The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  Betty says, “Taking another fake picture was all Ulys’s idea, wasn’t it?”

  He shakes his head. “You mustn’t defend me, Betty.”

  Havens’s mother returns with a glass of iced tea for her. “Clayton, where are your manners? Aren’t you going to ask your guest to sit?”

  “How about we go outside?” he suggests. He is glad the truth about Orphan Boy is out, glad that the very lie that had put him at odds with himself is now the ransom by which Jubilee has gone free—would that every wrong yield such a profit.

  Betty takes a seat on the bench beneath the wilted wisteria. “Well, I came to tell you Ulys has another harebrained idea, and this one could very well get him killed.” She reports that he’s sworn off all his old friends who are worried about him and fallen in with a bunch of Marxists obsessed with the Spanish Civil War. “Ulys is leaving next week to go fight in it, and I thought you could try to talk him out of it.”

  Somehow Massey’s enlisting in a foreign war doesn’t surprise him. “You know Massey doesn’t take advice, and he’s certainly not going to listen to me.” Never mind that Havens is in no mood for another confrontation with Massey. “Has he spoken to you about Chance?”

  “I know he feels bad about what happened to you,” she answers. “But you know Ulys—he can’t just come out and say that. It’s much more like him to show it by doing something heroic.” Betty reports that Massey has been writing obituaries for the Tribune and freelancing, barely making ends meet. “You two have had your ups and downs, but you’ve been friends a long time and I know you’ll end up hating yourself if something should happen to him over there and things weren’t right between you.”

  “I don’t know; maybe some things can’t be put right.” He tells her he appreciates her coming all this way to put him in the picture, and she insists he give it some thought, handing him a piece of paper with Massey’s contact details. She pats the bench for him to join her. “I’m sure everyone will forget about the pictures soon, and you’ll be back in the saddle again.”

  He makes a noncommittal sound.

  “I know you needed some time to yourself, but maybe now we can put all this unpleasantness behind us.”

  Surely Betty cannot be under the impression that their breakup had to do with the scandal. “I don’t think I explained properly last time we were together.”

  She cuts him off. “Everyone at some point regrets something they’ve done. Nobody’s perfect.”

  “I am so sorry, Betty. I can’t do this.”

  “It was a picture, that’s all. It’s over now—done—in the past.”

  She waves her hand to show how fleeting she thinks the past is, how irrelevant, how trifling compared to this interminable future she has in mind, and Havens understands this is why she didn’t just telephone him with the news about Massey, but drove here instead.

  “I can’t be with you anymore, Betty.” She waits for him to amend his statement, but he adds, “It wasn’t just a picture.”

  She puts her glass on the ground, smooths her skirt, and says in that no-nonsense way of hers, “There’s someone else.”

  Why deny it? “Yes.”

  “How long has it been going on?”

  “Things between you and me weren’t ever going to work out in the long run.”

  She stands. “Well, she can’t care that much for you if she lets you carry on in this condition.” Betty waves at his dishevelment.

  “Please believe I never meant to hurt you.”

  “You never mean to hurt anyone, do you? And yet somehow you do.” She clutches her purse. “Goodbye, Clay.”

  Betty’s car is backing out of the driveway when Havens’s mother comes out with a plate of almond cookies. “You do realize you are going to end up a miserable old man.”

  A couple of shots ring out from around the side of the house, and a flock of starlings fills the sky. “Oh, go tell your father to quit that before someone calls the police. That’s all we need now—a patrol car in our driveway.”

  Havens finds his father reloading his .22 rifle in the backyard. “Those damn birds aim to roost in my apple tree again.”

  Havens thinks of Jubilee at her aviary. “You can’t shoot birds, Dad.”

  “Have you seen one bluebird since you’ve been back? No, because the starlings have put an end to them. Goddamn intruders.”

  Havens leaves his father to guard his tree and returns to the living room, where he picks up the telephone and asks the operator to connect him to the number Betty’s written on the paper.

  * * *

  Havens is part of the great surge of passengers that spills from the train, rushes along the platform and through the tunnel, and eventually empties into the great hall of Cincinnati’s Union Station. He’d planned to get here long before the appointed meeting, allowing time to collect his thoughts and establish a position of dominance, but the train was delayed out of Dayton, and he hurries now to the waiting area like a boy late to class. He spots Massey at the hotdog stand, and again second-guesses his decision to come. Massey could not have sounded more indifferent on the telephone, and it was his idea to meet at the station rather than where he is lodging.

  “Hello, Massey.”

  “Jesus, don’t you look a sight.” Massey orders a second hotdog with a double serving of relish, the way Havens likes it, and refuses to take Havens’s money.

  Headed for the far corner of the waiting room, Massey asks, “So, you and Betty aren’t an item anymore, I hear.”

  “Not for several months.”

  “And yet here you are, still doing what she tells you to do.” Massey waves his napkin at him. “Hey, I’m kidding.” He slides into a leather armchair. “Betty’s been recruiting everyone shy of the pope to talk me out of going to Spain, but like I told you on the telephone, nothing’s going to stop me.”

  “When has anyone ever been able to stop you from doing anything?”

  Massey cocks an eyebrow and addresses the distracted passersby. “How quickly he forgets.” But instead of pursuing the subject of Jubilee’s photograph, he speaks of war and how the battle against the Nationalists in Spain has fractured into disputes among the various factions on the Republicans’ side. “Orwell was there fighting, you know. They made him a corporal. He’d still be there if the enemy hadn’t shot him in the neck.”

  “Orwell?” The name rings a bell.

  “You haven’t read The Road to Wigan Pier? Required reading for anyone with a political conscience.” Massey summarizes the English writer’s chronicle of the coal mines in Yorkshire, and describes an epistolary friendship that has sprung up between the two of them. “Hemingway, Neruda, Dos Passos, and a bunch of other writers are already over there fighting, so if I’m crazy, I’ll be in excellent company.”

  “I don’t think it’s crazy wanting to be a part of something that matters.”

  Massey seems pleased by this. “Everyone else I know thinks it’s baloney, like who the hell am I to think I can take on Franco, but this is the most important battle of the century. If it were a fight over territory or property, who cares, but it’s a fight for an Idea, and we’ve got to fight for it with everything we’ve got.”

  Havens recounts what he’s read in the papers about prowling gangs of armed men in Barcelona and food lines that go on for more than a mile, and Massey says he’s headed for the Aragon front instead.

  “The trenches?”

  “You know what they say—if your writing isn’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

  “The same is probably true for pictures,” Havens offers.

  For a moment, neither of them speaks.

  Massey fixes his attention on a young couple now sitting across from them. “It wasn’t my finest hour,” he says.

  Havens knows he refers to the Bufords. “Nor mine.”

  They watch the two neck.

  “I was expecting someone to knock on my door asking for comments, but you kept my name out of the papers. You had your cha
nce to get back at me, why didn’t you take it?”

  “Who says I wasn’t waiting for a better opportunity?”

  Massey taps his chest as an invitation for Havens to land a blow, and Havens lobs his crumpled napkin at the target instead.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about them?”

  Havens shakes his head. “I’m thinking of going back, though. They deserve to know the story was buried.”

  “They’d have figured that out by now, don’t you suppose?”

  Havens recounts the awful events leading up to the last time he saw Jubilee, confiding that she hadn’t shown up for the rendezvous. “Do you think it’s selfish of me to want to go back? Would I just stir things up again?”

  If Massey thought Havens should go, he’d say so. Instead, his expression is sympathetic, as if Havens is in a game where the scoring lead is too great and it’s only a matter of running out the clock.

  Still, Havens says, “I just think it would be good to have a proper visit and say a proper farewell, maybe even take one on the chin—I don’t know, something.”

  Havens expects Massey to advise against this, but he stands at attention and declares, “Farewells and frontlines—may we both return from them better men.”

  Havens shakes his outstretched hand. “When are you off?”

  “Ship sails day after tomorrow. Shall I tell Betty you did your best to talk me out of it?”

  Havens smiles.

  “See you around, Havens.” Massey salutes.

  “So long, Massey.”

  “Oh, one more thing.” Massey reaches into his messenger bag and hands Havens a manila envelope. Inside are all the black-and-whites Havens shot in Chance. “Don’t thank me—I wasn’t sure if I’d need any of them for the story.” Next, Massey slips his hand into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulls out a color photograph of Jubilee caught unawares in Havens’s arms. “And you ought to have this one, too.” Before Havens looks up again to thank him, Massey has disappeared into the crowd.

  On the train ride home, Havens studies the picture. Though the yearning to be with her swells, he can’t deny the obvious: he is so out of place and she is exactly where she belongs. His thoughts turn to the birds in his father’s apple tree. Whether or not the intruder intends harm, if it goes to a place it has no business going, the resident is threatened. All along, Jubilee knew what he did not want to admit to himself—starlings and bluebirds cannot build nests in the same tree.

  JUBILEE

  Bolting upright, hands flung to her face, Jubilee wakes up from the dream in which she’d been turned right-colored and returned home. She looks around and sees her room, and checks her hands to make sure about that part, too. Borrowed skin, because the blue has seeped to the surface again. She reaches for the bottle, swallows another pill, and waits. When the change comes, it happens everywhere all at once. Blue one minute, blooming the next. Some of her is the color of a peach, some the color of planed pine, some pale as fresh-churned butter. She peeks down the neck of her nightgown. Those two dark circles are now pale pink. She slips her hands underneath and handles her breasts as though they’re china teacups. Her belly is pale as laurel. She looks all the way down, and glances away with a smile. All so ripe-looking now.

  Dressing takes twice as long as it used to because she’s always getting sidetracked by the mirror, where she gets reacquainted with her twin in sunrise skin, the girl of her dreams: same kinky ginger hair; same flecked green eyes full of what-next worry; nose, cheeks, and chin where they always are except with dainty brown freckles instead of ink blots; and lips no longer the color of death but like some new-born thing. Her double smiles back at her. Pale pink gums, a pink tongue. She might as well have dined on flowers. All of her is brought forth like a new creation.

  She feels different, too, this new-skinned version, silky somehow. She shivers a bunch, tickles more easily, and what happens after a pinch is more like an adornment than a bruise. She has no words for this color—“right-colored” doesn’t do it justice. “Perfect-colored,” perhaps.

  From several hand-me-down dresses in her suitcase, she chooses the one patterned with dainty multicolored flowers, then twirls in front of the mirror. Another idea occurs to her. Underneath her mattress, almost out of reach, is the shirt Havens left behind. She takes off the dress, slips into it, and buttons up the front all the way to the collar. The tail falls almost to her knees and the cuffs end well below her fingertips. She wraps his sleeves around herself.

  How carefree and beautiful Havens made her feel. Often, she caught him looking at her, and she’d pretended something far away had piqued her interest so he could look all he wanted. She encouraged his looking with gestures—rubbing liniment into her hands, say, or twirling her hair. She did try to bewitch him, just as they accuse Blues of doing. She’d worn her apron low, taken her sweet time coming out of the rainstorm to see if he found wet and shivered blue as pretty as dry blue, lingered in the late afternoon sun making daisy chains for her flaming hair, fluffed her skirt and sang every ballad she knew. How she wanted him to keep his eyes on her. How she wanted something to come of their feelings. All the wrong things she wanted, wants still, now in this color even more.

  “Oh my good lord!” a voice exclaims behind her.

  She swings around.

  Socall fills the doorway, her mouth hanging open. Instead of taking time to form one whole question, Socall asks them all at once in bits and pieces. “But how can—Where—When, exactly?”

  Grabbing the dress off the floor, Jubilee rushes behind the closet door and changes in haste. Showing herself again makes Socall act as if she’s being paid a visit by the angel Gabriel and is still deciding whether to expect a smiting or a blessing. Jubilee is about to explain about blood molecules when she notices Willow-May peering from behind Socall’s skirt. It’s their old game, so in a loud voice, Jubilee says, “It’s too bad you didn’t bring Willow-May with you; she probably won’t like the present I brought for her anyhow,” and because Willow-May keeps to her post, Jubilee springs around Socall and grabs her sister and pulls her close for a tickle.

  Willow-May wrenches away in fright.

  “Someone’s a little moody this morning.” Socall reaches behind her for Willow-May. “Go give your sister a hug.”

  Jubilee gets on her haunches and holds out her arms. “It’s just me—Juby.”

  Willow-May lets go of Socall and runs off down the breezeway.

  “She needs time to get acclimated to—this—you.” Socall gets Jubilee by her shoulders and assesses her top to toe, turning her around for a thorough inspection, before closing those massive arms around her. “Never mind a cure, we’ve got to get some meat on those bones.” She asks about Louisville, and out comes the short version—Dr. Fordsworth and the pills, that long word—“methemoglobinemia”—and how it’s been little more than a week since she first started treatment. “There’s not much more to tell than that.”

  “Is that polish?”

  It’s too late to hide her fingernails, even though most of the red varnish has chipped off, so she busies herself straightening the bedcovers, because a person can’t hold Socall’s gaze and hold down secrets both. “You were right—the big wide world doesn’t have much to show for itself.” When Socall used to tell her that, Jubilee always took it to mean because Socall had only ever seen the little seaside bit of it where her sister lives in Florida, but Jubilee knows now that a person doesn’t have to see much of the world to come to such a conclusion. All you have to do is pay attention to what of the world people drag around with them.

  Socall picks up Havens’s shirt, folds it, and hands it back to Jubilee. “You don’t want your mama to see that.”

  Jubilee puts it at the back of her closet.

  “Does he know about any of this?”

  “How would he?”

  “Maybe you wrote to him when you were away?”

  Wrote? No. “He never gave me his address.” Which is not even th
e impossible part.

  “Well, those two were dishing their cards out to about half the town. Your pa got one. I got one. In case you want to—”

  “I’m not going to write to him! And say what?” Would Jubilee write about Levi’s death, about her mama on some ledge by herself? Seems she’d have to explain those subjects before the subject of skin could even be raised. “What would be the purpose anyhow?”

  “If I were him, I’d be glad to hear you are okay.”

  “If you were him, you would’ve found a way to answer that question yourself.” Jubilee puts an end to the issue by bringing up the matter of Ronny, something which she’s been hesitant to raise with Pa.

  “It’s not going to come as a surprise to you that charges haven’t been brought against Ronny.” Socall tells of Sheriff Suggins’s conducting a lopsided investigation while Pa was searching the hills and hollers, and how Mama was in no condition to answer questions about timelines and motives. “Your pa’s challenging Ronny’s claim of self-defense. The man he’s hired to look into the case is wet behind the ears but persistent as a deer tick.”

  “How’s Pa going to pay him?”

  “With what’s left of the crop earnings, and several of us are going to pony up when the next bill comes due, but don’t you breathe a word of that to him.”

  “Ronny isn’t going to be punished.”

  “You and I know that, but the case has given your pa hope, and hope’s what’s been getting him out of bed every morning.”

  Socall couldn’t look more pleased reporting that Urnamy Gault’s business is going down the toilet and there’s talk of voting for a new mayor come the next election. “On top of that, he has to deny rumors about Estil and Eddie that everyone knows are true.” As for Ronny, Socall reports that he doesn’t much leave his mother’s side anymore. “Estil has stopped going out entirely, though if you ask me, it’s vanity if she believes everyone’s discussing her and Eddie day and night. Good lord, what more can be said about that bit of nastiness other than Ronny’s living proof that two wrongs sure as hell don’t make a right.”