The Five Read online

  They progressed to the bedroom, where Tiffany proved to be an experienced participant and also a loud one, as she announced to her neighbors, the city of Dallas and most of north-central Texas how rough she wanted it, and in what orifice. Either her neighbors were deaf or they just rolled over in bed and said, “Oh, that’s Tiffany being Tiffany,” because nobody banged on the wall. Tiffany wanted to do things that would’ve made her Barbies blush, but Nomad hung in there. But as Tiffany thrashed about on top of him, he had the disturbing image of Ariel on stage, bathed in blue light, playing her acoustic guitar and singing,

  This song is a snake, winding through the woods,

  It’s full of bitter venom and it would bite you if it could.

  This song is a snake, coiled beneath the bed,

  And if you love another girl there it will rattle by your head.

  “Harder, harder, harder!” Tiffany shouted, but he could still hear the rattle.

  When all was screamed and done, they slept. Then Nomad awakened when the man was standing next to the bed.

  “Who are you?” His voice cracked. He grabbed the sheet and pulled it up to his chin like a naughty fop in a British sex comedy. But it wasn’t funny, because this kind of scene was why his father was dead. Nomad was ready to fight for his life if the guy pulled a gun.

  The dude was skinny, had a mass of tangled blonde hair and wore glasses. He had good musical taste, though, because he was wearing a black T-shirt with the symbols on it, in white, from Led Zeppelin’s Zoso album. He was also either drunk or high, from the frozen grin on his face and the way he couldn’t keep from drifting side-to-side. “Tiffany?” he said, shaking her starry shoulder. “Come on, Tiff, talk to me. Okay?”

  She was wiped, and she muttered something into her pink pillow and swatted at him as if he were a tsetse fly. He kept on pleading for her attention like a sad child.

  Nomad decided it was time to pull on his drawyas and get out. He slid from the bed, got dressed in a hurry, but careful not to make too much noise in case the punk went ballistic. Before Nomad could get out of the room, Tiffany sat up, rubbed her eyes and started talking to the guy. It was one of those do you really really want another chance and why should I give you one conversations, made totally bizarre when Tiffany seemed to remember Nomad was there and she said, “You can use the phonebook in the kitchen…call a cab.”

  “What’s the address here?”

  She shook her head, unable to process the numbers, and the Zeppelin fan who obviously had apartment key privileges said without looking at Nomad, “Just tell ’em the Zone apartments on Amesbury Drive. They’ll know the place.”

  Nomad just bet they would. He remembered passing a twenty-four-hour Arby’s near the entrance to the apartment complex, and when he called the cab company he said he’d be there waiting. He went out the door to the sounds of Tiffany’s voice whiplashing the guy and the poor sucker nearly sobbing.

  Rock’n roll, baby!

  So it was that Nomad approached the door of the suburban house on the weeping side of three o’clock. He tried the doorknob and found it was, sensibly, locked against people like him. He was about to turn his thoughts toward curling up on the porch when the door cracked open and a familiar face peered out.

  “Hey, bro,” Mike whispered. He opened the door wider. “Heard a car pull up, figured it was either you or Berke.”

  “Berke? She’s not here?”

  “Must be a good party they’re havin’. She and her friends left not too long after you went off with your chiquita. George saw you go. Watch it!” Mike warned, because in the dim light coming from a hallway he saw that John had almost stepped on Terry, who was wrapped up in a sleeping-bag on the carpeted floor. A few feet away from Terry, Ariel was also in a sleeping-bag. George was on the sofa since he knew the guy who owned the house and had worked it out for them to spend the night here.

  Nomad saw that a backyard light was on, and that the sliding glass door that led out was partway open. “You sleeping outside?”

  “Nope. Woke up a while ago. I was just sittin’ out there, thinkin’.”

  “Sounds heavy.”

  Mike shrugged. Ariel suddenly stirred and lifted her head, and she looked groggily at the two figures, squinting to make out who it was. “John?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Some of us are asleep,” she told him, and then she returned to her slumber.

  Nomad thought that all fucking decent citizens were asleep at this hour, and everybody else was just thrashing around in their cages.

  < >

  “Hey,” Mike whispered, “you want a cigarette?”

  Nomad nodded. He followed Mike out through the glass door and slid it shut. Out back, in the glare of a pair of security floodlights mounted on the underhang of the roof, a few concrete steps led down to a fenced-in area with a small lawn. There was a picnic table, a playhouse meant to look like a wilderness fort, and a kid-sized plastic pool decorated with decals of smiling seahorses. The family who owned the house had two children, both under ten. They were sleeping in a back room, safely away from the scummy musicians. In fact, their father had been a roadie a few years ago, had travelled with some bands who were successful enough to need roadies and actually pay them money, but that was then and now he was the manager of an AMC theater that he was proud to say had sixteen movie screens.

  On the picnic table was a coffee cup that Mike had been using for an ashtray. Beside it was his pack of smokes, his Zippo lighter bearing the logo of the New Orleans Saints, a small notebook with a green cover, and a ballpoint pen. By the light of the floods, Nomad saw three or four butts in the cup. He knew that Mike was waiting for Berke to come home, or what for the moment served as home.

  “She can take care of herself,” Nomad said, and realized this was a remark he’d made several times in the past, on occasions just like this.

  And Mike’s answer was the same, too: “Oh yeah, I don’t worry about her, bro.”

  They sat at the table, one on either side. Mike offered Nomad a cigarette, took one for himself, and he lit both of them up with the Zippo.

  Nomad blew smoke into the night air. “You guys hang around much longer?”

  “Not much. Caught about half of Gina Fayne’s set. Tight band, and she’s got some pipes, I swanee.”

  “Yeah.” She was compared to Janis Joplin on the Mudstaynes’ website. Maybe not so much roughness in her voice, but she was only twenty. Nomad heard she was catching up to Janis in the department of drinking and drugs, and he hoped somebody wasn’t stupid enough to let her try heroin to complete the picture. He glanced at the pen and notebook. “You writing something?”

  Mike frowned, as if this question was improper. “Just playin’ around.”

  “With what?”

  “My dick,” Mike replied, which meant it was not to be talked about any further. He smoked his cigarette some and listened for the noise of a car pulling up out front. That dog started barking in the distance again and another answered, but otherwise the neighborhood was Sunday-morning silent. “Nice house they got here,” he said. “I like that pool. Hot night, you could curl up right there.”

  “Yeah,” Nomad said.

  Mike drew on his cigarette, exhaled and regarded the little red glow, as people will. Then he reached out, trying not to be so obvious about it but being obvious all the same, and slid the notebook away from Nomad about four or five inches. “Did you know,” he said, “that Berke’s stepdad died last month?”

  “Huh? No, I didn’t.” Nomad smiled thinly. “Hey, she only talks to you, man.”

  “Heart attack. Had one about ten years ago. He had a pacemaker, took high blood pressure pills and all that, but the ticker got him. You know they weren’t too close.”

  “I know she doesn’t talk about him very much.” Floyd Fisk had been his name.

  “Yeah, well, the only reason I know is that she told me her mother called her. From San Diego. Said Floyd left her something he wanted her to hav
e. The dude must’ve felt his time runnin’ out, or maybe he was just gettin’ ready. But Berke says he left a letter…like…stipulatin’ his wishes and shit.”

  “What’d he leave her?”

  “She don’t know. Her mother don’t know, either. Whatever it is, it’s in three big sealed-up boxes in their garage. Letter said only Berke’s supposed to crack ’em open. Anyhow, her mom wants her to come pick ’em up.”

  The Five were scheduled to play at the Casbah in San Diego on August 1st, a Friday night, opening for The Mindfockers and the Mad Lads. Nomad said, “Whatever,” because that just seemed like a suitable, neutral comment.

  They didn’t speak for a while. Their cigarettes burned down. The dogs quietened. Mike shifted on the bench seat and said, “I’ve been thinkin’. You know that place with the blackberries? Somethin’ wasn’t right.”

  “What?” Nomad had heard him well enough, but the statement took him by surprise.

  “Wasn’t right,” Mike repeated.

  Damn straight it wasn’t, Nomad thought. He’d been rubbing his skull for two days, searching for the swelling of a tumor. Could you even find them that way? He didn’t know.

  Mike took another draw on his cigarette, almost burning it to his fingers. In the glare of the floods, the pictures on his arms moved with the shifting of his ropy muscles. “Ever picked blackberries?” he asked, and Nomad shook his head. “Second time I ran away from home, I found work on a farm. Fella grew blackberries, one of his crops. Well, I remember the season ended up…oh…last part of June, first week of July at the latest. I mean, they’re like…kinda fragile. The berry, not the fuckin’ thorns. But they need a lot of rain, and this heat should’ve shrivelled ’em up to nothin’. I’ve been thinkin’…wonderin’, I guess is the right word…how there could’ve been any blackberries at all in those brambles, it bein’ so dry and so hot. Get me?”

  “No, not really,” Nomad admitted. “Maybe they were…like…resistant or something.”

  “I think they were just wild blackberries,” Mike said quietly. “Growin’ when they shouldn’t be.”

  “Yeah.” Whatever, Nomad almost said, but that might sound like disrespect and you did not, no way, no how, want to throw a diss at Mike Davis.

  “That girl at the well,” Mike went on, after a short pause, “spoke to me.”

  Nomad nodded. He recalled what Mike had relayed from her: She says to tell you everybody’s welcome, and not to be afraid. “You told us.”

  “Not that.” Mike turned his head slightly, and through a haze of smoke Nomad caught the sharp glint of the deep-set dark brown eyes aimed at him, like the first quick display of a weapon that had best not be ignored. “To me,” Mike said. “Just to me. In English.”

  Nomad was almost afraid to ask, but Mike was waiting. “What was it?”

  “She said…welcome.” Mike started to crush his dying cigarette in the cup, but he took from it one more pull. “And… I could tell… I could…” He made a small gasping noise, and suddenly Nomad saw wetness bloom around Mike’s eyes, and he looked away and Mike looked away and it was a shocking moment, really, for both of them.

  “I could tell,” Mike continued, when he got his voice steadied, “that she meant it.”

  Nomad didn’t know what to say, so he made the wise decision and remained silent. He stared at the pool, at the surface of the still water.

  “Do you know,” Mike said in a distant voice, as if asking himself the question, “how many times somebody has said that to me, and meant it? How about…that was probably number one? I’m used to being thrown out of places, bro. At least, they fuckin’ try to throw me out. And someplaces I say, okay, I’ll go easy, and other places I say, let’s see you make me. Like that all my life, John. Ever was, ever will be. Except that girl…she was like…glad to see me. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “I can’t say,” seemed like the reasonable response.

  “One thing I do know is that I can tell when somebody’s shittin’ me or not, and right now you can’t figure out what the hell I’m talkin’ about, because she was just a little Mexican girl passin’ out water, and what of it, and you kinda think I’m dumb to begin with, and that’s where we’re at. Right?”

  “I don’t think you’re dumb,” Nomad said. “Where’d you get that idea?”

  Mike blinked slowly and crushed what was left of the cigarette into the cup. “Because,” he answered, “I am dumb. Oh yeah, I’m good with the bass axe. I do my part. I’m a pro, whatever that means. But as far as smarts take me, I’ve pretty much been hitchin’ rides for a long time.”

  “I don’t think anybody who read Moby Dick when he was a little boy can be dumb, do you?”

  “Oh. That.” Mike nodded. “It was more about the stealin’ than the readin’. I figured if I could make myself get through a book that size, and understand it, I could…” He stopped abruptly and took another smoke from the pack. “I could be as smart as Wayne was,” he said, as he fired up the Zippo and lit his cigarette.

  Mike’s dead older brother, killed in a lumberyard accident. The boy’s face was tattooed there on his left shoulder. Nomad said nothing; he just waited.

  When it came, Mike’s voice was hushed and sad. “Wayne was everybody’s golden boy. Star football runnin’ back, A-student, popular…he was the bomb, bro. Gonna go to college. Scholarship lined up to McNeese State. And then he got a summer job at the yard. Same kind of job kids have been doin’ there for years, summer after summer. A chain came loose, a safety gear that was supposed to lock up didn’t catch, a load of timber fell…all she wrote, as they say. Only he didn’t die for a while, he was busted and broken and they tried to put him back together in the hospital but he just…kinda gave up, I guess. He never came to all the way, but I mean…he wasn’t gonna be able to fuckin’ walk, his spine was so tore up. That was a bad day, that one was. I loved my brother. He was gonna be the kind of man who turns out to be a good dad. You know? The dependable one.”

  “Sure,” Nomad said.

  “You mind if I talk about this?” Mike asked, his eyes narrowed. “This is on me tonight. You mind if I talk?”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean…yeah, go ahead.”

  “It ain’t pretty,” Mike said.

  “Well, neither are you,” Nomad told him, and he saw Mike give a grim smile that did not last very long but at least was there for a few seconds.

  Mike smoked and thought for a little while. Then he said, “See, he covered me. I just coasted in his shadow, and nobody ever had any expectations or shit for me. He made it easy for me to slide on by. But without him bein’ around, my folks…they grieved for him, let’s put it that way. They grieved for him, and they grieved for him, and they grieved for him, and our house was a fuckin’ pit of grief, just seemed like the lightbulbs went out of the lamps one after another, and nobody put any new ones in. It wasn’t long before I was hatin’ him, and what he’d been, and I felt like they hated me, too, because I was the dumbshit brother, I was the pothead, the troublemaker, the musician. When they looked at me—wasn’t too often—I knew they were seein’ what was left. Wasn’t gonna be no football star in our house anymore, no smart honor roll student, and no McNeese State graduate either. No sir, that bird had flown. And I knew that I had to get away from that house and those people, so I could love Wayne like I used to. So I could think of him like a mountain holdin’ up the sky, with the clouds in his teeth. My big brother.” Mike took a drag and blew smoke from his nostrils like the exhalation of a dragon. “And he would have been the first one to tell me to go. So I went. Came back a couple of times, when I ran into trouble. But then I left one night, to get away from the hate and the hollerin’, and I got a ride on the highway with a black dude about a hundred and twenty years old, in a righteous old gold Cadillac with tailfins. He told me his name was Grover McFarland, and he was on his way to New Orleans from Montgomery, Alabama, to play in a blues festival. But he said he went by the stage name of Catfish McFarland, because he could play b
ass so deep he could just lie right there at the muddy bottom and grin.” Mike himself grinned at that memory. “He was a drunk, cheated at cards, had two wives at once and had shot a preacher in Pascagoula in 1959. But that sumbitch, rest his soul, was not a liar. At least not about playin’ bass.” He touched one of the guitars tattooed on his right arm. “This one was his, the best I remember it. The one he taught me on. He called her ‘Elvira, Mistress of the Darkies’.”

  Mike looked up suddenly, toward the street. “You hear a car?”

  Nomad listened. “No,” he decided. “She’s not back yet.”

  “That girl needs a good girl to look after her,” Mike said. “Drives me crazy sometimes.”

  Nomad had finished his cigarette and put it out in the cup, and he wanted to stand and stagger off to get a few hours of sleep before they loaded up to go to El Paso. Their gig wasn’t until Friday night, but they might as well get on the road and have a few days to lie around a pool somewhere. He hoped the T-shirt and CD sales had made them enough money for a friendly neighborhood Motel 6. But he didn’t go, because he felt that Mike still needed him.

  “I never thought about playin’ music for a livin’,” Mike went on after a short pause to strain an ear for the car that was not there. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a vet. I liked animals, I always got along with ’em. But you have to know math, chemistry…all that. I wasn’t smart enough. Even my teachers told me I wasn’t…and then the woman at the library, behind that desk, said…you’re a little boy, you’re not smart enough to read that big ol’ book. She said, go put it on the red shelf over there, and you get yourself a book you can actually read. And then she said… wait a minute, wait a minute…you’re Wayne Davis’s brother, aren’t you? Oh, is that book for him?”