by Tim Wynveen
Cyrus finally succeeded in pulling free of Jimmy’s clutches. He wiped his palm against his pant leg and said, “It’s nice to meet you. But the others. I should go inside. They’re waiting …” Then, backing sheepishly away, he dragged the dolly into the hall.
Sonny, who was standing at the door of the dressing room, waved him in, but not before he took a good look at Cyrus’s equipment. “Your gear’s not half bad,” he muttered. “Let’s hope you know how to use it.”
As Cyrus set up his amplifier and effects, he realized he’d have to keep his volume down. The keyboard was plugged into a tiny practice amp. The drummer had a snare drum wedged between his knees.
Sonny made the introductions. He pointed to the guy who’d been tossing the football outside and said, “That’s Tony Two Poops. He sings some, plays percussion some. He thinks he knows how to play harmonica but he doesn’t. And whatever you do, don’t play cards with him. He’ll skin you alive. Beside him there is D.C.”
“Europa,” the woman corrected, her voice deep and smoky and heavily accented. “Europa Del Conte. But you can call me Eura.”
It was the woman he’d seen earlier with the dog. Up close, he noticed she had a tattoo along one side of her neck, showing just above the collar of her sweater. It was a vine with bright red berries and tiny purple flowers with yellow centres.
“Like I said,” Sonny continued brusquely, “that’s D.C. Mostly she sucks cock—”
“Sonny!”
“—but she’s been known to sing a tune or two. Doesn’t have much talent either way, though.”
Eura reached into the nearby ice bucket and threw a can of beer at Sonny’s head, not at all playfully. He caught it in mid-air, popped the top and tossed back a mouthful. He flashed her a toothy grin.
“Our drummer,” he continued, “is Chuck Ray. I’m on keyboards. And you, it seems, are our guitar player.” He mouthed the last words with a sour look on his face. Then he put the beer aside and said, “Let’s see what kind of trouble we’re in.”
Chuck winked at Cyrus. “Don’t let Sonny rattle your cage. He’s only a prick till you get to know him. After that he’s just an asshole like the rest of us.” Then he launched into a half-time shuffle.
Sonny moved behind a Fender Rhodes electric piano, setting up a loping bass line and framing the occasional chord of a simple blues jam. All the while he kept his eyes on Cyrus, who let a whole twelve bars go by as he fiddled with his knobs and adjusted the strap on his shoulder. He still wasn’t familiar with the new guitar, but he was aching to blast away, to feel the power and exaltation.
He cut loose when the band moved into the second verse, a flurry of notes building quickly to a blizzard, his hand racing about the fingerboard and fitting most of his favourite licks into a twelve-bar section. He wanted to show that, even minus a finger, he could blaze away with the best of them. When he finished, Sonny took a turn.
If Cyrus’s solo was manic and unmannered, Sonny’s was a lazy Southern drawl full of wit and wisdom. There were more spaces than notes, and each phrase had a face and a voice of its own, each voice telling a story, each story leading to the next, a graceful tale of life and humanity.
When the song stumbled to an end, everyone nodded approvingly—everyone but Sonny. He winced as if he was in pain and said, “Listen kid, we don’t get paid by the note, you know.” Then he left the room and returned a minute later with a rickety music stand and a leather satchel. He pulled out a handful of sheet music and placed it on the stand in front of Cyrus.
“Ah,” Cyrus said, “that could be a problem.”
“It’ll do for now. We’ll get you a better stand for the show.”
“No,” Cyrus explained, “I mean the music. I guess I wasn’t very clear with Mr. Conger.”
“I don’t follow you, kid.”
Everyone heard the wariness in Sonny’s voice. No one moved. No one breathed. Cyrus touched the stand and said, “I don’t read music.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“But chord charts, right? You can read those at least.”
Cyrus dragged a hand through his hair and said, “Look, I usually pick things up real fast. I’m sure it won’t be a problem.”
“Problem?” Sonny suddenly towered over him. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about problems, pal. Don’t talk to me about problems.” He began to pace the room. “So let me get this straight. You don’t read. And it’s clear you don’t know how to play your instrument. You’re sure as hell not good-looking. So what’s your excuse for living?”
“Sonny,” Eura said, “this is just a boy.”
“He’s a dull fuck who’s jerking me around here. Jesus.” For emphasis, he kicked out his cowboy boot and sent the music stand cartwheeling across the floor, sheet music flying every which way. Then he turned on Cyrus and aimed his finger like a gun. “Jim likes to have a lot of bodies onstage, so you’re gonna stand up there with us even if your amp’s turned off. The three of us can cover the rhythm and the chords all right. See if you can stick in a few notes without screwing up the whole thing.”
SEVEN
Clarence sat on a stump at the edge of the orchard and gazed down the long ridge where Cyrus had tobogganed every winter. He could see clear over to the next concession, and the next, all the way to the Owens’ old place, those big black fields, the fluorescent green of the irrigation pond, the writhing forms of the willows.
Clarence couldn’t stand to be around the house just now. It pained him to see Ruby suffering for the boy, pained him, too, that he could do nothing about it and was maybe even to blame. Below all that, haunting his every waking moment, was the question of whether they had caught all the cancer. He felt so tired, and he was afraid that they’d have to go back in and remove more and more of him until there was nothing left. He didn’t feel like working and had never had much use for play, so he had wandered out in the April sunlight to think about happier times, which led him back to the day he first set eyes on Riley Owen.
Clarence was sixteen, had just gotten his driver’s licence and was barrelling down the Second Concession in his father’s Ford pickup when he saw a kid standing in the middle of the road and heaving stones, regular as clockwork, at a fence post fifty feet away. The kid looked to be about ten, and he wore blue overalls and nothing much else—no T-shirt underneath, no shoes on his feet, his blond hair standing straight up like a shock of wheat. A good-looking boy but poor as could be.
Clarence pulled up beside him and leaned out the window. “Hey there, sport,” he said, “what’s your name?”
“Dizzy,” he replied, never breaking his rhythm, “Dizzy Dean.”
“Hey that’s funny. My name is Babe Ruth.”
The kid kept tossing a stone every five seconds. If he threw twenty at the post, fifteen hit their target. Clarence said, “You’re pretty good at that. Got any other tricks?”
He stopped throwing and edged over by the truck. “I’m saving up to buy me a ball and glove. Gonna be in the big leagues.”
Clarence had half a mind to tell him he’d be better off buying some clothes. Instead he said, “While you’re dreaming, why don’t you dream me up a million bucks and a gal with big knockers.”
The kid gave him a dark look and then grabbed another handful of stones from the side of the road. “That’s our place over there,” he said, whipping stone after stone into the middle of the black mucky field in front of them. “Jake Owen and son. My real name’s Riley.”
Clarence leaned farther out the window to get a better look. Settling back into the truck again, he said, “Don’t know what place you’re talking about, Riley. All I see’s an empty field.”
The boy scowled at Clarence, then started throwing at the fence post again. “Ain’t built yet,” he said. “Pa and me’ll build it ourselves.”
Something about Riley, the certainty, the bravado, made Clarence smile. He’d never had a brother or sister, and the sight of t
his kid made him ache for one. He wanted to tease him but hug him, too. He stuck his arm out the window and offered his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Riley Owen. Name’s Clarence Mitchell. If you ever need anything, that’s our place up thataways—Orchard Knoll.” Then he stepped on the gas and left Riley standing in a cloud of dust.
The summer of 1931, the Owens managed to build a small barn and a chicken coop. Jake was practical that way, or impractical, depending on your point of view. The house would come eventually, and until it did, they would make do. The important thing was to be productive, he felt. Food was scarce; most things were. That winter they would live in the coop.
Riley had a hard time those first months of school, getting into a dust-up almost daily, often with older boys who teased him about his threadbare clothing. But with the first snowfall and first snowball fight, things began to change. The boys of Lakeview School soon realized that no one could match Riley’s arm and accuracy. By the second week of winter, the taunting had stopped. By the new year, the smarter boys were enlisting Riley’s services. Come summer and the baseball season, he had earned their grudging respect.
Some friendships flow in a single direction, with one person taking on most of the maintenance. That’s how it was with Riley and Clarence, only not the way you might expect. Riley was younger, poorer, more needful in every way. It would be natural for him to seek out Clarence who had so much to share. But Riley was naturally a loner, and maybe he just couldn’t imagine that he had anything to offer in return. Whatever the reason, it was always Clarence who suggested they get together. Not that they were best friends or anything. There were six years between them; they went to different schools. But Clarence, a straight-A student, helped Riley with his homework. He offered him rides around town. And it was Clarence who gave him his first ball glove.
“Here,” he said one day, handing the fielder’s mitt out the window of the truck. “Never had much use for this. You might as well have it.”
Riley turned it over, studying the intricate lacing of the web and fingers. He held it to his face and breathed in the aroma of good leather. Then he handed it back. “Don’t think I better.”
“Why’s that?”
“Ain’t mine, is it?”
Clarence studied the glove a moment, then held it out the window again. “Then maybe you could do me a favour, Riley, and break it in for me. The leather’s awful stiff.”
Riley jammed his hands into the pockets of his overalls. “Could do,” he said, his eyes darting from Clarence to the glove and back again. Finally he reached out and took the mitt. He put it on his left hand and pounded the leather with his right. “When you need it back?”
Clarence looked into the distance like he was doing some heavy figuring.
“Hard to say, Riley. Maybe next week, the week after. See if you can whip it into shape, will you?”
It became one of the signatures of their friendship. Once a month to start with, less often as the years went by, but continuing even after they were grown men with their own farms, Riley would ask, “You want that glove back yet?” And Clarence would shake his head and say, “No, not yet. You keep it awhile longer. Needs a bit more seasoning.”
And of all the pictures that Clarence had seen in his fifty-six years—the babies, the weddings, the birthday parties and graduations—none had brought him more joy than the photograph Riley sent him the spring of 1940. Clarence had just graduated from the agricultural college in Guelph, and Riley was a tall muscular farm boy who could throw a baseball through the eye of a needle and near a hundred miles an hour. In the picture, he was kneeling on the grass of Briggs Stadium in Detroit, home of his favourite team, the Tigers. On his right was Hank Greenberg, and on his left, Charlie Gehringer. Riley was grinning from ear to ear, having just signed a minor league contract. Soon he would be heading south to play with the Toledo Mud Hens, but for that golden moment in the photo, he was a Tiger. And there in front of him on the grass was the glove.
Clarence got to his feet and began to walk through the orchard toward the house. He’d heard it said more than once that Riley Owen had been born with a pure talent for baseball. But Clarence had his doubts about that. To his mind, talent was like faith—it only showed itself after a lot of practice. Hard work uncovered the nugget of one’s talent, and the same hard work expressed it.
Equally untrue, at least by Clarence’s reckoning, was the idea that talent was always such a good thing. What if all your hard work uncovered the wrong kind of talent, the sort that could twist your life out of shape and make you unfit for the workaday world? What if, like Riley, you were born with a talent for play—not quite enough to make a go of it, but enough to ruin your taste for honest labour? What then? And how would Riley, in light of his own mistakes, have instructed his son about the future?
According to Isabel, and even a few people in town, Cyrus had some musical ability (though no one, to his knowledge, had ever suggested it was anything more than a passable talent). And while there was nothing inherently wrong with the boy’s desire to be a musician, it made Clarence ache with sadness, the thought of all the disappointments he was sure to face. After all, if Riley hadn’t made it with pure talent and a full set of tools, what chance did Cyrus have? That’s why Clarence had been grooming the boy to work in the orchard.
Of course Clarence couldn’t imagine how it felt to reach so far beyond one’s grasp. Unlike Riley or Cyrus, he had been born into a life he loved, a job he relished, a world that pleased him daily. All his life he had known who he was and where he was going; and though his talents were much the same as his father’s and grandfather’s and were applied in the same daily routines of farm life, it was a great source of comfort, he felt, to have his talent and his life in agreement.
For Riley, every day had meant trouble of some sort. In time it had knocked the stuffing out of him and made him a sorry man. Clarence could only hope that Cyrus would be spared that grief.
RUBY LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW to the apple shed. Still no sign of Clarence. She wandered to the back door and looked down the driveway. Her car was just where she’d left it, beside the pickup. No traffic on the road at all. The school bus had rumbled past long ago.
She had work to do but couldn’t face it, so she drifted through the house, touching this, straightening that. In the bathroom she took Cyrus’s deodorant from the medicine cabinet and inhaled the brisk athletic scent. She smelled his shaving cream, which he used about once a week to scrape off the fuzz. She lifted his toothbrush from its holder and then put it back, a lump catching in her throat.
Upstairs, she worked her way down the hall, poking her head into each room. At the sight of her big queen-size bed she remembered Cyrus sleeping among the coats that one Christmas, could have been the last time they were all together, all the Owens, all the Mitchells. She remembered, too, how he used to come visiting with his mother, before he was old enough for school; and as Ruby and Catherine chatted over tea, he’d dress up in Clarence’s jacket and dress shoes, looking so adorable she had wanted to squeeze the living daylights out of him.
His room was just the way he had left it. His guitar was in its case under the bed. His stereo was immaculate, his records neatly arranged. Ruby had always hoped he would do more with the room. Wouldn’t another boy have put up baseball pennants or pin-ups or something? Wouldn’t there be a street sign maybe, or a notice on the door warning everyone to keep out? With Cyrus it was like he was just visiting. Well-mannered, polite, but not really committed. No calendar on his desk, no doodles on his blotter, no clutter, no photos. There were a few books on a shelf above his bed, things Isabel had bought for him. There was a compass, too. A gyroscope. And a cardboard tube full of Pick-Up sticks.
Without thinking, she grabbed the tube and shook it like a rattle. Ruby had never been one for games, and most especially that one. For some reason, it had always made her feel sad. But Cyrus loved it, even as a teenager. You wouldn’t think there would be much to get excited about.
“Hello, Mrs. Mitchell, any word?”
“Not much. He called to let us know he was safe. Campenola, I think he said. But that’s all we know. No school today?”
“Well, yeah, but I was thinking I could come out there this afternoon. I don’t want to bother you or anything. I just thought we could talk.”
“About what, dear?”
“About Cy.”
Ruby felt a secret thrill at the thought of the two of them playing hooky. “Why don’t I come and get you?” she said. “We could go for a drive or a walk or a cup of tea. Whatever you like.”
They met at the Three Links Hall a little before noon and drove to the town pier for a hot chocolate. For the first while, Janice looked out the side window, not interested in her drink. Finally she said, “I woke up this morning and realized my whole life had changed. I lost my best friend. The band is dead. I don’t care about school or summer vacation or anything, not even my folks. How does that happen?”
Ruby squeezed her hand. “You’ll be fine, dear.”
“I know,” she said. “But what I mean is, you think your life is pretty cool, everything pretty much the way you want it, and if somebody asked you to point to the coolest part, the part that makes all the other parts cool, you couldn’t do it, could you? Because it’s all just your life, one thing, like I see a pair of jeans here and not a million threads. You know?”