The Five (25 page)

She didn’t have the answers. Like everyone else, all she could do was wonder.

Berke came back in with a can of Coke she’d gotten from the first-floor vending machines. “All done with the prayer meeting?” she asked, but no one bothered to reply. She sat down on the sofa and propped her feet up on the table that held a stack of months-old magazines. What she didn’t intend to tell them was that, though she was far from being religious, she’d been curious about the chapel and had walked down that way to take a look. She’d stood on the threshold of a small, dimly-lit room with two pews, a lectern and a picture of Jesus kneeling in a garden. Maybe she’d said something in her mind about George. Maybe. It had been quick, just a passing thing. For good luck, if anything else. She’d always figured Jesus was kind of like a four-leaf-clover. A tip wouldn’t hurt either, she’d thought, so she’d put a buck in the slot of a little white lockbox screwed to the top of a table. Next to it was a white book where people wrote down the names of who they were praying for.

Better make it two bucks, she’d decided, but in the end it had been five.

About forty minutes after Berke’s return, an Asian doctor wearing blue scrubs and a surgeon’s cap came into the room. He told them in perfect English, his calm quiet doctor’s voice tinged with a trace of Southern accent, that George was out of surgery and in the ICU, and that the next twelve hours would be, as he put it, ‘the crucial period’. More than that, he couldn’t say. Nomad took that to mean the doctors had done all they were able to and now it was George’s fight.

They thanked him, and after he left they settled back into their places to wait some more. They were good at waiting; they did far more waiting than playing, so they’d made their peace with that necessary aspect of the musician’s life. But never before had they waited out the life or death of a bandmate, and it was going to be a trial for all of them.

And maybe most of all for Nomad. The walls were closing in on him. He hadn’t particularly liked hospitals before his father was shot, but afterwards…when he’d sat in a room similar to this, smelling the hospital’s odors and sensing the impending news, in front of him some dog-eared Batman, Green Lantern and Captain America comics a nurse had found for him, until one of the other Roadmen had come in and told him his dad was gone…

The Month of Death had arrived early this year.

As Ariel and Terry dozed and Berke watched through heavy-lidded eyes an old black-and-white TCM movie with Bette Davis on TV, Nomad stood up. He told Berke he was going downstairs to the machines, and did she want anything. She said no, she was okay.

He left.

At first he’d only intended to walk outside and breathe some non-hospital air, some air without bad memories in it. Then he decided to walk a little ways, not very far, just to get the blood moving. That waiting-room was killing him. To go back to it…no, not right now. He would walk a while down the city block, on this weeping side of three-o’clock.

Exactly when he’d decided to step out and hail the cab he saw coming, he didn’t know. But there it was, he waved an arm and it veered over to pick him up.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

Nomad sat thinking.
Where to?
was the question. What was open twenty-four hours downtown, say within two or three miles? Where had he used to hang out, at all hours, over a cup of black coffee, a steak sandwich and a platter of…

Greek potatoes, he remembered.

“The Argonaut,” Nomad said. He gave the driver the address, on East Congress Street, and the cab took him away.

THIRTEEN.

Walking into the Argonaut was like returning home to a house your family had sold and moved out of without letting you know. Sure, it had been years since he’d set foot in here, and it looked pretty much the same and had that same aroma of charred lamb kabobs and peppery fish soup he remembered so distinctly. But there were differences. The exterior that used to be painted soft ‘Aegean blue’ was now a hard yellow, making Nomad think of the color he saw in his mind when he closed his eyes and belted out the sustained A note at the end of ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, because it was true he did see mental colors when he sang. Another difference was that when you used to step into the place, a series of small bells chimed over the door; now there was only the whirring of the ceiling fans, but at least those were still there.

The cash register sat atop an unchanged and probably immovable scarred and battered wooden desk that looked as if it had been deck planking from one of those fighting Greek ships, but where was Jimmy? Short, barrel-chested Jimmy with his black crewcut and his mile-wide grin, and from his mouth a rusty barbed-wire voice that always launched the same words when you came in—
Hey, ya hungry?
and when you left,
Howja like ya food?

Fine, Jimmy, just fine
.

But Jimmy was not there, his place taken by a somber-looking girl with long dark hair who was texting somebody on her cell.

“Sit anywhere,” she told him, her eyes never leaving the blue screen.

There were lots of wheres to sit. The seven or eight tables were empty, but a few people sat in the red vinyl booths. Lamps with gold-colored shades shed light upon the early-morning patrons. Nomad counted three guys—college students, they looked to be—in one booth, a young couple cuddling close in another and in a third a solitary middle-aged man reading a book and drinking iced tea. Nomad took a booth away from everyone else, near the windows that gave a view onto East Congress, and he waited for a waitress to show up. From his seat he had the full impact of the mural of a Greek galley painted on the opposite wall, next to the kitchen door. It was a thing of beauty, and it had sailed through the years with only minor modifications to the original, which according to Jimmy had been painted in 1978, the year the Argonaut had opened.

It was of course the
Argo
, the ship built to carry Jason and the Argonauts to find the Golden Fleece. Under a sunlit sky decorated with lacy streamers of clouds, the Argo’s sharp prow cut through the dark blue waves. Seagulls flew before it, and a dolphin’s gray dorsal fin emerged from the white-capped water. The sturdy Argonauts pulled at their oars, in this rendition twenty on either side. Standing before the mast with its billowing russet-colored sail was the dark-bearded Jason, his right arm outthrust and index finger pointed to indicate the destination ahead. Nomad had always thought it was a really cool mural, its style similar to the beautifully luminous works of Maxfield Parrish he’d seen in one of Ariel’s art books. At the bottom, where the sea waves began, was signed the name ‘Myalodeon’, though whether that was the original artist or a later restorer Nomad didn’t know.

He was still waiting. Somebody had to be working in here, because the other customers had food and drink. He wished he’d thought to bring a magazine from the hospital, but then again, no: hospital magazines smelled like hospitals. He needed something to look at but his own hands, so he shifted a little in his seat, reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out an object of interest he’d been carrying since that night at the Curtain Club.

It was the piece of clear quartz crystal Cheryl Buoniconti—now Cheryl Capriata—had given to him. He set it on the table before him and just stared at it. He was trying to understand the depths of belief. Somehow, Cheryl believed healing crystals might intercede for her in her fight against cancer; somehow, Terry and Ariel believed God or Jesus Christ or whoever might help George in his fight for life. What was the difference? To him, he’d go for the crystal, because you could hold the fucking thing in your hand, and whether it did any good or not it was real, it had weight and it was solid. At the very least, it was a pretty cool paperweight.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Who had shot George? The same person who’d killed Mike? Different snipers, at different times in different places? Was there any possible sense to be made of that? And Berke saying she thought she’d been shot at, too? Was it open season on The Five, and if it was—and here he realized he might be sitting too close to the window—who was going to be next in the sniperscope?

He was tired, he needed some coffee. He saw a waitress come out of the kitchen door, and she saw him and then she retreated back into the kitchen. So much for that. Come on, damn it! He looked again at the crystal and wondered what his father would have thought about it. Dean Charles, in his never-ending—some might say fanatical—quest for women, would have spun a romantic story about it, a tale of it holding the image of a future lover, and when a man peered into it just right, and held it just so, he could see the face of a beautiful—not to say sexy—angel in it, and baby oh baby…there you are.

From what he knew of his father now, and what in time the other Roadmen told him, Nomad thought that everything Dean Charles had done was for the purpose of dipping the wick in as many honeypots as he could find. Except the music. Or maybe that’s what Nomad wanted to believe, so he had his own depths of belief too. He wanted to believe that the music had mattered, and that when his father threw flaming guitar chords at the audience and got the microphone up close to his sweating face to holler the lyrics to ‘Memphis’ it was for pure love of the music. But those women had been everywhere. Up front and backstage and in the restaurant after the gig and hanging out by the van and just ‘happening by’ the motel. There were bar girls and secretaries and housewives and waitresses and shy girls who wanted to show him their songs and brassy girls who wanted to crash into show business. There were quiet girls and loud girls and blondes and brunettes, redheads and streaked heads and the occasional soul queen. Nomad had been taken for a lot of ice cream cones, pizzas and to see a lot of movies by the other Roadmen in a lot of towns both big and small, and the number of Do Not Disturb Signs hanging on the doorknobs of Dean Charles’s motel rooms had been legion.

They’d never really talked about it, but gradually the kid who adored his dad grew up enough to notice how women dragged their gaze across him, how they talked to each other while looking at him from the corners of their eyes, how they grinned at him and touched him and got up close to breathe his hot musician’s sweat and his soured English Leather.

Johnny?
his father had said one Friday night in a Best Western in Mansfield, Ohio, while they were watching
The Dirty Dozen
on cable TV.
Would you mind goin’ over to finish this flick
with the guys?

A few minutes before he’d spoken, there’d been a quick check of the wristwatch.

No, Dad
, Johnny had said, as he’d sat on the edge of the bed and put on his shoes.
I don’t
mind.

But when the son had turned to look at his father, on his way out the door to a room down the hall, both of them knew what they were looking at.

Dad?
John had asked.
Don’t you love Mom anymore?

Are you kiddin’?
came the answer, with a quick harsh laugh.
’Course I love your mother! Know why I love her so much? ’Cause she gave you to me, that’s why. Us two men, on the road. Freedom and music, what could be better? Hey, you go tell Danny I said you guys call out for pizzas. ’Kay?

Okay, Dad
, the son had said, because Dean Charles was the light of his world and for years now in that little house in East Detroit, between Center Line and Roseville, Michelle Charles had been sitting on the living-room floor surrounded by her many Bibles and religious pamphlets, her brow furrowed in concentrated study, her eyes moving desperately from line to line to find something she could believe in, for she had discovered the letters in her husband’s shoebox.

But like Butch Munger’s girlfriend after he’d beaten her half-dead, Nomad thought as he waited for service, Michelle Charles was loyal and faithful and true and what was a woman like that doing with Dean-a-rino? Giving him space, Nomad mused. Letting him wander, knowing he would always come back home, if just to restring his guitar.

His mother was okay now. She lived in an apartment near her sister’s family in Sanford, Florida, and she worked in hospice care and had taken up tennis with a group of friends. She didn’t mind telling them her son was a “rock’n rolla”. Life, like the show, must go on.

Suddenly there was a waitress standing next to his booth, watching him think. He realized she wasn’t the same waitress he’d seen at the kitchen door, because that one was pouring iced tea for the middle-aged man.

“Um…I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” he told her. “Just black.”

“Is that all you want?” She was about forty or so, on the short side, had dark hair and dark eyes and she looked either very tired or supremely bored, as if she wanted to be anywhere on earth but the Argonaut at about three-thirty in the morning.

“No, I’d like the steak sandwich special.”

She didn’t write it down. “Steamed vegetables, Greek potatoes, or au gratin potatoes?”

“The Greek.” He felt he had to say the next thing, because the first time he’d ever come in here and ordered those they’d been way too oily, and because the waitress turnover was high, almost everytime he came in he had to say the same thing. “Can you ask the cook to hold back on the oil?”

“He just makes ’em one way,” she said.

“Yeah, but…you know…I’ve had them before and there was too much oil, so—”

“He just makes ’em one way,” she said, and this time there was a grim belligerence in her voice that made Nomad set his mouth in a hard line and stare up at her.

“Hey,” he told her, “trust your cook, okay?” He tried to smile but it wouldn’t happen. “He’ll get it right, if you ask him. Just trust your cook.”

She was silent for a few seconds, her mouth partly open. Her face was an expressionless mask, her eyes two small bits of unshining coal. “I’ll ask him,” she said tightly. “I know what I’m doing. I’m telling you he only makes ’em one way.”

“Alright, thanks,” Nomad said.

She said, “No
problem
,” as she was turning away from him, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck stir as if from a hot breeze.

OhmyGawd, Nomad thought when she had gone. Shimatta! What a bitch! Whatever was going on with her, he hoped she didn’t spit in his coffee before she brought it to him. His heart was beating a little hard. He thought he could write a song about this. A ballad, maybe. Right. Call it ‘The Ballad of the Greek Potatoes’.

First verse:
He stumbled in for want of food,

And found a waitress fucked-up and rude.

A steak sandwich, he asked for, and potatoes Greek.

She glared at him like he was a two-headed freak.

Or something like that.

Here she came again, bringing him a cup of coffee. He noted she didn’t make eye-contact with him. The cup was banged down, and some sloshed over onto the table. But then she’d turned around again and headed into the kitchen, and Nomad thought,

He asked the waitress to trust her cook,

And got for his trouble a dirty look.

This used to be a place he liked to go,

But now the service in this fucking joint doth blow.

Well, the meter was screwed up, but it got the point across.

He would eat his food, call a cab and get out. Simple enough. He stared again at the lump of crystal. Something to believe in, he thought.

He used to believe he was going somewhere in this business. He used to believe that one day all his dues would be paid. That he would come up with the Right Song, at the Right Time. With the Right Band, of course. He’d thought—believed, wished, whatever—that The Five was the Right Band. That in The Five the talents and the personalities and the desires meshed, as much as they could in any band. Were they perfect? No. Was The Five perfect, as a band? Absolutely not. But they had tried, so so hard…

He remembered what Felix Gogo had said, and it was the bitter truth:
Talent’s a piss-poor
third to ambition, and ambition is second to personality
.

And add these necessary ingredients: connections and luck. But even with all those things combined, something could still go horribly wrong.

He imagined a splitting of himself, a division between the Nomad and the John Charles. In his imagination the John Charles stood up from the Nomad and sat down on the other side of the booth.

“A shitty, shitty deal,” John Charles said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah,” Nomad said in his mind, to his mental boothmate. He was talking about the new music the Austin band Ezra’s Jawbone had finished back in February. Nomad was friends with both the lead singer and the keyboard player, who also wrote all their songs. They had wrapped up a project they called
Dustin Daye
, had given him a copy of the test CD to hear and then sent the package off to their label, MTBF Records.
Dustin Daye
had been a rock opera, about a young man who suddenly awakens in a hotel room in an unknown city and has no idea who he is or where he’s come from. As the music progresses, the idea is raised that Dustin Daye, who gets his name from the faint impression of a signature on a notepad in his room, might be the Second Coming or he might be the Devil in human flesh, and even he doesn’t know which one, but someone out there—or more than one person—is trying to kill him before he can accomplish what he feels he has to do, which he doesn’t know will ultimately be for Good or for Evil. Or is he just an escaped lunatic? Nomad wasn’t religious, but he understood the light versus dark concept. It was in all the best horror movies.