“Thanks,” Nomad said. He was still signing, but he was also listening very carefully.
“I believe a song can speak to a person. Like just jab a finger right in their throat, man, and say, like, ‘Yo, wake up!’ You know?”
“Got that right,” Nomad agreed.
“Yeah,” Rivington said with a kind of relief, as if an important bridge had been crossed.
They finished signing the last of the CDs. The bearded dude with the beret and the bulbous eyes gave them a million thanks and kissed Ariel’s hand and started to kiss Berke’s hand until he thought better of it. He pulled his handcart away to be unloaded. Everybody else was gone but the Vista Futura’s owner and the manager, who were clearing things up in the office and writing down orders for more beer. Berke’s drums had been loaded into the bed of her little black pickup truck, parked in the lot across the street. Nomad’s three guitars and variety of stompboxes were in his 2001 red Ford Focus, also waiting in the same lot. Ariel’s Ovation and her Tempest were packed in her silver-blue Corolla.
“Hey,” Berke said to Ben Rivington as they walked with Nomad and Ariel through the club toward the door, “whatever you want to say, you can say it in front of my friends.”
Rivington stopped. He was illuminated by the harsh light of the floods up at the corners of the room, the light of real life after the show is over and the fans have gone.
“Okay,” he said. “Gina’s sick. She’s on smack.”
No one spoke. Nomad remembered hearing that Gina Fayne was catching up to Janis in the department of drinking and drugs, and he’d hoped somebody wasn’t stupid enough to let her try heroin to complete the picture.
“She needs help.” He was speaking to Berke. “You know, she’s fucking crazy. She’s got all that voice, and the talent and the looks, and she fucking loves music more than anything, but it’s eating at her. It’s going to kill her, if she doesn’t get help.”
“Then get her help,” Berke said.
“That’s what the song said for me to do,” Rivington answered. “To come back here, and ask for you to help save Gina’s life.”
“Me? Why me?”
“We’ve got a tour to do starting in two weeks. Going to England. First overseas gig, it’s going to be a fucking grind. Gina’s being Gina. Taking her shit, climbing into a hole and pulling the hole in with her. And let me tell you, when she wants to go deep, she can go to a place nobody else can get to. But a few days ago Lawrence walked out.”
“Lawrence? Who’s that?”
“XB4Y,” Rivington said. “Lawrence Jolly. That’s his real name. He says he’s done with her shit, he’s already hooked up with the fucking Beastie Crew. That’s more his style, anyway. So our guy at PPK Management’s looking for a drummer, but…it has to be somebody with maturity. And road experience too, you know what I mean?”
Berke thought she did. She wasn’t certain she liked it either. “I’m only twenty-six.”
“Well…that’s like…older than everybody else. But I’m saying, we need… Gina needs… somebody she can count on. Somebody who, like, knows where she is.”
“And you think that would be me?”
Rivington shifted his weight from foot to foot. For a few seconds he didn’t dare meet the thundercloud where her face should be, and then he did.
“I was hoping,” he said.
Berke turned her head and gazed across at where Nomad and Ariel stood, within earshot but far enough away to show that, if she wanted to be, she was free.
“The really weird thing,” Rivington went on, “is that Gina’s from a conservative family, and she rebelled and all that, she threw her talent and…you know…herself in their faces, but she loves them. I think she needs her family. She just doesn’t know how to go home again.”
Berke stared at the floor for a long time.
“Can I buy you a beer somewhere? Sit down and talk about it?”
When Berke looked up, Nomad and Ariel saw a muscle clench in her jaw.
“If you or anybody else ever calls me ‘ma’am’,” she said, “I will knock some fucking heads together. Got that?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, very vigorously. “Sure.”
Berke turned her attention once more to her friends. She gave them a wicked smile that Ben Rivington could not see. “And I mean it.” she added.
“Understood,” said Rivington.
“You can buy me a beer,” Berke told him.
She cast one more look back at the darkened stage.
In the parking lot, she gave Nomad a high-five. She kissed Ariel’s cheek. “Call you guys later,” she said, maybe too brightly, as Rivington got into his Honda Pilot and started the engine. Then the brickhouse walked to her pickup, swung herself up under the wheel with easy grace, and she shot them a peace sign as she followed Rivington into her future.
Nomad and Ariel stood together, and alone.
“Cup of coffee?” he asked.
“I know a place I can get some silver needle.”
“Lead the way.”
Kate Allen woke up when she realized her husband was not in the bed. It was dark in the Radisson room. She reached over to the table to find the lamp, but her husband said, “No need for that.”
He was sitting in a chair at the window, in his crisp blue pajamas. The curtains were open. The lights of the city still glowed and winked, and up in the night sky a plane was passing.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Late. Or early. Be dawn soon.”
“Is it your arm? Hurting you?”
“Oh, it hurts all right.” He had the cast propped up. She could see his profile against the glass. “But I’m okay. Just thinking, really. You go back to sleep.”
She knew he had a lot to think about. He’d told her of going to visit Jeremy Pett’s family in Reno. It was something he said he had to do. It had been a one day flight, there in the morning and back in the evening. He’d told her of going to the small house in a sad part of town, a place that he said had a sour smell in the air, a bitter burnt smell. He’d told her how Jeremy Pett’s father, a decorated Marine, had never once looked in his eyes as they spoke, even as Truitt had expressed his deepest sympathy and his deepest respect for a young man who had lost his way.
Jeremy Pett’s father had kept his right hand continually closed in a fist so tight the knuckles were whitened. Three fingers were missing from the left hand. Jeremy Pett’s father had been a Marine sergeant who’d served in Operation Desert Storm, in 1991. Jeremy Pett’s mother, Truitt had told his wife, wore a blank mask for a face, and when she’d very slowly moved around the room she seemed to be clinging to the walls, and once or twice she had appeared in a chair where she wasn’t sitting a few seconds before, or she was no longer standing in a doorway where his last glance in a previous instant had placed her.
She had perfected the art of becoming invisible.
“Thanks for comin’ by,” Jeremy Pett’s father had said at the door, his sunken eyes fixed on a patch of earth where no grass grew.
Kate lay with her head on the pillow, watching her husband in the dark. “I guess we could get to the airport early.”
He nodded, but it was a small movement. He asked, “Would you listen to something?”
She said of course she would.
“Stone Church,” he said. “It’s on my mind. Has been for a couple of days.” He’d told her all about that. The story Ariel had spun. It was disturbing enough to Kate, so he didn’t know how he was going to tell her the rest of it, about Connor Addison and all, but he felt as her husband and her best friend, he needed to in time. She was his best friend too.
“Stone Church,” he repeated. “Wouldn’t it be amazing? Just incredible? If someday, who knows when, thirty or forty people came walking down the road from Stone Church?”
And, he said, wouldn’t it be amazing if they were bruised and cut from climbing over chains and barbed-wire, and they wore old outfits that weren’t costumes, and
they blinked in a sun that they’d forgotten they had ever seen before, because all their lives had seemed to be a bad dream? They walked down that road, on this far future day, and among them were an old doctor, and a big bear of a sheriff with a thin Chinese girl holding him up, and four Civil War hellraisers who had come to fight a skirmish and found another war, and a couple of prostitutes with French perfume still fresh on their throats, and rough men and their rough wives and children. And right in among them, right at the center, walked two young boys, a woman who had endured much, and a dazed reverend carrying the body of a little girl wrapped carefully in his coat.
“A bad dream, they thought,” said True from the dark. “A nightmare visit to a nightmare world. Like going to sleep in an instant, and waking up groggy, fogged, unable to figure out where you are. And that didn’t pass, it went on and on. And maybe they stayed together, trying to find a way out of their nightmare, and maybe the reverend had the most reason to keep going, to urge others to keep going too. He had the most reason, because even in his fog and despair he wanted to give his child a Christian burial.”
Wouldn’t it have been amazing, True said, if as those people struggled onward through a land that had no horizon and no compass, no sunlight and no moon, from the deeper dark a figure came forward, misshapen and diseased, and whispered through cracked lips, Follow me.
What kind of journey would that have been? From where to where? Across what unknown plains, across what desolate mountains and valleys writhing with shadows? And time had no meaning, there was no time. Some might have fallen away, or drifted off, or been lured to follow other paths, and they were lost. The figure had to keep the rest moving. Because the figure had found a way out. Not for himself. His life was done. For them, because they had not yet lived their full lives, and that was the crack in the glass.
How would they get out? In the same nightmare haze that had brought them there? Like a clap of thunder, jolting them awake in the middle of the night? Was there, far ahead, a thousand miles ahead, a small hole of light against the darkness, and they followed that like the eye of a candle?
Would they find themselves and their clothes dusted with red rock, as if they’d been reformed, squeezed through the walls of the mountain and remade on the other side? Would they find little glimmers of silver in their hair? And what might the reverend say to the misshapen figure on the last day, at the last instant before escape? What is your name?
And he might answer, in a voice from the depths of suffering: My name is—
“Stop it,” Kate said. “Really.”
True breathed softly. His elbow was hurting, but it would be better soon.
“Something like that,” he said, “would shake the foundations of the world.”
“Well, you’ve got a big imagination. I’ve always known that. When you retire, you ought to write the story.”
“No. I’ll just wait for it to happen.” True stared out the window, at the lights of humanity. Blue dawn was beginning to assert itself against the night. Interesting, he thought, to consider retirement. His injury would probably hasten it. And it might be good to go out as a big dog, with a big Medal Of Valor as his chewtoy.
“I’m thinking of a career in management,” he said.
Kate dared not ask what that meant. But she thought she’d go ahead and get up and take him to the IHOP out by the airport for one of his favorite meals: the syrupy pancakes, crumbled-up bacon and yellow-drippy eggs all mixed together.
She decided she was going to stop worrying so much about his heart.
At least, for one day.
Nomad and Ariel were on the road. She had left her car at their last stop, a place to watch freshly-baked doughnuts ride along a conveyor belt, becoming sprinkled with sugar or cinammon or sparkling with fresh glaze at the end of the line. They had climbed into his Focus, which was a blood brother to the Scumbucket with its crumpled front fender, its scrapes along the passenger’s side, its dents and dings and bangs and bumps. He’d bought it cheap from another musician, with some of these imperfections already there, but he’d added a lot himself too. He realized now, as they followed the crooked headlights along a Texas road with the windows down and the pre-dawn air sweetened by night, that he probably could afford a new set of wheels.
It had been a full night, for sure. A mug of black coffee, not so bitter, and a cup of silver needle tea at a little downtown place called Selma’s, which had about a dozen tables and served great chocolate brownies, though Ariel declined to order one. They’d started talking there, about the song. Then Nomad had decided he was really hungry, so they’d met again at the Magnolia Café, and this time Ariel had ordered a veggie Reuben when Nomad asked for a hamburger, and please make sure there’s no cheese on it, and could the waitress make it, like, medium rare so it’s a little pink in the middle?
And the waitress had said, “You got it.”
They had continued talking about the song.
“So,” Nomad had said, as the late-night crowd ate and drank and the waitresses buzzed around, “what happened, then?”
“I don’t know that anything happened.” They’d been over this ground at Selma’s, but Ariel knew it was important for him to backtrack and go over it again, looking for what he might have missed.
“Something had to have happened. Really.” He put his elbows on the table and looked her square in her mystic eyes. His ankle was sore from standing and sore from driving, but if the day ever came that he couldn’t take a little pain, he would be ready to kick out of this strange old world. Which was definitely not new. Or was it? He didn’t know. According to Ariel’s belief, they’d been given the task of writing a song by a girl who was something other than human. They hadn’t asked for it, but there it was. Then, according to Ariel’s belief, Jeremy Pett had been given the task of stopping the song from being finished, by something he called ‘Gunny’. Or was Pett just totally insane? What about Connor Addison, and the nutbag in the trailer park?
Nomad wondered about that trailer, parked in the flat hot desert on the ‘angel line’ radiating from the north side of Stone Church, or Apache Leap as it used to be called. That dumb fuck, the so-called Navy electronics expert, couldn’t tell his angels from his demons. Nomad wondered if someone who—and this sounded like Ariel thinking—was able to pick up vibes and shit could stand in that trailer, in the room the nutbag had used as his comm central, and listen, or feel, or sense, or whatever, a quiet in the wires. Maybe a few scattered mutterings passed, like distant voices heard from a pirate radio station through a wallplug, just faintly there, or maybe a squeal of static that was not static at all but an ungodly voice raised in anger, and then drifting away in a whimper like a whipped dog. And maybe chatterings passed, like teeth being ground down to nubs, or a sudden “You!” jumping out, all fucked-up sounding and muddy, as if in recrimination for a battleplan defeated.
But, most of all, a quiet in the wires.
Maybe an ominous quiet. One that said there were other battleplans to be made, because it was a forever war.
It had been a bitch writing that song. Ariel had been adamant that he needed to write a verse. He wanted nothing to do with it. He feared that when it was done, and played as their last song, the whole of Vista Futura would be sucked down a cosmic drain—gurgle, gurgle, gurgle—to Hell, to Heaven, or to some dimension in between, and they’d have to be fighting off crows in the eternal blackberry brambles when they weren’t filling baskets for Jesus. He just had no idea what was about to happen.
You need to write a verse, Ariel had told him with fire in her voice. It came from you first, do you understand that? Mike started it, but it came from you first. You have to write a verse.
In the Albuquerque hospital where they were waiting for True’s wife to arrive, he’d looked at what she’d written, at the title she’d given it, and he’d asked, “What’s this about?”
“Don’t you know yet?”
He did, really.
It
was about acceptance, he realized. Accepting who you are, within the limitations of a hard old world. It was realizing that sometimes things in the tough old world squeezed you, and crushed you, and drove you down into the dirt. But to survive, to keep going, you had to lighten yourself. To cast off things that no longer mattered, things that wore you down or weighed heavy on you. You needed courage to keep going, and sometimes you found it in yourself and sometimes in others. And it might seem hopeless, it might seem a fool’s path, and it was never safe travel even though an angel might wish it were so for you, and some things never changed, they never would, but nothing ever changed unless you believed they could.
And it was still the same old world as it had been yesterday. It was still a hard old world, a tough old world. It would always remain so. But it was a world that could not be described in just four minutes, with all its universe of good and evil, strong and weak, light and dark. It was the world, as it would ever be.
People lived and people died, and the lives of people were precious; their time to create and exist, live and love, was also precious. The song said, keep trying, keep living in the fullness of life, keep growing and creating, because no one here gets out alive. It was not a cry of fear; it was a declaration. You are here today, said the song. One tomorrow you will not be.
The song asked: Between those days, what will you do? Who will you become?
Could it be a new world, in this old one?
It could be.
Might it be a new world, in this old one?
That was for each person to decide. Travelling there was an inward journey, across an often fearsome land. The world within each person, the private world held deeply within. That was where the change happened, where a world could be made new in the midst of the old.