The Five

by Robert R. McCammon

  And that journey took all the courage you had.

  < >

  But for certain, Nomad thought as he sat with Ariel’s notebook in his lap, for himself it was not and would never again be the same old world.

  That’s what it was about.

  In the end, he’d repeated Mike’s opening with a variation, and added what he thought suited the song. He didn’t think his part was very good. He had listened to Ariel’s ideas about the music, the intro, the chord structure and the chorus. He’d given suggestions that he thought worked, but Berke didn’t like his idea about speeding up the beat, and Ariel thought he was wrong about some of the chord changes. He was deadset on throwing a B-sharp in there at a particular point, but she didn’t like that at all.

  “Are we writing a fucking church song?” he’d asked in frustration. “We’re a rock band, guys!”

  “It’ll come out well,” Ariel had told him. “When it’s finished. It will.”

  “Okay, you finish it, then! Shit! I’m going out to get a smoke!”

  But the deal was, he feared the song.

  “What was supposed to happen?” he asked Ariel again, at their table in the Magnolia Café.

  She shook her head.

  “Do you have any opinion? I mean, what was it for? Yeah, I know what it’s about. Or at least I think I know what it’s about, but we don’t really know, do we? We’re not sure, are we?”

  “No,” Ariel said, “we’re not sure. How could we be sure?”

  “Maybe it was for Gina Fayne. Maybe it was for that guy to hear, and for him to ask Berke to help keep Gina Fayne from overdosing on smack. Does that make sense?”

  She could tell he didn’t believe what he’d just said, but she answered, “Maybe it was.”

  “Uh huh. Tell me, then: You think the angels are that bent out of shape about Gina Fayne’s heroin habit? You think they set up this whole thing to save Gina Fayne’s life, so she could go on and be the next Janis Joplin? And you think whatever wanted to stop us—to fucking kill us—wanted to make sure Gina Fayne never became the next Janis Joplin?” Nomad almost pounded his fist on the table. He held himself back. “No way!” He was getting worked up, he had to eat his hamburger and ease down again. “I don’t see the point,” he said. “I wish somebody would tell me what it is. Or was. How come that girl, that…whatever she was…just didn’t tell us what she wanted? What we were supposed to do. She could speak English. I mean, Jesus, I guess she could speak every language in the world, if she was what you think she was! So how come she didn’t just tell us?”

  “Because,” Ariel said, “we would never have believed her. And how would you like to write a song knowing something we can’t understand—something awesome, John—is asking for a command performance? She did want us to write a song. We wrote the song she wanted.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes. And we wrote the song we wanted. It was as much for us, as it was for—” She stopped, because she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Gina Fayne?” Nomad asked.

  Ariel ate some of her sandwich and drank from her bottled water.

  Nomad watched her. There were so many things he wanted to ask her about all this. One question was: Why us? Another was: Are those things in this café right now, only we can’t see them? And: Are they everywhere all the time, and when I’m sitting on the toilet I ought to be a little more modest? And, maybe the questions he wanted to ask the most: Do they know everything? What don’t they know? Do they sleep, do they eat, do they screw? Is everything around us a fucking illusion, the dream within the dream?

  And, oh yeah, one more: Where do they come from?

  But she was eating her Reuben, really getting into it, and Nomad thought she could answer those questions no better than he could, no better than they’d been answered since the beginnings of time by scholars, priests, philosophers and thousands of others.

  They were not allowed to know.

  Nomad figured it was like the cosmos. You could only go so far, thinking about how many stars there were, and space going on into eternity. Where were the walls of the box?

  “I just want to make music,” he said, and Ariel looked at him over her sandwich and gave him a crooked half-smile, and before he could monitor his mouth the question jumped out of him: “Do you still need me?”

  “What?”

  “Do you still need me?” he repeated, and he answered it. “You really don’t. You’re ready to go out on your own. Maybe I was hard on you in Tucson, but I was telling you the truth. You could put your own band together. The Ariel Collier Band.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that sucks.”

  “The Ariels. The ACBs. The Blue Porkpies. That’s a good one. I like that look, it’s cool. Okay, back to naming your new band. The—”

  “Two,” she said, and she gave him the mystic blast.

  “I’m out of this for a while,” he told her, averting his gaze. “I need some time. Just to think.”

  “I need the same thing.”

  The moment had come. It felt so natural now, so right to do this. The new old world, at this table in the Magnolia.

  “You’re better than I am,” he said. “You’re a better guitarist, a better singer, and I know for sure a better songwriter. And you’re only going to get better still. I’m a party band type of guy.”

  “‘When The Storm Breaks’ isn’t a party band song. You’ve written plenty of songs that aren’t.”

  “You wrote all the parts that really said something. You wrote the parts that touched people. Their emotions, and all. I just hung on. You know what was driving me? Anger. At a lot of things, and I’ll explain if you want to hear it. Anger’s a tame word for it. More like fucking white-hot volcanic rage, which I guess you guys saw a lot of.” He took a drink of his Pibb. “You can only go so far on that. I figured out, when we started getting the big crowds and the media attention… I started losing my anger. I started feeling like…you know…we were a success, which is what the lack of was making me even more angry. Without that in me, what do I have? I’m not nearly as good as I need to be. I know that. So what do I have?”

  “You are good,” she said. “Ask the fans if you are or not.”

  “I’m not good enough,” Nomad said.

  She sighed heavily and threw him a look of exasperation. “No one’s good enough! Everybody has to push, and push, and try to break through some kind of wall. I know I’m not good enough. But I hope—I plan—on being better tomorrow, or the next time out. You start from where you are. You’ve broken through a lot of walls. Yes,” she said when he made a scoffing noise, “you have. But maybe the next wall you have to break through will be with your talent, not your fists.”

  He thought about that, and he progressed a step further into his own new world. “Will you help me?”

  “What? Like, give you lessons? I can see that happening!”

  “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.

&nbs
p; 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.

  “Comi
n’ 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.