Ruby River

by Lynn Pruett

  Maybe if she puked she could get out of here and go home to bed. She considered rummaging through Dodd’s drawer for cigarettes. What power he had. If she swiped a cigarette she could be charged with a misdemeanor, but if she took one from anybody else, they’d get pissed then buy some more. Maybe that’s what Mama saw in him, the great hunk of morality. She gagged. Mama deserved better, even if she wouldn’t admit it. Connie leaned too far back in her chair. The room jumped like a startled horse and the puke rose dangerously close to the top of her throat. She gripped her knees. A cool wave rose from her spine and washed up over her forehead.

  When she raised her head, Sheriff Dodd towered over her. He had snuck into the room. She eyed him, a sneer raising her left nostril, as if he smelled of some disgusting odor.

  “Did you take a shower?” he said.

  “Did you?” she said, and smirked when his set features slipped, for a moment, out of their detached-inquirer mode. He marched around his gray desk and sat in the ass-hugging chair. From a drawer he took a crime report, a pretty stack of pastel paper, and a black pen. He wrote some things down, then smiled at Connie. “Would you like something to drink?”

  His voice was pleasant, as if they were sitting around Mama’s table for Sunday supper. But she felt uneasy, aware of his size. “What kind of drink?”

  “Water.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot. This is the jail.”

  “I would offer you coffee but Heloise, that’s my secretary, goes shopping on Saturday for office supplies and she won’t be in with them until tomorrow.” He nodded toward a coffeemaker and Styrofoam cups resting on a file cabinet.

  Connie willed herself to smile. “I hate coffee.”

  Sheriff Dodd patted the report’s edges, pretending to straighten them. Connie looked at his thick fingers with their clipped nails. Poor Mama, they must feel like tapeworms inching up her leg.

  “I want a cigarette.”

  “Young girls shouldn’t smoke. It’s a dirty, nasty habit.”

  “You’re not my father.”

  His eyes slowly perused her outstretched legs, then moved up to the straps of her sundress slipping off her shoulders. “That’s right. I’m not your father.”

  She met his marble-blue gaze and drew it above her shoulders, where she knew it would stay. Then, “Fucker!” burst from her mouth. She wobbled and covered her lips and closed her eyes.

  “Being an instant dad would be hard,” he said, his voice a little softer. “I’m sorry. I’m just used to looking at a pretty girl.”

  She held herself as still as a column of stone and felt at the top of her head a small irritation, a flutter inside her skull. She clenched her hands and eyes tight. She would not cry.

  “Tell me what happened last night, accurately and in detail.”

  He probably gets his jollies this way, Connie thought. She looked at his hulking shoulders and shuddered.

  “I know this will be hard for you and I know it must be a tremendous disappointment for your prom to turn out so badly.”

  She’d tried to keep her mind off the disappointment of last night. “Are you going to arrest me? If you are, you need to tell me first before I say anything to you.” What a sneak. She’d tell Mama about this cute little trick. She crossed her arms.

  He quit tapping the pen. “Arrest you for what?”

  “Well, I am certainly not dumb enough to do your job for you.”

  “Look, there are enough laws on the book to get anybody any time. You’re underage and you’re nursing a hangover. Right!”

  She smoothed the yellow dress over her knees, forcing her fingers not to shake. “There’s no law against being hung over or throwing up in the sheriff’s office on a day when the secretary is out.”

  He sighed and looked at his watch. “Okay. Okay. You and Kyle Childers were parked at Pealiquor Ridge. What happened?”

  Connie was dead tired. He wouldn’t arrest her if she told the truth because Mama would drop him in a minute. And, she reasoned, he must know that. “Listen, I’ll quit smoking tomorrow if you just give me a cigarette. I really feel like I’m going to puke.”

  He walked to the coffeemaker and opened the lid to the water compartment. It hid a pack of Salems. He popped one out and offered it to her. She lit it. He opened the window and said, “Move your chair over here and direct the smoke outside, will you?”

  Connie took several drags before she risked getting up. Dodd pulled her chair abreast of his desk. She smothered a snort. He didn’t want his secretary to know when he’d had a smoke.

  “Well, Kyle was drunk as a skunk. I mean drunk.” She rolled the tip of the cigarette in the metal coaster he’d taken from under his chair leg and inhaled before speaking. She felt smoother inside and took another drag. “I was in a pretty desperate situation. You know how big Kyle is.”

  Dodd had quit writing and was watching her closely. Yet Connie felt her confidence return. “Well, you know how boys are.” She waited until he nodded. “Well, I was able to get out of the car still— ummmmm, still—”

  “Undamaged—unhurt,” Dodd said.

  “My dress was wrecked. It’s at home. It’s filthy with alcohol”—she curled her lips and held the cigarette away from them—“and blood.”

  “Whose blood?”

  Connie inhaled and took her time exhaling a thin stream that was swept out the window. “Kyle’s.”

  “Kyle’s?”

  “I smashed his face with the car door.” She offered Dodd a simple smile.

  “Did you hurt him in any other way?” Dodd shuffled through another pad of pastel papers.

  “No. That’s when I left.”

  “Alone?”

  “I had no choice. I was scared, considering he tried to rape me.” She felt a chill, remembering the dark woods.

  “He tried to? What about the gang of black men?”

  “I wouldn’t call them a gang. There were a lot of them at the Gentlemen’s Club but I didn’t see but a couple of them.”

  “Something’s not right here. Did the black men touch you?”

  Connie stubbed the cigarette out. She pushed her chair back and tried to read Dodd’s curious face. What was going on here?

  “Honey, I know this is a real traumatic thing for you. I hear there’s all kind of psychological damage done, but we want to punish them that have done wrong. Here, have another cigarette.”

  She took it and spent a great deal of time lighting it, slowly blowing out the flame, twirling the thing in her fingers before taking a drag. “Why am I here?”

  “Are you okay? Would you like a physical? I think you should have a physical because you’re all shook up. You’re blocking things out. It’s real common.”

  Connie stood up. “Look, Sheriff Dodd, if this is some excuse to play hugsy-feely with me, I am going to tell my mother. Physical, my ass.” She walked quickly to the door. Her sudden rise had upset her stomach. She reached for the doorknob.

  “Were you raped?” Sheriff Dodd called.

  She swung around, her mouth gaping with denial, when a flood shot out across the sheriff’s floor. Her stomach heaved and heaved until it was dry. Sheriff Dodd froze at his desk. Then, he began to swallow vigorously.

  Connie stepped over the puddle and returned to the desk. “I would just love a glass of water right now. And if you have a little squirt bottle of mouthwash—”

  He opened a desk drawer and produced a vial.

  “Thank you.” Connie sprayed her throat and swallowed the mint aftertaste. “Sheriff Dodd, I have told you the truth.”

  “There have been charges filed against a number of black men for attacking the two of you in Kyle’s car, beating him up, and taking you hostage. The Childerses have been to see me already today.”

  “The Childerses’!” said Connie. “It’s because he plays football, isn’t it? Because he signed with the Tide.”

  Sheriff Dodd moved closer to the open window and breathed in a lungful of air.

  “I tell you what. K
yle won’t be able to identify any of those men. If he does, he’s lying.”

  “Can you identify them?”

  “Yes,” she said, and then realized she’d answered too quickly. “The guy at the door—”she thought of his dark eyes but skipped over the urinators, because that would help make Kyle’s story truer—“and Dr. Feets.”

  “Dr. Feets?” said Sheriff Dodd, unbelieving.

  “The guy who bandaged my foot and drove me back to Pealiquor Ridge. Dr. Feets.” As she said the name, she began to giggle. How brilliant. Dr. Feets was a code. The sheriff couldn’t go to the Gentlemen’s Club and ask for Dr. Feets. He’d get laughed out of there, men claiming to know Dr. Lung or Dr. ’Sophagus but not Dr. Feets. She laughed and felt the room sway.

  “The law defines rape as against your will. It is obvious to me from this interview that nothing done last night was against your will.”

  “Everything that happened at Pealiquor Ridge was against my will. Kyle Childers almost raped me. Write that down.” She stood up and reached across the table and grabbed his pen. She scribbled words onto the crime report. “This is what happened. Nobody beat Kyle up. Go smash your face with the front door and see what it looks like. I tell you what pisses me off. I was robbed of a chance to go to the prom. Put that down. Kyle robbed me of that. I want him arrested.”

  “Get ahold of yourself!” he barked, and grabbed at her, wrenching her fingers as he snatched his pen back.

  She cupped her hand and said quietly to his flushed face, “You hurt me.”

  He gathered the papers to his side of the desk away from her and clicked the pen several times. “We are still investigating this incident. You had better watch yourself. Drinking underage is a crime.”

  “There are worse.” She limped away, circled the puke, and walked out the door, leaving Sheriff Dodd shaking. Damn, she thought. Mama materialized in the gray light of the hallway. She looked drawn as a dried apple but her arms were strong around Connie.

  “It’s okay, Mama. Nothing happened last night. I wasn’t raped by any black men. Kyle made that whole story up so he wouldn’t look like an ass. I admit I’m hung over, but all I need is sleep. And”—she squared her shoulders—“I think Sheriff Dodd is a fucking pig.”

  Mama slapped her face hard and then spun around abruptly. Mama’s sniffles came like a weak cry in the tunnel leading to the far-off door of sunlight.

  Connie was too shocked to yell. She counted out loud until Mama’s footsteps quit.

  Jessamine emerged from the shadows in the hallway. “Come on. Mama didn’t mean it. It was probably the word fucking.”

  “Why did she slap me?”

  “God, Connie, she thought you were raped. I mean, your clothes were torn and bloody. She was probably relieved you weren’t.”

  “I don’t believe that. It has to do with Sheriff Dodd.” Connie said. “He’s a fucking prick. I thought he’d be on my side, after what I’ve done for him and Mama. But there he sat, not believing me. I love the Crimson Tide, but goddamn, it doesn’t mean I have to service their players. And there was a minute in there when I thought he was checking me out, you know what I mean? If he’s that kind of shit, Mama doesn’t need him.”

  “I don’t think he’s the right man for Mama,” said Jessamine.

  “I wonder what happened on their last date,” Connie rubbed her smarting cheek.

  “Come on. Maybe you should apologize.”

  “Screw that. First I get dragged out of bed because someone says I’ve been raped. Then I have to put up with Dodd’s eyeballs, and then Mama slaps me because I wasn’t raped, and on top of that I am supposed to apologize?” Connie hobbled to the car. The pain in her foot reminded her that she needed fifty bucks to pay Dr. Feets and sixty bucks for the beauty salon. She couldn’t get her hands on that kind of money, especially since she only made tips. That pissed her off even more. She got in the backseat, slammed the door hard, lit a cigarette she’d swiped from Dodd, and blew the smoke at the back of Mama’s head.

  HATTIE BOHANNON

  Her first reaction to the fiasco had been anger at her daughter. Why couldn’t Connie go to the prom and return without scandal? As the pieces of the story came out and she understood Connie’s fear and courage, she felt ashamed of herself.

  In the afternoon, Hattie climbed the steps and went into the girls’ bedroom. Connie was asleep on the lower bunk, her face scrubbed and pale. Hattie bent to touch her forehead and kicked an ashtray hidden under the bed. She pulled back, gritting her teeth. It took several minutes of strong breathing to dissipate the anger she felt.

  Why was it so hard to simply hug this girl? She leaned against the top bunk and willed her hand to brush Connie’s brow. Warmth spread across her palm where they touched. Her anger softened.

  Connie’s eyes opened and she did not protest but lay under Hattie’s hand. “Kyle called me truck-stop girl.”

  “That’s not a bad thing,” said Hattie.

  “Yeah,” Connie shrugged.

  “I’m sorry,” said Hattie.

  A long sigh came from Connie. “Mama, are you going to kick their ass?”

  “Yes,” said Hattie. The church had started this holy war. The next move was hers.

  Paul Dodd came over that evening doused in the same aftershave he’d worn in his RV. The scent formed a small cloud on her porch, where they sat silently in the amber light of the fading day. Hattie closed her eyes. She was an overloaded electrical outlet, with cords crossing and burning, and here came a hand with one more wire, the wire that would blow the whole system to bits. Her eyes flew open and she breathed in Aqua Velva man. In the corner eave swayed a magnificent spiderweb, three feet across. The fat spider rested, the dark center of calm silver lines. It too had worked hard today, adding a foot of web, securing a large horsefly that hung like a ripe grape.

  “If Connie says nothing happened last night, there is no case,” said Paul. “As a mother, you wouldn’t want it otherwise.” He left his rocker and moved behind her and nuzzled her ear.

  It felt like a buzzing mosquito, something that would prick and draw blood and leave a demanding itch. Instead, she wanted a man who would police the world so her daughter could go to the prom without being attacked by a teenage boy. She wanted him to protect the truth, not merely the law. But he was a man, she realized, with flaws and scratches and itches. It was more than she wanted right now—to be his salve. What she wanted from him was unfair. To make her world right, safe, honest. To hold and protect her, to lift her when she was tired, to laugh at her jokes, to share her children’s woes, to offer solace and intelligence, guidance and help. Good Lord, she thought. What a price to pay for good sex.

  “I can’t see you anymore,” she said, with clarity.

  His hands fell to her shoulders, then commenced to squeeze them. He worked at the knots there, and she felt relief.

  “Paul, don’t.”

  He heaved a sigh. “I must,” he said. “Can I keep working your shoulders? I need to believe this.”

  “Please, don’t,” she said, her voice thin as a spider silk.

  He quit kneading but rested his heavy hands on her shoulders. “I did what you asked. I brought you your husband’s ashes. Did you love him so much you’ll always be his?”

  She was staring out at the truck stop and thinking of Oakley’s tobacco barn, tall and gray. Its planks and beams were stored under a tarp behind the garage. She’d burn them soon, in a memorial service for him. That would be fitting. Maybe after that she’d be ready for Paul Dodd. “I am so emptied out. I can’t love anyone right now,” she said.

  He moved away and leaned on the porch rail, the white web above his head like a halo. “I intended to marry this year.”

  She heard in that a further plea and turned this over in her head, but her heart did not jump-start. It beat on normally. “It’s only May,” she said.

  “So it is,” he said, and clomped down the steps. He bent and measured the grass, which was past the third knuckle on
his middle finger, ready to be cut.

  She almost expected him to wrestle the mower from the bed of his truck and power it up. The mower had a light in the front like the old super-deluxe-model vacuum cleaner Oakley had inherited from his mother. Oakley’s mother had traded two of her husband’s hunting dogs for it when a traveling salesman happened by, after the Tennessee Valley Authority brought light to Alabama. But Paul Dodd climbed into his truck. Fireflies dizzy with the dark flashed and dove above her overgrown yard. His headlights blasted them into obliteration.

  GERT GEURIN

  After the protest march, Miz Bohannon seen the error of her ways and broke it off with the sheriff. What a dog he turned out to be. He quit bringing his squad up for weekly breakfasts at the truck stop, and that hussy Ash Lee came back to work her wantonness in our parking lot.

  On the last Sunday before revival week, it was so humid every­body just wanted to ooze until fall, Reverend Peterson got hetted up in the pulpit about working for the Lord and wanting those of us in disreputable reputations to cease and desist. I studied on this but took my cue from the Lord God Himself. I had been given a mission and I was going to follow it through. My doctor said my blood has dropped down near normal, thanks to me getting off cigarettes.

  By the time I reached Reverend Peterson at the back of the sanctuary, I was bright with plans. The poor man had snakes in his own house but he did not know it. “I ain’t going to quit my job,” I said.

  He looked puzzled, like he couldn’t place where I work, and then said, “Of course not. Labor is a gift to God.”

  I gave him a big powdery hug that left him gasping and sneezing. Lord, I felt powerful.

  It was time to take action, what with the protest and Jessamine’s soiled reputation and that wild animal that attacked our dear Connie and ruined her beautiful dress. Miz Bohannon was too sunk in herself to defend her family. She said to me, “Gert, I watch those men playing video games in the back room of the truck stop and I just don’t get it. If they want real bloodshed in life, they ought to try being a single working mom.” This worried me as to her state of mind.