“I’m just asking.”
“Don’t ask.”
Terry started to slide his chair back, and then he seemed to think better of it. He drew a long breath, as if preparing himself.
“What do you want from me?” Nomad asked, again on the verge of either anger or tears. “You want me to get down on my knees and pray for George’s life? You want me to promise I’ll be a good boy or some shit like that, so George will come out of that operating room alive?” He felt his mouth start to twist into a snarl. “It doesn’t happen that way. Praying to a myth doesn’t get it. Either he lives or he doesn’t. Okay? And anyway…if God wasn’t a myth, why should He care about George? Why should He care about anybody in this room, or this city, or on this fucking earth? Huh?”
“I don’t know,” Terry said, but the way he said it told Nomad that maybe Terry had already asked himself these questions, many times over.
“Damn straight you don’t know.” Nomad looked to Ariel for support, but she was staring down at the floor. “Nobody knows, and for damn sure those fucking preachers don’t know. So what are we sitting here talking about?”
Terry’s face was impassive. Whatever he had been preparing himself for, he was ready. He said, “Can I tell you a story?”
“What kind of story?”
“A true story. Something that really happened to me, in a church about—”
“Oh, shit!” Nomad interrupted, scowling. “Come off it, man!”
“Terry?” Ariel’s voice was quiet but firm. “You can tell me.”
Terry nodded, but when he spoke again he was still staring at Nomad. “In a church about forty miles northwest of Oklahoma City,” he went on. “A small town called Kingfisher. Did I ever tell you about my dad?”
Nomad didn’t speak. Ariel said, “You told us he has a furniture store.”
“Not just a furniture store. He’s the White Knight there. That’s his chain of stores. White Knight Discount Furniture. Two locations in Oklahoma City, and four other stores across the state. One in Little Rock and one in St. Louis. My dad’s loaded. I mean, his dad started the business, but he really made it go. He’s a hard worker. He puts his nose to that grindstone, man. But it takes its due from him, I can tell you. With that many people working for you, and jumping when you say jump…it makes you into a bully, always pushing for what you want. Which he was, when I was growing up. It was his way or the highway, know what I’m saying?”
“Everybody has it tough,” Nomad commented.
“Yeah, that’s right. Ever hear this: Be kind to everybody you meet, because everybody’s fighting some kind of battle?” Terry paused for a response, but Nomad made none. “My dad was fighting one. His dad was, and back and back. But the deal was…you never said ‘no’ to Clayton Spitzenham. The White Knight just wouldn’t hear it. So I was seventeen years old and I’d been taking piano lessons since I was ten, and I told my dad I wanted to be a musician because music just…spoke to me…it was like food to me. I said I wanted to make music. Maybe join a band, or start one. I said I didn’t want to go into the family business. But you think he listened to me? You think he heard me?” A bemused and slightly bitter smile moved across Terry’s face. “Don’t think so. He said I’d outgrow all that. He said, Terry, you don’t know your own mind. You don’t know what’s good for you. You look around yourself, he said, and you’ll see that everything you have comes from that business you seem to want to turn your back on. This is a family business, he said. You have to realize what your place is in this family.”
Know your role, Nomad thought, remembering Felix Gogo’s advice.
“We really went at it,” Terry continued. “I was sticking to my guns and my dad was making the plans for me to get a business education.” He shrugged. “Hey, maybe it would’ve been good for me. Maybe I would’ve come to it myself, in time, but it wasn’t what I wanted. But he was pressuring me day and night, cutting down my music, cutting me down…everything he could do to get me in the box.”
The dreaded box, Nomad thought. For an artist, it was the worst thing. The safe, predictable thing that can lead a creative person to boredom, drugs, insanity and early death. Wasn’t that the point of the box? To kill risk, which was the life and soul of creation?
“He said everybody needs furniture,” Terry said. “But the world can go on just fine without music.”
“Oh,” Ariel said, as if she’d been punched in the stomach.
“I told him that wasn’t a world I wanted to live in. Without music? Without…my food? I mean, it’s like bread and wine to me, and you know what I’m saying. But there was nothing I could tell him, because when Clayton Spitzenham makes up his mind, it’s a done deal. And I guess I could’ve left home, just hit the road and gone, but I didn’t want it to be that way.” Terry hesitated, and now he was staring past Nomad at a distant place, his eyes lit up with lamplight behind the round lenses. “I guess I wanted him to give me his blessing, because for whatever he is, I did love him. I do love him. But like that was ever going to happen. Then…something did happen. On a Sunday morning, in a church in Kingfisher. And nobody knows about this but my folks, I’ve never told anybody because it just sounds so…” He trailed off, searching for a word.
“Holy-rolly?” Nomad prompted.
Terry gave a faint smile. “No, not that.” He found his word. “So awesome,” he said. “Maybe scary-awesome. But it did happen to me, just as I’m telling it. See, this church was building a camp for kids. They were going to be buying furniture for the cabins and the main building, and my dad wanted to get the contract. So he loaded me up, I guess to show how great of a family-man he was that he would bring his son with him to church even though he never set foot in one in Oklahoma City and neither did my mom, and we drove there and went in. He wanted to be seen, and to gladhand people, but neither one of us knew anybody there. I mean, it was forty-something miles from our house. So we’re sitting there in the pew, about midway in, and it’s a nice big church, modern, still smelled new, and the pastor gets up front and says there’s a special speaker that day.”
Terry was silent for a moment, working his fingers together. “When it came time for the speaker,” Terry said quietly, “the guy stood up at the lectern and looked out at the congregation. I don’t remember his name, but I remember that he was just real ordinary-looking. Kind of flabby and going bald, and he was wearing a tan suit. It was late June, warm outside. So he said hello to the people, and cracked a joke or something, and said he was going to talk about some mission work somewhere. And all of a sudden…just like that…he leaned over the podium and I remember…he trembled. His eyes closed, and he trembled, as if he was about to pass out. I remember that people gasped. Then the pastor jumped up to help him, and some other men at the front stood up…but then…that man lifted his face. He opened his eyes, and he’d gone pale and he was sweating, and he said, ‘I’m speaking to Terry’.”
“Oh, right!” Nomad said, with a crooked grin. “Did he like…have one of those booming voices that made the walls shake, and sawdust fell from the rafters?”
“No,” Terry answered, his own voice still quiet and controlled. “It was the same as it had been before. Just the voice of an ordinary man. I’m telling you what happened, John. It’s no joke, and it’s no lie.”
They stared at each other, until Nomad’s mocking smile faded away.
“Go on,” Ariel urged.
“The man spoke my name.” Terry turned his attention to Ariel and then back to Nomad once more. “And, sure, maybe there were other Terrys in the church. I think there were maybe eighty or a hundred people in there, so there could’ve been other Terrys. And he never looked at me, he just seemed to be staring at the back wall. But then he said, ‘Don’t be turned aside. Music will be your life’. And let me tell you guys…when you hear that from a stranger in a church you’ve never been in before…far from your home…what you feel is fear. The awesomeness came later. Right then, I just wanted to put my head down and hide,
because I was afraid.”
Terry waited for that to sink in. From Nomad there was no sign of interest or emotion. “He didn’t speak to me only. He spoke to two or three other people, but I can’t tell you what he said. Told them stuff he never should’ve known, is my guess. Then he just seemed to get tired, and he lowered his face again and he kind of staggered back, and the pastor got up and told the people to stay where they were, that everything was all right. He helped the man to his seat, and the man put a hand to his face and I could tell he was crying. Then my dad said to me, ‘We’re getting out of here’, and his face was the color of spit on a sidewalk. I mean, he was gray. So he got up and I got up and we went, and that was the end of him wanting that contract. I don’t think he ever went back there. I know I didn’t.”
Terry’s specs had slid down his nose a little bit, so he pushed them back into place with a forefinger. “We never talked about it. I guess he told my mom. Maybe he didn’t. But the thing is…after that happened, he was done trying to force his will on me. Whatever I wanted to do with music—whatever I wanted to try—he stepped aside and let me go my own way. I don’t think he was ever happy about it, but he accepted it. He still does. That’s why he’s helping me start the vintage keyboard business. He likes that word, business. But it took a stranger in a church for him to respect me, and what I wanted to do with my life. We didn’t know anybody there, John. There was no way it could have been anything but…” Again, he searched for his destination.
“The voice of God?” Nomad’s voice had a cutting edge. “Is that what you’re saying you heard?”
“I heard a man speaking,” Terry answered. “I’m not going to pretend to know where the words were coming from. But he said something that was meant for me and me alone. I’m sure of that. And the deal is…all I’ve ever wanted is to build a life with music in it, John. That was always my dream. Not to play on a stage in front of thousands of people or make tons of cash, or be anybody’s superstar.” He included Ariel with another glance. “I’ve gotten what I wanted…and more, really.”
“Okay, so you’re saying everything is like…preordained, right?” Nomad challenged. “It’s all written in the fucking stars?”
“He said ‘Don’t be turned aside’,” Terry answered. “So no, I don’t think it was preordained. I think I had a choice. He was just telling me how to get where I wanted to be.”
Nomad shook his head. “That’s bullshit.”
Terry grinned at Ariel, but his eyes were sad. “Now you see why I’ve never told anybody. Not even Julia.” His flighty, ethereal ex-wife, to whom he was married for less than a year before she took off from Austin to Florida with an old boyfriend. Nobody had known what he saw in her, except she was very pretty, she played classical piano and made great crepe St. Jacques when she wasn’t popping little blue Xanax tabs.
“Bullshit,” Nomad repeated, for emphasis.
“Do you think you know every-fucking-thing?” Terry asked, and now the sadness was gone; now he had some heat in his face and his eyes were bright with the beginning of anger and he had decided that right this minute—this minute—he was through backing down from John Charles because he knew what he’d seen and heard and—“Nobody on earth is going to say I’m a liar,” he said, his voice tight. He blinked rapidly; maybe he was still a little afraid of John, but this was important enough to fight for. “You don’t know everything. Not nearly. And I’m telling you I don’t either, because I don’t understand it and I never will, and I’m not trying to holy-roll anybody, but there’s a lot more to all this than we can see and hold. I mean, there’s like a world beyond this one. A dimension or something that we can’t get our minds around.”
“Oh, you’re talking about Heaven now? With the angels and the harps?”
“You make it sound stupid.”
“It is stupid, Terry. It’s stupid for stupid people.” When Terry paused, Nomad said, “Go on, let’s hear some more. Set it up so I can knock it down.”
But Terry stared at the floor and worked his hands together, and he didn’t answer as outside in the hallway there was the bing-bing of an intercom followed by a woman’s voice paging what sounded like ‘Dr. Pajiwong’.
At last Terry said, “It’s not as simple as you make it out to be. Or as simple-minded. See, you laugh and say it’s ‘bullshit’ because you’ve never heard a stranger speak your name in a church before. Nothing’s ever happened to you that shook your foundations, or made you think that you don’t know everything. I’m a human being, I can’t see through the dark glass. My personal belief is that there’s a Heaven and Hell of some kind, but—”
“Pitchforks and golden halos,” Nomad interrupted. “When I die I want to go south where the action is. I want a slut from Hell giving me an eternal—” Blow-job, he almost said, but he felt Ariel’s presence and he amended it to, “Lap dance.”
“Are you afraid,” Terry asked, as he lifted his gaze to Nomad’s, “to even let yourself wonder? Does that scare you so much?”
“No, it doesn’t scare me.” Nomad’s eyes narrowed. “I just don’t want to spend any time wondering about being nothing. Because that’s what you are after you die. Everything you were and thought, gone to nothing. Just like the dark blank before you were born. How come your stranger in the church didn’t help you out a little more with these kinds of questions, Terry? How come he like…hit and ran, without saying what everybody in that church really wanted to know. Huh? How come he just didn’t say, ‘I’m speaking with the voice of God, and I’m telling all of you there’s an eternity where everybody finds happiness…whatever that is’. How come he just picked out three or four people and left the others feeling like they were skinny kids in a schoolyard too nerdy to join the cool team?” He let that hang, and then he asked, “How come your stranger didn’t tell you why innocent children and good people like Mike get killed every day of every week, every month and every year? Now that would’ve been worth hearing. So if you’re saying it was the voice of God…he’s going to have to speak a whole hell of a lot louder before I’ll listen.”
Terry stared at him for a few seconds longer, with the reflection of Nomad’s face suspended on the lenses of his specs. Nomad stretched his legs out, leaned his head back and closed his eyes as an instruction for Terry to go find another place to sit. After a while Terry got up and pulled his chair over nearer Ariel, who gave him a faint smile and a nod but who saw that he’d been defeated in his purpose of making John Charles grasp the possibility of the Unknown Hand. That was how she’d always pictured God. An Unknown Hand, moving for the greater benefit of human beings. It seemed to her that when it could move it did, but there were times it could not, or for some unrevealed reason it did not.
John had asked some good questions, she thought as she watched him either feigning sleep or searching for it. Some questions that were asked by believers and non-believers alike. Believing didn’t mean the questions should be silenced, she thought.
She didn’t have the answers. No one on this side did, and if they pretended to they were probably lying to make money from frightened people, which made them deceivers that the Unknown Hand should have crushed…but it did not. Just as the Unknown Hand did not move to bring justice against the wicked, or stop evil, or eliminate suffering in an outpouring of miracles.
Because, she thought, that work depended upon known hands, the hands of men. Maybe the Unknown Hand moved things beyond the understanding of men, or set things into motion that asked men to make choices, and whatever choices men made they had to live with for better or worse. Maybe the Unknown Hand directed men, or prodded them, or presented them with problems to be solved and men were unaware of its presence in the chaotic life of day-to-day. But maybe the world belonged to men, it had been given to them as a gift, and whatever they did with that trust was their burden and responsibility, and the Unknown Hand—like the voice of a stranger in a church—could guide but not compel.
She didn’t have the answers. Like everyone
else, all she could do was wonder.
Berke came back in with a can of Coke she’d gotten from the first-floor vending machines. “All done with the prayer meeting?” she asked, but no one bothered to reply. She sat down on the sofa and propped her feet up on the table that held a stack of months-old magazines. What she didn’t intend to tell them was that, though she was far from being religious, she’d been curious about the chapel and had walked down that way to take a look. She’d stood on the threshold of a small, dimly-lit room with two pews, a lectern and a picture of Jesus kneeling in a garden. Maybe she’d said something in her mind about George. Maybe. It had been quick, just a passing thing. For good luck, if anything else. She’d always figured Jesus was kind of like a four-leaf-clover. A tip wouldn’t hurt either, she’d thought, so she’d put a buck in the slot of a little white lockbox screwed to the top of a table. Next to it was a white book where people wrote down the names of who they were praying for.
Better make it two bucks, she’d decided, but in the end it had been five.
About forty minutes after Berke’s return, an Asian doctor wearing blue scrubs and a surgeon’s cap came into the room. He told them in perfect English, his calm quiet doctor’s voice tinged with a trace of Southern accent, that George was out of surgery and in the ICU, and that the next twelve hours would be, as he put it, ‘the crucial period’. More than that, he couldn’t say. Nomad took that to mean the doctors had done all they were able to and now it was George’s fight.
They thanked him, and after he left they settled back into their places to wait some more. They were good at waiting; they did far more waiting than playing, so they’d made their peace with that necessary aspect of the musician’s life. But never before had they waited out the life or death of a bandmate, and it was going to be a trial for all of them.