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replaced . Look, there’s nobody who’s so all-that they can’t be replaced.”
    “What are you going to do when you get tired of cleaning the cobwebs out of little plastic keyboards? Get a gig at the Holiday Inn bar? You going to put out your tipbowl with the five-dollar bill in it? Start playing Billy Joel requests?”
    “Don’t knock Billy Joel,” Terry cautioned.
    “I’m knocking you . Thinking you can walk away from music and be happy about it.”
    “I’m not walking away, I’m—”
    “Repositionin’,” said Mike, which caused Terry to shut up because it sounded good, or at least better than what he was fumbling to get out. “Yeah, I get it.” Mike nodded and rubbed his chin. There were scrolled tattoos on the knuckles of each finger. “Repositionin’. Seems to me like everybody ought to reposition from time to time. Shake things up, see what falls out.”
    Berke scowled and was about to say something back to him, and maybe it would have been What the fuck do you know about it but in fact Mike Davis did know a whole hell of a lot about repositioning so she let it slide.
    Nomad figured that for every bright star and flaming asshole in a band, there were a dozen Mike Davises. The solid guy, the workman. The man who steps back out of the spotlight to play, because he doesn’t like the glare. Mike was thirty-three years old, stood about five-ten, but he was a small-framed guy—skinny, really—who looked like he was always in need of a good meal, though he ate like a grizzly bear just out of hibernation. He was tough and weathered and wiry in the way that said do not mess with me for I will take your fucking head off and use it as a planter . Nomad had seen Mike stare down a murder clique of drunk football players from the University of Tennessee, in a dismal little club in Knoxville, and something had passed between Mike and those three mouthy, swaggering young men—something dangerous, some message between animals—that warned them off before they made a very bad mistake. Maybe it was the long beak of a nose, the cement slab chin always stained with stubble, or the dark brown eyes hollowed back in a chiselled face that generally betrayed no emotion. He nearly always won in their poker games on the road, because it was like trying to read the expressions of a crab. He had shoulder-length dark brown hair that was showing streaks of gray at the temples. He would say he’d earned it, and more, for all he’d been through. Eight bands that Nomad knew of, and probably more Mike didn’t care to talk about. Two ex-wives, one in Nashville and one with their six-year-old daughter in Covington, Louisiana. Mike had been born just up the road from there, early Christmas morning, 1974, in Bogalusa. His life had been anything but holy.
    It was the tattoos on his arms that people saw first, and those either scared the shit out of you and made you keep your distance or entranced you into approaching nearer, if you dared. He wore sleeveless T-shirts to show off his sleeves. Moby Dick rising from the sea was the first art on the knob of his right shoulder, and on the left was the grinning freckled face of a boy who Mike said was his older brother Wayne, killed eighteen years ago in a lumberyard accident. His first bandmate. Played a mean Fender Telecaster, Mike said. Blue fire, like a cut diamond. The Tele, not the brother. It was also there, underneath the boy’s face, angled like a bowtie gone awry.
    Nomad had always thought that people carried worlds within them. Whatever they had experienced, whatever they saw or felt, whatever joys or sorrows, those things could never be exactly duplicated by anyone else, so everybody carried their own world. In Mike’s case, the tattoo artists—more than a half-dozen, in often jarringly-different styles—had depicted his world on his arms. From shoulders to wrists, it was all there in vibrant ink of many colors: faces of women and men copied from photographs, a variety of