Sweeter Life (16 page)

Next morning after roll call he went out to the exercise yard to look for his man, Golden Reynolds, who was practising his footwork, his jabs and hooks, rocking his neck around like a heavyweight before the bell. Hank approached and immediately felt the breeze of a one-two combo bracketing his head, followed by the suitable soundtrack: “Fsshht, fsshht. You down. You done. You dinner.”

“Hey Goldie, lookin’ good.”

“Fsshht-fsshht-fsshht.” Three quick body blows, the dance, the swagger, the head feints. “Can I do for you, Hank my man?”

Hank moved in closer, palms held out chest-high, a target for the other man’s fists. “Need batteries, Goldie. Those you sold me are dead already. Three weeks and they’re fried.”

Goldie backpedalled, throwing straight-arm jabs. “Fsshht. Fsshht.
Them would be the breaks there, Hoho. Gots ta feed the beast. And jus’ soz you unnerstan’, new ones ain’t gonna be so easy to arrange.”

“Meaning?”

“They gonna cost you some. Maybe twenty.”

“Out of your fucking mind. The radio cost me fifty …”

“Fsshht, fsshht. Gots ta’ have batteries, man.”

Hank backed Goldie up until he had him against the wall. They were nose to nose. Guards looked over in their direction, and Goldie stopped bobbing and weaving, his arms quivering at his side like they’d been dislocated. Hank leaned in so his lips were nearly touching the other man’s ear. He said, “Don’t be squeezing me. I need those batteries.”

Goldie bobbed into the open, making with the footwork again, his arms still twitching. “No squeeze,” he said. “No sleaze. Jus’ the facts, Hoho. You want the freight, you pay the rate. Another guy got this kind of grief’d tell you fuck youself, but not Golden Reynolds. Goldie stick with his clientele, you dig? We working together here to make this a better world is how I see it. Now when you be wanting your Evereadys?”

Hank looked across the yard where everyone was doing his thing—shooting hoops, a bit of catch, some just gabbing to hear themselves talk. He said, “I just give you my last fifty. You know that.”

And Goldie moved in close and said, “We got options, Hoho. Golden Reynolds got various payment plans.”

I
n Fenton the band had the day off—no concert, no travel, not even a jam because the gear had gone on to Jamestown, the next gig on their schedule, about fifty miles down the road. Cyrus was in the breakfast room of the hotel, flipping through the latest
Rolling Stone
(the cover showed a picture of a nutball by the name of Sun Ra) when Eura sat beside him in the booth.

“This is my idea,” she said. “We are tourists today. We will see the sights.”

He looked out the window of the coffee shop. A light rain was falling from a bruised-looking sky. He turned back to her and said, “What kind of sights were you thinking of? The place looks pretty dead.”

She took a sip of his coffee and shook her head with frustration. “Anywhere must be better than sitting around these rooms all day.”

He realized then that she had tried to talk everyone else into this half-baked outing and they had all turned her down. Nodding toward the window, he said, “You don’t mind the rain?”

“Nnn,” she said, luxuriously, “I love the rain. Do you love the rain?”

“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.