Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin

by Blew, Mary Clearman;

  I’m Ruby the watcher, floating on my own current.

  It’s easy enough to locate Lila Drive. The trees that were newly planted the night I walked here from the Alibi have grown much taller, and they shadow the pavement with their foliage.

  The house, on the other hand, is smaller than I remember, a split-level with an attached garage and a wide front lawn with a clump of birches and a mailbox on a post beside the driveway. No name on the mailbox, only the house number. No car parked in the driveway, no crack of light falling through the drawn curtains, no details to remind me of my mother. Even the paint on the siding is reduced to some obscure pale color by the glow from the streetlight at the end of the block.

  It’s possible she no longer lives here. It’s been ten years, after all. In ten years she could have divorced her public defender. Maybe she went back to singing in bars. Or maybe she stayed with her public defender and they used her fat cut of the wrongful imprisonment money to buy a mansion elsewhere in Versailles. Or a country estate. Or, or, or. No silhouette of a woman in a screen door is here.

  Suddenly the pavement is flooded with the headlights of a car on Lila Drive. I freeze in the shadows of the birches. The car turns, however, not into the driveway that might be my mother’s but into a driveway across the street.

  Some automatic device activates a security light near the roof and sends a garage door rumbling open. The car pulls into the garage, and a woman gets out of the driver’s door. For a moment she’s illuminated in the security light: sharp features, halo of golden hair.

  So this is Anne’s house.

  I don’t think she saw me. Surely the security light blinded her to any movement of mine in the shadows under the birches. And yet something halts her in the act of dropping her car keys into her handbag. For what seems a long moment but probably is an extenuated couple of seconds, she stares in my direction, while I kneel as petrified as the owl’s prey in the dappling of leaves.

  Nightwalker, lurker under trees—exactly the wrong place for me to be. If I’m seen and recognized, I’ll be thought damaged and dangerous and a thrower of eggs. She’ll likely report me as a stalker.

  The moment passes. Anne drops the keys into her handbag and turns with no sign of hurry or alarm and disappears. I have just time to register a man getting out of the passenger side of her car, a glimpse of his shoulders and leather jacket and a blond head as he, too, disappears and the garage door rumbles closed.

  Francis Albert, the rich doctor, returning to her? Or a new man for Anne? Or the friend who has come to stay with her? I don’t know, I don’t care, I only care about stilling my heartbeat and waiting until I’m sure no one watches from a shrouded window as I slip out from the protection of the birches and steal away.

  18

  My eyes are gritty on Saturday morning, and I have nothing much to do but wash up the breakfast things. Maybe I’ll take a nap. I never have trouble sleeping during the day. The trick would be to force myself awake before it’s time for lunch, and then what? No. I tell myself I’ve forgotten, but I haven’t. Isaiah and his guys are practicing in a barn somewhere, and I half-promised him I’d sit in.

  After a while I get up from the kitchen table—I’d persuaded Mrs. Pence to stop setting the dining room table—and set the oatmeal pan to soak and run water in the sink to wash two plates and bowls and Mrs. Pence’s cup and saucer. Never a coffee mug for her, always the porcelain cup with its tracery of vines and roses and its matching saucer. That done, I stack the dishes to dry themselves in the drain and slip out the kitchen door, as I’ve taken to doing, to check on the little backyard garden.

  The carrots and onion spikes thrive in the reflected heat from the garage wall. I kneel and probe the soil around the rows with my fingers and find it soft and moist.

  It’s early enough that the sun still feels pleasant on my back and shoulders when I stand and brush the crumbs of soil off my fingers. Jonathan, who followed me from the kitchen, curious about what interests me, sniffs at the edge of the tilled soil where it meets the scorched lawn. He glances in the direction of the driveway and then at me. It occurs to me that Jonathan knows the mystery gardener and sees him often on his weeding and watering visits.

  The marijuana plants behind the garage are bushy and luxuriant. When I look closer, I see fresh stubs where some of the leaves have been clipped.

  “So, Jonathan.”

  He gazes up at me with soulful eyes.

  I walk back through the house on my way to the stairs just in time to meet the blonde “Für Elise” teenager coming out of the piano room with her backpack of music.

  “You’re Ruth, right?” she greets me. “Still staying here, I see.”

  I nod while she takes in my height and careless braid and dirty hands. It doesn’t seem possible that any girl can be quite that young and that sure of herself.

  “I’m Madison Albert,” she says, “in case you were wondering.”

  I’m so surprised that I’m speechless—“You’re Anne’s daughter?”

  “God, no!” she says, and then she giggles, not a teenager’s giggle of embarrassment but a gleeful giggle at my embarrassment. I can’t think of a thing to say.

  She shoulders her backpack. “See ya!” she sings, and disappears through the front door.

  I go upstairs to my bedroom, and when I glance out the window, I see she’s walked past the street corner, and the two kids who have been hanging around the mailboxes all summer have swung out on their bicycles and followed her again. She looks back and scolds them, and they shout some grief back at her and keep following her.

  *

  Isaiah’s barn turns out to be a half-hour’s drive into the countryside, near the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation. I park the Pontiac in a weedy lot next to a newish white Ford pickup and a minivan with a crumpled rear fender. Late afternoon sunlight slants through a stand of quaking aspen, glints along a wire fence, and sheens the barn’s weathered siding. The barn itself lists off-center like a drunk trying to keep his balance. When I get out of the Pontiac, I hear not exactly music throbbing through the cracks but more of a vibration that threatens the poor old barn and spreads across the sparse gravel until I feel it through the soles of my boots.

  A pair of llamas, alert for trouble, swivel their heads on their long necks and study me from their pasture as I walk up to the door of the barn. No trouble here, llamas. Go back to your grass. I open the barn door, and for a moment I’m blind in the gloom. Then my eyes adjust, and I see a concrete floor, a row of what once must have been stalls, and a board half-ceiling holding up a loft where a few bales of hay still are stacked. Light from an upper window falls across a small bandstand where Isaiah and his guys have set up their drums and guitars and amps with what looks like miles of extension cord. Does the place actually have electricity? The extension cords must be plugged in somewhere.

  They’re pounding away at a tune I don’t recognize, with a sluggish bass line and a fiddle-dee-dee treble. Then Isaiah lays down his guitar and shades his eyes with his hand.

  “Ruby, that you? Come on over here!”

  He introduces us—Terry on drums, Brian on steel, Stu on bass. Isaiah and three white guys in their thirties, practicing in a barn like teenagers. The white guys eye me.

  “I told them you play keyboard.”

  “You’ve got a keyboard out here?”

  Isaiah pulls away a vinyl cover. “Right here. You gonna play some for us?”

  Isaiah’s keyboard is a little Yamaha. I sit on the folding stool and touch a key. When was the last time I played keyboard? It must have been that last night at the Kodiak Club. The tone of Isaiah’s Yamaha is a little tinny, but oh well, and before I think what I’m doing, I move into the sad slow chords of “Hickory Wind.”

  After the first few bars I’m weightless and uncaring, in a space out of mind where I’ve been before but have forgotten. Sunlight burns through the high window; the chinks in the barn’s siding glows; the dust motes turn to gold and float around me
. The only time that counts is 3/4 time.

  I come to the end.

  “Damn,” says Isaiah. “Start again.”

  He starts a soft backup on his guitar, and soon the echoing high notes from Brian’s steel rise behind us. I’m aware of Terry and Stu beginning an underpinning of rhythm, and what can I do but sing about the wind making me feel better each time it begins?

  And if my voice never was bell-like, it by god can hold its own in a falling-down barn with a half-assed group that practices on weekends, and I lean back and let the lyrics lift from my throat and soar through the sun and shadows into the rafters. Yes, I remember the trees, the pines and the oak. Poor shattered trees. Long ago. Not so long ago. I sing to the end and listen to the last wistful notes from the steel.

  A silence that rolls on and on.

  In that wide quietness, as I come back to the ordinary, the amps and extension cords and the dirty corners, I turn and find Isaiah beside me, and I see that he’s crying.

  “Damn,” he says, and swipes his forearm across his eyes.

  “We got a gig at the Three Hundred Club this weekend,” he says when his voice steadies. “Will you come and sing with us?”

  I hardly hear him. Playing “Hickory Wind,” singing it, hadn’t killed me. I had been so deep into the lingering pain behind those chords and those lyrics that I hadn’t even thought about pain of my own.

  I’m not the woman I was. Not the angry sixteen-year-old nor the Ruby who stood up to sing with the Rivermen in the fringed red suede skirt and vest that Gall bought for her in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, nor the Ruby who saw Gall leave her bed for the Screamer or whichever cute teenager had been hanging around the back door of the club. No, and not the Ruby who crawled, burning in anguish, back to Versailles to hide. First I’d had my appendix carved out, and then I shed a skin. The question is what next.

  Bill the Drummer whispers in my head again. What do you long for Ruby?

  “Ruby?”

  “I might come and listen to you and the guys.”

  “Listen, hell. I want to hear you sing.”

  “Does this band of yours have a name?”

  “We’re the Working Poor.”

  *

  I don’t know why I let Isaiah think I’ll sing with the Working Poor, and I don’t know what I’ll wear if I do. The red fringed suede skirt and vest I wore when I sang with the Rivermen I abandoned in Anchorage.

  The odors of Jackson Hole were sharp. The main street smelled of money, I now realize, or more exactly, it smelled of the expensive things money could buy. The silversmith shops, for example, with window displays spilling over with hammered silver, the silver concho belts and Navajo pearls and the glitter of liquid silver necklaces and squash blossom necklaces. Silver rings, silver bracelets set with turquoise.

  Next door the saddlery shop smelling of leather and exotic oils and displaying silver-mounted saddles and bridles of tooled leather and heavily ornate spurs. And then the leatherwear shop, heady with the scent of something raw, something wild, in all the beautiful dyed colors. Here Gall led me through the welcoming glass door that stood open to the sidewalk, and he rifled through the racks of clothing until he found the red fringed suede skirt and vest.

  Go try these on, Ruby Red.

  In the lighted triple mirror of the changing room, I saw a girl I’d never seen before, a girl with dark eyes and long dark hair and a glowing face, dressed in the expensive red leather. And I saw her again in Gall’s eyes when I stepped out from behind the changing room door.

  There was a side of Jackson Hole I understood a long time later, behind the shops and the elk horns around the square and the RVs parked in front of the expensive shops and the bars where the music spilled out into the street. But when I was sixteen and knew everything, I thought I was walking on newly swept and burnished streets, far removed from the dust and stockyard stench and muddy river currents of Versailles, Montana. Jackson Hole was a town where Gall laid hundred-dollar bills on the counter to buy me the red fringed suede.

  Gall. Brazos. I thought the names were made up, to make the guys seem more western in their country-western band, and I wondered how poor old Bill the Drummer got stuck with his plain name. But no, Brazos explained, it really was his name, after a character in a western novel that his mother admired—an awful novel, he said, he’d tried to read it once—and Gall really was Gall, after some ancestor who had been a big man among the Lakota. Gall shrugged off the ancestor. I’ve never been on the rez, he said. Never wanted to.

  The red suede skirt and vest that I left behind in Anchorage likely ended up in a thrift shop somewhere, and even if I still had that outfit, it would look dated as well as being a killer to wear in this heat. But I’ve saved a little cash since I repaid Mrs. Pence for my crow clothes, and I think I might buy a red T-shirt to wear with jeans.

  After all, the Working Poor aren’t all that bad. Isaiah might be truly good if he practiced more, and when he and I harmonize, we’ve got a sound. Terry, the drummer, is probably the weakest link. He’s a little tentative, a little too fearful of making a mistake. It took me time, listening to the Rivermen and other bands, to hear the amazing difference a truly fine percussionist makes—Bill the Drummer, for example, who probably has found another band by now.

  *

  Bill the Drummer. When I wash my hair and comb it out, I see it’s grown past my waist, with ends that haven’t been trimmed since Bill the Drummer last trimmed them. The thought takes me back to—oh, god, McCall, Idaho.

  Bill the Drummer keeps a pair of barber scissors in the tray of his toolbox, where he also keeps pliers and screwdrivers and some other small tools he probably knows the names of. Yesterday he used the scissors to trim Brazos’s hair and trim his own hair, and now he wipes the blades with a handkerchief while I sit astraddle a chair I’ve carried out of the McCall motel room. The late-afternoon sun balances on the smoky haze over the tips of pines along the horizon and streaks the little motel courtyard with a dirty gold that fills the cracks in the concrete where weeds have sprung. The air smells of smoke. I hand Bill my comb.

  How much do you want off, Ruby?

  Just the ends.

  He runs his fingers along the back of my head, lifts up most of my hair and twists it and pins it out of the way with my barrette. My hair reaches my waist, falls to within a couple feet of the concrete when I’m sitting down, and Bill has to drop to one knee to comb out the remaining strands and start his snipping.

  If your hair grows any longer, I’ll have to grow a longer arm.

  Gall lurches out of the motel room, shirtless and carrying his can of beer—Fucking fires. Now they’ve closed Highway 55.

  The hell they did, says Bill, and combs out another layer of my hair to trim. A stir of air carries a dark wisp of hair past my bare feet and a few yards across the concrete.

  It was on the news.

  Bill snips, snips again. The sun is warm, and the sensation of his fingers in my hair is vaguely pleasant. The cloud of smoke over the tips of pines is the only sign of flames.

  Gall watches us for a moment and takes another swig of beer. Next they’ll evacuate this fucking town. And there goes our gig.

  That was on the news? We’re going to evacuate?

  It’s not official yet. I’m just saying.

  There are fires in the summer, always fires. This summer we had packed up and left Joseph, Oregon, and driven across Idaho to McCall for what promised to be a two-week top-of-the-tourist-season gig and has turned out to be a limping, day-to-day proposition as fires to the south and east grow and spread and hotel reservations are canceled and vacations cut short. Gall wants to park the van in his parents’ garage in Boise and fly up to Anchorage, where nothing is burning, at least that he’s heard of. To hear him, anybody would think Anchorage is the country music capital of the world—the Nashville of the Northwest maybe—and he thinks we have a shot at the top there. But Brazos wants to hang on as long as we can here in McCall and hope we can at least sav
e enough to pay for airline tickets if we don’t drive the van.

  Brazos, yawning, comes out of the room on the other side of the courtyard that he and Bill share and walks across to us.

  What have you heard? Fires getting any closer?

  It’s not good.

  Fucking forest service, Brazos says.

  It’s an old grievance with Brazos. Yesterday when the TV news was full of the deaths by flames of the two smoke jumpers in the Malheur River fire, Brazos fumed about mismanagement and how the deaths were just the same as murder.

  Yeah, well, and I think we oughta get the fuck outta here, Gall had said.

  Bill lifts the last layer of my hair and fans it across my shoulders and back, and I feel the weight settle as it leaves his hands. Watching, Gall drains the last of his beer and crumples the can. Bill, you ’bout finished with her now?

  Just about.

  If they’d left the little fires to burn, but no, Brazos complains, they—

  We’re killing time here, man. Do we have to wait until they throw us out and lock the doors?

  —year after year, all that underbrush and trash timber growing up and drying out, and then they wonder why the fires explode—

  The hell with your goddamn underbrush! I want to get outta here, man! Christ, I need another beer. Wash the goddamn taste of smoke outta my mouth.

  You better go easy on the beer. We got a gig to play.

  Fuck! I’m good! I’m always good!

  Gall throws his empty can in the direction of the dumpster and jerks a lock of my hair so hard it hurts. You’re not touching my hair with your goddamn scissors, Bill.

  Bill the Drummer wipes his scissors and lays them in the tray of his toolbox, but he watches Gall pull me off my chair by my lock of hair, and I know he doesn’t like it, but what it tells me is how much Gall needs me. Gall pulls me all the way back to our room by my lock of hair, and I’m thinking it can’t be any worse in Anchorage. It will be our first time there, and we’re booked in good clubs, and we’re going to cut a CD. It will probably be much better in Anchorage than in McCall.