Exactly when he’d decided to step out and hail the cab he saw coming, he didn’t know. But there it was, he waved an arm and it veered over to pick him up.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
Nomad sat thinking. Where to? was the question. What was open twenty-four hours downtown, say within two or three miles? Where had he used to hang out, at all hours, over a cup of black coffee, a steak sandwich and a platter of…
Greek potatoes, he remembered.
“The Argonaut,” Nomad said. He gave the driver the address, on East Congress Street, and the cab took him away.
THIRTEEN.
Walking into the Argonaut was like returning home to a house your family had sold and moved out of without letting you know. Sure, it had been years since he’d set foot in here, and it looked pretty much the same and had that same aroma of charred lamb kabobs and peppery fish soup he remembered so distinctly. But there were differences. The exterior that used to be painted soft ‘Aegean blue’ was now a hard yellow, making Nomad think of the color he saw in his mind when he closed his eyes and belted out the sustained A note at the end of ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, because it was true he did see mental colors when he sang. Another difference was that when you used to step into the place, a series of small bells chimed over the door; now there was only the whirring of the ceiling fans, but at least those were still there.
The cash register sat atop an unchanged and probably immovable scarred and battered wooden desk that looked as if it had been deck planking from one of those fighting Greek ships, but where was Jimmy? Short, barrel-chested Jimmy with his black crewcut and his mile-wide grin, and from his mouth a rusty barbed-wire voice that always launched the same words when you came in—Hey, ya hungry? and when you left, Howja like ya food?
Fine, Jimmy, just fine.
But Jimmy was not there, his place taken by a somber-looking girl with long dark hair who was texting somebody on her cell.
“Sit anywhere,” she told him, her eyes never leaving the blue screen.
There were lots of wheres to sit. The seven or eight tables were empty, but a few people sat in the red vinyl booths. Lamps with gold-colored shades shed light upon the early-morning patrons. Nomad counted three guys—college students, they looked to be—in one booth, a young couple cuddling close in another and in a third a solitary middle-aged man reading a book and drinking iced tea. Nomad took a booth away from everyone else, near the windows that gave a view onto East Congress, and he waited for a waitress to show up. From his seat he had the full impact of the mural of a Greek galley painted on the opposite wall, next to the kitchen door. It was a thing of beauty, and it had sailed through the years with only minor modifications to the original, which according to Jimmy had been painted in 1978, the year the Argonaut had opened.
It was of course the Argo, the ship built to carry Jason and the Argonauts to find the Golden Fleece. Under a sunlit sky decorated with lacy streamers of clouds, the Argo’s sharp prow cut through the dark blue waves. Seagulls flew before it, and a dolphin’s gray dorsal fin emerged from the white-capped water. The sturdy Argonauts pulled at their oars, in this rendition twenty on either side. Standing before the mast with its billowing russet-colored sail was the dark-bearded Jason, his right arm outthrust and index finger pointed to indicate the destination ahead. Nomad had always thought it was a really cool mural, its style similar to the beautifully luminous works of Maxfield Parrish he’d seen in one of Ariel’s art books. At the bottom, where the sea waves began, was signed the name ‘Myalodeon’, though whether that was the original artist or a later restorer Nomad didn’t know.
He was still waiting. Somebody had to be working in here, because the other customers had food and drink. He wished he’d thought to bring a magazine from the hospital, but then again, no: hospital magazines smelled like hospitals. He needed something to look at but his own hands, so he shifted a little in his seat, reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out an object of interest he’d been carrying since that night at the Curtain Club.
It was the piece of clear quartz crystal Cheryl Buoniconti—now Cheryl Capriata—had given to him. He set it on the table before him and just stared at it. He was trying to understand the depths of belief. Somehow, Cheryl believed healing crystals might intercede for her in her fight against cancer; somehow, Terry and Ariel believed God or Jesus Christ or whoever might help George in his fight for life. What was the difference? To him, he’d go for the crystal, because you could hold the fucking thing in your hand, and whether it did any good or not it was real, it had weight and it was solid. At the very least, it was a pretty cool paperweight.
He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Who had shot George? The same person who’d killed Mike? Different snipers, at different times in different places? Was there any possible sense to be made of that? And Berke saying she thought she’d been shot at, too? Was it open season on The Five, and if it was—and here he realized he might be sitting too close to the window—who was going to be next in the sniperscope?
He was tired, he needed some coffee. He saw a waitress come out of the kitchen door, and she saw him and then she retreated back into the kitchen. So much for that. Come on, damn it! He looked again at the crystal and wondered what his father would have thought about it. Dean Charles, in his never-ending—some might say fanatical—quest for women, would have spun a romantic story about it, a tale of it holding the image of a future lover, and when a man peered into it just right, and held it just so, he could see the face of a beautiful—not to say sexy—angel in it, and baby oh baby…there you are.
From what he knew of his father now, and what in time the other Roadmen told him, Nomad thought that everything Dean Charles had done was for the purpose of dipping the wick in as many honeypots as he could find. Except the music. Or maybe that’s what Nomad wanted to believe, so he had his own depths of belief too. He wanted to believe that the music had mattered, and that when his father threw flaming guitar chords at the audience and got the microphone up close to his sweating face to holler the lyrics to ‘Memphis’ it was for pure love of the music. But those women had been everywhere. Up front and backstage and in the restaurant after the gig and hanging out by the van and just ‘happening by’ the motel. There were bar girls and secretaries and housewives and waitresses and shy girls who wanted to show him their songs and brassy girls who wanted to crash into show business. There were quiet girls and loud girls and blondes and brunettes, redheads and streaked heads and the occasional soul queen. Nomad had been taken for a lot of ice cream cones, pizzas and to see a lot of movies by the other Roadmen in a lot of towns both big and small, and the number of Do Not Disturb Signs hanging on the doorknobs of Dean Charles’s motel rooms had been legion.
They’d never really talked about it, but gradually the kid who adored his dad grew up enough to notice how women dragged their gaze across him, how they talked to each other while looking at him from the corners of their eyes, how they grinned at him and touched him and got up close to breathe his hot musician’s sweat and his soured English Leather.
Johnny? his father had said one Friday night in a Best Western in Mansfield, Ohio, while they were watching The Dirty Dozen on cable TV. Would you mind goin’ over to finish this flick with the guys?