Sweeter Life (21 page)

“I see you every day. Besides, these will remind me of what is not you, which is, I think, useless.”

On a day off in Blayne, Missouri, they went for a picnic in the park. It was a beautiful afternoon in mid-June, eighty degrees with a light breeze, a blue sky dotted here and there with flat-bottomed clouds like ten-gallon hats. They stopped at a grocery store for bread and cheese, a whole salami and a bottle of Spanish red. Then they spread a blanket beside a pond and lazed the day away.

Eura sang to him in a language he didn’t understand, ancient-sounding melodies in an ancient-sounding tongue. With his head in her lap, she braided the ends of his long silky hair. When she finished, she swept the bangs off his forehead and said, “I look at you and I am sometimes angry with the Jimmy Waters Revival. You are so young to be living this life with us. You should be eating pie with your aunt and uncle. You should be having a sweetheart and going to dances and driving around in a big American car. You should be falling in love and making foolish plans, and instead you are here with us.”

“Who says I’m not falling in love?”

“I say this,” she replied, pushing him roughly away. “And if you do not believe me, I will hit you.”

He shifted then, so he was lying beside her, his face pressed lightly against her hip. He knew that if he touched her anywhere else their afternoon would be spoiled. He was content to smell the warm cotton of her summer skirt and beneath that the subtle florals of her perfume.

A while later she said, “Tell me about a time when you were happy.”

“I’m happy right now.”

“No, when everything seemed perfect.”

He thought a moment and said, “I remember one time, I’m pretty young, not even in school yet, and I’m on the kitchen floor with a toy truck. My mother is there in the picture, or at least her legs and feet. She’s cooking dinner, and I’m driving my truck between her legs, probably making her crazy. And I can hear her singing, which is the best part. My mother loved to sing, and she had a real good voice, too. Her folks were rich, I guess, so she took lessons when she was a kid. You know that kind of fancy vibrato in opera? She could do that. You’d never know it to look at her, though, a bony little thing like a bird.”

Eura looked down at him and said, “Your father, he was rich, too?”

Cyrus laughed at that and rolled onto his back, his arm draped over his face. “My dad was about as poor as they come. His folks had a farm on the marsh. When my parents got together, her folks had a fit, I guess. Her dad was a doctor and had big things planned for her. After Mom and Dad got married, her folks never spoke to her again. They moved to San Diego a while after that. I never did meet them.”

“She must have loved your father very much.”

“Oh yeah. You see pictures of him from back then and he looked like a movie star—real handsome. A baseball player when he was younger. My uncle says he never saw anyone throw a ball better’n my dad. He was scouted by the Tigers and spent some time in the minor leagues. Then one day he got hurt and went back to the farm. Never played again.”

“It was better for him, perhaps.”

“Farming? I don’t think so. He was never much good at anything to do with farming. What I heard, his father wasn’t much better. When Dad took over, he had all sorts of big ideas, but nothing ever worked out, and we lost the farm, lost everything.”

She turned on her side until she was facing him. Running her hand across his cheek, she said, “That is not such a happy story, Cyrus.”

“You tell one then.”

“I am tired of my stories.”

WITH EVERY PERFORMANCE
, Cyrus got better at following the twists and turns of Sonny and the rest of the band, and on the night after his picnic with Eura, he had his best show ever. Everything seemed to work. In one song, he and Jim got into a call-and-response thing, Jim saying, “I know,” and Cyrus answering with his Les Paul:
dwee dow
.

“I know.”

Dwee dow
.

“I know.”

Dwee dow
.

“I know that my heart is a canyon deep and wild.”

Dwee dow dweedy-oh dweedy-dweedy-deedah-dwee
.

After the show, Cyrus was so pleased he could hardly sit still. As he walked with Eura toward the bus, he realized he couldn’t face the prospect of moping around in his room. What he wanted was to sneak off with her. So he grabbed her by the arm and said, “Let’s walk back.”

She studied his face a moment and shook her head. “I know what you are thinking, and you should think of something else.”

“I want to walk back to the hotel with you.”

She pushed his hair off his shoulder and let her hand linger at his neck. “You want more than that. But I will tell you what. You should go on the bus with the others. Let Sonny tell you what a genius you are.”

He handed her the Les Paul instead and walked into the night. He followed the main street until it ran out of buildings and headed into farm country, past big brick turn-of-the-century homes, wide fields and little wooden sheds by the road where the wife or maybe the kids would sell produce when it was in season. It was a beautiful night, the stars shining brightly, the air warm and full of familiar smells: freshly turned earth, the sweet stink of cattle and the unmistakable perfume of strawberries.

So many times he had wandered through the dark in just this way, after a fight with Clarence or Izzy, after a night with Janice, or sometimes after nothing at all. It was almost as if, in the darkness and the solitude and the subtly shifting textures of the night, he felt more at ease, more deeply connected to the heart of things.

He got back to the hotel well after midnight. The lights were on in the
Airstream, but there were no sounds of music or talk. Upstairs in the hotel, he listened a moment at the door to Adrian and Kerry’s room and, from the quiet, could tell there was nothing happening there, either. But he wasn’t tired; he was wired. So he drifted down the hall to Eura’s room. He could see a line of light from under her door. He knocked softly.

After a moment she said, “Go away.”

“My guitar,” he said. “I need it.”

“We are leaving early tomorrow. You need to sleep.”

“I want my guitar.”

A minute later she opened the door and backed into the room as if she was afraid to stand too close. She was wearing a bathrobe, which she clutched tightly around her.

His guitar case sat on the carpet just inside the door, but he walked past it, looking greedily around. “This is the first time you’ve invited me into your room,” he said.

“You invited yourself.”

On her bedside table she had spread a white cloth and hundreds of silver pins. Beside the cloth sat several glass vials, each one holding a different coloured liquid. A faint smell of rubbing alcohol lingered in the air.

“What are you doing?” he said, nodding toward the pins.

“I am minding my own business. You should do the same.”

He leaned back against the wall and shook his head. “Why won’t you let me get close to you?”

“You are close to me.”

“Not close enough.”

She tightened her grip on her robe. “Close enough for now.”

Without another word he grabbed his guitar and walked to his room. Sonny was snoring inside, so Cyrus sat in the hall beside a room-service tray of dishes and began to noodle on the unamplified instrument. In his head he heard a mid-tempo shuffle in G, very B. B. King. He waited a moment, trying to retrieve that mood from his walk along the dark country road, trying to tap into that bottomless well of emotion. Then he played the seven, the F, and gave it a sweet shiver of vibrato. A few licks followed and they were good; but they owed more to B. B. King than his feelings for Eura or the
mysteries of the night, so he stopped and tried again. This time he grabbed the A on the first string and bent it up a semitone to the minor third, letting it shimmer for a bar before wandering erratically through the blues scale. Again, uninspired. He tried starting on the fifth, on the major third; he tried it with the flatted third and the fifth plucked together. And each time he ended up with some awkward combination of notes that said nothing at all about the way he felt, and managed to say nothing in a way that was utterly graceless.

He was all too aware of the kind of music a real player like Sonny would produce under the circumstances, or the solo Eric Clapton would squeeze from his instrument if he felt even half as much for Eura. He launched into the guitar intro to one of his favourite songs, “Waitin’ on You,” by B. B. King.

That was the trouble. He could play nearly every blues solo ever recorded, from Robert Johnson to Johnny Winter. Every lick was memorized, categorized and catalogued, ready for instant recall. But when he tried to come up with a single phrase that summed up how
he
felt about Eura, there was silence, or worse, noise.

He studied the fretboard of the Les Paul. Clearly, there were only so many notes and, therefore, a limited number of combinations. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe everything that
could
be played
had
been played. And with that thought he packed away his guitar again and set it inside the room. Then he went back out to the parking lot. Just the sight of the night sky made him feel better. The Big Dipper and Cassiopeia and the great arc of the Milky Way reminded him that some things were inexpressible. He had nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps Eura was too big and too distant and too bright to be captured by a few melodies.

Bringing his gaze back down to earth, he noticed Jim out by the Airstream, coaxing the dog to do its duty. Before Cyrus could slip away, Jim turned and said, “It is a magical night out here, my son. The wind sweeps toward us from across the continent, bringin’ us a million stories.” He tucked
the dog under his arm, then closed the distance between them. Putting his other hand on Cyrus’s shoulder, he said, “What’s wrong? You look as though your heart is in your throat.”

When Cyrus shrugged, Jim leaned closer to peer into his eyes. After a moment, he smiled and said, “If I’m not mistaken, this
is
a matter of the heart. You’re in love.”

Cyrus looked away. “Not love,” he said. “More a feeling of—” he dragged a hand through his hair “—I don’t know, of feeling like the whole world is trying to pass through me, only it can’t.”

“What’s stoppin’ it?”

“I don’t know. I was playing my guitar before I came out, and when I closed my eyes I could feel it there as sure as anything, this big, big thing just waiting, but I couldn’t find the right notes, you know?”

“I do. And I’ll tell you this. I don’t want to hear about your guitar right now. This is no time for musical theory. Talk to me about love.” And with that he set the dog on the ground and covered Cyrus’s eyes with his big fleshy hand. “Do you see her? Tell me now, what’s the first thing you think about?”

Cyrus could feel a blush creeping up his neck and cheeks. His skin burned where Jim was touching him. After a bit of squirming, he closed his eyes beneath that massive hand and said, “Her lips, I guess. Her lips are great.” And it was Eura’s lips he pictured, like the graceful wings of a seagull in flight.

“Mmm-hmm, very nice. Her lips. You kiss her then, maybe pull her bottom lip right into your mouth like it’s a section of Christmas tangerine, and your hands, your hands are wild for somethin’, aren’t they? Sure enough have a mind of their own. You reach out and …”

“I touch her hair, her head.”

“Yes, indeed, you muss her hair and tilt her face so you can kiss every nook and cranny. She’s wild for you, too, isn’t she? What’s she doin’, Cyrus? How’s she touch you?”

Cyrus can scarcely breathe. In his mind Eura is rocking against him in that graceful dance of hers. And in a hushed voice, he says, “Her hips.”

“Oh my my, she’s a devil, rubbin’ her sweet thing against you. She wants
it bad, and all you gotta do is sing the song, my friend, cozy up and sing the words she wants to hear.”

Jim removed his hand and Cyrus said, “What words does she want to hear?”

“I would ask you the very same thing.”

Cyrus wheeled around and took several steps toward the hotel. Turning there, he said, “I don’t get it. I never know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t suppose you do. But you were sure enough with me tonight.”

“Onstage, you mean.”

“Yessir, you were right there with me. It was good what you did, playin’ off my words like that. Works both ways, you know.”

Cyrus nodded uncertainly, then walked slowly across the parking lot. At the hotel entrance, he stopped once again to look up at the stars. In just a few hours he had gone from fulfillment to longing. He had taken his playing to a higher place and discovered almost immediately how much farther he had to go.

R
onnie knew Wade Resman from the early days, working side by side on that first tour of America with Scot Free. Back then Wade was owner and chief technician of a company called Resman Sound and Light, renting out the appropriate gear for rock-and-roll tours and, for the right price, acting as soundman. Drugs, a bitter divorce and a serious lack of insurance had brought Wade to the brink of bankruptcy. He was now permanently off the road and had invested his last few dollars in ReSound, a low-end recording studio on a desolate stretch of county road between Buffalo and Rochester.

Wade had set up shop in an old general store—white clapboard, wide wooden veranda, with thick black curtains covering the plate glass window at the front. On one side of his property was Vinnie’s, a big auto-wrecking yard with a high plank fence topped with razor wire; on the other was a scrubby field covered with billboards, none of which had been updated in five years. It was not a busy road. The only noise Wade ever had to contend with was Vinnie’s arc welder, which occasionally set up a high-frequency hum in the studio’s amplifiers and mixing board.

It wasn’t for sentimental reasons that Ronnie chose ReSound for Jim’s next recording. It was the fact that they got four days of unlimited access, the use of all the gear, Wade’s not inconsiderable talents as an engineer, and a
sixteen-track tape for the cost of one day in a more established studio. So what if the place had a Hell’s Angels vibe? So what if everything was held together by duct tape? It was good enough for rock and roll—a statement that, to Ronnie’s mind, was less a compromise than a seal of approval.