The Five (8 page)

Hi, guys. Thanks for coming out tonight, and we hope you enjoy the BZZZZZZPPPP.

This life made
Spinal Tap
look like a Bergman film.

Behind Nomad, Ariel leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She had a mild headache, from the heat. In her mind she saw the crows circling over the blackberry field, and the workers standing up to go in again, and the sun beating down from the pale sky and the shadow of the girl at the well lying across the ground at Ariel’s feet.

You have a long journey
, she heard the girl say.

Yes
, Ariel answered. And then she was aware of the shadows of the crows on the ground as well, circling above them, and more and more, gathering together into a darkness, more and more, from all directions of the compass, and thickening the sky in their whirling eager hunger.

Courage when you need it,
Ariel thought, and she opened her eyes because she imagined she could hear the vibration of black wings around her, about to fall upon her like an ebony cloak.

But it was just the Scumbucket’s rumble and hum.

Just that, and nothing else.

FIVE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

< >

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come here
, the instruction repeats.

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

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

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

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

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

Oorah, motherfucker, oorah
!

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

“It’s about the war.”

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

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