Jonathan leaps up from under the piano bench, barks once sharply, and growls. I turn and freeze.
Dustin Murray stands by the spinet, watching me. Whether he knocked or rang the bell, I don’t know. I hadn’t heard a thing above the crashing ripples and chords of the rondo. But here he is, in the room with Beethoven’s bust and Mrs. Pence’s framed BMus diploma and the pianos and me. A part of my still-functioning mind notes that he’s as pale as a ghost of himself. He must have lost color during his incarceration and whatever it was, house arrest and monitoring, that he’s still supposed to be under. Otherwise, in ordinary Levi’s and a T-shirt, he looks just like himself, Dustin Murray, the cute guy with the tight ass.
Well, no. His stillness says he knows he’s where he should not be. Maybe he also knows he’s what he should not be: the angry boy who waited under Catina’s apartment stairs with his hunting rifle.
“I didn’t know you could play the piano.”
I can think of no response.
His mouth works. “I needed to—hey, I gotta sit down.”
He’s about to cry. He drops into the rose wingback chair and struggles to control his face.
“I need to talk to you,” he finally manages. “Because you”—his voice wobbles and breaks—“you knew how much I loved her. And now they want me to—”
That’s where he loses it and gives himself up to ugly racking sobs. I wait. I don’t know what else to do. It may be a minute or two, it may be longer, before he sobs himself out and raises a wild and tear-streaked face.
“They want me to—”
“They? Who are you talking about?”
“My attorneys! They want me to, how do they say it, enter a plea bargain. They think they can get the county attorney to go for a lesser charge if I”—his voice trembles again—“plead guilty to it and they don’t have to have a trial.”
“I see.”
“But I’d get thirty years! Maybe twenty with parole! Even then, I’d be forty-four when I got out! Forty-four! And those sons of bitches—excuse me, but that’s what they are—trying to tell me I should be glad not to get a life sentence. Forty-four! How am I supposed to be glad about that?”
How to get him out of the rose wingback chair and out of the house is my only thought. “No, of course you’re not glad.”
He looks up, as grateful as Jonathan for a sympathetic word. “I thought you might understand. I thought maybe you’d be willing to tell them, explain to them, how much I loved her. Because you know how much I loved her.”
“Yes. Yes, I know that.”
“I knew you’d understand, and if you can talk to them—tell them that all I want is to have her back—” He’s losing it again, struggling to swallow his sobs. “If I can’t have her back, they may as well give me the death penalty and get it over with!”
“I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them you loved her. I promise. But—” What to say. “Dustin, you’ve got to get some rest, and I have to get some rest, because I have to go to work tomorrow morning. If I promise to tell them how much you loved her, will you go home now and let me get some rest?”
“Uh—sure.” He sounds surprised. “I know you gotta go to work. I’ll leave now. Since you promised me.”
To my relief he’s on his feet and turning to the door.
“You’re a real nice lady,” he says, “even if you do hang out with that blackie.”
I follow him to the foyer, wait until he closes the door behind himself, and then watch through a crack in the living room curtains to see him climb into his lonely Mustang, turn on his headlights, and drive away. Then I lock the front door, scolding myself for not keeping it locked always—I should know better, except that it’s such a nuisance with piano students coming and going—and then I go to the kitchen with Jonathan bristling and growling at my heels every step of the way, and I lock the back door. Then I find my phone and call Isaiah.
32
The uniformed cop arrives about three minutes after Isaiah, which was at a dead run from his apartment to Mrs. Pence’s house with his phone clapped to his ear. He’s still breathing hard when I open the door to let in the cop and lead him back through the house to the kitchen table.
The cop has a youngish face beneath the blue and silver bill of his uniform cap. He opens his notebook on the kitchen table and jots a few notes as I describe Dustin Murray’s visit, and he shakes his head when I get to the part about his wanting to be executed and get it over with.
“Sounds like he’s more of a threat to himself than anybody else,” the cop says. “Apparently he thinks he can trust you. You could probably take out a restraining order against him, but it might give him the idea that you’ve turned on him.”
Isaiah growls something about the little son of a bitch, and the cop, who obviously knows him, says: “Take it easy, Ike. I’ll look up the terms of his bail, and we’ll keep an eye on your sister’s place. How’s your grandmother doing, by the way?”
Isaiah paces around the house after the cop leaves, turning off lights and checking windows and looking out at the darkened street. I look out once and see the outline of a prowl car parked a block away with its dome light off, and I feel suddenly and profoundly drained. I grope my way back to the kitchen, turn on a single lamp, and sit at the table with my head in my hands. Maybe I won’t go to work in the morning after all. Maybe I’ll cancel the piano lessons and stay in bed all day.
Isaiah joins me at the kitchen table. “Is there anything to drink in the house?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Grandmother used to keep Henry Weinhard’s for me.” He rummages in the back of the refrigerator and finds a bottle. “You want one?”
“Is there another?”
He brings out a second bottle, pops the caps off both, and hands me one. He takes a deep draft, and I sip, and we both look at the empty air around us.
“The cop knows you?”
“We played high school football together.”
A silence.
“Dustin Murray. I hope they fry him, the worthless little prick. Coming over here to cry on your shoulder. Please! Tell ’em I loved her! What did he think that was going to accomplish?”
Time drags on. Isaiah finishes half his bottle of ale. “Ruby. Bill. What’s going on between you and him?”
“What do you mean? Nothing’s going on.”
“Come on! We’ve all seen the way he looks at you. Why do you think he’s drumming for the Working Poor? It ain’t for my pretty face. Or Stu’s or Brian’s.”
I have to laugh. Maybe it’s the ale.
“Ruby,” he says. “Go for it. You deserve some good.”
I get up and hunt out linens, blankets, and a pillow for Isaiah’s night on the sofa. You deserve some good, Ruby. What Dr. Brenner said. None of this is your fault, Ruth. Don’t take all of it to heart.
Even Dustin. Now there was a testimonial to live up to: You’re a real nice lady.
No. A lot of the shit of my life might be my fault but not all of it. I might be tired out of my mind, too tired to sort it out tonight, but I’m not going to call in sick and cancel piano lessons and stay in bed all day. A time will come to sort out blame.
*
Isaiah had folded his sheets and blanket and left early to shower and shave at his place and dress for a day of teaching, but he had posted a note to the refrigerator with a musical note magnet.
My football buddy cop called me. They spotted Dustin Murray’s car parked on the Milk River Bridge and found him leaning over the rail and looking at the current. They decided it was reason enough to haul him in. Maybe the judge will revoke bail. Not that I think the little prick would have the guts to jump.
“Poor Dustin,” I sigh, when I tell Jamie over lunch what had happened. I should have known better.
“Poor Dustin, my ass. He feels sorry enough for himself without you feeling sorry for him.”
We’re in no hurry; we’ve come to the lull in the data entries at the end of late registrat
ion. Jamie’s custody hearing is next week, and her attorney is hopeful, and she feels better, and we both think we’ve earned a little slack.
Jamie takes another bite of the hamburger she splurged on and stirs a little more sugar into her iced tea. It looks like she’s suspended her diet for the day.
“Ruth, do you ever wonder whether feeling sorry for people is what’s got you in trouble over the years?”
No, I haven’t. But now I think about it. Who else have I felt sorry for in years past? Brad Gilcannon’s wife? Maybe a little sorry for her but mostly in looking back and being glad I didn’t have to live her life. More likely feeling sorry for myself.
Maybe feeling guilty is a way of feeling sorry for myself?
The din of the food court ebbs. Jamie and I are running late all right. Like getting used to the smoke, I’ve gotten used to the sounds of campus that were so maddening during my first weeks at work. The noise of women’s shoes and women’s voices punctuating their day as they arrive for work in the morning, take their coffee breaks, hurry out to lunch and back, and clatter out again at five. In between the clatter voices are lowered in the offices, where women sit at their silent computer screens in the faint hum of window air conditioners and the tap-tap of keyboards. Voices drop but never quite cease when the occasional student wanders in or a male executive in a suit passes through. Codes ripple between offices; words float here and there; threads of conversation connect from coffee breaks or carpooling. Like a miniature reflection of Versailles itself, the campus secretaries and clerks know what there is to know about each other and about the men and the one or two women they work for, factual or otherwise.
And here I am, letting my mind drift off into campus noise instead of answering Jamie’s question.
Maybe feeling guilty is a way of feeling sorry for myself, but feeling guilty as a reason for accepting punishment is more accurate.
I hadn’t answered Bill’s question either.
*
Gall has gone with Sharyn to her room, and I’m alone in ours, counting the elk on the wallpaper to keep my mind off the pain in my abdomen. Thirty-two elk, I think. All thirty-two have spreading antlers, so they must all be bulls. Each has his own little grove of low-growing firs that he seems to be walking through, leaving a little patch of blue sky behind him. Nothing but blue skies for these elk.
Maybe I’ve miscounted. I start over.
A tap at the door, and it’s Brazos, followed by a draft of Anchorage chill. He doesn’t wait to be asked in, but at least he pulls the door shut behind him while I pull my knees up under my chin and shiver.
How’d he seem to you tonight?
I shrug. It’s hard to say how Gall seems from one night to another. He’ll be in a stupor during a set, forgetting his chords and his words, while Brazos and I improvise a harmony to cover for him and Bill tries to hold us together with the drumbeat. Or else he can’t contain himself—he’s jumping up and down and playing and chattering, and we can’t keep up with him.
Did he go with the Screamer tonight?
Yeah.
I’m sorry, Ruby, Brazos says. He sits heavily beside me on the bed and pats my bare leg. What the hell are we going to do about him?
Brazos emanates worry. I can feel it seeping out of his pores, and it would seep into mine if I didn’t hurt so badly. It occurs to me that there are probably another two or three elk behind the mirror over the dresser. I’ll have to count again. It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for Brazos. I guess I do feel sorry for him. He and Gall have been friends a long time, since preschool in Boise maybe. Thirty-four, thirty-five elk? Something is trying to gnaw its way out of my abdomen.
He’s telling me about the girl he loved in Boise who moved away and married somebody else, and some dull part of my mind that isn’t counting elk tells me that explains a lot about Brazos. He never gets involved. Everybody else does. Even Bill the Drummer fell for that girl in Albuquerque.
He acts like a bastard to you, Ruby. How do you stand it? I can’t stand it, and I love him too.
Brazos kisses me. He tastes of the rum he’s been drinking, and I try to say no. Yes, Bill, I’m trying to say no. I do say no. You’re hurting me, Brazos—I can’t bear your weight. But I try not to whimper when he turns me on my belly and pulls down my cutoff jeans and tears the elastic of my underpants, and his hands on my breasts are not Gall’s hands; he is bigger boned than Gall, bigger and heavier; we’re half-on, half-off the bed; he’s probing, cunt hole, butt hole; I’m begging no, no, I hate it there, and the pain is no longer just in my abdomen but screaming from the place where he is bucking into me and calling not my name but Gall’s name, while the indifferent elk roam the walls around us. And then the door opens, and Brazos pulls out of me and turns, and there, watching, is Gall.
*
“Where the hell do you go sometimes?” says Jamie. “We’ll be in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation, and I realize that you’re . . . somewhere else. I never saw anything like it.”
A promise is a promise, and it’s not pity for Dustin or any belief of mine that telling his attorney how much he loved Catina will help him avoid prison, but my promise to him, along with Isaiah’s cop buddy’s warning, Don’t give him the idea that you’ve turned against him, that makes me leave work early and takes me up a flight of stairs between two brick buildings on lower Main that leads to a balcony overlooking a parking lot and a sign on a door that opens off the balcony: JERRY BOHN, LLD, ATTORNEY AT LAW.
Bad, bad idea, I knew after I combed the newspapers for the name of Dustin’s lead attorney. But Jerry Bohn is a lawyer, right? Who is he to pick and choose whose story he’ll listen to for, what, ten minutes? Just a few minutes, I told his secretary over the phone. Ten minutes. It has to do with Dustin Murray.
I take a minute to catch my breath and look down at the parking lot and the alley that leads past the back doors of retail stores toward Main Street. Garbage dumpsters and leftover packing cases and windblown leaves. One of the doors opens, and a woman, foreshortened in black stretch pants and a gold sweater, comes out with a sack of trash and a burst of late-afternoon canned country music. A real oldie. Tanya Tucker singing about the man who keeps asking a little girl, What’s your mama’s name? I realize it’s the back door of the Alibi when the woman drops her trash into a dumpster and returns, shutting the door and cutting off the sad swooping instrumentals behind the lyrics and leaving me with another song stuck in my head.
Jerry Bohn’s office is brighter than the shabby balcony would have suggested, more what I would expect for a man who lives in a house on Lila Drive, maybe too much for a public defender. Maybe he also takes other, more lucrative cases. Dustin Murray, with his rich grandfather, probably is a lucrative case.
The secretary I spoke with on the phone sits behind a well-polished desk of dark wood, and her computer and the printer on the credenza behind her look expensive. Fluorescent lighting, of course. A gilt-framed mirror on the wall behind the secretary’s desk reflects her talking to a young woman in a red shirt. It’s not until I notice the woman’s dark braid hanging over her shoulder that I realize I’m seeing myself. In the heat of late September I’ve given up my crow’s clothes for cotton shirts and khakis, and now I don’t recognize myself.
“Jerry will be right with you,” the secretary says. She smiles and gestures toward a sofa and a coffee table with a few magazines, but already the inner door is opening, and I see a tall man in his shirtsleeves, with a chiseled face and graying hair that touches his collar. I suppose I’ve seen him before, at Dustin’s arraignment, but I wouldn’t have known who he was, and in any case all the attorneys mostly had their backs turned to the spectators.
“Ruth?” he says. “Or Ruby, which?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I reply, although I’m beginning to think it does, and he holds the door for me and gestures me toward one of a pair of cream leather chairs arranged in front of the wide desk. After I sit down, he takes the other chair.
&nb
sp; “So. Ruth Gervais.” Szcher-vay. “You had a visit from young Murray.”
After telling Isaiah and then Isaiah’s cop buddy about Dustin’s visit, I can relate it without elaboration and well under my ten minutes, while Jerry Bohn listens without interrupting. I come to the end, my locking of the front door, and raise my eyes from where I had been keeping them, on my hands folded in my lap, to Jerry Bohn’s face.
Bluish-gray eyes, a blade nose, a wide mobile mouth. A face that my mother, angry and afraid, saw for the first time in a prison conference room.
“Were you afraid, Ruth?” Jerry Bohn asks.
I consider his question. “All I could really think about was how to get him to leave. Afterward, maybe, a little afraid.”
“What did he think”—he interrupts himself—“I don’t suppose think is the right word.”
“I don’t know what he thought. But I promised him I’d tell you he loved her.”
I’ve had my ten minutes, and I start to rise from the luxurious buttery leather of the chair. But Jerry Bohn raises a hand.
“It’s just as well you did, Ruth. If Dustin had blindsided me by asking whether you’d talked to me when you hadn’t, there’s no telling what he’d decide to do. I can tell you, and I tried to tell him, he’s damned lucky the prosecutor didn’t put the death penalty on the table. And now this stunt of his on the Milk River Bridge. Not that he was much danger to himself. The river there isn’t more than waist deep. But with luck we can keep him locked up for his own sake until we can get him evaluated. How did he strike you? Did you think he was in control of himself?”
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 19
