Sweeter Life

by Tim Wynveen

  “I think I do.”

  “So how can it be that there is one thing, one thread, and you pull on it and the whole fabric comes apart? How could we not know our lives depend on something like that? Shouldn’t they teach us that at school?”

  “They teach us that at church, dear.” Ruby reached out to run her hand across the girl’s lovely red hair, wishing she could do more to help her through this pain. “Why don’t you come with me this Sunday? You might enjoy it.”

  “Church? We’ve never been a religious family.”

  “That hardly matters, does it? Lots of people aren’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still attend the service. And if you don’t find religion, maybe you’ll find something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. I know sometimes I just like to get up on a Sunday morning, put on a nice outfit and fix my hair. I’ll talk Clarence into coming along but usually he can’t be bothered. And it feels so good to be there at the church, whether I listen to the sermon or not, as if I was doing the best possible thing I could ever do.”

  Ruby felt foolish, talking to a young girl this way. After a long moment, she said, “You’re about as thirsty as I am. Shall we walk along the pier?”

  They strolled arm-in-arm, the air tangy with fish and fuel and creosote. As they walked, Janice told Ruby everything she knew about Cyrus’s plan, how he had taken the cheque and bought the new guitar, how he had intended to put up a few signs in the music stores announcing his availability. But he had said nothing about leaving Wilbury so soon. She had thought he would wait until summer.

  “Yes,” Ruby said, “but that was before we had our argument. Who knows what we’ve driven him to? Campenola is hundreds of miles away. Hounslow would seem like just around the corner.”

  Janice turned to face Ruby. “I’ve known Cy a long time,” she said, “and if you ask me, there’s no driving him to anything unless he’s already made up his mind. He can be awful stubborn.”

  “Cyrus? He was always such a sweetheart.”

  Janice laughed at that. “You’ve never been in a band with him. When it’s something he really cares about, he’s like a bulldog.”

  This was a side of the boy Ruby had never seen. “But he was always so sweet and considerate. He talked to me. We were close.”

  The obvious response, though unspoken, hung between them nonetheless. What mattered to him was music, and he had kept Ruby in the dark about that. How close could they have been?

  WHEN CLARENCE CAME IN FROM THE ORCHARD, Ruby’s car was gone. He fixed himself a sandwich and called Frank Pentangeles and asked him if he could help out awhile. Frank, who was older than Clarence and had worked at Orchard Knoll for more than forty years, was supposed to be retired. But he jumped at the opportunity, and they made plans to start next day setting up the sprayers. Then Clarence walked out to the shed and turned on the radio. He had it tuned to the mellow sounds of WJR in Detroit, but he wasn’t really listening. He was remembering when he was ten years old, the day he and Frank first learned how to prune.

  Frank’s dad, Domenic, who had worked at Orchard Knoll for as long as he’d been in Canada, showed them the proper technique. He led them through the orchard until he found a suitably overgrown tree, then quietly began to prune. He didn’t go at it like a barber, standing on the outside and trimming here and there; he got right in to the trunk, right into the thick of things, and cut his way out. When he was finished, he turned to them and said, “This is good. Like so.” He moved his hand through the gaps he had created with his saw and shears. “So a bird can fly.”

  EIGHT

  The dressing room of the Campenola Armoury had seen more prize fighters than musicians. The apple-green walls were speckled with bloodstains; the air was rich with mildew and sweat and the overpowering sweetness of urinal pucks. But Cyrus noticed none of that. He was staring at his hands. His first show with the Jimmy Waters Revival had been a nightmare, and if not for the people milling about, doing their best to ignore him, he probably would have cried.

  Right from the opening vamp he’d been off balance, both literally and figuratively. The stage, displaying the kind of bounce you might expect of a boxing canvas, set up a complicated wave form that threatened to knock over the amplifiers the moment anyone so much as tapped his foot. Cyrus didn’t get his sea legs until a good ten minutes into the performance; and musically, he never found his balance. Just when he started to think that everything might be fine, the song would mysteriously shift key and tempo. Or Jimmy would start one of his vocal riffs—not singing really, hard to know what to call it—lumbering here and there along the front of the stage and shouting to the audience, waving his arms while the lights flashed and the music crashed. And all the while the audience sat as stiff as could be, like folks who had walked into the wrong movie or wrong funeral even and couldn’t quite work up the gumption to walk out again. Then right near the end of the show, Jim did this thing, this truly weird thing: he climbed down from the stage and wandered into the crowd, over to a grey-haired lady and, what, it was almost like he was massaging her scalp, his fingers flying a mile a minute, his eyes rolled back, as the lady swatted his arms and chest, and howled disapproval.

  With all that going on, Cyrus messed up so often that, by the end of the show, Eura was the only one who would look at him—and her sympathetic smile was worse than nothing at all. He had half a mind to grab his gear and go home and save himself further humiliation. But before he could do that, Ronnie walked into the dressing room and sat beside him.

  “I have heard music in my day,” he said, “but I have to tell you, that was a truly remarkable spectacle. Such feeling. Such abandon. The audience was not all I had hoped it would be, I confess. This is our first time in Campenola, and I fear our show is a bit of an acquired taste. But I can tell you without reservation that I was transported, young man. And you?”

  “It couldn’t have been worse.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about the finer points. Opening-night jitters and all. These things happen to a novice. But the overall direction, the energy, the vision—Jim was very impressed.”

  Cyrus snorted in disbelief.

  “Truly. He told me himself. ‘That boy is a keeper.’ So, there you have it. Basically, it’s the same thing tomorrow, back here at the Armoury. Sound check at four-thirty.” He clapped Cyrus on the shoulder. “You will do better, my musical friend. I have no doubt about that. Besides, we can’t break in a new guitar player every night, can we? Oh, and by the way—” he handed Cyrus a hotel key “—you will bunk with Sonny for the time being.” At Cyrus’s look of despair, Ronnie laughed and said, “Believe me, he is a pussycat when you get to know him.”

  Ronnie walked off then to speak to one of the caretakers of the hall and make sure everything was set for the show the next day. Cyrus slumped miserably against the wall. He was convinced his golden future had become a bad dream. When he looked up again, he and Eura were alone in the dressing room, and he took the opportunity to study her more closely.

  That afternoon beside the bus, he had thought she was attractive; but that had been more inclination than perception—he’d always been drawn to the company of women. Now he realized she wasn’t very pretty at all. For one thing, her tattoo was a little creepy. And her face made him think of those police sketches you see on TV, a composite of normal-looking features that would require imagination to make sense of. Judging from the way she carried herself—erect, graceful—he figured she was beyond the age when bad posture might be considered cool. He guessed thirty, maybe even thirty-five. It was her eyes that gave her away, their message dark and complicated, even when she smiled.

  Without looking at him, she said, “You need a ride.”

  Those four words cast a spell in the room. She was old enough to be his mother, she wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense, and yet his whole body was on alert. Parts that were normally dry had suddenly grown damp. Parts that were normally moist were dry as
dust.

  When he stammered something unintelligible, she got to her feet in a nearly liquid motion and moved toward him, tilting her head from side to side like she was trying to understand a painting. She said, “Everyone now is back at the hotel. The bus, the truck, the trailer … they are in such a hurry always. But Ronnie has more work to do here yet, so,” she stood before him now, one hand resting on his shoulder, “he has asked me to take you in his car back to the hotel. Or to some place you like.” Before he could say a word, she grabbed his guitar case and headed for the door. “Come along, Mr. Guitar Player,” she said, “this train is leaving.”

  Five minutes later he was in the Cadillac again. But now, in the darkness outside the hotel, breathing in Eura’s perfume, it felt a whole lot different. The engine was ticking, and she turned in the seat and said, “You must not let Sonny bother you. He is this way with all of us sometimes. You will get used to it. He is a good guy. You will see.”

  Cyrus shrugged, his gaze fixed on her mouth. He found if he focused on a single aspect—her lips or her eyes or her nose—it was better than trying to take in her entire face at one time. Her mouth, looked at in this way, to the exclusion of every other part of her face, was quite pleasant. So he watched her lips and her tongue and the shimmer of slightly crooked teeth in the darkness. And if her youth was a memory, her charms too complicated to absorb in a single viewing, wasn’t that attractive in its own way?

  He was tempted to kiss her, but before he could do anything about it, she nudged his shoulder. “You must go now,” she said. “It is late for talking. Ronnie will finish at the hall soon and need his car.”

  He dragged his Les Paul from the back seat and watched her drive away, the cooler air feeling to him like relief. Then he turned and noticed the Airstream parked at the end of the lot. Jim, dressed now in blue flannel pyjamas and pissing against one of the tires, looked over his shoulder and said, “Ah, Cyrus, one moment.” He wiped his hands on the front of his pyjama top and opened the door of the trailer. “Allow me to extend a bit of old-fashioned hospitality.”

  The floor was littered with books and newspapers and magazines, fast-food cartons grown rank with age, and here and there an empty bottle or a dog bone. Every step was a misstep, made all the more likely by the yappy Pekingese lunging at Cyrus’s legs.

  Jim followed him in and with one hand scooped up the dog and tossed it like a stuffed animal toward the rear of the trailer. Then he took two dirty glasses from the kitchen counter, rinsed them briefly under the tap and dried them with the very same pyjama top. He stopped abruptly when he caught the look in Cyrus’s eye and swept his arm in an arc. “You are wonderin’ how I can live like this, I imagine.”

  When Cyrus began to protest, Jim silenced him with a raised finger. “Fact is I have always preferred the edge of things: the lakefront, the forest clearin’, this journey of ours from town to town. It’s where good things happen, young fella. Life, I mean, yours and mine, it’s where it happens, on the border between two worlds. Before and after, cradle and grave. We trace a musical line between whole-note rests.”

  Jimmy smiled then, tickled by his own words, and waved Cyrus onto the bench in the dining nook. After a cursory inspection of the glasses, he slapped them on the table and grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam from the cupboard. He opened the freezer but found no ice cubes. From the refrigerator he retrieved a box of cold french fries, covered with dried, sticky-looking ketchup, and placed it on the table. With a critical sniff, he said, “Not the feast I had hoped it’d be.”

  They sat then, neither of them touching their bourbon, until Cyrus said, “I’m sorry about tonight. I really messed up.”

  “Did you? I can’t say I noticed. I thought we put on a fine show. And that woman out front, my God, her story was like electricity runnin’ up my arms. I’m sure I won’t sleep tonight. I felt such grief there, such anger. It brings tears to my eyes even now.”

  Cyrus stared at his guitar case, which he had set on the floor beside him. He was as confused by this conversation as he’d been by the music. Searching for a more suitable topic, he said, “Mr. Conger told me you are the absolute best musician he’s ever heard.”

  “Mmm-hmm, well, Ronnie may be our guidin’ light, but he is, you’ll find, wrong about many things. And this is one of them. I was never very good. Well, I was sometimes very good and once absolutely perfect. But believe me, I could never hold a candle to our Sonny Redmond.”

  “I’d still like to hear you play,” Cyrus said. “I’m sure I’d learn a lot.”

  “Ah, but you never will,” Jim replied. He waited a beat before adding, “I’ve taken a vow of musical silence.”

  “Why?”

  Jim held his palms up, a confession of his own helplessness. “Who knows why we do anythin’? Love maybe. Or faith.”

  “But what have you got against playing?”

  “Oh, Lord, nothin’ at all. I love to hear everyone play, especially Sonny. His music reaches out to me in ways I don’t understand. And I look forward to the music that will one day come from your corner, boy. I predict great things for you.”

  Cyrus shook his head. “I could never stop playing. Music is everything to me.”

  “Believe me, it was not as easy as I make it sound. I suffered some until Ronnie came along. He helped me understand what I had to do.”

  “The show, you mean.”

  “The words, Cyrus, the meanin’, this feelin’ that I am gettin’ somewhere, that we are all of us on to somethin’, our very own Genesis and Leviticus and Deuteronomy …”

  Those words hung in the air for a long while, like some heavenly static charge that shuts down communication links and short-circuits transformers and relay stations. Jim reached down to the clutter on the floor and picked up a dog-eared paperback, It Came Out of the Void. He studied the garish cover a moment, then waved the novel in the air like it was an important piece of evidence in a trial.

  “The world is filled with words, Cyrus. Some nights, walking Fifi, I come back with plastic bags filled with books and papers and magazines that people have thrown out.” He dragged a hand through his inky mane and said, “You might not think it to look at me but when I was a boy I was sickly. I searched for truth between the covers of books. Worlds opened up to me and I followed. Now the words themselves have opened up to me. After all this time, they are callin’ me back. After all this time I have begun to hear the connections like a melody. But I still have so much work to do.…”

  They fell into another, heavier silence, Jim drifting into deep thought and Cyrus staring into his glass. He understood the meaning of every single word Jim had spoken; no dictionary was required. What he didn’t understand was the way those words had been put together, with an entirely different grammar, it seemed. And sitting in that dog-smelly trailer, twirling around a smudged glass of whiskey, Cyrus realized that Jimmy Waters would be a source of more questions than answers. As soon as he could excuse himself, he gulped down his bourbon, grabbed his guitar and headed for the room he would share with Sonny.

  To his relief, there was no sign of his new roommate other than the untidy sprawl of his belongings, so he showered quickly and jumped into bed. But try as he might, he could not sleep, and for the first time since he’d left home, he wished he could sit with Janice and ask her advice.

  She was so smart. The first time they went out for coffee she talked for an hour about this school in England called Summerhill. He didn’t really get it, but he liked the idea that she was interested in that kind of weird shit. When he listened to her talk about politics and architecture and art, he figured it was like listening to jazz, something he didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand just yet, but knew one day he would and would look back and say, “Janice was all over that, way back when.” No question, she would know what to make of this situation now. She would have it sussed. Tomorrow he would call her. Or the next day. She would freak when he told her about the Jimmy Waters Revival.

  He wa
s still awake at four in the morning when he heard the door to the room open, heard the drunken stumbling, the grunts, the curses. The light came on then, and the racket died down. After a minute or so of silence, Cyrus opened one eye. Sonny was staring right at him.

  “If it isn’t Django fucking Reinhardt. How ya doin’?”

  Cyrus rolled onto his back and shielded his eyes. “Look, I’m real sorry about tonight …”

  Sonny fell heavily onto his own bed and kicked off his boots. “Water under the bridge, kid. Life’s too short to worry about things that can’t be changed. Anyway, believe it or not, you’re a step up from Cal. He couldn’t play, either, but at least you have the sense to feel bad about it. He thought he was a genius.”

  Cyrus flinched at those comments. He wanted to shout that he did know how to play. Instead he bit his tongue and let Sonny continue.

  “Truth is,” he said, “I’m the one should apologize, leaving you at the gig by yourself. Wasn’t the cool thing to do. Forgot about D.C. You’ll want to keep your distance from that one.”

  “Oh,” Cyrus stammered, “no problem, she just drove me back to the hotel.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe.” He pulled the covers over him, not bothering to take off his clothes. “My last piece of advice is this. If you ever hope to come out of this in one piece, drop by Adrian and Kerry’s after a gig. There’s nothing like a good cup of tea to straighten you around.”

  NINE

  Demeter Real Estate had three agents—Sheldon Demeter, Lawrence Bell and Isabel Muehlenburg—with three desks aligned by seniority. That meant Shel’s desk was near the front door. The middle of the room was Larry’s domain, smelling always of breath mints and Aqua Velva. Izzy’s desk was at the back by the filing cabinets, an area seldom graced by walk-in clients. Any business that came her way had to be self-generated. As Shel put it, “Startin’ out, you gotta be hungry.”