Sweeter Life (20 page)

“Well no, I know that. That much is clear. It’s like you don’t want much of anything these days.” She rubbed his hand with both of hers. In a softer, more sympathetic tone, she said, “Twenty-five years, Clarence. We’ve been married twenty-five years. And I was thinking, it’s the two of us now, just like before. Maybe it’s time for a change.”

He bowed his head and swallowed heavily. When he turned to look at her, all she saw was fear.

AT THE END OF JUNE
, Hank moved into the Willbourne Correctional Institute, which even as an address seemed a step in the right direction. There was a feeling of hope in the idea of correction, of making something right. A penitentiary, by contrast, sounded painful, where lost souls wearily awaited final judgment. It didn’t hurt that Willbourne was brand new, with low-slung buildings set against a rural backdrop. There were no stone walls, no barbed wire, no armed guards. Inmates called it the Country Club.

Hank had a ways to go before he’d get to see much of the place. He was still confined to his bed and had weeks of rehab before he’d even get into a wheelchair. But the metal brace had been replaced with something plastic and portable. And he had a new radio that required no batteries. He could listen all he wanted. Away from Portland’s dour cellblock, of course, the need for music wasn’t as pressing. He could be choosier in what he listened to. Some nights he turned the dial back and forth, scanning the airwaves for hours. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Maybe nothing. Or at least nothing he could explain.

A
week after they slipped across the border into the United States, Cyrus had his first real breakthrough. They were in Arbutus, Ohio, a mid-size steel town close to Cincinnati. The turnout was poor, but the show itself was surprisingly good, at least for Cyrus. He heard the music better that night, started to understand things the others took for granted.

If Jim’s music was about anything, it was about changes. In every song, they shifted keys, shifted tempos, shifted from one groove to another, anything to bring the music in line with Jim’s stories. And until that night, Cyrus had had no idea how to anticipate when a change might come or where it might go. There were neither verbal nor visual clues. But in Arbutus, he noticed that whenever Sonny played a certain chord in a certain way—Cyrus didn’t know what the chord was, but it sounded complicated, what Janice used to call a spider chord because it stretched out in so many directions—he was giving a sign that a bridge to a new place was under construction. Most of the time it signalled a key change, but if that chord was combined with a confusing rhythmic figure, and if Chuck’s drumming got scattered and chaotic, then it was pretty certain they were moving to another groove, too.

Because of this small discovery, his playing showed some spark for a change. Even Sonny noticed. As they left the stage that night, he actually
patted Cyrus on the shoulder and said, “How about that, the new dog learned an old trick.”

Cyrus, wanting to savour the moment, decided to stroll back to the hotel rather than ride in the bus, but he soon regretted his decision. What he really wanted was to be with Eura. Instead he was alone in the darkness, his elation turning by degrees into a dull ache.

Around midnight, he wandered past a small pub down by the river and saw Tommy Mac sitting at the bar. Cyrus slid up beside him and said, “Bad luck, drinking by yourself.”

Tom nearly fell off his stool. “Ye fuckin’ idjit, ye should have yer bollocks mangled.”

“How come you’re not with the others?”

Tom took a long pull on his draft beer and slammed the empty glass down on the bar. “Not a fuckin’ camel now, am I? A canna be waitin’ fer tha’ shower a wankers.”

The room had a few booths, a handful of tables and a long wooden bar. The place was packed with serious-looking drinkers, men with thick necks and faces that had been rearranged some, women with ponytails and bad teeth.

Cyrus leaned closer to the big Scotsman and said in a half-whisper, “I’m underage, I think. Why don’t you see if you can buy me a drink?”

“I dinna think they give two fucks even ef ye came from Jupiter.” Tom turned to the bartender and said, “Gie-us another, will ye? And a Bood-weiser for me mate here, Wing Commander Owen, who plays the guitar like a-ringin’ a bell.”

The two sat there through several drinks. With little prompting, Tom told Cyrus about the old days, booking concerts in Glasgow with Ronnie. In return, Cyrus offered stories of Wilbury. He couldn’t get over the fact that this strange and curious creature beside him had followed a circuitous route from Scotland, and that Cyrus had, by a twist of fate, made his own way from Wilbury, and that they had both ended up in this smoky bar on the outskirts of nowhere, swapping tales of days gone by and, in the process, laying the groundwork for tales yet to come, tales that would now include them both. He felt
grown-up and real and part of something. He felt that anything might be possible.

Tom excused himself to go to the washroom, and while he was gone, a woman sat with Cyrus at the bar. She said, “I heard your friend say you were a guitar player. I am so-ooo into music.” Just like that her hand was on his leg, much too intimate to be merely friendly or an accident. And although he could hardly see her—he couldn’t see much of anything through the haze of alcohol—she seemed beautiful and sexy and the embodiment of everything he had dreamed of.

When Tom returned to the bar, he understood the scene immediately. With a simple nod of farewell, he shuffled outside and back to the hotel. Cyrus ordered another round, and another, and got very stupid.

She took him to a frame house on a street of condemned buildings. The place smelled of natural gas and cat litter, and the woman led him up a rickety flight of stairs to a darkened room. They smoked something she called Thai stick, which was a hundred times more potent than the homegrown Janice got from her cousin outside of Toronto. The woman took her clothes off and danced around the room the way young girls sometimes pretend to be ballerinas. And she was laughing and singing, and then down on her knees undoing his pants, pulling him onto the floor where they fucked. There was nothing lovely about it.

He left the apartment around dawn and wandered the empty streets without a clue which way he was headed. Everywhere he looked he saw broken windows and the nervous scrawl of graffiti. In the parking lot of an abandoned factory, he threw up and, for the first time in years, let himself cry, not because he was in pain but because he was scared—of what might have happened, of what did happen, of how he had let a beautiful night become ugly.

Back at the hotel, he had just enough time to shower, pack his bags and climb onto the bus. They had a three-hour drive to Kitsee, Indiana, and for most of that time Cyrus busied himself with his guitar. Anyone else in his condition might have tried to catch a bit of sleep. But few things were as comforting to him as the weight of the Les Paul in his arms. Besides, he was young and resilient and, more than anything, wanted to understand that bridging chord he had discovered.

All his life he had played simple blues tunes, music that a self-taught sixty-year-old slave from the cotton fields could master on a dime-store instrument. Now, uncertain how to proceed, he wandered blindly up and down his fretboard, listening for something familiar. He started with a major chord, a G, added the dominant seven, the F, and knew it was still too pure, far too G-like even if he used the F as the bass note. Step by step he tried adding other notes to the chord—the E, the C, the A—trying different inversions with a variety of bass notes; and although he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he began to appreciate that chords were more interesting than he had thought. Solos and riffs had first attracted him to the guitar; chords had seemed dull and faceless. Now he was beginning to see how complicated they really were.

When he caught Sonny watching him from across the aisle, he said, “I’m trying to find that chord you play.”

“What chord you talking about, exactly? Been known to play a few.”

“You know, that one you use as a bridge when we change keys. I can hear it now, but I don’t know what it is or how it works.”

Sonny looked at him squarely, and for once there was neither sarcasm nor disdain. “Try the dominant over a six,” he said. When Cyrus gave no hint of comprehension, Sonny leaned closer and said, “What key are you in, G? Try a D chord with E as your bass note.”

Quietly and carefully, he tried what Sonny had suggested. But without the context, he still wasn’t sure. So he vamped for a while on G7, a funky little groove on a single chord, what a lot of Jim’s music was like. After about sixteen bars, singing a little melody in his head, he slid up to the D chord and wrapped his thumb around the neck to play the E on the bass string—and there it was, a bridge, a shift to higher ground. By uniting those two elements, the dominant and the six, he had forced the melody into another key. With that one step he had made a return to G virtually impossible. The world had shifted to A.

Cyrus could hardly sit still. It was like finding a tunnel in the backyard or a hidden passageway behind a panel in his bedroom. He knew this would lead him somewhere interesting, maybe even to treasure.

RONNIE CONGER LOVED THE SOUND
of spring peepers. They sang to him from the ditches and creeks of this back country road, mile after mile of them joined in a single voice. He loved especially the idea that he had brought this song together by his passage through this rural county, and that this song existed only for him. It was a symbol of his life, the nomad’s world he shared with Jim and the rest. Some things exist only in the flow, and if you stop moving long enough to inspect it, to analyze it, the song, their song, would separate into discrete elements.

Not that they had stopped moving much over the three years since he had befriended Jim—hardly long enough to catch his breath, in fact. They had travelled up and down the Eastern seaboard, around the Midwest and central Canada, hoodwinking church groups wherever they went. In every town they used the church halls, ate the wholesome potluck dinners, counted on the promotional network and fundraising skills of each community and delivered, in return, the Jimmy Waters Revival, which was never what those good folks had bargained for and was, as a result, another bridge burned. Ronnie knew it was only a matter of time before every church group in America would be wise to them. Fortunately, he had reason to believe they were on the verge of better things.

Their first recording, “JimJam,” had been a modest success. Adrian had recorded the track live at a show in Schenectady, and Ronnie, surreptitiously using the cash held in reserve from the lads’ salaries, had had just enough money to press five hundred singles, with no flip side, and mail them out to radio stations across North America. The song got a fair amount of airplay on campus stations late at night. It seemed a good fit with Dr. John the Night Tripper and the Velvet Underground, a nice segue from Captain Beefheart. But those who looked for the disk in their favourite store were out of luck—it wasn’t there.

Then, just two weeks ago, Nate Wroxeter came sniffing around, suddenly, no hard feelings. He had heard the record and, after a bit of negotiation, had agreed to set up a few gigs in the underground club scene. Better still, he had offered to front Ronnie enough cash to make a proper record and print up some bios, a few pics.

Ronnie had no illusions. He doubted they would ever hit the big time,
but it was never about that in the first place, never about getting rich or wild excess or making history. It was something other, something pure and almost private. What mattered was that the band, after a number of false starts, was starting to jell. No one else believed him yet, but Ronnie was convinced that it was only with the addition of Cyrus that the group made sense, as though they had all been made for each other and, in coming together, created a perfect emotional space that, were you to hold it to your ear, would offer a heavenly sound.

RONNIE’S GOOD NEWS HAD AN IMMEDIATE EFFECT
. They still travelled to a different town each day, still played concerts, but Sonny was spending all his free time in the Airstream with Jim, working on a new tune to record and sometimes calling in Chuck or Two Poops. Though Ronnie had lobbied on Cyrus’s behalf, it seemed that guitar would not be required this time around, and that was a real blow for Cyrus. There was one consolation, however: over the next few weeks he had a lot of time to wander on his own.

Cyrus did that a lot in Wilbury, especially in the years after his parents died. Aimless jaunts down country roads and farmers’ lanes, sometimes going all the way into town and cruising suburban streets that seemed as perfect and dreamy as something on TV; quiet rambles through neighbouring woodlots; or, best of all, wandering about the murkiest, muckiest reaches of the marsh and knowing intuitively that by simply being out in the world and open to suggestion, he would stumble on neat stuff: the snowy owl with the broken wing that he reported to the nature centre; the hobo living in the culvert by Spring Creek; the wheel from a DC-3 that landed in Curly Wilson’s soybeans one summer.

Now, with the others busy working on a new record, he fell into the same old routine, strolling through these poky towns, nosing around the shops and parks and promising laneways, chatting with salesmen and waitresses, the average folk on the street. When he got back to the hotel, he’d tell Eura about all the wonderful things he had discovered. It was a successful outing, he felt, if he could make her laugh or raise her eyebrows in wonder.

One day, on a whim, he brought her a jar of pickles from Poland.

“What is this, Cyrus?”

“I don’t know, I thought you might like them. I thought they’d remind you of home.”

“Home I remember, thank you. Besides, these will remind me of Poland, which also is not necessary.”

A few days later he popped into a photo booth at a train station and sat for the standard goofy poses—sticking out his tongue, goggling his eyes, puffing out his cheeks. When he returned to the hotel, he gave the photos to Eura. “Here,” he said. “So you can remember me.”