“Jeez.” Berke was not impressed. “I thought we were going to a studio.”
“Well, the guy evidently knows what he’s doing.” George eased the Scumbucket up next to the pristine Land Cruiser. He could imagine the Toyota saying to his van, in snobbish car-language, Have you ever heard of something called a wash? He cut the engine, put it in Park and pulled up the handbrake, and then he sat looking at what might have been a small stripmall before a meteor the size of a freight train must’ve crashed down onto it.
Nomad was thinking that a plane had arrowed in, short of the airport’s runway. Blackened walls testified to fire. Windows were broken out and red metal roofs sagged. Here and there, on remaining sections of gray cinderblock, were the elaborate black and blue swirls of gang symbols. Looked to him as if two gangs had fought over the turf, and nobody won. But then he realized the place may never have been actually finished, because nearby stood two abandoned Port-A-Potties and beyond them, back where the thicket boiled up, were pieces of machinery that appeared to be part of a cement-mixing truck. A pile of old tires lay beside those, and a few beatup garbage cans full of burned lumber. Rags and other bits of trash hung in the brush like a hermit’s laundry.
“This can’t be it,” Nomad said, but George was already getting out. Heat from Hell’s oven rolled into the Scumbucket. And here came the hermit himself from one of the crooked doorways. He was a chunky Hispanic dude, a kid really, maybe nineteen or twenty, and he was wearing a baggy pair of brown shorts and a white T-shirt damp with sweat. His arms were crisscrossed with tats and his scalp was shaved except for a black stripe going back along the middle of his head. Nomad thought they were about to get jumped by a cholo until he saw the light meter hanging on a cord around the guy’s neck.
“Hey, man,” the dude said to George. “We’re almost set up.” He motioned with a thumb toward the doorway from which he’d just emerged, and he continued to the cable company van to fish something out of the back.
“Ohhhhkay,” Mike said, mostly to himself. “Let’s do this.”
They climbed out of the Scumbucket. Sweat immediately popped from their pores. Their shadows were ebony on the bleached pavement, and as Terry, Mike and Berke followed George through the doorway Nomad stopped to wait for Ariel.
“Careful,” he told her, because the broken glass had crunched ominously under his own sneakers. Where the others had gone was in relative darkness. He felt her hand grasp his arm, to steady her path over the glittering rubble. He thought this place looked like a fucking warzone, and why they’d come here to do the interview instead of a comfortable air-conditioned studio was beyond him.
“Listen,” Ariel said, when she got up right beside him. “I like your idea about the song. I think it would be good for everybody.”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t said anymore about it since they’d been south of Waco.
She still had hold of his arm, and she was stopping him from going any further since she wanted a moment with him. “I’ve got some ideas in my notebook. Fragments, really. But maybe we can find something to start it off?”
Ariel and her notebook, Nomad thought. It was decorated with glued-on gemstones of a dozen colors. Some of her song ideas began with a single word, or a descriptive line, or a question to herself. He’d never looked inside her notebook, but he knew how she worked. He was the fiery energy of a song, the hot red anger and the will to fight. She was the ocean depths, the cool blue mysticism of the currents, the surrender to the inevitable will of the tides. He presented a snarl and a fist; she offered a smile shaded with sadness and an open hand. She was twenty-four years old, of medium height and slender build, and she’d been born in Manchester, Massachusetts, just up the coast from Boston. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair in curly ringlets that fell across her forehead and down around her shoulders like, Nomad thought, a heroine in one of those Victorian novels who is doomed to fall in love with the callous cad. She dressed in that fashion, too: lace-trimmed blouses, lacy-puffed sleeves, fine etchings of lace on the necks of her T-shirts and sewn on the cuffs of her distressed jeans. Not that he knew a whole hell of a lot about Victorian novels, but he knew he hated them from high school English.
Ariel was pretty, in that old English way. Or maybe it was Irish; the scatter of freckles across her nose and the pale cream of her skin made him think of that country the green soap was named for. She did smell nice, he couldn’t deny that. Sort of a faint honeysuckle aroma, caught sometimes when they were working close and she leaned past him. Everybody had a smell, of course. Take Berke, who smelled of friction.
But the thing that stood out particularly about Ariel Collier—leaving aside the fact that Nomad was grudgingly aware she left him in the dust on acoustic guitar, and her voice was a beautiful mezzo-soprano tessitura (which, she said, she’d learned when her parents had paid for operatic singing lessons)—was that the color of her eyes changed. Depending on the light, or her emotions, they could be gray from dove-to-dark, or show hints of sapphire blue, or sometimes display just faintly the sea-green of shallows where the reef almost touches the surface. He knew she was the baby of her family, with an older brother and sister, the former a corporate attorney in Boston and the latter a saleswoman with a yacht brokerage firm in Fort Lauderdale. Her father was an investment company executive. Her mother sold real estate. She was the baby of this family too, but she was no child to the hardships—challenges?—of the musician’s life. Neal Tapley, the leader of the band she’d been in before she joined The Five, had driven his car off a county two-lane south of Austin and launched into a stand of trees at a speed, the police later said, of a hundred and thirteen miles an hour. Which surprised everyone who followed Neal and his band The Blessed Hours because Neal was a genuinely decent guy except for some bad choices involving crack cocaine and 3rd Street loan sharks, and nobody had ever figured his old Volvo clunker could get up much over sixty.
Hell of a guitar player, Neal had been. Another world, gone down in flames.
“Yeah,” Nomad told her. “We ought to find something to start with.” But he wasn’t sure they could, and he heard his own uncertainty. He wasn’t sure it was such a good idea, after all. What was the point? But directing everybody’s mind to a new tune would give them a task to focus on, and pushing them to do what they’d never done before—a song with lyrics written by everyone, even the ones who thought they couldn’t write—might ease the feeling of dissolution that could rip any band apart. And there was another reason: Nomad hoped, deep in his heart, that with such a song that was a testament to The Five in the band’s darkest hour Terry would decide to stay, and George might find his own inner poet—however bad it turned out to be—and decide that he too was not ready to walk away.
Could, would, should…
Shit.
“Comin’ through, man,” said the tech dude. Nomad and Ariel stepped aside to let him pass carrying a coil of bright orange electrical cable, a can of Sherwin-Williams paint and a paintbrush.
“Little too late to be remodelling this dump,” Nomad said, but the guy didn’t respond on his way into the building. The darkness swallowed him up.
Nomad followed Ariel in. Once over the threshold he removed his sunglasses. The air was sweltering in here, in a rectangular room with a dirty concrete floor and gang graffiti spray-painted across every area of drywall that wasn’t punched full of holes. Or shot full of holes, because it looked like guns had been at work in here. There was no furniture. A piece of metal tubing dangled from the ceiling and hung down to the floor like the cock of a giant robot. To emphasize that image, a few used condoms were stuck to the concrete. Over in the left corner, a garbage can overflowed and on top of the mess was a Shipley’s Do-Nuts box. Good combination, Nomad thought: the tagbangers had sex first, got their blood sugar up with the doughnuts, and then finished off with a Glock orgy.