Jeremy knows he has three weapons: the soap in the sock, his Corps training, and the element of surprise. If he wants the money, he has to get the job done. So he moves forward, his teeth gritted, and when he reaches the broken section of fence he can see them down there in the culvert, one going through the man’s pants pockets and the other taking the watch off the right wrist.
One says something to the other, and the guy spoken to gives a short, wheezy laugh.
Before the laugh can end, Jeremy has slid down the side of the culvert and swung the soap-cake weapon against the side of the guy’s green-knit capped head. There is a very satisfying
thunk
like woodblocks hitting together. The laughing thief is not laughing any more. He makes a strangled sound and as the man falls Jeremy sees blood drooling from his mouth and figures part of a bitten-off tongue has gone down his throat. The thief in the ball cap looks up and freezes, but he proves to be faster than Jeremy would’ve thought because in the next instant he scuttles away from the body before Jeremy can swing at him; then he turns and runs like flaming hell along the culvert in the opposite direction.
At once Jeremy is after him, because if that bastard’s got the wallet then all this would be for shit.
The guy is fast, no doubt about it. Fear tends to speed the feet. But Jeremy is determined, and though he starts gasping for breath within the next ten seconds he can’t let the thief steal his money. He tries his hardest to overtake the man, yet he can’t quite get the boost of power his legs need. He is a very long way from his memory—fond, now—of running six miles in the rain at Camp Pendleton as fast as he could haul it.
If the Corps taught him any one thing, it was tenacity. It was stick to something until the something gives. The culvert keeps going on and on, but suddenly Jeremy’s tenacity pays off, because the thief breaks his rhythm and tries to scramble up the sloping side on the left to get out. He reaches up and grabs a handful of weeds, one basketball sneaker slides on the dusty concrete seeking a grip, and then Jeremy is upon him. A swing of the soap cracks against the thief’s left knee and buckles the leg. The guy says, “Oh man, oh man, come on,” in a boyishly pleading voice, and Jeremy figures he must be just a kid, really, but that doesn’t matter; this will be a night for the kid’s education.
Jeremy hauls the thief down by his neckchains, and when the kid turns and kicks at him with his good leg and hits Jeremy a glancing blow on the left ribcage it does not go well for him.
Jeremy avoids a fist, twists his body to deflect a knee to the groin, and then he hits the guy across the face with his cake of soap and there is a popping noise as a nose explodes. He swings again, hits him below the black streaming mass on his face and from the sound of it probably has claimed all of his front teeth. A third strike bangs into the guy’s shoulder, but by then the body is sinking down without resistance and the thief starts crying and puking at the same time there at the bottom of the endless culvert.
“Oh man…oh man,” the kid is saying. If Jeremy didn’t know what it was he wouldn’t recognize it as English.
Jeremy tries to speak. First he has to get his wind back. His ribs are going to be bruised tomorrow. He almost swings the weapon again, out of pure rage, but he decides the thief has had enough education for one night. “You got his wallet?” Jeremy asks.
“OhmanI’mfucked,” comes the garbled answer.
“His
wallet
, douchebag. Where is it?”
A trembling, bloody hand that has been clasped over a face unfit for public viewing digs into a pocket and comes up with a thin little piece of leather. Jeremy takes it. When he removes the money he realizes that this is not the Hispanic dentist’s wallet, but the thief’s own because he’s holding a measly trio of bills that he can’t make out in the dark.
“Where’s
his
wallet?” Jeremy demands. “The guy in the suit.”
But he’s lost his audience, because the kid has leaned back against the culvert’s side with both hands pressed to his face. Jeremy pats him down, finds some change in one pocket, a set of car keys in another. He keeps the change. The empty wallet goes into the weeds. Jeremy turns away and walks back to where the Hispanic man is still lying unconscious and the other thief is curled up on his side.
Beside the man’s right leg is the dropped wallet. It has a satisfying weight of cash, which Jeremy promptly removes. Somebody could make some money off all the credit cards in there, but Jeremy’s not that kind of player. He tosses the emptied wallet aside and then he kneels down and checks the man’s heartbeat. It’s strong enough; better a headache than a heart attack. The man begins to groan and stir, and Jeremy decides it’s time to make an exit.
First, though, he takes the other thief’s wallet and comes up with four bills. There are another two bills and change in the right pocket, along with a very nasty little length of black leather with a lead cylinder sewn up inside. He’ll count his money when he gets back to the motel.
He throws the bloodied gym sock with its weight of soap as far as he can into the night, and then he climbs out of the culvert, goes through the broken section of fence, walks to his truck as if strolling through an English garden, and drives away. He expects Gunny to be there, to say
Good work
or
Nice job
or something, but Gunny does not show. It’s okay, Jeremy thinks. Another thing they taught him in the Corps was the value of self-reliance.
On the drive back, through streets nearly empty, Jeremy has to pull over into a restaurant’s parking lot because a fit of shaking has come upon him and cold sweat has exploded from his flesh. He can’t get his breath, he thinks maybe he’s got a cracked rib and what is he going to do now? But he sits holding onto the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white, and when at last he takes a deep breath and sees he’s pulled up in front of a Popeye’s Fried Chicken joint he has to give out a broken laugh because God has such a twisted sense of humor. A mean streak, really.
He decides he’s all right. No cracked rib. Just the thrumming of violence through his nerves and the smell of blood up his nose.
In his motel room, under the light bar in the bathroom, Jeremy finds himself richer by three hundred twenty-eight dollars and seventeen cents. Not a bad night’s work.
He congratulates himself by buying a Dr Pepper and two bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips from the vending machines down by the office, and when at last he passes into a twilight sleep he feels well-fed.
ELEVEN.
At six o’clock on Saturday morning the Scumbucket pulled away from the La Quinta Inn on Remcon Circle in El Paso. George was at the wheel, Ariel sat in the front passenger seat, Nomad and Terry were behind them and Berke had her usual place. There was no joking around, no cutting comments flying back and forth; in fact, it was way too early to do anything but mutter. It had been a hard gig at the Spinhouse last night, a series of frustrations. Today they had about two hundred and eighty miles to travel before three o’clock. They were heading in a northwesterly direction up I-10 into New Mexico, and would follow it when it turned off almost due west for Tucson.
The call from Ash had come on Wednesday afternoon, about an hour after their interview on KTEP’s local radio talkshow. The Saturday night gig at Fortunato’s in Tucson was still open if they wanted it, he’d told George. And if they went that far, they might as well go on to San Diego and the rest of the venues, finish up the tour, but it was the band’s decision so if they needed some time to think about it they could let him know in the morning.
“How about the situation in Sweetwater?” George had asked as he lay on the bed in the room he shared with Nomad and Terry. This time, John Charles got the rollaway. “Did they find the shooter?”
There’d been no progress, Ash had told him. He said he had another call in to Detective Rios but was waiting to hear back.
George had thanked him, and when Ash had ended the call George said to his roomies, “We need to get Ariel and Berke in here and figure out what we’re going to do after the Spinhouse. We’re still on the schedule in Tucson and Ash is talking about us finishing the tour. What do you think?”
“Okay with me,” Nomad had said. “If everybody else says yes.” He’d lived in Tucson for two years in his early twenties, working at Budget Rent-A-Car at the airport and playing with a couple of bands that never got off the ground. It pleased him to go back to his old stomping grounds with some success under his wings.
“Me too,” Terry agreed, but what was foremost on his mind was getting to Eric Gherosimini’s house outside Albuquerque and seeing Lady Frankenstein.
“Let’s find out what
they
say.” George had reached back and knocked twice on the wall, and in a few seconds Ariel had opened the connecting door.
It had not been such a tough decision. They were professionals, and the show must go on.
That didn’t mean the show was going to go perfectly, or even
well
. As George drove the Scumbucket under the glare of a cloudless sky and between craggy brown mountain ranges, the band lay back in a silent reflection of the night before.
The Spinhouse had been packed, the merchandise and CDs had sold at a brisk pace, but the troubles had started when the lead singer of the Soul Cages—angry at being displaced as headliners for the night and not a little bit drunk—made a remark to Nomad backstage that a lot of Mike Davis’s fans were out there, they would’ve been smart to sell Beelzefudd CDs and T-shirts instead of The Five’s shit. Nomad had given him a glare that could melt glass, though he’d held his tongue and temper. He’d been in bands that had been knocked down from headliner status before, he knew what that felt like, but for two nickels and a cup of warm piss from a leper he would’ve punched the oh-so-groovy young fucker’s RayBans right off his face.
Then there was the show itself. Nomad had decided not to do the party song ‘Bad Cop’ and start it off with ‘Something From Nothing’, which rocked pretty hard but slowed down for a quieter chorus:
When things fall apart and the story comes to its end,
You have to make something out of nothing again.
Which was about the way they all felt.
Within a few minutes, Nomad had nearly put a foot through his malfunctioning monitor speaker before Ariel could calm him down. Her own monitor started going out during the third song, she couldn’t hear herself and she was drifting off-key and screwing up the rhythm too. George had huddled with the tech guy, a well-meaning aged hippie who had tripped over the fantastic light way too many times and as a result moved in slow-motion suitable for an alternate plane of existence, trying to make sense out of the tangle of cables and connections in the beatup mixing console. Everything had looked and sounded good in the light of day at sound check, but in the dark with six mirrorballs spinning at the ceiling, the noise of contained thunder from Berke’s drums, the hollering of beer-stewed fans and the speaker system throwing out shrieks and growls as it neared imminent overload and fuse blowout, the console revealed itself to be as addled and time-warped as its kaftan-clad master.
While George rode the sick console, Terry was trying to cover Mike’s line on the songs they’d agreed really needed the bass bottom, and he’d missed a couple of cues for his own keyboard parts. That was shocking in itself, because Terry never screwed up his parts; the realization came pretty quickly that he was trying too hard, and Nomad told him to concentrate on his usual job and forget the bass, which pissed Berke off because she thought it was disrespectful to Mike’s memory, like his part could just be thrown away and nobody would care.
But when the time came for Berke’s drum solo, at the midpoint of ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, she turned her anger into energy. With the opening blasts from her double crash cymbals the others knew to step back out of range. The stage was hers, and for almost three minutes she owned not only that platform but every ounce of turbulent air between the Spinhouse’s black-painted walls. She put her head down and became a machine, starting up a funk groove with kick and snare, complicating it with hi-hats, buzz rolling, double stroke hits, then breaking into a free-form conversation between the ride cymbal, the kick and the high
crack
of snare rimshots, speeding up and slowing down, speeding up and slowing down, slower, slower, now into a brassy
click-clack
clockwork of hi-hats with the kick drum thudding below them, adding a display of triplets and single stroke sevens and returning to a strutting funk groove in the tradition of her father’s soulful style before he lost his mind. With a brief shake of her head she waved Terry off at the two-minute mark when he came back onstage to add his keyboard part, and he drew away from the blue and red spotlights. Whatever she needed to say, she was determined to make it heard by her effort alone.
In the forty seconds or so that followed, Berke took her playing to the edge. She sat astride her throne at the center of a storm, and as her hands and her drumsticks blurred she went into a complex pattern between her floor toms, her snare, the kick and the sheet-brass Zildjian crashes. Nomad saw from his position the little lights of cellphone cameras sparkling out there in the dark. She was going so hard he thought she was going to destroy her kit, and as one drumstick snapped on the edge of the snare she reached into her holster of spares, drew another one out and kept going without missing a half-beat. Sweat gleamed on her face, her eyes were closed, she was a red-lit torch high somewhere in the drummer’s nirvana. The pitching hard-struck cymbals shimmered with blue and purple light, the black walls spoke back to her the thunder she was speaking, and the other members of The Five understood that furious wild language:
I am somebody, I am here, I am somebody, I am here
and I have earned this moment
.