“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 have. 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 bass 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’.”