Sweeter Life

by Tim Wynveen

  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.

  TWO

  After 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.”

  For the better part of two days Cyrus and Eura listened to Ronnie talk. They met him for breakfast at his hotel; they walked up and down neighbourhood streets; they went out to dinner and drove around in his car, and never once did the words stop flowing. He had a plan.

  “We’ll call the band ‘Jangle,’ yes? A subtle reference to our young Django here, but, I hope most clearly, a promise of music that will unsettle and excite.”

  Ronnie had no interest in the cheap horror of Alice Cooper, or the satanic claptrap of bands like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osborne. Rather he was after something more poetic, more dramatic. “Let us strip the music of its cloak. Take away the sexual pomp and strut, take away the gimmicks and the posing. That Mick Jagger routine is so tiresome. Instead, we will peel away the melody and the rhythm to show the bare beating heart inside.” When Cyrus gave no sign of comprehension, Ronnie said, “There’s a museum in Paris, the Pompidou. Perhaps you know it.”

  Cyrus shook his head.

  “My dear boy, it is a remarkable building. Imagine: it is built inside out, with its pipes and wires and vents, all its messy inner functions, on the exterior. I see us moving in that direction. Remove pop music’s shiny wrapping and show the blood and nerves inside.”

  Cyrus still didn’t understand, but it sounded like something he could embrace. He’d had similar thoughts himself. A return to roots music is how he put it to Eura, songs that come from real life. The prospect of such a thing made the gig at the Laredo seem unbearable, so the next day he phoned and said they were moving on.

  For two weeks, Ronnie refused to talk concretely about music. He took them to plays and movies and dance. They went to art galleries and improv clubs. During long candlelit dinners they discussed the state of the world and the nature of love. But what seemed to interest Ronnie more than anything were the few stories he managed to drag from Cyrus.

  “You must tell me about yourself,” he said. “Show me the blood. Show me the nerves. Tell me—” he looked up at the ceiling “—for instance, tell me about that bridge where we first met.”

  Cyrus described a young boy dreaming about the future, or lying in the shadows and listening to the creek with his brother; about beautiful April days when pike would cruise up from the lake to spawn, and how Hank would take a pitchfork and spear dozens of them for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of their writhing numbers in a burlap bag.

  “The bridge,” Ronnie said, “is a potent symbol. And to hear of you there with your brother brings out the emotional truth of it, does it not? I understand suddenly what it means to you, how it is not a bridge for you at all but a great metalworks poem.” He leaned closer, their faces almost touching. “And what of the brother? Was it ‘Hank’ you said?”

  Well, Hank was a different story, one that took many tellings, with false starts and second thoughts and self-censored silences. But over the course of a week, it began to dribble out—their bonds, their fractures, their disparate natures. And in time it all came out—the brushes with the law, the trips to the chicken coop, the fire, the poor guy at the gas station.

  Eventually Cyrus began to offer information without prompting. He described how proud he’d been of Izzy for having the courage to leave the way she did. He talked about Janice and Ruby and Clarence, and about his own penchant for exploring and getting lost. He talked about everything but his parents, a story that seemed to defy words.

  Eura disliked all this talking. She squirmed when Cyrus started to tell their stories: how they had fallen in love, their first trip to Portland, the dreariness of the gigs over the past few years. To her horror, he even told Ronnie about the tattoos, a transgression she would never forgive.

  At the end of his third week in Toronto, Ronnie said, “I have things to do back in New York, I’m afraid. Besides, you now have a job to do here.” He faced Cyrus and rested a hand on each shoulder. “I charge you with a singular responsibility, my young man. Write me the most heartfelt piece of music about your bridge, the bridge where we first met. And as we have discussed, not the bridge itself but the heart inside the bridge.”

  Eura raised a more practical matter. “What will we use for money during all of this writing he is supposed to do? He has quit his job.”

  Right on cue, Ronnie handed her a cheque for a thousand dollars. “I trust that will be sufficient for this past month or so of inconvenience. While I am in New York I wi
ll have my assistant send you a draft for $250 a week as a retainer. It is not a king’s ransom, but if you are frugal, I’m sure you can make ends meet. When I return I will bring the papers that need to be signed. We are on the verge of great things, my friends. Work well.”

  He left so quickly that Cyrus didn’t have time to explain he had never written a song before, unless you counted that little ditty he wrote for Eura, and that was only putting words to a B. B. King solo.

  JIM RESURFACED A FEW WEEKS after Ronnie returned to New York, and every newspaper carried the story on the front page. Cyrus barely recognized his old friend in the photo. His hair had been cut to collar length, and his beard was gone, revealing a strong square chin. He’d lost weight, too, and wore a thin white T-shirt, blue jeans and a pair of work boots. He was standing at the gates of a ranch in New Mexico beside a young man who was holding a shotgun.

  The reporter explained how he had driven out with the idea of interviewing the famous musician and had been met with No Trespassing signs. Summoning his courage, the reporter walked past the gate and knocked on the door of a tidy ranch house. Just as quickly, Jim and his young friend marched him right back out to the road, where the photographer snapped their picture. To all questions, Jim replied that he was no longer interested in music or fame, and that he had handed over his earthly possessions, as well as all future royalties, to the Worldwide Church of Jim.

  Cyrus phoned Ronnie right away.

  “This does not surprise me in the least,” Ronnie said. “He has always carried within him the kind of conflict that creates its own spark, its own thunder. It helps to explain his extraordinary success; but his success, I fear, also led to his undoing. It takes a great deal of strength to stand up to something like that. Mark my words, Cyrus. If you do not have your head screwed on, you will lose it.”

  Cyrus waited a moment, then asked the question that was gnawing at him. “Are you going down there? You saved him once.”