He saw George standing back by the counter where the merchandise was being sold. Keeping tabs on the action, for sure. A hand grabbed Nomad’s shoulder and he turned around to bump fists with a wild-haired dude in a Kings Of Leon T-shirt. Then he was through another group of people who smelled like they’d taken a bath in beer and George said, “The guy’s over here,” and led him past three girls who looked as if they wore their dresses spray-painted on, all in different shades of red.
Suddenly Nomad was right up in front of a big, bulky dude with close-cropped brown hair and a long, unshaven jaw. The guy wore baggy jeans and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt with white stripes. His eyes were sunken in, almost as if he’d just awakened from a heavy sleep. In his arms was a green plastic bag.
“Here he is,” George said. Nomad didn’t know which one of them he was speaking to.
“Hi,” the guy said.
“How’s it going?” Nomad asked, aware that the three girls were coming up on him from the right. Two blondes, neither of them natural in hair color or boob-size, but the girl in the middle with auburn hair was the real hottie.
“Good, real good,” the guy said. He blinked furiously, as if he was really nervous or he really needed glasses. And then he abruptly stepped aside and the thin woman who was standing behind him said, “John Charles!” She smiled, but only one side of her mouth worked very well. “Go Shamrocks!”
Shamrocks? he thought. East Detroit High School? Those Shamrocks? He had no idea who this person might be. She was a small, emaciated woman maybe in her mid-thirties. She leaned on the support of one of those curved metal walking-sticks with a black rubber tip that old people hobble on in hospitals. A bright, cheerful purple scarf was wrapped turban-style around her head, and fixed at the front with a gold-colored pin in the shape of a butterfly. Chemo, Nomad thought, because she had no hair. Her cheekbones and chin were so sharp they looked about to break the skin. She wore shapeless jeans and a white peasant-blouse top. A pink sweater was draped around her shoulders.
“I know you don’t remember me,” she said. “I’m Cheryl Buoniconti. I mean, I was. I’m Cheryl Capriata now. This is my husband, Ray.”
“Heard a lot about you.” Ray shook Nomad’s hand. “You put on a great show.”
“Thanks.” Nomad felt as if he’d been knocked to the floor and he was still trying to get up. He’d gone to school with Cheryl Buoniconti, grades six through eight at Oakwood Middle School and then freshman and sophomore years at East Detroit. They were the same age. Cheryl and her family had moved away, summer before the junior year. The Cheryl he’d known had been a flirt, in fact one of the group called the Flirty Four, had been a whiz at math, a reporter on the school paper, had been—in all honesty—really kind of a snooty bitch who’d looked down on the hoods, thugs and sad-ass cases John Charles had hung with.
“Thank you,” Cheryl said, “for coming out here. I don’t do so well getting around in crowds.”
“No problem,” Nomad answered, and nearly choked when he heard himself say it. “Uh… Cheryl. Jesus. Do you live in Dallas?”
“No. We live just east of Shreveport. In Minden. Ray teaches algebra at the high school. I…I mean we…follow you on your webpage. Your band, I mean. Well, we don’t exactly follow you, this is the first show we’ve been to, but…”
“We keep up,” Ray said, helpfully.
“We do keep up.” Cheryl smiled again, and this time Nomad saw a trace of the flirty teenaged girl way down in her dark brown eyes. But only a trace, and too quickly it was gone. “And we’re not the only ones. I’m on Facebook with a lot of people from East Detroit.” She mentioned several names, most of whom Nomad recalled as being in a different, higher atmosphere than himself. “Everybody’s rooting for you. I remember that talent show when we were freshmen. When you got up on stage with your band. What was their name?”
“The Unwanted,” Nomad said.
“I remember thinking you were going places. I remember thinking I wished I could find something as important to me as music was to you. But I guess I found it. Can I show you a picture of our daughter?”
“Absolutely,” Nomad said.
From his wallet Ray produced a picture of a girl eight or nine years old. She had her mother’s dark brown eyes, she wore her hair in bangs across the front, and she had an open, confident smile.
“That’s my angel,” Cheryl said. “Her name’s Courtney, she’s just turned nine.”
“Awesome,” Nomad told her, and it seemed to him that everybody needed an angel, of some kind. He returned the picture to Ray.
“I had to leave that summer before we were juniors. My dad lost his job at the Firestone plant. I didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye to my friends, we just came down to Louisiana to live with my Uncle Burt for a little while, I thought we were going back after the summer. You know?”
“I guess that was tough,” Nomad said, because he could tell it was important to her not only to explain this to him, but to get a response.
“Well…it was, but… I know it wasn’t like…what happened to you, in the sixth grade. To your dad. I remember my folks talking about it. Listen to me, I sound like my mom chattering away in line at the Publix. Would you sign those for us? Ray, have you got the pen?”
“I do,” said Ray, who brought from his pocket a silver permanent marker.
Inside the green bag were the CDs and the T-shirts. As Ray handed the first CD over to be signed, Nomad looked at Cheryl and asked, “Do you want my real name or my stage name?”
“Whatever you want to put. I’m just so glad to see somebody from East Detroit way down here. We had a good time, didn’t we?”
“We did,” he said, and he signed John ‘Nomad’ Charles. He wondered how long Cheryl had been sick, or what her prognosis was. He didn’t want to ask, but she looked bad. At one point, as Nomad did the signatures, he heard Ray quietly ask her, “You all right?” and she said, “Oh, yeah.” Ray put his arm around her, to steady her, and Nomad kept on signing.
The last T-shirt he signed, he put Go Shamrocks! under his name.
“Can we get a picture?” Cheryl asked, and Nomad said that was fine, as many as she wanted. As Ray took the shots, Nomad put his arm around Cheryl’s frail shoulders and his face against hers. He was aware of the three girls coming up right beside him to take their own pictures with the ever-present cellphone cameras. They began to laugh loud and drunkenly, to jostle him with their shoulders and their hips and he told them as politely as he could to step back, that they were crowding him, and one of the fake blondes called him a dumb fuck and the other fake blonde put up the middle finger right in his face and the first fake blonde took a picture of it. But they moved off and away into the crowd, and when Ray finished up the pictures Cheryl said, “I brought something for you,” and she reached into a pocket of her jeans and put into Nomad’s hand a small piece of clear quartz crystal. He instantly recognized it as a type of crystal people carried when they were into natural healing.