The Five (53 page)

True and his wife passed Thor and his pony in the doorway to the Green Room, and Nomad thought that if the old world didn’t crack itself wide open on that one, we were solid for the next few thousand years.

True and his wife sat in the Green Room with Nomad, Ariel, Berke, the Vista Futura’s owner, a couple of guys who ran Internet fan sites, a sound tech, and the old bearded dude who wore a beret and owned Play It Again, Man, which was a vintage vinyl and CD store out on West Anderson Lane. He’d wheeled in a handcart bearing two big boxes full of The Five CDs he was wanting to get signed, in silver marker, by the remaining members. A few other people came in and out, to meet-and-greet and take pictures. Someone, a kind soul, brought cold beers to the band. Two silver markers ran dry. The old dude supplied more from his massive backpack that smelled slightly suspicious to True. Sewn into the stained fabric was the depiction of a big marijuana leaf. True’s wife, a small-boned, attractive woman named Kate, kept glancing uneasily at the bearded dude, who had the habit of staring at people, herself included, and not blinking his bulbous eyes for what seemed to her minutes at a time. He also had the habit of getting up, pacing around the room a few times, and then sitting down again in his chair with his legs crossed under himself Indian-style. She whispered to her husband that she didn’t think that man was from earth. But True didn’t say anything. He had a bandage over his right eye. His elbow was aching under the cast, and it was time they were getting back to the Radisson because they had an early morning flight home.

“Better head in,” True announced. Ariel hugged him, and Berke came up stone-faced and sullen, and he didn’t know what she was going to do. She balled up her fist and hung it in the air and he gave her one of those fist-bump things and then she grinned at him like the dumbass he was and she hugged him too.

“Glad it’s not me having to sign all those,” True said to Nomad, motioning with his good hand toward the boxes.

“Yeah,” Nomad said. “Managers get off easy.”

True nodded. He looked at Kate and saw her staring at the bearded man and the bearded man staring back at her, a battle of the X-ray eyeballs. “Do you have a card?” True asked Nomad.

“A
car
? I’ve got a car.”

“A card,” True corrected. He had one of those in his left pocket, ready to give Nomad, and he took it out. “A business card, with your phone number on it.”

“Oh. No, I don’t have one of those.” Nomad accepted the card, which had True’s office number and extension on the front, and on the back, in scribbly left-hand-written ink, his H.P. number.

“You should. People need to know how to get in touch with you.” True knew that if he ever did want to get in touch with Nomad, he had the whole network of the FBI behind him as his White Pages. “Why’d you think I said ‘car’? Are your ears ringing?”

“No, it’s because nobody ever asked me if I had a card before.”

“You might think about some kind of ear protection. All of you need that. You know, your hearing is very important.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that.”

True stared at him. “You’re a little asshole,” he said, but he couldn’t do it straight-faced, he couldn’t keep the smile from creeping in.

“Yeah,” Nomad said. “I’ve heard that too.”

“You owe me some money, by the way. For certain dental expenses and mess cleanup on damage done at a Greek restaurant in Tucson, and the less you know about that the better. But I’m going to collect it from you someday. By then you’ll be rich enough to pay me back.”

“Maybe.” Nomad shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“Well,” True said, “better head in.”

Nomad’s heart ached. He put his arms around Truitt Allen and pulled him close, and True said, “Watch the elbow,” but his voice cracked when he said it. Kate stepped away a few feet, and the old bearded dude blinked and aimed his eyes at the silver-signed CD in his lap, a picture of The Five standing against a statue of one of the descending snakes on the pyramid of El Castillo at Chichen Itza, a washed-out purple-tinged glow of light all around them, and the title in dark purple lettering
Catch As Kukulkan
. The old dude had no way of knowing it was all computer-generated and photoshopped—no way could they afford the trip to the Yucatan—and had come from a dream Ariel had after eating a Mexican TV-dinner that evidently did not agree with her. She’s been left with a compelling and somewhat frightening image of travelling through space and time on the back of a feathered flying serpent, Kukulkan the link between the gods and human nobility, the overseer of human sacrifice. The
Catch As
part came from the term ‘Catch As Catch Can’, which meant getting through a situation however you could, using whatever happened to be lying around that could help. It was just something she’d come up with.

“Keep it real,” True said to Nomad, a statement he’d been planning on saying at this moment because it sounded like something a rocker would appreciate.

“Real, cranked to eleven,” Nomad answered.

Which True couldn’t make heads or tails of, but that was okay. This was where two worlds, having converged for a brief time in a circumstance of necessity, now by necessity moved again into their separate orbits.

“Thanks for getting us through,” Nomad said, and that made sense enough, though True would have many nights to wonder if there had been any other way to get them through, and if somehow Terry Spitzenham didn’t have to be dead. But he would never forget Terry playing in that studio, the voice of Lady Frankenstein rising from the speakers, and Terry saying
thank you for giving me
time
.

He knew, though, that Ariel was the one who’d really gotten them through, and he’d told her so. Standing up to Jeremy Pett and his rifle as she had was probably the bravest—or most foolhardy—act he’d ever witnessed in his life. There ought to be civilian medals for something like that, but as Kate would be the only person on earth to hear the whole story, or what Ariel had impressed upon him to be the truth as she understood it, an FBI Certificate Of Appreciation was the best he could get for her. It was the best he could get for the others in helping put an end, however tragic, to a dangerous individual who had been a brother Marine. But behind the scenes he could have John Charles’s money obligations taken care of and his record expunged. In his own case, he was to be awarded the FBI Star and the Medal of Valor at a ceremony next week.

< >

True felt honored to have known them all. He felt like one of them. After all, Ariel had told him she’d realized what the song was about from that off-handed statement he’d made.
Just when you think there’s nothing new in this old world
. She’d told him that after hearing those words, it was all clear to her. So part of him was in the song, too. He was a
songwriter
.

Sort of.

His wife took his left hand, because he was not moving and in his heart he wanted to stay until all the CDs were signed, every one, and the lights went out.

She led him from the Green Room, and when he looked back it was with the idea to tell them he planned to take up the guitar again when his arm was healed. But he let it go, because they needed to finish up their night and get home to bed, and so indeed did he.

THIRTY-ONE.

They were nearly done signing the CDs when a tall young man, maybe all of twenty, walked into the Green Room. He wore a The Five T-shirt under his red-striped jacket. He had long sandy-brown hair and gray eyes. He was handsome, but he was thin and angular and he had a darkly troubled expression. When Berke looked at him her first thought was that Gina Fayne, the new Janis Joplin and outspoken voice of the Nation, had died of too much life.

The young man’s name was Ben Rivington. He was the bass player for the Mudstaynes. He came right up to Berke, and he said, “Can I talk to you?”

“Shoot,” she told him, as she continued to sign the last two dozen.

He looked around at Nomad and Ariel, who knew who he was but didn’t exactly know him personally. Berke had never spoken to the guy in her life.

“I’d rather talk in private,” Rivington said.

“Okay,” Berke decided. “Let me finish these first.”

“It was a great show,” he told Nomad and Ariel. “I’m a big fan, have been since your first CD. I wanted to speak to you at the Curtain Club, but…you know…sometimes you get hung up. People get in your face. You know.”

“Do I ever,” said Nomad, signing away.

“I bought the shirt online.”

“Looks good on you,” Ariel said. She was wondering, as Nomad was, why this gator wasn’t playing somewhere tonight. Gina Fayne and the Mudstaynes were hot and hugely talented, they were young—the oldest being the twenty-two-year-old drummer XB4Y—and they had energy to burn. “I didn’t know you guys were in town. Did you have an early gig?”

“No,” he said. “I drove down from Dallas when I found out about this. Um…Gina’s not feeling too well.”

“What’s wrong?”

“She’s not well,” he repeated, his eyes haunted, and Ariel knew not to go any further. He watched Ariel sign her name on a CD and then reach for another. “You really came through the fire,” he said. “I don’t know how you survived it.”

“We were lucky.”

“I heard you were more than lucky. I heard you were…” He looked down, and Ariel waited for him to find what he searched for. “Blessed,” he said. “You’d have to be blessed to get through that. Does that sound fucking stupid?”

“No, not really,” Nomad told him. “I mean…I can handle that.”

“I liked that last song,” Rivington said. “The ‘New Old World’. It spoke to me.”

Ariel lifted her eyes to his. She could tell he needed something, a desperate need, and he would not have come here if he didn’t hope he could find it.

“After the gig, I was going to come back and speak but you had people on you, and I know how that goes. So I took off. Went to another club and had a beer. Heard another band finishing up. But that last song spoke to me. It told me to come back here. That part about, you know, changing things. That you’ve got to, like, step up to the plate if you want to get anything done. Take responsibility.” He grinned suddenly, like a shy kid, and he actually blushed. “Man, does that sound fucking dorky. Me
saying
it that way, not the song,” he corrected. “All props to the song, dudes.”

“Thanks,” Nomad said. He was still signing, but he was also listening very carefully.

“I believe a song can speak to a person. Like just jab a finger right in their throat, man, and say, like, ‘Yo, wake up!’ You know?”

“Got that right,” Nomad agreed.

“Yeah,” Rivington said with a kind of relief, as if an important bridge had been crossed.

They finished signing the last of the CDs. The bearded dude with the beret and the bulbous eyes gave them a million thanks and kissed Ariel’s hand and started to kiss Berke’s hand until he thought better of it. He pulled his handcart away to be unloaded. Everybody else was gone but the Vista Futura’s owner and the manager, who were clearing things up in the office and writing down orders for more beer. Berke’s drums had been loaded into the bed of her little black pickup truck, parked in the lot across the street. Nomad’s three guitars and variety of stompboxes were in his 2001 red Ford Focus, also waiting in the same lot. Ariel’s Ovation and her Tempest were packed in her silver-blue Corolla.

“Hey,” Berke said to Ben Rivington as they walked with Nomad and Ariel through the club toward the door, “whatever you want to say, you can say it in front of my friends.”

Rivington stopped. He was illuminated by the harsh light of the floods up at the corners of the room, the light of real life after the show is over and the fans have gone.

“Okay,” he said. “Gina’s sick. She’s on smack.”

No one spoke. Nomad remembered hearing that Gina Fayne was catching up to Janis in the department of drinking and drugs, and he’d hoped somebody wasn’t stupid enough to let her try heroin to complete the picture.

“She needs help.” He was speaking to Berke. “You know, she’s fucking crazy. She’s got all that voice, and the talent and the looks, and she fucking loves music more than anything, but it’s eating at her. It’s going to kill her, if she doesn’t get help.”

“Then get her help,” Berke said.

“That’s what the song said for me to do,” Rivington answered. “To come back here, and ask for you to help save Gina’s life.”

“
Me
? Why me?”

“We’ve got a tour to do starting in two weeks. Going to England. First overseas gig, it’s going to be a fucking grind. Gina’s being Gina. Taking her shit, climbing into a hole and pulling the hole in with her. And let me tell you, when she wants to go deep, she can go to a place nobody else can get to. But a few days ago Lawrence walked out.”

“Lawrence? Who’s that?”

“XB4Y,” Rivington said. “Lawrence Jolly. That’s his real name. He says he’s done with her shit, he’s already hooked up with the fucking Beastie Crew. That’s more his style, anyway. So our guy at PPK Management’s looking for a drummer, but…it has to be somebody with
maturity
. And road experience too, you know what I mean?”

Berke thought she did. She wasn’t certain she liked it either. “I’m only twenty-six.”

“Well…that’s like…older than everybody else. But I’m saying, we need…Gina needs… somebody she can count on. Somebody who, like, knows where she is.”

“And you think that would be me?”

Rivington shifted his weight from foot to foot. For a few seconds he didn’t dare meet the thundercloud where her face should be, and then he did.

“I was hoping,” he said.

Berke turned her head and gazed across at where Nomad and Ariel stood, within earshot but far enough away to show that, if she wanted to be, she was free.

“The really weird thing,” Rivington went on, “is that Gina’s from a conservative family, and she rebelled and all that, she threw her talent and…you know…herself in their faces, but she loves them. I think she needs her family. She just doesn’t know how to go home again.”

Berke stared at the floor for a long time.

“Can I buy you a beer somewhere? Sit down and talk about it?”

When Berke looked up, Nomad and Ariel saw a muscle clench in her jaw.

“If you or anybody else ever calls me ‘ma’am’,” she said, “I will knock some fucking heads together. Got that?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, very vigorously. “Sure.”

Berke turned her attention once more to her friends. She gave them a wicked smile that Ben Rivington could not see. “And I
mean
it.” she added.

“Understood,” said Rivington.

“You can buy me a beer,” Berke told him.

She cast one more look back at the darkened stage.

In the parking lot, she gave Nomad a high-five. She kissed Ariel’s cheek. “Call you guys later,” she said, maybe too brightly, as Rivington got into his Honda Pilot and started the engine. Then the brickhouse walked to her pickup, swung herself up under the wheel with easy grace, and she shot them a peace sign as she followed Rivington into her future.

Nomad and Ariel stood together, and alone.

“Cup of coffee?” he asked.

“I know a place I can get some silver needle.”

“Lead the way.”

< >

Kate Allen woke up when she realized her husband was not in the bed. It was dark in the Radisson room. She reached over to the table to find the lamp, but her husband said, “No need for that.”

He was sitting in a chair at the window, in his crisp blue pajamas. The curtains were open. The lights of the city still glowed and winked, and up in the night sky a plane was passing.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Late. Or early. Be dawn soon.”

“Is it your arm? Hurting you?”

“Oh, it hurts all right.” He had the cast propped up. She could see his profile against the glass. “But I’m okay. Just thinking, really. You go back to sleep.”

She knew he had a lot to think about. He’d told her of going to visit Jeremy Pett’s family in Reno. It was something he said he had to do. It had been a one day flight, there in the morning and back in the evening. He’d told her of going to the small house in a sad part of town, a place that he said had a sour smell in the air, a bitter burnt smell. He’d told her how Jeremy Pett’s father, a decorated Marine, had never once looked in his eyes as they spoke, even as Truitt had expressed his deepest sympathy and his deepest respect for a young man who had lost his way.

Jeremy Pett’s father had kept his right hand continually closed in a fist so tight the knuckles were whitened. Three fingers were missing from the left hand. Jeremy Pett’s father had been a Marine sergeant who’d served in Operation Desert Storm, in 1991. Jeremy Pett’s mother, Truitt had told his wife, wore a blank mask for a face, and when she’d very slowly moved around the room she seemed to be clinging to the walls, and once or twice she had appeared in a chair where she wasn’t sitting a few seconds before, or she was no longer standing in a doorway where his last glance in a previous instant had placed her.

She had perfected the art of becoming invisible.

“Thanks for comin’ by,” Jeremy Pett’s father had said at the door, his sunken eyes fixed on a patch of earth where no grass grew.

Kate lay with her head on the pillow, watching her husband in the dark. “I guess we could get to the airport early.”

He nodded, but it was a small movement. He asked, “Would you listen to something?”

She said of course she would.

“Stone Church,” he said. “It’s on my mind. Has been for a couple of days.” He’d told her all about that. The story Ariel had spun. It was disturbing enough to Kate, so he didn’t know how he was going to tell her the rest of it, about Connor Addison and all, but he felt as her husband and her best friend, he needed to in time. She was his best friend too.

“Stone Church,” he repeated. “Wouldn’t it be amazing? Just incredible? If someday, who knows when, thirty or forty people came walking down the road from Stone Church?”

And, he said, wouldn’t it be amazing if they were bruised and cut from climbing over chains and barbed-wire, and they wore old outfits that weren’t costumes, and they blinked in a sun that they’d forgotten they had ever seen before, because all their lives had seemed to be a bad dream? They walked down that road, on this far future day, and among them were an old doctor, and a big bear of a sheriff with a thin Chinese girl holding him up, and four Civil War hellraisers who had come to fight a skirmish and found another war, and a couple of prostitutes with French perfume still fresh on their throats, and rough men and their rough wives and children. And right in among them, right at the center, walked two young boys, a woman who had endured much, and a dazed reverend carrying the body of a little girl wrapped carefully in his coat.

“A bad dream, they thought,” said True from the dark. “A nightmare visit to a nightmare world. Like going to sleep in an instant, and waking up groggy, fogged, unable to figure out where you are. And that didn’t pass, it went on and on. And maybe they stayed together, trying to find a way out of their nightmare, and maybe the reverend had the most reason to keep going, to urge others to keep going too. He had the most reason, because even in his fog and despair he wanted to give his child a Christian burial.”

Wouldn’t it have been amazing, True said, if as those people struggled onward through a land that had no horizon and no compass, no sunlight and no moon, from the deeper dark a figure came forward, misshapen and diseased, and whispered through cracked lips,
Follow me
.

What kind of journey would that have been? From where to where? Across what unknown plains, across what desolate mountains and valleys writhing with shadows? And time had no meaning, there was no time. Some might have fallen away, or drifted off, or been lured to follow other paths, and they were lost. The figure had to keep the rest moving. Because the figure had found a way out. Not for himself. His life was done. For
them
, because they had not yet lived their full lives, and that was the crack in the glass.

How would they get out? In the same nightmare haze that had brought them there? Like a clap of thunder, jolting them awake in the middle of the night? Was there, far ahead, a thousand miles ahead, a small hole of light against the darkness, and they followed that like the eye of a candle?

Would they find themselves and their clothes dusted with red rock, as if they’d been reformed, squeezed through the walls of the mountain and remade on the other side? Would they find little glimmers of silver in their hair? And what might the reverend say to the misshapen figure on the last day, at the last instant before escape?
What is your name
?

And he might answer, in a voice from the depths of suffering:
My name is
—

“Stop it,” Kate said. “Really.”

True breathed softly. His elbow was hurting, but it would be better soon.

“Something like that,” he said, “would shake the foundations of the world.”

“Well, you’ve got a big imagination. I’ve always known that. When you retire, you ought to write the story.”

“No. I’ll just wait for it to happen.” True stared out the window, at the lights of humanity. Blue dawn was beginning to assert itself against the night. Interesting, he thought, to consider retirement. His injury would probably hasten it. And it might be good to go out as a big dog, with a big Medal Of Valor as his chewtoy.