“We’re going to a motel,” the Little Genius announced. “Stay there tonight.”
“You take them over,” the Digger said to her partner, in a quiet voice. She took the Big Boys Barbecue pad with the phone number on it. “I’ll do this one.”
Nomad didn’t think he could stand up. To an outsider, he might have appeared the most composed of the shattered group. He might have seemed the least in shock, the most able to bear this tragedy and to rebound the fastest from it. But the outsider would have been criminally incorrect.
In the past ninety minutes, he had relived his own personal nightmare a hundred times over.
< >
Johnny, there’s no roadmap.
But.
It had been different that night. That August 10th, 1991. A Saturday, outside the Shenanigans Club in Louisville. Nearing midnight, and in a parking lot bathed in blue and green neon Dean Charles and the Roadmen starting to pack up the van after opening for the Street Preachers. John was a boy, a son, a fan. Dad was the bomb, the Killer. Played a gold-colored Strat that could cut through an arrangement like a razor through a hamhock. And sing…that man could wail. He was a bottle full of lightning. Up there on stage, front-and-center in the godly glow, all that power coming off him, all that energy and life. He was one of a kind.
And then out in that parking lot, when they saw the two flat tires on the van, the old blue cat sitting crooked on her paws, and somebody said, “Oh, shit,” and somebody else growled, “Motherfucker!” because John was one of them, he had heard it all, he was a veteran of the road even at twelve years old.
Dean had looked at his son and shrugged and grinned in that way he had of saying nothing in this world was such a big deal that it tugged you out of shape, you could always find your way back to the center of the cool world the musician lived in, and he said as he always did in such situations, “Johnny, there’s no roadmap.” Then he’d paused just a second or two, maybe thinking it over for the first time, and he’d said to his son with that slip-sided smile, “But…”
“I’m gonna end it now,” said the man who had just stepped out from his crouch behind a parked car, and Dean had regarded him only with mild surprise, as if expecting a visitor who was late in coming.
< >
John had been standing next to his father when the pistol in the man’s hand spoke. It had shouted into his father’s left ear, and John remembered how his father had winced at the loud noise, because his father had always cautioned John to guard his hearing, he only had one set of ears.
The pistol had gone off twice more as Dean Charles was falling, a whiff of gunpowder and a smell of blood in John’s nostrils, the boy falling back in shock, falling as his father fell, one to be called dead four hours later in the hospital and the other left behind to relive the moment over and over again.
“I have to find it,” Berke said, but to whom she was speaking was unclear. She hadn’t moved from her chair.
“It’ll turn up.” George stood over her. “Come on, it’s time to go.”
Nomad counted slowly to three, and then he got to his feet. As he followed the others out of the police station into the solid heat of late afternoon, he thought how ridiculous this situation was. How utterly fucking ridiculous. Two days ago he’d been burdened with the fact that The Five would end their last tour in Austin on the 16th of August—the Month of Death, as far as he was concerned—and then it would be back to putting another band together, another name, another vibe, another set of personalities—and here he was, here they were, on the real last day come way too soon. And Mike dead. Dead. He had experience with sudden death, yeah, but at least he’d found out later that his father, one of the wiliest tomcatters to ever sneak in a housewife’s back door, was responsible for a Louisville beauty-shop operator divorcing an out-of-work husband who owned ten guns. It would have made a farce, a black comedy directed by the Coen brothers starring George Clooney, but with blue contacts, and to complete the tragedy the man who had shot Dean Charles had walked about five yards away and shot himself under the chin, leaving behind two more children who would always feel an empty hole at their birthday parties. So as terrible as that was, it had made sense. But this…if he believed in God, which he did not, he would have heard the sound of cruel cosmic laughter, funny to no one else. Now he had to stop seeing Mike fall down over and over again in his mind, and he had to stop hearing Berke’s strangled scream or he was going to lose it right here on the Sweetwater street.
George took the wheel and followed the detective’s car. Berke sat way in back, by herself. The sunglasses stayed on. Nobody could look at anybody else. Nomad stared blankly ahead and silently chewed on his insides.
On the drive from the gas station into town, Berke had suddenly come out of her state of coma and cried out, “The notebook! I left the notebook!”
“Hold on!” George had said. He was already about to jump out of his skin, and this outburst had nearly started the rip along his spine. “What notebook?”
“Oh Jesus, oh Christ! I dropped it! I had it in my hand, I must’ve dropped it!” Berke sounded close to hysteria, which put everybody else nearer the edge. “Did you see it?” she asked Ariel, who shook her head. “We’ve got to go back!” she told George. “Turn around, we’ve got to go back!” The last two words had been almost a shriek.
“Take it easy!” Nomad had said. “We can’t go back right now!” They were following the two detectives, who might not have understood or appreciated the Scumbucket pulling off and turning around.
“You shut up!” Berke spat at him, her eyes enraged. “You fucking shut up!”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Ariel had turned around and grasped one of Berke’s hands, and Terry was trying to console her as best he could, but Berke wasn’t finished. She tried to jerk her hand away from Ariel’s, nearly spraining Ariel’s wrist, and she snarled, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” but Ariel kept hold of her and kept calmly repeating, “Settle down, come on, settle down,” until some of the fight-against-the-world went out of Berke. When it went it went hard. Berke’s shoulders trembled, she lowered her head so no one could see her face, and she began to weep—almost silently, but not silently enough. Through it all, Ariel did not let her go.
Nomad and George had exchanged quick glances. Berke Bonnevey, who made an art of detachment, was caught in the open with nothing to hide behind. No flippant remarks, no casual scorn, no big bitchin’ set of Ludwigs. Just her, torn open. Witnessing it was almost as much of a shock as the shooting had been.
In another moment Berke’s crying seemed to stop, because she sniffled and ran her free hand across her eyes. Nomad had said, “Here,” and that’s how she got his sunglasses.
At the police station, the story had emerged about the green notebook, which Nomad had remembered was on the picnic table next to Mike. “Something he wanted me to read,” Berke explained. “It was important to him.”
A call had been made to the scene, but Luke—maybe explaining the origin of his luck—reported back, “No dice. It’s not there.” Then, sensing Berke’s slow and painful retreat into the sanctity of herself, he’d offered, “It’ll turn up, though. When everything gets catalogued.”
Nomad had taken that to mean it might have been thrown in with Mike’s box of doughnuts and bag of blood-spattered beef jerky on the meat wagon, but he kept his mouth shut.