Sweeter Life (48 page)

As they drove across town, they realized they hadn’t eaten since morning, so they stopped at Stewart’s Drive-in for burgers, onion rings and mugs of root beer. Hank, who often had difficulty remembering his time in Wilbury, was flooded with memories of Stewart’s. The laughs with his pals, the hot and heavy action with Jenny Duckworth and Donna Pulaski and a string of other faces that had lost their names. Or better still that spring night, about two in the morning, all the other cars gone, the parking lot full of shadows and shadfies and empty wrappers, and Milly Green slowly working up the nerve to take his thing in her hand, everything as slick as Christmas, when
who comes roaring into the lot but Dickie Bernardi, Milly’s ex-boyfriend, only Hank didn’t know that. And Dickie, because he’s huge and on the football team, thinks he’s invincible, and sure enough when he sees Milly in the front seat of the Owen pickup truck he goes apeshit and tries to pull her into his car. That’s when Hank put a few things straight. He kicked in Dickie’s front teeth and left him coughing blood on the asphalt. After that, Hank was king of the hill, the coolest cat. Certain girls lit up like candles whenever he came near; everyone else stayed out of his way. Like a dream come true.

Janice was the type who wouldn’t have given him a second look back then. His charms were lost on women like her. They didn’t get it, didn’t understand who he really was. And where some guys had other characters they could use in a pinch—they could be shy or smart or sporty or sexy, depending on the circumstance—he just had the one character, which hadn’t done him much good recently.

“Came here all the time,” he said, when he finished his burger.

Janice nodded. “Cyrus and I stopped after every gig. You can’t imagine the stuff we used to talk about.”

And it hit Hank that he couldn’t imagine his brother at all. Most of what he remembered about Wilbury came before Cy was ten years old, hardly even a person. Feeling a small space open inside him, an emptiness that needed to be filled, he turned to Janice and said, “Tell me about him. Anything you like.”

She sipped her root beer, then said, “He sure thought the world of you.” But that was such an old-lady comment, and so clearly did not hit the mark, that she tried again. “In the band we had this thing called The Hank Standard. Whenever we made a decision, Cyrus would say, ‘Okay, maybe, but would Hank think it was cool?’ ”

He laughed. “The Hank Standard. I like that.”

“One time,” she continued, “I even saw him defend your honour. Bryce McKutcheon was making wisecracks about you being in prison, and Cyrus went right after him.”

Hank gave the low whistle of astonishment. “I’ve seen that McKutcheon. He’s built like a Mack truck. Cyrus decked him?”

“Well, no, he actually got himself beaten pretty bad. Cy’s only fight that
I know of. ‘Stickin’ up for his bro’ is how he put it.”

Hank wasn’t all that tickled by that last story. Maybe she intended it that way, to show him what a negative influence he’d been. As if he needed any more of that kind of information. Janice, too, felt increasingly uneasy. Not that Hank seemed like such a bad guy, but the more she got to know him, the worse she felt about herself. Of all the people who had moved through her life, Cyrus had always had a special place, her first love. And yet she realized how selfish she’d been back then. She’d given almost no thought to what it must have been like to grow up in such a sad and painful family. She took what he gave her and gave what she had, without looking beyond or looking deeper.

When they finished eating, they drove out to Winters Shipping & Receiving and parked around back so Hank could manoeuvre his chair up the paved ramp of the loading dock. He felt right at home. This was the kind of place he had worked when he first quit school. The heft and groan, the sweat and ache. Given his present physical predicament, he’d give anything to do that kind of work again, to feel the power of his limbs, the pumping of his heart. Janice led him along a dark hallway and into an even darker storage room. From the sound of their echoes, it was a huge space, like a gymnasium. “Wait here,” she said, “while I get the lights.”

The darkness enveloped her in two seconds, and as he listened to her retreating footsteps, he realized that, for a night that had started out so poorly, it was turning out pretty well. Clarence’s death had been good in a way, all of them in that room watching him go. And although it was tough to see Ruby upset, Hank was glad he’d been there. The experience had brought him a few steps closer to a place he was meant to be, and the clearest indication of that was the relative peace and calm he felt just now sitting in the dark. Nothing at all like those anxious nights in prison, the shadowy faces leering at him out of the empty space.

It was Cy’s tape that had started it, he figured, and the picture of their mother, Catherine, floating into his mind as though she were swimming up to him from the murky bottom of a lake. He’d played the tape constantly the past several months, and each time another little piece of his life seemed to rise up to greet him: the smell of Wildroot Cream Oil, the taste of Beemans
chewing gum or NuGrape soda, the sound of his mother singing “Tennessee Waltz” or “Stardust.” Often those little snatches of memory were enough to trigger larger recollections, like the time he and his friends went swimming in the rock quarry on Rinders Island or the time he tickled Izzy until she peed her pants, each memory becoming a signpost for others, leading him, it seemed, down a very different path that summer, from Cy’s tape to the drives around town with Ruby to the art classes with Janice, all the way to that emotional gathering around Clarence’s final breath.

It wasn’t always a sunny thought he stumbled on, of course. The more he remembered his childhood, the more he remembered exactly why he hated his father, remembered how much they fought that last summer, one night after supper even wrestling in the dirt by the barn, neither one of them landing blows, but understanding all too clearly that it was over between them and the only thing left was to hurt each other. It wasn’t always a one-way street, either. With all the trouble he’d caused in his life, it’d be easy to blame himself for everything, but that wouldn’t be right. They both had problems, both did wrong; yet Hank was the only one still paying. Not that he’d ever been smart about it. He should have run and not looked back. But he kept licking the same wounds, circling over the same territory. Burning down the coop, that was plain stupid. And all those dark months in Hounslow, getting into more trouble and more pain and more trouble. It was stupid. He’d always been stupid. He was just so stupid.

He peered into the darkness for a glimpse of Janice. He listened closely for her footsteps. And then, all at once, a blaze of overhead work lights. He blinked once, twice, and there before him, dead centre in a huge empty room, was a pure-white figure falling backwards, a man falling backwards with his arms flying up in complete surprise, a dopey-looking guy surrounded by lights, just some poor fuck doing his job, doing what he was told, when bang he gets hit full blast by the unexpected, the unexpected bending him over backwards so his face is staring straight up at the sky, and his arms fly up in total fucking surprise, and bang, the surprise, the unexpected, bang, it’s right there blooming on his chest like flowers, the poor bastard, and on his arm, and one just above his belt buckle. And all he said, all the guy had said, was “Can I help you, mister?” That was all he said, standing there in his white
overalls and white T-shirt like he wanted to be extra visible that late at night, “Can I help you, mister?” And even now he can remember how that one stupid line made his blood boil, as if he’d ever wanted or needed anyone’s help. Can I help you. What the fuck was that? What did the guy expect? It was about never wanting help. It was about I can do this myself. It was fuck you and you and all of you because I don’t need your help, which, really, was the kind of thing that could catch a guy by surprise, send him back on his heels and bending over backwards. Because the guy was not too bright. Some local farm boy who didn’t have a whole lot of smarts in his favour, and yet he had this perfectly normal job, pumping gas, maybe fixing an engine now and again or changing a fan belt, certainly not hurting anyone and probably making his folks proud, when bang, something unexpected catches him right there near the collarbone, and there above the belt buckle, and in one wicked whip-crack his body bends backwards, his arms fly up and he goes stumbling into the gas pump and falls to the ground, a bit of snaky thrashing, his nice white overalls totally fucked now. Then he’s lying there still, and Hank is breathing so hard it’s like he’s run a hundred miles, only he just got out of the car, a snazzy little red Corvair, noisy as fuck, and like a bad dream where you forget important things, he suddenly remembers how he got the car, how he stole it from the parking lot at the racetrack, and he stops for gas, right, the thing needs gas, and the stupid-looking guy comes towards him in his nice white outfit, so fucking proud of those overalls you want to tear them to shreds, and the guy is such a loser, with buckteeth and zits and a face you just had to hate, saying, “Can I help you, mister?” and without thinking (how do you think about something like that? You don’t. You just do it) he reached under his shirt where he had a little .22-calibre pistol in his waistband, the kind of thing you’d take out to the dump to shoot rats, and he pulled it out and without saying anything, without thinking anything, he just squeezed the trigger, and the guy flew backwards like he’d been hit by Sonny Liston, his face looking up at the stars and his arms with a life of their own, and the guy went down, heavy, he went down heavy and his chest was gurgling, his whole body doing this snaky bit of thrashing until suddenly he’s still, and Hank looks at the gun in his hand, and he looks at that stupid fuck falling backwards and he feels an emptiness like he has never known before, like
there is no air left in the world. And he looks up and there she is, Cyrus’s friend Janice, and there is that guy frozen forever in mid-fall, his arms flying up, his back bent nearly in two, blown away by surprise, except Janice is looking at Hank as though he’s the one who’s been shot, and Hank holds his hand out to show her the gun, the cold metal in his fist, and all he can say is “I did it. I did it,” over and over until even that is beyond him and he begins to sob, a whitewater flow so powerful and turbulent he can’t fight it, he can only let it take him.

CYRUS AND ISABEL SAT SIDE-BY-SIDE
at the dining room table, both leaning heavily on their arms, too tired to speak. They had given Ruby a sedative and tucked her into Hank’s bed. Then they set about sedating themselves. When the wine was gone, they started on the Canadian Club. They took turns looking at the clock, took turns pouring the next round, took turns peering out the front door for signs of Hank and Janice. Neither spoke to the other about the concerns they might have.

When they heard the front door open around two in the morning, they moved soundlessly to the front hall. Whatever angry words Isabel had been teeing up, she quickly put away the moment she saw Hank. It looked as though he’d been weeping for hours, his eyes bloodshot and swollen. She was touched by the notion that her hard-edged brother, who had seldom shown a speck of consideration for others, was grieving this way for his uncle. She knew he had a fondness for Ruby. Even so, she was surprised to see him so upset.

Cyrus was more interested in the way Janice looked. As strong and confident as anyone he knew, she now seemed completely shell-shocked, as though she’d been shaken to her core by something. He only hoped Hank hadn’t done something stupid.

Janice spoke first. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My fault. We finished here early, and Hank didn’t want to wait by himself. I showed him what I’ve been working on. The time got away from us.”

Without a word or gesture, Hank put his chair in gear and motored toward his bedroom. Halfway there he remembered Ruby, turned his chair around, and rolled himself into the den where he flopped on the sofa, his
back to the room. In response to Cyrus’s raised eyebrows, Janice shook her head and backed sheepishly to the door.

“Thanks,” Isabel said. “We couldn’t have managed without you.”

Cyrus offered to walk Janice to her car. “I was just leaving myself,” he explained. “This hotel’s full.”

“I can put cushions on the floor!” Izzy protested.

He held his hand up like a traffic cop. “It’s all right, Iz. Any other time I’d take you up on the offer, but the last time my head hit a pillow was about forty-eight hours ago in England. If I don’t get some serious sleep, I’m going to collapse. Tomorrow, okay?”

On the sidewalk in front of the house, Janice offered to let him stay at her mother’s. “She’s in Florida,” she said. “She won’t mind.”

He stopped to look at her squarely. “And you don’t mind?”

“No, why would I?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a long time, Janice. I’m not sure I even know who you are anymore.”

“Well, if you’d rather not …”

He grabbed her wrist as she was about to move farther away. “I don’t want to make things awkward for you, that’s all. I only just heard from Iz, you know, about you and Jonathan.”

She pulled her hand away and took a step closer. In a softer, almost apologetic tone, she said, “The only thing that’s making me feel awkward is this stupid conversation. Would you like the spare room or not?”

“Yes. And a ride, too, if you don’t mind. I’m a little drunk.”

That simple decision lifted a weight off both of them. Cyrus led her to the rental car, where he grabbed a battered suitcase from the back seat. Her vehicle, a vintage Volvo station wagon, was so full of wood, cement, plaster, metal, plastic buckets and several gauges of wire and mesh that it was hard to find a spot for his suitcase. Anyone looking inside would think the car belonged to a construction worker.

Once they were driving, he looked at her and said, “So what’s with Hank? I’ve never seen him that way.”

Janice had always been good about secrets. Private knowledge might inform her art, but only in the most roundabout way. She could proudly
declare she had never broken a confidence, never snitched. So even if she had understood Hank, she would have been reluctant to reveal anything to Cyrus. As it was, she had no idea why his brother was so upset. He had told her about that terrible night at the gas station; but that was old news, surely. He’d been convicted of those crimes. He’d had years behind bars to come to terms with his guilt. Why the sudden breakdown? Why did he feel the need to confess to her, repeatedly—unless that was the curious way he related to women. In any case, there was nothing she could or would reveal about the matter, so she shrugged her shoulders and said he’d been upset. When Cy persisted, she looked at him and, in a flippant tone, said, “I don’t know, he’s
your
brother.”