“Keep it real,” True said to Nomad, a statement he’d been planning on saying at this moment because it sounded like something a rocker would appreciate.
“Real, cranked to eleven,” Nomad answered.
Which True couldn’t make heads or tails of, but that was okay. This was where two worlds, having converged for a brief time in a circumstance of necessity, now by necessity moved again into their separate orbits.
“Thanks for getting us through,” Nomad said, and that made sense enough, though True would have many nights to wonder if there had been any other way to get them through, and if somehow Terry Spitzenham didn’t have to be dead. But he would never forget Terry playing in that studio, the voice of Lady Frankenstein rising from the speakers, and Terry saying thank you for giving me time.
He knew, though, that Ariel was the one who’d really gotten them through, and he’d told her so. Standing up to Jeremy Pett and his rifle as she had was probably the bravest—or most foolhardy—act he’d ever witnessed in his life. There ought to be civilian medals for something like that, but as Kate would be the only person on earth to hear the whole story, or what Ariel had impressed upon him to be the truth as she understood it, an FBI Certificate Of Appreciation was the best he could get for her. It was the best he could get for the others in helping put an end, however tragic, to a dangerous individual who had been a brother Marine. But behind the scenes he could have John Charles’s money obligations taken care of and his record expunged. In his own case, he was to be awarded the FBI Star and the Medal of Valor at a ceremony next week.
< >
True felt honored to have known them all. He felt like one of them. After all, Ariel had told him she’d realized what the song was about from that off-handed statement he’d made. Just when you think there’s nothing new in this old world. She’d told him that after hearing those words, it was all clear to her. So part of him was in the song, too. He was a songwriter.
Sort of.
His wife took his left hand, because he was not moving and in his heart he wanted to stay until all the CDs were signed, every one, and the lights went out.
She led him from the Green Room, and when he looked back it was with the idea to tell them he planned to take up the guitar again when his arm was healed. But he let it go, because they needed to finish up their night and get home to bed, and so indeed did he.
THIRTY-ONE.
They were nearly done signing the CDs when a tall young man, maybe all of twenty, walked into the Green Room. He wore a The Five T-shirt under his red-striped jacket. He had long sandy-brown hair and gray eyes. He was handsome, but he was thin and angular and he had a darkly troubled expression. When Berke looked at him her first thought was that Gina Fayne, the new Janis Joplin and outspoken voice of the Nation, had died of too much life.
The young man’s name was Ben Rivington. He was the bass player for the Mudstaynes. He came right up to Berke, and he said, “Can I talk to you?”
“Shoot,” she told him, as she continued to sign the last two dozen.
He looked around at Nomad and Ariel, who knew who he was but didn’t exactly know him personally. Berke had never spoken to the guy in her life.
“I’d rather talk in private,” Rivington said.
“Okay,” Berke decided. “Let me finish these first.”
“It was a great show,” he told Nomad and Ariel. “I’m a big fan, have been since your first CD. I wanted to speak to you at the Curtain Club, but…you know…sometimes you get hung up. People get in your face. You know.”
“Do I ever,” said Nomad, signing away.
“I bought the shirt online.”
“Looks good on you,” Ariel said. She was wondering, as Nomad was, why this gator wasn’t playing somewhere tonight. Gina Fayne and the Mudstaynes were hot and hugely talented, they were young—the oldest being the twenty-two-year-old drummer XB4Y—and they had energy to burn. “I didn’t know you guys were in town. Did you have an early gig?”
“No,” he said. “I drove down from Dallas when I found out about this. Um… Gina’s not feeling too well.”
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s not well,” he repeated, his eyes haunted, and Ariel knew not to go any further. He watched Ariel sign her name on a CD and then reach for another. “You really came through the fire,” he said. “I don’t know how you survived it.”
“We were lucky.”
“I heard you were more than lucky. I heard you were…” He looked down, and Ariel waited for him to find what he searched for. “Blessed,” he said. “You’d have to be blessed to get through that. Does that sound fucking stupid?”
“No, not really,” Nomad told him. “I mean… I can handle that.”
“I liked that last song,” Rivington said. “The ‘New Old World’. It spoke to me.”
Ariel lifted her eyes to his. She could tell he needed something, a desperate need, and he would not have come here if he didn’t hope he could find it.
“After the gig, I was going to come back and speak but you had people on you, and I know how that goes. So I took off. Went to another club and had a beer. Heard another band finishing up. But that last song spoke to me. It told me to come back here. That part about, you know, changing things. That you’ve got to, like, step up to the plate if you want to get anything done. Take responsibility.” He grinned suddenly, like a shy kid, and he actually blushed. “Man, does that sound fucking dorky. Me saying it that way, not the song,” he corrected. “All props to the song, dudes.”
“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.