Sweeter Life (13 page)

Ronnie walked off then to speak to one of the caretakers of the hall and make sure everything was set for the show the next day. Cyrus slumped miserably against the wall. He was convinced his golden future had become a bad dream. When he looked up again, he and Eura were alone in the dressing room, and he took the opportunity to study her more closely.

That afternoon beside the bus, he had thought she was attractive; but that had been more inclination than perception—he’d always been drawn to the company of women. Now he realized she wasn’t very pretty at all. For one thing, her tattoo was a little creepy. And her face made him think of those police sketches you see on TV, a composite of normal-looking features that would require imagination to make sense of. Judging from the way she carried herself—erect, graceful—he figured she was beyond the age when bad posture might be considered cool. He guessed thirty, maybe even thirty-five. It was her eyes that gave her away, their message dark and complicated, even when she smiled.

Without looking at him, she said, “You need a ride.”

Those four words cast a spell in the room. She was old enough to be his mother, she wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense, and yet his whole body was on alert. Parts that were normally dry had suddenly grown damp. Parts that were normally moist were dry as dust.

When he stammered something unintelligible, she got to her feet in a nearly liquid motion and moved toward him, tilting her head from side to side like she was trying to understand a painting. She said, “Everyone now is back at the hotel. The bus, the truck, the trailer … they are in such a hurry always. But Ronnie has more work to do here yet, so,” she stood before him now, one hand resting on his shoulder, “he has asked me to take you in his car back to the hotel. Or to some place you like.” Before he could say a word, she grabbed his guitar case and headed for the door. “Come along, Mr. Guitar Player,” she said, “this train is leaving.”

Five minutes later he was in the Cadillac again. But now, in the darkness outside the hotel, breathing in Eura’s perfume, it felt a whole lot different. The engine was ticking, and she turned in the seat and said, “You must not let Sonny bother you. He is this way with all of us sometimes. You will get used to it. He is a good guy. You will see.”

Cyrus shrugged, his gaze fixed on her mouth. He found if he focused on a single aspect—her lips or her eyes or her nose—it was better than trying to take in her entire face at one time. Her mouth, looked at in this way, to the exclusion of every other part of her face, was quite pleasant. So he watched her lips and her tongue and the shimmer of slightly crooked teeth in the
darkness. And if her youth was a memory, her charms too complicated to absorb in a single viewing, wasn’t that attractive in its own way?

He was tempted to kiss her, but before he could do anything about it, she nudged his shoulder. “You must go now,” she said. “It is late for talking. Ronnie will finish at the hall soon and need his car.”

He dragged his Les Paul from the back seat and watched her drive away, the cooler air feeling to him like relief. Then he turned and noticed the Airstream parked at the end of the lot. Jim, dressed now in blue flannel pyjamas and pissing against one of the tires, looked over his shoulder and said, “Ah, Cyrus, one moment.” He wiped his hands on the front of his pyjama top and opened the door of the trailer. “Allow me to extend a bit of old-fashioned hospitality.”

The floor was littered with books and newspapers and magazines, fast-food cartons grown rank with age, and here and there an empty bottle or a dog bone. Every step was a misstep, made all the more likely by the yappy Pekingese lunging at Cyrus’s legs.

Jim followed him in and with one hand scooped up the dog and tossed it like a stuffed animal toward the rear of the trailer. Then he took two dirty glasses from the kitchen counter, rinsed them briefly under the tap and dried them with the very same pyjama top. He stopped abruptly when he caught the look in Cyrus’s eye and swept his arm in an arc. “You are wonderin’ how I can live like this, I imagine.”

When Cyrus began to protest, Jim silenced him with a raised finger. “Fact is I have always preferred the edge of things: the lakefront, the forest clearin’, this journey of ours from town to town. It’s where good things happen, young fella. Life, I mean, yours and mine, it’s where it happens, on the border between two worlds. Before and after, cradle and grave. We trace a musical line between whole-note rests.”

Jimmy smiled then, tickled by his own words, and waved Cyrus onto the bench in the dining nook. After a cursory inspection of the glasses, he slapped them on the table and grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam from the cupboard. He opened the freezer but found no ice cubes. From the refrigerator he retrieved a box of cold french fries, covered with dried, sticky-looking ketchup, and placed it on the table. With a critical sniff, he said, “Not the feast I had hoped it’d be.”

They sat then, neither of them touching their bourbon, until Cyrus said, “I’m sorry about tonight. I really messed up.”

“Did you? I can’t say I noticed. I thought we put on a fine show. And that woman out front, my God, her story was like electricity runnin’ up my arms. I’m sure I won’t sleep tonight. I felt such grief there, such anger. It brings tears to my eyes even now.”

Cyrus stared at his guitar case, which he had set on the floor beside him. He was as confused by this conversation as he’d been by the music. Searching for a more suitable topic, he said, “Mr. Conger told me you are the absolute best musician he’s ever heard.”

“Mmm-hmm, well, Ronnie may be our guidin’ light, but he is, you’ll find, wrong about many things. And this is one of them. I was never very good. Well, I was
sometimes
very good and once absolutely perfect. But believe me, I could never hold a candle to our Sonny Redmond.”

“I’d still like to hear you play,” Cyrus said. “I’m sure I’d learn a lot.”

“Ah, but you never will,” Jim replied. He waited a beat before adding, “I’ve taken a vow of musical silence.”

“Why?”

Jim held his palms up, a confession of his own helplessness. “Who knows why we do anythin’? Love maybe. Or faith.”

“But what have you got against playing?”

“Oh, Lord, nothin’ at all. I love to hear everyone play, especially Sonny. His music reaches out to me in ways I don’t understand. And I look forward to the music that will one day come from your corner, boy. I predict great things for you.”

Cyrus shook his head. “I could never stop playing. Music is everything to me.”

“Believe me, it was not as easy as I make it sound. I suffered some until Ronnie came along. He helped me understand what I had to do.”

“The show, you mean.”

“The
words
, Cyrus, the meanin’, this feelin’ that I am gettin’ somewhere, that we are all of us
on
to somethin’, our very own Genesis and Leviticus and Deuteronomy …”

Those words hung in the air for a long while, like some heavenly static
charge that shuts down communication links and short-circuits transformers and relay stations. Jim reached down to the clutter on the floor and picked up a dog-eared paperback,
It Came Out of the Void
. He studied the garish cover a moment, then waved the novel in the air like it was an important piece of evidence in a trial.

“The world is filled with words, Cyrus. Some nights, walking Fifi, I come back with plastic bags filled with books and papers and magazines that people have thrown out.” He dragged a hand through his inky mane and said, “You might not think it to look at me but when I was a boy I was sickly. I searched for truth between the covers of books. Worlds opened up to me and I followed. Now the words themselves have opened up to me. After all this time, they are callin’ me back. After all this time I have begun to hear the connections like a melody. But I still have so much work to do.…”

They fell into another, heavier silence, Jim drifting into deep thought and Cyrus staring into his glass. He understood the meaning of every single word Jim had spoken; no dictionary was required. What he didn’t understand was the way those words had been put together, with an entirely different grammar, it seemed. And sitting in that dog-smelly trailer, twirling around a smudged glass of whiskey, Cyrus realized that Jimmy Waters would be a source of more questions than answers. As soon as he could excuse himself, he gulped down his bourbon, grabbed his guitar and headed for the room he would share with Sonny.

To his relief, there was no sign of his new roommate other than the untidy sprawl of his belongings, so he showered quickly and jumped into bed. But try as he might, he could not sleep, and for the first time since he’d left home, he wished he could sit with Janice and ask her advice.

She was so smart. The first time they went out for coffee she talked for an hour about this school in England called Summerhill. He didn’t really get it, but he liked the idea that she was interested in that kind of weird shit. When he listened to her talk about politics and architecture and art, he figured it was like listening to jazz, something he didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand just yet, but knew one day he would and would look back and say, “Janice was all over that, way back when.” No question, she would know what to make of this situation now. She would have it sussed. Tomorrow he
would call her. Or the next day. She would freak when he told her about the Jimmy Waters Revival.

He was still awake at four in the morning when he heard the door to the room open, heard the drunken stumbling, the grunts, the curses. The light came on then, and the racket died down. After a minute or so of silence, Cyrus opened one eye. Sonny was staring right at him.

“If it isn’t Django fucking Reinhardt. How ya doin’?”

Cyrus rolled onto his back and shielded his eyes. “Look, I’m real sorry about tonight …”

Sonny fell heavily onto his own bed and kicked off his boots. “Water under the bridge, kid. Life’s too short to worry about things that can’t be changed. Anyway, believe it or not, you’re a step up from Cal. He couldn’t play, either, but at least you have the sense to feel bad about it. He thought he was a genius.”

Cyrus flinched at those comments. He wanted to shout that he did know how to play. Instead he bit his tongue and let Sonny continue.

“Truth is,” he said, “I’m the one should apologize, leaving you at the gig by yourself. Wasn’t the cool thing to do. Forgot about D.C. You’ll want to keep your distance from that one.”

“Oh,” Cyrus stammered, “no problem, she just drove me back to the hotel.”

“Yeah, well, maybe.” He pulled the covers over him, not bothering to take off his clothes. “My last piece of advice is this. If you ever hope to come out of this in one piece, drop by Adrian and Kerry’s after a gig. There’s nothing like a good cup of tea to straighten you around.”

D
emeter Real Estate had three agents—Sheldon Demeter, Lawrence Bell and Isabel Muehlenburg—with three desks aligned by seniority. That meant Shel’s desk was near the front door. The middle of the room was Larry’s domain, smelling always of breath mints and Aqua Velva. Izzy’s desk was at the back by the filing cabinets, an area seldom graced by walk-in clients. Any business that came her way had to be self-generated. As Shel put it, “Startin’ out, you gotta be hungry.”

Her routine every morning was to drive in about nine, pick up the new listings, have a coffee and chit-chat with Shel, and then start going door-to-door with her complimentary calendar, maybe hit an open house or two if she could swing it. If she came back by one, the guys would be out at lunch and she could do some cold calling for an hour. But she was late this morning and didn’t make it downtown until nearly eleven. By that time it was drizzling rain, and both Shel and Larry were out of the office.

It felt good to sit a few minutes and let the noise settle out of her head. In front of her was a picture of a little bungalow on Orange Street that Larry had listed the week before: two bedrooms, a beautiful kitchen, hardwood floors and a yard full of roses. It reminded her of a gingerbread house, and she had set the picture aside to show Ruby. With Clarence’s recent health problems, Isabel thought it was time those two considered retirement and
moving off the farm. Ruby in particular had to start thinking of how she would manage on her own. With this little bungalow, a simple twist of a key and she could get the hell out of here and spend her winters in Florida.

Shel came in before Isabel could get down to work. He hung his trench coat in the front closet and walked over to her desk. “Deadly dull these days,” he said.

She watched him carefully, uncertain whether he was complaining about her production or his own. “Well,” she said, “it seems pretty much the same everywhere. Not just us.”

“No,” he agreed, “not much you can do about a market like this one but wait it out and try to stay sane. It’s good, something like this. Works the riff raff out of the system.” He looked out the front window and then back at her. “How about we go up to Hounslow? We could have lunch at the racetrack. My treat.”

Isabel felt the blood rise to her cheeks and she looked away. She had heard both Shel and Larry talking in whispers about the “girls” they escorted to the racetrack—some of them married women from around town—and the afternoons of drinking and laughter, often followed by a few frantic hours at the Airport Inn. She felt stupid and ashamed that she hadn’t seen this coming.

When she was under control again, she said, “I don’t think I could, Shel. I’m just a marsh girl. We kind of take our marriages seriously.”

He studied her as she spoke. Then he leaned forward, his smoky breath making her blink. “You better make sure everyone’s playing by the same rule book,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Her voice had an edge to it, causing him to step back and jam his hands into his suit pockets, moving his shoulders in a kind of defensive swagger.

“I’m talking about Gerry. I’m assuming you know it’s not the draft beer that has him living at the Gaslight Room these days.”

And of course she knew, or she would have if she had just stopped to think about it a moment. The faint whiff of perfume lately, his switching to the Gaslight Room when all his life his hangout had been the Wilbury Hotel. The barmaid there, Ginny Maxwell, the chippy bit of trash who’d had
her eyes on Gerry going all the way back to high school. That funny voice of his when he answered the phone sometimes. The matchbook from the Riverside Motel in LaSalle that she’d found in his jacket about a year ago. Of course she knew. You’d have to be a fool not to.