“—I believe her friend plans to clear out her office this morning. Once he’s finished, you may as well move in. It’ll be a temporary appointment; you’ll have to apply for the position, but that can wait. Ruth—”
I drag my attention back from the fronds of plants.
“—you’ll have to apply for your position too. If you want it, that is.”
If I want it. He’s waiting for my answer. I nod.
Dr. Brenner picks up his coffee cup and stands. “Right. Good. We’ll borrow Zella from the registrar’s office to help you girls through the fall rush.”
His office door closes behind him.
I look at Jamie, and she looks at me.
“So. Zella,” she says. “Do you know her?”
“No.”
“Eech.”
That was at eight o’clock. Jamie and I have pounded steadily at our keyboards to make a dent in the backlog of student data that piled up during the past black weeks until ten o’clock, when we are jolted by a thud and crash at the outer door. It opens on Brazos, who has just dropped a stack of unassembled cardboard packing boxes, and Bill the Drummer, who pushes a dolly on creaking wheels.
Suddenly the Office of Student Accounting feels overwhelmed by large young men. Surly Brazos won’t look at me, and Bill’s face is carefully neutral, although he gives me a surreptitious two-finger wave.
Anne follows, looking unlike herself in a limp T-shirt and shorts and flip-flops. Her face is pale, and her lips tremble.
“Where?” Brazos asks her.
Anne points at her office door, and Brazos shoulders his way past my computer station, with every muscle of his face and body taut with anger. Anne unlocks her office, and they all go inside and shut the door, and Jamie and I are alone again with our computers and our backlog. But the air feels too dense to breathe, and not just from the lingering smoke from the fires. I’m hearing a high vibration that seems to have started between my ears, a whine in a minor key that swells and sinks and swells again. My head can’t contain it; I want to rid it from my head; I can’t bear this tension that hums like a wire in the wind. Thin smoke-tinged air separates me from Jamie, who peers into her computer screen and shows no sign that she’s affected by any whine or hum.
Something smashes behind Anne’s closed door, a waterfall of broken glass. The door is hurled open, and Anne runs out, nearly falling in her flip-flops. Brazos is right behind her and tries to take her arm, but she flings him away.
“Everything! Everything I have is broken!”
“Annie, I didn’t mean to break it! You know I didn’t mean to!”
She stands sobbing by my computer station. Brazos tries again, and this time she lets him gather her to him. Against his chest she’s small and blonde and fragile, with white pipe straws for arms and legs.
Brazos glares at me over Anne’s head. “Are you satisfied yet?”
The whine is back, the wire in the wind.
Dr. Brenner looks out of his office to see what’s going on, and Brazos tucks Anne under one arm and confronts him with cocked shoulders and braced legs.
“That liar. Ruby! Calling herself Ruth. You know she’s a liar, don’t you? So what did you do? You used her to make Annie miserable and have to quit her job, just when she most needed her job!”
He’s so angry I think he must be the wire in the wind, but Dr. Brenner, taller than Brazos by a couple of inches, just looks down at him with the detached interest a robot might take in a human’s unaccountable rage. How can Dr. Brenner stay so calm when a red film rises over my vision?
“Egging her house! Scaring her half out of her mind!”
I see Brazos through the red film. I’m on my feet. Jamie’s computer manual, three hundred pages of fine print on gray paper she left on a filing cabinet, finds its way into my hands, and with both hands I heave the manual at Brazos, and it hits him on his shoulder, where it bounces off and lands on the floor in a ruffle of exhausted pages, as though it has carried out an arduous task.
The manual couldn’t have hurt Brazos, but it obviously startled the hell out of him because he turns in bafflement, his face reflecting his sight of a girl whose strings he used to pull to make her move but now, for some puzzling reason, has cut the strings and started throwing computer manuals at him.
“Brazos Keane, you spoiled bastard! Don’t you dare call me a liar! I might be a thief, but I’m not a liar, and you damned well know it!”
His mouth opens and shuts. Opens and shuts.
“And it wasn’t your money I stole!”
“Young man, you’d better leave,” says Dr. Brenner, like a reprise. First he had to chase Dustin away from the office and now Brazos.
Brazos pulls himself together—“Oh, we’re leaving all right!”
He catches Anne by the hand and heads for the door, but Dr. Brenner says, “Mrs. Albert,” and she stops.
“Have you turned in your keys?”
She stares at him as though she doesn’t understand what the word keys means. Then she digs in the front pocket of her shorts and draws out a set of keys and looks at them for a moment. Closes her fingers over them. Then, slowly, she opens her fingers and hands over the keys.
“Thank you,” says Dr. Brenner.
She doesn’t answer but stares at him as though she wants to remember his face. Then Brazos draws her away, and they’re gone.
Bill the Drummer has watched the whole scene from the doorway of Anne’s office. Now he speaks in a voice that’s carefully matter-of-fact.
“I can pack up the rest of her stuff and finish getting the paintings down, but I can’t carry the rugs and chairs downstairs by myself. I’ll have to wait till Brazos can come back and give me a hand.”
He’s holding an electric drill.
“I’ll give you a hand,” says Dr. Brenner. He takes off his suit coat and hangs it on the back of Catina’s empty chair, and he turns back the cuffs of his shirt, and then he looks from me to the fallen computer manual, shakes his head, and follows Bill back into Anne’s office.
A choking sound from Jamie. She’s laughing and rocking back and forth in her chair, trying to contain herself.
“I have now seen everything,” she gurgles. “I have seen everything that can possibly happen in this goddamned office.”
*
“Just when you think nothing will change, you look around and notice that everything’s changed.”
Jamie holds the key Dr. Brenner gave her in the palm of her hand, looking at it as though she expects it to levitate and fly away. When it doesn’t, she says: “What the hell. We might as well take a look and see what she left behind.”
I follow reluctantly as she unlocks the door and opens it into a dusty emptiness and sneezes.
“Bless you,” I whisper.
“Holy shit,” she says.
Her voice echoes across the bare room. Anne’s desk remains and her desk chair and her computer, which probably are the property of the college, but the rugs are gone, and so are the armchairs and the paintings and even the curtains. All that is Anne’s is the blue color of the walls, but I feel like a trespasser in a forbidden space.
“I wonder how long it took them to pack all her precious shit. After they broke her lamp. Did you ever see this room, the way she had it fixed up?”
“No. Well—I got a glimpse through the door once.”
“I hope they’ll at least repaint the walls for me.”
I see darker-blue blotches on the walls, unfaded squares and rectangles where Anne’s paintings had hung, and the holes where Bill the Drummer removed the screws that held them up, and I’m thankful it is Jamie, not me, who will move into this haunted room.
“So you’ll be an administrative assistant now?”
“Looks like it. What about you?”
“I don’t know.”
Jamie gives me a strange look. “What don’t you know? You don’t want the permanent appointment?”
It’s what I meant. But I don’t know what I mean
t. A tangled something has webbed itself around my thoughts. A stick turned into a snakeskin. Mrs. Pence turning into my bedridden grandmother. Catina burned to ashes. James McMurtry singing “Bear Tracks” on the Pontiac’s radio . . . bear tracks, coming after me. Red suede coming to Versailles, Montana, coming after me. And now I’ve started throwing things at people. Maybe Dr. Brenner will fire me when he gets back.
What Anne knows. What she feared I knew and would tell when I came back to Versailles.
“Are you okay?”
I don’t think so, I want to say. Instead, I say, “I don’t know how you can stand to move into her office.”
“She never got to me the way she got to you. It’s just an office. I’ll hang up some plants and posters and spread my files around, and it’ll—” She pauses. “That was a stupid thing to ask. How could you be okay? I’m not okay. I just pretend to be.”
Her eyes are brilliant, and I have to turn away. I don’t want to see her grief. You should be sorry, Ruby Jarvis. You have a lot to be sorry for. I hadn’t stood by Gall. I hadn’t taken the Pontiac that afternoon and gone looking for Catina instead of telling myself I’d see her at the office, where I could warn her about Dustin. I hadn’t cruised past the Goodwill with an eye out for her, and I hadn’t checked out the shopping mall in its zero-tolerance air-conditioning. Or—I saw myself looking up Jim Belasco’s address in the phone book and driving to where he lives in the East Orchards, looking for Catina, or walking the few blocks and climbing the rickety stairs to Isaiah’s apartment and knocking on his door—would she have been there?
“Maybe I’ll be fired and I won’t have to think about the office.”
“I don’t think you’ll be fired. I very much doubt it.”
Jamie wanders over to the window and looks out at street and sidewalk and the tops of fir trees. Her voice, when she continues, is matter-of-fact.
“So pull it together. Pretend you’re okay. At least both of us will be getting bigger paychecks. There’s that.”
She turns from the window and shrugs.
28
The courthouse is smaller than I remember it. Once upon a time Brad Gilcannon led me by the hand past the bronze Chippewa Indian on horseback who guarded the front of the courthouse facade and observed the traffic on Main Street with his inalterable gaze. Brad led me across a marble foyer and up a grand marble staircase to the judge’s chambers on the second floor. I thought those stairs, with their ornate brass rails that soared aloft on either hand, were grand enough for a palace. Brad was in uniform because he was going to testify later. He winked at me and squeezed my hand for reassurance, and I felt frightened, but also important, because Brad was escorting me and I was going to be a big girl and tell my story to the judge.
The bronze Indian and his horse still oversee Main Street, but stains disfigure the marble foyer, and the staircase seems shrunken, its treads hollowed and stained by generations of footsteps. Now Isaiah’s feet and mine are contributing their miniscule wear toward deepening the hollows in the treads as we climb toward the early-morning shadows.
A balcony with a brass rail runs all the way around the stairwell, forming a U-shaped hallway with doors to chambers on either side and the main courtroom at the end of the U. Its double doors stand open to a metal detector, where a uniformed security guard waves us through, first me and then Isaiah, and into the courtroom.
Fluorescent lighting overhead, walls paneled in dark wood. Rows of public seating form a semicircle facing the judge’s bench and a raised section for a jury. I scan the backs of the heads of a handful of spectators and recognize Dr. Brenner’s bony shoulders and cropped gray head. Beside him, much shorter, Jamie’s head and shoulders. When I slide into the row of seating behind them, Jamie glances back and nods.
Isaiah sits by me, but his face is closed. He hardly spoke a word when I came to take his place yesterday with Mrs. Pence at the Orchards Villa, although he nodded when I told him the time the arraignment was scheduled, and he was ready and out the door of his apartment when I stopped to pick him up this morning.
This is the first time I’ve seen Isaiah in a suit and tie. I wouldn’t have thought he owned a suit, although maybe he wears a suit when he teaches. This suit is dark and perfectly pressed, and it makes him look unfamiliar and remote.
Dr. Brenner, now, the strange thing would be to see him not wearing a suit. He always looks as though he’d been unfolded from his closet that morning, suit and all. And here I am, thinking about men wearing suits. So I won’t have to think. Won’t have to wonder. Wonder how much Isaiah blames me. Blames me for not looking for Catina that afternoon. For not trying harder.
Jamie turns and whispers, “See the man in the plaid shirt? Opposite us? That’s Jim Belasco. Her father.”
Words. Plaid shirt. Father. Not someone I remember seeing at the laying of the ashes. A thick shock of curly gray hair and glasses and a little paunch. He wears a necktie with the plaid shirt. But my attention is wandering. I’m watching from the ceiling. Seeing suits. Men in suits spreading their papers on their respective tables. They seem friendly with each other, speaking back and forth in low voices across the space between their tables. A middle-aged woman climbs the steps to a platform to the right of the judge’s bench, where she seats herself behind a keyboard. Something is about to happen.
What happens is that Dustin is led in, handcuffed and shackled, which brings me down from the ceiling with a thud. Dustin’s face lacks color, in contrast with his bright-orange jumpsuit, and his eyes are fixed on someone seated behind us. Then he’s guided to a chair next to one of the men in suits and made to sit down with his back to us, and I breathe out.
I feel Isaiah’s tension beside me like a knotted fist, and I don’t dare look his way. More is happening. We’re all getting to our feet because the judge has come in. He seats himself behind his bench, and we all sit down again. I have not seen a judge since the one who questioned me in his chambers when I was nine. I remember him as elderly and kind. This judge is youngish, with rimless glasses and dark blond hair like Dustin’s.
Words. Words. I try not to float away. Behind the judge an American flag hangs, unfurled, and also the Montana state flag, with its plow and its shovel and its pick posed against a green pasture in front of the Great Falls of the Missouri. Oro y plata, reads a banner across the bottom of the flag. Gold and silver. What we value. Fame and fortune. Dustin and his attorney have risen to their feet. The judge asks a question, and Dustin must have answered because the judge nods. Now the other attorney rises from his table, and I pick out a few phrases. Your honor, a serious crime here . . . potentially first-degree murder . . . may ask for the death penalty . . . bail not recommended . . .
And now Dustin’s attorney. He’s lived here all his life . . . never lived anywhere else . . . not a flight risk, nowhere to go . . . nature of the crime . . . he’s not a threat to anyone else . . . parents will put up what they’ve got . . . take responsibility for him . . .
Dustin and the attorneys sit again.
“Bastard,” says Jamie, and Dr. Brenner glances down at her.
“Bail set at two million dollars,” says the judge. He raps the bench with his gavel, and that’s that.
“The bastards!” says Jamie, too loudly.
But the judge is gone. Dustin’s attorney claps him on the shoulder and says something that makes him smile at the faces he’d spotted in the back of the courtroom before he’s led away with his rear end just as high and tight in the orange jumpsuit as it had been in blue jeans.
The morning is still young, but the courthouse steps sizzle with the heat of Versailles and lingering smoke from the forest fires. Even the bronze Indian seems to quiver with the heat and smoke. He’s said to be Chief Stone Child of the Chippewa, from the Rocky Boy Reservation, and I imagine him swinging down from his horse and hunting himself up some shade and maybe a wet towel to breathe through.
Summer’s almost done for, though. The leaves of the young oak trees on the co
urthouse lawn have turned a burnished red. Winter’s comin’ on . . . The old lyrics are stuck in my head.
“They won’t have no trouble posting a couple million?” Jim Belasco asks Dr. Brenner, who shakes his head.
“Old Man Murray’s owned that junkyard east of town for years. That land is prime commercial development if anybody can pry him loose from it. Any bail bondsman will advance him the two hundred thousand cash he’ll need to get his grandson out of jail.”
“Old Man Murray wasn’t in court today,” Jim Belasco observes.
“No. He doesn’t get out much these days.”
“Kid’s folks was there, though. I saw them setting in back. Helluva thing.”
A slight breeze ruffles Jim Belasco’s gray curls—Catina’s curls—as he stands at the top of the courthouse steps, pondering. “And not that she wasn’t asking for trouble,” he says suddenly. “I told her, I dunno how many times I told her, but she couldn’t listen, oh hell no, no more than her mother could.”
Isaiah makes a strangled sound in his throat.
“I have to get out of here,” he mutters and takes off running down the courthouse steps. I can’t run in my heeled office shoes, and I have to hope he’s headed for the parking lot where we left the Pontiac and not—where he might—my thoughts won’t go any farther. But he’s in the parking lot, waiting by the Pontiac, when I get there.
He holds out a hand—“Let me drive.”
I give him the keys and walk around to the passenger side and get in. Isaiah sits behind the wheel and sticks the key in the ignition, but he doesn’t turn it.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck—”
He beats his forehead against the chrome Indian head on the horn button while I wonder why the horn doesn’t sound. Maybe it’s so old it doesn’t work. I can’t remember whether I’ve ever tried to use it. The chrome Indian is taking quite a beating. Isaiah’s going to raise a powerful welt on his forehead, and here I am thinking about chrome Indians and whether or not the Pontiac’s horn still works. Chrome Indians, bronze Indians, Indians everywhere, turned into statues and hood ornaments. Also elk, turned into wallpaper.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 16
