Sweeter Life (30 page)

“What about Clarence and Ruby? Maybe they could take him for a while. That way somebody’d be with him all the time.”

“Cyrus, no, it’s not the Mitchells’ problem.”

“What isn’t?” It was Hank now, filling the doorway. “What isn’t their problem?”

Isabel didn’t hesitate. “You, dummy. All of us. We’re not their problem, so we’ll leave them out of it.”

Cyrus dipped his index finger in the congealed cherry-red sauce and stuck it in his mouth. “They’re family,” he said. “What if they don’t want to be left out of it?”

“They’ll just have to get used to it. This is ours, and if we can’t take care of it, we don’t deserve it.”

“Nobody deserves anything,” Hank muttered.

When they had finished eating, Cyrus helped with the cleanup. At about nine, he yawned and said it was time to head back to Ruby’s. He planned to leave for Toronto early in the morning and felt he should visit with her a bit more. He shook Hank’s hand with a meaningful pressure and detected a grudging acknowledgement. He kissed Isabel on both cheeks.

“Don’t be such a stranger,” she said.

“I’ll call. I promise.”

“Well, you should think about getting settled somewhere with a phone and a mailbox like real people. How are we supposed to reach you?”

“I’ll call. I promise. I’ll try harder to stay in touch.”

Isabel laughed ruefully. “Your friend, the artist. I saw her last year, I forget now, she was down here for some reason, and I was saying how hard it is to communicate with someone who’s never there, never anywhere.”

“I’m always somewhere.”

“Never anywhere that we know of. Your friend just laughed and said we should maybe hire a medium. You know, hold a seance.”

“Very funny.”

“No, you’re right. It’s not funny. I’ve got too many ghosts in my life as it is. I wish I could just call you anytime I feel like it. I wish I could walk over on a Saturday afternoon and we could drink some beer on your porch and have a few laughs. I wish you were around sometimes to give me hell for being a bitch or to remind Hank that he’s being a jerk. I’ll tell you something, Cyrus, this past while here with Hank, sure, it’s been hard, I’ve hated it sometimes, but I feel like it’s something I have to do because it feels right, and this is maybe the first time I’ve felt right since Mom and Dad died. That makes me think that we need each other more than we let on. Or at least I do.”

Cyrus looked at his shoes. “What can I say, Iz? I’ll try harder.”

“Will you?”

“Well, maybe.” Then he walked to the car and sat in the cold a moment, knowing that Izzy was right: he was no more substantial than a figure in a dream.

He started up the Impala, rolled down the window and drove slowly out of town. At Spring Creek he stopped on the new bridge and remembered the night Ronnie came out of the darkness to offer him a bright future. Maybe that was the place to start again. He could track down Ronnie’s number and give him a call. Maybe he could take Eura to New York and they could start again. Maybe they could try one more time to put together a kick-ass band. Jim was out of the picture. Maybe Ronnie would be interested. At least he might help them find a new agent. All those things were possible if he called,
not so much going back as coming full circle, the way a melody returns for a second verse and gains strength and meaning.

A
fter Jim disappeared, Ronnie focused exclusively on what had to be done. There was a compilation album in the works,
The JimJams
, which required someone to sift through all the master recordings and live tapes in search of a few new tracks. He had to remix a few of the older numbers, write the liner notes, assemble the right photos and credits. It was a labour of love that carried him through the next six months. He ate at the office, he slept at the office. And all the while, there was the hope: he will return.

By Christmas a dark desolation began to settle over him, and by the end of January the emptiness had wormed its way into his heart. Everything he’d worked for—the resurrection of Jim and, one day, the glorious rebirth of The Solo—had gone up in smoke. His faith, if not shattered, was sorely tested. Late at night he stared out his office window at the cabs inching along Avenue of the Americas and knew that Jim was out there somewhere, maybe amid that sea of yellow cars or in the dark river of people that flowed along the sidewalk, in Brooklyn, maybe, or Jersey, or as far away as California or Tokyo, Melbourne or Montreal. Somewhere.

Financially, Ronnie had few worries. RC Music published all of Jim’s work. RonCon Productions took 20 percent of all other revenue, including concert receipts and merchandising. The money he’d collected from the band each
month as enforced savings had been repaid in full, with an average annual return of 8 percent, but he had used that cash to generate even greater profits (a complicated deal with the record company, where Ronnie paid a large part of the upfront production costs of each record, then sold the finished product for a higher-than-usual cut of sales). If he was frugal, he could afford to do nothing for a long time. But nothing was a bore. Nothing was hard to swallow.

When he wasn’t lying on the couch or staring down at the throngs on the street, he was keeping tabs on the only family he had ever cared about. Sonny was playing three nights a week at Bradley’s, near Washington Square. Chuck was giving lessons out his apartment in Queens and driving cab in his spare time. Two Poops, in a surprise move, had made a clean break from the music business. He’d met a little honey down in Gainesville, Florida, and two months after Jim disappeared, bought himself a twelve-unit motel and set about making babies. Adrian and Kerry and Tom went back to London, where they had been offered spots with a top-notch sound company. They were already on the road with a band called Marco Polo.

With nothing better to do, Ronnie had caught every performance of the Sonny Redmond Trio. It was at Bradley’s one evening that Sonny suggested to him it was time to find another act.

Ronnie, whose long brown hair had been transformed to short platinum spikes, shook his head disconsolately and said, “Another act? My God, allow me to grieve. Allow this poor heart to heal itself. Even if I were to entertain such a notion, what would you suggest? Some addled misfit in platform shoes? Someone who has never heard Lester Young or Earl Scruggs or T-Bone Walker? Is that the sort of thing you would have me do? Now, Sonny Redmond, there is a talent in whom I might invest my considerable energies. But aside from that, my friend, I confess I come up a tad empty.”

Still, for several weeks Ronnie took Sonny’s advice and drifted gloomily through the clubs of New York, hoping to hear even a few bars of something that might stir his heart. But by the end of the month, he had given up again and was living on a steady diet of marshmallow cookies and weak tea, waking each morning in a Glasgow frame of mind. For the first time in his life, he had neither a plan nor a direction. He didn’t even have the strength to see Sonny play anymore.

Then one morning his phone rang and the voice on the line nearly brought him to his knees. “Ronnie,” Cyrus said, “how’s it going?”

With a deep, calming breath, Ronnie moved to the window and looked down at the senseless patterns of his fellow man, bumping and jostling from cradle to grave, their ceaseless din and tumult at odds with what he had long felt to be his goal in life: to arrange the elements of this world in such a way that they would emit a beautiful sound. He cradled the receiver between head and shoulder and used both hands to open the window and let in the racket and fumes from down below. Then he leaned against the big cast iron radiator and said, “I have wished for many things in my life, some more noble than others, but I can tell you—in fact, I must tell you—that I have longed terribly to hear the sound of your voice again, to look upon your fine boyish features and, most especially, to witness one more time the magic you weave upon your fretboard. My dear fellow, how are you?”

“I’m okay. What about you? I heard about Jim and all.”

“Well, my friend, I confess I have been adrift this past while. I cannot even begin to convey to you how bereft I feel, like a man who has prayed with all his heart and soul for a miracle and hears only God’s mocking laughter. But that is a discussion we might save for another time. What have you been up to, my lad? Are you here in New York?”

“I’m in Toronto,” he said.

“And playing like a demon, I’ll wager.”

“Well, you know, playing like me, I guess.”

“Yes, I well remember the artistry of Cyrus Owen. And you know,” he moved across the room and perched on the edge of the desk, “it is funny you should call just now, because I have been thinking about you.”

“Really?”

“Let me put it to you directly. I have not been proud of myself this past while. It is commendable—and in our business, perhaps, even necessary—to have dreams and ideals, but one should never become inflexible. I have concentrated too much on what has been lost, when I should have set my sights on finding the next best thing.” He let those words land, take root. Finally he said, “You are, my boy. Jim is gone and you are the next best thing. I knew it the first time I saw you.”

The words had been drawn from him almost against his will. Worse, it was pure fabrication. He hadn’t given the boy a thought in years. And yet, there was an honesty in what he’d said. Even as he spoke, the truth was revealed to him. The boy would be his salvation. Cyrus was the next best thing.

“My question to you,” he continued, “is whether you are still playing, and whether or not the two of us could do something together.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“I am asking, if you are not otherwise engaged, to give me your trust and talent so I might use my resources to make you a star, so that together we can make some scary music. Do you remember, Cyrus? ‘Good scary. Scary the way it was meant to be, like it’s a lesson or something.’ ”

Cyrus laughed at that. And Ronnie laughed too. And then they both howled like wolves. As good as a handshake any day.

A MONTH PASSED BEFORE
Ronnie made it to Toronto, and during that time Cyrus and Eura got their life back together. With the two thousand dollars he’d brought from Wilbury, Eura had some repairs done to her teeth, he got his Les Paul out of hock, and they rented an apartment. It had been years since they’d had enough for first and last month’s rent.

They had taken the first place they looked at, a roomy one-bedroom above an empty storefront in the east end of the city. The apartment had been vacant for some time, but the carpeting still held the imprint of couches, armchairs and end tables and was worn especially thin in the high-traffic areas. The wall of the dining room showed the outline of a crucifix, the wallpaper like new inside the cross. Cyrus touched the wall there, felt the shape of that grease and dust, and remembered Jim’s story about the shadow of his father’s radio. When he caught Eura’s eye, she said, “This is not a door. This is dirt.” Even so, he insisted they take the place.

When they got the phone hooked up, Cyrus called Ronnie in New York to tell him the news and ask if it was time to put together a band.

“Gracious, no,” Ronnie said. “Let us make no mistakes with this venture. Let us form the vision first and then go forth.”

So Tongue & Groove kept up their gig at the Laredo. On their days off, Cyrus worked on a few ideas, while Eura cleaned and painted or searched the
junk stores for furniture. If she was excited about the latest turn of events, she didn’t show it. She had felt well rid of Ronnie and Jim and all the rest. She loved Cyrus and loved especially that she had him all to herself. Aside from the physical agony of the past few weeks, she had been happy in their life together; and while it would never fill the gaping hole inside her, roughly the size of her homeland, it had allowed her to relax a little, to ease up on the tattoos awhile. Anymore it was Cyrus who pulled out the pins and ink. If not for his interest in it, she might have let it slide altogether.

By Easter, the slush and snow had disappeared in Toronto. Gardens bloomed with crocuses, early tulips and hyacinths. Forsythia bushes had begun to yellow. Lawns were turning green again. One morning as Cyrus was returning from the Italian grocer down the block, where he had bought a pint of imported strawberries and a couple of fresh panini to have with their coffee, a white Mercedes sedan pulled up to the curb. At first Cyrus didn’t recognize the man behind the wheel—that spikey blond hair—but when Ronnie opened his mouth, there was no mistaking who it was.

For the next hour they sat around the kitchen table, and Ronnie talked non-stop, extolling the virtues of the neighbourhood, the apartment, the city, and “the absolute tonic” of seeing Cyrus and Eura again. “I only wish,” he said, “that I had come sooner. I so love the snow.”

Cyrus laughed. “You could get yourself shot, talking that way.”

“But it is what I most love about this country. Surely I’ve told you of my time in Staghorn, Alberta. I made a friend there, a bartender, who once showed me the gear he kept in the boot of his car: blankets, shovels, a box of small white candles. For the weather. It’ll kill you, he said. He knew a farmer who had walked out to the road to fetch his mail one day and never made it home again. Wandered in circles until he collapsed. Froze to death fifty yards from the house. Have you not heard that sort of story?”

“Sure. Who hasn’t?”

“But what an idea. In England, when they say the country will kill you, they mean it will break your spirit, that you might work for thirty years and have nothing to show for it and end up a broken man. Or they mean the mines will kill you, or the sea, inherently risky jobs. The idea that your country—your ‘home and native land,’ as you might put it—could simply rouse
itself one morning and drive you to your grave, I find that terribly exciting. I love the image of whiteouts sweeping across the landscape like death itself, catching the unwary, the unlucky, and carrying them away. So when we talk about making scary music, my friend, I rather think that is the sort of idea that might inform it. The wolf howl and the wind blow and the icy blast. Music that comes out of the Arctic night.”