Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin

by Blew, Mary Clearman;

  “The spookiest times are when I don’t remember anything and then all of a sudden I do remember.”

  The nest of dry needles under the blue spruce.

  Bill the Drummer’s hands in my hair.

  “So a lot of what’s going on now could be a blank to her later.”

  “Or not.”

  I can’t tell if there’s something Jamie hopes Prairie Rose will remember or fears she will.

  *

  The Working Poor are booked to play for a wedding reception in Broadview, twenty miles east of Versailles. The guys talked of canceling, what with Isaiah’s having to cut their practices short because of his grandmother, but the wedding date had long been scheduled, and in the end they decided they could go ahead and wing it if they had to. It wasn’t like it would be a critical audience, probably a lot of drunks. Would I play keyboard and sing? I said okay, hoping that playing music would lift me out of my doldrums, and so late Saturday afternoon, after the last piano lesson, I drive out to the barn to practice with the guys before the gig.

  I hadn’t bothered to do much more with myself than change out of my piano lesson clothes into jeans and a shirt and braid back my hair. After our practice I planned to drive up to the Villa and sit with Mrs. Pence until she fell asleep, then drive back to her house and wake up the pianos and play for myself for a few hours. My days are piano lessons and Mrs. Pence on weekends, the Student Accounting office and Mrs. Pence on weekdays, regular as a squirrel on a wheel. Welcome to my world, squirrel.

  I park in the weeds and take my time walking across to the barn. The sun is bright, but the days are getting shorter, and the air has a nip. I look for the llamas, but maybe they’ve gone to their barn for the night. On the other side of their pasture a bird rises from a flock that looks like thick black fruit clustered in a box elder tree. The bird soars, circles, and returns to the flock. Things in the bird world are in flux, and the flock is getting ready to leave. Let’s get the flock outta here. How long will I have to remember that?

  Inside the barn I find Isaiah and Stu and Brian doing nothing and looking morose. Brian, the steel player, gives me a halfhearted two-finger wave, but Isaiah and Stu just sit on their hay bales and study their feet while the last of the sun slants through the cracks in the barn’s siding and stipples them with patches of light.

  I see they’d started to unpack their instruments and amps and then stopped. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s what’s not going on,” says Brian.

  Isaiah abruptly stands up from his hay bale, flicks a stray wisp of hay off his shirtsleeve, and reaches for his guitar to stow it back in its case. Stu follows suit, shrouding his bass and zipping up the shroud.

  “We may as well spool up the cords,” says Isaiah. “Get it over with.”

  I hook my thumbs in the belt loops of my jeans and wait for one of them to tell me what has happened. Something dire, from the way they’re acting. Something awful. Although from the point of view of somebody like me who has lived through the past spring and summer, dire and awful are relative terms.

  Isaiah finally latches up his guitar case and slings the strap over his shoulder. “Terry’s quit us,” he says.

  “They’ve got a baby due any day. His wife put her foot down,” says Brian.

  “I tried to call you, tell you not bother driving out from town, but you’d already left.”

  It sinks in. Terry is the drummer. He quit. No drummer. “So now what?”

  “So now what is nothing! No Working Poor! You ever hear of a band with no drummer?”

  Of course not.

  Brian, folding up his steel, says over his shoulder, “Unless you just happen to know a drummer who ain’t currently playing somewhere, Ruby? Preferably one who’s out of high school and doesn’t have a curfew?”

  I don’t answer. My thoughts unfold like paper flowers in water, one depth after another. When I finally look up, cold autumn sunlight still stipples the instruments and amps and hay bales and dusty floor, and all three of the remaining Working Poor stare at me in dawning surmise.

  *

  I shut off my phone and ask myself what I’ve done. Even when I tapped in the number he’d given me, I’d been sure that if he did answer, it would be from somewhere on the highway between Versailles and Boise with his truckload of Anne’s belongings. No, he’d say, although being Bill, he’d manage to sound regretful. No, he wouldn’t be coming back to Versailles. It was too bad about my brother’s band, he knew these things sometimes happened, but he wouldn’t be available to fill in.

  Instead, a surprised pause and “Uh—sure, why not? Where’d you say you were practicing? Have you got a set of drums out there?”

  So I’m dragging Bill the Drummer from the Rivermen into the Working Poor, impelling the two halves of my life into an uneasy conjunction, and Isaiah and Brian and Stu are unpacking their instruments again and talking in low nervous tones among themselves.

  “Holy shit, the drummer from the Rivermen,” Stu had said, and began telling me what I already knew. “You guys were getting to be the real deal! You’d cut that CD, and you were getting reviews, and there were alternative stations, not just in Alaska but down here, that were playing your tunes.”

  We wait.

  Then the barn door opens on a sunset and Bill the Drummer in silhouette. Something lurches in me as he hesitates there, a dark shape of a man against the glow, to let his eyes adjust from the glare of the road. Then he closes the door behind him, and the glow is gone, and he’s taking his time through the dust and chaff toward our makeshift bandstand, a tall guy in a gray shirt and boots and Levi’s with a lock of dark hair hanging over his forehead.

  He shakes hands with Isaiah and Stu and Brian, who rise from where they’ve been sitting on the bandstand, and he puts an arm around my shoulders and gives me a hug.

  “So what’ve you been playing?”

  The guys tell him: they’ve been doing covers of popular country, also the wedding standards that everybody is sick of, like “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Bridge over Troubled Water,” but also some old Nanci Griffith tunes they like. “Lone Star State of Mind.” “Once in a Very Blue Moon.” Once in a while they go way back. Gram Parsons and the hickory wind. The Carter Family even.

  “Play a little for me,” says Bill. “I’ll see what I can pick up on. These the drums?”

  The drums are Terry’s, which he left behind at the last practice and hasn’t yet come back for. There’s some discussion. “Terry’s going to throw a fit if we—” “Well, why the hell should he? He’s the one who ditched us”—while Bill waits for them to hash it out and I feel the absence of warm weight where Bill’s arm had been. It hadn’t been a hug hug, more like the friendly handshakes he’d given the guys, and I’m trying hard to stay in the barn and not go time traveling. Bill’s arm around me. The fine long shape of Gall’s hands—Gall—the shape of Gall’s shoulders, the shape of his skull, the brush of his hair across my face. Then that night, the heavier alien shape of Brazos, his weight on me—and from there the situation with the Rivermen went from bad to terrible.

  What Bill asked me, the night he took me to dinner. Did you tell Brazos not to?

  “Ruby! Are you going to sing?”

  We run through “Lone Star State of Mind” while Bill finds the drumsticks where Terry dropped them, listens for several measures, finds a rhythm, and joins us. We’re ready to play it again, together, at a faster tempo than Griffith recorded it, to make people want to dance to it. My voice sounds harsher, in my own ears, than Griffith’s joyous lyricism. Maybe not what a wedding party would want to hear, if they listened to the verses. But I stand and sing to the hay bales and the drifting dust motes, and I hear the drums and cymbals behind me, tentative and then more assertive, underlying the strings and the steel and the vocal with their certainty and stitching us together.

  We come to the end. Brian adds a little riff on the steel and grins ear to ear. “Great friends you’ve got, Ruby!”


  Bill looks as unassuming behind the borrowed drums as he always did with the Rivermen. “Not too bad,” he says, and it’s heady praise.

  *

  When I walk into Mrs. Pence’s room at the Villa that evening, she seems to be dozing, while a Brahms piano sonata plays softly on her little radio. I see that she’s been brought her dinner on a tray, but she doesn’t seem to have touched it, and I don’t want to wake her, so I sit in the pink vinyl armchair by her bed and lean back and try to let my mind take a rest.

  Playing music helped. Even in the barn, without an audience, playing music took me somewhere else. Somewhere aloft that the birds know about and where nobody has to think. But I realize I’m tired. How many piano lessons today—eight? None of Mrs. Pence’s students have found another teacher, nor do they seem to be looking hard for one. And practice in the barn had gone on later and later, all of us wrapped up in our woven patterns of sound, and I reached the Villa too late to chat with Mrs. Pence over her dinner tray.

  And I haven’t eaten. I take a stick of celery from Mrs. Pence’s tray and crunch.

  “Rosalie?”

  Her eyes are open, searching the ceiling. I take her hand.

  “It’s Ruth.”

  She turns toward my voice. She doesn’t pull away from my hand, but she looks bewildered. “Ruth,” she repeats, and for the first time I doubt she recognizes me.

  *

  On my way to campus on Monday morning, I catch the last few bars of Reckless Kelly playing “Idaho Cowboy” on my retro station. Reckless Kelly, now there are a couple of Idaho boys who came out of a homeschooling life in the Sawtooths and made it big in Austin, Texas—what if Gall had been dead set on moving to Austin instead of Anchorage? And then comes the news of the forest fires south of us and to the west of us, still burning out of control, thousands of acres, hundreds of evacuations, property destroyed, livestock lost. The smoke doesn’t seem as bad to me as yesterday, but maybe I really am getting used to it.

  I’m not getting used to the new climate in the Office of Student Accounting. Zella from the registrar’s office is a stocky woman in her forties, freckled and sandy haired and incapable of silence. She tries to convince Jamie and me of the conspiracies she’s certain threaten us all—her favorite at the moment is that the contrails left by jet planes across the skies are in fact poisonous chemicals being filtered down by the government to destroy our minds.

  Jamie retreats to Anne’s old office and shuts the door, but Zella talks to me, or at me, when she isn’t talking out loud to herself. If it isn’t conspiracy theory, she’s narrating her progress on her data entries. “Okay, now I’m on page 7, at last I’m about to turn to a new page. Oh, just look at all those numbers! We must be getting more students enrolled in this dump. Wonder how long it’ll take me—oh, not too bad, not too bad, maybe I’ll be done by lunchtime—” And she has a talent for inopportune observations at the wrong moments. When Dr. Brenner arrived at the office on her second morning at work and greeted us with his usual “Good morning, girls,” as he poured his coffee, Zella brayed at his departing back: “Don’t you just hate it when he calls us ‘girls’? Or when he says, ‘You girls’?”

  I know he heard her. But what could he do, when his request to hire a permanent clerk still hasn’t been approved? At least he hasn’t fired me, although he looked at me and shook his head again when he came back to the office the day I threw the computer manual at Brazos.

  The Working Poor had practiced most of Sunday but shut down early enough for me to leave for the Villa in time for Mrs. Pence’s dinner. We all felt we were more than ready for the wedding gig next weekend, our sound more than better, and I knew it was the certainty of Bill’s rhythm and his sensitivity to the tenor of the drums and the whisper of the cymbals that made the difference. When I first sang with the Rivermen, I hadn’t realized that drumming wasn’t just keeping time with sticks, and at the memory I wince over my keyboard. Zella sees me and interrupts her monologue—“Whaja do? Make a mistake?”

  So much I learned with the Rivermen. In a sense Gall and Brazos and Bill had raised me. They took in the sixteen-year-old and taught her what they could. And what had the sixteen-year-old done in return? To Gall and all that lost talent? To Brazos, so driven and determined and now so enraged?

  She’d grown up was what she’d done.

  31

  The morning slips by. Clatter in the corridor signals the lunch hour, and Zella throws the cover over her computer and tears off to find her friends from the registrar’s office. Jamie’s door stays shut. She’s been increasingly withdrawn. I can’t remember when her next custody hearing is scheduled, but I’m sure it’s much on her mind.

  Dr. Brenner emerges from his office, sees me sitting alone, and stops.

  “How are you, Ruth? How’s your grandmother?”

  Grandmother. Just when I thought I had been staying so calm, I feel my tears spring with the word.

  He pulls out Zella’s chair and sits down beside me. “What’s the matter, Ruth?”

  It’s a moment before I can speak. When I do, it’s with an unraveling of words that can’t be coherent. Everything. Piano students, one after another. Gall with a dead brain and Brazos with a burning anger, Isaiah with a broken heart and Catina’s bright colors taken from her with her life. And now Mrs. Pence, my grandmother, who seemed a bit brighter last night, although I’m still not sure she knew me, and who asked again for Rosalie. Laced through it all, in a way I don’t understand, with the persistence of time past and the whisper of the cymbals, is Bill the Drummer.

  Dr. Brenner listens until I fall silent. Then he pulls one word out of the heap of shards.

  “Rosalie. Your mother. Are you in touch with her?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm.” He studies me with his strangely magnified eyes behind his glasses, pondering, and then he says: “When did you eat last? Let me take you to lunch, Ruth.”

  He leads me out of Admin to the parking lot and holds the door of a gray Prius for me, and then he folds his long bones into the driver’s seat and drives away from campus to downtown Versailles and a restaurant called Bloom, where sunlight falls through plenty of windows and smoke doesn’t seem to have filtered in. We’re seated at a table by one of the windows, and Dr. Brenner orders soup and sandwiches for us both.

  The soup is creamy and hot and thick, with chunks of potatoes and onions. Dr. Brenner waits until I drink most of it before he says, “I think it’s time that Rosalie steps up.”

  What in the world could cause that to happen? “Why—I don’t—I mean, why do you care?”

  The robot face allows its ghost of a smile. “Your grandmother—Mrs. Pence—was very good to me when I was a boy.” He drinks soup, lays down his spoon, and holds up a knotted hand. “You wouldn’t know it now, but my mother thought I might be able to play the piano in church, so I took piano lessons from Mrs. Pence for a couple of years. The lessons didn’t take, but Mrs. Pence did.”

  “I see,” I say, although I don’t.

  He takes another spoonful of soup. “She smoothed off some of my rough edges. She talked to my folks. Convinced them that I should get a college education, which was unheard of in my family. She even lent me the money for my first semester’s tuition. By the way, in those days she had a little money from Pence’s life insurance, and you should check whether any is left.”

  “Is that how you got to know Isaiah?”

  Again the almost-smile. “That was later. Isaiah came up here to college on a football scholarship—he was a standout high school running back, did you know that? And he took classes from me. Mrs. Pence, now, advised me to go back to college and get my doctorate. And she was very good to my wife when she first came to Montana. My wife is from England, you know, which is why I always wait until I get to the office for my coffee.”

  I didn’t know. So much I don’t know about Dr. Brenner. That robots have wives. English wives at that.

  “I knew how much she worried about you and Isaia
h.” He sets down his cup. “Eat your sandwich, Ruth. You’ve lost weight this summer. I haven’t seen much of Rosalie for several years, but I know Jerry Bohn pretty well. I’ll drop by his office and talk to him this afternoon.” He glances at his watch and adds: “None of this is your fault, Ruth. Don’t take all of it to heart.”

  Then, to my astonishment, he smiles a real smile. “And don’t throw anything at anybody else.”

  *

  Piano lessons, three or four weeknight students. Then the drive up to the Villa to sit with Mrs. Pence over her dinner tray and coax her to nibble a little of the macaroni and cheese, to take a bite or two of limp green beans. She does seem to enjoy her hot sugared tea and lets me pour her a second cup. I don’t think she knows me—“Rosalie?” “No, it’s Ruth”—although she treats me with the grave courtesy she shows toward the nursing assistants and the aides.

  Then the drive back to her house with another out-of-date tune playing on the Pontiac’s retro country station—Patterson Hood singing about incest and lost love with the Drive-By Truckers and their soaring steel behind him—and then the routines, filling Jonathan’s food bowl and water bowl and letting him out for his backyard run and giving him a little attention when he comes back into the kitchen, scratching his ears and rubbing his stomach. Then a glance through the refrigerator for whatever food I remembered to buy, maybe bread and cheese, then the minimal tidying the kitchen needed, and then, finally, finally, an hour or two to myself in the piano room.

  I have begun to relearn Haydn’s “Hungarian Rondo,” and I am concentrating on advice Mrs. Pence gave me before her stroke, to keep my fingers curved and close and to lean into the keyboard for power. Even on the practice Kimball, the rush of sixteenth notes through the rising crescendos fills the room with wild sound that seems to escape the constraints of the keys, fighting to break through walls and windows and ceiling and into its natural element of night wind and endlessness, where all sounds live on, where Haydn himself plays the rondo amid a cacophony of street noise and bombs and screams and barking dogs. I had looked with longing at the Steinway concert grand, knowing the increased volume its big soundboard and the length of its strings would give to the rondo, but I would never touch Mrs. Pence’s piano behind her back, and so I lean into the Kimball and tear through the crescendos and the restraint of the diminuendos and free myself in music. I come to the end and lift my hands from the keys and lose myself in a room full of tones sinking back down to rest.