“No, he had the idea for all of us to write a song before we got there. He came up with the idea, but she…” Ariel hesitated, as lost as she’d been in her dream. What exactly was she trying to get at? “…is refining it,” she said, for want of a better term.
“Is refining it? Is? Ariel, here are the lines of the song, right here on this page. In this notebook. Your notebook. And you came up with this line about figuring what to keep and what to leave behind, didn’t you? You did, not…her. So how can she be refining the song? How can she have anything to do with it? Okay, maybe George had a dream about her in the hospital, just like you did last night, but I don’t see—”
“Why would George have had a dream about her? He hardly spoke to her that day.”
“That’s the way dreams work. Things pop in and out. Look, I haven’t had any dreams about her. As far as I know, neither have John or Berke. If she was like…some kind of supernatural force or something, then why wouldn’t she speak to all of us at the same time?”
Ariel almost said it, but she didn’t: Maybe she spoke to the one who would listen, and maybe she trusted that listener to carry the message forward.
“What would be the reason for it?” Terry had his hand on her shoulder, like someone might do to calm a deranged person. “Honestly, now. Are we supposed to write a song that brings about whirled peas? Come on! Are we supposed to write a song that makes us…like…a huge success and suddenly we’re the great big music stars? If you’ve noticed, we’re all over the news right now, and you know who made that possible? It wasn’t that girl.” He leaned in closer, as if confiding a secret, but Ariel already knew what he was going to say. “It was Jeremy Pett. It was Mike’s murder, and George getting shot. It was some nut with a .25 at Stone Church. Yeah, I believe there’s a God, and I believe there’s a Satan too. I believe in a Heaven and a Hell, and all the stuff that a lot of people laugh at. But this is just a few lines of a song.”
“A .25?” Ariel asked. That was the first she’d heard of it. “True didn’t say what kind of gun it was.”
“It sounded like a .25 to me. A small gun. My dad’s a collector. Handguns, not rifles. He took me out to a pistol range a few times.” Terry shrugged. “It’s one of the man things he was pushing on me.” He reached out for the notebook and the pen. “Can I show you something?”
She gave the two items up.
Terry sat for a while looking at the lines, and then beneath the last line he wrote in the purple ink Won’t you move my hand, please tell me what to write.
Then he waited, pen poised.
“Okay already,” Ariel said. “I get it.”
Terry’s hand moved, and he began to write.
I’m sitting here like a candle on the darkest night.
I’ve got my hot flame, got my flicker on, but where am I when my light is gone?
I wish you safe travel, courage, you’re gonna need it.
Terry looked up and handed her back the pen. “Second verse. Did that girl write it, or did I?”
Ariel took the pen and also the notebook. She closed it.
He was right. Of course he was right. But she couldn’t help thinking that if she hadn’t been sitting out here on this bench, saving a seat just for Terry, and if she hadn’t told him what was on her mind, this second verse would not have been born today.
“What a way to earn a living.” Terry was looking at the two FBI agents who were still scanning the street, the houses and the hills. When he spoke again, his tone was a little wistful. “I’m so sorry about Mike and George. But the awful thing—the thing that makes you really sick—is that the media attention has already made us a success, if you want to use that word for it. It’s already sold thousands of CDs that we wouldn’t have sold just going on like we were. No telling what doors are about to open. And we’re just doing exactly what we were doing before.” He gave a small bitter smile. “Because before all this press and shit, where were we going? Around in a circle.” He didn’t have to remind her of what they’d shared for the last three years: the grinding road trips, the gigs where you hoped to sell enough T-shirts to pay for a motel room, the indignity of opening for bands—some younger and much less experienced—who got the lucky break of a record deal early on, and you never saw your own break coming, no matter how hard you worked or what you did. “That just wears you down,” Terry said. “You know? It wore me down. Way down. And before that I was there with the Venomaires, watching that death battle between John and Kevin Keeler over who was going to run the band, and then Kevin having his nervous breakdown on stage in Atlanta. With all that, and then Julia and the pain pills.”
When he sighed, it was the sound of a man whose joy has become a burden. “I don’t know what you guys are planning to do, whether or not you’ll keep the name and soldier on with some new faces. I’m leaving because I want to do the vintage keyboards thing, sure, but the other part is…where am I when my light is gone? What have I done? What am I going to do? Have I mattered to anybody?” He paused for a moment, and he straightened his glasses on his face as if to be able to see a little more clearly. “I need some time and space, all my own. I need to get off the bus and find out where I am.”
Ariel said, “The man in the church. The voice. About music being your life.”
“I’ll always play, if just for myself. I’ll always write songs. Maybe I’ll kick in with another band someday. Maybe I’ll record at home. I’m not doubting what he told me. I just want to know why he took the time to speak to me, if that’s all there is.” Terry sat staring at the ground, where the edge of the eucalyptus shade met the promise of the California sun. “Well,” he said at last, and he stood up a bit creakily, like an old codger artfully disguised in a young skin. “That stew smelled pretty good in there. I’m starving.”
Ariel also got to her feet, holding the notebook close to her side. “Let’s get at it,” she suggested. She took his hand and they walked into the house together, and behind them the FBI agents returned to their Yukon.
In the kitchen, the two lovely birds of morning had emerged from their slumber nests and had already been served with bowls of veggie stew. One bird had touselled, curly black hair and dark hollows under her equally dark eyes, she wore a loose-fitting T-shirt and a pair of camo-print men’s boxer shorts and she was sullenly nursing a cup of coffee that may or may not have been spiked like momma’s own. The other, wearing the Five tee and the gray PJ bottoms in which he’d slept, had an even more wildly cockscrewed bedhead of long black hair and—
“Christ, what an eye!” Terry said, not without admiration.
“Thanks, and go eff yourself,” Nomad replied, being a gentleman in front of the older lady.
The first thing that had jumped into Terry’s mind upon seeing that eye was the title of King Crimson’s 1974 album Starless and Bible Black. Except the swollen-shut lump of head-butted flesh wasn’t completely black, it contained splotches and streaks of green in maybe four different sick shades. It had been bad last night but today…whoa! It was time for the phantom to put his mask back on.