The Five (11 page)

He saw George standing back by the counter where the merchandise was being sold. Keeping tabs on the action, for sure. A hand grabbed Nomad’s shoulder and he turned around to bump fists with a wild-haired dude in a Kings Of Leon T-shirt. Then he was through another group of people who smelled like they’d taken a bath in beer and George said, “The guy’s over here,” and led him past three girls who looked as if they wore their dresses spray-painted on, all in different shades of red.

Suddenly Nomad was right up in front of a big, bulky dude with close-cropped brown hair and a long, unshaven jaw. The guy wore baggy jeans and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt with white stripes. His eyes were sunken in, almost as if he’d just awakened from a heavy sleep. In his arms was a green plastic bag.

“Here he is,” George said. Nomad didn’t know which one of them he was speaking to.

“Hi,” the guy said.

“How’s it going?” Nomad asked, aware that the three girls were coming up on him from the right. Two blondes, neither of them natural in hair color or boob-size, but the girl in the middle with auburn hair was the real hottie.

“Good, real good,” the guy said. He blinked furiously, as if he was really nervous or he really needed glasses. And then he abruptly stepped aside and the thin woman who was standing behind him said, “John Charles!” She smiled, but only one side of her mouth worked very well. “Go Shamrocks!”

Shamrocks
? he thought. East Detroit High School? Those Shamrocks? He had no idea who this person might be. She was a small, emaciated woman maybe in her mid-thirties. She leaned on the support of one of those curved metal walking-sticks with a black rubber tip that old people hobble on in hospitals. A bright, cheerful purple scarf was wrapped turban-style around her head, and fixed at the front with a gold-colored pin in the shape of a butterfly.
Chemo
, Nomad thought, because she had no hair. Her cheekbones and chin were so sharp they looked about to break the skin. She wore shapeless jeans and a white peasant-blouse top. A pink sweater was draped around her shoulders.

“I know you don’t remember me,” she said. “I’m Cheryl Buoniconti. I mean, I
was.
I’m Cheryl Capriata now. This is my husband, Ray.”

“Heard a lot about you.” Ray shook Nomad’s hand. “You put on a great show.”

“Thanks.” Nomad felt as if he’d been knocked to the floor and he was still trying to get up. He’d gone to school with Cheryl Buoniconti, grades six through eight at Oakwood Middle School and then freshman and sophomore years at East Detroit. They were the same age. Cheryl and her family had moved away, summer before the junior year. The Cheryl he’d known had been a flirt, in fact one of the group called the Flirty Four, had been a whiz at math, a reporter on the school paper, had been—in all honesty—really kind of a snooty bitch who’d looked down on the hoods, thugs and sad-ass cases John Charles had hung with.

“Thank
you
,” Cheryl said, “for coming out here. I don’t do so well getting around in crowds.”

“No problem,” Nomad answered, and nearly choked when he heard himself say it. “Uh…
Cheryl
. Jesus. Do you live in Dallas?”

“No. We live just east of Shreveport. In Minden. Ray teaches algebra at the high school. I…I mean
we
…follow you on your webpage. Your band, I mean. Well, we don’t exactly
follow
you, this is the first show we’ve been to, but…”

“We keep up,” Ray said, helpfully.

“We do keep up.” Cheryl smiled again, and this time Nomad saw a trace of the flirty teenaged girl way down in her dark brown eyes. But only a trace, and too quickly it was gone. “And we’re not the only ones. I’m on Facebook with a lot of people from East Detroit.” She mentioned several names, most of whom Nomad recalled as being in a different, higher atmosphere than himself. “Everybody’s rooting for you. I remember that talent show when we were freshmen. When you got up on stage with your band. What was their name?”

“The Unwanted,” Nomad said.

“I remember thinking you were going places. I remember thinking I wished I could find something as important to me as music was to you. But I guess I found it. Can I show you a picture of our daughter?”

“Absolutely,” Nomad said.

From his wallet Ray produced a picture of a girl eight or nine years old. She had her mother’s dark brown eyes, she wore her hair in bangs across the front, and she had an open, confident smile.

“That’s my angel,” Cheryl said. “Her name’s Courtney, she’s just turned nine.”

“Awesome,” Nomad told her, and it seemed to him that everybody needed an angel, of some kind. He returned the picture to Ray.

“I had to leave that summer before we were juniors. My dad lost his job at the Firestone plant. I didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye to my friends, we just came down to Louisiana to live with my Uncle Burt for a little while, I thought we were going back after the summer. You know?”

“I guess that was tough,” Nomad said, because he could tell it was important to her not only to explain this to him, but to get
a response.

“Well…it was, but…I know it wasn’t like…what happened to you, in the sixth grade. To
your
dad. I remember my folks talking about it. Listen to me, I sound like my mom chattering away in line at the Publix. Would you sign those for us? Ray, have you got the pen?”

“I do,” said Ray, who brought from his pocket a silver permanent marker.

Inside the green bag were the CDs and the T-shirts. As Ray handed the first CD over to be signed, Nomad looked at Cheryl and asked, “Do you want my real name or my stage name?”

“Whatever you want to put. I’m just so glad to see somebody from East Detroit way down here. We had a good time, didn’t we?”

“We did,” he said, and he signed
John ‘Nomad’ Charles
. He wondered how long Cheryl had been sick, or what her prognosis was. He didn’t want to ask, but she looked bad. At one point, as Nomad did the signatures, he heard Ray quietly ask her, “You all right?” and she said, “Oh, yeah.” Ray put his arm around her, to steady her, and Nomad kept on signing.

The last T-shirt he signed, he put
Go Shamrocks!
under his name.

“Can we get a picture?” Cheryl asked, and Nomad said that was fine, as many as she wanted. As Ray took the shots, Nomad put his arm around Cheryl’s frail shoulders and his face against hers. He was aware of the three girls coming up right beside him to take their own pictures with the ever-present cellphone cameras. They began to laugh loud and drunkenly, to jostle him with their shoulders and their hips and he told them as politely as he could to step back, that they were crowding him, and one of the fake blondes called him a dumb fuck and the other fake blonde put up the middle finger right in his face and the first fake blonde took a picture of it. But they moved off and away into the crowd, and when Ray finished up the pictures Cheryl said, “I brought something for you,” and she reached into a pocket of her jeans and put into Nomad’s hand a small piece of clear quartz crystal. He instantly recognized it as a type of crystal people carried when they were into natural healing.

“Thanks,” Nomad said. “I appreciate you coming to the show.”

“We wouldn’t have missed it for anything. We can’t stay, though, we’ve got to get back home tonight. I’ll put the pictures up on Facebook. I know lots of people would love to see them. And if you ever come through Minden, we’re in the directory. Under Raymond Capriata.” She spelled the last name. Then she squeezed his hand with her thin fingers, and she smiled up at him. “I’m so happy to know,” she said, “that somebody from East Detroit High School is living out their dream. Most people aren’t able to do that, John. And I am proud to say I knew you back in the day.”

Nomad nodded.
Back in the day
. His bitter sense of sarcasm welled up, and he wanted to ask,
Which day was that? The Tuesday when Quince Massey and two of his dickwads jumped me from behind in the parking lot, and when they were done they threw me into a garbage dumpster and slammed the lid shut? Or the Friday the booger-smeared note was left in my locker telling me that if I even looked at Sofia Chandrette again I could kiss my nuts goodbye? How about the Saturday, when I saw the knife in Quince Massey’s hand outside the Olive Garden and I hit him as hard as I could in the throat and put him in the hospital and the police came to my house to arrest me for battery? Yeah, back in the day.

But he did not ask these things, because by the time they had happened Cheryl was down in Louisiana, and maybe even then the cancer was a small darkness in her body.

Instead, he leaned forward and kissed Cheryl on the cheek, and he said, “You take care, okay?”

“I will.” She had turned a little bit pink. A flash of flirty came up, very suddenly, from the depths of the soulful eyes. “
Nomad
,” she said, and then her husband took her free hand and helped her through the crowd. She walked with a slow, careful step and she depended on the metal stick, and Nomad was struck by how very young all the other people in the room seemed to be, how young they moved and talked and looked, though by years they were not so much younger than Cheryl, nor so much younger than himself. He felt like twenty-nine had become the new fifty. But Cheryl was going home with her husband at her side, and a daughter when she got there. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

When he turned away, he was shoulder-grazed by a big dude in a dark gray hoodie who kept going, on his way out the front door. Nomad started to say,
Where’s the fire
? but he had the mental image of somebody hearing him and shouting
Fire!
out of drunken mischief or plain stupidity and that would not do. So he kept his mouth shut, a guy came up to him, said, “Fuckin’
mighty
show, man!” and flashed a camera in his face, and Nomad sought out the Little Genius, who had returned again to monitor the merchandise sales.

George was not only keeping count of the sales, but was tracking other numbers on his cellphone. “Hits on the new video,” he told Nomad. “Three hundred and thirty-eight on YouTube, three hundred and sixty-one on MySpace, four hundred and twenty-six on the webpage. Not bad, it’s still early.”

“How many times have
you
watched it?”

“A few. Not many. You work everything out with those people? She told me she’d gone to school with you, wanted it to be a surprise. Was it?” George looked at him over the rims of his glasses.

“It was.”

“You want to sign some T-shirts while you’re over here?”

“I’m on my way to over
there
,” Nomad said, and entered the main room where in a few minutes, give or take, Gina Fayne’s band was going to start playing. He caught sight of Berke at the center of a group of five or six women down front, laughing and chatting each other up, and he noted—as he always did when he saw Berke mingling with her sisters—that a couple of them had shoulders like Longhorn tackles, were grim-lipped and fearsome in appearance while the others never failed to be hot enough to melt a steel dildo. It had to be the
idea
that they didn’t need men that was such a turn-on, Nomad thought. Maybe it was the fact that unless they were going for the butch style they never overplayed their sexuality like straight women sometimes did. Nomad had seen Berke in the company of some stunning women who made you want to, as Mike had put it, “try and cry”. It was the way they looked at you, too; either lingering, their eyes cool and remote, as if to dare you to cross an invisible line, or they sliced you up with a few quick glances and cut your throat with a knife-edged half-smile.

“Hi,” said the girl who stood next to his left elbow. She was holding a beer and she leaned in closer, because of the noise. “Sorry they acted like assholes.”

It was the auburn-haired girl who’d been with the two fake blondes. She looked to be about twenty or so, had light green eyes and a cute pug nose and the tattoo of a blue star on her right shoulder. “You’re in that band that just played,” she said, as if she wanted to make sure. Her eyelids were a little heavy. Maybe she’d been hitting more than just the beer tonight.

“Yeah,” Nomad said.

“You wanna go somewhere?” she asked, and she held up a set of car keys that had a silver Playboy rabbit head on the chain.

The thing about being in a touring band was, people didn’t realize what a grind it could be. They didn’t realize that the only glamor in it was manufactured. They didn’t realize that most of being on a tour was the miles and miles and hours and hours of travelling, and if not that then the waiting. There were three things that made the grind bearable: the actual gig, which could be either Paradise or Pandemonium; the frequent use of somewhat illegal but naturally-growing substances to ease the flow of electric energy given off by the Paradise so that one could sleep that night or the following day, or to lighten the self-anger or rage at one’s bandmates following the disaster of a Pandemonium.

The third thing?

Nomad was looking at it.

“Sure,” he said, as it had been said so many times before. “What about your friends?”

“Fuck ’em, they’re bitches,” the girl slurred. “And it’s
my
car, anyway.”

“Okay, but I think I should drive.”

“Yeah,” she said, and she gave him the keys, and it was that easy.

During the three hours that followed, Nomad was in an apartment off Amesbury Drive in North Dallas. There was evidence of a female roommate and a second bedroom with a closed door, but nobody came out of it. He smoked some weed with the girl, whose name was Tiffany and who worked somewhere at the Galleria doing something, he never could figure it out, and they made some margaritas in her blender and she showed him her collection of Barbie Birthstone dolls lined up on a shelf, they were real expensive she said and the only one she didn’t have yet was Miss Opal of October, and then she asked him if he wanted to take a shower. He recalled that Ninja Warrior was on TV when he said he thought that was an awesome idea.

When they were wet and soapy Tiffany asked him if it would be a big deal if she got her video camera and took some clips in the bedroom, that it got her hot all over again to watch the replay and anyway she liked to be directed. Nomad, who had already seen the dolphin tattoo leaping up from the pink cleft between her thighs and had thought
Another fucking Flipper
, just shrugged his shoulders. This was not a first. In fact, years ago he’d considered bringing along a black mask to situations like this. More than once, a girl had gotten her friend to hide in a closet with a videocam. The techno thing was becoming ridiculous, it was like people couldn’t
survive
without having some gadget near at hand. But there was no time for a rumination over the future of a civilization addicted to either porn or the electronic capture of special moments, because Tiffany was on her knees.