The Five (47 page)

“Who’re you calling?” Terry asked when True took the cell out of his leather bag.

“Hang on a minute.” But in only a few seconds True realized he wasn’t calling anyone. No bars, no service out in this expanse of desert. He said, “Just checking something,” and then he put the cellphone away.

“We ought to be almost there,” Terry told him. “The sign’ll say
Blue Chalk
.”

“Okay,” True answered, and he tried to concentrate on his driving.

Terry knew very well what he’d heard and kept when he was a child, and knew he had it still, hidden away in a place of safety. It was something from his grandparents’ house. His mother’s parents lived in a brick house a few blocks from his grammar school. They were still there, Granddad Gerald in his mid-seventies and Grandmother Mimi just turned seventy. Some days after school, Terry had gone there to get a cold drink and sit on the screened-in porch as his grandfather listened to the early autumn baseball games on the radio and smoked a pipe with a face carved on the bowl that GeeGee said was a musketeer. His grandfather played board games with him, too. Any excuse to pull from the closet the old Milton Bradley
Dogfight
or the Mattel
Lie Detector
or the really cool Transogram 52-variety game chest with all the different colored boards. And then as the afternoon wore on, and Terry didn’t want to leave because this house was small and warm and not like his own at all, Grandmother Mimi brought from the closet a small plastic keyboard that she plugged in and placed in her lap as she sat in the front room. He would never forget the sound of that keyboard coming to life when she flipped a switch. It was like hearing an orchestra warm up, the violins, the oboes, the flutes and trumpets just softly starting to awaken. An orchestra contained in a small plastic box. And then she played it with her supple fingers, and he was sure that her fingers were supple because she
did
play it, and maybe it called to her to play it, day after day, because they needed each other to stay young.

What stories that keyboard told! When Terry closed his eyes and listened, he could see the image in his mind of a boy on a raft with a beautiful girl clinging to him, and in the river the rapids ran fast over dangerous rocks and the boy would have to be quick and smart to get them through that treacherous stretch. Or he saw a hundred Cossacks on their horses, driving forward through the snow under a moon as bright as a new quarter. Or he saw himself, older but still young, playing that very same keyboard before a vast audience, in a great concert hall, and then the Cossack chief rode in right down the aisle and awarded him an official sword and the beautiful girl stood up from the front row and said she would be his forever.

And then, of course, GeeGee cleared his throat across the game table, and when Terry opened his eyes GeeGee puffed smoke from the musketeer’s feathered hat and slapped down the dogfight’s ‘5 Bursts’ card, which meant Terry’s Spad was going down in flames.

He began to think they were teaming up on him.

“Terry,” said Grandmother Mimi, “do you want me to show you some chords?”

Chords? You mean…like…
ropes
?

“Sort of,” she’d answered. “Only these ropes never wear out, and they always keep you connected to something wonderful.”

Years later, the small portable organ just didn’t wake up on one day. It was a Hohner Organetta, not the kind of instrument found in every neighborhood music store. It sat silent in the closet, gathering dust. Was it for that reason Grandmother Mimi’s fingers began to swell and twist with the onset of arthritis?

“Let me try to fix it,” said Terry Spitzenham, the high school freshman.

There was no owner’s manual. No electronics diagram. Maybe somewhere in Germany there lived a Hohner Organetta expert, but he wasn’t in Oklahoma City. Terry opened the keyboard up, and looked at the old wiring and the reeds. He replaced the electric cord, but no go. It had to be a voltage problem, according to his electronics books. Not enough voltage was being generated to produce sound. He tried this and that, and that and this, but the keyboard remained mute. Finally he decided to take it all apart, every last bit of it, and rebuild it.

It regained its voice too late for Grandmother Mimi, whose fingers would no longer let her play. But, she said, she would love to
listen
, because she said that when she closed her eyes and he was playing—just that small keyboard with its twelve black keys and seventeen white—she felt like she was right there with him.

His first vintage keyboard buy had been a Hohner Symphonic 320, a real nasal-sounding and nasty-ass bastard found in the back of a garage. If those old brutes weren’t the heart and soul of rock, he didn’t know what
rock
was.

And now, he was minutes away from seeing—touching,
playing
if he could—the legend of legends, Lady Frankenstein.

“There’s the sign,” he said, and he heard in himself the excited voice of a little boy.

Blue Chalk
, it read. True noted that it was defaced by a pair of close-set bullet holes. He took the exit off Route 66 and started north along a cracked and uneven asphalt road. Ahead stood a mesa, purple above the burnt brown of the desert floor. True drove sixty feet and slowed the Scumbucket to a halt. He peered into the sideview mirror.

“What’s the problem?” Nomad asked. True was acting shady this afternoon; something was up, and it wasn’t just because of the second security team leaving, as True had told the band at lunch.

True was holding his breath. In his lap was the leather bag that held his pistol. He watched the exit curve very carefully.

“True, what is it?” Ariel had awakened when the van stopped, and now Berke opened her eyes and removed the earbuds.

“Where are we?” Berke asked.

True could see cars speeding by on the highway. He watched the curve for a white car that might suddenly take the same turn to Blue Chalk.

Nobody said anything else, because they realized True was not only working, he was a two-hundred pound tuning fork that had just been struck into vibration.

He saw the white car pass.

Then he let his breath go.

He gave the Scumbucket some gas and it rumbled onward.

“What was
that
about?” Nomad looked back, but of course could see nothing beyond the trailer’s bulk.

“I wanted to make sure we weren’t being followed.”

“Why?” Berke’s voice was tight. “Did you see something?”

“We’re good,” he told her, and drove on toward the distant mesa.

The road began to undulate, to rise up on small scrub-covered hillocks and then to fall into rock-walled gullies. Here and there were trailers with external generators because the power poles that marched this way no longer held electrical lines. They passed several houses that had collapsed under the weight of time. Maybe this had been a community when Route 66 was a leisurely scenic road, the theater of Buz and Tod in their red Corvette convertible, but now it was a footnote to progress.

The road curved in and out. If there was any blue chalk in these red walls of rock, it was hiding under camouflage paint. This place was so far off the track it was refreshingly clean, not a beer can or broken bottle or spray of graffiti to be found. An undiscovered country, True thought. Well, it had been discovered
once
, but in the end nature always won.

They rounded a curve and there stood the brown stone building Eric Gherosimini had told Terry to watch for in his letter. It was a hollow shell, really. An abandoned gas station. Long abandoned, from the looks of the two rusted-out antique pumps in front. A few tires that might have been perfect for a 1959 Ranchero lay in a dust-whitened stack.

“Damn!” Berke said, looking out her window. “Was gas ever twenty-five cents a gallon?”

A barely-legible metal sign leaning against a broken wall said it was.

“And who’s Ethel?” she asked, but True didn’t tell her.

Across the road were a half-dozen remnants of houses, not much left but the roofs and frames, and around them stood the boulders and shale that had over the years—decades?—drifted down from the rugged hill behind. Between two of the ruins was a rusted swingset, a slide and a seesaw. Once upon a time, a children’s playground.

The Scumbucket negotiated another sharp turn, another descent into a washed-out gully, and there the asphalt ended. Ahead the road turned to dirt.

“Your boy wanted to get away from it all, didn’t he?” True asked, easing on the brake. “You sure about this?”

“He said he lives a half-mile past the pumps,” Terry said. “We’re almost there.”

“I think if I’d wanted to be a hermit I would’ve chosen an island in the Caribbean,” True replied, but he pressed the pedal and the wheels of the van went round and round, raising whorls of dust behind them. “Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s just me.”

They continued on. True had been glancing every so often in the sideview mirror. It disturbed him that he couldn’t see anything through the dust. They rounded one more snakespine of a curve and Terry said, “That’s it.”

On the right was a small, regular-looking adobe-style house, nothing special about it at all. It might have been plucked from any Southwestern city suburb, with a minimalist and rock-loving landscaper in charge. But then again, most adobe-style houses in city suburbs were connected to power lines and didn’t have a pair of big metal boxes that could only be heavy-duty generators cabled up alongside. As they got nearer, they could hear a rumble like an old aircraft engine turning its propellor. An honest-to-God outhouse stood out back, along with a raised wooden platform that held a showerhead and some kind of waterbucket device operated by a pullchain. A sagging pickup truck the dun color of mole’s skin was parked on the shale in front of the house. Berke thought that it had probably used its share of twenty-five-cents-a-gallon gas.

True was getting the picture of where they were. He could see two trailers standing maybe a hundred yards further on, where the dirt road ended at a rock wall that angled toward the sky. He figured the Zen masters of hermitry lived in those trailers. Either that, or they were cooking meth
and
hiding from the IRS.

“You guys ever watch Western movies?” he asked. They gave him blank expressions. “Know what a box canyon is?” When there was no reply, he wondered what young people were learning in schools these days. “Well,” said True, “we’re in one.”

He stopped the Scumbucket in front of the house. A reddish-brown dog came rocketing off the shady porch, planted its paws in the stones and gave them a reception that could be heard even over the rumble of aircraft props.

Terry saw a man emerge from the house. The man stood on the porch, watching them climb out of the van. He looked as if he were trying to decide if he knew them or not. True clutched his leather bag close to his side.

Over the dog’s barking and the generator noise, Terry called out, “Mr. Gherosimini? I’m Terry Spitzenham! You remember? From The Five? You wrote me a letter saying I could come—”

“My
brother
!” the man shouted, and lifted his hands in the air. He had a gray beard that hung over the chest of his overalls and was decorated with what appeared to be small metallic beads. His deeply-seamed face grinned. “
Finally
come home!” He came striding off the porch with the gait of an energetic younger man. The barking dog put itself between him and the visitors in a posture of defense.

Eric Gherosimini was making music as he walked, though they couldn’t hear it. Tied in his beard with white and gold-colored cords were little bells. He was barefoot. Nomad thought the soles of those horny-toed feet must have been an inch thick to survive all the wicked edges. Gherosimini was thin and stoop-shouldered and bald on the top of his scalp except for a few remaining wild sprigs of gray, while the hair on the sides and back flowed down over his shoulders like opaque curtains. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that were not very different from Terry’s.

My brother. Finally come home.

Oh my God, Nomad thought. This dude’s going to ask Terry to change places with him so he can go out and paint the world red, and Terry will have to be the guardian of the secret fucking keyboards until the next sucker comes along.

But Eric Gherosimini raised his index finger to the dog and said sternly, “Stereo!” The mongrel stopped barking. Then the frail genius of the 13th Floors looked Terry full in the face, blinked his electric-blue eyes and touched Terry’s shirt, which today was black-and-purple paisleys on a background of dove gray.

“
Boss
shirt,” he said with admiration. “Vintage, ‘66? H.I.S.?”

“You got it.” Terry remembered who he was talking to. “Sir.”

Gherosimini put an arm around Terry’s shoulder. “Come on inside. All of you. Come see the madman’s dreams.”

They followed him, with Stereo sniffing at their shadows.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

 I didn’t know if you’d be here or not,” Terry said, when he didn’t know what else to say.

“Usually here, man. Don’t get out much, but…how do you guys say it?..
it’s all good
.”

“Can I ask something?” True waited for Eric Gherosimini’s eyes to focus on him. It looked to True as if the man had some difficulty in that department. “Why do you live so far from town? There’s just nothing around here.”

Gherosimini’s gaze floated down along the creases of True’s slacks to take aim at the black wingtips. An impish smile worked at the corners of his mouth. “Man, I know I’ve been out of action a
lonnngggg
time, but they sure don’t make road managers like they used to.”

They were sitting in what passed as the man’s living room. It contained inflatable chairs in Day-Glo colors and a plaid sofa that must have come all the way from Scotland’s Salvation Army. On the woodplank floor was a blue rug with the image of the moon and sun woven into it. Some type of scrawny leafless tree in a rusted metal pot stood in a corner, its limbs bearing a strange fruit of several different kinds of multi-colored glass windchimes. A fan powered by the generator continually stirred the chimes into musical tinklings. A blue cone of incense burned in a metal cup on a table made out of what True thought might be compressed telephone books. The faintly sweet smell of the incense reminded Ariel of the way the air smelled at Singing Beach, in Manchester, after a summer rain. Several unlit candle lanterns in an ornate Moroccan style stood about, indicating that the generators were not always running. Stereo sprawled on the floor at his master’s bare feet, chewing on a green dental hygiene bone.

And it was not every living room that had walls covered, every inch except the front window, with white sound-dampening acoustic tiles. Bamboo blinds hung over the window. Tacked up in several places on the wall tiles were posters of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the rugged majesty of the Big Sur coast and the skyline of Seattle showing the Space Needle.

Gherosimini had brought them small ceramic cups of reddish-hued water that he’d said was sent to him by a fellow shapeshifter from the Lion’s Head Fountain at a place called Chalice Well, in England. He offered a part-toast, part-prayer that the world should be healed by the power of mystic waters, and that it should begin right here in this room.

Nomad thought the water tasted like it had been soaking rusty nails. He took a couple of sips and decided, mystic waters or not, he wasn’t going to run the risk of getting lockjaw.

“So far from town,” Gherosimini said, repeating a portion of True’s question. He was lounging in a bright orange inflatable chair. The windchimes tinkled softly as the fan’s breeze touched them, and Stereo gnawed on his chewie. “Nothing around here. Why do you think that, Mr. Manager Man?”

“Because I have two working eyes.”

“You
sure
they’re working?”

“Pretty much.” True took another sip of the water stained with iron oxide. It wasn’t so bad, but what he would pay right now for a glass of iced tea!

“How about you?” Gherosimini’s attention turned to Ariel. “You’re very quiet. Do
you
think there’s nothing around here?”

She shrugged, not sure how he wanted her to respond. “I guess I—”

“No,” he interrupted. “Say what you really think.”

“I think…” She saw he was forming an appraisal of her, and she decided to tell him what she really thought. “I think there’s the wind at night, and when you walk in it you can hear music, or voices, or both. I think there’s a silence that asks you who you are. I think there’s a sky of stars that would knock a person’s eyes out. I think the colors of the sunset and sunrise are never exactly the same. I think you could swim in the moonlight if you wanted to. I think you could stand in the blue cool of the evening and smell the ocean waves that used to roll here.” She could smell those right now, from the smoky cone of incense. “I think the rocks might move when you’re not looking, but if you keep looking one day you’ll see it happen. I think you could see a hundred thousand pictures in the clouds and never the same one twice. I think maybe you could see angels out here, if you tried hard enough.”

“And devils?” Gherosimini’s thick gray eyebrows shot up. “Could I see those too, if I tried hard enough?”

She nodded. “Yes. But I wouldn’t want to try that hard.”

He looked at his other guests with a smile that told them the quiet ones always ran the deepest. “What do you think about that, Mr. Manager Man?”

“I think I must be nearsighted,” he said, which really was the truth.

That made the genius of the 13th Floors laugh. The sound must’ve been unusual, because Stereo looked up from his chewie and made a weird questioning noise between a whine and a growl. Call it a whrowl. Then he went right back to chewing.

“My turn for a question,” Nomad announced. He realized Terry was looking at him with fear on his face, not knowing what John was going to throw at his hero. Nomad had heard of the 13th Floors before, sure, and Gherosimini had earned his respect for blazing a trail, but this bell-bearded sixty-something-year-old bag of hippie dust was just plain ol’ Jack to him. “You called Terry your brother and said he’d finally come home. What was that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t have a computer here,” Gherosimini answered, and then he sat there so silently and for so long that Nomad thought the tons of acid he’d swallowed back in the dark ages had come back to drop a psychedelic bomb on his brain. But then the man finished his cup of weird water. “After I got Terry’s letter, I went to the Internet room at the library in town. I went to your website. Nice site, man. Very cool, easy to navigate. I watched your videos. I wrote Terry that I bought one of your CDs. They’re hard to find. But…you know…I knew you before you were born.”

“Really?” Uh huh, he thought. Acid bomb, bigtime.

“Really. You were the lead singer of the Mojo Ghandis. And you were the lead singer of Freight Train South. You were up on stage fronting The Souljers, and man did you work your ass off for Proud Pete and the Prophets. Oh yeah, I knew you. Watched you burn up a stage, work up a crowd, many nights. Many, many gigs.” The wispy-haired head nodded, the blue eyes fixed on Nomad and unyielding. “I knew Ariel, too. She was the girl you went to when you needed to come down to earth. When it got real floaty and spooky up there in the high dark, and you needed a safe place to land. She was the one who told you what you didn’t want to hear, because she was one of the few people—the
very
few—who gave a shit whether you lived or died. And Terry…oh, yeah. He was there. In how many bands and behind how many keyboards, who can count? But he was always where he needed to be, when he needed to be there.”

Gherosimini looked at Berke. “I’m not sure,” he said, “if I ever knew
you
. Not in my era. The female drummer was a freak. Shit, you may be a freak too. But I do know one thing: you can bust it up with anybody who ever sat behind
me
. So take that compliment from a gator who drove drummers so fucking crazy they’d do anything to get out of the band, including jumping out of windows. And that guy you’ve probably heard about, who jumped into a pool at a Holiday Inn and broke a woman’s back?” Gherosimini grinned. “That spaz thought we were on the parking lot side.”

A frown suddenly surfaced. “Your bass player. Where is he?”

It hit them all, at that moment, that Eric Gherosimini had no idea what The Five had been through in the past twenty-four days. Without a computer, without the Internet, possibly without a television or a radio, maybe adverse to reading newspapers and magazines…he truly had decided to put many miles between himself and modern civilization. Maybe, Nomad thought, he just didn’t like the music anymore.

“Mike’s not with us,” Berke said. “But we’ll catch up with him later on.”

“Outta sight,” was Gherosimini’s comment, with an upraised thumb. “Oh, yeah…your question.” He focused on Nomad. “Terry’s my brother ’cause he feels the love. Of what we do. What we feel when we’re playing. And I say he’s finally come home, because he’s wanted to come here for a long time. Not necessarily this place, man, but to wherever
I
am. I know what I’ve done. I know who I am. Terry’s like family. He’s finally come home, and I know the why of that, too. He wants to meet the lady. Isn’t that right, Terry?”

The question made Terry’s heart race. The moment was near. “Yes,” he said.

Gherosimini stood up, and so did Stereo. “Let me introduce you.”

They followed him into the small kitchen and then through a sliding metal door into a larger room at the back of the house. He flipped a light switch. When the fluorescents came on, Terry thought this must be the first step on the stairway to Heaven.

It was another room whose walls were covered with the white acoustic tiles. The floor was of gray concrete. Within the room were several sets of speakers of different sizes, a twenty-four-track mixing board on a desk, a chair for the board rider, and cables connected to an item True certainly recognized, a multitrack reel-to-reel tape recorder. Next to the console was a wooden rack holding what the others knew to be echo and effects boxes, compressors, limiters, and other studio necessities. None of the equipment looked very new, and most of it was definitely vintage, from the late ’60s or early ’70s. If any of this stuff still worked, Nomad thought, gear collectors would piss their pants with excitement in here. Various vintage microphones were on their stands waiting for use. A plastic crate held a rat’s nest of cables, wallwarts and power cords.

On the left side of the studio stood a second desk, smaller than the one holding the mixer, on which sat a typewriter. A piece of paper was held in the rollers, with typing on it. Near at hand was a sheaf of paper, a tin cup holding some pens and pencils, and an ashtray with half of a plump brown cigarette in it that True decided he wouldn’t stroll over and examine. On the right side of the studio was a workbench with various pieces of circuitry and wiring lying atop it.

Terry was focused straight ahead. Nothing in Eric Gherosimini’s studio pulled at him but the array of mind-blowing vintage organs and electric pianos on their stands that dominated the space.

He felt for a few seconds that he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t draw a breath. Something in his brain was so hit with the electric pleasure prod, and so deeply, that his automatic life-functions had gone on the fritz. But then he figured he really should concentrate on drawing in a long lungful of air, to clear his head and keep himself from passing out, because there never ever in his life would be another moment like this.

He went through a quick assessment of what he was looking at: a Vox Continental UK Version 1 with the cool black keys from about 1962; a fire-engine red Vox Jaguar 304, built to start a blaze on a dance floor; a silver-top Rhodes electric piano from 1968; a 1975 Rhodes Mark 1, a battered warrior; an ARP synthesizer…no,
two
ARPs, one opened up to show its internals and probably being cannibalized; a beautiful Roland Jupiter 8; a Minimoog Voyager and a Moog Sonic 6; a Prophet 600 with some missing keys on the high end; a Rhodes Chroma; an unknown thing labelled ‘Sonick’ in a suitcase with a blue keyboard and a control board with different colored knobs and what looked like a pegboard to chart the ocillators; a gorgeous wood-grained, double-keyboard early Mellotron; a glossy black Panther Duo 2200, the stage instrument of ‘The Partridge Family’ but capable of doing the nasty in any biker bar; an elegant, slightly arrogant gray Doric; two of the weird slabs of Kustom Kombos, the Naugahyde-padded “Zodiac” combined keyboard-and-stage-speakers, one in blue and the other yellow.

He saw sleek Farfisas and Cordovoxes with the ‘AstroSound’ effect. He saw a hundred-and-thirty-two pounds of double-keyboard vintage Yamaha, circa 1972. He saw the Gems: a Caravan, a Sprinter and a Joker 61. And then he came to the instruments he did not know, the ones that held no names or trademarks. The ones that were born from the acid-stretched mind of Eric Gherosimini.

He saw a sleek silver keyboard with wings, like a fighter jet awaiting takeoff. On the wings that curved back on either side of the player were dozens of rocker switches. Next to it stood a hulking black synthesizer five feet tall and about four feet wide. Above the blood-red keyboard were many banks of toggles, multi-colored cables plugged from one connection to another, knobs by the dozens and—ominously—a single broken wine glass sitting on a metal foil tray atop the brutish instrument’s ledge.

He saw an instrument shaped like a hand, with rows of gray circular buttons designed to be pressed or played or whatever by each finger. A one-handed symphony. He saw a thing that looked like a harp crossed with a washboard. He saw a five-note keyboard, three whites and two blacks, with a control console that resembled a peacock’s fan. Next to it was a red-painted upright acoustic piano with garishly-colored keys and desert plants and cacti bursting out of the open top. Was Gherosimini experimenting with organic sound-dampeners? Trying to create a naturalist sound using elements from nature?

“What’s this one?” Terry asked.

Gherosimini craned his neck to see. “Oh, that’s my planter,” he said.

And there…right there…only fifteen feet away, on the other side of the planter, she was standing white and pure on four shining aluminum legs.

Gherosimini crossed to the wall, opened a metal box and pulled a lever. They couldn’t hear the second generator kick into action, but they could feel its vibration in the floor. Green lights came on in a central command box. Lights of many colors, some steady and others pulsing like heartbeats, began to appear on the instruments. And there was a glorious hum of life.

“My brother,” Gherosimini said to Terry, “you can play anything you like. This is your home.”

Terry lowered his head.

Silently he wept tears of joy.

“Mr. Gherosimini?” Ariel was speaking from across the studio, where she’d wandered over to the typewriter to see, curious and writer-to-writer, what he was doing. “You have a new project?” She remembered the letter Terry had read.
I’m working on something real
, Gherosimini had told him.