Sweeter Life by Tim Wynveen Read Free Book Online Page A

built in a day.
    Up ahead, he spotted flickering neon: Lakeview Motel. Weathered clapboard that had once been painted baby blue. Shutters hanging cockeyed. Mossy roof, weedy parking lot. Vacancy.
    Ronnie wheeled into the parking spot farthest from the office and walked over to inquire about a room. The air off the lake was cold and rank and fishy, and he nodded with satisfaction. Just the sort of camouflage Cal might need. Ten minutes later Ronnie was sitting in a room that smelled of mothballs, wringing his hands and wondering how he had gotten himself in this sorry predicament. He was so far away from where he was meant to be, so far from kith and kin.
    His father, the Reverend Archibald Conger of the Baptist Church in East Kilbride, a stolid and proper man who spoke in perfectly formed sentences and believed that thought was God’s greatest gift to mankind, had scrimped and saved on his paltry wages in order to send Ronnie to a decent school and, when the need was greatest, swallowed his pride and pulled whatever strings he could to get his son, a bright but indifferent student, accepted into the divinity program at Regent College, Oxford, where Archie himself had taken his degree. Unfortunately, Archie’s great sacrifice left Ronnie’s doubts and desires entirely out of the equation. Had Archie quizzed his son more fully, he might not have wasted his hard-earned money in paving a dead-end path to paradise. But then, how could he have known that Ronnie would have an epiphany four short months into his second year at Oxford?
    It happened around the time of the winter solstice, as so many epiphanies do. Ronnie and a few of the more serious students in his college had walked across the Isis to the Fife and Drum, having just handed in their final essays before Christmas break. The idea was to treat themselves to a pint and a steak-and-kidney pie, and to say farewell until the new year. But one pint became two, and as Ronnie neared the bottom of his third ale, Colin McDermid put a coin in the jukebox. Minor chords swelled to fill the room. A brooding, sultry beat, a twangy American voice:
    Keep on ridin’ with the herd,
Runnin’ with the pack,
Flappin’ with the birds,
But honey—don’t look back.
    A pop tune like something you might get from Gene Pitney or Bobby Rydell. Catchy, in a mindless sort of way, and Ronnie at first was only half-listening. Then, after the second plaintive chorus, the room was filled with a sound as stirring as Gabriel’s trumpet, only it wasn’t any kind of instrument Ronnie had ever heard, or any kind of musicianship he could understand. In fact, it was so otherworldly, so large and joyful and confusing, that the minute the solo ended he couldn’t remember a single note of it, couldn’t think of a way to even describe it to himself or name the effect it had had on him.
    He handed Colin another coin. “Play it again,” he demanded.
    The song, he discovered, was called “Don’t Look Back,” by a singer named Gil Gannon. On second listening, the lyrics and melody seemed inane, simple sentiments given an anxious treatment. Ronnie was about to turn away from the jukebox disheartened, as though the whole thing had been a momentary aberration, but then the solo started and he stood transfixed, struggling to understand just what it was he was hearing. A keyboard of some sort, he was certain, but no keyboard he had ever heard before, and played in a fashion that was unfamiliar to him. Nothing like the church music he had heard all his life. And when the solo ended, his sense of it evaporated completely.
    He put another coin in the machine and chose the song again. This time he returned to the table and had everyone pay attention. After the solo had sounded a third time, he looked at his friends and said, “What is that? What am I listening to?”
    They laughed as though it was the alcohol talking. “Top 40,” Colin mocked. “Nothing to get fussed about. You want to try Brubeck