Finally, Isaiah slumps against the wheel. “Maybe you’d better drive after all,” he says, so I get out again and walk around the car while he slides over on the bench seat.
“Where do you want to go?”
“You decide.”
I pull out of the courthouse parking lot and leave the bronze Indian supervising the traffic on Main Street. The radio wakes up, mid-song, with a Reckless Kelly hit, which Isaiah slams off. I drive north and cross the Milk River bridge and then a few more blocks along a residential street until I draw up to the curb by the little park with the gazebo that overlooks the river.
“Do you want to walk?”
He shrugs, but he gets out and waits for me.
I have to pick my way in my office heels across the desiccated grass and stubble of weeds, but by full light of day I easily make out the depressions of the rifle pits, where long ago the men of Versailles crouched with their rifles and waited for the Indians to ride north across the prairie and attack the town and where I had nearly stumbled in the dark. Daylight exposes the gazebo as a ramshackle shelter in need of repair. Birds have been nesting in its rafters, and a stray twig floats down and catches on a splinter. The little bench is streaked white with dried droppings, and I worry about Isaiah sitting there in his good suit, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
We sit. Sunlight falls through cracks in the roof of the gazebo and speckles the board floor. I take shallow breaths in the dusty air and wonder what a passerby might think, seeing a man and a woman in dark formal clothing sitting on a bench in a decrepit gazebo and gazing straight ahead without speaking. What are they doing there, in the heat of the day? Why do they look so glum?
“Isaiah, have you known about us always?”
Just when I’m sure he won’t answer, he says, “Pretty much.”
I wait.
“It helped that I learned in college how to do research. I tracked down my birth certificate in Monterey. It didn’t give a father’s name, but my name was given as Isaiah Pride, and my mother was Rosalie Pence.”
A pause. The air feels dense. My imaginary passerby waits to hear what happened next.
“I guess she didn’t know what else to do, so she brought me back here,” he says. “For a while we lived at”—he hesitates—“Grandmother’s house. I can sort of remember. Mostly I remember hearing the music, the piano. And then we—anyway. I was three when CPS took me. I got bounced around for a while and ended up with Brad.”
Below us the Milk River flows on its unhurried way. Isaiah watches something, a flight of birds that swoops above the river and sinks and seems to dissolve like the reflection of a dark cloud into the current.
“I can’t remember you before I met you at Brad’s. I don’t know why.”
“I can remember you. I’d walk up the hill to visit Grandmother or Brad would drop me off, and you’d be having a piano lesson. Do you remember that?”
“I remember the piano lessons.”
Playing hands alone on the practice Kimball from John Thompson’s Teaching Little Fingers to Play. The solemn tone of the piano. C, D, E, C, D, E. Sing with the notes. Here we go, up a row. Good. Play it again.
“Brad was always good that way. Other ways, not so much. Remember our fights? But he made sure I got to see Grandmother. Or more like it, made sure she got to see me.”
“He dropped me off for piano lessons, but that was all.”
“By the time you moved in with him, he was up to his neck in charges and trials and testimonies, and you were part of the testimonies. He probably wanted to shelter you from anybody who might twist your thinking one way or the other.”
Isaiah studies the surface of the river. From here it looks like cast metal. Where did the birds go?
“What a bastard Brad could be. But I don’t know if he deserved what he got or not.”
“Isaiah, did you know my father?”
I’ve always thought that maybe my father’s name was Gervais. Because why the odd spelling, which Brazos had told me was French? If my mother picked it at random, wouldn’t she have spelled it Jarvis?
“No. But I’ve always thought he had to be somebody in Versailles because we’d been gone from Monterey almost three years before you were born.”
A screaming confrontation.
Like you gave away the other one?
I hate you!
“She gave you away when she got pregnant with me?”
“Probably.”
“What about your father?”
“All I know is, obviously he was black. I was three years old, remember. What would she have told me?”
“Maybe your father’s name was Pride?”
“Maybe.”
A golden oldie. A voice singing about kissing an angel good morning.
“Not that dude,” Isaiah says, as if he reads my mind. “Charlie Pride had left Great Falls and was living in Texas by then. More likely it was Rosalie’s bad joke.”
I wonder about Rosalie Pence. How had she felt about Isaiah’s father? About leaving him behind in California? Had she left him behind in California? Maybe he died in a car wreck. Maybe he was killed in whatever war was going on thirty years ago. Maybe he killed his brain with bad heroin. If I’d had a baby with Gall, would I know how she felt?
“The best thing that happened to her was going to prison. You need to know that. Even if it was a crock that put her there. She sobered up and got her head straight—straighter anyway—and then Jerry Bohn got her sprung, and he married her, and I think that’s worked out okay for her.”
“You’ve been in touch with her?”
“No.” He hesitates. “Dr. Brenner keeps me up. He was a professor of mine when I was in college, before he went into administration.”
The imaginary passerby waits to hear the rest of the story. He’s going to be disappointed. The sun has worked its way westward and dazzles the river through the remains of the smoke. Monterey was a long time ago. Rosalie Pence and her troubles were a long time ago. Our troubles are now. Sweat trickles under my dark clothes, and I think about driving home, taking a shower, and driving up to the Villa to take my turn with Mrs. Pence. My grandmother.
“Why do you think she—Grandmother—didn’t take us when Rosalie went to prison?”
“Rosalie gave me away,” he says. “Put me up for adoption, which didn’t happen. You? I don’t know. CPS came and took you away. Maybe Rosalie had, what, some kind of veto power?”
“Maybe.”
He shakes his head and studies the river. “I guess it’s getting to be that time of year,” he says.
. . . summer’s almost gone . . .
“Anyway,” he said.
Anyway. Anyway.
Anyway.
What we talk about when we can’t talk about—
“Catina,” I said.
“Yup.”
. . . winter’s comin’ on . . .
“She was so goddamn alive,” he bursts. “And she by god didn’t deserve what she got. Life for her was one experiment after another, and I was one of her experiments.”
He’s looking at his hands, clenching his fingers. “I should never have let her leave and go home that night.”
“I should have looked for her.”
He reaches over and takes my hand and holds it. Our hands so much alike, dark and pale, big piano-playing hands. We sit together while the imaginary passerby wonders who we are and why we’re lingering so long and where we might be going, until the air in the gazebo grows so hot and suffocating that we get up and walk across the dying grass to the Pontiac, where the chrome Indian on the hood has been keeping watch over us all afternoon.
29
Madison’s rendition of “Für Elise” has improved after working on it all summer, but she still misses the accidental F sharps that Mrs. Pence had circled in red for her. She misses the first F sharp, and her fingers stumble on the beginning of the long chromatic scale, and when the doorbell rings, she stops. It rings again, and I get up to chase off
whoever is interrupting her lesson.
Bill the Drummer, carrying a suitcase, has left the porch and is circling around the house toward the backyard where he found me last time. When he hears the door open, he turns, grins at me, and climbs the porch steps with the suitcase.
“I brought your clothes.”
“Oh. I thought you’d gone back to Boise.”
“Brazos and Annie did. Um—are you going to let me come in?”
“I’m giving a piano lesson.” I hesitate. “But it’s almost finished.”
Madison hits another F natural instead of F sharp as we enter the piano room, and Bill winces. He sets down the suitcase and makes himself comfortable in the rose wingback armchair where mothers observing their daughters’ lessons usually sit. Where Mrs. Pence sat in the evenings, listening to her radio.
Bill the Drummer, once so unobtrusive a part of the Rivermen, is taking up more space in this room than I would have thought possible. His hazel eyes, fixed on me. His dark brows, his heavy fringe of dark eyelashes—I remember Sharyn the Screamer calling him Mr. Eyelashes, although it never got her anywhere with him—his Levi’s and his familiar old Justin boots and the gray linen shirt he was wearing when he and Dr. Brenner moved Anne’s armchairs and paintings and rugs out of her office. What I thought would be my last sight of him was that gray shirt tightening across the muscles of his back when he bent to pick up his end of the rolled-up rug and loosening when he stood to follow Dr. Brenner, who carried the other end of the rug, out the door.
The sound of the drill I had mistaken for the sound of the tension in the room that day. Tension in this room today. How can Bill look so at ease?
To silence the sound of tension, I turn my back to Bill and sit on the piano bench beside Madison as she starts over, and I point out the accidentals with the tip of my pencil as she comes to them, and she actually plays to the end without a more serious mistake than slowing down on the sixteenth notes.
“You’ve made the same mistakes so many times that your fingers have learned to play them. You need to practice a few measures, over and over, until your fingers relearn the right way.”
Madison looks at her fingers and makes a face, but she rises and gathers her music books.
Bill grins. “I never thought I’d see you giving piano lessons. What got you started as a piano teacher?”
“My grandmother had a stroke, and I’ve taken over her students until they can get on a real piano teacher’s list.”
“Hey, I’m sorry!” He sounds as though he really is sorry. “Is she going to be okay?”
Madison has her back to us, stuffing her music books into her backpack, but I know she’s listening. “We don’t know yet. We hope so.”
“I’m really sorry, Ruby. And I was hoping I could talk you into coming back to Boise with me.”
I’m so surprised that I can find no words. “But Brazos—”
“He’ll get over it. We won’t be the Rivermen again, but we’ll play music.”
“What makes you think I’ll get over it? He called me a liar! He said I egged her house!”
Madison lets out a mouse’s squeak. She whirls around with a last music book in one hand and her backpack in the other, fuming with the righteous indignation of a fifteen-year-old, and shakes the backpack at Bill while he stares at her from the rose armchair.
“Did you say Ruth egged Ugly Anne’s house? You listen, Mister. That’s a lie! Ruth never egged Anne’s house!”
“Wait a minute! It wasn’t me—it was Brazos said it when he was angry, which is a bad time to say anything.”
“Who’s Brazos? Some guy? Then he’s a liar because Ruth never egged Anne’s house, and I know she never egged Anne’s house!”
“Because you know who really did it?” Bill suggests.
That stops her. I watch her face as she adds up her thoughts to an uncomfortable total. Finally, she jams the last music book into her backpack and heads for the door but turns to fire her last shot—“All I’m saying! Ruth never egged Anne’s house.”
The front door slams.
Bill shakes his head, half-smiling in a way that deepens the vertical lines under his cheekbones. “What set her off?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ruth. Ruby. Why do you have two names?”
“You asked me once before. I don’t know. It just happened. I think my mother named me Ruth and started calling me Ruby for some reason, but Mrs.—my grandmother—went on calling me Ruth. Sometimes it feels like I’m two different people.”
“Hmm.” He ponders for a minute with a hand propped under his chin. “Do we know for sure that Annie’s house got egged?”
“It must have been. Dr. Brenner went over and helped her clean it up.”
“Ruby”—Bill leans forward in the rose chair—“what you need to understand about Anne is that she’s broken. Really broken inside. I didn’t grow up in the Boise Highlands, I never knew her or Brazos and Gall until we started high school, but they knew her from way back, and I think Brazos always had a crush on her. Remember him talking about the girl he loved who moved away to Montana and married somebody else?”
I do remember.
“And he told me that something was broken in her from when she was really little. Her mother put her in counseling because she thought men were following her. She’d hide and spy, trying to spot the men. When she was a little older, she thought her mother was trying to kill her. That’s when she went into foster care. And they got her on medication, and apparently she did really well there.”
Yes. She had done really, really well. Brad’s star success story. “And Brazos wants to fix her?”
“Yeah. He’s kept track of her all this time. But he can’t fix her. No more than he could fix Gall. But it’s deeper than that. It’s like he wants to join her somehow. He wants to believe in her fears.”
I can’t make sense of what Bill is trying to tell me. How would you join somebody who thought men were following her? Or join somebody who thought her mother was trying to kill her? If you could, why would you want to?
Join in hiding, now, would be something else. In a big cardboard box in the blackberry brambles behind Brad Gilcannon’s house, where the air is thick and dim and smells of ripening fruit, and someone might call and call your name because no one knows where you are. Or at night, hiding under your covers where the air has a moldy smell, and you listen for the stealthy footsteps, wait for the intruder’s knife blade to your heart.
Shards from a glass lamp. Everything I have is broken.
Anne knows something that has nothing to do with dead babies and satanic rituals and people having sex in church, and so do I, even if neither of us knows what it is we know. Will I ever know? Will she?
Meanwhile, here is Bill, the quiet workhorse of the Rivermen, who checked the electronic gear and counted the electrical cords. Bill, who serviced the van and wouldn’t let Brazos and Gall squander the money he needed to gas it up, even though Brazos always drove it. Kept track of our gig dates and got us there. Kept track of us. Kept his own counsel. Trimmed my hair. I wonder if he ever thinks of the girl in Albuquerque.
Bill has sprawled back in the wingback chair where the mothers usually sit, incongruous but clearly comfortable. He smiles at me so the vertical lines in his cheeks deepen again.
“You’re not going to throw anything at me, are you?”
His drummer’s hands. His hands in my hair. Hank of dark hair hanging over his forehead. Watchful dark-hazel eyes. It occurs to me that for ten years Bill never missed a thing while I missed so much.
“So it looks like I can’t talk you into coming back to Boise with me,” he says, “but maybe I can talk you into letting me buy you dinner?”
30
“How old were you when your mother went to prison?” asks Jamie.
“Nine. She was there for three years, so I would have been about twelve when she got out.”
“You were living with Brad Gilcannon all that time? So you were ol
d enough to remember all the trials and appeals and then what, the overturned convictions?”
“Yes.”
We’re sitting over our salads in the food court, in the relief of getting away from Zella. Now that the fall session has begun and we’re back on the hour-long lunch period, Zella likes to eat downtown or out at the mall with her friends from the registrar’s office. She no longer bothers to invite Jamie and me along.
“It must have been awful,” Jamie says.
Brad was gone a lot during the early years. Later I understood he was testifying at trial after trial, going over his legwork again and again, going over his research. He came home late, and his wife kept their little boys out of his way while he ate his dinner. But the prosecutor had been winning conviction after conviction in those days, and Brad was buoyant. It was later that his world turned sour.
“Did you ever get to see your mother? During her trial? Or after?”
“No.”
She hadn’t wanted to see me, although I wasn’t told that at the time.
Losing a child. What could be worse, Mrs. Pence said. She asked about Jamie again last night, wondering how her custody case was going.
“Jamie, what would make a mother give away her children?”
“Well—could be different reasons, I suppose. Seems to me it would have to be something pretty bad. Maybe if she couldn’t afford to keep them fed?”
“Maybe.”
“Or—maybe somebody raped her and got her pregnant, and she couldn’t stand to look at the baby because she saw its father in its face? God, I can’t imagine.”
“I can’t either. Maybe if I ever had a baby I’d understand more.”
“I keep wondering—what Prairie Rose will remember.”
“It’s strange for me. Whole patches are just gone. I’ll be told what was happening at a certain period, and it’s like hearing about a movie I never saw. Other times everything is so vivid that I feel like I’m time traveling.”
“Hmm.”
I see that Jamie is trying to imagine time traveling.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 17
