Sweeter Life (34 page)

Even so, the recent change in Hank surprised her. All it took, seemingly, was a handful of shirts and ties, a few lightweight suits, a regular haircut and a reason to get up in the morning. Six weeks ago she had offered him a job in her office going to the bank and the post office and the printer, sending faxes, keeping on top of all the piddly details that everyone was too frazzled to deal with. The job was nothing to get excited about, but it had worked a kind of magic. Hank was suddenly focused, making some money of his own, off the streets and out of trouble, and he had truly been a help to them all. Isabel wasn’t the only one in town to notice the change in him. People who had previously given him a wide berth were now going out of their way to be
sociable. Even his parole officer had been impressed. It seemed a real and true success story, and they all took a bit of the credit.

Near the end of June her bank manager, Bill Bickford, called. “We’re holding a cheque here, Iz, from your office. Doesn’t have proper authorization.” That meant the cheque was drawn on the trust account, where client money was deposited until a deal closed. Any cheque on that account required two signatures, including Izzy’s.

“We’ve been so busy, Bill, I probably just forgot to countersign. I have to go out in a minute. I’ll walk over.”

“No,” he said, “it’s nothing like that. Your signature’s on the cheque all right. It’s just the other one belongs to Hank.”

She brought a hand to her breastbone. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a cheque made out to Gord Spinks.”

She looked frantically around the office, realizing that Hank hadn’t been in all morning. “Maybe he grabbed the wrong cheque book, Bill. That’s been done before.”

There was a significant pause, as though he were hoping she would listen to herself. “I suppose that’s possible, Iz, but why would he sign your name, too? I’m certain that’s been forged. Not anything like your hand.”

Isabel slumped in her chair and massaged her forehead. She knew Hank had been friendly with that Spinks character, and she had spoken to him about it. “Thanks for this,” she said. “And between you and me? I’d appreciate it if we could keep this little slip-up quiet. I’ll speak to him this evening. I’m sure he thought no one would miss a few dollars.”

“Well, Iz, the cheque is for fifteen thousand.”

Isabel drove straight home but found no sign of Hank there, and no note, so she hopped in her car and began cruising around town. After an hour of that, she went back to the office and asked the other agents if they had seen him. No luck there, either.

She had three appointments that afternoon, the last one ending just before dinnertime. She rushed home without stopping for takeout and found the house just as she’d left it. His suits were in his closet. His jeans were gone, and so was the leather jacket she’d bought him.

After gobbling a handful of cheese and crackers, she climbed back in her
car and began to search the town more methodically, asking in restaurants and bars and poolrooms if anyone had seen him. At about ten o’clock, she drove past the fairgrounds and noticed two young boys, one pushing the other in a wheelchair. She pulled over to the curb and stopped them. It was Hank’s chair, all right. The boys said they’d found it in front of the grandstand and, terrified that they were in trouble, gave it up readily and ran off into the night. She stowed the chair in her trunk and drove slowly through the stone gates, into the fairgrounds parking lot. She parked in front of the old grandstand. She hadn’t been there since childhood, the time their father took them to see the daredevil show.

She called Hank’s name but the only reply was the wind whistling through the empty stands. She walked inside and stood at the railing, gazing out at the muddy oval, which still showed the scars of last week’s harness racing. And then she turned and looked up into the bleachers with that great towering slant of roof like something out of history. There, on the centre stairs, halfway up, was a body.

She took the stairs two at a time, then ran down again even faster. At the nearest phone booth she called an ambulance, hoping to God he wasn’t already dead. From the hospital she called Ruby and then Cyrus in Toronto. “Come quick,” she said. “Please.”

Cyrus and Eura arrived at the Wilbury District Hospital long after Ruby and Clarence had gone home to bed. Isabel was pacing the emergency ward, looking pale and owlish. She had been holding up reasonably well. No tears, other than those few on the telephone. But the minute she saw Cyrus, she began to blubber. “He’s still unconscious. What they did to him.”

Cyrus hadn’t seen much brutality in his life. In his darker moments, he had imagined the tableaux of his parents’ accident, his brother’s crime, but the pictures were short on details and long on emotion. Because of those early tragedies, he shied away from gruesome headlines and Hollywood violence. So the sight of Hank lying so still, his face pulped and purple, his eyes swollen closed, his jaw wired shut, the bandages and tubes and monitors, was enough to make him wobble on his feet. He might have passed out had he not steadied himself a moment by touching his brother’s arm.

That simple contact caused Hank to open his eyes. He moved his
blood-sticky lips, but no sound emerged from that ruined mouth. Cyrus moved closer and peered meaningfully into the slits of his eyes. And Hank tried again to speak. He swallowed several times, an excruciating ordeal, and in a hoarse, gurgled whisper said, “Stupid.”

Cyrus leaned lightly on the mattress, his lips nearly touching his brother’s ear. “Who did this?” he asked. “Who did this to you?”

Hank closed his eyes. The lines in his face grew taut. He spluttered deep in his throat and said, “I fucking did.”

Later, back in the hallway with Isabel and Eura, Cyrus learned that Hank had also been stabbed several times and had nearly bled to death. If Izzy had found him five minutes later, he never would have pulled through. She told Cyrus about the bogus cheque.

Midmorning, he drove to the Satan’s Wrath clubhouse, a two-storey brick building that used to be Hunter’s Dairy. Gordie was there by himself, sitting at a metal table and playing solitaire. He had a White Owl clamped between his teeth. He was nursing a can of diet cola.

“Looks like today I’m Mr. Popular,” Gordie said. He took the cigar from his mouth and indicated with the soggy end that Cyrus should take a seat. “First I have a little chat with Danny Scanlon, and now this, a visit with Mr. Rock Star. Sorry to hear about your brother, kid.”

Cyrus settled in the hardback chair and watched Spinks carefully. “You nearly killed him,” he said.

“Me? You got it wrong. We’re pals, me and Hoho. I was just thinking I should send him some flowers.”

Cyrus could hardly speak he was so full of disgust. “You were squeezing him,” he said. “He wrote you a cheque that bounced, and you beat the shit out of him. A fucking cripple, man.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Jackson. Let me set you straight. Tell you just what I told Scanlon. I repeat: me and Hoho are pals, okay? Now it just so happens I give him some news awhile back, you know, something I heard through the grapevine, and the dumb fuck gets all excited and tries to give me this money. Go figure, eh?”

“What news?”

“About some guy Hoho knew at Portland, Golden Reynolds. Got himself
whacked is what I heard. So I tell Hoho that, and whattaya know he goes all generous and, like I said, tries to lay this dough on me. Not that I was gonna keep it or anything. It was going to charity had my way …”

“Cut the bullshit, Spinks. What did Hank ever do to you?”

Gordie blew a cloud of smoke into the air and watched it dissipate. “I don’t think you’re paying attention,” he said. “I personally never laid a finger on your brother. Okay, maybe I’m a little disappointed. He figures to pay a certain debt, shall we say, for services rendered, so to speak. Then, instead of doing what he oughta, he turns the whole thing into a major fuck-up. But that shit at the fairgrounds? That’s not my style, kid. Ask your brother. I’m a patient man.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Okay, so let me clue you in on a couple facts, just between you and me. Some mother in Portland gets his throat slit. Game over. So you maybe can see how that might leave some folks with certain ideas, maybe a bad taste in their mouth. Payback time maybe you’d call it.”

Cyrus leaned forward. “You saying Hank had someone killed?”

“That’d be your call there, kid. I wouldn’t know all the details, only what I hear. Rumour has it, though, this guy, this Goldie, was the one who worked Hank over in Portland.”

Cyrus jumped to his feet, stumbling over the chair. Gordie said, “Be cool, kid. Don’t be thinkin’ too hard on this. The slate’s clean the way I understand it. Nobody owes nuthin’.”

“Maybe that’s not the way I see it.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself. But maybe think about this: this ain’t no game here. This is the real deal with folks who play for keeps. My advice is you just move on. You upset the balance, it’ll come back and hurt you. Look at me, I’m the one with the temporary cash flow problem all of a sudden, and you don’t see me gettin’ all fired up. Some shit you just gotta walk away from.”

NOTHING WAS WORKING FOR HANK
. His nose was plugged. His eyes were swollen shut. His tongue tasted of nothing but blood. His brain was clouded with chemicals and pain. He couldn’t move a muscle even if he
wanted to, sealed inside this pummelled vessel, the aching prison of his body.

He remembered (or had he dreamt?) that Cyrus had touched his arm. Aside from that one moment, there’d been nothing to break the monotony—no sunny vision of himself as a park ranger, no wide-brimmed hat or dusty jeep, no natural vistas or cleansing winds, not even the mindless distraction of television—nothing but the same old loop of grainy pictures he’d always had, the looming presence of his father, the acrid smell of chicken shit and feathers, that voice (“I’ll teach you”) followed by the blows across the face, the shame and the pain and, inevitably, those other dark figures, the grunting voices, the flash of steel and fist, a seemingly endless cycle of lessons learned.

Then Cyrus was there again, and Hank wanted to say something cool, show some attitude, some spunk, if only to make it easier on them both. But his voice didn’t work, and he was months away from a high-five. Even a head feint was out of the question. He couldn’t curl his lip or shoot the finger. He couldn’t grin the wiseass grin. And with a wave of panic, he realized he no longer existed. Everything that made him Hank had been taken away.

Cyrus pulled a chair close so he could whisper into his brother’s scabby ear. “You hear me?” he said. “I just saw Spinks. What he told me, honest to God, I feel like giving you a few kicks myself. Tell you the truth, I’m sick to death of even looking at you. I just wanted to say one thing. It’s our secret. I’m not going to tell Izzy because, well, I don’t know why exactly. I don’t want her to hate you, I guess. That’ll be
my
job, knowing what a jerk you are. Oh, and one more thing. If you ever screw up again, and I mean ever, I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

B
y the middle of July, after auditioning more than a hundred musicians, Cyrus and Pete Marone had found a drummer, a bass player and a rhythm guitarist. Despite Ronnie’s insistence, there would be no vocalist, but they were all strong singers should the need arise. They practised every day from noon until five in an empty warehouse by the waterfront. Ronnie had been right about the music. It was far too dense and complicated to work in the context of a band. So now they had gone back to the beginning, but with a kind of blueprint. It was the most fun Cyrus had ever had playing his guitar.

Eura was the dark spot in his life. She tried to be happy for him, but he was already so happy for himself. She knew she should be proud of what he was accomplishing, but he had that amply covered, too. Every day seemed to take him another step away from her; and although his world was growing ever larger, ever brighter, it seemed to have less and less room for her.

In one of his unkinder moments, Cyrus criticized her for wallowing in self-pity. There was some truth in that, and she knew it. But her clearest feeling was bitterness. She had fought long and hard to keep him at a distance, to protect her damaged heart from any more hurt, and in the end she’d allowed him entry to her life only to find that he could never be what she wanted. She needed a love as large as a nation, ten million arms to hold her
and kiss her and fill her emptiness, and he could offer nothing more substantial than melody, the stirring of wind in the trees. This kind of man, she mused, could only be an artist.

All that summer the band rehearsed, rearranging, rewriting, jamming, joking around, until they had taken the next step in the musical chain and become a band not in name, not in legal terms with a trademark and accountants and licensing agreements, but in spirit, their sum so much greater than its parts. In a matter of a few months they had gone from being perfect strangers to having the kind of relationship in which each member could say: I could not play so brilliantly, I could not think this way or know so much or be so alive without these friends beside me.

At the end of August, Ronnie returned to Toronto to hear what progress had been made. He spoke briefly to each member of the band (Cyrus had never seen him so reserved), and then he stood at the back of the room while they ran through the twelve songs. He didn’t say a word between numbers, which gave the whole scene the feel of an audition. When they finished their hour-long set, they looked at him and waited.

Slowly, like someone who had been in a trance, he lifted his head to look straight at Cyrus. “I will remember this moment the rest of my life,” he said.

“You liked it?”

“Like
is not the word I would choose, my friend. I like liver and onions. I like living in New York. But this is another category altogether. Look.” He held out his hand. “I am trembling.”

Cyrus moved forward to squeeze Ronnie’s arm. “Were you worried?”

“Unprepared, perhaps. I had no idea you had advanced so far in this short time. No, my friend,
now
I am worried. You have handed me a thing so precious I am fearful I might destroy it somehow with my fumbling. What if I don’t have the strength to carry you as far as you need to go?”