Sweeter Life (54 page)

He had decided to organize a benefit concert. He wanted to shine a critical light on Ronnie’s family and their false pieties, but even more on the shameful state into which social services had fallen. As Nigel laid out the details of his plan, he peered into the darkness outside the window, as though he could divine the future out there. He could get Noel Plaice to promote and organize the concert, he said. Noel owed Nigel favours. They could use the grounds at Knebworth possibly. If not, there was always Wimbledon. He listed all the big-name bands he could count on. There would be stories in the papers about Ronnie’s brilliant career and subsequent misery, abandoned by his family and his country.

Cyrus nodded encouragement but didn’t share the same enthusiasm for the project. As he went to bed that night, two sore points kept him from getting much rest. If anyone had earned the right to appear onstage for Ronnie’s benefit, it was Jangle. Yet that was impossible. Cyrus had several operations ahead of him and months of therapy before he could even begin to hold a guitar again. That fed directly into his second disappointment. He was a young musician struck down in his prime and with few, if any, prospects of ever playing again; yet no one had spoken of a benefit in
his
honour, if only to rescue his album from the limbo of the courts.

Cyrus knew he could voice none of these complaints without appearing selfish. Ronnie needed his help. Everything else had to wait.

WHEN HER DEAL CLOSED
, Isabel drove to the old place and set her plans in motion. A team of workmen tore down the chain-link fence. Though the pumps and storage tanks had already been carted away, there were large sections of sheet metal, splintered wooden palettes, hoses and tubing and wire to be collected from the property and carted off to the dump. The ground was stained black with oil, which Benny Driscoll had foolishly tried to burn off. The place still had the scorched taste of disaster.

Once the land was cleared of debris, she had Joe Filmon remove the contaminated soil. He made a hole five feet deep and fifty yards square. When people drove by and saw the backhoe and dump trucks, they wondered if Izzy was planning to put up a skyscraper. In the back of her mind she was thinking greenhouses like the ones Gerry had built.

The first time Hank came out with her to see it, he just shook his head critically. He had no sentimental attachment to the land, and he didn’t suppose she had either. He figured she’d lost her mind, pouring good money into a place like that. But once the property had been freed of all debris, and especially after Joe began to dig, Hank began to think more positively, began to think that maybe one of his own dreams, however truncated, might come true.

“Tell Joe to go deeper,” he told her. When she explained they had already removed the contamination, he said, “Doesn’t matter. Go ten. Go twenty if you can. Can’t be too safe.” When she complained about the expense, he said he would chip in. When she reminded him he didn’t have any money, he told her he would ask Ruby. When she asked him why he was so interested, he said he had an idea.

For two more days she had Joe pull out soil and cart it away. At ten feet they struck water. By the next morning the hole was a five-acre pond, which Hank dubbed Lake Isabel. She wasn’t amused.

The next night after dinner they drove out and parked at the side of the road, the sun still low in the sky. A humid breeze blew in off the lake. They didn’t bother to get out of the car.

“Now we plant trees,” he said. “Poplars at first. They grow like weeds. A few willow. We plant grass, too, and get Joe to lay a gravel path all the way around the pond.” When Isabel still didn’t get it, he said, “A campground, Iz. Two years from now we could have people in trailers out here. With lots thirty feet wide,
you could have twenty around this pond alone. We stock it with fish, build a little rec room somewhere …”

She turned in her seat and gave him her most scornful look. “Who in their right mind is going to want to stay out here?”

“Me, for one. I could be the manager, you know. I get myself a little mobile home, maybe a little shed where I can fix things. A little sit-down mower to keep the place tidy. I could hire some local kid to help me in the summer. I got it all figured out, Iz. I need something to do. I need to get out of your hair. I can do this. I know I can.”

When she didn’t respond, he cleared his throat and told her about his dream from his prison days, the park ranger, the jeep, the wide-brimmed hat. “It’s not the Grand Canyon,” he said, “but it’ll do. Whataya say?”

She stared out the window of the car for the longest while. There was already a pair of seagulls floating around the pond. And she said, “You have to promise to wear the hat.”

A
fter two days of planning, Nigel and Cyrus returned to London to visit Ronnie. His condition was the same. His expression was the same. His hair, the angle of his chin, the position of his hands folded across his stomach—they were all the same. Lying there, seemingly dead to the myriad stimuli of the world, a great tangle of tubes and wires and patches connecting him to the technical marvel of modern medicine, Ronnie looked to Cyrus like the kind of arcane gizmo you might find in the recording studio, as if he had found a way to transform himself into music’s perfect receptor.

While Nigel sat beside Ronnie’s bed and spoke softly about what he was planning, Cyrus got the latest report from Doreen. Pneumonia was the danger now, she said. Then she took his broken hand in hers and reminded him he had his own medical problems to take care of. He nodded, though he had no intention of following her advice. That would mean going back to Toronto, and he wasn’t ready to do that just yet.

Cyrus returned to Ronnie’s bedside and listened to Nigel chat about the football scores. When they were preparing to leave, Doreen came in and said there was a man on the phone. “He wants to speak to someone in the Conger family. I thought you two might be close enough.”

Cyrus followed her down the hall to the nurse’s station. A familiar voice on the other end of the phone said, “I have only just heard. I have only just
heard and my heart aches at the news, and yet, and yet I want so much to give you my deepest condolences in this time of sadness. He was like a saviour to me, your Ronald. He saved me and anointed me and brought me out of the wilderness and gave me a voice. I tell you truthfully that I would take his place if I could.”

Cyrus waited until the first pause in that mellifluous flow of words, and then said, “Jim, it’s me. It’s Cyrus Owen.”

“Oh, Lord,” he said. “This is luck. When I first read the news, I knew I had to reach you somehow and tell you how sorry I am for your misfortune, one musician to another. Tell me, now, what is the prognosis? When do they think you will play again?”

Cyrus explained what the specialists had told him, but to hear it in his own words, without the doctor’s authority, made the outlook seem hopeless.

Jim clucked his tongue sadly. “Get yourself home, young man. Do not dilly-dally with somethin’ like this. The stakes are too high.”

“I intend to,” he replied, “but not just yet. We’re organizing a benefit concert for Ronnie. I have to stick around for that.”

After a moment’s pause, Jim cleared his throat and said, “I know I am not the star I once was, not that I ever was such a big attraction, but I would be most honoured if you would consider me as a possible performer. And, if not onstage, then in some other capacity. I have realized this past while that I owe Ronnie more than I could ever repay. I would be most grateful, you know, if I could help out.”

Cyrus took Jim’s phone number, in a place called Waldorf, Nebraska, and said he would phone in a day or two. But considering the role Jim’s music had played in Ronnie’s life, Cyrus more or less promised him a spot onstage.

Nigel was thrilled. “A reunion of the Revival,” he said excitedly. “Imagine if we could convince Gil Gannon. It’d be fucking brilliant.”

Cyrus called Jim the next day. A woman answered on the second ring. “Billie’s House of Music, Billie speaking.”

“Sorry. I was looking for Jimmy Waters.”

“He’s with a customer right now. Can he call you back?”

“Well, I guess. I’m calling from England—”

“Lord love a duck!” she exclaimed. Then, half-covering the mouthpiece, she shouted, “Jim, git your fanny over here. It’s that fella from England.” Back in her phone voice, she said, “He’s coming. And next time don’t be so mealy-mouthed. I imagine this is costing you an arm and a leg.”

Cyrus heard what sounded like a bit of sexual roughhouse, full of slap and tickle and girlish giggles. Then Jim said, “Young man, I am in high spirits today. This is good news, I hope.”

When Cyrus said they wanted him to reunite the Revival, Jim actually whooped with delight. “The very thing I wanted to hear. I have already taken the liberty of callin’ Sonny and the others, and they are ready to roll. I would prefer to have you with us, naturally, but considerin’ your circumstances I have asked Derek De Groome to fill in, as he did so well when you and Eura left us those many years ago. But if you could talk that lovely lady of yours into joinin’ us onstage, I’d be most honoured.”

Cyrus cleared his throat and said, “I haven’t spoken to Eura in a while. We split up. I don’t even know where she lives.”

“Ah, what a pity. I did think you two would last. But then I never have been very wise in matters of the heart.”

In order to bring the conversation back to a safer footing, Cyrus said, “You work in a music store?”

“Hard to call it workin’, my friend. I am havin’ the time of my life.”

NIGEL WAS BACK IN THE STUDIO
, producing an album for Newton’s Apple, a band that had seemingly perfected the art of stadium rock. (Every record contained six or seven ponderous tunes of drug-induced splendour and implied significance that always—and this was the secret—sounded best in the vast echoing confines of a football stadium or hockey arena.) At the end of each day of recording, the band returned to the pleasures of London, and Nigel turned to the arrangements for the benefit. He seldom had more than a word of greeting for Cyrus. Sophie and Patrick had switched their focus to the studio’s new clients. Sometimes Cyrus felt he had become invisible; at other times he thought he had become something even worse, something only partly visible and wholly upsetting.

In the days after he had spoken to Jim and made the arrangements for
him and the others to fly over, Cyrus did little more than stroll about the grounds of Hidey-Hole. As the promotion for the concert increased, however, reporters asked him to explain what Ronnie was really like, to describe the dreadful attack. The interviews invariably left him feeling sorry for himself. He almost always ended those days with a few solitary rounds at the Two Poofs.

After one particularly depressing interview and the ensuing pints of bitter, he called Janice. More than anything, he wanted to hear her voice, one of the happiest sounds he had ever known. But this time he heard worry. She had read the news stories and had spoken with Izzy. She wanted to know how he was doing; she wanted details. And no matter how he tried to shift topics, she came back to her central concern until, finally, he told her everything.

“I’m supposed to have a few operations,” he said. “But it doesn’t look good. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Are you asking for advice?”

“No,” he said, “not really. I just wanted to hear your voice, I guess. How are things there?”

She told him that Isabel had bought back the old farm and was turning it into a trailer park, with Hank as superintendent. “Just last week,” she said, “he bought a mobile home. He’s already living out there. Drives around in a little golf cart. I’m invited for dinner tomorrow night.”

Every time he phoned Wilbury, it seemed the fabric of the world had become unravelled and knitted together again in some new pattern. “I assume Izzy’s paying for all this,” Cyrus said.

“I’m not the one you should ask. It’s none of my business. But I think Ruby helped him get started. She’s been very generous lately.”

“I guess you heard about Orchard Knoll. Bet you never thought I’d be a farmer.”

“You’ll also be a landlord soon. Ruby’s living in town now. Izzy found her a condo down by the marina.” Cyrus wasn’t surprised that Ruby wanted to live closer to her friends, but the news hit him hard. The combination of Ruby and Orchard Knoll had always been his salvation. When he didn’t respond, Janice continued. “I told you, didn’t I, that I was thinking of moving to Wilbury more permanently? I mean, I’ll always keep my studio in the
city, but being back here, even at my mother’s place, has been good for me. My work is going well, I feel good about my classes, I’ve enjoyed being with Ruby and your brother and sister, and, well, they rented me the farm, Orchard Knoll, I mean. Two weeks from now I’ll be living out there with all those apples. Donny Pentangeles, Frank’s son, is going to help me move around some of the equipment in the barn so I can work out there. You don’t mind, do you?”

What he minded was that he wasn’t in Wilbury with her. The people he cared about—Janice, Hank, Izzy, Jim—hadn’t forgotten him, but they had created new lives without him. In a voice drained of energy, he said, “That’s fine, Janice. I’m glad you’re staying out there. Maybe I’ll come see you someday.”

“You’d better, and soon. Right after you see about that hand.”

They said their goodbyes, then Cyrus went to his room and tried to sleep, wondering what he’d done so wrong that his life had turned out this way.

THE BENEFIT WAS MORE SUCCESSFUL
than anyone had bargained for. Sixty thousand people arrived on the chilly grounds of Knebworth to witness the spectacle. The BBC filmed it for a special. Nigel recorded every second of it for a live album. There were T-shirts and posters on sale, information booths, petitions to be signed. They made the front page of both the
Guardian
and the
Times
.

The backstage area was a paparazzo’s dream: David Bowie and Elton John in animated conversation in the food tent; Peters Frampton, Townshend and Gabriel mugging for the television cameras. And that sense of communion carried over to the show itself, which became a monster jam session with several drummers, banks of guitarists and no end of singers and percussionists and keyboard players.