Sweeter Life (7 page)

Just then a car pulled out of a driveway a hundred yards ahead and sped down the road away from him. Ronnie slowed his car to a crawl and stopped. To his right, where the car had come from, stood a two-storey farmhouse, large barns and outbuildings, and acres of fruit trees. In the silvery glow of moonlight, everything seemed so neatly arranged, so lovingly tended, he could scarcely imagine the kind of people who might live there. Geniuses, perhaps, adepts at the art of living, whose time on the planet displayed a wholesome perfection that made his own life, and the lives of those with whom he travelled, seem a blighted, shadowy existence.

After pausing there a few minutes, he put his car into gear once more and crept past the farmhouse, slowly picking up speed as he went. Turning a wide curve in the road, he saw a bridge up ahead of him, and on the bridge, a young man sitting on the supports, as though he were preparing to jump. That image spoke to him as clearly as any he had ever seen in a painting. He thought: The boy is troubled. The boy is the answer to my problems.

It was always this way. Like boxing or soccer, like the circus even, Ronnie saw the music business as a way out, a bridge across, a road up from whatever dead-end, broken-down, hard-luck life you might have been born to. With
quick feet or quick hands, with tricks or licks or derring-do, one could make a bright new shiny life for oneself without the blessing of family or fortune or a fine education. These were natural callings for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the ostracized. And this boy looked very much in need of an open door.

Ronnie was playing a dangerous hunch in making himself visible, but he brought the car to a halt in the middle of the bridge and stepped out. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I hope you are not contemplating anything so rash as jumping. I am afraid I am not the ablest of swimmers.”

The boy looked over his shoulder, and with a weak smile said, “Don’t worry. I’m just sitting here thinking. Besides, I’d break my neck before I drowned. There’s only six inches of water down there.”

Ronnie closed the door and folded both arms across the roof of the car. “Seems a chilly spot to be sitting on a night like this. Surely there are more comfortable places to ponder the mysteries of life. Is there somewhere I can drop you?”

“Chicago’s what I’d like. But I guess I should just head home.”

“Ah,” Ronnie said, “home. It’s funny, but you rather had the look of a young man with another destination. I spotted you from a fair piece down the road there, and the moment I set eyes on you, I had the sense—don’t ask me why—that you were saying a goodbye of some sort. And I suppose it reminded me of myself at your age, taking my last fond look at home before I headed down to London.”

The boy snorted good-naturedly and swung his legs over the bridge to face him. “You’re from England?”

“Scotland, in fact, but everywhere really, Scotland, England, Ireland, New York. The world, as they say, is my playground.” He paused a moment to consider once again the wisdom of what he was doing. Then he stepped around his car and offered his hand. “My name is Ronnie,” he said, “Ronnie Conger. And you are …”

“Cyrus Owen.”

“Owen,” he repeated. “That sounds like a good strong Anglo-Saxon name. And Cyrus, let me guess, you are what, eighteen?”

“I just turned nineteen.”

“Yes, and wondering what the future holds. I remember well what that feels like, let me tell you.” He smiled kindly, noticing for the first time the deformed hand that rested in the boy’s lap. And in that moment Ronnie knew he had found his needy soul. He clapped him on the shoulder and said, “But never mind my boring story. Tell me this, Cyrus, have you ever thought you might like to be in show business?”

THEY STOPPED AT THE THREE LINKS HALL
just long enough to fetch Cyrus’s gear and pile it in the trunk. (“Just there on that old bedspread, my dear boy.”) The moment they got back in the car, however, Cyrus started to have second thoughts. He had no idea where he was going. He had about ten bucks in his pocket. Worse, this guy could be a pervert for all he knew. As the car turned onto the eastbound freeway, he felt his spirits sink further. After a few minutes of deepening anxiety, he said, “What kind of show did you say it was again?”

“Well, I don’t think I ever said in so many words. Are you familiar with Jimmy Waters?”

Cyrus shook his head uncertainly.

“No, I thought not. Before your time, perhaps. What do you listen to, Cyrus, Jefferson Airplane? Grateful Dead? Rolling Stones?”

“Anything really. I like it all as long as it’s good.”

Ronnie laughed. “As long as it’s good, yes, I know what you mean. You like the music you like. Very well put. And you know, I’m sure Jimmy’s music will speak to you. The first time I heard it I was mesmerized. I tell you—and this is no exaggeration—when I heard his solo on the recording of ‘Don’t Look Back,’ my life was changed forever. Does that make sense to you?”

Cyrus looked out the side window at the nighttime scenery flashing by. He knew the song, of course. Who didn’t? A golden oldie, one of the countless crappy pop tunes that clogged the airwaves before the British Invasion. And although he wasn’t a fan of the music, he was excited by the prospect of playing with a recording star, even a faded one. This Ronnie Conger didn’t seem so bad, either. Cyrus had never met an adult who talked about music this way. He looked across the seat and said, “For me, it was the Animals, ‘House of the Rising Sun.’ I bought the single and played it a thousand times.
Something about it, I don’t know, it scared me. It was like—and this is weird—but when I was a kid, I went camping with a friend and we heard wolves. Just plain scary, but good scary. Scary the way it was meant to be, like it’s a lesson or something.”

Ronnie laughed again, this time with real feeling. “Cyrus, my boy, you are a poet. That is exactly what I mean: music that is a lesson, a pure and sometimes frightening communication.” And with that he howled like a wolf.

Years later, Cyrus would marvel that he had driven off with Ronnie that way. How many young people hopped into strangers’ cars and were never seen again? How many people accepted the kindness of others and ended up shilling for Reverend Moon or L. Ron Hubbard, or getting caught in the nightmare of someone like Jim Jones? And while some might label the music business itself a kind of cult, demanding similar sacrifices, promising similar rewards, it never felt that way to Cyrus. All his life there’d been a place inside him he needed to reach, a power inside him he needed to tap, a story inside him he needed to learn. That night, as he cruised through the darkness in Ronnie’s Cadillac, he sensed for the first time that all those things might be possible.

I
sabel sat on the sunporch nursing a coffee and staring vacantly across the front yard to the dirt road that ran past their farm. It was the first warm day of April, and the flies, stupid and fat and not long for this world, were swarming the house again. They made a sound like corn popping as they bumped against the walls and windows, not a welcome noise by any means; it heralded another terrible season of pig reek. By June she wouldn’t be able to open her windows and doors. The air conditioning would run non-stop. Even if she changed the filters every week, the smell of her clothes would make her gag.

Gerry never minded as much; but then, after the lung-scorching stench of the barns themselves, ammonia so dense it made her eyes run, the rest of their property probably came as a breath of fresh air. On summer nights, he often sat outside on the lawn and drank a beer or two. She’d seen him take his pie and coffee out to the picnic table under the maple and eat it with a hundred flies buzzing around his head.

When they were first married, she assumed she would get used to everything, but in fact it seemed to get worse with time. Every year from April to November, Isabel felt sick to her stomach; and now, with the warm weather on its way, she would begin again to dread Gerry’s coming to bed at night, settling his long frame on their cheap Sears mattress set, the one they had bought before they were married and that now dipped so badly she
had to cling to the edge to keep from rolling into him. Even after a shower, the smell of him, the prickle of his leg hair, and especially those crazy tufts on his back, were too much for her. She tried not to think it, but more and more often the picture came to her that she was lying in the dark with a hog, and she felt stricken in her heart that she could ever think such things about the man she had married.

Lord knew she wasn’t perfect. She had never been a beauty, twiggy as a brush pile. She knew that people talked about her, too. They would say she wore too much perfume. They’d wonder who she was trying to impress—the new clothes always, the beauty parlour once a week. And they would think it curious that she insisted on having a job when Gerry needed her there on the farm to do all the things a farmwife does. They’d feel sorry for Gerry, and she was pretty sure he would agree with them (though he would never let on).

But Isabel didn’t care about any of that. She was proud she had graduated top of her class from the real estate course at St. Clair College. She enjoyed painting her nails. She loved her new cream pantsuit, and the older red and blue ones she had bought last summer at Dainty Miss. She loved her briefcase with its rich leather and brassy clasps, and loved how it felt to get behind the wheel of the big new Buick she leased from Rollie Marks to chauffeur clients around. She was thrilled most of all to have a job at Demeter Real Estate and to get away from the damn pigs. It seemed to her such a sensible decision. At last. At last she was moving in the right direction. And while she understood that you couldn’t turn back the clock, she felt you could at least make up for lost time, which was just what she planned to do.

After she had finished her coffee, she lit her first cigarette, the only guilt-free smoke of the day. Then she headed upstairs to get ready for work. She had just finished putting on her makeup when she heard Gerry clomp upstairs and stand in the hallway. He pushed open the bathroom door with the toe of his boot and stood watching her awhile, his arms across his chest.

“Be late tonight?” he asked.

She brushed off the front of her blouse, then double-checked to see if she could do anything more with her face. At last she turned to him and said, “No, I don’t think so. No appointments. I thought we could have baked chicken and Rice-A-Roni.”

He nodded, his mind not on dinner or her job. “About Reg Foster.…”

She tossed her cosmetics into her little zippered bag. Without turning, she said, “I thought we’d been over this. You always said we’d never use the home farm for collateral.”

“I know what I said. But maybe this is different.”

“Gerry, the only thing different is Foster. Five years ago he wouldn’t give you the time of day, remember? Now he’s trying to rope you into a big loan you don’t want and don’t need.”

“Or maybe,” he said, his face darkening, “maybe
you
don’t know anymore what I want or need.” Then he pounded down the stairs and out across the yard to the barn.

JANICE OPENED HER EYES
to find her mother leaning over her. It was morning; but judging from the colour of the walls, it was too early to get up for school. Her mother was still wearing her housecoat, and the look on her face jolted Janice wide awake.

“It’s Mrs. Mitchell,” her mother whispered. “Cy’s aunt. She’s in the front hall. She wants to talk to you.”

Janice threw on some clothes and followed her mother down. Sure enough, Ruby Mitchell was standing by the front door in her brown cloth coat. She looked so tired and wired that Janice knew immediately that something terrible had happened.

Ruby’s face brightened with hope the moment she set eyes on her. “Cyrus,” she said, “have you seen him?”

Janice turned to her mother, and then back to Ruby, but it was Cyrus’s face she saw, outside the Three Links Hall last night. He was smiling like an idiot, drunk on his own good fortune. She had asked him to be careful. Like a lot of guys, he got stupid when he was happy.

“I haven’t seen him since yesterday, Mrs. Mitchell. We met at the hall after school and had a pizza. I came home about ten, I guess.”

“Well, I was just at the hall. I thought he had maybe slept there last night. He does that sometimes when—well, you know, he was a little upset—and so I went there and the door was locked, and I called his name and pounded on the door like I sometimes do, but he didn’t come down, and I
started wondering if he was okay, or maybe he was hurt or sick or—” Ruby covered her mouth with a liver-spotted hand and took a deep breath. “I was wondering if maybe you had a key I could borrow …”

“I’ll come with you,” Janice said.

To a stranger, the change at the rehearsal space would not be apparent. It was a dusty room filled with drums, microphones, amplifiers and a threadbare collection of flea-market furniture. But Janice and Ruby understood right away. Cy’s equipment was gone. They walked together to the spot where his amplifier usually stood, and they stared at the bare wooden floor, which showed a clean rectangle the size of his Fender Dual Showman, outlined in dustballs and picks and broken strings, candy wrappers and crumpled set lists and song lyrics. It was like his gear had been vaporized, leaving only its shadow behind.

Janice turned in a circle to see if perhaps Cyrus had moved his amp to another spot. Beside her, speaking in a dream voice, Ruby said, “His amplifier, his little suitcase for his cords. It’s all gone.”

Janice walked to the window and looked out on the street. It was a sunny day, as fresh and clean as the morning after a storm. She and Cyrus had talked for hours last night about his quitting school and heading off soon to find a full-time band, maybe in Hounslow or even Toronto to start with, one day making a name for himself. But she never imagined he meant so soon. It didn’t seem possible. A part of her found it hard to believe he’d even been serious. He was good, probably the best musician in Wilbury; but there were any number of guitarists in Hounslow who could play circles around him, and Hounslow was as far away from the big time as you could get. Did he really believe he would become a star?