We start with “Moon River” for the bride’s dance with the groom, heavy on keyboard and steel and augmented by whoops and whistles from the crowd, and switch to “Daddy’s Little Girl” for her dance with her father. We sound fine, but it hardly matters. These are happy folks.
And so the evening progresses. The temperature in the banquet room soars, even though somebody opens a door that looks out at the parking lot. We take a fifteen-minute break every hour and use the restrooms and wipe the sweat off our faces and sample the salami, which one of the barmaids says has been made from antelope meat. It’s nearly midnight when we get the whole crowd line dancing to “Louisiana Saturday Night,” while Brian makes faces over his steel that mime retching at the music and the sight of bridesmaids trying to kick-dance in hoopskirts.
Then it’s past midnight, and we’re playing “Indian Outlaw” to a thunder of cowboy boots on the board floor, and everybody’s hopping and stomping, when a man with a beard and a fatigue jacket with American flag patches on the sleeves throws a bottle across the room and hits a long-haired fellow in a sleeveless leather vest with snake tattoos up and down his arms—Draw, sodbuster!—and Isaiah and Bill and Brian and Stu get up and stand in front of me and their instruments, and the bartender and a couple of his burly friends turn up the lights and storm over to break up the battle. “Hey! Bunce! Jackson! None o’ that in here!”
After that the room thins out, some to see the bride and groom off to wherever they’re going on their honeymoon and others to watch Bunce and Jackson duke it out in the parking lot. Isaiah glances back at me and nods, and I get up from the keyboard and join him and his guitar at the front of the bandstand, and we sing the songs we want to sing. In harmony, alto and baritone over the throb of snares and whisper of cymbals and richness of bass and steel. “High on a Mountaintop.” “Lone Star State of Mind.” “Love Hurts.”
Then Bill and Isaiah are giving each other high fives over the drums as a smattering of applause rises from the survivors in the audience, and that’s when I see, in the back of the room, Jerry Bohn in a chambray shirt and Levi’s, looking more like an old hippie than an attorney at a wedding reception. He strolls up to the bandstand and nods at Isaiah and me.
“I wanted to hear you play,” he says, “so when I heard you were booked out here, I cadged an invitation.” He touches my hand. “I’ll call you next week,” he says.
35
Time with its own motion. Sunday afternoon, and Bill and I sit on Mrs. Pence’s porch steps, eating peanuts and watching the weather move over the porch roof and on eastward. The forecast had spoken cautiously of rain.
“Did you see Gall or Brazos while you were in Boise?”
“Gall, no. He’s still in that facility in Seattle. Brazos, yes. He helped me unload Annie’s furniture at her new place.”
So much I want to know, so much I don’t know how to ask. “Did Brazos say anything about Gall? How he is?”
“He says the doctors are starting to see some muscle flickers. His eyes move back and forth. But he can’t speak, and they don’t think he can hear anything.”
Bill cracks another peanut and tosses the shell into a pile of fallen leaves. The sky has deepened to purple. Down by the mailboxes the bicycle kids are practicing their wheelies.
“I don’t know a hell of a lot about these things, but a coma that’s lasted this long can’t be good.”
“No.”
“We had a real shot, you know. The Rivermen had a real shot, that is. But then Gall’s meltdown.”
“Do you think the Working Poor has a shot?”
“Probably not. We’d need a songwriter, for one thing. We’d need to get away from playing covers.”
We.
Bill looks at me, straight on. Warm hazel eyes, dark lashes. “I didn’t love Gall, not the way you did and Brazos did. And not that I’d wish what happened to him on anybody, but he was a mean arrogant bastard, and there were too many times I was ready to walk off and find somewhere else to play music.”
I think about the words. A spoiled bastard and a mean arrogant bastard. “Brazos always talked you into staying.”
“Well, yeah, he did! Where was he going to find a better drummer?”
Bill grins and tosses away another peanut shell, but it’s no more than the truth.
“Also—” He doesn’t finish the thought. Cracks another peanut.
“Gall might have been a mean arrogant bastard, but god, the talent. The voice he had. Ruby, who the hell are those kids by the mailboxes, and do they always hang around there?”
Just as he speaks, the older boy tries another wheelie, hits loose gravel, and takes a spill. He untangles himself from his bicycle and gets to his feet, rubbing himself and checking his elbows, while the younger kid points at him and lets out a cackle that we can hear from our seat on the porch steps.
“I see them there a lot. I think they’re Madison Albert’s little brothers. They live a few blocks away.”
“The ‘Für Elise’ girl?”
“You remember her?”
“The one who couldn’t hit F sharp? The one who had a meltdown over the house egging?”
A sudden gust of wind torments the bare maple branches across the street and drives a cascade of dead leaves off the roof of the porch with a rattle that might have been rain. Sure enough, a few wet spots darken the gravel walk.
“When I asked you the question I did,” Bill says, “I didn’t mean—”
A pause.
“—I didn’t mean, did you fail to say no. I meant, was Brazos listening?”
“No. He wasn’t listening.”
“Damn him.”
We sit for a time, listening to the thrashing of branches overhead and sporadic raindrops slapping at the porch roof. Down by the mailboxes, the bicycle kids pull their jackets over their heads, but they aren’t giving up. I wonder if their mother will be able to move into a better house now that Francis Albert has divorced Anne and Anne has gone back to Boise with Brazos.
He’s already got a new girlfriend, Madison had sneered. I hate him!
Bill lays his hand on my knee, and I shiver.
“What do you see yourself doing now, Ruby?”
I surprise myself with my answer. “Living here, in this house. At least for a while. Taking care of the pianos. And hoping my grandmother can come home, at least for a while. I won’t have her forever.” After a moment I add, “And playing music.”
Thunder explodes like a bombshell out of the west, powerful enough to splinter the air over Versailles. Its reverberations roll over our heads, turning the sky the color of a bruise and pouring down torrents of rain and hopping hailstones. The bicycle kids abandon the mailboxes and pedal off as fast as their legs can churn.
Bill laughs, long and exuberant, and I feel his enjoyment of the storm and the sight of the fleeing kids through his hand on my knee.
“What do you see yourself doing?” I ask, when I can make myself heard over the rain and hail.
“Staying in Versailles for a while. Finding a day job. Playing music.”
“Even in bars like Rowdy’s?”
“Hell, it was kind of fun. Your guys are pretty good, you know. Or would be, if they could practice more. Ruby, have you ever thought of singing Gall’s tenor parts? Dropping your range down even half an octave?”
“No. Really? Do you think I’d have the voice for it?”
“Yeah, I do. And with that big baritone of Isaiah’s, we’d have a helluva vocal sound.”
We watch our jingle-jangle storm until the rain starts to slacken, and Jonathan, standing on his hind legs to watch us through the screen door, whines anxiously.
“I have a theory,” Bill says, “about the house egging.”
*
Time with its own motion. Monday afternoon, and Isaiah and I sit in the matching cream leather chairs in Jerry Bohn’s office. Isaiah had finished his classes at Mike Mansfield High, and Dr. Brenner let me leave the Student Accounting office early. The rain tapered off durin
g the night, but the window that looks out over Main Street shows the dripping facades of old brick commercial buildings and a slice of sodden sky.
Jerry Bohn, in his shirtsleeves, sits behind his desk with his back to the window. “The thing is,” he says, “she’s been hurt pretty deeply too.”
He glances at the framed photograph on his desk. I only see its black velvet backing and stand from where I sit, but I can guess whose picture it is.
“There will be expenses,” says Isaiah. “It’s hard to know what the total might come to. Our grandmother has her little social security check and Ray Pence’s pension check, and she did have some income from her piano students, although that’s fallen off as she’s gotten older, and now, of course—well, that’s how it is. I’m a high school teacher. Ruby is a data entry clerk. The nursing home will take Grandmother’s social security checks and the pension checks, but they’ll need more. And there’s the expense of keeping up the house. Do we have to sell it? Can we sell it?”
“Did your grandmother give either of you a power of attorney?”
I don’t know what a power of attorney is, but Isaiah says, “No,” and adds to me, “You’d know if she gave you one.”
“And of course we still hope she’ll be able to come home,” he goes on. But she’ll need more care than Ruby and I can give her unless one of us quits a job, and even then—”
“I’ll have some of this researched for you,” says Jerry Bohn. He makes a couple of notes.
When he first ushered us into his office, he had caught us up on Dustin Murray’s status, his bail revoked pending psychiatric evaluation, which, Jerry Bohn said, might even play in his favor if it came to a trial. I felt Isaiah go tense beside me and prayed he wasn’t going to explode over anything’s playing in Dustin Murray’s favor.
“So don’t worry about any more visits from him, at least for a while,” Jerry Bohn said, “and we’ll give you a heads-up if there’s a change.”
Now he says, “We can work out the financial situation. Yes, the house might have to be sold, down the road. Do you have any idea of its value?”
“I don’t,” Isaiah says. “It’s old, and it needs renovation. The kitchen looks like it was installed in the 1930s, and the plumbing is almost as old as the house. The pianos, of course, are valuable, especially the Steinway.”
Selling the pianos. The Steinway.
Jerry Bohn leans back in his chair and glances again at the photograph on his desk. Steeples his fingers. “The finances are one thing. George and I talked about the other aspect of the situation, and it’s murkier. What, exactly, are you hoping to bring about between the two of you and your grandmother and my wife?”
I speak before Isaiah can. “It’s not about Isaiah or me—it’s about our grandmother.”
It’s almost the truth. Almost? Well, no.
Jerry Bohn waits gravely while I find words to explain to this decent man what I hope for. “Mr. Bohn, I haven’t lived with, or talked to, my mother since I was eight years old. I turned twenty-seven in July. That’s almost twenty years, and it’s been longer for Isaiah. Twenty years is a lot of time, and a lot that’s just—over and done with. I don’t know her now, and she doesn’t know me. But my grandmother isn’t over it. I don’t think she recognizes me now. But every night when I visit her”—I have to pause and take a deep breath—“she says, ‘Rosalie?’”
Jerry Bohn closes his eyes for a moment and opens them again. “I see,” he says. He massages the bridge of his nose. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I hesitate. But when will I have another chance to ask? And who better to ask than a man who has been an attorney at law in Versailles for at least twenty years?
“Mr. Bohn, did you know my father?”
In the startled silence I have time to regret my question and wish I could ask more questions and watch emotions I cannot not follow as they play across Jerry Bohn’s face.
“No. I didn’t.” He meets my eyes. “There’s a lot—as you say, over and done with—Rosalie and I have never spoken about. I do know”—another long hesitation—“she was badly damaged by Isaiah’s father. She has never spoken his name, but he was the reason she left Monterey and came home to Versailles.”
“I see. Thank you.”
A rap of rain against the window, the dregs of the storm passing over Versailles. We’re all on our feet now, and Jerry Bohn reaches across his desk to shake my hand and to shake Isaiah’s hand.
We drive in Isaiah’s pickup from Jerry Bohn’s office to the Orchards Villa, where we spend an hour with Mrs. Pence. She’s sitting up in bed with her dinner tray on the adjustable arm, and she seems a little brighter than she had the night before. She always knows Isaiah, of course, and smiles up at him and clasps his hand. With me it’s “Rosalie?”
And this time I say, “Yes,” and see a tremulous smile light her face.
“I was so afraid,” she says, “that you had gone away with Mark Gervais.”
A startled exchange of glances between me and Isaiah. “Have we got a real name?” he mouths.
*
Daylight has faded, and streetlights are winking on when Isaiah parks at the curb by the familiar picket fence. When I get out, he kills the headlights and turns off his engine and follows me. A lot on his mind, I suppose. I find my key—yes! key! I remembered to lock up! Thank you for that, Dustin! I unlock the front door, and Jonathan is greeting us in the foyer when Isaiah says, “Play some for me, Ruby.”
He relaxes in the rose wingback chair while I play Haydn’s rondo. I’ve been working on it off and on, and it’s getting better, although I still can’t afford even a glance away from the music to Isaiah. He had looked dead tired. Of course he’d had a full day at the high school and then the meeting with Jerry Bohn and the visit at the Villa. I play the last notes and let the sound linger as long as I can hear it before I turn on the piano bench.
Isaiah opens his eyes. “Damn, you’re getting good.”
“You want a beer? I picked up a six-pack of Henry’s this morning.”
“Sure.”
I fetch us each a Henry’s from the kitchen, and we sit in silence for some time, Isaiah in the wingback chair and I on the piano bench.
“We have a name,” he says after a while. “Maybe we have a name.”
I nod.
“You ever wonder what kind of life Rosalie might have had if she hadn’t left Monterey and come back here?”
“Yes. Often.” And I tell him about the box of clippings I discovered, long ago, in the closet of the rental house north of the river in Versailles.
“They must have mattered to her if she saved them. What do you think became of them?”
“Trashed. Along with her records. She was living in that house when she was arrested, and she never went back.”
“All that talent.”
Like Gall. All that talent.
Isaiah straightens in the armchair and belches a little from the Henry’s. “You think she ever plays music now? Sings?”
“No idea.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, “about songwriting.”
“Songwriting? Who have you been talking to? Bill?”
He laughs. “Hey, I took a poetry writing class in college. I wrote a couple poems.” Then he asks, as Bill had, “What do you have in mind for yourself, Ruby?”
I take a slow sip of ale. “It depends, doesn’t it. Whether Grandmother can come home.”
“And Bill?”
I could brush him off with Bill? What about Bill? Instead, I try to explain, maybe to Isaiah, maybe to myself, what I’ve been feeling.
“The Rivermen were like fathers to me, at least in the beginning.”
Again I’m hearing Patterson Hood with the Drive-By Truckers singing “The Deeper In,” about incest and love and loss, which isn’t exactly what’s troubling me but has something to do with the way I had loved Gall and what happened with Brazos and how I can be drawn to Bill. I hadn’t told Bill the details with Brazos, on
ly that it happened, and maybe Brazos told him more, but Jamie, yes, I’d told Jamie more. Sounds to me, Jamie said, like there was more going on between the two of those guys than either one of them with you.
Isaiah listens to my stumbling attempts at words and says, “Bill’s a great drummer, and he’s a good man. Take your time.”
Time. It was mid-May when I came back to Versailles. Now it’s mid-October. I drink more ale and think about yesterday’s rain and whether it came in time to save the lawns and trees of the Orchards. Poor shattered trees. Scattered thoughts in the magpie’s nest. Shiny fragments. I catch at one.
“Something I’ve always wondered and never asked Grandmother—why does she have all that mismatched sterling silverware? There must be a dozen different patterns. A couple of forks in one pattern, five or six in another, a few teaspoons in still another, assorted knives, all jumbled together in the top kitchen drawer.”
“I know the answer to that.”
“You do?”
“I wondered too, and so I asked her, and she told me. Turns out she had a whole flock of great-aunts in England, and none of them ever married, and they all had sets of sterling silver tableware. One by one they died and passed what silver they hadn’t lost or forgotten to their niece, who was Grandmother’s mother. Then she died, and when Grandmother came to Montana, she brought all the odd knives and forks and spoons with her.”
“So that’s one mystery solved.”
“Yup. How many do we got to go?”
36
Rosalie, Rosalie, Rosalie. What were you seeking in Monterey? Fame and fortune? Was that what you yearned for? And what did you find?
Now you live on a sagebrush prairie, in Versailles, Montana, in a house overlooking the Milk River. What do you do all day while your husband and rescuer, Jerry Bohn, goes about his work of rescuing others? You’ve cast off your children. You’ve told your mother that you hate her. Do you have friends? Do you listen to music? What music? Do you still sing, even to yourself?
What is worse than a singer who has lost his hearing? Maybe a singer who still has her hearing but has silenced her voice?
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 21
