“I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it,” Ariel was saying, and Nomad thought he’d never heard her sound so hurt before. “It’s over when you go, Terry. Nobody can step in for you, no matter who it is.”
“I don’t know about that,” George offered. “There are—”
“I think you ought to shut up,” Nomad interrupted, and George’s mouth closed.
“Fucking tell him,” Berke said.
“Plug your lava-hole too,” Nomad shot back.
“Happy happy joy joy!” said Mike, with a gravedigger’s cackle. “Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, bro!”
Nomad put his fingers against his temples and slid down in his seat. The air-conditioner was racketing, but was it working? He put his right hand against the nearest vent. A weak breath of cool air, but not cold. Hadn’t George taken the Scumbucket in for a road check last week, like he was supposed to? That low, grating hum—sounded to him like an E minor chord strummed on a cheap Singapore guitar—seemed to have amped up in volume, and it was going to drive everybody batshitty by the time they reached Waco. Bastard was already screwing up on his job, and they were hardly out of the gate.
“So,” Terry said with a quaver in his voice, “Does everybody hate me now?”
God, it was going to be a long tour.
The last tour, with this lineup. Maybe the last tour with any of them together, because once a band started unravelling the emperor got naked real quick.
The thing is, he was the emperor. He’d never asked to be. Never wanted to be. But he was, and that was it.
He realized, as he listened to the hum from the dashboard and felt the oppressive silence at his back, that this shit could tear the band apart before they even finished up the weekend. At best, they were in for heavy weather. What could he do right now—right this fucking minute, while it counted—to show them he was still the emperor, and that The Five was still a band until he said it was not?
He found something amid the chaos, and he latched onto it.
< >
“Nobody hates you. I ought to, but I don’t. I guess everybody has to do what they think is right,” he said. “And I’m thinking we ought to write a new song.”
No one else spoke.
“A new song,” Nomad repeated, and he turned around to gauge the response. Berke’s eyes were closed, Mike was staring vacantly out his window, and Terry was polishing his glasses on the front of his shirt.
Only Ariel was paying attention. “What about?”
“I don’t know. Just something new.”
“What’s your idea?”
“I don’t have any ideas. I’m just saying, we ought to write a new song.”
“Hm,” Ariel said, and she frowned. “You mean pull something out of the air?”
“No.” Nomad understood Ariel’s question, because this wasn’t the way they worked. Most of the original songs The Five played—tunes like ‘The Let Down’, ‘Pain Parade’, ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, ‘Another Man’, and ‘Pale Echo’—had been written jointly by Nomad and Ariel. Terry had written a few more, both alone and with either of the two lead singers. But the way they worked was that Nomad or Ariel would come up with an idea and start kicking it around with each other, and it might go somewhere or stall and die, you never could tell about songwriting. The others would be asked their opinion, and for ideas on tempo or key, or Terry might come up with an organ motif or solo. Mike was quick to come up with an inventive bass line, and he might go through a few variations before he settled on what he wanted to offer. Berke supplied the core beat, the fills and embellishments, and sometimes she went for what was asked of her and other times she kicked it and went off in an unexpected direction. However it worked—and sometimes it was hard to say exactly how it worked—the result was another song for the set, though from beginning to end of the process might be anywhere from a couple of days to many weeks.
“Not just something out of the air,” Nomad continued. “I’d like everybody to think about it. Put our heads together.”
“Our heads?” That had brought Berke out of her sham sleep. “What do you mean, ‘everybody’?”
“I mean what I said. I think we all ought to work on a new song, together. Not just Ariel and me, but the whole band. Start with the words, maybe. Everybody does a few lines.”
Mike’s thick eyebrows jumped. “Say what?”
“We all contribute to the lyrics. Is that so hard to follow?”
“Hell yes, it is,” Mike answered. “I ain’t no poet. Never written a line in my life.”
“Me neither,” Berke said. “That’s not my job.”
“Can I speak?” George asked, and in the space that followed he went on. “I think it’s a good idea. I mean, why not at least try?”
“Yeah, I’m glad you think so,” Nomad told him, “because you ought to contribute to the song, too.”
“Me? Come on! I’m the last man in the world who could write a song!”
“Have you ever tried?”
“No, and that’s because I can’t. I know sound, but I am completely unmusical, man.”
“But like you said, why not at least try?”
Before George could respond, Berke said, “Okay, we get it.” Her voice carried a patronizing note that made Nomad think he ought to have punched her in the face a long time ago, and been done with it. “You’re looking for some way to keep us together, right? Keep our minds straight for the tour? What is this…like…busy work for the soul or something?”
“Maybe it is.” His throat felt constricted like it did when he had an allergic reaction, which was why he stayed away from all dairy. “Or maybe it’s a productive thing for people to get their heads around.”
“Good try, bro,” said Mike, “but I know my limits.”
“Yeah,” Berke agreed, “me too. And it’s not going to make me forget. Look, even if we all sat down in a circle around the campfire and wrote another ‘Kumbaya’, we’re still going to know it’s over. I mean, really. With George and Terry out, we’re not who we were anymore. Yeah, we can find another road manager and audition for a keyboard player, but…” She paused, and in that instant of hesitation Nomad thought he saw pain disturb her features like a ripple across a pond that held its secrets deep. Then it was gone, leaving Nomad with the impression that he was not the only one who’d already begun to mourn a death.
“It won’t work,” Berke said quietly, and she looked at him with what might have been sadness in those dark chocolate eyes. In contrast to that, a quick and nasty smile flashed across her mouth. Nomad thought she was torn up inside, just like himself, and she didn’t know whether to cry or curse. But Berke was Berke, and so she said, “Fuck it” before she turned her gaze away.
THREE.
For a while they didn’t seem to be anywhere, and then suddenly they were where they needed to be.
< >
“Must be the place,” George said, as he pulled the Scumbucket and the U-Haul trailer off China Spring Road into a parking lot. They had passed through a nondescript area north of Lake Waco and the Waco regional airport surrounded by scrubby fields and scabby warehouses. He’d been directed by email from Felix Gogo to look for the red-and-yellow Delgado Cable van, and there it was, sitting next to a shiny black Toyota Land Cruiser from which the sun radiated like a blazing mirror.
“Watch out for glass,” Terry warned. Jagged bits of it glittered on the heat-cracked pavement. Not only that, but broken beer bottles lay scattered about, and one of those under a tire would not only sound like a roadside bomb in Iraq going off but might lame their ride.