The Five
Copyright © 2011 by The McCammon Corporation.
All rights reserved.
Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2011 by Vincent Chong.
All rights reserved.
Interior design Copyright © 2011 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.
All rights reserved.
Electronic ISBN
9781596064379
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
www.subterraneanpress.com
Table of Contents
Death of A Band
One
Two
Three
Four
Are You My Pet
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Ballad of The Greek Potatoes
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Stone Church
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
This Seat Is Saved
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Twenty Five
Twenty Six
Twenty Seven
Twenty Eight
Twenty Nine
The Last Song
Thirty
Thirty One
Thirty Two
Thanks and Dedications
’Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, this life.
Try to make ends meet,
You’re a slave to money then you die.
I’ll take you down the only road I’ve ever been down.
You know the one that takes you to the places
where all the veins meet.
Bittersweet Symphony
The Verve
ONE
Death of a Band
ONE.
Nomad decided he would have to kill the waitress.
< >
How he would do it, he didn’t know. But it would have to be done soon, because in another minute he was going to go off like that dude in The Thing whose alien blood bubbled and shrieked under the touch of a hot wire. His neck was going to grow six feet long and spikes would shoot out of his arms before he tore the room apart. The waitress was cheerful and talky. Nomad hated cheerful and talky. He wasn’t a particularly good guy, nor a very bad one. He was a musician.
Besides, he wasn’t worth a damn before noon, and here he was at ten in the morning sitting in a booth at a Denny’s restaurant just off I-35 at Round Rock, about twenty miles north of Austin. Everything was too bright for him in here. Everything was yellow and red and the sun was blasting between the blinds of the east-facing windows. His sunglasses helped a little, but underneath them his eyes were tired. And now here came the fucking waitress again, her third swoop past in as many minutes. She was an old hippie chick somewhere in the human wasteland of her late forties, he figured. She looked like she’d been somebody’s groupie, back in the day. She was too thin and too old to be wearing her copper-colored hair in braids like some kind of Pippi Longstocking wannabe. She was bringing the coffee pot, she in her goldenrod yellow uniform, smiling, a big-toothed goddess of breakfast. Her nametag said Hi I’m Laurie.
“Oh, my God,” Nomad said, to no one in particular.
“Fill ’em up?” Laurie asked, coffee pot poised.
There were various noises of assent. “Thanks,” Mike said, when his cup was brimmed, and then Laurie answered, “No problem,” and Nomad looked at the ketchup bottle as a weapon of murder because she’d just stepped on the nuts of one of his worst pet peeves. Where that damned No Problem had started he didn’t know, but he wished he had two minutes in a locked room with the sonofabitch who’d first said it. Like a waitress or waiter was saying Oh it’s no problem that you’re asking me to do something that I’m fucking paid to do, and that is part of my job description, and that if I didn’t do I would be kicked in the ass out the door by whoever pays me to do it. Oh no, it’s no problem at all.
Then Laurie took a long look at all of them, at Nomad and Ariel and Terry in the first booth and Mike and Berke in the one just behind, and she gave a lopsided little grin and came up with the familiar question: “Are ya’ll in a band?”
Nomad, whose given name was John Charles, did not rate breakfast at the top of his daily needs. Some of the others liked it. Mike and Terry did, especially, and had wanted to stop here before they headed up to Waco. Usually they stopped at a barbecue joint just outside Austin called Smitty’s, where the one-eyed ex-Marine cook put eggs and beef hash in a blender with hellacious homemade hot sauce and called it a Texas Tornado, but Smitty had closed up shop at the first of the summer and so Denny’s got the vote. They had never been in here before and had never met Laurie, but of course she knew. Probably because if there were thirteen hundred and fifty-two guitar players in Nashville there had to be fourteen hundred and sixty-three bands in and around Austin, so seeing musicians sitting in a Denny’s was no biggie. But more clues were the bracelets of green vines and music notes—the opening bars of ‘Amazing Grace’—tattooed around Ariel Collier’s wrists, or maybe Terry Spitzenham’s soul patch and shaved skull, or Mike Davis’s heavily-tattooed arms, or Berke Bonnevey’s silver nose ring and in general her do-not-fuck-with-me attitude, or Nomad’s own shoulder-length black hair, sunglasses designed to shut out the world, and his dark demeanor.
Take all that together and you had either a band or a freak show, and some would say there was very little difference.
“We are,” Ariel answered, and she offered the waitress the encouragement of a direct gaze and a smile, which Nomad had known was coming because Ariel—sweet, simple child—could never turn her face from a stranger.
“What’s your name? Your band’s name, I mean?”
“The Five,” Ariel said.
There was just the briefest of pauses, and then Laurie wrinkled her brow and cocked her head to one side as if she’d missed part of that. “The five what?”
“Aces,” Mike mumbled, into his coffee cup.
“Asses,” Berke corrected.
But Laurie’s attention was still on Ariel, as if she knew Ariel was probably the only person in this group who wouldn’t steer her into a ditch.
“Just The Five,” Ariel said. “We wanted to keep it easy to remember.”
“Oh, yeah. Like the Fab Five, right?”
“Fab Four,” Terry spoke up. The sunlight sparked off his round-lensed wire-rimmed glasses, which were suitably Lennonesque. “That was the Beatles.”
“Right, right.” Laurie nodded, and again she swept her eyes across the assembled Five, in all their glory of an early-morning saddle-up and an impending ride into the great unknown. “How come there are six of you?” She motioned with the coffee pot toward the place next to Berke where the sixth member had been sitting until about ninety seconds ago.
“He’s the manager,” Ariel replied.
“The slave driver,” Mike said. “Keeper of the keys and the money bags.”
“The boss, huh?” Laurie asked. “Well, I guess everybody’s got to have one.” She caught sight of another customer flagging her down for a refill, and she said, “’Scuse me,” and moved away.