Sweeter Life (14 page)
Swallowing the lump in her throat, she rose unsteadily to her feet and said, “Your invitation … I guess I should be flattered.” She traced a pattern on the surface of her desk with a red fingernail, then grabbed her purse and coat and walked out the door.
She sat outside in her Buick for several minutes, surprised by her self-control. No tears, no tantrums. It was a powerful feeling, maybe even liberating. What struck her most was how light she felt, how clear. She saw time stretch ahead in precise, practical steps: the selling of the farm, the splitting of assets. She imagined herself standing in a cozy house of her own, pulling aside the drapes to let in the light and a view of roses.
When she turned on the windshield wipers she noticed that girl, Janice, looking all limp and forlorn, and walking along the other side of the street under a paisley umbrella. Isabel rolled down the window and asked her if she wanted a ride somewhere.
Janice stood a moment thinking, then crossed over. “I was just wandering around,” she said. “Wasn’t in the mood for lunch today.”
Isabel took a deep breath and let it out noisily. “We heard from Cyrus. He’s in Campenola of all places.”
“Mrs. Mitchell told me. How’d he sound?”
Isabel stared into the distance and then back at this young girl. “You know what? He sounded happy. Excited. And that’s great. Good for him. Stay too long in this town and you can rot.”
Janice nodded, but not with any enthusiasm. She’d been hoping Cy was miserable and would soon be home.
“I’ll tell you what,” Izzy said, touching the girl’s hand reassuringly, “as soon as we get a phone number or something, I’ll give it to you. Maybe you can find out what’s really going on.”
Janice smiled thinly and watched the Buick disappear down the street. She’d always been put off by the cloud of perfume, the smear of makeup and the nearly audible static of Izzy’s synthetic suits. From a distance she appeared
to be a jittery, brittle and profoundly unhappy woman, the archetype of all that Janice hoped to avoid in life. But Cyrus spoke fondly of his sister. He said she was the only softness that had survived a hard and stupid family. And maybe she was. Janice was surprised to hear her talking of Cy’s departure as something positive. It made Janice think that her own reaction was selfish, that maybe Cy was better off leaving town. He’d certainly talked enough about it. For as long as she’d known him he’d been dreaming about the world outside of Wilbury. Everyone did that, of course, grouse about their rotten luck to be stuck in this hick town so far away from all that was cool. But with Cyrus it was different. It wasn’t that he hated Wilbury, it was that he wanted more, of everything. She liked that about him. He wasn’t envious or bitter. He was hungry, excited, and it showed in everything he did, the manic exhilaration of his playing, the lip-smacking gusto at the table, the joyous abandon in her bed.
She started walking again, past the Carnegie Library, past the Royal Bank and the four corners. She had planned to hang around the rehearsal space for the rest of the day, but decided that that would just make her feel miserable. So on the spur of the moment, she ducked into the Abbey, the only store in town that had cool clothing. Tricked out with wooden pews and bevelled mirrors with oak frames, the Abbey was an oasis of modern fashion in the land that time forgot.
Gwen Morrow, who owned the store with her husband, helped Janice pick out a dark paisley skirt, and a white cotton blouse from the Andes. “Very nice,” she said when Janice tried them on. “Is this for graduation?”
Janice turned in a circle so the skirt unfurled like a matador’s cape. And she smiled, only now thinking it through. “No,” she said, “not for graduation. For church, I guess.”
GERRY ATE HIS LUNCH
at the main counter of the Hilltop, the better to make wisecracks to Barb Dutton, who’d been working there for as long as he could remember. It had started to rain since he’d come in, thick grey clouds blowing in from the lake, and Gerry had just tucked into a second slice of blueberry pie when Vince Ragulli slapped him on the back and straddled the stool beside him, a smart-ass sparkle in his eye.
“Drove by your place just now, Muehlenburg. Looks like you might want to get over there. The wife’s making a statement.”
Gerry nodded and, without a word, finished his pie and coffee in no particular hurry. When he got back to the farm, he parked out at the gate rather than drive up to the house. He sat there with the windows closed, the wipers working, and sucked at his teeth.
Izzy had dumped his clothes on the driveway. His luggage, too. His bowling ball, still in its leather case, was under the tree, beside his fishing rod and tackle box. His sporting magazines—
Field & Stream, Rod and Gun
—sat in neat piles by the porch, the top pages flapping in the wind.
As he sat watching, she drifted serenely out of the house, his golf bag over one shoulder. There, in the middle of the lawn, in the pouring rain, she took out his putter and sent it flying. She did the same with his irons, his woods, looking so cool and methodical it was like she had been practising her entire life. One by one she lobbed his new golf balls to every point of the compass. Then she went inside.
Gerry didn’t need to see any more. He understood well enough. He turned the truck around and drove back to town. He’d have to see Peppy Bascombe at the Wilbury Hotel about getting a special rate on a room. And all the way into town, he kept thinking he could kiss those new pig barns goodbye.
P
eople who make a living on the road—baseball players, musicians, travelling salesmen—all struggle with the same illusion: the more distance you cover, the easier it is to believe you’re getting somewhere. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth, and Cyrus was beginning to understand that.
Over the span of two weeks they had travelled to ten different towns, each one as faceless and forgettable as the next; they had stayed in ten different hotels, equally without character or charm, and had played to nearly indistinguishable audiences that, without exception, could not have cared less about the Jimmy Waters Revival. That Ronnie was able to fill halls in town after town and charge admission was a great mystery to Cyrus. As near as he could tell, there hadn’t been a single person at any of the shows who had appreciated what Jim was doing. Mostly there was bafflement.
Cyrus had problems of his own that darkened each day, chief among them his loneliness. He had hoped to get better acquainted with Eura. He had imagined the two of them chatting pleasantly through all the dull hours on the bus. Unfortunately, she travelled with Jim in the Airstream. And Adrian and Kerry, the most approachable members of the crew, drove the Fairlane and the truck. Ronnie pretty much lived out of his Cadillac, either staying behind to work the phone or going ahead
to firm up arrangements. So, by default, Cyrus spent the bulk of his time with the other members of the band, who stumbled onto the bus each morning still half-drunk or stoned from the night before and who, without the slightest greeting or pleasantry, slumped in their seats and started snoring.
Mid-afternoon each day, he made his way over to sound check, after which there was a quick dinner and the gig. And although every night after the show someone asked him to come to Adrian’s for a cup of tea, he never accepted the offer, because every night he seemed to play worse than the night before and, much like Clarence, he preferred to suffer in private.
He couldn’t understand why, with all his practising and dedication, he had made so little progress. He kept bumping against the same brick wall, unable to find the doorway or even so much as a chink in the mortar that would let him into the heart of Jim’s music. And with that in mind, he decided to walk over to the Meckling Auditorium a few hours early. He still wasn’t comfortable with the new guitar and figured he needed some extra practice through his amplifier.
Meckling was a town of ten thousand people, a few bars, a few banks, one movie theatre and not much else worth noticing, the sort of place, like Wilbury, where you were viewed as suspicious if you didn’t own a car and a house. Taking taxis and renting apartments marked you out as a loser. And walking, Cyrus’s preferred mode of transport, was viewed by most as a sign of mental instability. The only folks you ever saw wandering about Wilbury usually had a screw loose, like Po Mosely.
The auditorium stood north of town, beside the Kinsmen Pool, and when Cyrus walked around back he was surprised to find Sonny behind the wheel of the bus, absently picking his teeth with a matchbook cover. Sonny swung open the door and said, “If it ain’t the Gee-tar Man.”
Cyrus stepped onto the bus. He was already sick to death of the thing. The vinyl seats were torn and stained. A couple of the windows had cracks. A chemical toilet at the back filled the bus with the sweet taint of morgues and undertakers. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to sit there if they didn’t have to.
He balanced the guitar case in front of him and said, “I thought I’d play
through my amp a bit. While I’m at it, maybe I could grab those charts and get a little more familiar with the tunes. I’m missing a lot.”
Sonny raised an eyebrow. “You don’t read, remember?”
“I can read. A little. Just not fast enough to play.”
Sonny thought a moment and pulled a folder of sheet music from a briefcase on the seat behind him. “Just so’s you know,” he said, “these will only get you so far. We maybe start out the way it says, but we don’t often end up where we’re supposed to. They’re kind of like a compass. You ever use a compass? The place you want to go may be due north, but you can’t get there from here. There’s rivers and ridges and miles of bog, so you go east a ways, and west a ways, and if you’re lucky you end up close to where you meant to be. You know what I mean?”
“Kind of, I guess.”
“Well it’s like this, baby doll: don’t go thinkin’ any of this here is gospel. Only scribbles on a page.”
Then Sonny reached into his bag again and pulled out a reel-to-reel tape. “Tell Ade you want to listen to this,” he said. “But it doesn’t leave your sight, and you bring it back to me soon as you’re finished.”
Cyrus nodded his thanks and said, “Sound check isn’t for a few hours. What are you doing here?”
Sonny propped his boots on the dashboard. “Gonna jam a bit, the others ever get back from the liquor store.”
Cyrus found Adrian easily enough. He was making himself a cup of tea beside the stage. When Cyrus showed him the tape—“JJ2” was written on the cover—Adrian smiled knowingly and led him over to a beat-up Revox by the mixing console. He threaded the tape for him and pointed out a pair of headphones he could use. Then he winked and went back to his teapot.
To Cyrus’s surprise, it appeared to be a tape of Jim talking, the background music barely audible. He fiddled with the knobs, thinking one of the channels was turned down, but nothing seemed to help. Noticing Sonny at the edge of the stage, he put the machine on Pause and said, “What am I supposed to do with this? I don’t get it.”
Sonny shrugged. “What can I say? Either you do or you don’t. Maybe you’re better off working with the charts.”
Cyrus ignored that and started the tape rolling again, Jimmy’s voice warm and soothing:
I’d like to tell you a story now if I may,
about a time when I was not much older than five or six.
We had a little house, down at the lake
in Erie, Pennsylvania, a few years after my daddy lost
his fishin’ boat. And though this little house,
the one we had in Erie, Pennsylvania, wasn’t much
by any standard—junky tarpaper shack,
screen door bangin’ somethin’ awful in the wind—it was ours.
And from our porch I could see the big old freighters,
and the cranes and trucks and gulls—
everythin’ a boy could want of life.
The voice paused, and Cyrus could hear the music much clearer. On the surface, it sounded like a slow, loping blues, but it wasn’t. He tried counting it out and got lost. It sure wasn’t any kind of metre he was aware of. Jimmy came back in a stronger voice.
When I remember my poor old daddy, I see
a dark and angry man all broken up inside by feelin’s
maybe he just couldn’t understand.
I remember him comin’ home at night, I was maybe five or six,
and he’d walk into that tiny house and he wouldn’t
say a single blessed word, not even howyadoin’.
He’d be all covered in dirt from the docks where he worked—
when he wasn’t out of work. And because, you know, he was so dirty,
and because he was too tired to hike upstairs,
and because he was involved in labour he didn’t like at all,
havin’, you know, run out of luck on every
dream he’d ever put his mind to, he’d drag a chair
into the parlour and sit in front of our radio,
a big old wooden thing as tall as an icebox and looked to me
back then like the Ark of the Covenant, all shiny wood
and fancy knobs and full of light and sound.
And my daddy would sit
alone there in the parlour of our house,
and listen to some preacher out of West Helena, Arkansas.
Mama would move behind him, touch his shoulder,
and smooth the hair on his neck. She’d bring him water or a plate of food,
and he would turn and bark like an angry dog
all busted up inside, all pained and hurt and only wantin’
to be left alone in the parlour of our house,
the radio up and the lights turned way down low. But sometimes, you know,
I’d sneak beside him quiet as a mouse
and listen with him to that crazy preacher, the bass of that cabinet
boomin’ inside my head, and man oh man,
it felt so good to sit there in our house, my little head
a-restin’ there against my daddy’s leg,
and I would think: It’s just me and my daddy, me and my daddy.
Another pause, longer this time, the music building intensity, slowly asserting itself. Like any good blues, it was hypnotic, working its way into a private space.
I remember one night special. I was five or six.
I was upstairs in my room and I heard my daddy
drag the chair, the radio start to rumble, and Mama’s voice,
her sad old voice, singin’ just like always,
but this time risin’ like a scale and cryin’, “Baby please!”
I was scared and hurried down the hall
and fell—thumpin’ down those fifteen wooden steps and landin’
on my back, and poor old Mama singin’:
“Oh, baby, baby please, babypleasedon’tgo!”