Sweeter Life (5 page)

RUBY HUGGED HER HUSBAND FROM BEHIND
, her cheek pressed against his broad back. Through his pyjamas she could feel the hard ridge of scar tissue from his operation nine months ago, when they had removed part of his lung. “A touch of cancer” is how he referred to it now. All those sprays he used in the orchard, or the pipe he smoked when she first met him, or just rotten luck—it scarcely mattered. She couldn’t think of that scar without shuddering, though it only made sense a body would carry to the grave a reminder of such a deep wound.

She could tell by the sound of Clarence’s breathing that he was awake. But neither of them spoke. She simply needed to press against him, to soften the jangled edge of her nerves against his warm body.

She had felt this kind of jittery static before, of course, especially on the weekend Riley and Catherine died. Her sister had called to say there’d been more trouble with Hank, and that they were heading up to Hounslow to fetch him home, if possible. But the temperature was dropping, the wind started to howl off the lake, and somewhere just outside of the city, Riley hit a patch of black ice and ran the pickup into a hydro pole. Ruby was sitting by the phone, waiting on word from her sister when the police called, setting in motion a long, lurid nightmare of blood and metal and unanswerable questions. It wasn’t until twenty-four hours later, with Cyrus and Isabel in the spare room down the hall, that Ruby and Clarence finally tumbled into bed; and even then she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking and shivering. The only solace she could find was in the feel of her husband’s broad back, needing that physical connection in order to hold herself together. Now, a decade later, she could find small comfort there—it was not the same back. These were not the same times.

A car’s headlights swept slowly along the wall, up the ceiling and away. She hugged her husband tighter, wishing he would turn around and hug her, too. But that wasn’t likely. Whenever he was worried he drew into himself, as though the answer to every problem was locked inside his head. So she kissed his neck and said, “He’s a good boy, Clarence. He knows we love him. I’m sure he’ll do the right thing and come home.”

“Could be,” he said distantly. “Could be. But some people, you know, they just don’t do the right thing, least in that family.”

“He’s part of
our
family.”

“You think?”

She got up on one elbow so she could see the side of his face. “Come on now,” she said, “he’s run off before, remember, and spent the night at the hall. I’ll go fetch him in the morning, and we’ll have a long talk just the two of us. He’ll be fine.”

“Well,” he said, pulling the blanket closer to his chin, “you suit yourself. Could be I’ve about had enough of the Owens for one lifetime.”

R
onnie Conger took a sip of evaporated milk straight from the can and closed his eyes while the elevator took him up to the seventh floor of the Golden Lion Hotel. He’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, but that was nothing new. Before he could lay his head on a pillow, he needed to know that his boys were safe and sound. He had responsibilities, to them and to Jimmy. And one of those responsibilities was the two A.M. head check, almost always his favourite part of the day. He liked to think of it as counting his blessings.

Out on the fast-food strip that stretched north of Ironville, the roar and tumult had dwindled to the odd car now and then, each vehicle a discrete disturbance in the general hush, like a falling star that briefly animates the heavens. Inside the hotel the restaurant had closed, the bar, too, the night staff dawdling over their accounts and fighting off sleep. With the lights dimmed and the dingy corridors all hushed and confidential, the inner workings of the hotel itself became more noticeable: the asthmatic wheeze of the heating vents, the vast gurgling network of twelve floors of plumbing, the hum and thrum of elevator and laundry and how many kilowatts of light bulbs, not to mention the irreverent chatter from the ice and pop machines down the hall, like kids on a sleepover who just can’t turn it off. It didn’t matter the town or country, every hotel come two in the morning gave Ronnie
pretty much the same feeling. If pressed to give that feeling a name, he would have said, “Home.”

He knocked on the door of Adrian and Kerry’s room. Theirs was always the first stop on his rounds; it was where the lads naturally congregated. And sure enough, the door opened a crack and a cloud of smoke wafted into the hall, followed shortly by Adrian’s sweet Welsh tones.

“Oh, aye, it’s the warden come to clap us in irons,” he said for the benefit of the others in the room, who responded with a bedlam of raspberries and catcalls.

Ronnie stepped through the doorway and looked around. As usual, the whole crew, both roadies and musicians, had drifted down to Adrian and Kerry’s room to unwind. They were slumped on the beds, squatting on the floor, perched on every available surface. Like pirates, he thought, in the belly of a ship. There were bottles of Jim Beam and Jameson Irish whiskey. There were six-packs of Canadian beer, American beer, mickeys of vodka and rum and rye. Everyone was smoking, or so it seemed. It was story time, each of them chipping in with a tale of wicked wonders, wild characters, other worlds.

Adrian, all hairy and dwarfish, a battered tweed cap on his head, was making tea and passing around biscuits he had found in a little shop that specialized in British imports. “Just like me mum’s,” he said, offering the plate to Ronnie, who took a chocolate digestive.

Kerry was rolling joints and passing them out. He, too, was from Wales. With his sallow face, the pale scar on his cheek only half obscured by stubble, he looked to Ronnie like someone a half step from the grave when in fact he was a tireless worker, the most dependable of anyone on the crew. The least dependable, the person Ronnie most wanted to keep tabs on, was Cal Hudson, a smart-talking bass player from Philadelphia. Cal had a few problems that marked him as a high-maintenance pain in the ass, and a quick glance around the room revealed that Cal was the only one who had not made it to Adrian and Kerry’s for a nightcap.

Ronnie took another sip of his tinned milk and scanned the room a second time for the halo of frizzy hair. “I don’t see Cal,” he said. “You were meant to keep that sorry pisser in your sights. Was he on the bus?”

Adrian paused with his china cup half-raised. “Looked a bit naff, Arsey. Went straight to his room. Something up?”

But Ronnie had already turned and was walking down the hall to Cal’s, a sick pressure building in his stomach. Cal didn’t do well on his own. Left alone for even a short while, he tended to make a hash of things. As a result, Ronnie had found that the best strategy was to keep him busy with work or play. Give the guy an idle moment and he was lost.

Ronnie listened at Cal’s door and could hear the radio playing softly, “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” He knocked a few times but got no response; he fetched another key from the front desk and opened the door, but the chain was on. So he walked back to Adrian’s, grabbed Tommy MacIntosh by the arm and dragged him down the hall to Cal’s room. Tom and Ronnie went way back, all the way to Glasgow, in fact. More important now, Tom was a bull, easily the strongest man on the crew. Ronnie said, “Give us your shoulder, will you? Cal isn’t responding to my summons.”

Tom scarcely seemed to move, yet the chain was ripped neatly off the frame. Ronnie handed him the half-empty tin of milk. “I’ll handle the rest,” he said. “Go back to your party.” Then he closed the door behind him and moved into the room.

It was Cream playing now, the free-for-all of “Crossroads.” The only light came from a small blue flame on the bedside table, the kind of burner you might find in a chemistry set. Cal was propped against the headboard, the needle still in his arm. His eyes were open and unblinking. When Ronnie touched the hand, already cold and grey and unresponsive, he knew intuitively what to do. He put out the flame, locked the room and walked down the hall to rejoin the others. “Don’t know where that boy could be,” he said as he retrieved his milk, fixing Tom with a pointed look.

Not long after that, Adrian and Kerry began to drop hints that it might be time for bed. When everyone but Tom had shuffled off to their rooms, Ronnie waved the three of them closer and said, “I need your help, lads. And your discretion. Our Cal is dead.”

He laid out the facts as best he could and suggested what he felt was the wisest course of action. They would smuggle the body into the elevator and down to the parking garage in the basement. There they would place the
corpse in the trunk of Ronnie’s Cadillac for a long drive into the countryside somewhere. The best thing might be for some farmer to happen across the body and report it to the proper authorities.

Adrian poured the dregs from the teapot into his cup and downed it in a gulp. “I don’t follow,” he said. “Why not call the police ourselves? There’s no one guilty here but Cal.”

Ronnie dragged his hand through the lank curls of his long brown hair. “You forget Jim,” he said, his voice low and solemn. “You forget guilt by association. Above all, we must protect Jim and, in turn, ourselves from this stain. We have important work to do. I believe even Cal would have wanted it so. Remember how we found him? Hard to believe it was just five short months ago. I think even the harshest judge would forgive us this small transgression when you consider what is at stake.”

Ronnie bowed his head, remembering the young man he had spotted one night in downtown Philadelphia. A dreary November drizzle had given the city an electric shine; and Cal, high as a kite, was parading shirtless along the street behind the YMCA. When Ronnie pulled the car to the curb, Cal sauntered over with all the wrong ideas and started his filthy come-on. But Ronnie could see the sweet damaged boy beneath all that chemical jive and pretense. “Why don’t you get in the car for a minute?” Ronnie had said. “Seems a bit of a chilly night to be dressed like that.” When Cal slid onto the front seat, Ronnie clasped his hands together as though in prayer. “Tell me,” he said, “have you ever thought you might like to be in show business?”

Ronnie shook the memory away and stared grimly at his tour mates. “What do you think, lads?” he said. “Will you help me with this? We are on the cusp of great things, I believe. Our first record is getting airplay. Can we four do the right thing here? I will take full responsibility. You can deny everything. But for now, I need your strong arms and determination.”

They were not easily persuaded, but in the end they agreed and went tiptoeing down the hall to Cal’s room. By four-thirty they had the body and all of Cal’s personal belongings stowed in the trunk of the Cadillac. They hadn’t seen a soul.

“What about his gear?” Kerry asked. “Not many musicians go off with their dirty laundry and leave their axe behind.”

For a moment, Ronnie was stymied. But then he smiled and said, “You forget that no one but us knows he ever played an instrument. No long-lost relative is going to come calling for something like that. In fact, we bought the equipment so, strictly speaking, it’s ours. And as far as a band member getting suspicious, they know better than anyone that our Cal was not a musician. They experienced that sorry fact every night. It will make perfect sense to them that he left his gear behind and went off in search of an easier high.”

Then Ronnie got behind the wheel of his Cadillac and fired up the engine. As he rolled down the window, he said, “I’m certain you three can handle everything on this end. Don’t forget receipts. I must have receipts. Tell everyone that Cal has cleared out and that I’ve gone to find a new bass player. Sonny can figure out something for tomorrow, I’m sure. He’s done it before.” Then he pulled out of the parking space and drove into the night.

Tom looked at the two Welshmen and said, “Itsa fuckin’ mucky weddled.”

SO THERE HE WAS
, Ronnie Conger, back in his car for maybe the hundredth time that day, only this time he was heading miles away from his crew. Nowhere in particular, you understand, but somewhere far, somewhere that felt right. And before long it wasn’t highways anymore but gravel roads, and it wasn’t nighttime but daylight, and then this long lonely concession road, the straightest road he had ever been on, through the squarest and flattest fields he had ever seen. And he had the radio off and the windows open, even though it was early spring and the air was freezing. The speedometer sat solidly on sixty, the speed limit. He was using his turn signals, too, steering straight and true, because the last thing he wanted was to get stopped by the cops with a dead body in his car, the body of a friend, no less, which was wrapped in a floral bedspread and pumped full of heroin and quite unceremoniously shoved in the trunk.

And it was only then, with the sun up over those wide black fields, and people heading to work, that he realized there was no way he could dump the body in broad daylight—Ronnie Conger stomping through some farmer’s field in his expensive suit and shoes and dragging a corpse behind him? No,
a stopover was key, a bit of shut-eye, because he was starting to feel punchy. A motel, maybe, some dismal place where no one in his right mind would stop. A little rest, a bite of food. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Up ahead, he spotted flickering neon: Lakeview Motel. Weathered clapboard that had once been painted baby blue. Shutters hanging cockeyed. Mossy roof, weedy parking lot. Vacancy.

Ronnie wheeled into the parking spot farthest from the office and walked over to inquire about a room. The air off the lake was cold and rank and fishy, and he nodded with satisfaction. Just the sort of camouflage Cal might need. Ten minutes later Ronnie was sitting in a room that smelled of mothballs, wringing his hands and wondering how he had gotten himself in this sorry predicament. He was so far away from where he was meant to be, so far from kith and kin.

His father, the Reverend Archibald Conger of the Baptist Church in East Kilbride, a stolid and proper man who spoke in perfectly formed sentences and believed that thought was God’s greatest gift to mankind, had scrimped and saved on his paltry wages in order to send Ronnie to a decent school and, when the need was greatest, swallowed his pride and pulled whatever strings he could to get his son, a bright but indifferent student, accepted into the divinity program at Regent College, Oxford, where Archie himself had taken his degree. Unfortunately, Archie’s great sacrifice left Ronnie’s doubts and desires entirely out of the equation. Had Archie quizzed his son more fully, he might not have wasted his hard-earned money in paving a dead-end path to paradise. But then, how could he have known that Ronnie would have an epiphany four short months into his second year at Oxford?