The Five (39 page)

Ariel had no idea what to say, so she said what she felt: “I’m so sorry.”

Chappie blew air between her lips and waved Ariel’s comment away and took another drink of Jack and java. “Life,” she said. “It’s not bubblegum. See, the deal is…Berke asked me one time—oh, she asked many times, in that very nice way she has of asking—why I would give up on her father and marry—her description—a total loser. The Mayberry barber, she called him. The bookworm, that was another one. She said, Mom, he’s just so
nothing
. And I looked her right in the face, I stared her down, and I said I love Floyd Fisk because he loves me, and because he loved
her
, whether she wanted to accept that or not, and because they call it ‘flash’ for the reason that it goes up in smoke so fast, but you can hold onto ‘substance’, and it holds onto you. ‘Substance’ honors responsibility, and you can say…oh, man, that’s so
old
…but the truth is, I wanted to be happy and I wanted to be loved. I wanted things to be settled. If that’s old, you can wrap it up for me because I’ll take as much of that as I can carry.”

Chappie’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “
Oh
,” she said softly, and brokenly.

Ariel saw a box of Kleenex on the counter. She pulled a couple of tissues out and gave them to Berke’s mother.

“Thanks,” Chappie said as she dabbed her eyes. “You’re sweet.”

Ariel stood with her a while longer until it was clear Chappie had unburdened herself as much as she was able, and now Chappie was focusing back on the soap opera again, and she had finished her Jacked-up coffee and put the cup aside. Ariel said she was going to go sit outside and think about some things. Chappie told her to enjoy the bench out there, it had been where Floyd liked to sit and read when he got home from the bookstore in the afternoons.

The house was a light tan with darker brown trim around the windows. A picket fence guarded the property. There was a rock garden in front, and the eucalyptus tree threw shade over the park bench. The Scumbucket and the trailer stood in the short driveway, behind Chappie’s vanilla-colored VW Beetle. When Ariel emerged from the house and started down the front steps, two agents got out of the white Yukon parked on the street and began talking to each other as if discussing baseball scores or some other interest between men. Ariel saw that they were wearing sunglasses and they didn’t really look at each other as they spoke; they were scanning the street and the houses and hills. She approached them, and when one of the men recognized her presence she asked if she could bring them something to drink but the man said, “No, miss, we’re good, but thank you.”

Ariel wondered if there was a toilet in the rear of that giant SUV. It was likely there was some sanitary setup for their convenience. She sat down on the bench, under the tree, and opened her notebook to the lines of the song again as the men, no longer talking, stood with their backs to her.

It was a puzzle to her. What this could possibly mean. She had no idea where it was supposed to go or what it was supposed to say. She considered the idea that if she closed her eyes very, very tightly and thought very, very hard, maybe the girl would come to her again from the green mist of the blackberry brambles and tell her exactly what it was supposed to mean, or if the girl was feeling particularly salvatious today she would offer up the next line or two.

But deep down Ariel knew it was not going to work that way. The Unknown Hand was not going to write this for them. The song, like any other act of creativity, was no good if it wasn’t strained through the joys and woes of human experience. It was no good if it was not in some way personal. It would not come fully-formed from a girl in a dream. It would have to be worked on, trial and error, writing and scratching out, searching for rhyme and struggling for reason.

Just as it always was, no different.

“Inspiration?”

Ariel looked up at Terry, who had taken his own shower and was dressed in gray shorts and a seagreen shirt covered with small blue and gray paisleys, circa 1969. “Going over our song,” she told.

“You mean
the
song, right?” He nodded toward the empty half of the bench. “Can I sit?”

“This seat is saved,” she said, “just for you.”

Terry sat down. He angled his head to read the lines and Ariel cocked the notebook toward him so he had a better view.

“Say anything to you?” she asked.

“No, not really. To you?”

“I guess it’s about change. A summing up of things. Where you
stand
,” she decided. “Like…where are you in your life. What do you need to keep and what do you need to let go of, in order to move on. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Terry said. “I can see that. So you’re wanting another couple of verses and a chorus?”

She thought about it. “I don’t know what I want,” she said. What she meant was: I don’t know the
why
of this song, much less the
what
. It sounded so crazy, so spooky-oooky, to say that the girl at the well was directing them. That maybe John had come up with the idea of the communal song on his own, it was something he felt was necessary to keep the band on the same page, but the girl had…what?…read his mind, or planted a seed in Mike’s head, and made a passing statement of care that had struck George strongly enough to remember it in his ICU bed, and maybe…planted the desire to finish this song in Ariel’s own psyche?

But if that were true, in a Twilight Zoney way, then what was the
why
of it?

“I have to ask you something,” she told him. “This is going to sound strange, but have you had any weird dreams lately?”

His eyes blinked behind the specs. “The night before Stone Church. I was pretty tense about that gig. I had a weird dream that I was playing the Hammond and it bit my hands off at the wrists.”

“That’s not what I mean. I know you believe in God and a Heaven of some kind—whatever that is—and you believe in the
other
side of that, too. Right?” She waited for him to nod. “I want to tell you about a dream I had last night…or this morning, or whenever it was. I just want you to sit and listen, and then I want to talk to you about some things that are on my mind, and if you think I’m losing it…okay, fair enough. Maybe I
am
losing it. Maybe I’m the one who ought to be hanging it up for a while and taking a break.” She stared directly into his eyes. “But I don’t think so.” She hesitated, to underscore her resolve at this statement. Then: “Can I tell you?”

“Yeah, sure. Go ahead,” Terry said.

How trustingly he said that, Ariel thought. How bravely he said it. In the next few minutes, she would find out how trusting Terry was of his system of belief, and how bravely he could handle her interpretation of the Unknown Hand at work.

Because she was already thinking that the other side also had its unknown hand.

And it too might be at work.

TWENTY-TWO.

When Ariel had finished and they’d talked it back and forth for about ten minutes, Terry felt either that the incident at Stone Church had snapped her strings or something was happening to The Five that he could not explain or understand. He didn’t know which he believed. It was one thing to hear your voice spoken in a church by a man you could not possibly know, and that was strange and frightening enough, but
this
…

This was like looking at your reflection in a mirror and putting your hand up against it, and suddenly your hand pushes through the mirror like it’s a thin pane of ice and beyond it is a world that was right there all the time, and maybe you suspected it was right there all the time, and you talked about it and made theories about it, but to actually look into it, to actually see the fearsome wonder that lies hidden beyond the mirror…

Or it was like swimming in the sea at night, under a million stars, and swimming further and further out from the lights of shore until a current takes you and you can’t get back, and you swim and swim against the current until you’re tired, but you have to rest for a while, have to tread water and get your strength back, and then in that night-black water something massive and covered with the scars of time slides along under your feet, and it just keeps sliding on and on, an entity too awesome to look at, and you know the leviathan has either come to eat you or give you a place to stand with your head just above the waves.

What Ariel had told him, and her thoughts about that girl and the song, about George seeing her in his hospital room and calling her an
angel of life
, about crows flying from the mouth of Jeremy Pett in the blackberry bramble battleground…it was too much for even a believer. It was too much for even someone who had heard his name spoken by a stranger in a church far from home.

“I don’t know,” he told her, sitting on the park bench in the fragrant shade of the eucalyptus tree. She had just asked him if he thought they should talk this over with John and Berke. He could tell that she wanted to, but she needed him to agree. “I’m not sure they’re ready for this.”

“You mean,
you’re
not ready.”

“Ariel…listen…I’m trying to make sense of this, okay?” Terry felt himself floundering, like that swimmer in the night far from shore. “You saying this song is…like…divinely inspired, right? By that girl, and she was something
other
than an ordinary girl? But John had the idea for all of us to write the song before we got to that place.”

“No, he had the idea for all of us to write
a
song before we got there. He came up with the idea, but she…” Ariel hesitated, as lost as she’d been in her dream. What exactly was she trying to get at? “…is refining it,” she said, for want of a better term.

“
Is
refining it?
Is
? Ariel, here are the lines of the song, right here on this page. In this notebook. Your notebook. And you came up with this line about figuring what to keep and what to leave behind, didn’t you?
You
did, not…her. So how can
she
be refining the song? How can she have anything to do with it? Okay, maybe George had a dream about her in the hospital, just like you did last night, but I don’t see—”

“Why would George have had a dream about her? He hardly spoke to her that day.”

“That’s the way dreams work. Things pop in and out. Look,
I
haven’t had any dreams about her. As far as I know, neither have John or Berke. If she was like…some kind of supernatural
force
or something, then why wouldn’t she speak to all of us at the same time?”

Ariel almost said it, but she didn’t:
Maybe she spoke to the one who would listen
,
and maybe she trusted that listener to carry the message forward
.

“What would be the reason for it?” Terry had his hand on her shoulder, like someone might do to calm a deranged person. “Honestly, now. Are we supposed to write a song that brings about whirled peas? Come on! Are we supposed to write a song that makes us…like…a huge success and suddenly we’re the great big music stars? If you’ve noticed, we’re all over the news right now, and you know who made that possible? It wasn’t that girl.” He leaned in closer, as if confiding a secret, but Ariel already knew what he was going to say. “It was
Jeremy Pett
. It was Mike’s murder, and George getting shot. It was some nut with a .25 at Stone Church. Yeah, I believe there’s a God, and I believe there’s a Satan too. I believe in a Heaven and a Hell, and all the stuff that a lot of people laugh at. But
this
is just a few lines of a song.”

“A .25?” Ariel asked. That was the first she’d heard of it. “True didn’t say what kind of gun it was.”

“It sounded like a .25 to me. A small gun. My dad’s a collector. Handguns, not rifles. He took me out to a pistol range a few times.” Terry shrugged. “It’s one of the man things he was pushing on me.” He reached out for the notebook and the pen. “Can I show you something?”

She gave the two items up.

Terry sat for a while looking at the lines, and then beneath the last line he wrote in the purple ink
Won’t you
move my hand, please tell me what to write
.

Then he waited, pen poised.

“Okay already,” Ariel said. “I get it.”

Terry’s hand moved, and he began to write.

I’m sitting here like a candle on the darkest night.

I’ve got my hot flame, got my flicker on, but where am I when my light is gone?

I wish you safe travel, courage, you’re gonna need it.

Terry looked up and handed her back the pen. “Second verse. Did that girl write it, or did I?”

Ariel took the pen and also the notebook. She closed it.

He was right. Of course he was right. But she couldn’t help thinking that if she hadn’t been sitting out here on this bench, saving a seat just for Terry, and if she hadn’t told him what was on her mind, this second verse would not have been born today.

“What a way to earn a living.” Terry was looking at the two FBI agents who were still scanning the street, the houses and the hills. When he spoke again, his tone was a little wistful. “I’m so sorry about Mike and George. But the awful thing—the thing that makes you really sick—is that the media attention has already made us a
success
, if you want to use that word for it. It’s already sold thousands of CDs that we wouldn’t have sold just going on like we were. No telling what doors are about to open. And we’re just doing exactly what we were doing
before
.” He gave a small bitter smile. “Because before all this press and shit, where were we going? Around in a circle.” He didn’t have to remind her of what they’d shared for the last three years: the grinding road trips, the gigs where you hoped to sell enough T-shirts to pay for a motel room, the indignity of opening for bands—some younger and much less experienced—who got the lucky break of a record deal early on, and you never saw your own break coming, no matter how hard you worked or what you did. “That just wears you down,” Terry said. “You know? It wore
me
down. Way down. And before that I was there with the Venomaires, watching that death battle between John and Kevin Keeler over who was going to run the band, and then Kevin having his nervous breakdown on stage in Atlanta. With all that, and then Julia and the pain pills.”

When he sighed, it was the sound of a man whose joy has become a burden. “I don’t know what you guys are planning to do, whether or not you’ll keep the name and soldier on with some new faces. I’m leaving because I want to do the vintage keyboards thing, sure, but the other part is…where am I when my light is gone? What have I
done
? What am I
going
to do? Have I mattered to
anybody
?” He paused for a moment, and he straightened his glasses on his face as if to be able to see a little more clearly. “I need some time and space, all my own. I need to get off the bus and find out where I am.”

Ariel said, “The man in the church. The voice. About music being your life.”

“I’ll always play, if just for myself. I’ll always write songs. Maybe I’ll kick in with another band someday. Maybe I’ll record at home. I’m not doubting what he told me. I just want to know why he took the time to speak to me, if that’s all there is.” Terry sat staring at the ground, where the edge of the eucalyptus shade met the promise of the California sun. “Well,” he said at last, and he stood up a bit creakily, like an old codger artfully disguised in a young skin. “That stew smelled pretty good in there. I’m starving.”

Ariel also got to her feet, holding the notebook close to her side. “Let’s get at it,” she suggested. She took his hand and they walked into the house together, and behind them the FBI agents returned to their Yukon.

In the kitchen, the two lovely birds of morning had emerged from their slumber nests and had already been served with bowls of veggie stew. One bird had touselled, curly black hair and dark hollows under her equally dark eyes, she wore a loose-fitting T-shirt and a pair of camo-print men’s boxer shorts and she was sullenly nursing a cup of coffee that may or may not have been spiked like momma’s own. The other, wearing the Five tee and the gray PJ bottoms in which he’d slept, had an even more wildly cockscrewed bedhead of long black hair and—

“Christ, what an eye!” Terry said, not without admiration.

“Thanks, and go eff yourself,” Nomad replied, being a gentleman in front of the older lady.

The first thing that had jumped into Terry’s mind upon seeing that eye was the title of King Crimson’s 1974 album
Starless and Bible Black
. Except the swollen-shut lump of head-butted flesh wasn’t completely black, it contained splotches and streaks of green in maybe four different sick shades. It had been bad last night but today…whoa! It was time for the phantom to put his mask back on.

“Are you going to be able to do the gig?” Ariel asked.

“Yes, I am.” Nomad’s voice was huskier than usual. His good eye looked bloodshot. “Don’t worry about me.” He kept eating his stew, though his spoon seemed to have trouble finding his mouth.

Ariel nodded, but the fact remained that she did worry about him. She remembered apologizing for John’s behavior to the girl at the well, and telling her
I just try to clean up the mess
. It was her path, it seemed. She had tried to clean up the mess for many people, most of them guys she’d been involved with. Most all of them musicians, the messiest of the bunch. Like Neal Tapley, and before him Jess Vandergriff, who was one of the best acoustic guitarists on the East Coast but one of the worst in believing everything was either perfection or crap, nothing in between. And before him, others. After Neal had driven himself off a county road to his death, in the aftermath of one of the messiest drug scenes/breakups/breakdowns Ariel had ever tearfully and agonizingly witnessed, she had sworn off men of the music. There was not going to be any involvement with any guy in any band she was in ever again, no romance, not any little funky and innocent—mostly—fun fuelled by a few vodka shooters when she knew she ought to be drinking silver needle tea and getting the broom ready. Nothing.

And yet.

She had looked at the shape lying in the other bed last night, his shoulder and the wounded side of his face touched by the faintest iridescence of moonlight, and it had crossed her mind that if Terry was not lying on the floor in the sleeping bag she might have drawn aside her sheet, gotten up and gone to John, as silent as a spirit.

She might have slipped in beside him, and gently touched his forehead as if to draw from it the fever of his pain. She would bear that for him, if he would let her. She would ease the trouble in his bones and smooth the worry from his mind. She would take the fire of his anger in her hands, and make of it a candle.

He had so much potential. He was so very good, in so many ways, without knowing he was. She thought maybe that was a great part of why she admired him so much; he didn’t strut or brag, he just
did
. She wished she had a few embers of his flame, to heat up the sometimes too-cool hallways of her own house. She knew he could be abrasive, he could be childish, he could throw his tantrums and say things his mouth wished seconds later had never tumbled out. He could be terribly human, is what he could be. Human, cranked up to eleven. But she wished she had his ability to go full-throttle, to open up his engines and let the roar of life thunder out. If he made a mistake, the same kind of mistake that would have paralyzed her with the fear she might commit it again, he kicked it aside like an old sack full of ashes. He just kept going forward, even if he didn’t know exactly where he was going. To be honest, sometimes he played his guitar like that, too. But his passion and energy always made up for his lack of direction. At least, in her opinion.

She had asked herself if she was falling in love with him.
Love
. That was not a word used by members of a gigging band for each other, unless it was in the concept of
I love my brother
or
I love my sister
or
I love my whole dysfunctional road-crazed family
. She wasn’t sure, but she did feel for him—what would be the word used in those old Victorian novels by the Brontë sisters that she liked to read in school?—oh, yes….‘stirrings’.

But only stirrings, because she had tried—and failed, mostly—to clean up so many messes, and her own heartbreak was not a mess she was eager to tackle, her own weeping side of three o’clock had come and gone so many mornings when John had left a club with one or two girls laughing and rubbing themselves all over him, but that was the Nomad part of John, the persona, and she had tried very hard and so far successfully to sing and play ‘This Song Is A Snake’ with no hint of a hiss.

Anyway, there was not going to be any involvement with any guy in any band she was ever in again. No romance. No little funky fun.