“Oh, I’ll get it,” Chappie said, and she swooped in as mothers will and got the container of orange juice out before Ariel could even register exactly where it was.
“I guess Berke’s still asleep?” Ariel asked as Chappie poured juice into a glass.
“Haven’t heard from her. Here you go. Now, for your toast.”
“Thank you.” Ariel drank some of the juice and gazed around the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was a sunny place. A homey place, with homey knickknacks collected from different tourist destinations. Everything neat and clean, everything orderly. It was difficult to grasp, in this sunny kitchen with the soap on TV and Chappie busy loading up the toaster, that Chappie’s husband—her second husband—and Berke’s stepdad had died last month, yet there was a feeling in this house, however bright and neat it was, that someone was missing and would not be coming home.
Ariel, and none of the other band members as far as she knew, had ever met Floyd Fisk. Berke had told her mother well in advance of their gigs in San Diego that she didn’t want him anywhere near her, and so he’d never shown his face.
Floyd fucking Fisk, Berke had said to Ariel one day at rehearsal when they were talking about—or talking around, really—their parents. Don’t you think that sounds like the fucking dumb-ass barber in Mayberry? You know, the Opie show?
What’s so bad about him? Ariel had asked. I mean…is he like…cruel to your mother?
Cruel to my mother, Berke had repeated, as if trying that on as a reason. No, he’s not cruel to her. She loves him. But he’s not my dad. You know?
Ariel wasn’t sure she did know, but Berke’s mood had gotten black-cloud stormy and that was a good sign not to travel any further without a lightning rod.
“Can I ask you a question?” Chappie asked as she spread strawberry jam on the two pieces of toast. “This…is kind of weird to ask, but…are you…Berke’s friend?”
“I’m her friend, yes.”
“Well… I mean…” Chappie gave her a quick sidelong glance. “Are you her good friend?”
“Oh!” Ariel realized what the subject of this was. “Oh, no. Not that kind of friend.”
A blush of color rose into the woman’s cheeks. She shrugged. “I didn’t know. I don’t ask Berke very much.” She offered Ariel the toast on a yellow plate with brown ceramic flowers around the rim. “She can snap your head off when she’s in a bad mood. But I don’t have to tell you, do I?”
“We all get edgy sometimes.”
“Oh… I’m supposed to let you know… Mr. Allen went downtown this morning. He said he’d be back by early afternoon.”
“Did he take the van?”
“No, he got into one of those huge SUVs. Do you know he ate four eggs and just about finished off all my bacon? He said he’d reimburse me, but still…that man can eat.” Chappie pretended to watch her soap opera for a moment, but Ariel could tell she was formulating either another statement or question because the corners of her mouth moved. “Let me ask you something else,” she finally said. “Do you trust that man to protect you? I mean to protect all of you. The whole band. I watched that video over and over. I saw how close you came to getting shot. Aren’t your parents worried about you? Haven’t you heard from them?”
“I’ve called them,” Ariel answered. “When it first happened, in Sweetwater. I called them again from Tucson.”
“And…what? They don’t want you to come home?”
“They didn’t mention that. I didn’t expect them to.” Ariel took a bite of toast and chewed it. “Anyway, I wouldn’t go, because that’s not my home anymore. I live in Austin. But…next year…it may be somewhere else.”
“Berke did tell me that the band is breaking up,” Chappie said matter-of-factly. “I’m sorry to hear that, because she always…” Here she paused, as if deciding whether she was betraying a confidence or not. She went on. “Always believed in you guys,” she said. “More I think than she’s believed in any of her other bands. She particularly believed in John and in you. That you would find success. Make a hit record. Get the recording deal. Whatever. Jesus, I am old, but I swear I didn’t date Elvis Presley.”
Ariel smiled.
“But I did date Todd Rundgren,” Chappie said. “I had a little thing going on with Joe Strummer. I used to give backrubs to Iggy Pop. And Robert Plant kissed my hand one night in Hollywood, standing right on the Sunset Strip, and something like that you never forget.”
“I guess not,” Ariel said.
“Wow, the music scene back then…it was in—” There was just the briefest of pauses and Ariel thought she was about to hear the f-bomb dropped, but Chappie caught herself. “—credible,” she finished. “So much going on, so many bands. It was just electric. And we were right in there. People wouldn’t believe how many songs were written about the sisters.”
Ariel nodded. Chappie wasn’t hesitant to admit her membership in the sisterhood of groupies. To hear her tell it, as she’d told it before, Chappie and the ‘sisters of comfort’ were all about maintaining the sanity of their rocker men and keeping them well-supplied so the great works could keep on coming. Flowing. Being created. Ariel finished her orange juice and again said thank you.
“I’ve got coffee. Do you want some?” Chappie motioned toward the pot. Her own cup, a piece of merchandise—maybe an original—that bore a picture of The Eagles, sat on the counter. “Oh…you’re a tea drinker, aren’t you?”
“Right.”
Chappie refilled her cup. “So you think Mr. Allen and those men out there can protect you?” She reached up to a cupboard, opened it and with a smooth, unhurried and completely unselfconscious motion she brought out a half-bottle of Jack Daniels. It was the most natural thing in the world to pour a small bite of Jack into your coffee before noon, which she did. “You trust the FBI?”
“I guess I do, so far.”
“So far, you’re not dead.” Chappie capped the Jack bottle and put it away. She sipped at her high-octane fuel. “Neither is my daughter. But you know that was a close call yesterday, don’t you? Nancy Grace said last night on TV that this guy at Stone Church was probably copycatting Jeremy Pett, and she thinks there’ll be others. Listen, if you were my blood, I’d get on a plane and come collect you. I’d say no tour or music or ticket sales are worth getting killed for. I’d say put it all away until that nut is in jail.”
“Have you said any of this to Berke?” Ariel asked, knowing what the answer would be.
Chappie took another drink before she replied. “This is the biggest cliché in the world, what I’m about to say. But Berke has always walked to her own beat. She’s her own different drummer. She might be scared, but she’s not going to show it and she won’t back down from anybody…not even that…” Again, the f-bomb was poised to drop. But no. “Nut,” Chappie finished.
“Berke is a strong person,” Ariel agreed. “I envy her strength. Her knowing how to get what she wants.”
“Yeah, it’d be a great world if everybody was like her.” Chappie attempted a smile that didn’t quite work due to the bitterness at its core. Then she walked a few steps away to check on the crockpot.
Ariel decided it was time to move on. “I think I’ll go outside for a while.” Last night she’d seen, in the front yard, the wooden park bench under the eucalyptus tree. “Thanks for the—”
“I’m surprised she even agreed to come here,” Chappie interrupted, and Ariel braced for an onslaught. “Even with Floyd gone. I’m surprised, that’s all.”
“Well…” Ariel felt as if she were walking on treacherous ground. “I guess she wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I had to almost beg her to come. To get what he left her. He said to me very plainly, early last year, that if anything happened to him he wanted her to have what he’d saved for her. It was very important to him.” She nodded. “Very important. And the letter too. I told him, nothing was going to happen, he was fine and he was going to have another checkup to make sure. Mandy ca
me over twice a week to watch him take his medicine and check his blood pressure. But…he said he was tired sometimes. Just tired. Everybody gets tired.” She started to take another drink, but lowered the cup before it reached her mouth. “They did what they could for him. The emergency team. I watched them work, so I know they did what they could. But oh my God, how I miss him.” Her hand came up and the fingers pressed against her lips. Her eyes glistened. “And the thing was…he tried so hard…so hard…to be a father to Berke, but she wouldn’t let him in. She turned her back on everything he tried to do for her. Okay, so he wasn’t…like…the world’s greatest drummer, like Warren thought he was. Floyd didn’t know music, and he didn’t keep up with bands, and he liked most of all just reading, or sitting on the couch watching football or old movies, and he wasn’t flash…but he was substance. Do you understand what I mean?” She looked hopefully at Ariel, and Ariel said she absolutely understood.
When Chappie spoke again it was in a tone of reverence. “Floyd was no Todd Rundgren. He was no Joe Strummer or Iggy Pop. He was no Warren Bonnevey, either. He didn’t say he was going out for cigarettes and three days later he was calling you from Los Angeles asking you to send money because he was on the edge—right on the edge, he said—of getting a gig with the latest hitmaker, whoever was high on the chart that week. He didn’t knock holes in the walls because he didn’t get a callback. Jesus, if that house Berke grew up in could talk, it would fucking scream. Excuse my mouth, but it would. Floyd didn’t holler and yell and go on a rampage at three o’clock in the morning because he thought I was stealing his sticks and burying them in the back yard. And then he didn’t go sit in the bathtub and start shouting that if he had a gun he’d kill everybody in the house and then himself. Oh, those were some choice days and nights, Ariel. And the terrible thing was… Warren really was good. He had a great talent. He had the fire inside, you know? But it was a horrible thing, to watch someone you loved burn alive from the inside out.”
Ariel had no idea what to say, so she said what she felt: “I’m so sorry.”
Chappie blew air between her lips and waved Ariel’s comment away and took another drink of Jack and java. “Life,” she said. “It’s not bubblegum. See, the deal is… Berke asked me one time—oh, she asked many times, in that very nice way she has of asking—why I would give up on her father and marry—her description—a total loser. The Mayberry barber, she called him. The bookworm, that was another one. She said, Mom, he’s just so nothing. And I looked her right in the face, I stared her down, and I said I love Floyd Fisk because he loves me, and because he loved her, whether she wanted to accept that or not, and because they call it ‘flash’ for the reason that it goes up in smoke so fast, but you can hold onto ‘substance’, and it holds onto you. ‘Substance’ honors responsibility, and you can say…oh, man, that’s so old…but the truth is, I wanted to be happy and I wanted to be loved. I wanted things to be settled. If that’s old, you can wrap it up for me because I’ll take as much of that as I can carry.”
Chappie’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Oh,” she said softly, and brokenly.
Ariel saw a box of Kleenex on the counter. She pulled a couple of tissues out and gave them to Berke’s mother.
“Thanks,” Chappie said as she dabbed her eyes. “You’re sweet.”
Ariel stood with her a while longer until it was clear Chappie had unburdened herself as much as she was able, and now Chappie was focusing back on the soap opera again, and she had finished her Jacked-up coffee and put the cup aside. Ariel said she was going to go sit outside and think about some things. Chappie told her to enjoy the bench out there, it had been where Floyd liked to sit and read when he got home from the bookstore in the afternoons.
The house was a light tan with darker brown trim around the windows. A picket fence guarded the property. There was a rock garden in front, and the eucalyptus tree threw shade over the park bench. The Scumbucket and the trailer stood in the short driveway, behind Chappie’s vanilla-colored VW Beetle. When Ariel emerged from the house and started down the front steps, two agents got out of the white Yukon parked on the street and began talking to each other as if discussing baseball scores or some other interest between men. Ariel saw that they were wearing sunglasses and they didn’t really look at each other as they spoke; they were scanning the street and the houses and hills. She approached them, and when one of the men recognized her presence she asked if she could bring them something to drink but the man said, “No, miss, we’re good, but thank you.”
Ariel wondered if there was a toilet in the rear of that giant SUV. It was likely there was some sanitary setup for their convenience. She sat down on the bench, under the tree, and opened her notebook to the lines of the song again as the men, no longer talking, stood with their backs to her.
It was a puzzle to her. What this could possibly mean. She had no idea where it was supposed to go or what it was supposed to say. She considered the idea that if she closed her eyes very, very tightly and thought very, very hard, maybe the girl would come to her again from the green mist of the blackberry brambles and tell her exactly what it was supposed to mean, or if the girl was feeling particularly salvatious today she would offer up the next line or two.
But deep down Ariel knew it was not going to work that way. The Unknown Hand was not going to write this for them. The song, like any other act of creativity, was no good if it wasn’t strained through the joys and woes of human experience. It was no good if it was not in some way personal. It would not come fully-formed from a girl in a dream. It would have to be worked on, trial and error, writing and scratching out, searching for rhyme and struggling for reason.
Just as it always was, no different.
“Inspiration?”
Ariel looked up at Terry, who had taken his own shower and was dressed in gray shorts and a seagreen shirt covered with small blue and gray paisleys, circa 1969. “Going over our song,” she told.
“You mean the song, right?” He nodded toward the empty half of the bench. “Can I sit?”
“This seat is saved,” she said, “just for you.”
Terry sat down. He angled his head to read the lines and Ariel cocked the notebook toward him so he had a better view.
“Say anything to you?” she asked.
“No, not really. To you?”
“I guess it’s about change. A summing up of things. Where you stand,” she decided. “Like…where are you in your life. What do you need to keep and what do you need to let go of, in order to move on. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” Terry said. “I can see that. So you’re wanting another couple of verses and a chorus?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know what I want,” she said. What she meant was: I don’t know the why of this song, much less the what. It sounded so crazy, so spooky-oooky, to say that the girl at the well was directing them. That maybe John had come up with the idea of the communal song on his own, it was something he felt was necessary to keep the band on the same page, but the girl had…what?…read his mind, or planted a seed in Mike’s head, and made a passing statement of care that had struck George strongly enough to remember it in his ICU bed, and maybe…planted the desire to finish this song in Ariel’s own psyche?
But if that were true, in a Twilight Zoney way, then what was the why of it?
“I have to ask you something,” she told him. “This is going to sound strange, but have you had any weird dreams lately?”
His eyes blinked behind the specs. “The night before Stone Church. I was pretty tense about that gig. I had a weird dream that I was playing the Hammond and it bit my hands off at the wrists.”
“That’s not what I mean. I know you believe in God and a Heaven of some kind—whatever that is—and you believe in the other side of that, too. Right?” She waited for him to nod. “I want to tell you about a dream I had last night…or this morning, or whenever it was. I just want you to sit and listen, and then I want to talk to you about some
things that are on my mind, and if you think I’m losing it…okay, fair enough. Maybe I am losing it. Maybe I’m the one who ought to be hanging it up for a while and taking a break.” She stared directly into his eyes. “But I don’t think so.” She hesitated, to underscore her resolve at this statement. Then: “Can I tell you?”
“Yeah, sure. Go ahead,” Terry said.
How trustingly he said that, Ariel thought. How bravely he said it. In the next few minutes, she would find out how trusting Terry was of his system of belief, and how bravely he could handle her interpretation of the Unknown Hand at work.
Because she was already thinking that the other side also had its unknown hand.
And it too might be at work.
TWENTY-TWO.
When Ariel had finished and they’d talked it back and forth for about ten minutes, Terry felt either that the incident at Stone Church had snapped her strings or something was happening to The Five that he could not explain or understand. He didn’t know which he believed. It was one thing to hear your voice spoken in a church by a man you could not possibly know, and that was strange and frightening enough, but this…
This was like looking at your reflection in a mirror and putting your hand up against it, and suddenly your hand pushes through the mirror like it’s a thin pane of ice and beyond it is a world that was right there all the time, and maybe you suspected it was right there all the time, and you talked about it and made theories about it, but to actually look into it, to actually see the fearsome wonder that lies hidden beyond the mirror…