“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.