“Don’t look at me. I ain’t hassling chickens.”
Mrs. Pence makes a little face of comic regret over the chickens, and she and Isaiah both laugh. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
“Never mind chickens,” says Isaiah. “Ruth, are you planning to cook those peas for dinner tonight?”
He’s wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, and he’s brimming with enjoyment at my surprise. When I can’t find words to answer him, he pulls out a chair for himself and reaches for a pod and shells it into the pan.
Mrs. Pence sits beside him, smiling fondly. Flirtatiously even. How had she met Isaiah, of all people? How long has she known him? Beside his dark male vibrancy she looks more fragile than ever. The unshaded bulb that hangs from its cord over the kitchen table has bleached her face and deepened her cruel wrinkles and her softening skin. What does Isaiah want from her? I feel a protective surge of anger and realize I’ve twisted a peapod into a squashed mess.
Isaiah glances at the leaking green pod in my hands and then at my face. “Ruby,” he says. “Ruth. I can’t get around that name, you know. You’ve always been Ruby to me.”
His dark eyes soften when he looks at me, but he’s wary in a way I don’t remember, and I wonder what his life has been like. I saw him so seldom since childhood—once or twice, downtown at night, before I left Versailles—and I remember that that night in the Alibi was the last time, and I shudder with the memory.
He reaches across the table for another pod. “Tell you what. Let’s finish shelling these mothers, and then I’ll cook dinner for us.”
“Yes!” says Mrs. Pence, who has been looking from one to the other of us and smiling. Now she reaches for a peapod herself. For a moment our three pairs of hands lie in the circle of light from the unshaded bulb: Mrs. Pence’s pale and arch tendoned and brown spotted with age; mine spare and limber now that I’ve been practicing the piano again; and Isaiah’s hands brown and supple, pale on the palms and darker around the knuckles. Big piano-playing hands with long, strong fingers and oversized knuckles, all three of us.
Isaiah, who had come looking for me that night in the Alibi. Isaiah, who had hated Brazos and Gall on sight. But I wasn’t in the Alibi now, even though it felt like it for a moment, the walls of smoke-darkened fake leather and the booths that were upholstered in cracked red vinyl and the TV that hung above the bar and was tuned to whatever, probably some sports analysis program that nobody listened to, and the shelter of Gall’s arms, and my last sight of Isaiah.
In Mrs. Pence’s kitchen, where the unshaded light bares the flaws of flaking wallpaper, chipped enamel sink, fraying old curtains, and my wandering thoughts—one thing I should do with my next paycheck is buy a shade for that light bulb—Isaiah remains. We’ve finished shelling the peas, and now he’s heating a skillet. I go to scrub potatoes at the sink, where I’m pretty sure Mrs. Pence can’t hear me over the running water.
“What are you doing here, Isaiah?”
I expect him to be evasive or to try to turn me away with a joke, but he turns from the stove and looks at me for a long moment and doesn’t speak, so I plunge in.
“I don’t want her hurt.”
“Coming from you—” He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to finish. I’m burning with equal parts anger and shame at what he hasn’t said. I was the out-of-control, acting-out teenager who’d run off without leaving word with anybody, hadn’t gotten in touch with anybody, left my mother anguished by my betrayal, left Brad Gilcannon to pick up his life as best he could after the humiliation of the abuse acquittals, and left Mrs. Pence to trace my whereabouts from the Idaho Rivermen’s posters that had started cropping up around the West. From the anger and shame I speak the truth.
“I didn’t think anybody cared.”
Except Brad maybe, but that was another story.
Isaiah just looks at me for another long moment. If he feels any anger, he’s keeping it well hidden. What I see in his face is more like weariness, and I suppose it costs him something to keep up the laughing vigor he usually shows.
“I’ve been trying to keep an eye on her,” he says.
We both glance back at Mrs. Pence at the kitchen table with the cup of tea Isaiah had made her. She yawns, recovers, and sips a little tea, her eyes soft and her mind elsewhere.
“She still got all her piano students?”
“I think so. I see them coming and going—and hear them.”
He grins.
“Seriously,” he says, “I’ve got a good little combo together. Come and listen one night. Play some keyboard with us.”
“Maybe.”
“And sing.”
A voice like a bell. “I’m no Rosalie. You’d be disappointed.”
He’s turning the salmon filets in the skillet and doesn’t answer right away. Then he says, “You been in touch with Rosalie?”
“No,” I say, surprised.
“Hmm.”
I wait, but he’s busy with his cooking, and he says no more about my mother.
16
I think at least I’ll be able to sleep this night. It’d been how long since I slept more than an hour or two? After the dinner dishes are washed and Isaiah has said good night and taken himself off, I come upstairs and go to the window, where, by the glow of the distant streetlight and the rising moon, l see Isaiah’s dark head and white T-shirt growing smaller as he walks farther away. I watch him for a few minutes until he disappears around somebody’s shadowed veranda at the end of the block, and then I drop the curtain and go across the hall to the bathroom to brush my teeth and my hair and rinse out the hose I’d worn to work. And sleep.
But no. What seems like the next minute, I’m wide awake, and the numbers on the digital alarm are 2:30. Oh hell. Just like the old nights of the damned.
The nights of the damned. It’s the awakening that signals the onset. I’m oblivious in deep sleep, then snap, I realize I’m wide awake. Where’s Gall? Not in bed beside me. Now my eyes are open, neck and arms and legs tense under the sheets. Not an unfamiliar sound in the room, not a light or a sensation or a secret movement by the sullen young man in the Polaroid that might have stirred me from sleep. But I’m as alert as a hunted deer, ready to leap out of bed and run.
A branch taps the window, a faraway car accelerates on the avenue, but there’s nothing in this room but shadows and me. The heap of my clothes on a chair, the closet door ominously ajar. The red glowing numerals on the digital alarm clock now read 2:31 a.m.
What seems like an hour later the clock reads 2:32 a.m., and I’m sweating, my panic growing. Will the clock never move? Will it never be morning? If only I could sleep. All the time knowing that by daylight I would be able to sleep, sleep all day in blessed, blessed obliteration until five or six in the afternoon. So why can’t I sleep now?
Toss. Turn. The clock reads 2:33 a.m. By now I’m shaking, holding onto myself, my arms wrapped around my knees, my face buried in my arms, my own body odors as sharp as fear. Fecal, disgusting. If I don’t hang on, I’ll be torn apart. Bits and pieces of me, disintegrating molecules spinning out of reach. No safety net, no rope, nothing to grab for, nothing that will hold. The black hole yawns. And all I want to do is scream, scream and run down the street, tearing off my clothing, tearing off my skin. I want out of my skin!
Not quite like those nights, not as bad. For one thing I’m not worried about Gall, at least not in the same way. Wherever Gall is—whatever he’s become—he’s not in the Screamer’s bed or some other girl’s bed. And so I lie still, thinking I might go back to sleep, but it’s no use.
So, walk somewhere. Wear myself out. Then come back and try to sleep.
I pull on jeans and flip-flops, steal down the stairs, and ease open the front door, where I listen for a moment, not wanting to wake or worry Mrs. Pence.
The three-quarters moon is on its descent by now, riding low behind the trees and edging the leaves and silvering the ancient shingles on the houses on the other side of the street. Dark clo
uds race aloft, creating the impression that the moon itself is racing for the horizon, but not a breath of breeze stirs the leaves down here at street level. Everyone on the street prays for rain to succor the lawns and save the gardens, but rain doesn’t look likely tonight.
I wish it would rain—wash my tears away . . .
I’ve come to think in song lyrics.
I close the gate in the picket fence behind me and follow my indistinct shadow down the street in the direction I had seen Isaiah walking. It’s a way I have walked before. Beyond the residences of the Orchards, the street narrows into a graveled lane that dips down into a gulch, where the heat of the day lies in the grass. The distant light to my left is from the airport, and the darkness in the gulch is too deep for me to make out my feet or know where I’m walking except for the feel of the gravel under the thin soles of my flip-flops. The lane follows the gulch for a few yards and then climbs back to even ground on a winding grade scraped out of the side of the gulch. Soon I’m breathing hard from the exertion of the climb. Sitting at a computer all day long has left me out of shape for night walking.
When I come to the pasture where the horses sleep on their hoofs in a corner of the fence, I sit down in the grass to rest, get my breath back, and listen to the night sounds. The grass smells of baked seeds and dust, and somewhere is a rustling of some small animal hunting or being hunted. Far away a dog barks and one of the horses lifts his head, stamps, and goes back to sleep. Far away the airport lights burn, far away traffic rumbles, but here, for now, I’m the only watcher and listener.
I’m thinking of curling up and sleeping in the warm grass when something large and dark swooshes over my head on wings that slice the air and disappears on the other side of the gulch before I can dodge or gasp.
I’m clutching handfuls of grass. The night world around me has changed. The odor of road dust and horses, the bulk of trees and distant houses against a horizon imperceptibly lightening with the dawn of the longest day of the year. All the same and all changed by the watcher and listener.
I’d seen an owl on the hunt, I suppose, going after whatever frightened thing huddles in the grass.
James McMurtry on the radio, singing about bear tracks coming after me.
I rise and brush off my jeans and look around to get my bearings. Another few yards, and I will stand on the edge of the bluff above the Milk River.
The lane, little more than a trail by now, opens upon a flattish space of thin soil and weeds on the brink of the gorge. The pale line of light in the east is enough to pick out crumpled trash and the glint of beer bottles and the darker verge where the road, as I remember, angles down to the residences along the river. Teenagers used to drive up here and park. From the litter, apparently they still do.
What looks like a thin dead branch lies in my way, and I reach down to toss it aside. When it crackles in my hand, I realize I’m holding no dead branch but a desiccated snakeskin, and I fling it away and wipe my hands on the thighs of my jeans. This is no place to be wandering around alone in the dark. I should go home.
But from here I see streetlights and rooftops that look close enough to hit by throwing a handful of gravel. It’s farther than it looks, though.
My mother lived down there after she was exonerated and freed from prison and married to her public defender. Drawn by some thread, I walked past her house one night after my shift at the Alibi, on a street called Lila Drive. It must have been just a week or two before I left Versailles with the Rivermen. My mother could never have known that I watched her bedroom light until it went dark.
*
Isaiah is the brave one.
He’s defiant: I ain’t seen no dead babies, and I ain’t gonna say I did!
Anne screams at him—You did too!
I did not!
You’re nothing but a dirty little black mistake! I made Ruby tell, and I’ll make you tell!
Anne usually ignores us younger kids, but I can tell she’s really angry at Isaiah, angry enough to kill him. Her just-washed hair straggles down, and she tosses it back, too angry even to care that her high forehead shows. Isaiah’s on the balls of his feet with his knees flexed, nothing warm about his grin now. He’s just waiting for her to give him the excuse to deck her one.
Anne! Isaiah!
Brad’s wife is drying her hands on a towel as she runs from the kitchen. One of her little boys, looking scared, grabs at her skirt.
Isaiah, you go downstairs right now! And stay there! Or I’ll tell Brad!
Did Isaiah do as he was told? Why the blank spaces between the flashes of what I remember? Are they really getting to be fewer?
*
When I open the gate in the picket fence, I hear Mrs. Pence playing the piano downstairs, but I push back the impulse to linger and listen, and I enter the house as silently as I can. Climb the stairs as silently as I can, not to disturb her, and close my bedroom door.
But I wonder. Does Mrs. Pence have nights of the damned that drive her to the piano?
17
Monday begins quietly. Jamie arrived early as usual and started the coffee and watered her plants before the rest of us came in, although she now seems withdrawn, thinking deep thoughts of her own. Dr. Brenner gives her a sharp look when she pours his coffee, which he keeps telling her not to do, but she says nothing. Anne goes straight to her own office and closes her door behind her. The hands of the office clock make their slow rounds, and we work through the morning.
At eleven-thirty Jamie turns off her computer and slings her bag over her shoulder. “I’ve got an appointment, and I may be a little late getting back.”
I look at Catina, who shrugs, and so we return to our computer screens and our columns of names and numbers.
A new silence wakes me from the trance of keyboarding, and I look up. Travel posters, spider plants, sunlight falling through the window. Catina bent over her work, her ringlets in spirals down her back. Jamie’s desk bare, her computer shrouded.
Anne stands over me.
“I know what you’re doing! I know it was you!”
Over her shoulder I watch the second hand of the office clock continue its imperturbable circle. Better to watch the second hand than Anne’s face, although I can’t not see her lips drawn back from her teeth in a rictus, her eyes hot enough to burn, her high forehead broken into red blotches. This isn’t just Anne being Anne. Something is seriously wrong, and I push back my chair, rise, and turn to her.
“Are you okay? Do you need help?”
In her five-inch stilettos she’s as tall as me and swaying. “I don’t want help from you!”
“Is there somebody I can call?”
Drawn by trouble, Dr. Brenner sticks his head out of his office. “What’s going on?”
Anne whirls around. “Her! She’s what’s wrong! Ruby Jarvis! Sneaking around at night and throwing eggs at my house!”
“Anne,” says Dr. Brenner in a tone I’ve never heard him use, “what makes you think Ruth would do such a thing?”
“Because she did! Eggs dripping down my front door! Dripping down my windows! Cooking on the glass! This heat is—is—” Suddenly she throws herself at him.
He catches her awkwardly and pats her shoulder. “Anne,” he says, more gently. “I’m so sorry. When did this happen? Last night? Have you called the police?”
“—the heat is killing me! The stench! And eggshells all over my walk!”
“Have you called the police?” Dr. Brenner repeats.
“What would the police do? I know who did it! She’s the only one who hates me enough to hurt me!”
“Anne, Anne. Have you been taking your medication?”
On the periphery I catch sight of Catina, cowering behind her computer screen.
“Anne, get your things together. Would you like me to drive you home?”
And she nods like a child.
Dr. Brenner guides a still-weeping Anne to the door and glances back. “This office is falling apart,” he says, more t
o himself than to us, and closes the door behind him and Anne.
“Wow.”
I’m remembering a sobbing Anne flinging herself into Brad Gilcannon’s arms. Had she forgotten her meds that day?
I pull myself from—where? Brad Gilcannon’s TV-watching room?—back into the Office of Student Accounting, where Catina and I sit and look at each other until Catina pulls out her phone. She wakes the screen, pushes some buttons, shakes her head.
“When was this supposed to have happened? Last night? Here we go.”
She studies the screen. “Here’s the police blotter for yesterday and so far today. A domestic dispute—that wouldn’t be it—minor in possession, traffic collision on First and Main. Well, she said she didn’t report it. If it happened.”
I’m trying to decide which is worse, really getting her house egged or pretending her house has been egged.
“Why is she so against you? I mean, she doesn’t like any of us, but it’s like she hates you.” Catina gives me a sudden sharp look. “You didn’t sleep with her husband or anything, did you?”
“I don’t even know who he is.”
“Well, it’s got to be something. It’s like she’s afraid of something.”
It’s nearly noon before Dr. Brenner turns up with yellow stains on the knees of his gray trousers. “I helped her with the mess. She’s going to take some sick days. I don’t think she’s been taking her medication as she should. A friend is coming to stay with her.”
*
How long since it has rained in Versailles? Even in the hours before dawn, the air smells parched, and the wild grass beneath my feet is so brittle that it snaps with every step I take. And yes, I’m making my way by touch down the road that leads off the bluff into the upscale housing development, drawn like a sleepwalker by who knows what invisible thread.
Below the roofs of sleeping houses and a filigree of willows that lines its banks, the Milk River is a silver thread flowing east to merge with the Missouri. The water I’m watching began its flow near Montana’s border with Canada, two hundred miles to the west of Versailles, flowed east and then northeast into Alberta, and now flows below me on its way southeast to join the Missouri and continue to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. What passes for cool air rises from the water on invisible air currents like a wave of farewell.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 9
