Maybe it was to hang on to something as long as you could. Youth, beauty, coolness…whatever. Maybe it was about power over other people, making them dance to your tune. Striking back at people, for past indignities and pain. Whatever that thing was that you needed to find, sex was just the outer skin of it.
Sitting on this sofa, watching the bodies go past and the games be played out, Berke thought of a card her father had sent her. Not Floyd fucking Fisk, but her real father, Warren Bonnevey. It had been sent to her on the eve of her first gig, when she was seventeen. Its colors were faded, it was spotted with yellow and looked like it dated from the ’50s. On the cover were feminine-looking bees with long eyelashes flying around a hive. Where it had said Congratu-lations On Your First Job, the word Job had been marked out and Gig written in.
And inside, the verse had been:
Congratulations on your new position,
I know it’s just what you’ve been wishin’.
I’d like to say a whole lot more,
But that’s what cards like this are for.
Try and try,
Grow and thrive,
You’ll be the busiest bee in a honey of a hive.
Only the last line had also been marked out, and written in her father’s hand was: Remember no one here gets out alive. Love, Warren.
Strange, yes. Unsettling, for sure. But then again, her father was insane.
“Hi, I’m Noble,” said the darkly-tanned woman with blonde-streaked hair who held a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale in one hand and offered the other out toward Berke. She was maybe twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Had very beautiful green eyes, a confident voice. Wore a black tank top, slim-leg jeans and brown, scuffed cowboy boots. Nothing sparkly about her. Good enough.
Berke shook her hand, and when Noble asked if anybody was sitting next to her, Berke said no, she was welcome to park it.
“Hey, lemme ask you somethin’.”
Berke turned from the cooler and her perplexing choice of bottled teas. Mike had come up behind her, clutching his ginger ale, box of doughtnuts and bag of beef jerky, which he’d already broken into. “Go,” Berke said when Mike hesitated.
Mike glanced toward the door. Berke saw that a state trooper had just entered, a young very clean-cut looking Hispanic guy, and he came straight back to the cooler and got himself a bottle of apple juice. He nodded at them, Mike said, “How’s it goin’?” and then the trooper took his drink to the counter and started a conversation in Spanish with the woman, whom he seemed to know pretty well.
“What’re you gettin’?” Mike asked her.
“I don’t know. Is that what you wanted to ask?” She knew it wasn’t; he always approached things sideways, like a crab.
“Ever try the V8 Fusion stuff? The tropical orange is good.”
She looked him in the eyes, because he seemed awfully nervous. “What’s up?”
Mike watched the trooper leave. Except for the woman and the boy, they were alone in here. “Hey… I was wonderin’…have you thought anymore about that song idea?”
“John’s idea,” Mike explained. “You know, what he said. About everybody writin’ words to a new song.”
“Oh, that bullshit.” Berke gave him a thin smile. “The Kumbaya song, right?” She decided to give the tropical orange a try, and reached into the cooler for it.
“Well…yeah, okay…but…you know, maybe it ain’t such a bad idea.” Mike followed her to the counter. “I know what he’s gettin’ at, but—”
“Busy work, that’s what he’s getting at,” Berke interrupted, as she put her money up.
“Yeah, but…” Mike glanced out the window, through all the backwards soap-chalk words and prices written there. The fuelling was done. George had paid at the pump and was probably in the bathroom. Terry was getting back into the Scumbucket; it was Nomad’s turn to drive. Nomad and Ariel were standing in the shade, a distance apart. The trooper had raised the cruiser’s hood and looked like he was pouring water from a red plastic pitcher into the reservoir for his windshield-wash fluid. “Maybe it’s a good idea,” Mike said. “You know, to keep everybody together.”
“We are together,” she reminded him, and pocketed her change. “How could we be on tour and not be together?”
“Together…like…not gettin’ pissed at each other. Not blamin’ each other for the breakup. Like on the same wavelength or somethin’.”
Berke had been about to go out the door, and now she stopped and stared at him very carefully, as if searching his face for a third eye. “Maybe I am pissed,” she said.
He shrugged. The shrug said maybe he was pissed too, deep down, but repositioning was a fact of the musician’s life. Take it or leave it.
“And who says we’re breaking up?” Berke went on. “So George and Terry are leaving. We’ll replace them and we’ll keep going.” Before Mike could respond to this wishful thinking, she narrowed her eyes. “Wavelength?” she asked. “What are you now, a pop psychologist?”
She again started to push through the door, and a little heat rolled in but Mike stopped her by saying, “I’ve started writin’ a song. I don’t have a whole lot of it, but… I was kinda hopin’ you’d take a look at it, before I showed it to anybody else.”
Berke was silent. For a few seconds she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her face revealed no emotion—her barrier against the world, and everything that was in it—but her heart was touched. She thought for a quick fleeting instant that she might tear up, but no way she was going to let that happen. The truth was, she loved Mike Davis as much as she could love anyone. They were a team, the backbone, the foundation, the rhythm twins. He gave her a rough elbow to hold onto, and she gave him a punch in the ribs to show she needed it. They had clicked from the very first, if clicking meant the sharing of fart jokes and beer from the same bottle. And now here he stood, asking her to do this for him. It was important to him, she could see that in his eyes. Before I showed it to anybody else, he’d said.
But she was who she was, and even this could not be made easy. “You’re not falling for this song-writing crap, are you? Tell me you’re not that stupid.”
He smiled, but the corners of his mouth were tight. “Maybe what I’ve written is no good…likely it’s not…but nobody ever asked me to write words before. Yeah, I know it ain’t what I do. What I’m supposed to do, I mean. But who says I can’t give it a try?” He saw the flicker of derision in her faintest of half-smiles and he picked up his tempo like a double thumb slap. “If it was to be okay, and maybe start off a new song everybody could be part of…then I’d be doin’ a good thing for the band, right? And…hey…you could maybe add your part, too.”
“We’re not the writers.” Berke’s voice was low and patient, as if speaking to a small child or a dog. “John, Ariel and Terry are the writers. I have no idea—none, nada—about how to write song lyrics. Come on, let’s hit it.” She went out, with Mike following right after her.
The trooper had lowered his hood, and with a squeegee was washing a layer of dust from his windshield that the malfunctioning fluid reservoir had failed to clear.
“Please,” Mike said.
Berke had only taken a couple of strides from the door. Once more she stopped, because she realized there was a time to play the game of cruelty and a time not to be afraid to be kind. And this definitely, undeniably, was that.