The Five

by Robert R. McCammon

  Ariel waited while Nomad opened the notebook to the last few pages and re-read what Mike had written:

  Welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it.

  Write a song about it, just keep it under four minutes.

  Nomad looked at all the scratched-out lines that had given birth to the surviving two. His eyes went to the Girl at the well written there, like a phrase of…

  “Inspiration,” he said.

  “What?” Ariel asked.

  “Here. Where he wrote Girl at the well.” Nomad showed her, and Terry tilted forward to get a look at it too. “I don’t think that’s a title. I mean…it doesn’t have to be. I think it’s something he wrote down for inspiration.” He decided to tell them the rest of it. “Early Sunday morning, after the Curtain Club, Mike told me that girl spoke to him. Said ‘welcome’ to him, and it got to him because…” Nomad shrugged. “Because he said he felt like she was glad to see him. I guess he didn’t get that from his family very much. Maybe it’s why he started with that one word, out of anything else he could’ve chosen.”

  “He wrote that because of the girl?” George asked, glancing at them in the rearview mirror.

  “I’m just saying, I think he chose that word because she spoke to him. Because that’s what she said, and he got something out of it.”

  “Or made something out of it, you mean,” Berke countered.

  “Whatever. I know as much about this as you do.” He continued the notebook’s journey to Ariel.

  There followed a few seconds of silence, during which Ariel studied the lines. George thought there was a lot of traffic on I-10 this morning, and most of it was passing him. The Scumbucket was pulling as hard as it could. He looked into the sideview mirror and saw behind him an array of tractor-trailer trucks, SUVs, pickups and cars all heading to points west.

  “Kinda strange,” Terry said quietly. Today he was wearing one of his favorite vintage shirts, a psychedelic eyeshock of blue paisleys against an orange background. “You travel with a guy so long, but you realize there’s so much you didn’t know about him. I never knew Mike wanted to write a song.”

  Berke took a drink of her bottled water before she spoke. “At the gas station…” Her voice sounded strained, so she stopped and tried again. “At the gas station, he said nobody had ever asked him to try writing. He said…if he started a new song everybody could be part of, it would be good for the band. I guess he liked your idea, John.”

  Nomad didn’t return a comment. He was thinking about that girl. That damned girl with her ladle of well-water and her face hidden in the shadow of her raggedy straw hat. She was creepy, even now, even at this distance. He wished he’d never thrown his fit and gotten out anywhere near that place.

  “Hey, Berke,” Terry said, and twisted around to look at her. “Have you ever wanted to write a song?”

  “Never. It’s not what I do.”

  “You could write a few lines. Add something to what Mike set down. We all could, and we could come up with…” He stopped, because he realized where he was going.

  “The last song,” Nomad finished for him. His original idea had been for them to work on a song together to keep from falling into the squabbling that he’d seen poison the final weeks of many band’s careers. As the emperor of this band, to give them a common purpose over and above the grind of the gigs. And—a wild desperate hope—to change both Terry’s mind and that of the Little Genius by creating what Berke called, and maybe rightly, a ‘Kumbaya song’.

  Now, though, the idea seemed more like creating a legacy for Mike, something that would go on without him. But something that he had been courageous enough to start, and for sure it had taken courage for Mike to step out of his comfort zone and put those words on paper.

  Nobody wanted to be rejected, or laughed at, or thought a fool. Nomad knew that was what you risked when you threw yourself into the wilds of creation, where often you didn’t know where you were going but hoped you’d find the right path somewhere to lead you out. Nomad had been there many times, and so had Ariel and Terry. It was some scary shit, to feel lost in yourself.

  But—bottom line—that was the life he’d chosen. Or had chosen him, he wasn’t sure which. Had chosen all of them, the same. Deal with it or not, make or break, do or die, the world still went on. Just as the world would go on without Mike.

  “We should finish it,” Nomad said. “All of us, adding something.”

  “All of us?” George frowned. “I already told you, I can’t write anything!”

  “You can try. Mike did.”

  “And the point of this is…?”

  “The point is, you might think of yourself as a manager only, but I think of you as a pretty valuable member of this band. Until you pack up and leave, I mean. So because I’m the boss of the band, I say you contribute to this song. I don’t care what it is. Two or three lines, or two or three words. But this is going to be a group effort.” Nomad took off his sunglasses, the better to match stares with Berke. “If it’s our last song as the current lineup—and I guess it will be—then I want a part of everybody in the lyrics.” He had a sudden energizing idea: “We can play it at our last concert back in Austin. Last show, last song. How about that?”

  “It won’t make any sense,” Berke said. “It’ll end up in fucking chaos.”

  “Mike didn’t seem to think so,” he reminded her. “You said he told you it would be good for us.”

  “Yeah, well, Mike isn’t here to tell us where he was going with it.”

  “I have some ideas,” Ariel said, and everybody else shut up. Nomad knew he might be The Five’s leader and frontman, but Ariel was no doubt the band’s creative soul. “I was thinking…maybe…” After writing or co-writing nearly seventy songs with Blue Fly, The Shamans, Strobe, The Blessed Hours and The Five, she still always felt a little uncomfortable being in the spotlight of attention, as if she feared embracing it would open her to the hurt of it being taken away. “I was thinking,” she went on, because they were all expecting something, “that Mike might’ve been writing about the music business. The limitations, maybe. This part about keeping the song under four minutes.” They all knew every music producer wanted singles, which rarely tracked over three-fifty-nine. “See, he’s wanting to write a song about the world and everything in it, but he’s limited by the four minutes,” Ariel said. “Or…it might be a song about change, or choices.”

  Everybody was still listening. Some loose flap inside the air-conditioner went thwack…thwack…thwack.

  “Change,” Ariel continued, “in that he’s saying it’s impossible to write about everything in the world inside four minutes, so to make it fit…either the world itself has to be changed…or perceived in a different way…and that choices have to be made as to what to…wait, let me try something.” She opened her fringed-leather bag and brought out her pen, which wrote with purple ink, and her own gemstone-decorated notebook. She found an empty page, paused in thought for only a few seconds, wrote a line, scratched it out, wrote again, then another short scratch-out, after which the purple ink flowed without interruption. “Okay,” she said. “How does this sound as a next line?” She read: “Got to figure what to keep, and what to leave behind, and like life it’s never easy.” When she looked up, she found Nomad’s face. “Rough draft,” she said, and he noted that today her eyes seemed to be the blue where a continent ends at the mysterious deep.

  Thwrip…thwrip…thwrip, spoke the air-conditioner.

  “See?” Nomad said to George, and included Berke in his appraisal. “How hard is that?”

  They declined to respond. Nomad slid his sunglasses on, Berke leaned back in her seat, folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes, Terry listened to his iPod and George whacked the air-conditioner with the palm of his hand to clear its congestion.

  Ariel gave her attention once more to the song.

  She thought it needed something here, after the like life, it’s never easy. Before you went into th
e second verse, it needed another line or two. Some other statement of choice, or change. Something short and decisive.

  Whatever it ought to be, she couldn’t find it yet. But she had time. They all had plenty of time to work on it. Tomorrow…the next day…next week…it would come together, in time.

  She closed both the green notebook and her own, and she put her pen away. She gazed out at the brilliant azure sky, the yellow earth blotched with browns and grays, the march of mountains across the horizon. I have come a long way, she thought. We all have…but me, especially me. She caught Nomad’s reflection in a trick of sun and glass. I love my family, she thought. I love them, just the way they are. What am I going to do without them?

  Because choice and change were in the air. The choices of Terry and George to go their own ways, and change that could not be stopped. Already it had begun, with Mike’s death. John and Berke would try to put together a new band, with a new name, and she would stand with them but it would never be the same as it was now. Could never be. The same river can never be crossed twice, she knew. The flowing water has no memory of footprints.

  When she closed her eyes against the glare, Ariel saw what she had left behind: a large two-story brick house with a wide green lawn and a curving driveway made of paving stones, and at the end of that driveway a white Jaguar and a dark blue BMW convertible. A house that was not a home, for inside it she had drifted from room to room like a passing shadow. In that house, among those people who had birthed her and raised her and sought to have influence over her, she had been insubstantial. They all fit together—father, mother, older brother and sister—because they spoke the same language, they measured wealth by the thickness of folding green and happiness by the size of the television screen (which happened to be a line from one of the first songs she’d written). They were always so busy. It had been a house of furious ambition, nothing could be still and calm, surely no time for the weakness of introspection. Life was a combat against competitors, a battle of shiny possessions and numbers in bank accounts, and that was the only life they knew.

  But Ariel had been the strange one. The one who didn’t ‘get it’, as her father often said. The lazy girl with no ambition. The time-wasting daydreamer. Oh sure, she liked to write her stories and her poems, and pick on that guitar, but really…she’s so quiet, so passive, she can melt into a wall, you don’t know she’s there until you trip over her. Professional young men want vivacious girls, girls with charm and sociability. Well, there was always the hope that the girl would wake up from her lethargy, or her somnambulism, or whatever, and if she’s at all seriously interested in training her voice she’ll apply herself to the operatic disciplines. After all, Madame Giordano did say she has a malleable tone.

  Her sister had been the closest to her in age, but six years can become a vast distance. Her brother, the Boston lawyer, rarely visited because their mother hated his wife, a situation that caused rancorous arguments between her parents since the girl was the daughter of one of Edward Collier’s partners. Ariel—christened ‘Susan’, but who’d taken that name from a British nanny who used to play guitar for her when she was a little girl—watched her parents descend into a pattern of chaos, a script of drinking and fighting that made her believe things had gone wrong between them years before she was born. It seemed to center around Ariel’s brother, Andrew. But nothing was ever solved in the uneasy calm after the turbulence, and Ariel came to realize at an early age that her mother and father both needed the other to flail them with recriminations, to atone for some secret guilt or acts of disloyalty.

  Except for the presence of a number of nannies, she was alone for as long as she could recall. Alone in the deepest sense, alone as if she had been left in a basket at the front gate of this house within salt-scent of Manchester harbor and taken in by strangers who thought they could put their thumbprints upon a spirit. She had nothing against possessions, against the shiny and the beautiful and the faddish, but she did have something against becoming a slave to them.

  Wasn’t there more to life than an existence, fevered by this year’s model and passion for a cellphone?

  Wasn’t there?

  She thought there was. Why she sought peace when her family revelled in chaos, why she valued books that told quiet, meaningful stories and were not written to encourage the application of Genghis Khan’s methods to modern business, why she heard music in the night breeze and saw poems on paper before they were written, she didn’t know. But she did, and what she’d told Felix Gogo was true; she couldn’t remember not hearing some kind of music and wanting to write down what she heard. Or, rather, capture what she heard, which was very often a difficult task because some tunes—like wild animals, or like John Charles for instance—resisted being put into neat small boxes for the pleasure of the public.

  Ariel believed that a song was a living thing. It could burst into the world prematurely, ragged and half-formed, yes, but she thought the best of them—the most fully-realized, the most able to go the distance—grew slowly from a seed, gradually developing its heart and mind, over time becoming male or female in its attitude, its swagger or its contemplation. It grew skin lusty or lustrous, it preferred night or day for its rambles, it dressed itself in the leather or suede or gossamer of a million colors. And the ones she remembered being touched by when she was alone and lonely among strangers had some message to give to her. To her, even though it might have been written for a different generation, like ‘Wait For An Answer’ by Heart or ‘The Lady’ by Sandy Denny. They offered her some secret solace, some friendship like a hand on the shoulder, a whisper of I have been where you are, and now where are you going?

  Or they gave her a rap to the side of the head, to say Wake up, girl, and get your ass in gear, because the thing that kills is a thing called fear.

  Which was also a line from one of her early tunes.

  She had been gone from that house and the people who lived there long before she left. It had taken a handsome young man she’d met when she was playing her twelve-string Gibson in the Starbucks on Church Street in Cambridge to actually cut the last ties that held her to her old life. He was starting up a band, had a couple of players together who’d paid their dues in other bands, they were calling this band Blue Fly, and did she maybe want to audition. And he wasn’t promising anything, he’d said, but they had some interest from guys who actually managed hot bands like Big Top and Adam Raised A Cain, so there was that.

  Awesome, she remembered saying.

  She thought it had been a relief to her mother and father, the day she’d told them she was quitting her job at Barnes & Noble in Brookline, that she was leaving the apartment she shared with two other young women, and that she was driving to Nashville with three ex-members of Blue Fly to start another band. She hoped she might get some session work there, too. She thought it had been a relief for her parents because they never once asked her to reconsider, or said that she was travelling too far from home, or that she wasn’t wise yet to the ways of the world.

  Maybe her father was glad that at last she’d discovered her ambition, even if it was unfathomable to him as to how she would make any money; maybe her mother wanted to mourn in solitude the loss of years that no plastic surgeon could replace. Maybe they both too were alone, each in themselves; maybe it was a state of being for the Colliers of Manchester.

  Whatever it was, Ariel could not help them, and so she put aside the thing called fear and went out to help herself.

  That had been the spring of 2003. Her stay in Nashville had been little more than a year, working with the bands The Shamen and Strobe, before she’d headed to Austin with a new band who called themselves The Blessed Hours, and the rest was herstory.

  The morning moved on. In front of the Scumbucket, the long gray stretch of I-10 baked and shimmered. They passed across the desert where it lapped up against truckstops and small towns built around cemeteries. Always mountains stood hazy against the horizon, the sky was cloudless and mor
e white than blue as if the very color of heaven was burning away.

  Since Mike’s death, a stop at the gas pumps to fill the Scumbucket’s tank brought everything back in terrifying detail. Berke would no longer leave the van, somebody else had to go get her bottled water for her and whatever else she wanted. Whoever was pumping the gas couldn’t help but look uneasily over their shoulder and scan the far distance, but what they were looking for they didn’t know. Everybody breathed better when the transaction was done and they were back in the Scumbucket pulling away, because the Scumbucket—ugly as it was, worn down and beaten up by the thousands of miles it had carried them—was their protection. But from what, no one could say.

  Except for a twenty-minute creepy-crawl when traffic on I-10 was backed up by one of those situations where a car or a truck has broken down and everybody and their dashboard Jesus has to gawk at the wrecker, they made the Tucson city limits in plenty of time. Nomad had always liked Tucson when he’d lived there; it was a beautiful city, artsy-craftsy, bright Mexican colors, the San Xavier del Bac mission, the dry mesquite smell of the Sonoran desert, lots of golf courses drinking that precious water and lots of old people, sure, because it was a retirement haven, but there were lots of goths and metalheads in Tucson too. The University of Arizona kept the funk going. There was a pretty hot music scene, a healthy variety of clubs showcasing different styles, some very good and cheap restaurants and some way cool bars like the Surly Wench Pub and Snuffy’s. So in a way he felt he was back at his second home, though he didn’t care to revisit the grimy “musician’s special” apartment he’d lived in out on South Herbert Avenue.

  Nomad had found them a way to save some money this time into Tucson, and he reminded George of the address and how to get there. They were staying for the night with the cousin of one of his old bandmates from Uppercut, which had lived and died within the space of six months, but the cousin was cool, he’d let them rehearse in his garage. The house was in a development northwest of the city. They got there without a problem, said their hellos to the cousin and his wife, unpacked their bags and had time to eat the ham sandwiches and taco chips that were graciously provided for their lunch. Then they turned around again and headed downtown, to the brown brick Fortunato’s on North Fourth Avenue, for their three-o’clock load-in and sound check.