The Five (22 page)

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.