Sweeter Life (15 page)

Suddenly there was muscle in the snare. The bass played a quirky riff that ran up to the seven and back down to the root. Sonny played chord
spasms on the B-3, lots of Leslie. And Jimmy was in full voice.

That was all there was to the tape, and Cyrus, blinking with bewilderment, looked over at Sonny who was sprawled onstage asleep. Not knowing what else to do, or what to think, he turned off the Revox and sat there feeling stupid.

A few minutes later the rest of the band wandered in, passing around a forty-ounce bottle of Johnnie Walker. Chuck took off his baseball cap and
slapped Sonny with it. “Rise and shine, you old fart. Let’s rock and roll.”

While Sonny sat there rubbing his face back to life, Two Poops walked over to Cyrus. The minute he saw the tape, he gave a knowing smile. “I see Sonny’s trying to convert you. I’d stick to the sheet music, I was you.” Then he drifted back to the bottle, following it and the other musicians onto the stage.

Cyrus turned back to the charts again, wondering how long it would take him to make sense of all those chicken tracks. From behind the piano, Sonny said, “What the fuck you need, an invite? We’re jamming here, hotshot. Maybe you could come and learn a few things, whataya say?”

When Cyrus joined them onstage, Sonny launched into a slinky little bass riff with his left hand, and Chuck immediately locked into the groove. Two Poops fiddled with his horn a bit, but seemed more interested in smoking a cigarette. After twelve bars, Sonny started in with his right hand. Nothing fancy. Simple logical statements. Each proposition flowing from another. Nothing tricky, really, no fire and lightning. But each step was a step higher, a shade deeper, leading to a place that felt just right.

When it was Cyrus’s turn he tried his best to imitate Sonny’s laid-back approach and even, you know, closed his eyes and tried to imagine he
was
Sonny, as if such a thing were possible, as if he, Cyrus, had any idea who Sonny was or what he was like, and so, of course, the solo, the solo that came out was, yeah, sure, it was pure Cyrus, manic and shapeless, and the more he played the worse it got until finally after several passes through the chord changes he stopped.

Sonny looked up from the keyboard and said, “Maybe we need to slice off another finger, whataya say?” That brought a chorus of disapproval from the other band members, which Cyrus found more embarrassing than the jibe. If Sonny felt chastened, he didn’t show it.

TWO THINGS DOMINATED
the backstage area: dinner and a dartboard. And over the past few weeks it was the only place where Cyrus had felt anything close to happiness.

The dartboard was built into a six-foot hard-shell case, the kind that all the other gear travelled in. After the crew had taken out the cords and adapters that were required for the PA, they stood the case on end and the
dartboard was at the correct height. On the inside of the lid were chalk, slate, brush, spare darts and flights. All day there had been a game going on. When Adrian wasn’t busy onstage, you could find him near the board, playing or keeping score or brewing pots of tea.

Dinner, on this night, came courtesy of the Meckling Baptist Women’s League—roast turkey with stuffing and gravy, homemade cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts. For dessert there was apple cobbler with cream. Aside from Jim, who was served in the Airstream, the musicians and crew ate together at the kind of wooden tables you find in most church basements. They were served by grey-haired women in print dresses and serious shoes, women who seemed an awful lot like Ruby and who did not take kindly to the teasing and profanity.

When Cyrus had finished his meal, he took his coffee over by the dartboard. Ronnie patted the seat beside him.

“My young friend,” he said, “I hear through the grapevine that you have been hard at work all day. I cannot tell you how pleased I am that you have grasped the nettle, as it were.”

Cyrus made no reply. His attention was focused on Eura as she wandered through the loading doors and into the night. The past few weeks she had kept her distance, offering him a smile every morning, a wave every night, and not much else.

“How long has Eura been with you?” he asked.

“D.C.? About a year I should think. Jim is extremely fond of her. Has she told you she was once a circus performer?”

“No,” he said, both surprised and not surprised. “We haven’t talked much.”

“Well just imagine, she was part of this little troupe that visited the United States a few years back. The target for some knife thrower would be my guess.”

Cyrus could no longer see Eura, but he continued to look in that direction. “Del Conte sounds Italian,” he said. “Is that where she’s from?”

“I am not entirely certain which country she calls home, but I do know that Del Conte is not her real name. I gave her that moniker myself. Sonny, of course, in all his redneck charm, thinks she is a Communist spy.”

Cyrus got to his feet—the thought of Eura sitting alone out there was too much for him to ignore. “Need some fresh air,” he said. Then he headed out back.

The sun was down, the night surprisingly warm and still. A light shone from Jim’s trailer. Through the bedroom window, he could see Eura, or rather her shoulders and the back of her head, rocking with a steady rhythm. And he heard Jim’s voice, soft and languorous: “Mmm, yes. That’s the way. Don’t stop, darlin’.”

CYRUS MADE HEADWAY THAT NIGHT
. At least
he
thought so. He managed to block out most of the distractions and, listening carefully to what everyone else was doing, let the music take him where it would. He gave no thought to expressing himself, or impressing others, but let the current lead him. Whenever he felt unsure of himself, he stopped playing.

Chuck flashed him a thumbs-up after the show, but Sonny gave no reaction at all, which struck Cyrus as unfair—he felt he deserved encouragement. So he stayed in the dressing room long after Jim and the rest of the band had gone back to the hotel. He put new strings on his guitar and polished it with lemon oil. He even helped the crew finish the load-out. As a result, he was still backstage when a thin man in a black suit led a group of grim-faced locals over to Ronnie, who was seated at a small table, writing in his daily planner.

“Mr. Conger,” the man said, his hands clasped before him, “we have a bone to pick. There was not a single word about Jesus tonight.”

“No,” Ronnie said, nodding agreeably, “nothing
directly
about Jesus, you are correct. But I’d say in a roundabout fashion most definitely. So not Jesus, but Jesus
-ish.”

The man looked to his group of followers and then back to Ronnie. “Well, no sir, if you’ll pardon my saying so, not exactly. Now I can’t tell you right off what in the name of the Lord your man was gabbling about, but I know it had nothing to do with the revival of Christ everlasting. And you told us, sir, that it would be so. Think Billy Graham, you said. Think Rex Humbard. But this performance, if that’s what you call it, this Jimmy Waters Revival, is nothing but a fraud.”

Ronnie got slowly to his feet and extended his hands, palms up, as though he were holding the evidence there for all to see. “It is one of the trials of an artist, I fear. You present a vision and some will see it, others not. And as you know, even Jesus was not appreciated by all who saw him. The spirit moves in mysterious ways and does not move all equally. Tonight, personally, I felt very much in the presence of something holy. I am saddened to hear that you and your friends were unmoved.”

Ronnie gave Cyrus a pointed look, and Cyrus grabbed his guitar case and moved toward the loading door. From there he could see Adrian, Kerry and Tom climbing into the cab of the truck. Then he turned and, in a singsong voice, said, “Mr. Conger, the crew is leaving.”

Ronnie grabbed the man’s hand, pumped it vigorously and followed Cyrus from the room. Undaunted, the irate locals tried to form a human blockade at the end of the parking lot, but the truck and the Cadillac wheeled past them with little trouble. Ronnie slowed just enough to stick his head out the car window and shout, “May the Lord be with you!”

At the hotel in Woodville, thirty miles west of Meckling, Cyrus once again ignored the invitation to join the others at Adrian and Kerry’s. He was still disappointed. But the more he thought about his performance, the more positive he felt. He had been comfortable on stage. He had stayed in the groove. Best of all he hadn’t let Jim’s performance or Eura’s presence distract him. Sonny should have said something.

After a long hot shower, his own soapy hands making him ache with loneliness, he dialled Janice’s number. She answered on the first ring, which meant she was in her room.

“Hey there,” he said, “all tucked into bed?” His voice had a jovial back-slapping tone, entirely at odds with the way he felt. It was the way his father sounded whenever they went anywhere as a family.

“Cyrus? What’s going on? Your sister said you were in Campenola.”

“I’m playing, Janice. I got this gig that is so weird I can’t even begin to tell you. But it’s cool, too, you know. I mean, I’m doing it, just like I said I would.”

“Well,” she said, half-heartedly, “I’m glad. Really, you deserve it. So, like, this is a permanent thing in Campenola?”

“What? No, I’m somewhere else now. Woodville. I’m on tour. A new place almost every day. It is such a trip.”

“Well, you’ll have to let us know if you’re ever close to Wilbury …”

The sound of her voice was making his heart ache. He had expected her to be excited for him, but the conversation wasn’t going the way he wanted. “So what about you?” he said. “What’s new at school?”

She took a deep breath and said, “Sorry. I can’t do this right now.” Then she hung up.

He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. It was bad enough he’d hurt everyone back home. Now he had lied to Janice, the one person on earth he’d always been straight with. Life on the road was not at all what he’d made it out to be. Sure, parts of the gig seemed professional, and the musicians were better than any he’d ever played with, but it was nothing like the life he’d imagined. Where were the easy riders, the barefoot nymphs? Instead he was playing to tubby middle-aged couples and their Bible-thumping teens, for blue-haired ladies with hairnets and shawls and ill-fitting dentures. Most curious of all was their reaction to the show, as if they, too, were wondering what in hell they were doing there. It seemed to Cyrus there wasn’t a single person on or off the stage who had a clue what the Jimmy Waters Revival was working so hard to revive.

W
hen Hank’s batteries died, he was tormented once again by the din of broken souls, the skittering of rats, the starkness and the darkness and the absence of even simple freedoms. He tossed and turned on his bed. The air tasted of stone and metal and human sweat. In desperation, he stood at his cell door for hours and peered into the future. But try as he might, he found no goat or jeep or wide-brimmed hat. What he saw instead in that dark, empty, echoing space was the barely discernible outline of a man, the way you might see a face take form within a shifting cloud of smoke. There had been other men, other faces, but this time it was his father.

Hank closed his eyes, hoping to dispel the vision, but when he opened them again, the face was there watching him, a hovering presence. So he crept back to his bed and lay perfectly still, struggling to breathe as a scene took shape before him.

He was twelve years old. Ken and Gary and Teddy and Pete, they were all in on it, a club kind of, never anyone’s idea but something that seemed to well up whenever they were together. They met at Pete’s place after school, smoked a few cigarettes and headed downtown in a gang. At Woolworth’s they wandered in one at a time and each swiped a toy derringer. (“Hawk” is the word they used—“let’s hawk some guns”—like they were birds of prey.) No one wanted them as toys; no one played guns anymore. It was the stealing that
was needed, the thrill. It was the knee-knocking amazement at their own nerve. They carried their little treasures back to Pete’s garage and hid them in the pot-bellied stove. And the more guns they collected, the more compelled they were to steal again. It became a necessary challenge.

Then one Friday after supper, Teddy Birch got nailed coming out of the store. Ted was only eleven and a big crybaby, and he squealed on the whole gang and brought the cops right to Pete’s garage and the stove and their cache of derringers. A few hours later Officer Danny Scanlon, a marsh boy himself, drove Hank out to the farm. Danny told his story in a few words, then drifted out to his cruiser and back to town.

Hank stood in the living room, afraid to move, until his father grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the yard, out past the barn, through the hissing leaves of corn and into the chicken coop. There, in the darkness, with moonlight filtering through the cracks in the wood, a smell of feathers and chicken shit floating on the damp night air, he watched his father remove his belt and swing it above his head. The big square buckle glinted, then slashed across his mouth, and the last thing he remembered was the taste of blood and the faint tinkle of a tooth skittering across the wooden planks of the coop. “I’ll teach you,” his father had said, exactly the way he was saying it now, just outside the cell door, the voice, the face, everywhere in the darkness so Hank couldn’t sleep at all.