“You have to keep on keeping on,” John Charles said.
“Do I?” Nomad asked, and then he saw the waitress coming with his food and John Charles slipped back into him because they both were hungry.
She again offered him no eye-contact. She thumped the steak sandwich plate down and then the platter of…
“What’s this?” Nomad asked.
Her eyes became slits when she looked at him. “It’s the au gratin potatoes, just like you asked for.”
He had smelled the yellow cheese striped across the top of the potatoes before he saw it. “I can’t eat that,” he said.
“You ordered it,” she answered.
“No, I ordered the Greek potatoes.”
“You ordered the au gratin.”
“Listen, ma’am,” Nomad said, feeling his guts start to clench. George would’ve said Easy, take it easy. “I know what I ordered.” She just stood there staring at him, her coal-black eyes fierce and her head cocked to one side as if it were getting ready to fly from her neck and bite his dick off. “Okay,” he said, and he put up both hands palm-outward to keep the peace. The other customers were watching. “Just forget it, okay?” He pushed the offending potatoes aside. “I’ll sit here and eat my sandwich, that’s really all I—”
“No, if you want Greek potatoes, I’ll get you Greek potatoes!” said the waitress, as she snatched up the au gratin. Her face was all screwed up and getting red, the anger about to burst forth like snot from her nose and spittle from her mouth. “I’ll get you Greek potatoes, but you didn’t order ’em!” It had almost been a shout.
You dumb shit, you didn’t write it down, Nomad nearly said. But he did not. He took a long deep breath and he grasped the edge of the table with both hands and he tried to force a smile that did not take. “Listen,” he began.
“Quit telling me to listen! I can hear you, you think I’m deaf?”
“No, I’m just saying—”
“You want Greek potatoes, I’m gonna get ’em for you!” She began backing away from him, as the other waitress rubbernecked out from the kitchen and the cashier girl poked her head around the corner.
It came from Nomad with surprising force: his rough whiskey voice, demanding “Stop!”
She took two more steps in retreat before she obeyed, and then she seemed to hunch her shoulders forward like a pit bull bitch about to attack.
“Please.” Nomad heard his voice tremble, as rough as it was. “Please.” He was starting to shake, he was starting to come apart at the seams. Mike was dead. George might be dead within the next twelve hours. The crucial period, the doctor had said. But right now, right this minute, this felt pretty crucial too. The Five was staggering toward its grave. Nomad thought his heart was beating too hard, he needed to calm down, easy take it easy George would say but the Little Genius was not at his side and might never be there again.
“Please,” Nomad breathed, “just let me eat my sandwich. Leave me alone and let me eat my sandwich. Alright?”
A burly sandy-haired man in a cook’s apron had come to the kitchen door and was looking over the top of the other waitress’s head.
Nomad’s waitress gave a tight little grin, a nasty little smirk of victory, and she said in a voice like a hammer driving a nail into Nomad’s skull, three beats: “No. Prob. Lem.”
Then she turned around with a dramatic sweep like Bette Davis in that movie Berke had been watching and carried the platter of cheesy potatoes away. The cook and the other waitress retreated before her. The kitchen door closed.
Nomad started eating, but he couldn’t taste anything. Whatever war he’d walked into the middle of, whatever was eating at this dominatrix waitress and made her flail out at him, he wanted none of it.
“Stay cool, man,” said one of the students, who must’ve thought Nomad was the cause of the trouble. When Nomad glanced at their table, all three of them were staring at him so he couldn’t tell which dork had spoken. He returned to chewing his way through the sandwich, and then one of the guys made the mistake of letting out a chortle, a slobbery laugh hidden behind a fratboy’s greasy hand.
Nomad felt the flashfire burn across his face. He turned his head toward them, picked out the heftiest one to aim his full beams at and said, loudly enough to be perfectly understood, “Hey, are you Moe, Larry, or that fat fuck who gets his ass whipped?”
They all glared back at him without speaking. Suddenly the couple got up from their booth and, hand-in-hand, headed for the cashier.
He wanted to tell them not to worry, that nobody was going to get hurt, that he had his spike of anger under control and they didn’t have to rush out the—
Something was slammed down upon his table so hard it made him jump.
He looked up into the face of his waitress, who had come up on him so fast he hadn’t realized she was out of the kitchen.
“There,” she said, with a twisted smile. Her eyes were small black circles of rage, but at the center of their darkness was a red glint of triumph. “That suit you?” Medusa couldn’t have hissed it better.
Nomad saw that she’d brought him a platter of Greek potatoes.
Oil kept to a minimum.
Just as he’d asked.
They were perfect.
She grinned at him.
He could not let this stand.
George was not here to talk him down. Ariel was not here, to be at his side whether he wanted her there or not. The memory of Mike’s body being put into a white coroner’s van and George’s body being lifted into the back of an ambulance and Dean Charles’s body lying sprawled on the pavement mixed together, bled into each other like the songs on Dustin Daye, and from that neon-lit, heat-stroked Hell Felix Gogo told him to know his role and a sniper in a suit reloaded his rifle and three fratboys laughed behind his back and the waitress gave him perfect Greek potatoes and said it was no problem.
He was a mass of clanging alarms and trapped terrors, and just like that he broke.
It was a quiet breakage.
He said, with sweat sparkling on his cheeks and forehead, “Ma’am?” Whose voice was that? He didn’t know it. He was aware of the other waitress, standing again at the kitchen door to watch.
Well…it was showtime.
“Ma’am?” Nomad said again. “There’s something in my food.”
“What?”
He picked up the platter of Greek potatoes and slid out of the booth with a slow, smooth motion, and he said, “Your fucking face,” in a mild matter-of-fact tone before he grasped the back of her head and pushed the platter into her stunned mug.
She shouldn’t have screamed as she did, like a wild animal. She shouldn’t have reached out and clawed at his face and kicked at his shins. Because he would’ve thrown down a tenner and walked out, but with lines of blood rising from the scratches on his left cheek and one of his shins nearly cracked he also gave an animalish roar and shoved her away from him, and she fell back over a table and chair and went down on the floor still screaming.
The three stooges should not have jumped him from behind, either. They should not have tried to catch his arms and pin them at his sides and drop him to the floor by kicking his legs out from under him. All that just made Nomad punch loose from them, pick up a chair and start swinging. “Come on, man! Come on!” shouted one of the guys, but whether he was wanting Nomad to stop fighting or to advance on him was unknown, because the chair crunched him across the left shoulder, he grabbed at his injury and scuttled away and he didn’t say much after that.
The middle-aged man fled with his book. The other waitress was screaming Call the cops! Call the cops! The waitress with lightly-oiled Greek potatoes on her face came rushing at Nomad with a dinner knife raised in a stabbing position, and Nomad in his red rictus of rage got the chair between them and drove her back across another table. “Jesus Christ! Stop it!” someone shouted, and Nomad saw the cook standing in the kitchen door. Then the bravest or most stupid of the young men caught him around the neck f
rom behind and tried to wrestle him to the floor. Nomad dropped the chair and thrashed like a maniac to get loose. The blood was pounding in his head and dark spots swirled before his eyes. He gave the guy an elbow shot in the ribs, followed up with another one that drew a grunt of pain, and then he broke free, turned around and swung a right fist that popped a jaw crooked. A second punch to the face ended the discussion because the guy ran for the door holding a bloody mouth.
It might have finished there, if the waitress had not thrown the ketchup bottle at Nomad’s head.
“Fuck you, you motherfucker!” she shrieked just before she threw it, giving Nomad enough time to dodge it and save his skull, but the bottle crashed through the front window. Then Nomad, who heard George’s voice in his head begging him to stop but who was now locked into what seemed almost a catharsis of hallucinatory violence, picked up another chair and threw it at her, and she ducked down as it passed overhead. The chair crashed into the Argo, the painted ship upon the painted sea, and knocked a plate-sized hole in the mural’s wall just above the waterline.
Two seconds after that, the cook came out of the kitchen holding the pistol.
He was red-faced and shaking and he held the gun out toward Nomad with his finger on the trigger and he bellowed, “I’ll shoot you, you sonofabitch! I’ll—”
Nomad only had an instant in which to flinch, because then the bullet had sizzled through the air past his left ear and followed the ketchup bottle through the glass onto East Congress. The cook was looking at the pistol with horror, as if he were grasping a spitting cobra. Nomad staggered to the side, against the booth he’d been occupying, as he saw the cook bringing the gun back to bear on him.
“Don’t move!” the cook shouted, but by then the coffee cup that Nomad had thrown was on its way, and as the man lifted an arm to deflect it he—by accident or by intention—fired again.
The bullet punched a neat round hole in the booth’s red vinyl seat. Nomad saw the pistol’s barrel searching for him. In either desperation or madness he picked something else up from the table and flung it and the lump of healing crystal hit the cook smack on the collarbone, causing him to stagger back against the wounded Argo.
Nomad attacked. He propelled himself at the cook with his head down and his shoulders ready for collision. He was his own bullet.
Before Nomad got to his target, the waitress on the floor grabbed at his legs and tripped him up. Still, his momentum was enough to hurl him forward, and before the cook could get the pistol between them Nomad hit him so hard they almost crashed straight through the Argo into ancient Greece, or at least the kitchen. They fought face-to-face, the cook trying to get the gun in position and Nomad trying to pin the gunhand. Then Nomad head-butted him and suddenly all the fight jumped out of the other man, his fingers opened and Nomad was holding the pistol.
“Run! Run!” the cook shouted, as he—a truly brave soul—tried to push Nomad back so the waitress could get out. She ran for her life, trailing a shriek, and then the cook let go of Nomad’s shirt and he ran too.
And then Nomad was alone in the Argonaut with three lines of blood on his face and a gun in his hand.
He heard the sirens coming.
His fire had diminished, but it was not yet embers. He put the pistol down on a table and listened to the sirens. Music, of a sort. Ariel could do something with this situation. She could write it out so you could feel the pain and frustration and sadness as if you were living it yourself. Because, really and truthfully, she was so much better a songcrafter than he.
Now there were red and blue lights spinning out on East Congress, beyond the broken window. He didn’t know how many police cars were out there, but it looked like a cop convention. He could hear people shouting. Heard what might have been the voice of that damned bitch of a waitress, raised to ear-breaking decibels.
He had been a bad, bad boy.
“Oh my God,” he said, and though he did not believe in God, who were you gonna call on when the shit hit the fan?
A bullhorn spoke from the street: “Attention in there! Throw your firearm out the window and come to the door with your hands locked behind your head! Nobody’s going to get hurt!”
Nomad just stared at the busted wall and the broken mural, as his shadow danced in a world of red and blue spinning lights. Poor fucked-up Jason, he thought. Standing at that mast, directing a ship that never moved. Believing he was actually going somewhere, getting closer to a golden fleece.
He thought he would put Jason and the other Argonauts out of their misery.
The bullhorn repeated its message, but this time it left out the last line.
Nomad picked up a chair and began to demolish the mural and destroy the wall. When that chair broke to pieces he picked up another one and kept on knocking holes in Jason’s stupid dream. With the breaking of the second chair he picked up a third, and this was hard work now, very hard, but he was determined to finish what he’d begun, he wasn’t a quitter, no way Dean and Michelle Charles had raised a quitter, and so he was still working hard when the two small torpedo-shaped canisters came through the window and he didn’t even turn around, he didn’t even care because he was involved in his emancipation of Jason, and when the gas swirled up around him like purple snakes and his skin began to burn and his eyes involuntarily shut tight because they were full of wet fire he kept swinging in the dark because it was all he knew how to do.
He was on his knees, surrounded by broken chairs, when they came in. They entered as if from another world. They looked like mad combinations of frogmen and masked wrestlers from parts unknown.
They drew his arms back behind him, snapped white plastic restraints on his wrists and ankles, and they hauled him out like yesterday’s garbage.
FOUR
Stone Church
FOURTEEN.
It wasn’t so bad. He’d paid money to stay in motels that were worse than this. But the bright orange jumpsuit…now, that was ridiculous. The thing had its own inner glow, and you still saw it pulsing when you closed your eyes. The huge black-lettered word JAIL across the back wasn’t too cool, either.
The situation being what it was, though, Nomad was impressed by the Pima County jail. It was clean, well-managed and seemed more like a strictly-run—very strictly-run—dorm for wayward men. The roach-overrun lockup was dead in the modern era of physical confinement. Now the “cells” were cubicles fronted with impact-resistant glass. Each cell held eight inmates, and eight cells made up what was called a “pod”, each pod with its own dayroom. The place was cheerfully lit and the air conditioning was kept on the chilly side. Books, magazines and a TV were provided. He’d already seen himself on the television screen, several times in fact, and he was a real celebrity around here.
It was nearing ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. He’d been in jail for about fifty-four hours, but who was counting? He didn’t care that he’d come to the end of this particular road; at his arraignment he’d been so tight-lipped and uncaring about the whole thing that the judge had wanted to run him through a battery of psychiatric tests. Nomad had just shrugged. “Whatever you want to do, man,” he’d told Your Honor. “Fuck it.”
Which had not gone over so well. He wasn’t going anywhere soon, because Your Honor had decided to postpone a decision on setting bail until the nutbag questions were done and some mental health geek had filed three hundred and thirty-three reports on the state of Nomad’s mind. But Nomad didn’t have anyplace he really needed to be, The Five was over, everything was done, so why not just stick here for a while?
His call had been to the University Medical Center. He’d asked to have Ariel Collier paged.
“John?” she’d answered. “Where are you?”
“Around. Any word on George?”
“They think he’s going to make it. They’re not sure yet, but they’re saying his vital signs are looking good. John, tell me where you are.”
“I went out to get something to eat. Maybe I went a little too far.” He h
eard a drunk guy shouting and raging over in the booking area. The cops would take care of that outburst in a hurry, but he figured Ariel had probably heard it too. “I might not be able to get back for a while.”
“What’s that noise?”
“Loud party goin’ on.”
“On a Sunday morning? What’s the number there? And what’s wrong with your voice?”
“Listen to me.” His voice was tired and scratchy. Tear gas was not gentle on the vocal chords. He’d been scrubbed clean, all the purple dye washed out of his hair, and he’d been allowed to curl up in a holding cell and rest until he had enough strength to talk, but it had taken some time. “I’m glad George is going to make it. I’m just going to hang out where I am, so don’t worry. Okay?”
“John.” The way she spoke his name told him she knew. “Are you in trouble?”
“A little.”
“Tell me where you are,” she said tersely. “I mean it.”
Nomad allowed himself a slight smile. It tugged at the scratches on his left cheek, which wore a pink shine of disinfectant. He’d never seen Ariel angry, never heard her lose her temper. She sounded close to it, right now. That would be a sight, he thought; Ariel Collier, in sympathy with the vibrations of the cosmos, going batshit. “You need to get back to Austin,” he said. “You, Terry and Berke. When Ash gets there, tell him… I don’t know, just tell him to get you guys home.” The drunk dude was really hollering now, about his rights and all that, as three cops were dragging him into a holding cell. “Go back and start over,” he said.
“Start over? What do you mean, start over? We’re still The Five, John. We don’t have to start over.”
“Oh yes, you do. Believe me.”
“What’ve you done?”
“I don’t want to talk about that. Get home,” he told her. And then he was silent and she was silent and he didn’t know what she was thinking but he was thinking he had really let them down this time, he had screwed up when they needed him the most and he couldn’t stand to look into her face again and see her disappointment. He couldn’t stand to look into the faces of any of them again, but especially not hers, because…because he thought she really didn’t need The Five, she was talented enough to go out on her own, and in these last three years he had known that and had never said anything. Never encouraged her to at least think about it, because he was the emperor and emperors could hide their jealousy under their crowns of tarnished tin.