The Five (38 page)

Ariel thought that the girl—whoever and whatever she might be—was helping them write this song.

“John?” she said. And again: “John?”

“No,” he mumbled, “I don’t want any.”

She was relieved, in a way. What was she going to tell him? How was she going to explain what she
felt
? And it was just a feeling, that’s all it was.

Walk with me
, the girl had said.

Ariel decided she needed to get up. Like right now. She needed to take a shower and wash the red dust of Stone Church out of her hair, and then she needed to get dressed and find a quiet place to work on this song.

It was time to get serious.

Terry was still asleep on the floor, in his sleeping bag. Berke had taken the sofa in the basement’s little junkroom.
It’s
good enough for me
, Ariel had heard Berke tell her mother before she’d carried her suitcase down the steps. Ariel figured Berke had wanted to sleep as far as possible from the room where her mother and stepfather had lain together for nearly ten years. As Ariel understood the story, Berke had been fourteen when her mother and father had divorced, and later her mother had sold the house where Berke had been born and she and her daughter had moved in with Floyd Fisk, the divorced father of a twenty-year-old nursing student, after the wedding.

Ariel took her shower, washed her hair and got dressed in jeans and a purple long-sleeved peasant blouse with a floral print and ruffles of white lace at the cuffs and neck. One of her many finds from vintage clothes shops, though now these were nearly as expensive as the newer items. When she emerged from the bathroom she ran into a bleary-eyed Terry, who just grunted a greeting and shambled past in his tatty gray bathrobe.

Ariel saw that John was still conked out. Maybe that was for the best. She took her notebook and her purple-inked pen and walked through the hallway into the kitchen, where she found Berke’s mother monitoring a crockpot while she was watching a soap opera on a small TV.

“Good morning!” Berke’s mother had been born Kim Chapman, but somewhere in her days as a thespian and cheerleader at Patrick Henry High School she’d been called ‘Chappie’, and it had stuck. Her face lit up with the presence of someone else in the room. She was an attractive woman, tall and lean with her daughter’s strong bone structure. But her brown eyes, many shades lighter than Berke’s, were sad. Ariel had met Chappie on several occasions when they’d played San Diego but had never been to this house. She knew that Chappie was forty-nine, that she was the middle child between two brothers, that her own father was a retired technical worker for Northrup Grumman who had once shaken the hand of Howard Hughes, and that she used Clairol Medium Brown to cover up the creeping gray in her long, still-silky hair. She was wearing a pair of beige slacks and a black sleeveless blouse.

“Morning,” Ariel replied. “Smells good.”

“Veggie stew for lunch. Do you want breakfast? I can make just about anything.”

“Really, all I’d like is a glass of orange juice.” She reconsidered. “Maybe some toast would be nice. And some jam?”

“Juice, two slices of whole-wheat toast and some strawberry jam. Does that sound all right?”

“Great. I’ll get the juice.” Ariel made a move toward the refrigerator, which was covered with bright little flowery magnets in different hues holding a variety of color photos, some faded with age. She saw glimpses of a different world: a smiling, balding heavy-set man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and sitting amid piles of books; a slim girl about sixteen years old with thick, curly black hair pounding away at a drum set with her eyes closed; a terrier of some kind, head cocked and looking quizzically at the camera; a scene in a bar with maybe a dozen people, most of them long-haired and gray-haired, lifting their beer bottles; the balding heavy-set man, now in sunglasses, standing with his arm around a happier Chappie Fisk and behind them the natural wonder of the Grand Canyon.

“Oh, I’ll get it,” Chappie said, and she swooped in as mothers will and got the container of orange juice out before Ariel could even register exactly where it was.

“I guess Berke’s still asleep?” Ariel asked as Chappie poured juice into a glass.

“Haven’t heard from her. Here you go. Now, for your toast.”

“Thank you.” Ariel drank some of the juice and gazed around the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was a sunny place. A homey place, with homey knickknacks collected from different tourist destinations. Everything neat and clean, everything orderly. It was difficult to grasp, in this sunny kitchen with the soap on TV and Chappie busy loading up the toaster, that Chappie’s husband—her second husband—and Berke’s stepdad had died last month, yet there
was
a feeling in this house, however bright and neat it was, that someone was missing and would not be coming home.

Ariel, and none of the other band members as far as she knew, had ever met Floyd Fisk. Berke had told her mother well in advance of their gigs in San Diego that she didn’t want him anywhere near her, and so he’d never shown his face.

Floyd fucking Fisk
, Berke had said to Ariel one day at rehearsal when they were talking about—or talking
around
, really—their parents.
Don’t you think that sounds like the fucking dumb-ass
barber in Mayberry? You know, the Opie show?

What’s so bad about him?
Ariel had asked.
I mean…is he like…cruel to your mother?

Cruel to my mother
, Berke had repeated, as if trying that on as a reason.
No, he’s not
cruel to her. She loves him.
But he’s not my dad. You know?

Ariel wasn’t sure she did know, but Berke’s mood had gotten black-cloud stormy and that was a good sign not to travel any further without a lightning rod.

“Can I ask you a question?” Chappie asked as she spread strawberry jam on the two pieces of toast. “This…is kind of weird to ask, but…are you…Berke’s
friend
?”

“I’m her friend, yes.”

“Well…I mean…” Chappie gave her a quick sidelong glance. “Are you her
good
friend?”

“Oh!” Ariel realized what the subject of this was. “Oh, no. Not that kind of friend.”

A blush of color rose into the woman’s cheeks. She shrugged. “I didn’t know. I don’t ask Berke very much.” She offered Ariel the toast on a yellow plate with brown ceramic flowers around the rim. “She can snap your head off when she’s in a bad mood. But I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

“We all get edgy sometimes.”

“Oh…I’m supposed to let you know…Mr. Allen went downtown this morning. He said he’d be back by early afternoon.”

“Did he take the van?”

“No, he got into one of those huge SUVs. Do you know he ate
four
eggs and just about finished off all my bacon? He said he’d reimburse me, but still…that man can eat.” Chappie pretended to watch her soap opera for a moment, but Ariel could tell she was formulating either another statement or question because the corners of her mouth moved. “Let me ask you something else,” she finally said. “Do you trust that man to protect you? I mean to protect all of you. The whole band. I watched that video over and over. I saw how close you came to getting shot. Aren’t your parents worried about you? Haven’t you heard from them?”

“I’ve called them,” Ariel answered. “When it first happened, in Sweetwater. I called them again from Tucson.”

“And…what? They don’t want you to come home?”

“They didn’t mention that. I didn’t expect them to.” Ariel took a bite of toast and chewed it. “Anyway, I wouldn’t go, because that’s not my home anymore. I live in Austin. But…next year…it may be somewhere else.”

“Berke
did
tell me that the band is breaking up,” Chappie said matter-of-factly. “I’m sorry to hear that, because she always…” Here she paused, as if deciding whether she was betraying a confidence or not. She went on. “Always believed in you guys,” she said. “More I think than she’s believed in any of her other bands. She particularly believed in John and in
you
. That you would find success. Make a hit record. Get the recording deal. Whatever. Jesus, I am
old
, but I swear I didn’t date Elvis Presley.”

Ariel smiled.

“But I
did
date Todd Rundgren,” Chappie said. “I had a little thing going on with Joe Strummer. I used to give backrubs to Iggy Pop.
And
Robert Plant kissed my hand one night in Hollywood, standing right on the Sunset Strip, and something like that you never forget.”

“I guess not,” Ariel said.

“Wow, the music scene back then…it was in—” There was just the briefest of pauses and Ariel thought she was about to hear the f-bomb dropped, but Chappie caught herself. “—credible,” she finished. “So much going on, so many bands. It was just electric. And we were right in there. People wouldn’t believe how many songs were written about the sisters.”

Ariel nodded. Chappie wasn’t hesitant to admit her membership in the sisterhood of groupies. To hear her tell it, as she’d told it before, Chappie and the ‘sisters of comfort’ were all about maintaining the sanity of their rocker men and keeping them well-supplied so the great works could keep on coming. Flowing. Being created. Ariel finished her orange juice and again said thank you.

“I’ve got coffee. Do you want some?” Chappie motioned toward the pot. Her own cup, a piece of merchandise—maybe an original—that bore a picture of The Eagles, sat on the counter. “Oh…you’re a tea drinker, aren’t you?”

“Right.”

Chappie refilled her cup. “So you think Mr. Allen and those men out there can protect you?” She reached up to a cupboard, opened it and with a smooth, unhurried and completely unselfconscious motion she brought out a half-bottle of Jack Daniels. It was the most natural thing in the world to pour a small bite of Jack into your coffee before noon, which she did. “You trust the FBI?”

“I guess I do, so far.”

“So far, you’re not dead.” Chappie capped the Jack bottle and put it away. She sipped at her high-octane fuel. “Neither is my daughter. But you know that was a close call yesterday, don’t you? Nancy Grace said last night on TV that this guy at Stone Church was probably copycatting Jeremy Pett, and she thinks there’ll be others. Listen, if you were
my
blood, I’d get on a plane and come collect you. I’d say no tour or music or ticket sales are worth getting killed for. I’d say put it all away until that nut is in jail.”

“Have you said any of this to Berke?” Ariel asked, knowing what the answer would be.

Chappie took another drink before she replied. “This is the biggest cliché in the world, what I’m about to say. But Berke has always walked to her own beat. She’s her own different drummer. She might be scared, but she’s not going to show it and she won’t back down from anybody…not even that…” Again, the f-bomb was poised to drop. But no. “
Nut
,” Chappie finished.

“Berke is a strong person,” Ariel agreed. “I envy her strength. Her knowing how to get what she wants.”

“Yeah, it’d be a great world if everybody was like
her
.” Chappie attempted a smile that didn’t quite work due to the bitterness at its core. Then she walked a few steps away to check on the crockpot.

Ariel decided it was time to move on. “I think I’ll go outside for a while.” Last night she’d seen, in the front yard, the wooden park bench under the eucalyptus tree. “Thanks for the—”

“I’m surprised she even agreed to come here,” Chappie interrupted, and Ariel braced for an onslaught. “Even with Floyd gone. I’m surprised, that’s all.”

“Well…” Ariel felt as if she were walking on treacherous ground. “I guess she wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I had to almost beg her to come. To get what he left her. He said to me very plainly, early last year, that if anything happened to him he wanted her to have what he’d saved for her. It was very important to him.” She nodded. “Very important. And the letter too. I told him, nothing was going to happen, he was fine and he was going to have another checkup to make sure. Mandy came over twice a week to watch him take his medicine and check his blood pressure. But…he said he was tired sometimes. Just tired. Everybody gets tired.” She started to take another drink, but lowered the cup before it reached her mouth. “They did what they could for him. The emergency team. I watched them work, so I know they did what they could. But oh my God, how I miss him.” Her hand came up and the fingers pressed against her lips. Her eyes glistened. “And the thing was…he tried so hard…so hard…to be a father to Berke, but she wouldn’t let him in. She turned her back on everything he tried to do for her. Okay, so he wasn’t…like…the world’s greatest drummer, like Warren thought
he
was. Floyd didn’t know music, and he didn’t keep up with bands, and he liked most of all just reading, or sitting on the couch watching football or old movies, and he wasn’t flash…but he was
substance
. Do you understand what I mean?” She looked hopefully at Ariel, and Ariel said she absolutely understood.

When Chappie spoke again it was in a tone of reverence. “Floyd was no Todd Rundgren. He was no Joe Strummer or Iggy Pop. He was no Warren Bonnevey, either. He didn’t say he was going out for cigarettes and three days later he was calling you from Los Angeles asking you to send money because he was on the edge—right on the
edge
, he said—of getting a gig with the latest hitmaker, whoever was high on the chart that week. He didn’t knock holes in the walls because he didn’t get a callback. Jesus, if that house Berke grew up in could talk, it would fucking scream. Excuse my mouth, but it would. Floyd didn’t holler and yell and go on a rampage at three o’clock in the morning because he thought I was stealing his sticks and burying them in the back yard. And then he didn’t go sit in the bathtub and start shouting that if he had a gun he’d kill everybody in the house and then himself. Oh, those were some choice days and nights, Ariel. And the terrible thing was…Warren really
was
good. He had a great talent. He had the fire inside, you know? But it was a horrible thing, to watch someone you loved burn alive from the inside out.”