The Five

by Robert R. McCammon

  There had been no sex between them, no kissing, no hand-holding. They didn’t talk about being gay, because in fact Berke was never sure Melissa was gay. She dated guys, and talked about how awful some of them were, and how some were really hot and fun but somehow…somehow…they weren’t what she was searching for. Berke figured that if Melissa was gay, she would find her own way to it, eventually. But they were good friends, and they enjoyed being together. My folks are so conservative, Melissa had said. And I’ve never disappointed them. I’d die before I’d disappoint them, they’re looking for me to be perfect at whatever I do, only perfection for our family, you can go back generations and see our accomplishments, our lists of awards and honors. You can’t disappoint a family of people who throw themselves at challenges and always win. You know?

  Yes, Berke had said. I do.

  I know you’re not very religious, but I thank God we met, Melissa had confided. We can talk about anything.

  Except for that thing. The thing that was slowly killing her, and making her take notes in her mind of the strengths of different cords, and the perfect length she would need. Then when the time was perfect, and her mind perfectly fixed on this particular challenge, she had left this world because something in her could not abide the truth of her own heart, and she was too much the good girl to ever disappoint her family.

  Berke had had no clue. Their last phone conversation, on that Saturday, had been about where they were going to eat pizza after they saw Rabbit-Proof Fence on Tuesday, their movie night. Melissa had said she was thinking about going down to Macon and spending a few days with her family. But everything had been bright, light, upbeat. Everything had been about the future, that blue-skyed place where all dreams come true and anybody can be who they want to be because This Is America. Melissa’s roommate had found the body, on Monday afternoon. There had been no note, no blame, no incrimination: just a silence, to endure the generations.

  The sun was hotter. Berke quickly looked around to get her bearings. She was in an area of dry brown fields, rusted barbed wire fences, and distant farmhouses that appeared abandoned. A few scraggly trees reached up from the miserable earth. It was time to turn around and head back. She was coming to a dirt road ahead that snaked off to the left across a plain of weeds. The air smelled bitter, with the drifting scent of roadkill. She decided she would turn around at the road.

  Berke had never doubted her journey. Given the choice between a dress and a flannel shirt, she was glad in plaid. Not that she hadn’t tried sex with guys, just to see what it was like. There had been three different guys, in three different states, in three different seasons. Three times, and three times only. Fuelled probably by alcohol or drugs, or maybe they were all mercy fucks. She couldn’t really remember many details except the rough hands that didn’t know what they were doing, the neanderthalic grunts that made her crush a laugh behind her teeth and at last—oh suffering Jesus, at long last!—the most godawful mess ever to scrawl across a bedsheet. You want to put that thing where? Uh uh, Bluto, my mercy’s used up.

  She wanted nothing to do with those kings of artless sex, those preening princes who thought they were a gift to all women of every size, shape and color and who fell apart in whines, tears and rages at the sound of “No”. She did recall her three prizes as being ridiculously heavy, lying atop her like concrete suits. Their hairy backs and pimply asses…urk, she was going to have to stop thinking about this, or she would go over to the roadside and throw up.

  She missed Melissa. She missed Mike, and she was going to miss him more as time went on. Maybe that was how the world worked, taking people you loved away from you with no warning, but if that was the best God could come up with She needed to rethink Her game.

  Berke was almost to the dirt road. She looked along it and saw what appeared to be a haze of dust floating in the air, as if a vehicle had only recently driven that way. A sun-faded sign that used to be red, white and blue proclaimed Land For Sale. In the distance, a couple of hundred yards or so away and framed by skeleton trees, was a farmhouse the same color as the brown dry brush that surrounded it. The windows looked to be broken out, the chimney reduced to an iron pipe. But, oddly enough, a battered mailbox remained at the turnoff onto the dirt road, and on the mailbox was the name Sam Dodge.

  She caught a quick flare of light from a front window. Sun on metal, she thought.

  She heard a firecracker go off, not very loud of a pop.

  Something zipped past her, a hornet or wasp, about level with her collarbone. She smelled the scorched air under her nose. She looked to her right and saw a plume of dust rising from the barren earth beyond a barbed-wire fence. And then it came to her very clearly that someone had just taken a shot at her, from the window of that house in the field.

  Dodge, she thought.

  She did better than that: she flung herself to the road and crawled into the weeds on the right. In a matter of seconds, her well-trained heart was pounding, her lungs gasped for air and a new bloom of sweat had burst from her pores.

  Berke tensed for a second bullet. Her legs were still in the road. She pulled herself deeper into the weeds. When she looked toward the house again, she could no longer see it. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be seen. A rush of emotions wheeled through her mind, culminating in anger: who the fuck was shooting? Her New Balances, her knees and her elbows pushed against the ground; she crawled through the brush along the barbed-wire fence. Then there was something right in front of her face that she thought at first was a piece of discarded rope, but since when did rope have scales and alternating light and dark brown bands? She couldn’t see a head and she didn’t hear a rattle but suddenly the thing shot away from her as if it had been touched with a hot iron, and just that fast it slithered through the brush and was gone. She thought she had peed a cup’s worth in her lycra shorts.

  She heard a car coming. She lifted her head as much as she dared. A pickup truck that might have been welded together from four or five other wrecked trucks of various colors was approaching over in the left lane, on its way into town. Two men were in the truck, their windows down, and in the back was a piece of machinery that maybe was an air-conditioning unit. On the driver’s dented door was Baumgartner Heating & Cooling with a phone number. In another few seconds the truck was going to pass by. She thought that if she got up and ran for the truck, whoever was in that house was going to have another chance to kill her. But staying here was not an option, and even a snake had that much sense.

  When the pickup was almost between her and the house, she jumped up and ran toward it with her arms waving. “Hey!” she shouted. “Stop! Stop!”

  The driver hit his brake and the truck skidded to a halt. He had a mop of gray hair and a gray mustache, and the red letters in a white circle on his sweat-stained brown shirt said his name was Roy.

  “Can you give me a ride?” Berke asked. Her voice was shaking. “To the motel?” Roy and his partner, a thin Hispanic man burned nearly black by the sun, just stared at her. “The Lariat motel,” Berke explained. “I need a ride.” She glanced through the cab toward the farmhouse, but it looked only empty and forlorn.

  “You need a ride?” Roy obviously was the type to deliberate at his own speed. “What’re you doin’ out here?” He took stock of her outfit. “You runnin’ in this heat?”

  “Can I get in?”

  Roy made a sucking noise with his lips against his teeth. His slow deliberation obviously also included sound effects. “Yeah,” he decided, “get on in.”

  She edged around the truck. The Hispanic dude opened the door and scooted over. As Berke climbed in, the flesh on the back of her neck tingled in expectation of the bullet, but nothing hit it except a few gnats interested in her salt. She slammed the door shut, glanced again at the farmhouse and saw nothing move, no glint of metal, nothing. “Who lives there?” she asked.

  “Land’s for sale,” Roy said. “Suppose it’s vacant. You a buyer?”

  By the time Berke sho
ok her head, Roy had put a boot on the accelerator and with a tired groan the patched-up truck rolled on toward town.

  “You ain’t from around here, are you?” Roy asked, and Berke told him no, she was not. “Where you from, then?” Austin, Berke said, and added that she was going back to Austin today. “Big city,” Roy remarked, after which he began to tell her about the time he went to his sister’s wedding in Fort Worth, which was another big city but he didn’t care for big cities, he had been here in this town for all his life and made a good living, had a wife and three sons, one worked on an oil rig in the Gulf and boy howdy did that little rooster make a wad of dough.

  Berke had stopped listening about the time she’d said she was going back to Austin today. She knew someone had fired a shot at her. She knew it. Had felt the bullet go past, had smelled it. But… Jesus Christ…why? A bullet fired from an empty farmhouse? Yeah, well, it must not have been so fucking empty. What had she done, gotten some trigger-happy hermit mad at her? But this was too weird… Mike getting shot yesterday, and now this…

  Roy and the silent Hispanic stick-man were looking at her. She’d missed something. “What?” she asked.

  “Did you fall down?” Roy repeated. “You’re dusty, I figured you fell down.”

  “Yeah, I fell down.”

  They were getting close to the Lariat. Berke’s fingers were on the door handle.

  “Better be careful,” Roy advised as he pulled the truck into the parking lot. Berke saw that the guest list had thinned; the silver Subaru and the dark blue pickup were gone. “Fella got shot dead out on I-20 yesterday afternoon,” Roy said. “In the paper this mornin’. This is crazy times.”

  “Okay. Thanks for the ride.” She got out while the truck was still rolling. The Hispanic guy raised a hand in farewell as Roy drove away. Berke was close enough to the swimming pool to see that Ariel was still lying on the blue lounge chair in exactly the same position she’d occupied about forty minutes ago. Berke opened the gate. She walked with long strides around the pool to Ariel’s chair and touched her shoulder.

  “Hey, wake up,” Berke said. “Ariel! Wake up!”

  Ariel’s eyes opened. She turned her head toward Berke and immediately made a noise of pain. She pressed a hand to the side of her neck. “Ow,” she said, massaging the cramped muscle. Her shoulder was stiff too; these loungers definitely were not meant to take the place of a bed, but it had been so nice out here, with the sound of the water and the panorama of the stars overhead. It was hot and bright out here now, though. Who was standing over her? She squinted to see. “Berke? What is it?”

  “Somebody shot at me.”

  “Somebody…what?”

  “Listen to me. Wake up. Somebody shot at me, when I went out running.”

  Ariel sat up, still working the offending muscle in her neck. She realized one of her shoes had fallen off during the night. “Went out running?”

  Berke abruptly turned away and headed toward the room. Ariel was cute, smart, talented with lyrics and melody, a real trooper when it came to the grind, but before she got her bowl of granola and cup of silver needle tea in the mornings she could be as thick as a brick. Berke opened the door and went into the room, where George was sitting on one of the chairs staring at his cellphone’s screen. Nomad and Terry were still laid out on their beds, asleep. Berke felt the heat of fresh tears at her eyes, because Mike wasn’t there, and she wasn’t sure she was ever going to get past this tragedy.

  “I got—” shot at, she was going to say.

  But before Berke could finish her sentence, George said, “Amazing. This is just…awesome.”

  “Listen to me. Okay? I got—”

  “We sold one hundred and sixty-three CDs last night,” George went on. “That’s just figures for Catch. One sixty three,” he repeated, for emphasis. He didn’t have to tell her the CDs were ten dollars a pop, payable through PayPal. He consulted some more awesome numbers. “The video’s up to five hundred and nineteen hits on YouTube, six hundred and thirty-eight on MySpace and…get this…seven hundred and twelve on the webpage.” Behind his glasses, his eyes were shining. “Jesus!” he said. “What happened?”

  “Yeah, great, I’m glad, but—”

  “Guys!” George started shaking the others awake. “Get up! Come on, you’ve got to hear this!” They responded with snorts and snarls, like animals being dragged from their dens of refuge. “I mean it!” George almost shouted. “We made some fucking numbers last night!”

  Nomad was the first to reply, his voice husky with sleep. “What the shit…?”

  George’s cell buzzed. He checked the caller. It was Ash. “Yeah!” George said, and listened as Nomad and Terry fought out of the bands of bedsheets that had wrapped around them during the night. Nomad staggered off to the bathroom. “I saw the numbers, yeah,” George said. “What’s the deal?” He was silent, letting Ash speak.

  “Somebody took a shot at me,” Berke told Terry. She didn’t know if he’d heard her or not, because he was fumbling for his specs on the bedside table. The door opened again, letting in a blinding burst of sunlight from which Ariel emerged, still working her neck.

  “Oh. Okay, right.” George had eased down into the chair again. Something had changed in his voice; some of the happiness had evaporated.

  “What’s going on?” Ariel asked.

  “Somebody took a—” Berke stopped herself. She could still hear the sound of that bullet zipping past, but now the whole event seemed dreamlike, surreal, mixed up with the crack of the slug hitting the gas station’s window yesterday. She thought that the heat had gotten to her out in front of that empty farmhouse, or that she must be going crazy. Why would anybody be shooting at her? Did that make any sense? But had it made any sense that a bullet had hit Mike in the head and now he was lying stretched out on a slab somewhere?

  “Really,” George said. It was a reaction to something Ash had just told him. “No, we haven’t seen it. Wow. That’s all I can say, man…just…wow.”

  Berke put a hand to her forehead to see if she’d overheated. If anything, she felt clammy. Maybe she had overheated. Maybe she was going to throw up in another minute, because her stomach was roiling. This is like that syndrome soldiers have, she thought. That delayed stress syndrome deal. She felt cold sweat crawling on her cheeks.

  “You okay?” Ariel asked. She’d heard Berke clearly enough outside—Somebody shot at me—and now Berke’s face had gone gray. She thought Berke was having a nervous reaction from yesterday, and who could fault her for going to pieces?

  Berke rushed away to the other bathroom beyond the connecting door, where she turned on the tap, splashed water into her face and then, trembling violently, leaned over the toilet and wracked herself with a series of dry heaves audible at least two rooms away. Ariel followed to stand outside the door if Berke called for help.

  “Hold it, wait a minute,” George told Ash. “Is she sick?” he called to Ariel.

  “I’m fucking fine!” Berke shouted back through the cardboard door. “I’m fucking peachy-keen fabulous!”

  “Who’s puking?” asked Nomad as he came out of the other bathroom, his eyes sleep-stung and squinty.

  “We’re having an episode here,” George said to Ash. “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “What the hell’s happening?” Terry asked of no one in particular, then he hauled himself up and went to the bathroom Nomad had just vacated. Nomad returned to bed and lay there on his back, staring up at the ceiling tiles and wondering if Mike’s daughter had been told the news yet. It was going to be a bad ride back to Austin, and not much to look forward to when they got there, regardless of his big plans from last night.

  “Why are they calling it that?” The Little Genius’s question into the phone snagged Nomad’s attention. George was silent again as Ash spoke. Nomad propped himself up on a pillow, watching George’s facial expressions to get some clue of the conversation. “We’re supposed to hear from them this morning,” George said. “I guess th
ey’ll tell us we can leave.”

  Talking about the detectives, Nomad thought.

  “So…what’s the deal?” At this question, Nomad’s ears again went up. “Better than what? Fifty percent?”

  Berke and Ariel returned to the room, one with a hand pressed to her stomach and the other rubbing the side of her neck. In the bathroom, Berke had gotten down a couple of glasses of water and felt a little better. She was deciding whether or not to pursue this tale of the farmhouse shooter.

  “Jesus,” George said. “Is he really serious?”

  The toilet’s flush announced Terry’s exit from the bathroom. He looked quizzically at Nomad, who replied with a shrug.

  George scratched his chin. “Can he go to seventy-five percent on the merchandise?”

  “What’s he talking about?” Berke asked, but no one could respond.

  Nomad didn’t want to say, but it sounded to him as if George and Ash were talking about a gig. He remembered, not without some bitterness, George’s voice of reason in the Subway last night: We’re going home in the morning. Tour cancelled. All done.

  Well, it was morning, the tour was cancelled and The Five were all done. So what was this shit about?

  “I hear you. I understand,” said the voice of reason. “I’ll run it by everybody. Yeah.” He nodded, as more instructions came through the digital air from Austin. “Okay, thanks,” he said, and put his cellphone away. Then he sat exactly where he was without moving, staring at the floor, as second after second ticked past.

  “Are you going to make us guess?” Berke asked sharply, which was a very good sign.

  “You would never,” George answered in a quiet, measured voice, “guess this in the proverbial million years.” He looked first at Nomad, then at the others. “Trey Yeager left a message for Ash last night. He wants us to keep the date at the Spinhouse.” Yeager was the Spinhouse’s booking manager, had been in the business for about thirty years at various clubs across the Southwest. “That’s not all. They want to bump us up to headliner. It’s a little more money, but Ash thinks we can get a way better percentage on merchandise.”