by Tim Wynveen
“It’s all right. If you’re dressed for it.”
“But it is the opposite I was thinking.” Her eyes sparkled with laughter. “It is all right if you are undressed. It is what rain is made for.”
They rented a sedan at the front desk. Half an hour later they were sitting in the car with a map spread across their laps. Eura pointed and said, “There. Portland. Is that good? It is on the water, I think.”
It was the only place within a hundred miles that Cyrus had been to, an annual pilgrimage with Clarence and Ruby. He said, “Portland is a city. Is that what you want?”
“What I want is to feel alive and not dead, not like I am a prisoner of the Jimmy Waters Revival. So a city would not be so bad, I think. We drive here on this little road and see farms maybe, yes? And pretty farmhouses, and stony fields with cows and sheep. This would not be bad also. And in the city—Portland, is it?—we can find maybe some place to eat that isn’t this tasteless food, something with spice, okay? Some place with a tablecloth and candles and wine. We can do this, Cyrus, a simple day with a few pleasures. This is not asking too much.” She folded the map decisively and handed it to him. “Portland is good?”
“Portland is fine,” he said.
Only Portland wasn’t fine, not really. Portland meant a world of bad memories. Clarence and Ruby had taken him there every year for as long as he could remember, and every visit was a misery. It was Hank’s home and had been for nine years now.
As they sped out of Fenton, Eura sang snatches of songs he didn’t recognize, oohing and aahing at otherwise unremarkable scenery while Cyrus tried to figure out how he would slip away from her long enough to visit his brother. Gradually her excitement broke through his dark thoughts and he started to enjoy the drive. He began to wonder if a visit with Hank would be so bad.
He turned in his seat to look at her. She wore black jeans and a yellow turtleneck sweater that covered up the tattoo, but the thought of it beneath the cotton, its tracery leading who knows where, made his skin tingle. Another thing he noticed, now that he knew her better, was that her face had begun to make more sense to him. It was a sequential thing. One time her mouth dominated her face, another time her skin. At the moment, with her initial euphoria beginning to fade, her sad eyes were front and centre. And it was her eyes that made him speak. It didn’t matter that she was driving, he wanted her to look at him, to be happy again.
“Ronnie mentioned the other night that you were in the circus.”
She thought a moment and said, “Ronnie talks too much.”
“So he was wrong?”
“No,” she responded quietly, “not wrong. I was in a circus, but it was not what you think. We had no lion tamer, no dancing bears. Our clowns were not so harmless, our music not something you march to. European circuses are very different from what you know. Sometimes darker, sometimes more gentle.”
She smiled at him, or at her memories. “Our performers were very talented,” she continued, eyes back on the road. “Jugglers, gymnasts who twist their bodies in the most terrible way it could make your head spin. Always, you know, we would try not to defy death but to trick it, to mesmerize it. So it is very different from the circus that you think of.”
Cyrus could tell she was both proud and embarrassed to be talking about this. “A circus would be such a trip,” he said. “Why’d you leave?”
She looked at him briefly, then turned back to the road. He was sweet and simple and full of promise, and he reminded her of happier times. Finally, she stroked his arm as though soothing a hurt and said, “This is our day to see the sights and have some fun. Please, let us talk about something else.”
EURA PARKED THE CAR in front of Portland’s city hall, overlooking the harbour, and watched Cyrus walk down the street away from her. The first time she saw him, getting out of Ronnie’s Cadillac, she had noticed his gait, so heavy and determined, like a young soldier who believes he is fighting the good fight. Right then and there she had wanted to grab him and warn him about the world. It is always the young who walk this way, without a clue what they will one day be asked to sacrifice.
When he disappeared around a corner, she got out of the car and wandered about the city with her umbrella, not so much window shopping as drifting through the fog and rain. She was glad Cyrus had suggested they split up for a while. It was a relief, for an afternoon, to forget about Europa Del Conte. These people hurrying by on the street did not know her. She did not have to care about what they thought, nor did she have to spend one moment thinking about them. She could give herself up to the past, to the memory of a husband’s blue eyes and long blond hair, a nature keyed to enthusiasms.
He had laughed at her for being so indecisive. “This is something you must do,” he said. “America is not an experience you turn down.”
“And what about you?” she said. “How will you survive without me?”
“I will survive. I am a survivor. And you will come back to me with a thousand stories of America.”
“America. I think it is more you are interested in a new pair of jeans.”
“This is not a small consideration.”
She grabbed the lapel of his leather jacket and pressed her cheek above his heart. “I will be the one who does not survive.”
“You will be strong,” he said. “The time will fly.”
So she left home, and it was springtime and all things seemed possible. The Little Circus had been booked for a tour of America, twenty cities in three months. Eura, who had once been a dancer with the national ballet, no longer performed. She belonged backstage now, a masseuse, her showtimes non-stop. Without her magic fingers, the circus would grind to a halt.
They flew into New York on May 30, 1968, and from the moment she stepped off the plane, her once-in-a-lifetime trip to America went steadily downhill. You will love the cabbies, people told her, but she found them rude and unkempt, their vehicles a disgrace. You must see the architecture, they said, the Empire State Building and the Waldorf-Astoria, and always she wondered at a people who would choose to live and work in such monstrosities. The food was muck, the beer, even those brands that sounded familiar—Stroh’s, Blatz, Budweiser—were abominable. From New York to Washington, Baltimore to Boston, her opinion of America declined. The stories had been all wrong except for one detail: the music. Jazz and blue-grass, folk and rock and roll. This was something Americans did better than anyone else the world over. They could, with an honest simplicity, translate the energy of life into something memorable and then make it dance like crazy. It was her one comfort during those three miserable months in America, the one thing she knew she would carry back to friends and say, “This at least is true.”
In the middle of August, the Little Circus travelled to Detroit, the one city of the tour where it seemed the world had ended, or was about to. More than a year after the terrible riots, the downtown was still a charred ruin. She had never seen anything like it, not even in Europe, the scene of so many grievous conflicts. “I do not like this,” she said to Alexander, the tour manager. “I wish we were not in this place.”
In almost every conceivable way, she wasn’t. She travelled by shuttle bus from the hotel to Cobo Hall where they performed each night, and by the same bus back to the hotel. She did not stroll the city streets. She did not visit the clubs. She merely drifted through the days, her mind already home, already comfortably back in the cozy apartment near the university.
Then one night Alexander woke her from a sound sleep. It was three in the morning, and the moment she opened her door to him he pushed her back into the room. He quietly closed the door and began to throw her clothing into her suitcase. “Anna,” he said in a whisper, “you must listen. Get dressed and do not waste a moment.” He was in the bathroom now, scooping her belongings into a plastic bag, which he tossed into her suitcase. When she still hadn’t moved, he squeezed her arm until it hurt. “Do as I say,” he hissed. “Movemovemovemovemove.”
She stumbled into some
clothes, followed him out to a taxi and set off into the night. Once they were on the expressway, Alexander turned to her with a look of utter desolation and said, “It’s bad. They’ve brought in the tanks. It is all over.”
FOR SOME PEOPLE, Portland was a university town, the home of their alma mater. For others it was a historical treasure, the site of a frontier garrison. For others still it was of architectural interest. But for Cyrus, Portland meant only one thing: the maximum security prison where his brother was an inmate. It meant a tense and tedious drive from Wilbury, with Ruby chattering non-stop and Clarence rigidly silent. The trip home almost always involved his aunt weeping and his uncle driving well above the speed limit. On both legs of the journey, Cyrus stared blindly out the window while his aunt and uncle sucked in all the poison in the car and in their own determined way tried to neutralize it.
So it was no surprise that, without Eura’s presence to rev him up, Cyrus was having second thoughts about visiting Hank. He wandered in the rain, stopping at five different variety stores before he found what he was looking for. Even then he walked past the prison entrance several times. It was difficult enough summoning the courage to face Hank after almost a year, but a visit to Portland also dredged up memories that Cyrus preferred to keep buried.
Like the sight of his brother handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser, the car parked on the drive where the poplars stood like sentries, and Danny Scanlon on the front porch explaining how they’d caught Hank and Pete Critchlow in LaSalle with a stolen car and Riley’s .22-calibre rifle.
Like the sight of his mother wiping away her tears with the heel of her hand as she said goodbye to Hank, who was off to serve his eight months at Burwash, a minimum-security work farm for young offenders.
Like that summer after Burwash, Hank’s last at home, with arguments in the middle of the night, slamming doors, a dust-up between Hank and the old man—no punches, just a bit of wrestling and grunting and maybe the sudden realization on both their parts that this battle of wills had gotten nasty, that it was no longer a father and son working out the kinks in a relationship but a clash between two angry men.
Then one night about nine o’clock, Cyrus was riding his bike home from a softball game, and saw he Hank and Pete Critchlow zooming the other way on Pete’s motorcycle. Ten minutes later a fire engine passed him with sirens wailing, headed for the marsh. When he stopped to sniff the air, he could smell smoke all right. He picked up his pace and, turning onto the Marsh Road, felt a jolt of panic—the smoke was coming from their place. He could see the fire engine, a crowd of people; but by the time he got to the farm, all the excitement was over. The chicken coop had burned to the ground. All that remained was a blackened stain on the earth. Folks stood around and shook their heads. The firemen rolled up their hoses. No one had any doubts about how the fire started.
Hank didn’t come home that night. Or the next. Or ever again. Several months later, just before Christmas, there was a flurry of phone calls. That night their parents drove into the city, and Cyrus stayed home with Isabel. It was only next morning when Ruby came to the house that they learned Hank had killed a gas station attendant in a botched robbery in Hounslow, and that Riley and Catherine, who had been on their way to the police station, had died when their truck slammed into a hydro pole.
Hank’s trial was quick. No one put up much of a struggle; no one talked about hiring the best lawyers money could buy and fighting this down the line. By then the fight had gone out of those who would care. Hank had been trouble from the start. A poor student, an angry soul, the wrong crowd, a chemical imbalance—any number of reasons were put forward as an explanation, but explanations couldn’t undo the damage already done, nor prevent what followed. Cyrus and, for a while, Isabel went to live with the Mitchells. The insurance money came up short, and the bank took the farm. There were some who hoped they had seen the last of Hank Owen.
It was Ruby who suggested they visit each year. She was a religious woman. She believed in forgiveness. She said even a wayward soul like Hank needed love and family. And while it was tough at first to be in the same room with him, the person responsible for so much of their grief, it became easier with time because in Hank’s presence it was hard to believe in his guilt—and hardest of all for Hank, it seemed. Throughout the trial he acted more surprised than sorry to be there, never showing the proper remorse or gravity.
Over the years they continued to ask him for explanations, but nothing he said ever made much sense to them. He said he could picture the crime and remember certain details clearly—the smell of gasoline, the song playing on the radio (Jimmy Dean talking his way through “Big Bad John”)—but couldn’t put himself in the scene. He couldn’t remember pulling the trigger or getting back into his car. When asked about his feelings that night or what was going through his head, he shrugged and said he felt nothing then and nothing now, not even guilt. In time, of course, he learned to accept his guilt because the facts pointed in that direction, just as we accept that the earth is round though our senses tell us it is not. If everyone believed he had killed the attendant, it must be true. But accepting guilt wasn’t the same as feeling it. What he felt, he said, was an emptiness, a lack, as if something important, something necessary to his happiness, had been plucked from his breast.
The psychologist had no shortage of theories about what had happened. He found numerous patterns in the pain Hank left behind; but none of the talk ever made sense to Cyrus. If there was a progression, he had given up trying to understand it and had, in fact, spent much of the past decade trying to disconnect events. Only recently had he come to accept that Hank wasn’t responsible for the death of their parents, that bad luck and bad choices often worked in tandem. As for the crimes his brother had committed, they pretty much fell outside the scope of Cyrus’s natural sympathies. Hank was his brother; everything else seemed like conjecture.
Once Cyrus had passed all the security checkpoints, he was brought to a glass partition that had a phone on each side of it. A moment later Hank walked in, slouchy but unyielding. The first hint of wrinkles coupled with the touches of grey already showing at the temples of his brush cut made him look much older than his years. There were new scars on his face, the initials “HO” carved into each cheek.
“Hey there, Cyrus, whataya know?”
“Nothing, Hank, just like always.”
Hank turned his chair around and straddled it, his arms resting on the chair back. “That’s good, kid. Keep it that way. Keep your nose to the grindstone, right?”
Cyrus shrugged, the dopey kid brother, and stared down at his lap. When he looked up again he said, “What’s with your face?”
Hank touched his cheek. “This? I was bored. You know how it is. So where’s the rest of the crew? They can’t face me no more?”
“I came alone,” he said, still unable to look him in the eye.
There was something uncharacteristic in his voice just then, a kind of stagey nonchalance. Hank looked at him with his coal-dark eyes, comparing that voice to others he had heard. “You came on your own all the way to Portland. What about school, kid? Why aren’t you in school?”
A grin eased into place, a crack in the dam. Then, in a rush, Cyrus came alive. “I quit, Hank. I’m finished with that crap. You remember how I told you I played guitar and all? Well, I got a job with a band. I’m travelling, getting paid real well. It’s a blast.”
Hank sat up straighter as if to get a better perspective. “A musician,” he said. “Isn’t that a kick in the head. I always pegged you for a farmer.”
“Get lost. I never wanted to be a farmer. Never.”
Hank leaned forward again and said, “So how’s Izzy? Last time I saw her she looked like hell.”
“She’s okay, I guess. I don’t know, we used to talk a lot, me and her, especially after you left. I always thought she was cool. Now it’s like she’s too busy or something.”
“Hey, somebody’s gotta be normal in this family.”
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“Normal.” Cyrus snorted. “She’s always got a burr up her ass.”
For a moment they felt the uncommon warmth that occurs when a younger sibling makes the older one laugh. Hank lit a cigarette then, the phone clamped between his cheek and shoulder. Cyrus said, “Brought you a carton. They’ll give them to you later, I guess.”
“Black Cats?”
“Hell to find, too. You might want to think about switching to a more popular brand.”
Hank blew a smoke ring. “Thanks kiddo. But I never was that interested in what was popular. And look where that got me. But music, eh? I can see that. Music is pretty cool. Bet you have to beat the babes off with a club. How’s that old prick Clarence?”
“He’s okay. Kind of worried I guess about the cancer. You shouldn’t be so hard on him. He’s not so bad.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it’s me. Guess I won’t expect an invitation, I ever get out of this place.”
Cyrus perked up. “Is there talk? I mean, about you getting out?”
“There’s always talk, kid. Don’t mean fuck all, really. Let’s face it, nobody’s gonna be too thrilled by the prospect. Not sure I am, either. Might have to ask my kid brother to show me the ropes. Been a while.”
Cyrus felt completely different visiting Hank on his own. There was no one to act as a buffer or run interference or set the tone. It was just two brothers now, looking at how to move on. And he realized he didn’t have the faintest idea of what to say next or where to look.
It must have been obvious. Before long Hank motioned to the closest guard that the visit was over. As he stood to leave, he said, “Appreciate the smokes, pal. Keep your nose clean.”
CYRUS MET EURA AS PLANNED at the rental car, then walked with her along the main street. She had spent time looking for a suitable restaurant, something that might remind her of home, and in the end had settled on Reggio’s, a little place that served bottled dressing on iceberg lettuce, and lasagna made with hamburger and cottage cheese and no discernible spices. The house wine, though, was a sharp Chianti, which by the second glass had softened her anxieties and, for one night, made her more or less resigned to the food and Portland and the Jimmy Waters Revival.