The Five (3 page)

“Can I explain?” Terry asked.

Nomad nodded.

“I want to go into the vintage instrument business. I’ve got some money saved up, and my dad says he’ll help me with a loan.” The way Terry said it—a rush of words, an outpouring, a release—told Nomad that this decision had been working on him for a long time. Maybe it had begun as a passing thought, way back when they were with the Venomaires. Maybe it had just evolved over the years until it had grown wings and purpose, and now it was big enough to fly Terry away.

Terry went on, obviously relieved to rid himself of what he’d been keeping. His plan, he said, was to go back home, to Oklahoma City. To set himself up there in a business that would buy old keyboards in any condition—vintage Hammond organs in their many variations, aged Farfisas, Rhodes pianos, the Hohner keyboards, the Gems, Kustoms, Cordovoxes, the Elkas and the Ace Tones, the Doric and Ekosonic lines, and other proud ancient warriors—and bring them back to life. He already had most of the manuals, he said, and he’d always been good with fixing the vintage keyboards in his own collection. He thought he could repair just about anything that came along, and if he couldn’t find the parts he could make them. These old keys were collector’s items now, he said. They were a dying breed, and really most of the makes and models had died when disco boogied in. But there were those who wanted to either find instruments they’d played on as teenagers in garage bands or repair the ones moldering in the basement, he said. And he’d begun hearing some of them on new songs, too. He believed he could start an Internet search service for musicians or collectors looking for a particular electric keyboard, he told them. Some of the details had to be figured out yet, but he thought it would be a good start.

When Terry was done plotting his future course, Nomad didn’t know what to say. He saw a billboard up ahead on the right, as they neared the outskirts of Temple. It showed from the waist up a trim Hispanic man with a silver mustache and thick silver muttonchop sideburns; he was wearing a black cowboy hat, a black tuxedo jacket, a black ruffled shirt and black bolo tie with a turquoise clasp, and he was smiling and pointing to the legend
Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White
. Over his head were the big words, in red,
Felix Gogo Toyota
and next to that
Temple…Waco…Fort Worth…Dallas
. At the bottom of the overcrowded ad were the words “Walk In, Drive Out!”

“So,” Terry prodded, “what do you think?”

Nomad didn’t answer, because he was pondering the many ways a band could die.

He’d seen nearly all of them. The war of egos that ultimately exploded, the simmering resentments that built up over time, the quick flare of anger that hid exhaustion at its heart, the hard and final bang of a door slamming, the parking lot scuffle, the on-stage implosion, the rehearsal walk-out, the accusations of betrayal as cutting as the death throes of a marriage, the silence that screamed, the guitar flung across a motel room like a flying scythe, the fist into the wall and the broken fingers, Black Tar and Buzzard Dust, Twack and Shiznit, New Jack Swing and all the other combinations of heroin, crack, meth and whatever could be cooked, smoked, inhaled or injected.

Nothing was pretty about the death of a band.

He was staring into space, his eyes unfocused, but he thought he was looking into an abyss. Sure, they could go on without Terry. Have to find another keyboard player, if that’s the way they wanted to go. But Terry provided a sound integral to The Five, ranging from raw and rowdy to the swirling of psychedelic colors to a dark bluesy wail that particularly complimented Nomad’s own rough-edged, smoke-and-whiskey singing voice. Sure, they could go on without Terry. But it wouldn’t be The Five anymore, not even with another keyboard player. It would be another band, but not this one.

And Nomad realized he would mourn this death, maybe more than any other. When it was running on all cylinders, The Five was tight and clean and everybody had their space. Everybody had their job to do, and they did it like professionals. They did it with pride. And though the life was tough and the money not much to speak of, the gigs could lift you up. There was nothing like being in the groove, like feeling the energy of the audience and the heat of the lights and the pure electric heart of the moment. It was so real. But more than that, Nomad had thought—had hoped—that The Five was going to find a way through the wall, that this band of any band he’d ever played in was going to get the record deal. Was going to get the moneymen behind it, with their engine of promotion and contacts and open doors.

Johnny,
spoke the old familiar voice somewhere deep inside his head,
there’s no roadmap
.

He could still see the little crooked smile surface on his father’s mouth, and those blue eyes shining like Beale Street neon at midnight.

“Well,” Terry said, “don’t everybody speak at once.”

Nomad knew what the silence was saying. Everyone was thinking the same thing: after this tour, when they trekked west through Arizona into California and came back through New Mexico to do a last show in Austin on the 16th of August, little less than a month away, The Five was finished.

“You can find somebody to fill my place.” Terry proved he could read minds, if he had to. “It’s not like I’m the one and only.”

“I can’t believe this.” It was Ariel’s voice, still hushed with shock.

“I can think of five or six keyboard players right now,” Terry went on. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s not the end of the band.”

George gave a faint noise, something between a sigh and a grunt, that only Nomad caught.

“You have anything to say?” Nomad asked him, more sharply than he’d intended, but George shook his head and concentrated on his driving.

“That’s a great big load of hot mess for us to wade through,” Berke said, and if anybody could sound more acerbic than Nomad, she took the prize. “Fucking
great
.”

“Hold on, now.” Terry turned around to face her. “I can be
replaced
. Look, there’s nobody who’s so all-that they can’t be replaced.”

“What are you going to do when you get tired of cleaning the cobwebs out of little plastic keyboards? Get a gig at the Holiday Inn bar? You going to put out your tipbowl with the five-dollar bill in it? Start playing Billy Joel requests?”

“Don’t knock Billy Joel,” Terry cautioned.

“I’m knocking
you
. Thinking you can walk away from music and be happy about it.”

“I’m not walking away, I’m—”

“Repositionin’,” said Mike, which caused Terry to shut up because it sounded good, or at least better than what he was fumbling to get out. “Yeah, I get it.” Mike nodded and rubbed his chin. There were scrolled tattoos on the knuckles of each finger. “Repositionin’. Seems to me like everybody ought to reposition from time to time. Shake things up, see what falls out.”

Berke scowled and was about to say something back to him, and maybe it would have been
What the
fuck do you know about it
but in fact Mike Davis did know a whole hell of a lot about repositioning so she let it slide.

Nomad figured that for every bright star and flaming asshole in a band, there were a dozen Mike Davises. The solid guy, the workman. The man who steps back out of the spotlight to play, because he doesn’t like the glare. Mike was thirty-three years old, stood about five-ten, but he was a small-framed guy—skinny, really—who looked like he was always in need of a good meal, though he ate like a grizzly bear just out of hibernation. He was tough and weathered and wiry in the way that said
do not mess with me for
I will take your fucking head off and use it as a planter
. Nomad had seen Mike stare down a murder clique of drunk football players from the University of Tennessee, in a dismal little club in Knoxville, and something had passed between Mike and those three mouthy, swaggering young men—something dangerous, some message between animals—that warned them off before they made a very bad mistake. Maybe it was the long beak of a nose, the cement slab chin always stained with stubble, or the dark brown eyes hollowed back in a chiselled face that generally betrayed no emotion. He nearly always won in their poker games on the road, because it was like trying to read the expressions of a crab. He had shoulder-length dark brown hair that was showing streaks of gray at the temples. He would say he’d earned it, and more, for all he’d been through. Eight bands that Nomad knew of, and probably more Mike didn’t care to talk about. Two ex-wives, one in Nashville and one with their six-year-old daughter in Covington, Louisiana. Mike had been born just up the road from there, early Christmas morning, 1974, in Bogalusa. His life had been anything but holy.

It was the tattoos on his arms that people saw first, and those either scared the shit out of you and made you keep your distance or entranced you into approaching nearer, if you dared. He wore sleeveless T-shirts to show off his sleeves. Moby Dick rising from the sea was the first art on the knob of his right shoulder, and on the left was the grinning freckled face of a boy who Mike said was his older brother Wayne, killed eighteen years ago in a lumberyard accident. His first bandmate. Played a mean Fender Telecaster, Mike said. Blue fire, like a cut diamond. The Tele, not the brother. It was also there, underneath the boy’s face, angled like a bowtie gone awry.

Nomad had always thought that people carried worlds within them. Whatever they had experienced, whatever they saw or felt, whatever joys or sorrows, those things could never be exactly duplicated by anyone else, so everybody carried their own world. In Mike’s case, the tattoo artists—more than a half-dozen, in often jarringly-different styles—had depicted his world on his arms. From shoulders to wrists, it was all there in vibrant ink of many colors: faces of women and men copied from photographs, a variety of bad-ass or sorry-ass cars and—as Mike put it—pick-me-up trucks, numbers that had some meaning for him, a whiskey bottle here, a burning joint there, the bars of a cell, a long country road, a skull spitting fire, bass axes he had loved or lost or pawned, a white dog, a black dog, a devil, an angel, his little Sara’s face, the names of the bands he wanted to remember which did include The Five, declarations such as
Trust Is Earned
and
Live Before You Die
and everything in a progression from the past to the present, shoulders to wrists. Everything, as well, underlaid by a phantasmagoric deep blue star-speckled background against which the trails of fiery red and yellow comets passed between the artwork. It had occurred to Nomad, as it surely must have to Mike, that he was running out of room.

Moby Dick? The first book Mike had read that he liked. Actually, he’d stolen it from the Bogalusa Public Library when the librarian said he was too young to check it out. He’d rooted for the white whale to make it out alive.

“Right,” Terry said when it seemed safe to speak again. He was talking directly to Mike. “Repositioning is just what I’m doing.”

“Why shouldn’t we pull over and let you reposition your butt on the side of the road right now?” Berke asked, in her charming way.

“Because,” he answered with great dignity, “I’m in it just like George is. For the tour. I’m going to do what I’ve always done. Nobody’s going to say I’m slacking, don’t worry about it.”

“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?”