Dancing on the Edge of the Roof

by Sheila Williams

  Sometimes, on Fridays, Millie rents tapes from the local video shop and we make popcorn and settle into the plush cushions of the back parlor to watch old movies. Millie loves Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, and some Swedish guy who makes really strange pictures. I like Superfly, Denzel Washington, and anything with Sean Connery in it, but that's another story.

  One Friday, I worked late at the diner because Jess had to go to Missoula. By the time I got home, it was eight o'clock, and my ass was dragging. Millie was already popping the popcorn and settling herself and the cats onto the couches.

  “Juanita, is that you?”

  She appeared in the front hall in a cloud of Joy perfume (her favorite, her second or third husband had loved it), pale pink satin robe, and matching slippers.

  “Sorry I'm late. I had to cover for Jess …” Out of breath, I stepped out of the way as the mysterious Siamese entered silently behind me and disappeared into the dark dining room. Millie acted as if she hadn't see him.

  “Never mind about that. I rented Now Voyager for tonight, and the popcorn is popping.”

  I groaned. I was really tired. And my feet hurt.

  “Millie, I've been frying hamburgers all night, I smell like grease and onions. Let me take a shower first. Move, Antonio!”

  Antonio gave me a hard look and a sniff, then turned on all four of his heels and stalked away.

  Millie called after him in Italian, and I started up the stairs.

  “Isn't Tonio going to watch the movie?”

  Millie shook her head disgustedly and picked up Paul, who was trying to sneak out of the front door.

  “He only likes Bertolucci and Rossellini. Hates American movies.”

  “Oh.” The only Italian word I could pronounce was “spaghetti.”

  “Don't be too long, you don't want to miss the first part.”

  “I won't!” I called down.

  The door to the “Blue Bathroom,” which I shared with the absent Jewell Matthews, was closed, but I didn't think much of it since there was a family with several kids staying for the weekend, and they had probably run out of bathroom space. I went to my room, tore off my clothes, put on my robe, and grabbed my bath things. Then I headed down the hall. The bathroom door was now open and coming down the hall toward me was a dark-haired woman, carrying a basket. Her hair was long and loose, and she wore a flowing navy blue robe, kind of old-fashioned-looking.

  “Hello,” I said. At Millie's house, there were no strangers.

  “Lovely evening, isn't it?” she responded as she passed. She smiled at me. There was the smell of roses in the air.

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed, and I went into the bathroom and closed the door. Before the door shut, I saw the woman turn the corner and climb the stairs to the third floor.

  Later, when Now Voyager was on its closing credits and we were picking up the tissues we had dropped, I asked Millie about her weekend visitors.

  “I see you're letting the weekenders use the Blue Bathroom,” I told her as I removed a piece of popcorn from Louis's tail.

  “The Blue Bathroom? Are you sure? I would have thought the two bathrooms in the Floral Suite would be enough.”

  I shrugged my shoulders, and moved to rewind the tape.

  “Guess not. I met the mother coming out of the bathroom …” I paused a moment. “Are you sure you put them in the Floral Suite? She went upstairs.” I tapped the Rewind button. Nothing happened. Shoot.

  Millie turned around quickly and stared at me, her blue eyes narrowing.

  “What did she look like?”

  I looked closer at the VCR. No wonder nothing was happening. I was pressing the Stop button.

  “Tall, thin with long, dark, stringy hair …”

  “Navy blue flowing robe, carrying a basket?” Millie interrupted.

  “Yeah, that's her,” I said slowly. “How did you know?”

  Millie grinned at me, and put a cigarette into her two-foot-long mother-of-pearl cigarette holder.

  “No. That's not her. Ms. Archer is of medium height, stocky build, a tow-headed girl with freckles, walks like a football player.”

  “That's not who I saw.”

  “That's because you saw Elma Van Roan. You saw our ghost.”

  My fingers turned stiff and I felt a chill go through me. She had looked so real, not shadowy or luminous, not all white or spooky. I had spoken to a ghost? And stranger still, the ghost had spoken back.

  “G-ghost?”

  Millie's laughter sounded like little bells.

  “You betcha! And if she was carrying that basket, she was headed up to the Tower Room to reenact the murder of her husband. Local legend says she carried the knives up to the room in a cloth-covered basket. Told her husband they were pastries,” she said breezily.

  I shivered and reached for the knitted afghan that Louis had burrowed into.

  “M-murder? You … you never said a thing about a murder.”

  Millie's pretty face clouded for a moment as she tried to remember. “Oh … didn't I mention it?” she asked innocently. “It's a great story! Elma Van Roan found out that her husband, Fergus, was having an affair with the maid, a local girl. Elma and Fergus were just rooming here for a few months while their house was being built. Fergus was the Methodist minister.”

  I smiled despite my uneasiness. A minister. That figures.

  “Elma spied them … ah … en flagrante, and decided to take matters into her own hands. She actually waited until morning, told her husband that she wanted to bring him a surprise for breakfast. Went to the kitchen and packed up the meat cleaver and a slicing knife into her basket. Went upstairs, gave her husband a muffin to eat, then cut off his … well … you can guess what she cut off. I'll bet he was surprised! She left him there to bleed to death and went after the maid. Elma was caught, of course, and hanged. Totally unrepentant. And she's never really left this house.” She looked at me closely. “As you can attest.”

  By now I was shivering and shaking under the afghan as if it was twenty degrees below zero outside. I'd never met a ghost before. Especially one who was carrying knives.

  “Ah … is she … ah … dangerous?” I asked. How stupid did that sound?

  Millie smiled.

  “No. Just wanders around the place. Speaks to the guests sometimes. Inez and I see her at least once a month. Occasionally, she ties up the bathroom, washing the blood off her hands, I think. She won't bother you. It's usually the male guests of the Tower Room who have trouble.”

  I didn't sleep well for a couple of nights after that. I kept seeing the dark-haired woman carrying a basket up the stairs. A woman with an angelic smile on her face and the fury of hell in her heart.

  But I was also having dreams of a different kind. The kind I hadn't had since I was fifteen, over a hundred years ago. And in all of them, I could see Jess Gardiner's face. And his quiet eyes.

  Chapter Ten

  Paper Moon is a spot in the road, with fifteen hundred people or so in the town and surrounding area. It's on the way to the Glacier National Park and Idaho, so a lot of people pass through in the spring, summer, and fall months. The antiques and craft shops stay open from April through September to accommodate the tourists. On weekends, the population swells. It's a big deal here. Reverend Hare told me proudly that Paper Moon had a traffic jam once last year in July.

  But Paper Moon is, basically, a one-horse town. And most days it's kinda dead. It's just that no one has gotten around to burying it yet.

  Most women could strip naked at the corner of Arcadia Lake Road and High Street and never draw a crowd.

  But I bet you I could.

  In a way, I became a sort of tourist attraction for Paper Moon. There were people of Scot, English, and Irish descent. Some with ancestors from Sweden and Norway, Ireland and Bavaria. There are Kootenai, Salish, Crow, and Cheyenne. There were Lakota, like Jess and his family, and Blackf
oot. But there weren't many black folk.

  Let me rephrase that.

  There weren't any black folk.

  I swore that some people came into the diner not just to eat but to look. At me. I told Jess I was thinking about selling tickets. He thought I was crazy.

  I could spot them right away. They weren't even cool about it. They walk through the door, look around slowly, trying not to call attention to themselves. I knew what was going through their minds: “I don't see her. Where is she?” Then they would spot me, whisper to one another, and come on in. The whole time I'm cooking, or taking the orders from Mignon or Rosetta, I'd catch glimpses of them, looking at me, watching everything I did. Sometimes, when Jess rang up the bill on the register, they'd forget to take their change because they were watching me.

  I told Jess, “This is starting to really piss me off.”

  “They just want to see we got diversity.” He grinned.

  I rolled my eyes and put a drop of vanilla in the batter.

  “Aw, you're just seeing things,” Jess told me, as he wiped up spilled milk and orange juice after a family of seven had departed. “You ain't that much of an oddity. We're sophisticated, you know. We get colored folks around here all the time. Mignon,” he called out, “didn't some black man pass through here with Lewis and Clark, back in 1804 or 1805? Somewhere back there?”

  “Yeah, but he didn't stay, Jess,” Mignon yelled back with a grin. “Said he wanted more of a cosmopolitan atmosphere.”

  I snickered at them, giving my pancake batter a stir for the nine o'clock rush.

  “You call me colored again and we're gonna fight, Mr. Running Fox Gardiner,” I told him, using his proper names. “I'm not just imagining things. Those people come in here just to stare at me.”

  “She's angling for a raise, Uncle Jess,” Mignon commented. “Figures she's worth more since she thinks she's the main attraction, the one that customers are here to see.”

  “Hell, they're not here for her. They come for my Montana Continental French onion soup. And she won't get a raise,” Jess retorted. “Besides, it's all in her head. Juanita's suffering from hormonal paranoia. Common for women of her age.”

  I threw a large rainbow trout at him.

  But by eleven o'clock, I wasn't feeling any better. Five people had asked me about those “things” on my head— referring to the tiny, tight twists of hair I wore, which I kept out of my way by wrapping a cloth around my head like a headband.

  Thank God my sister was a hairdresser!

  Kay could do anything to anyone's hair—from bleached blondes to locks. And since I was her “little” sister, I had been her guinea pig ever since I had enough hair to comb. Any hairdo she had ever tried on my head (and there had been a million of them) she had taught me how to take care of myself. Including these twist things.

  Good thing, too.

  Francine's Beauty World in downtown Paper Moon, Montana, could do a mean wash and set but they didn't know a damn thing about my tightly coiled hair.

  I was pissed off and getting tired of having to explain myself. Throwing the dishes around, slamming the pans down onto the stove. Jess came in the front door with Dracula. The place had quieted down—it was just before the lunch crowd came in. (We don't do “brunch” at the diner—it's breakfast, lunch, and dinner.)

  “What's up with you?”

  Dracula padded over to me and sat down, giving me a sad puppy-dog look. He wanted me to feel sorry for him so I would give him a piece of sausage.

  “If one more person asks me what those 'things' are on my head, I'll knock 'im in his head with this frying pan!” Jess shrugged, and poured himself some coffee. “It's not their fault, Juanita. We don't get many African queens round here.” His lips twisted upward into a smirk. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye as I cleaned up the mess I had made, and handed Dracula his treat. “I'm beginning to feel like an alien. Like I just landed here from Mars or somewhere.” “Something new and different, Your Highness.” “Hummph,” I said, imitating his favorite word. “Well, this

  African queen is getting sick and tired of being a museum piece. Maybe I should tell 'em I'm practicing voodoo or something. That would give 'em something to talk about.”

  Jess stopped sipping for a moment. He was frowning.

  “Is that like geechie?”

  I turned and looked at him.

  “Now where out here in the mountains of Montana did you ever hear about geechie?” Jess shrugged his shoulders again and smiled that slight smile of his. “My best friend in the army … was a black dude, Eddie

  Rice. He was from South Carolina. Used to talk about this girl he was in love with. Said she was a ‘geechie woman.’ He told me he never crossed that girl, that she could mix up some potions that could mess him up good. Is that like voodoo?”

  “I'd forgotten you were in the army,” I told him. But I hadn't. Mignon said Jess had earned a Purple Heart. There were pictures of his regiment on the walls of the diner.

  The glimmer in Jess's eye went out like a snap, and he got that distant, closed look he always gets when he doesn't want to talk about something.

  “You and Eddie were tight, huh?” I asked, watching Jess, hoping that the door hadn't shut too tight.

  “Yeah, he was the one who …” He stopped. In the silence, I heard the refrigerator hum.

  “Yeah,” he said with finality.

  I knew why he had closed up.

  I heard it in his voice. Knew it was there without even looking at his face. I just went on and put some bread in the toaster and added a pinch of sugar to my concoction. I wanted to keep the conversation as normal and boring as possible. I wanted to hear what he had to say about his buddy. I liked hearing the warmth and lightness in his voice. So I tried to be cool.

  Nonchalant.

  “Vietnam.”

  “Yep. Tunnel rat.”

  “Did Eddie get out?” But I knew the answer before I asked it. All of Jess's service stuff was arranged like a shrine on the mantel over the hearth in the diner. And in the middle of the “shrine” was a snapshot of Jess and a black guy, probably Eddie. Eddie hadn't made it.

  “Blew up in front of my face.”

  I winced. My brother, Jerome, had died in a rice paddy near Saigon. There was barely enough of him left to bury. What they call a real “basket case.” My mother never got over it. I turned back to the stove, but not before catching another good look at Jess's haunted face. Guess he had never gotten over it either.

  I wanted to say something to him to make him feel better. I wanted to touch his shoulder and let him know that I understood. But I knew his memories were in a place I couldn't reach. And even if I could get there, he'd close the door in my face. I let it alone. I drank my coffee and said good-bye to some customers who were leaving.

  I left Jess with his own thoughts and went back to the meat loaf I was making for lunch. Buried my hands in a bowl full of ground meat, egg, oatmeal, catsup, and spices. Squished it around a little, remembered that I needed to add more salt and pepper.

  The idea struck me when I turned around and reached up to the shelf over the stove to get the salt box. It was the silliest thing. I laughed out loud and told Jess what I wanted to do.

  Jess's eyes widened as I told him.

  He shook his head firmly.

  “No way! What're you gonna do? Run off all my customers? Forget it!”

  I laughed and held up the cayenne pepper can and the bottle of cumin.

  “Now, Jess, there are only a few things in this world that a little extra red pepper won't improve.”

  “What the hell …” he growled at me. “Juanita …”

  “Or a little cumin … mixed with chili pepper …” I was on my tiptoes rummaging around the cabinet. There was another spice can that I couldn't quite reach.

  “I wasn't planning on being sued for food poisoning, Juanita.”
/>   “You won't be. Besides, you'll be better off without those kind of customers, Jess. They deserve a little … there! Got it!”

  Triumphantly, I held up the small jar of gumbo filé. “Just a little spice in their lives.”

  “Frankly, lady, you're enough spice … for all of us.”

  I sighed. I just loved it when he talked like that.

  Jess's eyes locked with mine for a second then he looked more closely at the can I held in my hand.

  “Christ! That's just what I need! Folks runnin' back ‘n’ forth to the can!”

  He frowned a little and shook his head, his black hair spilling over his shoulders like an ebony waterfall. Asked a question, listened to my answer. Then he grinned at me.

  “Juanita, you having hot flashes or what?” There was a twinkle in his eye.

  I threw another trout at him.

  But my idea came in handy a few weeks later. Especially on the day the Confederates arrived. But I'll get to that in a minute. Let me tell you about Millie.

  I had the morning off. Rode with Millie over to Missoula for her doctor's appointment, and had just left her back at the rooming house. (The doctor said that Millie had the intestines of a twenty-year-old, but that's a story for another time and more information than I want to share.) It was a real experience driving on those two-lane roads in a 1961 white Cadillac convertible. Especially since Millie has a lead foot. My knees still get a little shaky when I think about it.

  Millie insisted on driving (said it was Paul Daniels's car, and he wouldn't let anyone drive it but her) and drive she did—eighty-five-plus miles an hour both ways. I was a nervous wreck by the time we got back to Paper Moon.

  She looked like Marilyn Monroe behind the wheel: huge, black sunglasses: a white scarf around her head, the ends tied behind; red lipstick; and just the tiniest hint of that blond hair peeking out from beneath the scarf. It was hard to believe that she was sixty-five, seventy, eighty, thirty, who knows?

  “Millie, how old are you really?” I asked her breathlessly. That last turn, taken at eighty miles an hour, had left my wind and my stomach behind.