn’t speak to me only. He spoke to two or three other people, but I can’t tell you what he said. Told them stuff he never should’ve known, is my guess. Then he just seemed to get tired, and he lowered his face again and he kind of staggered back, and the pastor got up and told the people to stay where they were, that everything was all right. He helped the man to his seat, and the man put a hand to his face and I could tell he was crying. Then my dad said to me, ‘We’re getting out of here’, and his face was the color of spit on a sidewalk. I mean, he was gray. So he got up and I got up and we went, and that was the end of him wanting that contract. I don’t think he ever went back there. I know I didn’t.”
Terry’s specs had slid down his nose a little bit, so he pushed them back into place with a forefinger. “We never talked about it. I guess he told my mom. Maybe he didn’t. But the thing is…after that happened, he was done trying to force his will on me. Whatever I wanted to do with music—whatever I wanted to try—he stepped aside and let me go my own way. I don’t think he was ever happy about it, but he accepted it. He still does. That’s why he’s helping me start the vintage keyboard business. He likes that word, business. But it took a stranger in a church for him to respect me, and what I wanted to do with my life. We didn’t know anybody there, John. There was no way it could have been anything but…” Again, he searched for his destination.
“The voice of God?” Nomad’s voice had a cutting edge. “Is that what you’re saying you heard?”
“I heard a man speaking,” Terry answered. “I’m not going to pretend to know where the words were coming from. But he said something that was meant for me and me alone. I’m sure of that. And the deal is…all I’ve ever wanted is to build a life with music in it, John. That was always my dream. Not to play on a stage in front of thousands of people or make tons of cash, or be anybody’s superstar.” He included Ariel with another glance. “I’ve gotten what I wanted…and more, really.”
“Okay, so you’re saying everything is like…preordained, right?” Nomad challenged. “It’s all written in the fucking stars?”
“He said ‘Don’t be turned aside’,” Terry answered. “So no, I don’t think it was preordained. I think I had a choice. He was just telling me how to get where I wanted to be.”
Nomad shook his head. “That’s bullshit.”
Terry grinned at Ariel, but his eyes were sad. “Now you see why I’ve never told anybody. Not even Julia.” His flighty, ethereal ex-wife, to whom he was married for less than a year before she took off from Austin to Florida with an old boyfriend. Nobody had known what he saw in her, except she was very pretty, she played classical piano and made great crepe St. Jacques when she wasn’t popping little blue Xanax tabs.
“Bullshit,” Nomad repeated, for emphasis.
“Do you think you know every-fucking-thing?” Terry asked, and now the sadness was gone; now he had some heat in his face and his eyes were bright with the beginning of anger and he had decided that right this minute—this minute—he was through backing down from John Charles because he knew what he’d seen and heard and—“Nobody on earth is going to say I’m a liar,” he said, his voice tight. He blinked rapidly; maybe he was still a little afraid of John, but this was important enough to fight for. “You don’t know everything. Not nearly. And I’m telling you I don’t either, because I don’t understand it and I never will, and I’m not trying to holy-roll anybody, but there’s a lot more to all this than we can see and hold. I mean, there’s like a world beyond this one. A dimension or something that we can’t get our minds around.”
“Oh, you’re talking about Heaven now? With the angels and the harps?”
“You make it sound stupid.”
“It is stupid, Terry. It’s stupid for stupid people.” When Terry paused, Nomad said, “Go on, let’s hear some more. Set it up so I can knock it down.”
But Terry stared at the floor and worked his hands together, and he didn’t answer as outside in the hallway there was the bing-bing of an intercom followed by a woman’s voice paging what sounded like ‘Dr. Pajiwong’.
At last Terry said, “It’s not as simple as you make it out to be. Or as simple-minded. See, you laugh and say it’s ‘bullshit’ because you’ve never heard a stranger speak your name in a church before. Nothing’s ever happened to you that shook your foundations, or made you think that you don’t know everything. I’m a human being, I can’t see through the dark glass. My personal belief is that there’s a Heaven and Hell of some kind, but—”
“Pitchforks and golden halos,” Nomad interrupted. “When I die I want to go south where the action is. I want a slut from Hell giving me an eternal—” Blow-job, he almost said, but he felt Ariel’s presence and he amended it to, “Lap dance.”
“Are you afraid,” Terry asked, as he lifted his gaze to Nomad’s, “to even let yourself wonder? Does that scare you so much?”
“No, it doesn’t scare me.” Nomad’s eyes narrowed. “I just don’t want to spend any time wondering about being nothing. Because that’s what you are after you die. Everything you were and thought, gone to nothing. Just like the dark blank before you were born. How come your stranger in the church didn’t help you out a little more with these kinds of questions, Terry? How come he like…hit and ran, without saying what everybody in that church really wanted to know. Huh? How come he just didn’t say, ‘I’m speaking with the voice of God, and I’m telling all of you there’s an eternity where everybody finds happiness…whatever that is’. How come he just picked out three or four people and left the others feeling like they were skinny kids in a schoolyard too nerdy to join the cool team?” He let that hang, and then he asked, “How come your stranger didn’t tell you why innocent children and good people like Mike get killed every day of every week, every month and every year? Now that would’ve been worth hearing. So if you’re saying it was the voice of God…he’s going to have to speak a whole hell of a lot louder before I’ll listen.”
Terry stared at him for a few seconds longer, with the reflection of Nomad’s face suspended on the lenses of his specs. Nomad stretched his legs out, leaned his head back and closed his eyes as an instruction for Terry to go find another place to sit. After a while Terry got up and pulled his chair over nearer Ariel, who gave him a faint smile and a nod but who saw that he’d been defeated in his purpose of making John Charles grasp the possibility of the Unknown Hand. That was how she’d always pictured God. An Unknown Hand, moving for the greater benefit of human beings. It seemed to her that when it could move it did, but there were times it could not, or for some unrevealed reason it did not.
John had asked some good questions, she thought as she watched him either feigning sleep or searching for it. Some questions that were asked by believers and non-believers alike. Believing didn’t mean the questions should be silenced, she thought.
She didn’t have the answers. No one on this side did, and if they pretended to they were probably lying to make money from frightened people, which made them deceivers that the Unknown Hand should have crushed…but it did not. Just as the Unknown Hand did not move to bring justice against the wicked, or stop evil, or eliminate suffering in an outpouring of miracles.
Because, she thought, that work depended upon known hands, the hands of men. Maybe the Unknown Hand moved things beyond the understanding of men, or set things into motion that asked men to make choices, and whatever choices men made they had to live with for better or worse. Maybe the Unknown Hand directed men, or prodded them, or presented them with problems to be solved and men were unaware of its presence in the chaotic life of day-to-day. But maybe the world belonged to men, it had been given to them as a gift, and whatever they did with that trust was their burden and responsibility, and the Unknown Hand—like the voice of a stranger in a church—could guide but not compel.
She didn’t have the answers. Like everyone else, all she could do was wonder.
Berke came back in with a can of Coke she’d gotten from the first-floor vending machines. “All done with the prayer meeting?” she asked, but no one bothered to reply. She sat down on the sofa and propped her feet up on the table that held a stack of months-old magazines. What she didn’t intend to tell them was that, though she was far from being religious, she’d been curious about the chapel and had walked down that way to take a look. She’d stood on the threshold of a small, dimly-lit room with two pews, a lectern and a picture of Jesus kneeling in a garden. Maybe she’d said something in her mind about George. Maybe. It had been quick, just a passing thing. For good luck, if anything else. She’d always figured Jesus was kind of like a four-leaf-clover. A tip wouldn’t hurt either, she’d thought, so she’d put a buck in the slot of a little white lockbox screwed to the top of a table. Next to it was a white book where people wrote down the names of who they were praying for.
Better make it two bucks, she’d decided, but in the end it had been five.
About forty minutes after Berke’s return, an Asian doctor wearing blue scrubs and a surgeon’s cap came into the room. He told them in perfect English, his calm quiet doctor’s voice tinged with a trace of Southern accent, that George was out of surgery and in the ICU, and that the next twelve hours would be, as he put it, ‘the crucial period’. More than that, he couldn’t say. Nomad took that to mean the doctors had done all they were able to and now it was George’s fight.
They thanked him, and after he left they settled back into their places to wait some more. They were good at waiting; they did far more waiting than playing, so they’d made their peace with that necessary aspect of the musician’s life. But never before had they waited out the life or death of a bandmate, and it was going to be a trial for all of them.
And maybe most of all for Nomad. The walls were closing in on him. He hadn’t particularly liked hospitals before his father was shot, but afterwards…when he’d sat in a room similar to this, smelling the hospital’s odors and sensing the impending news, in front of him some dog-eared Batman, Green Lantern and Captain America comics a nurse had found for him, until one of the other Roadmen had come in and told him his dad was gone…
The Month of Death had arrived early this year.
As Ariel and Terry dozed and Berke watched through heavy-lidded eyes an old black-and-white TCM movie with Bette Davis on TV, Nomad stood up. He told Berke he was going downstairs to the machines, and did she want anything. She said no, she was okay.
He left.
At first he’d only intended to walk outside and breathe some non-hospital air, some air without bad memories in it. Then he decided to walk a little ways, not very far, just to get the blood moving. That waiting-room was killing him. To go back to it…no, not right now. He would walk a while down the city block, on this weeping side of three-o’clock.
Exactly when he’d decided to step out and hail the cab he saw coming, he didn’t know. But there it was, he waved an arm and it veered over to pick him up.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
Nomad sat thinking. Where to? was the question. What was open twenty-four hours downtown, say within two or three miles? Where had he used to hang out, at all hours, over a cup of black coffee, a steak sandwich and a platter of…
Greek potatoes, he remembered.
“The Argonaut,” Nomad said. He gave the driver the address, on East Congress Street, and the cab took him away.
THIRTEEN.
Walking into the Argonaut was like returning home to a house your family had sold and moved out of without letting you know. Sure, it had been years since he’d set foot in here, and it looked pretty much the same and had that same aroma of charred lamb kabobs and peppery fish soup he remembered so distinctly. But there were differences. The exterior that used to be painted soft ‘Aegean blue’ was now a hard yellow, making Nomad think of the color he saw in his mind when he closed his eyes and belted out the sustained A note at the end of ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, because it was true he did see mental colors when he sang. Another difference was that when you used to step into the place, a series of small bells chimed over the door; now there was only the whirring of the ceiling fans, but at least those were still there.
The cash register sat atop an unchanged and probably immovable scarred and battered wooden desk that looked as if it had been deck planking from one of those fighting Greek ships, but where was Jimmy? Short, barrel-chested Jimmy with his black crewcut and his mile-wide grin, and from his mouth a rusty barbed-wire voice that always launched the same words when you came in—Hey, ya hungry? and when you left, Howja like ya food?
Fine, Jimmy, just fine.
But Jimmy was not there, his place taken by a somber-looking girl with long dark hair who was texting somebody on her cell.
“Sit anywhere,” she told him, her eyes never leaving the blue screen.
There were lots of wheres to sit. The seven or eight tables were empty, but a few people sat in the red vinyl booths. Lamps with gold-colored shades shed light upon the early-morning patrons. Nomad counted three guys—college students, they looked to be—in one booth, a young couple cuddling close in another and in a third a solitary middle-aged man reading a book and drinking iced tea. Nomad took a booth away from everyone else, near the windows that gave a view onto East Congress, and he waited for a waitress to show up. From his seat he had the full impact of the mural of a Greek galley painted on the opposite wall, next to the kitchen door. It was a thing of beauty, and it had sailed through the years with only minor modifications to the original, which according to Jimmy had been painted in 1978, the year the Argonaut had opened.
It was of course the Argo, the ship built to carry Jason and the Argonauts to find the Golden Fleece. Under a sunlit sky decorated with lacy streamers of clouds, the Argo’s sharp prow cut through the dark blue waves. Seagulls flew before it, and a dolphin’s gray dorsal fin emerged from the white-capped water. The sturdy Argonauts pulled at their oars, in this rendition twenty on either side. Standing before the mast with its billowing russet-colored sail was the dark-bearded Jason, his right arm outthrust and index finger pointed to indicate the destination ahead. Nomad had always thought it was a really cool mural, its style similar to the beautifully luminous works of Maxfield Parrish he’d seen in one of Ariel’s art books. At the bottom, where the sea waves began, was signed the name ‘Myalodeon’, though whether that was the original artist or a later restorer Nomad didn’t know.
He was still waiting. Somebody had to be working in here, because the other customers had food and drink. He wished he’d thought to bring a magazine from the hospital, but then again, no: hospital magazines smelled like hospitals. He needed something to look at but his own hands, so he shifted a little in his seat, reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out an object of interest he’d been carrying since that night at the Curtain Club.
It was the piece of clear quartz crystal Cheryl Buoniconti—now Cheryl Capriata—had given to him. He set it on the table before him and just stared at it. He was trying to understand the depths of belief. Somehow, Cheryl believed healing crystals might intercede for her in her fight against cancer; somehow, Terry and Ariel believed God or Jesus Christ or whoever might help George in his fight for life. What was the difference? To him, he’d go for the crystal, because you could hold the fucking thing in your hand, and whether it did any good or not it was real, it had weight and it was solid. At the very least, it was a pretty cool paperweight.
He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Who had shot George? The same person who’d killed Mike? Different snipers, at different times in different places? Was there any possible sense to be made of that? And Berke saying she thought she’d been shot at, too? Was it open season on The Five, and if it was—and here he realized he might be sitting too close to the window—who was going to be next in the sniperscope?
He was tired, he needed some coffee. He saw a waitress come out of the kitchen door, and she saw him and then she retreated back into the kitchen. So much for that. Come on, damn it! He looked again at the crystal and wondered what his father would have thought about it. Dean Charles, in his never-ending—some might say fanatical—quest for women, would have spun a romantic story about it, a tale of it holding the image of a future lover, and when a man peered into it just right, and held it just so, he could see the face of a beautiful—not to say sexy—angel in it, and baby oh baby…there you are.
From what he knew of his father now, and what in time the other Roadmen told him, Nomad thought that everything Dean Charles had done was for the purpose of dipping the wick in as many honeypots as he could find. Except the music. Or maybe that’s what Nomad wanted to believe, so he had his own depths of belief too. He wanted to believe that the music had mattered, and that when his father threw flaming guitar chords at the audience and got the microphone up close to his sweating face to holler the lyrics to ‘Memphis’ it was for pure love of the music. But those women had been everywhere. Up front and backstage and in the restaurant after the gig and hanging out by the van and just ‘happening by’ the motel. There were bar girls and secretaries and housewives and waitresses and shy girls who wanted to show him their songs and brassy girls who wanted to crash into show business. There were quiet girls and loud girls and blondes and brunettes, redheads and streaked heads and the occasional soul queen. Nomad had been taken for a lot of ice cream cones, pizzas and to see a lot of movies by the other Roadmen in a lot of towns both big and small, and the number of Do Not Disturb Signs hanging on the doorknobs of Dean Charles’s motel rooms had been legion.
They’d never really talked about it, but gradually the kid who adored his dad grew up enough to notice how women dragged their gaze across him, how they talked to each other while looking at him from the corners of their eyes, how they grinned at him and touched him and got up close to breathe his hot musician’s sweat and his soured English Leather.
Johnny? his father had said one Friday night in a Best Western in Mansfield, Ohio, while they were watching The Dirty Dozen on cable TV. Would you mind goin’ over to finish this flick with the guys?
A few minutes before he’d spoken, there’d been a quick check of the wristwatch.
No, Dad, Johnny had said, as he’d sat on the edge of the bed and put on his shoes. I don’t mind.
But when the son had turned to look at his father, on his way out the door to a room down the hall, both of them knew what they were looking at.
Dad? John had asked. Don’t you love Mom anymore?
Are you kiddin’? came the answer, with a quick harsh laugh. ’Course I love your mother! Know why I love her so much? ’Cause she gave you to me, that’s why. Us two men, on the road. Freedom and music, what could be better? Hey, you go tell Danny I said you guys call out for pizzas. ’Kay?
Okay, Dad, the son had said, because Dean Charles was the light of his world and for years now in that little house in East Detroit, between Center Line and Roseville, Michelle Charles had been sitting on the living-room floor surrounded by her many Bibles and religious pamphlets, her brow furrowed in concentrated study, her eyes moving desperately from line to line to find something she could believe in, for she had discovered the letters in her husband’s shoebox.
But like Butch Munger’s girlfriend after he’d beaten her half-dead, Nomad thought as he waited for service, Michelle Charles was loyal and faithful and true and what was a woman like that doing with Dean-a-rino? Giving him space, Nomad mused. Letting him wander, knowing he would always come back home, if just to restring his guitar.
His mother was okay now. She lived in an apartment near her sister’s family in Sanford, Florida, and she worked in hospice care and had taken up tennis with a group of friends. She didn’t mind telling them her son was a “rock’n rolla”. Life, like the show, must go on.
Suddenly there was a waitress standing next to his booth, watching him think. He realized she wasn’t the same waitress he’d seen at the kitchen door, because that one was pouring iced tea for the middle-aged man.
“Um… I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” he told her. “Just black.”
“Is that all you want?” She was about forty or so, on the short side, had dark hair and dark eyes and she looked either very tired or supremely bored, as if she wanted to be anywhere on earth but the Argonaut at about three-thirty in the morning.
“No, I’d like the steak sandwich special.”
She didn’t write it down. “Steamed vegetables, Greek potatoes, or au gratin potatoes?”
“The Greek.” He felt he had to say the next thing, because the first time he’d ever come in here and ordered those they’d been way too oily, and because the waitress turnover was high, almost everytime he came in he had to say the same thing. “Can you ask the cook to hold back on the oil?”
“He just makes ’em one way,” she said.
“Yeah, but…you know… I’ve had them before and there was too much oil, so—”
“He just makes ’em one way,” she said, and this time there was a grim belligerence in her voice that made Nomad set his mouth in a hard line and stare up at her.
“Hey,” he told her, “trust your cook, okay?” He tried to smile but it wouldn’t happen. “He’ll get it right, if you ask him. Just trust your cook.”
She was silent for a few seconds, her mouth partly open. Her face was an expressionless mask, her eyes two small bits of unshining coal. “I’ll ask him,” she said tightly. “I know what I’m doing. I’m telling you he only makes ’em one way.”
“Alright, thanks,” Nomad said.
She said, “No problem,” as she was turning away from him, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck stir as if from a hot breeze.
OhmyGawd, Nomad thought when she had gone. Shimatta! What a bitch! Whatever was going on with her, he hoped she didn’t spit in his coffee before she brought it to him. His heart was beating a little hard. He thought he could write a song about this. A ballad, maybe. Right. Call it ‘The Ballad of the Greek Potatoes’.
First verse: He stumbled in for want of food,
And found a waitress fucked-up and rude.
A steak sandwich, he asked for, and potatoes Greek.
She glared at him like he was a two-headed freak.
Or something like that.
Here she came again, bringing him a cup of coffee. He noted she didn’t make eye-contact with him. The cup was banged down, and some sloshed over onto the table. But then she’d turned around again and headed into the kitchen, and Nomad thought,
He asked the waitress to trust her cook,
And got for his trouble a dirty look.
This used to be a place he liked to go,
But now the service in this fucking joint doth blow.
Well, the meter was screwed up, but it got the point across.
He would eat his food, call a cab and get out. Simple enough. He stared again at the lump of crystal. Something to believe in, he thought.
He used to believe he was going somewhere in this business. He used to believe that one day all his dues would be paid. That he would come up with the Right Song, at the Right Time. With the Right Band, of course. He’d thought—believed, wished, whatever—that The Five was the Right Band. That in The Five the talents and the personalities and the desires meshed, as much as they could in any band. Were they perfect? No. Was The Five perfect, as a band? Absolutely not. But they had tried, so so hard…
He remembered what Felix Gogo had said, and it was the bitter truth: Talent’s a piss-poor third to ambition, and ambition is second to personality.
And add these necessary ingredients: connections and luck. But even with all those things combined, something could still go horribly wrong.
He imagined a splitting of himself, a division between the Nomad and the John Charles. In his imagination the John Charles stood up from the Nomad and sat down on the other side of the booth.
“A shitty, shitty deal,” John Charles said. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah,” Nomad said in his mind, to his mental boothmate. He was talking about the new music the Austin band Ezra’s Jawbone had finished back in February. Nomad was friends with both the lead singer and the keyboard player, who also wrote all their songs. They had wrapped up a project they called Dustin Daye, had given him a copy of the test CD to hear and then sent the package off to their label, MTBF Records. Dustin Daye had been a rock opera, about a young man who suddenly awakens in a hotel room in an unknown city and has no idea who he is or where he’s come from. As the music progresses, the idea is raised that Dustin Daye, who gets his name from the faint impression of a signature on a notepad in his room, might be the Second Coming or he might be the Devil in human flesh, and even he doesn’t know which one, but someone out there—or more than one person—is trying to kill him before he can accomplish what he feels he has to do, which he doesn’t know will ultimately be for Good or for Evil. Or is he just an escaped lunatic? Nomad wasn’t religious, but he understood the light versus dark concept. It was in all the best horror movies.
“That’s some awesome music,” John Charles said, and Nomad had to agree. The fifteen songs, two nearing the seven-minute mark and one up there over ten minutes, were absolutely mindblowing. They flowed from and into each other, they went in unexpected and amazing directions, the arrangements and vocals were off the hook and there were mid-song key and tempo changes that should never have worked but to Nomad sounded like some of the freshest, most vibrant music he’d ever heard. Plus it had a last song, ‘The Last Song’, that made Nomad lie awake at night hearing it over and over in his head and thinking this was going to be a huge breakthrough biggie for Ezra’s Jawbone.
“You know how that went,” John Charles reminded him.
“The fucking suits,” Nomad answered. He remembered hearing from his shell-shocked friend the lead singer that the first impression of Dustin Daye from MTBF was that there were no singles. That some of the tunes—fucking ‘tunes’, they called them—were way too long, that kids wouldn’t listen to tunes that long. That this really was, and sorry but we have to be truthful, one of the worst, most confusing collection of tunes we’ve ever heard. That Ezra’s Jawbone had already set up its hard rock/country funk vibe on its first two releases, so this attempt at a product does not play to the market. That there’s no sense to be made of people sitting talking to themselves, or having ghosts—or whatever the fuck they are—roaming around. And then there’s the religion angle, and we’ll be the first to say we respect all views and opinions but this is really where the shit starts to slide. MTBF is not a contemporary Christian label; have you seen our iTunes hit list lately? No religious tunes on there, nada. So when you get into this area, you are walking on sinking sand. Your audience wants to be entertained, not preached to. This is an entertainment business. So we have to say, and we’re all in full agreement on this, that Dustin Daye is not releaseable as it is. Now, having made that clear…we can hook you up with a proven production team we have in mind who can help rework this record, but you’re going to have to give them more control to do what needs to be done, because Bogdan Anastasio and Ji Chao require complete authority.
“Those sick fucks,” sneered John Charles.
“Can you imagine that scene?” Nomad asked. “The suits sitting in a conference room listening to Dustin Daye and saying it’s shit because there aren’t any singles? And these are the same guys who’ve driven the whole fucking business over the cliff, you know.”
“Right,” said John Charles.
“Didn’t lower the cost of CDs when they could have,” Nomad said. “Should’ve dropped them to half-price. So there go the independent CD and vinyl stores down the tubes, and those indie stores were the lifeblood, man.” He stopped to sip his black coffee. “It won’t ever come back to what it was,” he told himself, in his mental voice.
“You have to keep on keeping on,” John Charles said.
“Do I?” Nomad asked, and then he saw the waitress coming with his food and John Charles slipped back into him because they both were hungry.
She again offered him no eye-contact. She thumped the steak sandwich plate down and then the platter of…
“What’s this?” Nomad asked.
Her eyes became slits when she looked at him. “It’s the au gratin potatoes, just like you asked for.”
He had smelled the yellow cheese striped across the top of the potatoes before he saw it. “I can’t eat that,” he said.
“You ordered it,” she answered.
“No, I ordered the Greek potatoes.”
“You ordered the au gratin.”
“Listen, ma’am,” Nomad said, feeling his guts start to clench. George would’ve said Easy, take it easy. “I know what I ordered.” She just stood there staring at him, her coal-black eyes fierce and her head cocked to one side as if it were getting ready to fly from her neck and bite his dick off. “Okay,” he said, and he put up both hands palm-outward to keep the peace. The other customers were watching. “Just forget it, okay?” He pushed the offending potatoes aside. “I’ll sit here and eat my sandwich, that’s really all I—”
“No, if you want Greek potatoes, I’ll get you Greek potatoes!” said the waitress, as she snatched up the au gratin. Her face was all screwed up and getting red, the anger about to burst forth like snot from her nose and spittle from her mouth. “I’ll get you Greek potatoes, but you didn’t order ’em!” It had almost been a shout.
You dumb shit, you didn’t write it down, Nomad nearly said. But he did not. He took a long deep breath and he grasped the edge of the table with both hands and he tried to force a smile that did not take. “Listen,” he began.
“Quit telling me to listen! I can hear you, you think I’m deaf?”
“No, I’m just saying—”
“You want Greek potatoes, I’m gonna get ’em for you!” She began backing away from him, as the other waitress rubbernecked out from the kitchen and the cashier girl poked her head around the corner.
It came from Nomad with surprising force: his rough whiskey voice, demanding “Stop!”
She took two more steps in retreat before she obeyed, and then she seemed to hunch her shoulders forward like a pit bull bitch about to attack.
“Please.” Nomad heard his voice tremble, as rough as it was. “Please.” He was starting to shake, he was starting to come apart at the seams. Mike was dead. George might be dead within the next twelve hours. The crucial period, the doctor had said. But right now, right this minute, this felt pretty crucial too. The Five was staggering toward its grave. Nomad thought his heart was beating too hard, he needed to calm down, easy take it easy George would say but the Little Genius was not at his side and might never be there again.
“Please,” Nomad breathed, “just let me eat my sandwich. Leave me alone and let me eat my sandwich. Alright?”
A burly sandy-haired man in a cook’s apron had come to the kitchen door and was looking over the top of the other waitress’s head.
Nomad’s waitress gave a tight little grin, a nasty little smirk of victory, and she said in a voice like a hammer driving a nail into Nomad’s skull, three beats: “No. Prob. Lem.”
Then she turned around with a dramatic sweep like Bette Davis in that movie Berke had been watching and carried the platter of cheesy potatoes away. The cook and the other waitress retreated before her. The kitchen door closed.
Nomad started eating, but he couldn’t taste anything. Whatever war he’d walked into the middle of, whatever was eating at this dominatrix waitress and made her flail out at him, he wanted none of it.
“Stay cool, man,” said one of the students, who must’ve thought Nomad was the cause of the trouble. When Nomad glanced at their table, all three of them were staring at him so he couldn’t tell which dork had spoken. He returned to chewing his way through the sandwich, and then one of the guys made the mistake of letting out a chortle, a slobbery laugh hidden behind a fratboy’s greasy hand.
Nomad felt the flashfire burn across his face. He turned his head toward them, picked out the heftiest one to aim his full beams at and said, loudly enough to be perfectly understood, “Hey, are you Moe, Larry, or that fat fuck who gets his ass whipped?”
They all glared back at him without speaking. Suddenly the couple got up from their booth and, hand-in-hand, headed for the cashier.
He wanted to tell them not to worry, that nobody was going to get hurt, that he had his spike of anger under control and they didn’t have to rush out the—
Something was slammed down upon his table so hard it made him jump.
He looked up into the face of his waitress, who had come up on him so fast he hadn’t realized she was out of the kitchen.
“There,” she said, with a twisted smile. Her eyes were small black circles of rage, but at the center of their darkness was a red glint of triumph. “That suit you?” Medusa couldn’t have hissed it better.
Nomad saw that she’d brought him a platter of Greek potatoes.
Oil kept to a minimum.
Just as he’d asked.
They were perfect.
She grinned at him.
He could not let this stand.
George was not here to talk him down. Ariel was not here, to be at his side whether he wanted her there or not. The memory of Mike’s body being put into a white coroner’s van and George’s body being lifted into the back of an ambulance and Dean Charles’s body lying sprawled on the pavement mixed together, bled into each other like the songs on Dustin Daye, and from that neon-lit, heat-stroked Hell Felix Gogo told him to know his role and a sniper in a suit reloaded his rifle and three fratboys laughed behind his back and the waitress gave him perfect Greek potatoes and said it was no problem.
He was a mass of clanging alarms and trapped terrors, and just like that he broke.
It was a quiet breakage.
He said, with sweat sparkling on his cheeks and forehead, “Ma’am?” Whose voice was that? He didn’t know it. He was aware of the other waitress, standing again at the kitchen door to watch.
Well…it was showtime.
“Ma’am?” Nomad said again. “There’s something in my food.”
“What?”
He picked up the platter of Greek potatoes and slid out of the booth with a slow, smooth motion, and he said, “Your fucking face,” in a mild matter-of-fact tone before he grasped the back of her head and pushed the platter into her stunned mug.
She shouldn’t have screamed as she did, like a wild animal. She shouldn’t have reached out and clawed at his face and kicked at his shins. Because he would’ve thrown down a tenner and walked out, but with lines of blood rising from the scratches on his left cheek and one of his shins nearly cracked he also gave an animalish roar and shoved her away from him, and she fell back over a table and chair and went down on the floor still screaming.
The three stooges should not have jumped him from behind, either. They should not have tried to catch his arms and pin them at his sides and drop him to the floor by kicking his legs out from under him. All that just made Nomad punch loose from them, pick up a chair and start swinging. “Come on, man! Come on!” shouted one of the guys, but whether he was wanting Nomad to stop fighting or to advance on him was unknown, because the chair crunched him across the left shoulder, he grabbed at his injury and scuttled away and he didn’t say much after that.
The middle-aged man fled with his book. The other waitress was screaming Call the cops! Call the cops! The waitress with lightly-oiled Greek potatoes on her face came rushing at Nomad with a dinner knife raised in a stabbing position, and Nomad in his red rictus of rage got the chair between them and drove her back across another table. “Jesus Christ! Stop it!” someone shouted, and Nomad saw the cook standing in the kitchen door. Then the bravest or most stupid of the young men caught him around the neck from behind and tried to wrestle him to the floor. Nomad dropped the chair and thrashed like a maniac to get loose. The blood was pounding in his head and dark spots swirled before his eyes. He gave the guy an elbow shot in the ribs, followed up with another one that drew a grunt of pain, and then he broke free, turned around and swung a right fist that popped a jaw crooked. A second punch to the face ended the discussion because the guy ran for the door holding a bloody mouth.
It might have finished there, if the waitress had not thrown the ketchup bottle at Nomad’s head.
“Fuck you, you motherfucker!” she shrieked just before she threw it, giving Nomad enough time to dodge it and save his skull, but the bottle crashed through the front window. Then Nomad, who heard George’s voice in his head begging him to stop but who was now locked into what seemed almost a catharsis of hallucinatory violence, picked up another chair and threw it at her, and she ducked down as it passed overhead. The chair crashed into the Argo, the painted ship upon the painted sea, and knocked a plate-sized hole in the mural’s wall just above the waterline.
Two seconds after that, the cook came out of the kitchen holding the pistol.
He was red-faced and shaking and he held the gun out toward Nomad with his finger on the trigger and he bellowed, “I’ll shoot you, you sonofabitch! I’ll—”
Nomad only had an instant in which to flinch, because then the bullet had sizzled through the air past his left ear and followed the ketchup bottle through the glass onto East Congress. The cook was looking at the pistol with horror, as if he were grasping a spitting cobra. Nomad staggered to the side, against the booth he’d been occupying, as he saw the cook bringing the gun back to bear on him.
“Don’t move!” the cook shouted, but by then the coffee cup that Nomad had thrown was on its way, and as the man lifted an arm to deflect it he—by accident or by intention—fired again.
The bullet punched a neat round hole in the booth’s red vinyl seat. Nomad saw the pistol’s barrel searching for him. In either desperation or madness he picked something else up from the table and flung it and the lump of healing crystal hit the cook smack on the collarbone, causing him to stagger back against the wounded Argo.
Nomad attacked. He propelled himself at the cook with his head down and his shoulders ready for collision. He was his own bullet.
Before Nomad got to his target, the waitress on the floor grabbed at his legs and tripped him up. Still, his momentum was enough to hurl him forward, and before the cook could get the pistol between them Nomad hit him so hard they almost crashed straight through the Argo into ancient Greece, or at least the kitchen. They fought face-to-face, the cook trying to get the gun in position and Nomad trying to pin the gunhand. Then Nomad head-butted him and suddenly all the fight jumped out of the other man, his fingers opened and Nomad was holding the pistol.
“Run! Run!” the cook shouted, as he—a truly brave soul—tried to push Nomad back so the waitress could get out. She ran for her life, trailing a shriek, and then the cook let go of Nomad’s shirt and he ran too.
And then Nomad was alone in the Argonaut with three lines of blood on his face and a gun in his hand.
He heard the sirens coming.
His fire had diminished, but it was not yet embers. He put the pistol down on a table and listened to the sirens. Music, of a sort. Ariel could do something with this situation. She could write it out so you could feel the pain and frustration and sadness as if you were living it yourself. Because, really and truthfully, she was so much better a songcrafter than he.
Now there were red and blue lights spinning out on East Congress, beyond the broken window. He didn’t know how many police cars were out there, but it looked like a cop convention. He could hear people shouting. Heard what might have been the voice of that damned bitch of a waitress, raised to ear-breaking decibels.
He had been a bad, bad boy.
“Oh my God,” he said, and though he did not believe in God, who were you gonna call on when the shit hit the fan?
A bullhorn spoke from the street: “Attention in there! Throw your firearm out the window and come to the door with your hands locked behind your head! Nobody’s going to get hurt!”
Nomad just stared at the busted wall and the broken mural, as his shadow danced in a world of red and blue spinning lights. Poor fucked-up Jason, he thought. Standing at that mast, directing a ship that never moved. Believing he was actually going somewhere, getting closer to a golden fleece.
He thought he would put Jason and the other Argonauts out of their misery.
The bullhorn repeated its message, but this time it left out the last line.
Nomad picked up a chair and began to demolish the mural and destroy the wall. When that chair broke to pieces he picked up another one and kept on knocking holes in Jason’s stupid dream. With the breaking of the second chair he picked up a third, and this was hard work now, very hard, but he was determined to finish what he’d begun, he wasn’t a quitter, no way Dean and Michelle Charles had raised a quitter, and so he was still working hard when the two small torpedo-shaped canisters came through the window and he didn’t even turn around, he didn’t even care because he was involved in his emancipation of Jason, and when the gas swirled up around him like purple snakes and his skin began to burn and his eyes involuntarily shut tight because they were full of wet fire he kept swinging in the dark because it was all he knew how to do.
He was on his knees, surrounded by broken chairs, when they came in. They entered as if from another world. They looked like mad combinations of frogmen and masked wrestlers from parts unknown.
They drew his arms back behind him, snapped white plastic restraints on his wrists and ankles, and they hauled him out like yesterday’s garbage.