But Ariel had been the strange one. The one who didn’t ‘get it’, as her father often said. The lazy girl with no ambition. The time-wasting daydreamer. Oh sure, she liked to write her stories and her poems, and pick on that guitar, but really…she’s so quiet, so passive, she can melt into a wall, you don’t know she’s there until you trip over her. Professional young men want vivacious girls, girls with charm and sociability. Well, there was always the hope that the girl would wake up from her lethargy, or her somnambulism, or whatever, and if she’s at all seriously interested in training her voice she’ll apply herself to the operatic disciplines. After all, Madame Giordano did say she has a malleable tone.
Her sister had been the closest to her in age, but six years can become a vast distance. Her brother, the Boston lawyer, rarely visited because their mother hated his wife, a situation that caused rancorous arguments between her parents since the girl was the daughter of one of Edward Collier’s partners. Ariel—christened ‘Susan’, but who’d taken that name from a British nanny who used to play guitar for her when she was a little girl—watched her parents descend into a pattern of chaos, a script of drinking and fighting that made her believe things had gone wrong between them years before she was born. It seemed to center around Ariel’s brother, Andrew. But nothing was ever solved in the uneasy calm after the turbulence, and Ariel came to realize at an early age that her mother and father both needed the other to flail them with recriminations, to atone for some secret guilt or acts of disloyalty.
Except for the presence of a number of nannies, she was alone for as long as she could recall. Alone in the deepest sense, alone as if she had been left in a basket at the front gate of this house within salt-scent of Manchester harbor and taken in by strangers who thought they could put their thumbprints upon a spirit. She had nothing against possessions, against the shiny and the beautiful and the faddish, but she did have something against becoming a slave to them.
Wasn’t there more to life than an existence, fevered by this year’s model and passion for a cellphone?
Wasn’t there?
She thought there was. Why she sought peace when her family revelled in chaos, why she valued books that told quiet, meaningful stories and were not written to encourage the application of Genghis Khan’s methods to modern business, why she heard music in the night breeze and saw poems on paper before they were written, she didn’t know. But she did, and what she’d told Felix Gogo was true; she couldn’t remember not hearing some kind of music and wanting to write down what she heard. Or, rather, capture what she heard, which was very often a difficult task because some tunes—like wild animals, or like John Charles for instance—resisted being put into neat small boxes for the pleasure of the public.
Ariel believed that a song was a living thing. It could burst into the world prematurely, ragged and half-formed, yes, but she thought the best of them—the most fully-realized, the most able to go the distance—grew slowly from a seed, gradually developing its heart and mind, over time becoming male or female in its attitude, its swagger or its contemplation. It grew skin lusty or lustrous, it preferred night or day for its rambles, it dressed itself in the leather or suede or gossamer of a million colors. And the ones she remembered being touched by when she was alone and lonely among strangers had some message to give to her. To her, even though it might have been written for a different generation, like ‘Wait For An Answer’ by Heart or ‘The Lady’ by Sandy Denny. They offered her some secret solace, some friendship like a hand on the shoulder, a whisper of I have been where you are, and now where are you going?
Or they gave her a rap to the side of the head, to say Wake up, girl, and get your ass in gear, because the thing that kills is a thing called fear.
Which was also a line from one of her early tunes.
She had been gone from that house and the people who lived there long before she left. It had taken a handsome young man she’d met when she was playing her twelve-string Gibson in the Starbucks on Church Street in Cambridge to actually cut the last ties that held her to her old life. He was starting up a band, had a couple of players together who’d paid their dues in other bands, they were calling this band Blue Fly, and did she maybe want to audition. And he wasn’t promising anything, he’d said, but they had some interest from guys who actually managed hot bands like Big Top and Adam Raised A Cain, so there was that.
Awesome, she remembered saying.
She thought it had been a relief to her mother and father, the day she’d told them she was quitting her job at Barnes & Noble in Brookline, that she was leaving the apartment she shared with two other young women, and that she was driving to Nashville with three ex-members of Blue Fly to start another band. She hoped she might get some session work there, too. She thought it had been a relief for her parents because they never once asked her to reconsider, or said that she was travelling too far from home, or that she wasn’t wise yet to the ways of the world.
Maybe her father was glad that at last she’d discovered her ambition, even if it was unfathomable to him as to how she would make any money; maybe her mother wanted to mourn in solitude the loss of years that no plastic surgeon could replace. Maybe they both too were alone, each in themselves; maybe it was a state of being for the Colliers of Manchester.
Whatever it was, Ariel could not help them, and so she put aside the thing called fear and went out to help herself.
That had been the spring of 2003. Her stay in Nashville had been little more than a year, working with the bands The Shamen and Strobe, before she’d headed to Austin with a new band who called themselves The Blessed Hours, and the rest was herstory.
The morning moved on. In front of the Scumbucket, the long gray stretch of I-10 baked and shimmered. They passed across the desert where it lapped up against truckstops and small towns built around cemeteries. Always mountains stood hazy against the horizon, the sky was cloudless and more white than blue as if the very color of heaven was burning away.
Since Mike’s death, a stop at the gas pumps to fill the Scumbucket’s tank brought everything back in terrifying detail. Berke would no longer leave the van, somebody else had to go get her bottled water for her and whatever else she wanted. Whoever was pumping the gas couldn’t help but look uneasily over their shoulder and scan the far distance, but what they were looking for they didn’t know. Everybody breathed better when the transaction was done and they were back in the Scumbucket pulling away, because the Scumbucket—ugly as it was, worn down and beaten up by the thousands of miles it had carried them—was their protection. But from what, no one could say.
Except for a twenty-minute creepy-crawl when traffic on I-10 was backed up by one of those situations where a car or a truck has broken down and everybody and their dashboard Jesus has to gawk at the wrecker, they made the Tucson city limits in plenty of time. Nomad had always liked Tucson when he’d lived there; it was a beautiful city, artsy-craftsy, bright Mexican colors, the San Xavier del Bac mission, the dry mesquite smell of the Sonoran desert, lots of golf courses drinking that precious water and lots of old people, sure, because it was a retirement haven, but there were lots of goths and metalheads in Tucson too. The University of Arizona kept the funk going. There was a pretty hot music scene, a healthy variety of clubs showcasing different styles, some very good and cheap restaurants and some way cool bars like the Surly Wench Pub and Snuffy’s. So in a way he felt he was back at his second home, though he didn’t care to revisit the grimy “musician’s special” apartment he’d lived in out on South Herbert Avenue.