The Five Read online

  “Where would that be?” Nomad asked.

  “Not in the crapper, which is where ninety-nine percent of you people end up. Listen, you’ve got a good voice and a good presence. I like you. I’m just saying, the reason blacks rule music these days is because their songs are about fun and sex. The guys sing about getting bling and finding fresh pussy, and the girls sing about getting bling and cutting the nuts off the guys who screwed them over, huh?” Gogo waited for that point to sink in. “White musicians are singing about angst and the cruel world and how nothing’s any damned good. What’s the fun in that? Who’s going to dance to that beat, huh? Now you want to be fucking political. I’m telling you, don’t go that way.”

  “Maybe I don’t have a choice.”

  “What, because you’re such an artist? Because you’re going to teach the world to sing? Yeah, right.” His face got up closer to Nomad’s, and Nomad could feel the heat coming off it. “Everybody’s got a choice. And if you’ve got any brains, you’ll know your role. Comprende?”

  Nomad didn’t answer for a few seconds. He was feeling his own heat. “I think I’d better go,” he said.

  “One more piece of free advice,” Gogo offered. “Ditch the dyke.”

  Nomad turned his back on the man, and he walked to the Scumbucket where his family was waiting.

  FOUR.

  The McD’s that Mike had mentioned was about two miles back toward Waco along East Lake Shore. It was connected to a gas station, but it did have a drive-up window. George gave the orders: two cheeseburgers, Coke and double fries for Mike; a burger and a Coke for Nomad, and the same for himself. The others didn’t want anything. They hadn’t done much talking since the interview. The Scumbucket’s air-conditioning continued its off-key humming, the sun beat down mercilessly upon the hood and windshield, the sky was almost white with heat, and all was not right with this world.

  They were waiting for their order to come up at the window. Berke took a drink from her bottle of tepid water. “I’ll bet he screws us over. I’ll bet when we see the segment we won’t even recognize ourselves.”

  “I don’t want to see it,” said Ariel, picking the silver polish off her fingernails.

  “It’ll be okay,” George told them. “He won’t screw us over. It was a favor for Roger, remember?” As if he knew Roger Chester well enough to call him by his first name.

  “I’m sick of rude mechanicals,” Terry said, frowning toward a distant field where cattle searched for shade. “They run the world.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the only world we’ve got.” Mike was watching for the sack of burgers to appear. “Have to live in it, bro.”

  Nomad had his sunglasses back on. He offered no comment. He felt worn out, his energy sapped by the heat, and it was hardly noon. Before they headed over to Common Grounds they were due to check in at the Motel 6 in South Waco. Two rooms, three and three, at forty dollars each. If they didn’t sell enough T-shirts and CDs tonight, they’d already be behind the curve.

  The chow came. George handed the stuff out and started off, turning right on East Lake Shore. Distractedly, Nomad put the Coke on the seat between his legs and started unwrapping his burger.

  “So what’d he talk to you about?” George asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Had to be something, man.”

  “I guess he was warning me. Us, I mean.”

  “Yeah? About what?” Terry asked.

  Nomad took a bite of his sandwich. “About knowing our—” Roles, he was going to say, but just as he swallowed he caught the tang of the melted cheese tucked under the meat and smelled it and he looked at the sandwich and saw it in there, yellow and gooey. He realized the guy at the window had screwed up the order, because his burger was wrapped in white paper and not yellow. It was down his gullet now, too late to spit it up, and he knew one bite of cheese was not going to lay him low, it would just cause his throat to itch, but it was one more thing to deal with and he yelled, “Shit!”

  Startled, George hit the brake. Nomad grabbed for his drink, the plastic lid popped off, and suddenly his seat was awash in Coca-Cola.

  “What is it?” George asked, steering toward the shoulder. “What the hell…?”

  “Fucking shit!” Nomad shouted, as he crushed the offending hamburger in one hand. “Let me out! Stop the van, let me out!”

  “Cool it, bro!” Mike said, his mouth full. “Come on!”

  “Out!” Nomad repeated, and this time it was almost a shriek. He felt Ariel’s hand on his shoulder and he shook it off, and he realized as if looking down on himself in a dream that he was cracking up, he was about to fly to pieces, he had been blindsided by a fucking cheeseburger but that wasn’t all of it, no, not by a long shot, he was about to flail out and hurt somebody and he had to get out of this van…RIGHT…FUCKING…NOW!

  “Okay, okay, okay!” George steered the Scumbucket off onto a dirt road that led into a thicket of pines and scrub-brush. Before George could stop, Nomad was out the door, Coke dripping from his crotch and the seat of his jeans, and he threw the balled-up burger as far as he could with an effort that he knew his shoulder was going to feel tomorrow morning.

  This is a comedy, he thought. A comedy of errors, large and small. A guy standing on a dirt road in wet jeans, his fists clenched at his sides, his feet stomping the dust, rage in his heart and nobody to fight. It should be funny, he thought, and worth a real laugh on down the line.

  Only he did not laugh, and in the next instant the tears welled up hot and blinding in his eyes and his chest shuddered with a sob.

  He had to get away. But to where, he didn’t know.

  Just away.

  “Hey, John!” George called from the van. “We’ll get it cleaned up, man! No biggie!”

  But Nomad, who had always thought his given name of John Charles made him sound incomplete, began to walk away along the road as if he were really going somewhere. He briefly took his sunglasses off to wipe his eyes; what a way to blow an image, he told himself. Big tough bad-ass reduced to a snivelling pussy. He was aware that the Scumbucket was following right at his heels, like an ugly dog begging for attention. A banner of dust floated up into the air behind the U-Haul trailer, and above the dark pines the sky was milky-white.

  “Come on, John,” George said. “Shake it off.”

  Nomad kept his head down. He kept walking. Space was what he needed. He needed to find a place to curl up and think. His heart was hurting. He kicked at his shadow, to get it out of his way. With George and Terry leaving, the band was done. It would be only a matter of time before the center could not hold. Know your role, he thought.

  My clock is ticking, John. Yours is too, if you’ll be truthful.

  Behind him, George tapped the horn, but Nomad did not look back.

  He was following this road for which there was no roadmap. His father had been right. It was the musician’s path. His father had been right, even on the night of August 10th, 1991, when John Charles had seen him shot to death outside the Shenanigans Club in Louisville, Kentucky. And so rest in peace, Dean Charles and the Roadmen.

  Know your role.

  Someone tell me what that is, he thought. Someone. Please. Someone please please tell me where I fit, and where I am going.

  Because I am lost.

  “John?”

  The voice had startled him. He hadn’t heard her get out of the van, but Ariel was walking at his side. He kept his face averted from her.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. She tried to take his hand.

  “I don’t need you,” he said, and he pulled away.

  She blinked back her hurt. She knew from experience that sometimes pain must suffer alone, but she kept walking beside him.

  A bell began to ring.

  It was a crisp sound, the ringing of bright metal. Not the low, sad tolling of a funeral bell, but a calling.

  Nomad and Ariel came out along the road through the pines, and there before them was a wide field that held some kind of s
houlder-high plants. Not a pot field, as was Nomad’s first thought. It was more of an arrangement of thickets. And from among them people were emerging, as if answering the call of the bell. Nomad saw that all of them wore hats, some wore netting around their faces to keep away the bugs, and all wore gloves and carried baskets. A berry field, Nomad decided. He could see the dark berries in the baskets. Blackberries, most likely. Patches of the field were brown, but most of it thrived even in this ungodly furnace.

  It was a small farm community, tucked away back here behind the trees about a hundred yards off the main road. Not so much a town as a Joadville, Nomad thought. Something straight out of The Grapes Of Wrath. Maybe fifteen yards from where he and Ariel stood the dirt road curved toward a building that looked to be made out of tarpaper and green plastic siding, with a wooden cross painted gold up over the arched doorway. In front of this building a large-hipped Hispanic woman with gray hair bound by a red bandana was holding a bell and methodically swinging it back and forth. Around her, other women were setting out platters of tortillas, beans and enchiladas onto a table under the shade of a huge oak tree. Before the church, on the sparse grass, stood a well made of brown stones.

  It was lunch time, Nomad realized. They were calling the workers in from the field.

  He saw on the far side of the church a dozen more tarpaper shacks and structures protected by the shade of other oak trees. The buildings were made of what looked like things wealthier people had cast aside: patio tiles, water-stained awnings, sheets of corrugated metal and plasterboard, multicolored chunks of glass melted together to make windows. Little concrete statues that maybe had once been lawn ornaments in some other world decorated the plots of dirt: a rabbit with one ear cracked off, a greyhound looking around as if in search of its lost hind leg, a cherub with arms ready to fire the arrow but for the missing bow and hand that had gone with it. Nomad wondered if there wasn’t a dump somewhere nearby, where the people here found what they needed. A few old pickup trucks and cars stood about, sharing the indignity of rusted fenders and sun-cracked skins like the rough hides of alligators.

  Nomad watched the figures in sweat-soaked hats and clothes coming out of the blackberry brambles. Even in this heat, most of them wore long-sleeved work shirts to ward off the thorns. He didn’t know how they could bear it. He would’ve been crawling out on his knees. A chocolate-colored dog came trotting closer to Nomad and Ariel, followed at a distance by two other mutts. It stopped short, splayed its legs and greeted them with a series of ear-splitting barks that went on until one of the women spoke to it chidingly and threw out a tortilla for the dogs to tussel over.

  Other than that, no one seemed to pay the two intruders much attention except for a passing glance, followed by a comment or a shrug.

  “We’d better go,” Ariel told him.

  “In a minute.” He was waiting for his jeans to dry out a little more, which wouldn’t take too much longer in this heavy heat.

  “Everybody okay?” Mike walked up on the other side of Nomad. “John, you past your fit?”

  “I’m past it.” His fit had been eclipsed by this scene of hardship. Nomad knew that things were rough, with his personal disappointments and the band breaking up and all, but at least he didn’t have to labor in a blackberry field and live in a shack. Maybe he was heading that way, but not yet. He glanced back and saw that George had stopped the Scumbucket and had come around to the passenger side. George was using a towel from somebody’s bag to mop up the seat. Terry had gotten out too and was walking toward Nomad, shaking his head and showing a wry grin.

  Someone came out of the field and crossed the road in front of Nomad. He felt himself being examined. When he returned the attention, he saw it was a slender young girl with long, glossy black hair. On her head was a raggedy old wide-brimmed straw hat. The small buds of her breasts were visible under the open workshirt and sweat-wet gray tee beneath that, and she wore sun-bleached khakis with patched-up knees. On her feet were dusty sandals. Before he could catch her face, she had looked away; all he was left with was an impression of penetrating eyes in a pool of shadow.

  He watched her take her basket of blackberries to one of the pickup trucks and give it to a man who dumped its contents into one of several smaller flat plastic containers. She said something to the man, who smiled and showed a silver glint of teeth. Then she removed her stained leather gloves and shrugged off her workshirt and put them on the ground, and she passed by the table that held the platters of food and also a supply of paper cups that one of the other women had brought. She went to the well, where she cranked the handle that pulled up the pail. She took a ladle from a hook and dipped it full. Instead of drinking it, as Nomad had thought she would, she turned around and filled the offered paper cup of an older, sweat-drenched woman who had followed her out of the brambles and had likewise given her blackberries to the man at the pickup truck. The girl spoke and touched the woman’s arm. The woman’s heavily-lined face smiled, and she nodded at the comment and went to get her food.

  Then the next person, a white-haired older man who displayed thick, tattooed forearms after he’d removed his own workshirt, came forward with his offered cup. The girl filled it, and she leaned forward and said something and patted his shoulder, just a quick light touch, and when the man turned around to go get his lunch Nomad thought he could see a boy looking out from the wrinkled face.

  “We’re good to go!” George called, wringing the towel out on the ground. Two children about seven or eight years old were standing beside him, monitoring his progress. Their arms were crossed over their chests and their expressions as serious as any lord of the domain.

  But Nomad was watching the procession. Between thirty and forty people had come out of the field. They were all ages, from early teens to elderly. All of them were burned dark by the sun, and all of them walked with a weary step until they reached the girl at the well, whose smile and touch seemed to revive them in some way Nomad could not understand.

  Their day was most likely only half over. When their lunch was done, they would go back into the brambles. Maybe they kept at it until all the containers were full. Maybe they’d been at it since sunrise. Nomad figured the berries would be driven to a farmer’s market, or to a winery, or somewhere to be processed into jelly or jam. It was a hard day’s work, in anybody’s book. He thought, watching the girl and the people who filed past, that she was giving them more than just the water. A pat on the shoulder here, a touch on the elbow there, a leaning-in, a nod, a comment that urged a laugh. Maybe her real offering was human kindness, he thought, which also quenched thirst.

  He knew that, in her own way, she was giving them the strength they needed to keep going.

  And the thing was…the thing was…she didn’t pause in her work to get her own drink, though she was surely parched and thirsty like all the others. She had decided she was going to give everyone else their water first, and she would be the last to take one for herself.

  Maybe it was just a small sacrifice, on this brutally hot day. Maybe it didn’t mean much, really, but a sacrifice of any kind wasn’t something Nomad saw very often.

  “Let’s saddle up, people!” George said, about to climb behind the wheel.

  “You guys ready?” Terry asked.

  “No,” Nomad answered. “I’m not ready yet.”

  He was fascinated by the scene before him. How the girl—maybe fifteen or sixteen?—picked everyone up as they came past her. It seemed so effortless for her, and so important. Everyone got a few seconds of undivided attention. They were not rushed along. Most of them carried their own canteens, or half-empty water bottles pushed into pockets of work-aprons, but it was clear that they wanted—needed, maybe—water from the girl at the well.

  He was struck by the desire to see her face. He had the feeling that if he did not see her face, he might never again have the chance. And then he asked himself what the big deal was. It was just a young Hispanic girl in a floppy straw hat giving people wa
ter. So what?

  But he wanted to see her face, because he had the feeling that he would see in it a beauty he had forgotten existed.

  “Will you dumb-asses move it?” Berke had gotten out and was standing next to the Scumbucket, one hand on her hip and the other holding her own bottle of water, which had about two good swallows left in it. The children had retreated a few paces. “You want to get heat stroke?”

  “We’re coming,” Ariel said, but she did not leave Nomad’s side.

  And then the last person got his cup filled and went to join the workers who sat on the ground under the oak tree talking with each other and eating their lunches, and the girl at the well dipped her ladle into the pail and looked directly at the band members.

  She held the ladle toward them, offering a drink.

  No one moved or spoke for a few seconds, and then Mike said, “Well, shit, I’ll get me some if she’s givin’ it out.” He walked forward.

  “It might not be clean,” Ariel warned.

  Mike said, “Hey, I was raised on well water. Didn’t stunt my growth too bad.” He nodded a greeting to the women who’d brought the food and cups, and took one of the cups from the table. Then he walked to the well, said, “Buenos dias,” to the girl and held out his cup. Nomad saw the girl say something to Mike as she filled it, but it was spoken so quietly Nomad could not hear. Mike swigged the water down and came back to the group.

  “It’s cold,” he said. “She says to tell you everybody’s welcome, and not to be afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” Nomad asked. He watched the girl, who seemed to be waiting for them. She still had not taken a drink herself.

  “I don’t know. That it’s not clean, I guess.”

  “I think we’d better stick to bottled,” said Ariel.

  “Hey, we’re cooking over here!” Berke came closer. “What the fuck’s wrong with you guys?”