But when the time came for Berke’s drum solo, at the midpoint of ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, she turned her anger into energy. With the opening blasts from her double crash cymbals the others knew to step back out of range. The stage was hers, and for almost three minutes she owned not only that platform but every ounce of turbulent air between the Spinhouse’s black-painted walls. She put her head down and became a machine, starting up a funk groove with kick and snare, complicating it with hi-hats, buzz rolling, double stroke hits, then breaking into a free-form conversation between the ride cymbal, the kick and the high crack of snare rimshots, speeding up and slowing down, speeding up and slowing down, slower, slower, now into a brassy click-clack clockwork of hi-hats with the kick drum thudding below them, adding a display of triplets and single stroke sevens and returning to a strutting funk groove in the tradition of her father’s soulful style before he lost his mind. With a brief shake of her head she waved Terry off at the two-minute mark when he came back onstage to add his keyboard part, and he drew away from the blue and red spotlights. Whatever she needed to say, she was determined to make it heard by her effort alone.
In the forty seconds or so that followed, Berke took her playing to the edge. She sat astride her throne at the center of a storm, and as her hands and her drumsticks blurred she went into a complex pattern between her floor toms, her snare, the kick and the sheet-brass Zildjian crashes. Nomad saw from his position the little lights of cellphone cameras sparkling out there in the dark. She was going so hard he thought she was going to destroy her kit, and as one drumstick snapped on the edge of the snare she reached into her holster of spares, drew another one out and kept going without missing a half-beat. Sweat gleamed on her face, her eyes were closed, she was a red-lit torch high somewhere in the drummer’s nirvana. The pitching hard-struck cymbals shimmered with blue and purple light, the black walls spoke back to her the thunder she was speaking, and the other members of The Five understood that furious wild language: I am somebody, I am here, I am somebody, I am here and I have earned this moment.
Dig it.
Berke pounded a military tattoo on the snare like a machine-gun burst, and then she suddenly raised her arms with the sticks clenched in her hands and there was only silence. In the next second it was filled by the applause and shouts of approval from the audience—which was a good thing, because many audiences didn’t give a shit about drum solos—but as the alcohol-fuelled admiration went on Berke did not lower her arms. The others knew: she was waiting for the low thump of Mike’s bass guitar to bring her back to the steady 4/4 beat of ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’. But it didn’t come, the seconds passed, and just as Nomad, Ariel and Terry walked back onstage Berke lowered her arms and picked up the song as if she’d been listening to her bandmate lay down the bottom like he’d done in nearly three hundred gigs across thirty-six states and five Canadian provinces.
From then on, Berke had returned to her role in The Five: the engine of rhythm driving the music forward, supplying the fills and an occasional quick display of flash just for the hell of it. But whatever the tempo, she was always where she needed to be.
When the show was over there came the people asking to get backstage, who were the same everywhere except for wearing different faces. First were the honest-to-God true fans, the ones who bought the CDs and merchandise and knew the songs, and they wanted to take pictures and say how sorry they were about Mike and to ask how Catch As Kukulkan was selling because that was great, man, really great, the best ever. Thank you for being here, they said, and they meant it. Then came the people who knew the Spinhouse manager or had connections with this or that local entertainment rag and just wanted to be seen going backstage, and from this group there might be comments about how absolutely fucking amazing the new Death Cab For Cutie CD was, or how they’d really come to see The Soul Cages but you guys were right up there, almost as good. In this group there would always be several hot girls looking for action with whomever they could snatch, and a couple of snaky guys wanting to see if the band “needed anything”, and usually one fugly bitch with bad breath and charcoal black around her eyes asking up in Nomad’s face why they weren’t as popular as some band like Ra Ra Riot.
Unlike the night in Dallas, The Five had packed up their equipment and driven back to the La Quinta Inn without any further distractions. They had gone to sleep like tired old geezers, because tomorrow—today, by now—was going to be tough.
They went through a McDonald’s drive-in at an exit about sixteen miles out of El Paso to get breakfast. Nomad insisted on opening the wrapper to check that his Egg McMuffin was cheeseless, as ordered, before they went on. Then George got the Scumbucket back on I-10, hauling the trailer, and on both sides of the highway the sun shone hot and glaring off the hard yellow earth stubbled with spiny brown vegetation and the sparse thin triumph of an ironwood tree.
Ariel unwrapped and ate one of the granola bars she’d brought along. She washed it down with a drink from her bottle of silver needle tea, and then she looked back and said, “Berke, can I see Mike’s song?”
Berke roused herself to activity, unzipped her travel bag and brought out the green notebook. She leaned forward to pass it to Ariel, but Nomad—his eyes obscured by his sunglasses—intercepted it before it changed hands.
Ariel waited while Nomad opened the notebook to the last few pages and re-read what Mike had written:
Welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it.
Write a song about it, just keep it under four minutes.
Nomad looked at all the scratched-out lines that had given birth to the surviving two. His eyes went to the Girl at the well written there, like a phrase of…
“Inspiration,” he said.
“What?” Ariel asked.
“Here. Where he wrote Girl at the well.” Nomad showed her, and Terry tilted forward to get a look at it too. “I don’t think that’s a title. I mean…it doesn’t have to be. I think it’s something he wrote down for inspiration.” He decided to tell them the rest of it. “Early Sunday morning, after the Curtain Club, Mike told me that girl spoke to him. Said ‘welcome’ to him, and it got to him because…” Nomad shrugged. “Because he said he felt like she was glad to see him. I guess he didn’t get that from his family very much. Maybe it’s why he started with that one word, out of anything else he could’ve chosen.”
“He wrote that because of the girl?” George asked, glancing at them in the rearview mirror.
“I’m just saying, I think he chose that word because she spoke to him. Because that’s what she said, and he got something out of it.”
“Or made something out of it, you mean,” Berke countered.
“Whatever. I know as much about this as you do.” He continued the notebook’s journey to Ariel.
There followed a few seconds of silence, during which Ariel studied the lines. George thought there was a lot of traffic on I-10 this morning, and most of it was passing him. The Scumbucket was pulling as hard as it could. He looked into the sideview mirror and saw behind him an array of tractor-trailer trucks, SUVs, pickups and cars all heading to points west.
“Kinda strange,” Terry said quietly. Today he was wearing one of his favorite vintage shirts, a psychedelic eyeshock of blue paisleys against an orange background. “You travel with a guy so long, but you realize there’s so much you didn’t know about him. I never knew Mike wanted to write a song.”
Berke took a drink of her bottled water before she spoke. “At the gas station…” Her voice sounded strained, so she stopped and tried again. “At the gas station, he said nobody had ever asked him to try writing. He said…if he started a new song everybody could be part of, it would be good for the band. I guess he liked your idea, John.”