The Five (55 page)

“No,” he said. “Will you help me push
myself
?”

She looked at him across the table, across the half-eaten Reuben and the remains of a burger. It occurred to her that you might call this a ‘date’.

“Yes,” she said.

They sat for a while longer, until two young couples came up asking if they were who they thought they were, and Nomad wanted to ask
Who do we think we are?
but he was nice about it, he and Ariel had their pictures taken and the couples explained they wanted to get into the show at the Vista Futura but the doors closed, the fire code or something, and so they wound up over at Antone’s hearing The Crop Circles. Nomad picked up the check and paid it—
My God, it really is a date
, Ariel thought—and then they were out of the café and Nomad said he wanted to take her one more place and it wasn’t very far.

They watched the doughnuts file one after the other along the line. He ate a glazed and she ate a cruller. Then he asked her if he could tell her his story, about his father, and that he would like to drive as he told it, just drive, and keep driving toward morning.

They left the highway several miles out of Austin and followed the Texas roads. They passed towns waking up before the dawn. They passed dark fields and the lights of distant houses that seemed to be sitting on the edge of the world.

Nomad told his story, with the windows down and the pre-dawn air sweetened by night, and when he’d finished, when everything that needed to be said was said, Ariel leaned over and kissed him lightly, at the corner of his mouth, and she told him that yes, she did need him.

She needed the fighter, she said. She needed the rager against the machine. She needed the teller of truths, as he understood them to be. And if indeed some of his anger had dissipated, what had left him was self-anger, a crippling anger, directed at his own soul. She needed the man he was going to become, who dug deeply within himself, and pushed himself to create and to speak, to hear and to be heard, the man who said being just good was never enough. She thought she could love that man, if she didn’t already. And she told him never, ever, to forget that.

< >

Besides, she said, he was just such a sexy bastard.

They had to get some gas. At an intersection of four roads there stood a small station, lights on, a Mom-and-Pop kind of place. Looked like a miniature bunkhouse. Still a little swoony from what he’d just heard, Nomad pulled up to the pumps. Ariel got out to stretch her legs. The air was still and silent; it was turning blue, and the last of the stars sparkled overhead. Nomad was about to unhook the nozzle from the nearest pump when a man’s voice said, “No credit. Cash only. And here you pay up front.”

Nomad and Ariel found the source of that voice. An overhead bug light shone on a man sitting in a chair next to the front door. Beyond him, in the interior, were shelves of stuff: paper towels, bags of chips, motor oil, detergent and the like. A mini-grocery, too. The man wore a cowboy hat, a faded workshirt, jeans and boots. He held an acoustic guitar, had obviously been playing it when they’d pulled in.

“Pay up front,” he said again, his voice as harsh as dry wind. He strummed the guitar.

“I’ll want to get twenty bucks worth.” Nomad limped toward the man, taking out his wallet for the cash. He slowed down as he neared the cowboy, because though he couldn’t fully see the face beneath the wide shadow of the brim, he had the impression of looking at someone who was older than the hills beneath the hills. Someone fence-post lean and shaved-leather raw, someone who looked meaner than a broken bottle of five-dollar whiskey.

The cowboy continued strumming his guitar—it had a nice full tone—and then took the money in one sinewy hand.

“Get your gas,” he said. He began playing once more, a Tejano-flavored tune that Nomad did not recognize.

Nomad worked the nozzle. The gas flowed. Ariel walked a distance away. She lifted her face toward the fading stars, her hands on her hips. He thought she looked really hot in that outfit. He thought he might take her somewhere for breakfast. But he wasn’t quite sure where they were, and he didn’t see any signs.

“Sir?” he asked the man. “Where does that road go?” He motioned toward the intersection and the road that stretched east.

The guitar strumming stopped. Then it started up again, a slow, leisurely playing, all the time in the world.

“The road goes on,” the cowboy said.

Nomad felt a slight tremor pass through him, like something waking up deep inside.

“What say?” he asked.

The cowboy continued playing, some trills up and down the neck. Just showing off.

“Got some cotton swabs in there if you want to clean your ears out,” he said.

“John?” Ariel asked, coming nearer. “What is it?”

Nomad didn’t reply. He couldn’t speak.

It was the answer to a seventeen-year-old mystery. Maybe, too, it was a gift.

Johnny, there’s no roadmap
…
but
…

…
the road goes on
.

If it was not an answer, it was as near as John Charles knew he would ever find.

< >

He smiled at Ariel. He felt himself smile widely. He felt a weight leave him.

It was a very good feeling.

“You okay?” she asked.

He nodded, and he replaced the nozzle when he was done. He closed the gas tank’s port. He stepped back and regarded his busted-up car as if seeing it in a new light.

“Sir?” he asked the cowboy, who kept his face lowered. “Do you have any spraypaint?”

“Cans of red, white, and blue. All out of red and white. Take your pick.”

Nomad chose the blue. He paid for it, said for the cowboy to keep the change, and then as the guitar strummed at his back he shook the can of paint, popped the top off, and sprayed four letters first on one side, under the driver’s window, and then on the other. Ariel stood beside him, incredulous, as the bright blue paint streamed down from the ends of the letters.

“You’re crazy!” she said, with a grin.

“I’m a musician,” he answered. That explained it all. His ankle was hurting him, not so badly but enough to want to rest it. He decided he needed some help. “Will you drive?”

“Sure,” she said, and she took the offered keys.

John Charles climbed into the passenger seat. Ariel Collier got behind the wheel. He suggested they drive east, toward morning. As they pulled out, the cowboy was still playing his guitar, and he never looked up from the strings.

John thought every ship needed two captains. One to take the wheel when the other got tired, or heartsick, or ever doubted their destination. Maybe the two captains of this ship would never know what the song was about, or who it was for. But maybe it was enough to know that it was out there, on fan web sites and on YouTube, and in the memories of the audience. The Five would be out there, too, on those videos and CDs. You just had to look to find them.

Still gigging, still alive, after all these years.

The
Argo,
blood brother to the Scumbucket, headed east toward morning.

The indigo light of dawn cast a transformation upon the earth. It created waves from sand hills and whitecaps from pale stones.

And somewhere ahead, it washed clean against a distant shore.

THIRTY-TWO.

She awakened to the sound of a guitar, drifting through the wall between them.

Her heart beat harder. What time was it? Quarter ’til four, by the alarm clock. She would have to be getting up in a few minutes anyway.

A guitar. Imagine that.

She switched on the bedside lamp. She stood up, wrapped her cotton robe around herself, and left her room to go to Jenn’s, which was two steps away.

The door was closed. She knocked.

The guitar playing immediately stopped.

“Open up!” she said.

There was a hesitation. She could feel Jenn inside the room, maybe sitting on her bed, staring at the door.

“I heard you playin’, hon. It sounded nice.”

Footsteps. Quiet ones. Jenn was light on her feet.

The door opened, and her daughter peered out.

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Jenn said.

“Aw, baby! You don’t worry about
that
! I was glad to hear it.” And that, she thought, was the biggest fish that ever passed as a minnow. She saw that Jenn must not have gone to sleep last night. She was still wearing her jeans and the T-shirt she’d worn to the concert. Jenn looked tired, her brown eyes were a little hazy. “Were you up all night?”

“I’m okay,” Jenn said.

“Hm.” She glanced into the room, at the posters on the walls. It was a typical room for a sixteen-year-old girl. Jenn’s guitar, the old Washburn Joel had bought for her at the downtown pawn shop three years ago, was sitting on its stand next to the bed. “Well, then.” Did she dare to ask the next question? She did. “You want a little breakfast? An egg? Slice of bacon?”

Jenn was thinking about it. She had a way of compressing her lips tightly together when she was thinking. “Can I have two slices?” she asked.

“Comin’ up,” said the woman, and when she turned away from her daughter to go to the kitchen in the small house on Lancelot Lane her mouth trembled and tears had jumped into her eyes.

Jenn retreated into her room, but she left the door cracked open.

She picked up her guitar. She sat on her bed and played a little bit. Nothing special, just strumming some chords. Hearing the ring of the notes. They looked copper-colored, like her mother’s hair. She tried some hammer-ons and pull-offs, gradually picking up the speed. Those were okay, but her fingers were so stiff. She tried some tapping, again increasing the speed.

Ouch
. That sounded like Pop Rocks dropped into a big bowl of mess.

Try it one more time.

No, she had a ways to go yet.

She returned to strumming, slowly, letting the copper orbs fly around the room and bounce off the walls. At least, in her mind they did. Some of them bounced off the posters. They evaporated in the air, after they were done singing.

She turned her head. She gazed past her ugly reflection in the mirror over the dresser to the cork bulletin board with pictures of herself and her dad on it. In those pictures, they were both playing guitars. She was fourteen, and he was still alive. In a corner of the board was a blue ribbon that said First Place Winner, Talent Show, Cedar Park High School, 2006.

Her eyes returned to the face of her father. He had been so handsome. A big man, and rugged. He had been an auto mechanic at the Felix Gogo Toyota dealership in Temple. He’d said there wasn’t an engine made he couldn’t fix. He’d driven fifty-seven miles there in the morning, and fifty-seven miles back at night. Every weekday for as long as she could remember. He had called her Birdy.

“Birdy,” he said, “the crows
will
fly.”

And that was exactly as he said it, the
will
pushed down like a thumb on a sore spot.

It was what he said to explain that bad things are going to happen, no matter how much you pray for them not to. No matter how much you ask God to save your father. No matter how much you cry in your room, and lie there on the bed thinking about how handsome he was, and how big and how rugged, before the cancer starting eating at him and shrinking him down. Those crows, they’re gonna fly.

“You know what, Birdy?” he said in the hospital room, with the afternoon light streaming through the window and those tubes up his nose. “Have to take me down in size some. So I can get through the Pearly Gates. Aw, honey, it ain’t nothin’. Come on, wipe your eyes. Laurie, get her a tissue. Listen,
listen
.” He gave her the stern look, the one that always worked. “Get yourself together. Mom tells me you’re not eatin’. Is that right?”

“Not hungry,” Jenn had answered.

“You better
get
hungry, girl. One thing for a big ol’ hoss like me to shrink down, and it’s another for a twig like you.”

“
Dad
,” Jenn had said, and her eyes had almost flooded out of her head.

And he was such a good guitar player, too. His hands were big, sure, but they moved so lightly on the strings. Together they sat on the porch, and they played songs like America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’, and Waylon Jennings’s ‘Luckenbach, Texas’, and his ‘Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys’. And so many, many others.

She was named after Waylon Jennings, who had taken the time to shake her father’s hand and talk to him like a regular person at a concert in Austin long before she was born. Her name wasn’t ‘Jennifer’, it was just ‘Jenn’. Jenn Stewart, that was her.

“Birdy,” he’d said one day in July on the porch, and this was just before he’d gotten sick, “you are a natural-born guitar player. And I swear, you’ve got lightning in those fingers. I can’t even do licks like those! Lord girl, you put me to shame!”

But that was his way of saying he was proud.

Her nickname, Birdy, came from him too. He said she could sing the birds out of the trees. Said she must be half-bird herself, to sing like that. That voice going up and up, right to the clouds. Up and up, right to God’s ear. You must be half-bird, Birdy. The other half’s an ol’ stinkbug! Ain’t that right, Laurie?

And her mother Laurie would grin and say, “Just like her daddy!”

Jenn had her father’s eyes, but she mostly resembled her mother. She was thin—much thinner now—and wiry, with the same copper-colored hair. She was a pretty girl—used to be—with high cheekbones and an elegant nose, again like her mother’s. That was a good thing, because many of the Stewarts and the Ingrahams had honkers. She could be funny, she had a quick wit and she liked to dance, but there was a side of her that had some of the hard earth of Texas in it. That side was serious and sometimes moody. That side didn’t go in for a lot of foolishness. An old soul, her mother called her when that side showed itself. Old beyond her years. That was the side that told her not to smoke pot or cigarettes, though her mother had admitted smoking pot herself back in the days when she was—and she said this with some pride in her voice—“kind of a hippie”. Jenn had tried beer at a party after the Crosstown Showdown, but she went back to her sweet tea.

Sometimes she wore her hair like her mother did, in braids. Today, though, it lay loose about her shoulders. It didn’t shine, though. It was dull.

She strummed the guitar some more, just trying it out again. Her fingers were not what they used to be. How long had it been since she’d brought this guitar out of its case in the closet? Three, four months? Half a year? Maybe so.

It had been a good concert last night at the Vista Futura. Her mom had told her about meeting The Five at the Denny’s, where she was a waitress.

You know what one of them said when I asked him what that thing with the fist and the peace sign meant? He said ‘Bullshit!’ His exact word. I almost pooted, tryin’ to hold back a laugh. But the girl was nice. She seemed kind. She’s the one who gave me the shirt.

Won’t you eat just a little dinner, honey?

< >

Jenn had seen them on television. She’d followed their progress, and in a way shared their tribulations. First off, the sniper shooting the bass player in Sweetwater. Her grandmother lived in Sweetwater, so it had riveted her attention. Then what had happened to their road manager in Tucson. And that Stone Church thing, and finally two deaths in the New Mexico desert.

It was a tragic story. She’d gone to their website, heard their songs and watched their videos. She thought they were very strong, very talented, especially Ariel Collier, and she thought Nomad’s voice was as good as Waylon’s. So when her mom had brought in a newspaper ad saying The Five was doing a last show at the Vista Futura, and all ages were welcome and you could get in free if you wore the T-shirt, well…

No, Mom, I can’t go. I just don’t feel like it
.

Jenn stood up, returned the guitar to its stand, and looked at herself in the mirror.

That hateful mirror. That ugly, ugly mirror. It showed her that the crows
will
fly, even if you stay in your own room and stop going outside. They will fly if you stop eating. They will fly if you shun food, because at first the sight of it makes you think of your father throwing up his dinners and shrinking down to a sick, dying sack of bones, and you don’t want to eat, either, if he can’t. And then, later…you think…really…I want to be with him, and play guitars, and be a family like we used to be, and I love my mom with all my heart but I need my dad, and maybe if I get right to the edge…right to the very edge of slipping into a sweet sleep, he will come as a spirit, whole and well again, to tell me
you better eat, girl
, and I can let him know how much I miss him, and how since he’s been gone all the music is gone too.

But he never came. He never could get through.

They call it
anorexia
. The doctor said:
anorexia nervosa
.

Jenn looked at herself. She really was a twig, now. Half of a twig. A sprig. Her bones could be counted.

No, Mom, I can’t go
.

Her mother had said she might enjoy it, if she let herself. Nobody was going to know her there, if that’s what she was worried about. I’ll pick you up when it’s over. Jenn,
go
.

That band had gone through so much. Had seen so much death and tragedy. Yet still they kept going. They were unstoppable. So maybe…
okay, Mom, I’ll go
.

She almost didn’t make it in. She’d been outside the club waiting with about eighteen thousand people, it seemed like, and had started talking to another girl her age whose mother had let her off. The girl, whose name was Diane, wore very thick glasses and had a kind smile. She was wearing a The Five T-shirt and she said she was their Number One Fan. She said her mother had brought her from Waco. Then the doors had opened up and the crowd had started rushing in, and everybody was moving forward in a mob and there stood a man counting people on a little metal clicker, and when Jenn got up to the door with Diane behind her some people had pushed Diane back to get in front of her, and Jenn heard the man call out to someone inside, “We’re about at the limit!”

So Jenn had reached a scrawny arm back through the surging crowd and caught Diane’s hand and at first pulled her through and then pushed her forward so she could enter the door first, because Waco was a lot further away than Cedar Park, and Jenn had a cellphone she could call her mother with and Diane had just been kind of let out on the street.

But they’d both gotten in. The doors had closed about six people after Jenn.

“Breakfast’s almost ready!” her mother called from the kitchen. “Orange juice? Milk?” It was a hopeful question.

Jenn stared at herself in the mirror.

She heard that song again.

The last song.

She heard the words
I’m sitting here like a candle on the darkest night
.

“Jenn, listen to me, now. Listen real close.” It was her father’s voice, speaking to her in the hospital room on one of the final days. “I don’t want you to get sick. Do you hear me? You have
life
ahead of you. Hear me? I want you to be somebody’s candle, Jenn. I want you to show somebody your light. I think, with your talent and your heart, that’s what you’re gonna do. But you can’t get sick. You can’t follow me. Do you understand that?”

She did understand, but it was something she couldn’t control now. The crows were flying, and they destroyed little birdies.

But that last song…

And the part
Try and try, grow and thrive, because no one here gets out alive
.

Her father’s voice once more, on maybe the very last day?

“Jenn,” he whispered. “My beautiful Birdy. Don’t cry, baby. Laurie, you don’t cry either. It’s all right. Do you think people get out of life
alive
? No, they don’t. That’s why you have to make every day…every minute…
count
. I love my girls. God bless you both.”

And hearing that line in the song, in the Vista Futura, had made tears bloom in Jenn’s eyes. Had made them trickle down her cheeks, until Diane had looked at her and said maybe Jenn ought to be the Number One Fan, if that song moved her so much.

Jenn had thought—had
known
—that at last, her father had found a way to get through.

It had been a good song. A really, really good song. It had deeply touched her. It had spoken to her in a way she thought it could speak to no other person in the audience.

But she thought she could do better.

She looked at her posters on the walls.

There was Gwen Stefani, who Jenn thought was one of the most beautiful and talented women in the world. Gwen Stefani had a sweet heart. Jenn could tell that about a person.

There was a woman named Joni Mitchell, standing on a stage before a huge crowd with her arms upraised. A vintage poster, bought off eBay. These two women, on the CDs she owned, were separate and distinct talents. Both had fire and passion in their voices. Joni Mitchell wanted to get things done. She wanted to give a voice to people who had none. She wanted to speak clearly, and to clearly be heard. And to do that, you also had to clearly
hear
.

Gwen Stefani used her talent as an entertainer. To enthrall and delight, to dance to a beat, to have fun, to laugh and help people shrug off the worries of the world for a little while. To help them find strength when the crows came flying.