Anchorage, it must have been, because that’s when Sharyn the Screamer lingered near me in the filthy laundry room back of the motel where I was washing Gall’s and Brazos’s underwear and she was folding shirts. Gall and Brazos had walked past the window on their way to the van, and of course my eyes had followed Gall, the slope of his shoulders and the way the wind lifted his hair.
“He can be a real bastard in the sack,” Sharyn murmured. I supposed she was bragging, and I shrugged. I’d known he slept with her, after all. Much later I wondered if she was trying to warn me.
But what happened after her remark was that I stopped being his kitten in bed, warm and content to be held and stroked. Started wanting more of him. Wondering why he didn’t want to have sex with me. I began kissing him, aiming for his mouth but settling for his neck and collarbone and working my way down until he stopped me. A time or two he got out of bed and pulled on his pants and sweatshirt and left in his bare feet, so I knew he wouldn’t be going far. Maybe to Sharyn? Finally, he returned, unsteady on his feet and reeking of bourbon through his pores.
I had nearly been asleep and roused to see him looming over me and unbuckling his belt. He threw back the blanket and sheet and grabbed the neck of my nightgown and ripped it all the way down the front. There was enough light from the motel neon through the window that I could see he was up and he was hard, so if he’d been with Sharyn, he’d recovered pretty fast, but that was all I had time to think. His right hand was under me, and he was gripping my buttocks so hard that my legs opened, and then he was between my legs, cursing me under his breath. Nothing tender about him now, just plunge, plunge, plunge, to the tune of damn, damn, damn. And then I felt his contraction and ejection, and he lifted his head and upper body as if searching the ceiling for something, an answer maybe, and then he rolled off me and was asleep or maybe passed out, almost at once, leaving me to wipe myself with my ruined nightgown and wonder.
What I didn’t know was that we had come not to a beginning but to something bad.
But he had wakened something in me I hadn’t known I had. Desire, I guessed it was. Wanting him and wanting him, yearning for the plunge, plunge, plunge punishment that didn’t bring relief but frantic yearning for more. I became hard to get along with, snapping at people for flatted notes or missed beats or maybe just looking at me the wrong way. Bill and Brazos started keeping their distance from me.
Again it was Sharyn who sidled up to me. Looking back, I realize I always misjudged her. She was a tall, skinny girl with freckles and almost-white eyelashes and hair that tried to be red but had faded, and she’d never been “Outside,” as they said in Alaska about the rest of the United States. I always thought she looked up to me and the Rivermen and supposed we were sophisticated outsiders, but there again I misjudged her. She was the one who knew things I didn’t.
“He can be real stingy,” she said.
I stared at her. What could she mean? Gall, stingy, who had laid down ten hundred-dollar bills for my red fringed suede?
“You can do it for yourself,” she said. “Bring yourself off, I mean. It helps a lot.”
And then she whispered, “I could show you how.”
23
So, the Three Hundred Club.
It had begun as a bowling alley on the east fringe of the Orchards, a long, low, wooden building that had been painted gray at some distant time. Since then it had changed hands several times, and one of the owners had added a bar and a dance floor.
The long summer twilight has faded by the time I pull into the parking lot after I put off leaving Mrs. Pence’s, maybe reluctant to leave her alone and asleep in her wing chair but more likely because I didn’t really want to sing with the Working Poor. I told myself she had been just fine by herself for years and she knew where I was going. Told myself to get a grip and stop finding excuses.
Lighted neon over the club door advertises summer league bowling and the weekend’s featuring of the Working Poor. They aren’t playing when I walk in, although their equipment is set up on the small bandstand. In the dim lighting I make out a smallish audience grouped around the dance floor and one familiar figure, short and stout as a fireplug, sitting at a table by herself.
I buy myself a beer on tap at the bar and carry it over to join Jamie. I feel guilty for telling her I would be singing at the Three Hundred Club, as though I’m a featured attraction, a big star, instead of someone Isaiah coaxed to come and sing one or two numbers. I haven’t even rehearsed with the Working Poor, unless I count the afternoon last Saturday in Isaiah’s barn.
“You’re looking good,” says Jamie when I set down my beer. I see she’s been nursing a glass of Coke.
“Have they played yet?”
“They were playing when I got here. They just now took their break. They’re not too bad. Not too bad for country-western anyway. What do you get out of it? It’s all the same. Whiskey’s my drink; my life’s in the sink.”
I have to laugh.
“Your boy Isaiah came over and said hello. Wanted to buy me a drink.”
I want to ask whether she’s seen Catina, which I really, really don’t want to ask Isaiah. But she adds, “How did you ever get to know him?”
“I thought I told you.”
But no, it was Catina I told. “We were in foster care together. Back in the nasty times. When there were abuse investigations. And scares about satanic rituals.”
“Oh, I remember. A whole lot of people got arrested.”
“Yes. Our foster father—Isaiah’s and my foster father—was the policeman who headed the investigation. And I had to testify at the trials. And I lied because my foster father told me to. And people went to prison, and then the appeals started, and they all got exonerated.”
And we kids who testified were the villains. All but Anne. Anne had risen above the scandal. Ruby Jarvis told me, and I believed her.
Jamie looks past me. “Don’t turn around, but the Queen just walked in. With a guy.”
My neck goes rigid with the effort not to turn. All that saves me is the appearance of Isaiah and his band. They stride up to the bandstand in black jeans and tacky gold satin shirts, grinning at the ripple of applause they get, and strike up a number I don’t recognize, maybe one of the summer top hits that’s too new for the retro station. Whatever, it has a heavy bass line and a relentless percussion, and several couples get up to dance or at least to flail around the dance floor.
I watch Isaiah’s fingers dance across the neck of his guitar, picking out a melody while he listens to his sidemen and winces when the bass player misses a note and has to jump to catch up. Back in the groove, Isaiah takes time to scan his audience and finds me.
The number comes to an end with another smattering of applause. While the dancers wait to see what happens next, Isaiah and his guys confer briefly, then begin a slow, insistent repeating phrase. Isaiah steps up to the forward mike.
“Folks, we got a treat tonight, we got a real voice here with us tonight, and she’s gonna sing a number with the Working Poor.”
His eyes are on me, daring me. “Give a hand to Ruth!”
Real stage fright isn’t something I’ve felt for a long time. Butterflies, of course, on the first night of a new gig, wondering if everything will pull together and the electrical sound system and the amps will work and all of us hoping for a friendly audience. I didn’t expect what I feel now, with Isaiah’s eyes willing me to the bandstand while his guys repeat the insistent phrase, slower, harder. My bones have gone soft, but I manage to push my chair back and stand and walk across the dance floor in a wavering spotlight and hesitant applause, with everyone probably wondering what they’re in for.
Isaiah gives me a hand up on the bandstand and puts his arm around me to make me face the audience. When he kisses me on the cheek, I hear a murmur from the tables around the dance floor. It’s clear that Isaiah is a local favorite. Now the guys slide into the beautiful sad chords of “Hickory Wind,” and Isaiah steps back and takes up
the melody line, and I close my eyes and sing.
After the first bar I’m all right. I’m at a mike with a band behind me, and maybe it’s a band that’s only a step up from a garage band, but still it’s a band, and I’m performing, and I will by god make these Versailles people fall in love, if not with me, at least with the hickory wind. I sing the aching melody and feel the energy ignited by an audience, and I open my eyes and see Jamie at her table just behind the dance floor with her face working and, beyond Jamie, Anne Albert with her face a mask, and the blond man sitting by Anne with his back turned to the bandstand. At the sound of my voice he whips around in his chair, and if anything could have made me lose my place in the line and the lyrics, it’s the sight of his face because it’s Brazos.
*
“He called you Ruth.”
I nod. My two names are too complicated to explain, too complicated for me at this moment. Brazos is too complicated for me. I lived beside him and played music beside him for ten years, he’s as familiar to me as the red suede skirt and vest I lost, and I owe him a lot, and he has a right to be angry.
“Not one goddamn word from you. Not one goddamn word!”
Isaiah’s hand comes to rest on my shoulder.
“The last place in the world I ever thought you’d be! Versailles! This hole in the sagebrush that Gall and I dragged you out of! Calling yourself Ruth!”
“It’s my name.”
I’m standing on the bandstand, and Brazos has to tip back to glare at me. I want to ask him about Gall. Brazos and Gall go way back. If anybody knows what became of Gall, it will be Brazos. But I can’t find the words, and my pulse throbs in my ears, keeping a beat with the pulse I see in Brazos’s face. A circle of silent faces observes us from the ring of tables around the bandstand.
Isaiah slides his arm around my waist. “Hey, man, we got a set to play.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“He’s my brother,” I say, and Isaiah’s arm tightens.
Brazos’s face changes, as though he’s working out a difficult arithmetic problem in his head. “Ruby, you and I have to talk. I’ve got to take Annie home. Will you be here when I come back?”
Annie.
The moment stretches like an elastic band toward a snap. A bald man in a suit is making his way through the tables toward us.
“Yes. I’ll wait.”
“Everything okay here, Ike?” asks the man in the suit.
“I think we got it worked out, Jimmy.”
The suit turns to Brazos. “You finished with your business here?”
Brazos nods. “You promised to wait, Ruby.”
He returns, stiff legged, to the table where Anne Albert is crying and puts his arms around her. The man in the suit says something to Isaiah over his shoulder as he starts back toward the bar, and Isaiah answers him, “Yeah, yeah.”
“You gonna sing again?” Isaiah whispers, and I shake my head. But I remember how it felt, in performance, with an audience, the escape from my old battered self.
“Later. Not now.”
Isaiah lets me go, and I step down from the bandstand. By the time I get back to Jamie, he and his guys have charged into an old standard with plenty of rhythm and percussion to break the tension, Proud Mary keeping on rolling, and a few couples get up to dance, although faces still look my way and whisper.
“Are they gone yet?” I ask Jamie, and she nods and touches my hand.
“You’ve got the strangest friends. Goddamn musicians anyway. They never seem real to me. Like they’re onstage all the time. Like they’re in a movie. Who in the state of Montana is that guy?”
“His name is Brazos Keane. He’s a spoiled rich kid from Boise. Do you want a beer?”
“No. If I drink one, I won’t stop.”
*
The bar is getting ready to close when Brazos returns. Jamie has crossed her arms on the table and looks as though she is ready to rest her head and go to sleep. When I asked if she had talked to Catina, she had shrugged and shaken her head.
The people who ordered fresh drinks at last call are finishing them, and Isaiah and his guys are unplugging and covering and storing instruments and amps. Isaiah glances over his shoulder when Brazos sits at my table, but he goes on coiling electrical cords.
Brazos wears a threadbare white shirt and jeans and brings with him that sense of disjointed time. Surely I’ve carried that very shirt to a Laundromat and brought it back to our motel room and ironed it for him. And seeing Brazos and Isaiah at the same time in a bar in Versailles is time traveling me back ten years. It’s hard to know what’s past and what isn’t.
I ask the only question I have for him. “What happened to Gall?”
“His father came and took him back to Boise on a medivac plane.”
His words are slurred, and I know he’s a little drunk. One of the bar staff is turning chairs upside down on tables and shooing out the last of the clientele. Isaiah’s guys are leaving, but Isaiah comes over and sits down with us.
Brazos ignores him. “Anywhere we can go to talk?”
I try to think. Does he have a hotel room, or is he staying with Anne? Annie. His blond head—the blond head I saw a few days ago in Anne’s driveway.
Isaiah leans across the table and speaks directly to me, ignoring Brazos. “We can go to Mrs. Pence’s if you want. I’ll make you coffee.”
“What about Mrs. Pence?”
“She’s a night owl. She’s probably playing the piano.”
*
Ray Pence smiles down at us from his photograph in the foyer. What possible good news can he expect from us? Brazos, Isaiah, Jamie, and I, who have trailed each other from the Three Hundred Club in our various vehicles.
Mrs. Pence is playing the Debussy étude on the Steinway behind the closed door of the piano room. Brazos pauses to listen to the rich notes rising from the Steinway’s long soundboard. I see the foyer through his eyes, the contrast between the wealth of the Steinway’s sound and the shabby wallpaper, the umbrella stand, the stairs and the bannister rail.
Shabby could be a word for life on the road, but Brazos comes from a different world. Once he drove us past the house in the Boise Highlands where he grew up, a block from the house where Gall grew up, and the country club just down the street.
I hear Isaiah grinding coffee beans in the kitchen. By the time the rest of us file in with the notes of the Steinway fading behind us, he’s filling the pot with water and setting the filter.
“My mother had a kitchen a lot like this,” remarks Jamie. She pulls out a chair for herself, sits at the table, smooths out a wrinkle in the oilcloth, and yawns. “Ah-ah. What time is it? Two thirty? It’s been a long time since I was out and about at this hour. Does she always play the piano in the middle of the night?”
“Since you asked,” says Brazos, “Gall agreed to go home, and Bill and I got him as far as the airport, but he took off running again. Finally, the Anchorage police caught him and locked him up and sedated him.”
No one speaks.
“By the time his dad could book a flight to Seattle the next morning, they had Gall so drugged up that he didn’t know where he was or who he was. And you’d run off, nobody knew where.”
Silence, except that the old coffeepot starts to growl.
“His dad had to charter that goddamn medivac plane to get him down to Boise. And on the flight he lapsed some more. And now he’s in a—what do they call it—care facility in Seattle. I went to see him. He didn’t know me. Didn’t know anybody. He’s—”
He clenches his fists on the tabletop in his effort to find words.
“He’s gone! His brain is blown! Nobody home! Gall! The best fucking country tenor since Gram, and he’s not there anymore.”
Brazos, the perfectionist of the Rivermen, the dreamer who saw that the Rivermen had a real shot and wrote the songs and got Gall sober enough to perform and several times talked Bill out of quitting and going back to Boise. He taught me to how to live on the road. How
to live on potato chips and salami and how, when we were camping to save motel money, to take a bath in a bucket. Taught me how to perform. Tonight he’s been drinking, and he’s rigid with tension, anger—and grief.
But I can’t feel anything yet. Gall. Gone. His brain blown. Not there anymore.
“What was he using?” asks Jamie.
Brazos looks at Jamie as if he’d forgotten she was there. She just looks back at him.
“We don’t know. He’d been doing heroin after coke in Seattle. And there was talk around Anchorage about bad heroin.”
“Did you talk to anybody at the facility? What are his chances?”
“Nobody knows a damn thing. They told me about a kid that came out of his coma after three weeks.”
“So—”
“For Gall it’s been three fucking months! And the kid that came around after three weeks? He lost his fucking hearing!”
Isaiah sets a cup of black coffee in front of him. Brazos stares at it as though he’s never seen a cup of coffee before. I’m trying to absorb the idea of a musician losing his hearing.
“Anybody else?” says Isaiah. Jamie and I shake our heads, and Isaiah shrugs and pours himself a cup.
“So, how long have you known Anne Albert?” asks Jamie as pleasantly as though normal conversation is normal tonight. Jamie with her fireplug poise, Isaiah with his coffeepot—no wonder Brazos looks unfocused.
“Since we were kids. My mother and her mother were best friends. Annie’s brilliant, but she went through a lot of troubles in her teens—her mother moved over to Montana with her, which is how she ended up in foster care here in Versailles for a year or two—”
He loses his thought and turns on me again. “And you, making more trouble for her, like running off from Gall wasn’t enough for you—you bitch—”
“That’s enough of that,” says Isaiah in a voice I’ve never heard before.
Brazos pushes his chair back from the kitchen table, and Isaiah’s on his feet, and I see Jamie gather herself for whatever happens next.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 13
