“You’re all wired up,” Terry said, and he gave a weak little laugh.
“Oh yeah,” George answered, more of a breath with words than a regular voice. The sound was made hollow by the mask. “Getting tuned,” he said. “Weird thing. I can see better now.”
Nomad walked to the side of the bed, wary of all the life-sustaining machinery. He didn’t know what to say, so he said what welled up when he looked into the pale, waxen face. “They’re going to get the bastard, George.”
“Same guy,” George said; it was not a question, because he knew.
“Yeah. We’re going to finish the tour.” Just that fast, smelling the lingering burned scent of a critical wound that he recalled had hazed the air around his father’s body there in the Louisville parking lot, Nomad had made his decision. “We’re going to help get him.”
“Finish…?” George blinked, maybe thinking he was more out of his mind than he’d realized. “The tour?”
“Thanks for asking us,” Berke said, but when both Nomad and George looked at her, she frowned as if she’d stepped on the crack that broke her mother’s back. “Shit.” The lines on her forehead only deepened. “Okay, screw it. I’m in.”
Terry said, with a shifting of his shoulders that was not quite a shrug, “I guess I’m in too.”
Ariel didn’t speak.
“Crazy.” It was a distant voice from a faded man. “All of you.”
A silence stretched. Nomad was not good with hospitals; this was torture, wanting to be gone but needing to be here.
“I almost let go,” George said.
Ariel had composed herself. Her eyes were red, but she came forward to stand where she thought she should be, beside John Charles.
“It was up there.” George lifted his chin toward the ceiling. Toward the corner of the ceiling, up on the right where the curtain guide was.
“What was there?” Nomad glanced up to where George had indicated. Ceiling, curtain guide, nothing else.
“Folded up,” said George. “Sharp edges.” He took a few slow breaths before he spoke again. “I couldn’t see a head. No face. But I knew. It was watching me. It was like…the wings of a crow. Or like black origami. It was waiting. Right up there.”
“Waiting for what?” Ariel asked.
And George answered, “For me to die.”
Terry gave that nervous laugh again. “You’re not going to die, man! Get real!”
“You’re not going to die,” Berke said. “You’re past the worst part.” She hoped. “Listen, we probably need to go so you can rest. Okay?”
“That’s not all,” George said. “I was fighting. Really fighting. Hard. And I don’t know…when it was…but I heard somebody speak my name. It was like…a voice I knew. Maybe… a teacher I used to have. Somebody who cared about me. I knew that voice.” He made a noise that sounded as if he were struggling to breathe, and Nomad almost went for the nurse’s call button but then George said, “I opened my eyes and that girl was here.”
“Who?” Ariel asked.
“That girl,” he repeated. “Where they were picking the blackberries. You know.”
Nomad and Ariel exchanged glances. Terry looked quickly at Berke, but Berke was just staring down at the floor.
“Standing in the corner. There.” George lifted his chin toward the left-hand corner. “She said, ‘I believe in you, George,’ and then…she smiled at me…and she nodded. That voice…somebody else’s voice… I don’t know whose. I was afraid. Closed my eyes. Tight. I thought…if I burst a blood vessel…least I’m in the hospital already.” He had to stop and take a breather. “She was gone when I looked,” he said. His eyes found Nomad’s. “John… I thought…she was the angel of death. But now… I think she was the angel of life.”
“You had a dream,” Berke said quietly. “That’s all.”
“Right. A dream. But listen…if you guys…drove back there. To that place. She’d still be there…right? That whole place…it would still be there. Right?”
“Yeah,” Nomad told him. “It would.”
“Go back…and find out,” George said.
Nomad had no idea what he was talking about. It was time to leave; past time, really.
“Take the Scumbucket,” George said. “Old warhorse. Good for nothing…but following the music.”
“We can’t do that,” Ariel said. “It’s your van.”
“Done with me. ’Member, John?” His voice was getting weaker. His eyes were wanting to close and stay shut. “I said… I was with you guys. Said I’d take care of you. Like always.” He moved his legs again under the sheet, seeking some kind of comfort. “Dad’s got the keys. I’ll tell him.”
The young woman with the auburn hair came in. “George,” she said in a light, friendly tone, “I’m afraid your visitors are going to need to leave.” She made a quick visual check of the monitors and systems.
“Hey.” George roused himself from his impending slumber. “The song. Don’t you want my part?”
“The song?” Nomad shook his head.
Ariel knew. The song Mike started, probably the last song they would ever write. “Yes, George,” she said. “We do want your part.”
“I’m adding…what the girl said. To you, Ariel. I wish you…safe travel…courage when you need it.” The Little Genius offered them a wistful smile. His eyes glistened. “You need it now,” he said.
“I’ll see you on the other side of this,” Nomad vowed.
They said their goodbyes. Terry, who had been last going into the room, was the last out. Berke walked on ahead, moving quickly, her head lowered.
Ariel kept pace with Nomad. Heavy-burdened, they went back to the room where the suits were waiting, and where their new road manager had just gotten them eight hundred dollars for ninety minutes in the afternoon sun at Stone Church.
SIXTEEN.
“Tell me what I don’t already know about Stone Church,” said Truitt Allen.
“What do you already know?” Nomad fired back, from his seat behind Ariel.
“Damn, look at that fool!” Allen tapped the Scumbucket’s brake. The purple-and-blue spray-painted camper just ahead had swerved into the right lane without a turn signal. “Nothing pisses me off worse than a careless driver.” There were maybe a dozen stickers on the camper’s rear bumper, things like Eat Me, Not Meat and What Would Jesus Shoot?
Nomad thought Mr. Driver’s Education had better get used to it, because the train of huge recreational vehicles, campers, Volkswagen vans, pickup trucks and motley rusted-out mutts on four tires heading up I-10 was only going to get longer and more piss-worthy the closer they got to the junction of I-8 and the straight shot to Gila Bend.
The U-Haul trailer was an orange thumb that indicated they were on their way to Garth Brickenfield’s little bitty ole festival, as he’d described it to Allen over the phone. It was indeed thirteen years old, but it was no longer little bitty. The highway, at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, was already a demolition derby in the making. The troopers were out in force but so were the wreckmakers. A few minutes earlier, they’d passed the blinking lights at a fresh mess and seen crashed in a ditch one of those gargantuan black pickup trucks meant to carry Paul Bunyan’s lumber. Around it on the ground sat seven or eight people who looked to be made out of tattoos. One of the shirtless baldheaded young men was raging at the troopers as the plastic cuffs were being locked on his wrists, and none of The Five could fail to note on the man’s sunburned back a tattoo of a downward-facing pentagram with a red goat’s head at its center.
Have fun in the Pima County Jail, Nomad had thought. But what concerned him was that there were many more music-lovers just like that guy who weren’t going to crash their rides today.
It was going to be crazy on the two-lane road that left I-8 a few miles west of Gila Bend and twisted up into the mountains on its way to Apache Leap. The weathergirl on KVOA had said it was going to be cloudless skies and a hundred degrees at noon, so maybe at three o’clock, when
The Five took the stage, it would be in the upper nineties. But it was dry heat, so they would bake instead of steam.
“I have a question for you.” It was the first time Berke had spoken since she’d climbed into the back seat about thirty minutes ago. She was dressed, appropriately for the weather of this 31st day of July and her current state of mind, in black jeans and a black wifebeater T-shirt. One thing new she was wearing was a small silver pin in the shape of a bass guitar that she’d bought yesterday in a crafts shop on North Campbell Avenue. “What handle are we supposed to give you?”
“What handle?” A pair of intense blue eyes glanced back in the rearview mirror.
“Your name,” Berke clarified. “Like…what? Allen? Mr. Allen? Truitt? I mean, if you’re pretending to be our road manager, then—”
“No,” he interrupted, and she stopped dead because she could tell when he spoke that word he meant it. “I’m not pretending. If I’m asking you to do…what I’m asking you to do…then you need to make some money off it. And if Pett doesn’t show up here, we’ll be ready for him in San Diego. Or Los Angeles, or wherever. But believe me…are you listening?” He’d seen her look away with a pained expression.
“I am,” Berke said, but she still stared out her window at the white sea of sand and clumps of spiny vegetation, darkened green by the newly-tinted glass.
“Believe me,” he repeated, “I’m going to do a real job.” He didn’t have to tell her he’d gone over his new role very thoroughly with Roger Chester. Organization was his mantra; how difficult could this be? “By the way, are you feeling the air-conditioning back there?”
“It feels great,” Terry said.
Nomad grunted. He had to give credit where credit was due. Mr. Pep Boy had taken the Scumbucket somewhere—maybe the agency garage—and had the van scrubbed and detailed, though scrubbing and detailing didn’t do much for beat-up battleship gray. Still, it was amazing that there wasn’t a single crumb of last year’s marijuana brownies anywhere on the floorboards, not a forgotten straw nor a plastic cup lid. In fact, there were new rubber mats, still with the new rubbery smell. The multitudinous variety of soft drink, tea, beer, mustard, hot sauce and other stains that had blotched the seats for years like a collection of Rorschach inkblots was gone as if absorbed by a magic ShamWow. The air-conditioning worked like an oil sheik’s dream. And it was nearly silent.
But what really blew the top off the Awesome Meter was the fact that Mr. Dark Glasses At Night had gotten that tint job done within a single day. For the ordinary man, it would’ve been a week on the wait. Windshield, side windows and back glass: all were pimped with the cool green, which made sunglasses unnecessary and also helped the air-conditioning.
Nomad knew the reason for that, as they all did: somebody—Jeremy Pett by name—wanting to fire a shot into the van wouldn’t have as clear a target as before.
On first seeing it, Nomad had asked their Scumbucket benefactor if the pop-up machine-guns, the oilslick shooters and the automated armor shields were in working order, and which seat was the ejector?
“I’m not sure of that other stuff,” came the reply, “but how about riding shotgun today?”
Which was how Ariel had wound up in that front passenger seat, though of course Nomad had known Mr. Fit-At-Fifty was just pulling his chain.
He hadn’t slept very soundly the last couple of nights, and today he was feeling it. When he closed his eyes, he saw George’s face with the oxygen mask strapped to it, in that bed in the hospital whose smell took him back to a death in Louisville. He saw George looking into one corner of the room—It was waiting. Right up there—and then into the other.
I opened my eyes and that girl was here.
Why would George have dreamed about that girl? Of all people…her?
I believe in you, George.
It was creepy, Nomad thought. Way creepy. And then adding that line about safe travel and courage to the song. Ariel had written it down in her notebook, with the other lines begun by the word Welcome.
That single word had been powerful enough to bring tears to Mike’s eyes. And powerful enough for him to dare to start writing a song.
Creepy, he thought. But it could be explained. Dreams were just dreams and Mike had been a lot more sentimental than he’d let on. So there was really no big deal. It was a song. And what else would it be?
“So how about it?” Berke persisted, speaking to their driver. “What do we call you?”
He thought it over. There had been a name for him, back in the day. Before he’d gotten so serious…well, no, he’d always been serious…but, still…
It had been given to him…no, he’d earned it, as he’d earned everything in his life, the hard way…by his fraternity brothers at the University of Oregon. He decided it was good enough for now, as well.
“True,” he said. “With an ‘e’. Opposite of ‘false’.”
Berke tried it out, to see how it sounded and felt: “True. Okay, I guess that works.”
“I can’t see calling you that,” Ariel said.
True frowned. A big fat-assed red SUV was right in front of him, he couldn’t spare even a quick glance at her. “Why not?”
“I don’t know, I just can’t.”
“Oh.” He got it. “Right. Because I’m old. Because you’re thinking you need to be saying ‘sir’ to me, and calling me ‘mister’?”
“I didn’t say you were old.” She paused, trying to figure out exactly what she was trying to say. After a moment more of uncomfortable silence, she asked, “How old are you?”
“Fifty-three. Coming up to fifty-four in November. My story: met my wife in college, at Oregon, married her after graduation, been married—very happily—for thirty years. We have two daughters, one in enviromental science for the city of Tucson, and another an FBI agent in Dallas. We have one grandchild, a boy named Wesley Truitt Adams. My wife and I like to go on cruises when we can, and we enjoy river rafting and mountain biking. I like reading military history. I have a stereo room, and I listen to a lot of Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles but I also like Tony Bennett and bluegrass. What am I leaving out that you might like to know?”
“Big jump from Oregon to Arizona,” Nomad said. “How’d that happen?”
“I was actually born in Yuma. Went to high school there. Played football with the Criminals. Senior quarterback until a Kofa High King got through the defense and knocked me into orbit, three games from the end of the season. But I guess I wanted to see something green. I wanted to see a forest and hear rain and…you know…do something that you feel you need to do. So you go do it. Anything else?”
“You were a policeman before you joined the FBI?” Ariel asked.
“Oh, yeah. Did all that grunt work.” True was trying to read the white-on-black sticker on the bumper of that red SUV. He sped up a little bit, getting closer. The SUV had a Texas tag. The part of the sticker he could read said Have Some Fun. Underneath that were small words he couldn’t make out. Nun? He gave it some more gas.
Nomad asked, “You were a cop in Tucson?”
“Hold it, hold it, I’m trying to—” And then he was close enough to read the smaller words. The second line read Fuck A Nun. About two seconds after seeing that, he saw a black decal with an upside-down cross on it at a corner of the rear glass, and then he realized something was staring at him from the back of the SUV.
He could see the whites of two eyes and below them a gleam of bared teeth. It was a black dog, he thought. A big dog. Its eyes were fixed upon him as if it could see him clearly and distinctly through the green tint. Maybe it could. The way the thing stared at him, immobile though both the van and the SUV were doing about sixty miles an hour and the highway was flashing past underneath, made True think that if that dog could get at him it would rip his throat open from ear-to-ear.
A Melville quote came to him: I saw the opening maw of hell.
True felt the small hairs on the back of his neck tingle. Suddenly a white arm braided wit
h a barbed-wire tattoo emerged from the dark within, hooked around the animal’s neck and pulled the dog away from the glass…
…and then the SUV’s brakelights flared red, True saw a rear-end collision about to destroy his perfect driving record and perhaps the way his head sat upon his spine, and he swerved the van and trailer into the left-hand lane directly in front of a Winnebago painted a sand-colored camo scheme. He came within inches of scraping that hideous sticker off the metal and he felt the whipsaw of the trailer shudder through the van’s frame. The trailer swayed back and forth a few times, as True cut his speed to keep the rig from dragging them off the interstate. The shriek of tires and blare of horns followed.
“Jesus Christ!” Nomad hollered.
“Hey, man!” Terry said, righting himself after his seatbelt had nearly cut him in half. It was a pain, wearing these seatbelts, but with an FBI agent at the wheel, what were you gonna do? “I thought you could drive!”
“Sorry.” True checked the sideview mirrors. Thank God, he was leaving no accidents in his wake. The driver of the red SUV dropped back, turned on the blinker and merged smoothly into the left-hand lane a few vehicles behind the Scumbucket.
“That was different,” Berke said. “I used to have a drum kit back in that fucking trailer instead of shit and splinters.”
“It’ll be all right,” he told her. He felt such animosity from her, he couldn’t resist saying, “It would’ve been busted up if it hadn’t been repacked.”
“Repacked?” Terry asked; it had also gone through his mind that his keyboards, even in their hard cases, weren’t up to that kind of rock-and-rolling.
“I had everything repacked by experts,” True said, feeling a little superior. “They filled in the empty spaces with styrofoam cubes and put color-key labels on everything.”
“Color-key labels?” Berke leaned forward as far as her sealtbelt would let her. “What for?”
“There’s a diagram taped to the inside of the trailer. It shows how everything should be packed, according to the colors.” When no one spoke for a time, True said, “More efficient this way.”
The Five Page 28
