The Loves of Ruby Dee

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  She and Sally drove home, with the starry sky above and country music playing from the radio. It was terribly beautiful and romantic, and was a pointed reminder to Ruby Dee that she was living in a house with three men yet was alone, except for a dog. She told herself that Sally was a very special dog.

  When she reached the house, the lights were blazing from the kitchen and back porch. Surprisingly, Lonnie’s truck was back in its place. And then she saw a figure coming out across the yard...Lonnie. Her heart leaped in her throat, and her first thought was of Hardy.

  But then Lonnie was asking if she was all right.

  “Well, yes. Why?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “You’ve just never been out so late. It’s after eleven. Here, let me help you with your bags.”

  And then they were entering the kitchen, and there were Hardy and Will. Both of them in the room together, and not fighting!

  She saw the relief on their faces. They each looked quickly at her, as if ascertaining that she was real, and then they looked away.

  Hardy said, “It’s about time, woman,” and gathered up his leather pieces from the table. Will turned his back to pour a cup of coffee.

  Well. They had been worried about her. She went racing up to her room, threw herself across her bed and cried and cried. She didn’t want them to worry about her. She didn’t want to care for them. She wasn’t staying here. She was saving her money and buying her farm house and having her babies in overalls. Oh, Lordy, she knew they were just going to complicate everything.

  A hesitant knock sounded at her door. “Ruby Dee, are you all right? Are you sick?”

  It was Will’s voice, uncertain and worried. “I’m fine,” she said after a long minute, and she spoke sharply, without knowing why.

  She heard footsteps in the hallway, and Lonnie saying, “Women just cry like that at certain times of the month.”

  Chapter 16

  While working to repair fence, Wildcat sliced his palm open on the barbed wire. Depending on the chore at hand, Wildcat had to either slice or rip or pound or burn his hand at least once.

  Will tossed his fence pliers into the battered wooden tool box. “Lon, you finish up here while I take Wildcat up to the house so’s Ruby Dee can doctor his hand.”

  “Why in the hell do you get to take him, and I have to finish the work?” Lonnie pushed back his hat and assumed a belligerent stance.

  “Because once you get in the house with Ruby Dee, drinkin’ ice tea and eatin’ cookies, you won’t ever come out.”

  As he walked away, he heard Lonnie cursing under his breath. Will opened the pickup door, then turned. “When you finish up here, get on over to the spring creek and check that section of fence. I’ll meet you over there.”

  Lonnie threw down his hammer, clearly wishing to have thrown it at Will.

  “You’re aggravatin’ that boy,” Wildcat said, when Will slipped into the seat.

  “I know. I don’t have a lot of pleasures, since I started tryin’ to give up cigarettes.”

  “Me and Charlene saw a thing about cigarettes on the news the other night. Do you know, there is some research to indicate that smokers have less cavities? And also, there's research that conflicts about smoking being bad for the heart..."

  Wildcat went on about cigarette research all the way back to the house. Will drifted off. He had been short-tempered lately, more so than normal.

  He missed Georgia.

  No, he missed getting laid. And it was somewhat amazing to him to find his body could exhibit so much control over him in that area. That it did annoyed him.

  He didn’t actually miss Georgia so much, which surprised him. After all their years together, on and off, he should miss her more. He had certainly had regrets when she married Frank. He could see now that what he’d felt was regret over their relationship. He had wasted a lot of years with Georgia. Now, though, what he felt mostly was relief. He didn’t have to wonder if he really loved her and if they might have made it, given another chance, because they’d had chances and it was finally over for good. The relief should have made him feel better than he did, though.

  The relief did not override his missing something. He missed holding a woman and snuggling with her softness. He also missed being able to hang out at Georgia’s. He had no good place to go now to get away from the ranch.

  He had nowhere to go to get away from seeing the old man in that damn wheelchair, and his desire to get away didn’t have anything to do with worrying about the old man’s leg, because there was nothing wrong with that leg that hadn’t been wrong with it twenty years ago. Will was sure of that now. It had to do with thinking the old man would squander his remaining years in that chair, when he didn’t have to, just to annoy Will. Just to control him and Lonnie, and even Ruby Dee.

  Ruby Dee. He tried really hard not to think a lot about Ruby Dee, and to stay away from her, too, because being around her just set him into hot, horny confusion. Ruby Dee was the main cause of his short temper.

  When they reached the house, they found Ruby Dee’s car gone. Will remembered then that she had said something about taking the old man into Reeves’s Quick Stop. She was trying to interest him in playing dominoes with T. Boone and Jenks Larson. She wanted to get the old man out of the house, but he kept refusing to go anywhere in particular, although he had allowed her to drive him around Harney, where everyone could see him in a flashy convertible driven by a pretty young woman.

  That the old man would do that was a good surprise, but not compared to all the other things he had started doing. The old man did a lot of things with Ruby Dee that he never had with anyone else.

  Every day now, he got himself spiffed up in jeans or khaki trousers and one of the new shirts Ruby Dee had gotten for him down in Cheyenne. He shaved every day, too, and he let Ruby Dee do it for him half the time, while he lay back in the old green recliner. He’d even let her give him a haircut, shorter on top and longer in the back. Will had been startled by how much younger the old man looked with his hair cut that way. These days the old man had begun to look more like the man Will remembered, the one who used to wheel and deal at the stockyards, trading cattle and stories and making money out of both.

  Almost every evening Ruby Dee and the old man would go into his bedroom and read to each other. At first Ruby Dee had read to the old man, whether he wanted her to or not. But gradually she had gotten him to start reading to her.

  Just last evening, when Will had been coming through the dining room, he had caught the sound of the old man’s voice, reading. He’d stopped right there in the middle of the room, surprised.

  “Now, when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon con...concerning the name of the Lord, she came to test him with hard ques-tions..."

  Ruby Dee interrupted. “Oh, so Sheba wasn’t her name, it was a place. I never knew that. We’ll have to look it up...I’ll make a note.”

  “Are you done? Can I pro-ceed?”

  The old man seemed to be learning bigger words from Ruby Dee, too.

  His stubbornness aside, the old man was crafty, and Will was of the opinion that the reason he let Ruby Dee read to him and he read to her was to keep her occupied with him every evening.

  Will had come to the amazing conclusion that the old man was struck on Ruby Dee. Further, Will had been shocked to catch a hint of sexuality in the way the old man looked at her, too.

  Since Ruby Dee wasn’t there, Wildcat proposed going on home, but Will figured he had better doctor Wildcat’s hand. “At least let’s clean it up and put a bandage on it.”

  They were walking toward the house, Wildcat with quite a bit of reluctance, when the Galaxie came flying up the drive. Ruby Dee tooted and waved, then stopped with a loud crunch of gravel. The back end of the car swayed, because she’d stomped on the brakes.

  Wildcat was greatly relieved. “No offense, boss, but Ruby Dee is a nurse.”

  “Hardy and I bought dominoes!” Ruby Dee cried, swinging up a bag as she got
out of the car. “He’s gonna teach me to play. Then we’re gonna go down and sit at Reeves’s and rake in the money. Aren’t we, Hardy?”

  “You’ll probably annoy me into it eventually,” Hardy said. “Get my chair,” he ordered Will, who was already on his way to do just that.

  After the old man settled into his chair, Will told Ruby Dee about Wildcat’s hand, which had the effect of diverting her attention from the old man and gave Will a small slice of satisfaction. He understood the sentiment as a petty one, but he wasn’t sorry for it.

  In the kitchen, Wildcat laid his hand on the table, content to let Ruby Dee work him over. Wildcat had come to believe Ruby Dee was some kind of shaman. He and Charlene tended toward hypochondria, anyway, and they had taken to consulting Ruby Dee on everything from headaches to ingrown toenails.

  No living thing escaped Ruby Dee’s tending, and castor oil appeared the remedy of choice—not through the mouth, but applied to the body. For a week, Ruby Dee had made Will rub it on the wound on his cheek every morning and night, supposedly to reduce the scarring. Lonnie got it put on his hands to soften his calluses, and Wildcat got castor-oil-soaked patches to soothe his eyes, strained from too much television watching, a remedy he took home to Charlene. The cat got his ears doused with it for mites, the roan colt got it rubbed on his hocks when Will overworked him, and several mama cows got their fly bites doctored with it.

  Will had to admit that in each case, Ruby Dee and her castor oil hadn’t hurt anything and did appear to help. Wildcat claimed his eyes didn’t burn like they had, and Charlene was so impressed that she took to using it for her house cat’s ear mites. If the wound on Will’s cheek left a scar, it would be small, and the colt’s hocks were back to normal overnight.

  The castor oil’s one failure seemed to be with the old man. He’d consented to have Ruby Dee rub it on his ankle and knee and bind them up each morning for the first two weeks after his accident. But now almost a month had gone by, and he remained in the wheelchair.

  Will figured that in this case the power of castor oil was outmatched by the old man’s stubbornness.

  Then he realized that he was staring at the feminine curve of Ruby Dee’s backside, where she bent over Wildcat’s hand. He glanced over and saw the old man looking at him, his eyes sharp and knowing.

  Turning, Will reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a can of Dr. Pepper. “I’m gonna check the water in the pickup radiator, Wildcat. I’ll be out there when Ruby Dee’s finished with you.”

  He almost burned his hand on the radiator cap before he found a rag to use. Steam poured out. The old pickup needed a lot of work.

  He threw the rag on the ground. Letting the radiator cool, he sat in the seat, with the door open, and smoked his third cigarette of the day. The snapping of sheets like sails in the wind caught his attention. The sheets were bright white on Ruby Dee’s clothesline, and next to them fluttered several sets of bras and panties, like colorful signal flags around a car lot.

  Ruby Dee was still here. Hardy’s grouchiness hadn’t run her off; nor had the considerable lack of privacy, the repetitive work, the isolation, the blowing dust.

  Yes, she’d stayed, and the sheets hanging there alongside the bras and panties were proof of her existence and the changes she had made in their lives.

  With Ruby Dee in the house, boots and spurs were left at the back door, and spitting and cursing and farting stopped there, too. Ruby Dee was so much a woman that a man felt called on to be a gentleman. He and Lonnie said please and thank you and took their hats off. And now they had to take their clothes into the bathroom with them when they showered, because they couldn’t go running around in their birthday suits, and they had to remember to close the door, too.

  Will kept forgetting that door. It was fortunate that there was a shower curtain, because once, he’d been buck naked, about to step into the shower, when Ruby Dee came waltzing through the open door with an armload of towels. He’d grabbed the shower curtain faster than a gunslinger going for his guns. It had embarrassed the hell out of him, but Ruby Dee had said blandly, “I’ve seen a lot of naked bodies, Will Starr, doin’ what I do.”

  She’d been amused by his embarrassment. In his opinion Ruby Dee had little respect for private personal things. Maybe she had seen a lot of naked bodies, but his wasn’t among them, and especially his with a hard-on.

  With Ruby Dee in the house, every morning there was an enormous breakfast on the table, every noon a light meal, and every evening another enormous meal. There was ice tea and fresh-squeezed orange juice in the refrigerator and fresh baked cookies in the cookie jar.

  With Ruby Dee, there was prayer before meals, lingering afterward over the best coffee Will had ever tasted, and watching while Ruby Dee hummed her way through clearing the dishes. There were clean towels on the rods, clean socks and underwear in their drawers and clean sheets on their beds each Wednesday. Sheets that smelled like summer air, because she strung the clothesline from her aluminum trailer to the corner of the tractor barn.

  Will had propped a two-by-four in the middle of it to keep it from sagging when it was loaded with sheets or her endless array of underthings.

  With Ruby Dee in the house, Will saw more bras and panties in a month than he had seen in his entire lifetime—hanging all over the shower rod, fallen on the floor, lying on the washer. In Will’s opinion, the woman was a little careless with clothes that were not meant to be seen.

  One afternoon, he found a bra lying on the stairway. It was startling pink against the worn brown wood. As far as Will could tell, Ruby Dee didn’t have a stitch of white underwear.

  He hesitated, then picked up the delicate article, held it gingerly with his fingers. It struck him that, aside from undoing clasps when these things were on a female, he had never touched one.

  He could hear her singing in her bedroom. He went on up and stopped in the open doorway of her room. She was peering into the mirror above the dresser and swaying to the sound of her own singing. Will imagined quite dearly what the pink bra and matching panties would look like on her beneath the dress she wore.

  Seeing him in the mirror, she whirled around. “Will, you scared the daylights out of me! I guess I was thinkin’ hard.”

  “The door was open,” he said. “Ah...you dropped this on the stairs.” He held out the bra.

  She didn’t so much as blush. “Oh, gosh, thank you so much. I just carried a load down to the washer. I want to hang them out in the moonlight tonight.” She said it as if the moonlight were something very important.

  She turned back to the mirror, and Will’s gaze roamed the room. It had become the most colorful place in the house. Scarves draped here and there, old movie and circus posters, books and magazines, that urn on the dresser.

  “Will, I’ve got somethin’ in my eye...I can’t see anything, and I’ve blinked and blinked. Can you see anything?”

  She came over to him, just like that, and lifted her face to him. There was that about Ruby Dee—she didn’t keep distance with anyone. She touched people with her hands and her eyes and her voice.

  He looked closely. “I think...yeah, there’s a piece of fuzz. Don’t blink.” His fingers felt big and clumsy, but he managed to pick away the fine, crinkled filament caught in her lashes. “There.”

  “Thanks...oh, that’s better.” She blinked rapidly.

  And then her eyes were on his, and he knew she was feeling the same heat he was, because those brown eyes began to steam.

  That she would feel what he did came as a distinct surprise. Later he wondered if he had imagined it. Maybe it had been some other emotion.

  With Ruby Dee in the house, there was so much emotion, like her underwear, cast all over the place. Her coffee-brown eyes shimmered and simmered with feelings, the same as a neon sign, and she didn’t try to hide them any more than she did her underwear.

  She didn’t laugh a lot, but she had a way of smiling quietly, and she could sure snap like summer lightning if she was
mad. She turned to liquid when she was sad. The woman could cry...at a sad movie, a song on the radio, a dead bird left by the cat, and over nothing in particular at all.

  Ruby Dee’s frank display of emotions unnerved Will. Aside from anger, which he tried to keep under wraps, he wasn’t used to emotions being on open display. Giving way to feelings just wasn’t done in his world. The fight he and the old man had had was a prime example of what could happen when they weren’t contained.

  As for crying, he had seen his father cry one time in his life, and that had been the day his mother left. He remembered his daddy calling Lonnie a sissy for crying. Aunt Roe had held that an emotional display was so unseemly that at her own husband’s funeral she had gotten up and served cake, dry-eyed and grand with grace, and when his cousin Betty Jo started crying, Aunt Roe had cuffed her good and sent her from the room. After that, anyone in the room even thinking about crying had dried up.

  Ruby Dee’s emotions swirling all around made Will pointedly aware of emotions inside himself that he didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand, by God.

  They also made him powerfully aware of living the life of a monk, a life he had not chosen at all.

  Tossing his cigarette butt into the dirt, Will went to see if he could find a can of stop-leak for the radiator. As far as he could tell, deep thinking got a man nowhere but confused.

  * * * *

  Wildcat went home after Ruby Dee bandaged his hand, and Will went back to fixing fence with Lonnie. Apparently Lonnie felt the need to cover the older man’s absence by talking.

  “I heard on the weather channel this mornin’ that rain isn’t in sight for another two weeks. We’re gonna burn up...Wildcat says he hasn’t seen a summer like this one since 1980. I don’t recall how it was that year. I didn’t pay much attention to the weather in high school...Wildcat, he eats and sleeps weather and movies.”