“I—no, I guess I didn’t. Although I never really knew him before he—” And now I’m taking more than my ten minutes, telling Jerry Bohn about Dustin with his putter and his golf ball across the street from campus. About the day he sat on the floor outside the Student Accounting office until Jamie kicked the door open and pinched his rear end. About the afternoon when Catina crouched in terror on the floor of the Pontiac as I drove away from the Goodwill store.
“That was when I started to worry. Up until then I just thought he was good-looking and dim.”
Jerry Bohn had scrawled a note or two on a pad, and now he glances back over it. “We’ll try to get his bail revoked for a while at least. “So, Ruth—”
He’s weighing something he’s about to say. An old hippie, somebody had described Jerry Bohn to me, this graying man with the top three buttons of his shirt undone and his suit coat and necktie hanging over the back of his desk chair. I had gone online and combed through some of the old newspaper coverage of the trials and appeals after I made the appointment with him. A young crusader, he’d been called back then, who had fought to overturn the satanic ritual and child abuse convictions. He had won my mother’s release from prison and fallen in love with her and married her. Now his dark eyebrows show a few white hairs, and he’s got lines of weariness around his eyes, and he could use a shave, and saving people is still his line of work. Saving Dustin from himself, I guess.
And he’s, more or less—no. No more or less to it. He’s my stepfather.
A stepfather whose stepdaughter is a stranger to him. A stranger who, long ago as he well knows, was driven past her mother’s house and said, Yes, it happened in that house. What must he be thinking?
He glances at his watch, and I know I’ve overstayed, but all he says is: “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Ruth. George Brenner speaks highly of you. We’ll talk soon.”
*
Jamie surprises me by lingering in the office on Friday afternoon until she’s sure Zella has covered her computer and left for the day. Now she turns from the window, where she had been watching the street and making sure that Zella hadn’t changed her mind and come back.
“This came in the mail,” she says. “I wanted to show it to you.”
She hands me a rectangular blue envelope, and I see that it’s addressed to Ms. Jamie Warren at 620 West Montana Street, Versailles, Montana, in a clear handwriting with black ink.
“Go ahead and open it.”
I hesitate, then draw out an all-occasion card decorated with birds that I think are penguins until I notice their curious black and red beaks. Puffins? What a strange card. I turn it over and see it’s from a set of free cards sent by a charitable organization hoping for a donation. Then I open it to a different handwriting, a child’s uneven cursive in pencil.
Dear Mommy—
I look up at Jamie. Her eyes are brilliant with unshed tears. I turn back to the card.
My teacher is helping me to write this letter to you. I miss you. I hope I can come to see you soon. I love you.
Your daughter,
Prairie Rose
33
The wedding reception gig at Broadview is set for Saturday evening, and the Working Poor have agreed to meet at Isaiah’s barn that afternoon for a final run-through before we pack up the instruments and head out. I rescheduled my piano students and visited Mrs. Pence while she was being served her lunch, since both Isaiah and I will be playing music later, and now I’m driving out to the barn with my retro station fading in and out of reception, with Dylan singing about the jingle-jangle morning through bursts of static.
Except it’s not morning; it’s a midafternoon jingle-jangle of sharp sunlight cutting through bronze cottonwood leaves to dance on the windshield of the Pontiac, and my thoughts are as sharp edged and sporadic as the static. The smoke in the air has cleared, and the good news on the radio reported that the wildfires to the south are under control. Until next fire season, until next fire season.
No llamas in their pasture behind the barn, no birds forming flocks in the trees, only a few dry leaves floating down as testament to what’s coming. We haven’t had a hard freeze yet, but the weather’s changing, with something ominous in the darker-blue band taking shape over the western horizon. It’s a hard freeze—a hard freeze. Are those the words from a real song, or did I dream them?
Bill, I told Brazos not to, and I begged him to stop, and if he’d been thinking about anybody but himself and Gall, he might have heard me. True, I wasn’t a sixteen-year-old anymore, being raised by three twenty-something fathers. I was twenty-six and old enough to say no, and maybe I should have fought harder to stop him. But I didn’t want him to do what he did.
I wasn’t feeling sorry for him, Jamie. I was miserable with pain and grief, and within thirty-six hours I would be undergoing emergency surgery in Versailles Memorial Hospital in Montana. I understood Brazos’s grief. I knew he loved Gall, had loved him longer than I had. But I didn’t want him to do what he did.
I haven’t seen or heard from Bill since he took me to dinner after our practice session in the barn. Not that I expected to see him, but my wandering mind loops out and circles back, searching for reasons. When he took me to dinner, he still had a truckload of Anne’s belongings to take down to Boise. Probably that was where he went. Once in Boise, with its vibrant live music scene, why would he come back to Versailles?
“When he took you to dinner that night—did you have a good time?” Jamie asked.
*
Dinner with Bill the Drummer. I can’t relax. Being near him in the cab of a pickup truck. Trying to think of him as Bill and not as Bill the Drummer of the Rivermen, while Gall and Brazos, two gaping dark absences, ride with us. Bill is too present. His hand on the steering wheel, his hand dropping to the knob of the shift when he changes gears. Although he’s scrupulous about giving me my space. No touching of my hand, no brushing against my shoulder. After he parks at the restaurant, he gets out and holds my door for me but doesn’t try to help me with the long step down from his pickup, a big Toyota Tundra with a canopy, to the pavement.
The restaurant is on the Milk River, with a deck that extends over the current. A girl in black jeans and a black T-shirt leads us to a table on the deck, by the railing, where the warmth of the day yields to the faintest of air currents and where she leaves us with menus. Only a few other diners. Tables with cloths and overhead globes of light that reflect on the river with an illusion of stillness spread across its surface.
Bill might be keeping his hands to himself but not his eyes, and when I look up, he smiles at me.
“Ruby.”
I tell myself to say something. “What have you been doing in Boise?”
A pause. Water lapping at the edge of the deck.
“I was working construction,” he says, “and hanging out with my mom.”
Inside the restaurant music is playing, something saccharine with strings that swells when a waiter comes out with a tray of drinks and fades when the door closes behind him. Bill has picked up a menu, and he glances at it, and I see the darkened patch on his thumbnail is growing out.
He returns to me. “Ruby, when we couldn’t find you that morning, it was—all that kept me from either killing Brazos or leaving on my own was knowing how bad he felt. So we said goodbye to Sharyn and packed up the gear and shipped it home and sold the van and bought tickets to Boise.”
“But you quit a job to help Brazos?”
“Oh, hell, I got over wanting to kill Brazos.” Bill smiles at me again, and the warmth unsettles me. “Mostly got over it. And I can always find a day job. And there’s always a band somewhere that can use a drummer.”
A waiter comes with water glasses to take our orders, and Bill looks a question at me, and I shrug. I’m not sure I can eat.
“Give us another minute. Bring me a bourbon—Mark, if you’ve got it. Ruby, you used to like white wine?”
“Whatever.”
But whate
ver isn’t going to do it. Act like a normal person. Straighten your back. “Tell me about your mom.”
By chance I’ve raised the right topic. Bill smiles a little to himself, thinking of his mother. “Oh, she’s—my mom is cool. My dad died when I was twelve. He was career military and gone so much I hardly remember him, and so my mom basically raised me. She was, well, still is, a nurse practitioner, and she taught me to cook and do my own laundry, which has come in real handy in my life since.”
A mini jet boat rips past us, spraying a slosh of white water against the deck and misting the air over us, and everyone at the other tables looks up.
“Damn them,” someone says distinctly.
“Anyway. My mom’s an old Boise girl, and after my dad died, she brought me back from wherever we’d been living, Fort Bragg I guess it was, and she bought”—he grins, remembering—“she bought us this house. It wasn’t exactly on the wrong side of the tracks, but it sure as hell wasn’t the Boise Highlands. It had been, can you believe? somebody’s crack house, and it”—he shakes his head and laughs—“it was beyond bad. My mom and I gutted it and remodeled it. My mom and a twelve-year-old boy, pretty much by ourselves. She lives there to this day.”
“I never knew any of this.”
“No, I don’t suppose so.”
He’s watching the curving wake of the jet boat getting fainter and farther away and finally disappearing under the Milk River bridge.
“I started drumming in junior high band. Went on drumming in high school and got to know Gall and Brazos and Annie. Had a couple years at Boise State and probably should have stayed longer, but Gall and Brazos were starting the Rivermen by then, and the music, well, called.”
“Did you have a girlfriend in Boise?” I ask, again to keep him from what I fear he wants to talk about.
A longer pause this time.
“There was a woman. Named Teresa. God, I was young in those days.”
“Is she still there?”
“No. She died. Some kind of fast cancer. And that was when I left Boise with the Rivermen. I was twenty-one.”
I’m stricken to have asked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“No.”
His smile is gone. But he’s looking at me as though he expects me to evaporate as easily as I disappeared from that motel in Anchorage. Without a word.
But then he says: “Ruby. That night in Anchorage. Did you tell Brazos not to do what he did to you?”
*
I pull myself out of my head and get out of the Pontiac and walk across the lot to the barn, shivering when an unexpected nip of wind scours my face and bare arms and rattles the weeds. I should have brought a jacket. Isaiah’s white pickup and the minivan Brian and Stu use to get back and forth are parked by the barn. So they’re here but no Toyota Tundra.
Isaiah stands on the makeshift bandstand in a shaft of thin sunlight that haloes his silky black curls. He tilts his head to listen as he tunes his guitar, notices me, and gives the G string a final twang.
“Is that what you’re going to wear tonight?”
I’d shaken jeans and a T-shirt out of the laundry hamper that morning. “No. I’ll change.”
Brian is adjusting the height of his steel, doing something that requires a screwdriver, while Stu sits on the edge of the bandstand and thumbs through a SHAR catalog. No hurries here and no worries apparently.
But Isaiah has a sardonic eye on me. “Look behind me,” he says.
Behind him? A scattering of chaff across the floor, chill sunlight falling through the high window that once had been the door to the hayloft. The instrument cases. The set of drums.
“Look closer.”
The drums. I recognize them. Tama Imperialstars with deep-red poplar shells and the specially sealed chrome fittings. I remember the day they were purchased for a quarter of their worth at a pawnshop in Billings, Montana.
“Those aren’t Terry’s drums. They’re Bill’s!”
“Right,” says Isaiah. “He drove all the way to Boise, two goddamn days, with his truckload of Anne Albert’s shit, and he unloaded it for her, and then he drove back up here, another two days it took him, with his own drums. Now he’s trying get some sleep before we practice.”
Somewhere in the ether Bob Dylan sings about a jingle-jangle morning, and Gram and Emmy Lou sing about love that hurts.
34
We drive east to Broadview in two vehicles, Brian and Stu with most of the instruments in Brian’s white van and Isaiah and me with Bill in his pickup, with Bill’s drums under the canopy in back. I’m crammed into the narrow rear seat with my knees against the front passenger seat and my garment bag spread across my lap. My plan is to wait and change clothes after we get the instruments set up. There will be plenty of time. The wedding party reserved the bar and restaurant at Rowdy’s, starting at nine, and we can expect the celebration to continue until two in the morning, when the bar has to close.
The sky has lost light, although occasional clumps of box elders or hawthorn brush are silhouettes against a pale gray. Closer to the asphalt are dim shapes, shapes that sometimes have eyes and move. Bill’s headlights cut across sagebrush on the curves and return as the highway straightens. I can make out partial outlines of Bill’s head and Isaiah’s, and I know they’re discussing something but not what it is, and I wonder, as I’ve often wondered, whether either remembers the other from that long-ago night at the Alibi.
Then a nest of lights ahead, with scattered outliers, and the BROADVIEW POP. 597 sign and speed limit signs and then the amenities of the town strung out along the highway: a motel, a tractor dealership, a food market, an incongruous Starbuck’s. Isaiah points, and Bill makes the left turn at the traffic light and pulls into the parking lot at Rowdy’s. The white van pulls in right behind us.
I have never been in the bar at Rowdy’s, and yet I feel as though I’ve walked into it a hundred times. It’s almost a parody of itself. Recessed lighting and dark paneling hung with mounted elk heads that stare out, glass-eyed, at the clientele hunched over their beers at the bar or at a few scattered tables. Caps and flannel shirts and suspicious eyes on these strangers, one of them black, who are carrying instrument cases and mysterious equipment into their space. I think of lines from old western movies: Hey! Sodbuster! Whadda ya think you’re doin’ here?
But the bartender comes around the end of the bar, a big guy with a dark beard who obviously knows Isaiah—“Hey, Ike, howza goin”—and they shake hands, and the bartender points us to the back room, where tables with white paper tablecloths are grouped around a bandstand with an open space for dancing.
“The ladies room, where you can change—”
Why do restrooms in country bars all smell the same? The odor of disinfectant soap overlying something fetid. Scarred linoleum tiles, never quite clean, that evoke the fumes of a filling station pump. I let down the changing table—changing table, up-to-date!—so I can drape my garment bag over it. Then I unbutton my shirt and pull off my jeans and hang them on the hook on the back of the door while a young woman with long dark hair watches me from a clouded mirror. She’s a taller woman than her mother. She has a straight nose, without the arch of her mother’s and grandmother’s noses. Does she look like her father?
New black jeans from the garment bag, new red cowboy boots, and a dark-red silk shirt. My hair loose to my waist and waving slightly from being in a braid.
I had lifted the fringed red suede skirt and vest from the suitcase Bill brought down from Anchorage, and I unfolded the leather and smoothed out the creases and spread the skirt and vest out on the bed. The suede had stiffened over time, and the afternoon light picked out a few worn patches in the nap but none so bald that bar lighting wouldn’t conceal, and I thought about stepping into the skirt and zipping it and slipping on the vest like a familiar second skin—somebody else’s skin—but I knew I would never wear these clothes again. I hung them in the bedroom closet opposite the painting of the cathedral in the trees where stor
m clouds gathered and the sullen young man glowered from his Polaroid, and I made a hasty trip to the shopping mall for new jeans and boots and then to the Goodwill, where Catina’s ghost followed me through the sale racks until I found a silk shirt that actually fit me.
Out in the dimly lit banquet room a couple of women are decorating the tables with plastic flowers and white disposable cameras and laying out trays of crackers and dips and toothpicks and salami slices. The guys have finished setting up the instruments and amps on the bandstand. We’ll have time for a little supper before the show.
Bill is seated behind his drums, frowning over something underneath the smallest snare, but he looks up and sees me and rises to his feet.
Slow motion, time doing its thing. Bill steps down from the bandstand and walks toward me between tables set for the bridal party. In the background Isaiah and Brian and Stu seem not to move.
“You didn’t think I’d come back from Boise?” When I can’t answer, he touches my cheek. “I’m not going anywhere, Ruby.”
When he turns back to the bandstand to fiddle with his drums, one of the women carrying a tray of nibbles winks at me. “He looks like a keeper to me, honey.”
*
How to perform for a crowd of happy drunks: first, hope they stay happy.
The wedding party rushes into the banquet room ahead of the throng, the bride with her veil askew and lots of white lace over a hoopskirt and the groom in a black tuxedo jacket and Levi’s and cowboy boots. Groomsmen in tuxedo jackets and Levi’s and boots, bridesmaids in billowing lilac lace. Several little girls, also in lilac lace, are hastily sidelined near the food. Then the onslaught of family and friends, going through a semblance of a receiving line and ordering drinks from the cash bar.
Isaiah introduces the band—“Stu on bass, Bill on drums, Ruby on the keyboard, and Cryin’ Brian on the steel.”
We look pretty good, I think. At least I’d coaxed the guys out of their awful gold satin shirts and into plain black linen.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 20
