RUBY MASON STARTS AWAKE, her eyes tracking so fast they might leave their sockets. 3:37. She spends the next two hours and twenty-three minutes thrashing. Daughters. You think you’re done fretting when they move out, but that’s when the worry only revs up.
At six she pulls the phone from the charger, calls before she’s even put her teeth in. “Myrtle. What’s going on with Olive Ann?”
“You’re a witch, Mama.” Olive Ann is Ruby’s grand, sixteen and gorgeous, more trouble than an old man spurting blood from a neck artery (Ruby once worked on one struck by a showerhead gone berserk). She’s only a year out of the EMT biz and good riddance to the heavy lifting, but she’d gladly go back to work if it meant she didn’t have to track after Olive Ann again. Talk about a heavy lift.
“That same boy?”
“That same bastard.”
“You call the cops?”
“They won’t so much as take a report.”
“Damn their eyes.” Ruby’s conversation is often inspired by Johnny Cash lyrics—her ambulance partner Charlie Cleaver played him round the clock. Charlie was long-married and ten years younger, so it helped that she knew how to keep a crush on simmer. She did sometimes daydream the wife dead of a massive stroke (quick, no lingering), but she also knows how to forgive herself a fantasy.
“I gotta work today. But you don’t gotta look.” Myrt’s snivel means please.
“I’ll look. I’ll give her what-for.”
“Thank you, Mama.” Myrt’s slobbering now. Ruby has the sense not to remind her daughter how many times she had to go Myrtle-tracking, and anyway her own mother had plenty of Ruby-trouble to deal with. Four generations with an eye for the charming, hurting, out-of-control boys. “They’ve been hanging out in Pomelo.”
Ruby makes herself breathe. “All the way up there?”
“He’s been hunting.”
“Course he has.” Course he has a rifle. Johnny Cash warns against taking your gun to town, which is the wrong direction, but bracing. Her hand shakes, scrawling down directions to the hunting shack. Myrt hasn’t actually been out there, but after the cops went looking the last time, Olive Ann gave her what passes for an address. Probably not a turn signal of it’s true.
In the bathroom Ruby sees a ghost, not a witch, in the mirror. Blondes might attract trouble when they’re sixteen, but these days her skin’s hatched through with fine lines and her hair’s lightened to a pale yellow. Sparse too. She wishes it would just go white and get this old-lady business over with. She should cut it super short, spike it up, spray it stiff, but she still wears it pulled back from her face in a ponytail, same as Myrt, same as Olive Ann. Not that you’d otherwise miss that they’re kin: They’re all short and skinny with pert little breasts—only hers aren’t so pert anymore, Myrt’s neither. They all have the same long chin. Myrt’s classmates used to call her Reese Witherspoon.
What do Olive Ann’s classmates call her?
She’s at the school early, hoping to catch one of her granddaughter’s tight-lipped so-called friends, but that guidance counselor with the evil eye, stout Mrs. Starts-with-S, spots her at the security desk, elbows her past the guard, steers her to the guidance office. Speaks not a word, thereby making Ruby feel that she’s the one who’s ruined her life, thrown away her potential, blah blah. Her long chin juts out in defiance. She didn’t go to this school—she went to Due East High in its last days of so-called Freedom of Choice, just before full integration—and because she was a model student there, she resents this treatment. In fact she resents all guidance counselors because, despite her straight A’s, not a one ever suggested she go to college. No, she was relegated to the B track, for average students, and there she stayed, taking business English and math. Not that she didn’t enjoy those subjects—she found the clear rules comforting—but it still steamed her that nobody thought she could do the harder stuff. The impatient counselor who added up her credits before graduation asked if she was planning to look for work, as if that was the only option for the Ruby Masons of the world. It was, in fact, the only option she’d imagined.
Olive Ann came here for the International Baccalaureate program, the harder stuff Ruby once craved, offered only at this one school that would otherwise be one hundred percent juvenile delinquents. Now Olive Ann’s on the path to becoming one herself. She no longer makes the grades that got her here, and the counselor’s hell-bent on punishing Ruby for that.
“Has she gone missing again?”
“Only since last night.” Now she feels tricked into snitching.
“Maybe she showed up in homeroom.” They both know this is not remotely possible, but the counselor checks a schedule and disappears down the hall for an eternity. Ruby’s certain this is another trick to make her report the worst thing her granddaughter’s ever done, when it’s only that she’s so boy crazy she’ll follow them anywhere, delinquents or not.
Mrs. S-whatever returns with pursed lips, retakes her seat, strokes away importantly at her keyboard. Then she beckons. Ruby rises reluctantly. She’s not sure what she sees when she looks at the scores—she herself did not take the PSAT.
“Perfect scores, verbal and math.” The counselor sneers: “Perfect. She could go to Vanderbilt, Emory. Princeton! Or could have, before—”
Ruby cuts her off. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
And cheerful, helpful Ruby Mason, the very Ruby who once volunteered to straighten desks and hand out exams, flips the guidance counselor the bird and hightails it out of there. Like grandmother, like granddaughter. Or vice versa.
Might as well head straight out to Pomelo and spend the day poking her nose in abandoned barns and chicken coops. Those two could be anywhere, but like the sucker she is, she’ll follow Olive Ann’s directions first. She pumps gas, resenting every dollar ticking higher. Her luck, she’ll blow a tire on the back roads, but what can you do. You don’t see the current version—Olive Ann’s petulant face made up last year like some porn star and this year stripped bare, so that the big ugly bull ring across the middle of her nose stands out all the more. No, Ruby doesn’t see this year’s face. She sees the three-year-old, the beaming slip of a thing in her pink Sunday school dress who tucked her hand into her grandmama’s and made up for every mistake Ruby ever made. Driving out to Pomelo is guaranteed to bring those mistakes back one by one. She frets that Olive Ann’s guessed somehow about her past. You got to let me get through this the way you got through it, G.M. So I can know who I am.
“Olive Ann, you are sixteen years old. We know who you are!” She heads up the highway, moving her lips though no sound comes out, beaming messages to her granddaughter as she passes car lots and fortune tellers and the tree-stump guy. Her past comes with the messages, that time when she was sick of being the cheerful, helpful girl, when she was bored comatose by her job. She’d applied for every secretarial job in town, but jobs weren’t so easy to come by in the seventies, not with all the military wives and war widows wanting them too. After she took the civil service test, her father wrecked the car the morning of her interview, and the Marines didn’t call again. She was stuck in the same crappy dime store where she’d worked all four years of high school. Dying.
She met him—the love of her life, her ticket out—at the Yankee, where she headed most every night because it passed the endless dead time. Between the jarheads and the boys she’d gone to school with, she never had to pay for a beer. Her mother protested that Baptists weren’t supposed to drink but finally gave up (maybe in her day she’d sipped a few beers herself). Anyway, Ruby was sure her mother would like this vet, a corporal who would’ve made sergeant, he said, if his lieutenant hadn’t had it in for him. That was Nam—fun times. Everybody called him Randy because supposedly he was a hound dog, but with her he made it a long flirtation. Let her win at pool when he otherwise owned the table. Round after round of Heinekens instead of the PBRs on tap that other Marines bought her. Heinies in the bottle, he called them. Took a week to even ask her out.
He was skinnier even than she was, cargo pants slipping down his hips and a wispy mustache on his narrow upper lip. Heavy lidded. Had a look in those small brown eyes, deep hurt or soulfulness, and how was she supposed to know which unless she followed him where he wanted to take her?
Gladys didn’t like him after all, not a bit, complained about his unshaven chin, scruffy hair. “He’s a sweetheart, a perfect gentleman,” Ruby protested. Stroking her cheek with the back of his hand, Randy was as tender as her little brothers when they thought nobody was looking.
At least her mother didn’t find out that he dealt (uppers, downers, acid, mescaline) or that Ruby tried a benny on his dare. She liked the way it lifted the top of her head. None of the paranoia she felt with weed or hash, and once Randy started doling them out, the workday sped by. After a while, he said maybe she didn’t need to go to work. He’d take care of her.
She was happy to jump, but how was she going to tell her mama, raising those two boys on a piddling paycheck? Gladys, always saying thank goodness her daughter wasn’t one of those college kids burning flags, needed every dollar her daughter gave her. But Ruby screwed up a double dose of courage and watched from a great distance, high over the kitchen where her mother ranted. “I’ll visit,” she murmured.
“No you won’t. No you most certainly will not, not when you’re shacking up with that boy who looks like he just got out of jail.” Ruby was shocked her mother even knew the phrase shacking up. Gladys commenced to cry, and now Ruby had the cover she needed to pack, to be the one who could carry on an adult conversation without breaking down. She filled the big ungainly suitcase with the bikinis and sexy nightgowns she’d acquired with her employee discount. Randy’s Mustang was parked outside, waiting.
The bridge is already coming up—time flies when you’re remembering speed—and she has to pull over to read Olive Ann’s directions in her own rushed hand, her once-exemplary Palmer penmanship deteriorated into a geezer scrawl. She knows full well what she’s doing, stalling this way. That bridge is the crossing where she first departed the workaday world for her new reality, or maybe her new unreality. Life with Randy.
She pulls back onto the road and, a hundred yards later, bumps onto the bridge’s roadway. The Lowcountry is magical all over, but once you leave town it’s wild too. Temperamental. Peaceful one minute, raging the next. Crossing this bridge always cracks her heart. The old one was lower to the water—hard to picture it exactly, when those days began and ended in blur. What hasn’t changed is the clumps of cordgrass in both directions. Sky meets water till it doesn’t matter which is which. An ibis’s legs so spindly they disappear into the dazzle. The patience of it, hunting solo, the way it’s solitary when all the other birds are fussing or flying off in little gangs.
Out here you might see a bobcat streaking through slash pines: big, strange, coiled tight. Or a boar snouting its way through a field of stubble—the size of it—and feel a power beyond reckoning. Tyger tyger, burning bright. Sixth grade, the last poem anybody ever asked her to memorize.
Third right past the bridge. Paved and dirt coexist out here, and street signs only stand where teenage boys have decided it’s not worth the trouble to steal them. She takes the third right, if you don’t count the funeral home. The road’s paved smooth and takes her down to a creek—Myrt said the shack is close by the water. Ruby could live in the Lowcountry till she’s a hundred and two and still not know all the creeks and gullies, all the paths water finds. Big old live oaks, moss hanging down. Green even in deep winter.
Randy had himself a trailer, a futuristic Airstream, a shiny space-age capsule that was, in its way, as sexy as his Mustang, and a little plot of land down a pocked dirt road somewhere near here. She was used to tight spaces, but the Airstream squeezed tighter. From the start, Randy acted penned in when they were both inside. Most days he took off with his rifle after she brought him his coffee.
And wasn’t back till afternoon, which meant they didn’t start popping pills till the time the lawyers in town started shaking their martinis. Randy liked a buzz on when he skinned a critter out by the grill. It helped her with the cooking too—she swallowed down her squeamishness and got good with rabbit stew. Fricasseed the squirrels, poor things. Didn’t know what hit ’em. Thank goodness he dragged the deer away for dressing.
At first she went with him, a couple of nights a week, back to town and the Yankee, where he sold his wares out of her suitcase in the Mustang’s trunk. But the combination of all the bennies she’d swallowed at the trailer and all the beer she drank at the bar made her swing between wanting one more, one more, just one more, and feeling like she was about to puke her brains out. When Randy said maybe she’d like to stay home one night, watch TV and maybe fix herself up some, she took the hint. After a while they were both glad for the space between them. She could tear through the Airstream, leave every surface shining, and then spend delicious hours alone, writing her dreams in shorthand, though sometimes in the morning she couldn’t make full sense of what she was trying to tell herself.
What did he do all morning in the woods? He could have found himself a squirrel to shoot in three minutes. She took her own walks through the bramble. One day she counted a dozen buzzards gathered in a big old live oak, waiting on something to die. First they looked like church elders, and then she thought: no, the choir. Randy told her to watch for gators, but there wasn’t much fresh water back there, and she’d rather make her way to the salt marsh anyway, because no matter how many times you saw a blue heron, it was a brand-new thrill when it lifted for takeoff, the same way the top of her head lifted off after the first benny.
When she told Randy she’d seen a baby godwit, he looked at her like she was talking Greek. She only knew what half the birds were called, but Randy couldn’t name a single creature because he came from Cleveland, which she pictured as a city of concrete blocks. She joked that he wouldn’t know a dodo from a sandpiper, but he narrowed those small brown eyes. “Just kidding,” she whispered and felt it as a slap when he answered: “Maybe don’t kid around with a guy who’s seen what I’ve seen.”
She tried to put her arms around him by way of apology, but he pushed her away, though later that night he did brush her cheek with the back of his hand. She beamed a message to Gladys: Just a sweetheart, Mama.
Olive Ann’s directions say park in the cul-de-sac—a cul-de-sac back here, a subdivision though there’s nothing but woods to divide, much less subdivide, with the same mix of houses you get in town, fancy and plain, brick and frame, not a one as small or as shabby as the one she grew up in. She parks by the curb-less grass, imagines eyes watching her from that picture window.
Paper in hand, tempted to wave, she goes looking for a path. She’s sure it’s Olive Ann’s fiction until the path appears, pine needles beaten down to a walkway. Now she’s in a fairy tale, following a trail of breadcrumbs. The light conspires with the treetops. She takes a right where the needle-path branches. Jumps over a shallow ditch. Out of nowhere, an enormous stump—a giant’s stump, though maybe that’s the wrong fairy tale—and behind it the very same ramshackle cabin she conjured when Myrt first said the words hunting shack. One room, probably, planks chipped and gouged, rusting tin roof. The firepit outside is a precarious old thing, concrete crumbling between the bricks.
Ruby doesn’t say a word, just stands there until the door creaks and he comes out. The bastard, she’s sure, though she’s never before been granted a sighting. He’s six feet at least, gangly—all the females in her family go for skinny—and a color that means he’s part white and part something else, Black or Yamassee or Vietnamese or a mix, all of the above, his hair in wiry black curls with a reddish tint when the clouds let the sun through.
He’s wearing a dress, a reality so strange that it takes her a minute to see it’s Olive Ann’s, from when she was still in her porn-star phase, a stringy-strapped, silky slinky sheath in a color that matches his skin. The dress came to Olive Ann’s ankles but stops at his knees. He’s going commando underneath, which means Ruby can see everything. She has to swallow back well hung, words Charlie Cleaver once used to describe one of their naked crazies. Johnny Cash sings “A Boy Named Sue.”
She says it loud and plain: “I came to take Olive Ann home.”
The bastard in the dress gives her a coy look, or maybe he’s shy. In a husky, breathless tone he’s learned from Beyoncé, he says: “They’re not here. They’re out hunting.”
Randy lectured how hard it was to get Benzedrine, how pricey, blah blah, how she better try some other stuff. But she knew the bennies, trusted them. While he was out hunting, she sneaked one out of his stash in a cowboy boot he never wore. Groping for it in the space where they piled their shoes, a so-called closet as narrow as a coffin standing on end, she already felt high—what if he came back?—and gulped it down dry. Tasted a bitterness she’d never known before. Thou shalt not steal. She walked out of the Airstream through the woods in a new direction altogether and waited for the top of her head to lift off.
She wandered a long way until she discovered a little stream that led to the other side of the creek. A bobcat swam out past the brown clumps, but she wasn’t afraid—cats hated water, so it couldn’t be a real bobcat. Oh no. Oh no no no. She was tripping again the way she did that time with the hash that was maybe laced with acid. Little fairies flitted through the cordgrass, delicate and translucent, their lights sparkling. Bells chimed. She ran for the Airstream, water moccasins rearing up out of every puddle.
Randy was sitting at the linoleum slab in what passed for a kitchen, though it was really just an aisle in their spaceship. He didn’t have to say a word because they didn’t need to say things out loud. They had a brainwave connection.
“I did,” she said. “I did take it I’m sorry I needed to but it was the wrong one and now I’m so scared please help me I’m hearing music I need you to—”
He broke in before she reached stroke my cheek. “I’ll help you,” he said, and rose to his full height, which wasn’t much, maybe five seven or eight, too short to be an astronaut but not too short for a soldier. He used the palm of his hand, not the back, to slap her full across her cheek, and then he stood there and said she was never going to touch his stash again, which of course she’d never do again, why would she do that when right now her heart might burst out of her body, a thousand bloody vessels, little squirrel veins, little pieces of pellet piercing the globules. He stomped off and didn’t even bother to take his rifle.
But that night on the thin little mattress on the shelf that passed for a bed, he said men who hit women were scum and then—it was hard to say when it happened because she was still tripping, though it was getting easier to sort real from unreal—he sobbed in a way she’d never seen a grown man do, not even in a movie. Slapped himself hard on one side of his face and punched the other. She stroked the patches of uneven stubble until his sobs subsided into hiccups and knew she’d always forgive him because what were all those years of Sunday school for? It was hurt that drove him, and she’d been sent to comfort him.
The bastard in the slinky dress disappears into the shack and brings back a folding chair. She plops herself down, grateful for the metal at her back if not the hard bottom. Then he fetches another and they sit like that, companionable, till she feels a chill in the air and wonders if he’d like to fetch himself a sweater.
“I’m fine.” He’s easygoing as he can be. “I’m Diamond, by the way.”
“Ruby.” Put them together and they could be the crown jewels.
“O.A. said you were a Ruby. Can I get you a blanket?”
“Good night. Do I look that old?”
“My grandmama doesn’t like it when people think she’s old either.” The falsity of his pitch drives her crazy, but otherwise she’s starting to like him.
“Well, I am old, old enough to say what I see. A boy in a girl’s dress.”
He draws a deep breath and studies one knee, crossed over the other beneath the satin.
“Maybe that was rude.”
“I’m not a boy. It’s hard for”—probably pulling back old ladies—“some people to understand, but I identify as a girl.” That too drives her nuts. You are or you aren’t. What was this identify business?
“You’re a girl then.”
He looks up. “Thank you.” They both sit in the enormity of it, but he can’t help himself, he has to gush: “Most people can’t accept it ’cause they never knew anybody like me before.”
“Son.” She hears that son’s not right but pushes on. “‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’” She’s stunned that after all these years she can still recite the verse, but she did once know her Scripture. “We knew people like you—we just didn’t know who they were. It just wasn’t an option.”
Options, ha. She had no car, no sense left between the slaps and the punches and the new pills he wouldn’t even name—just speed, just take them—her teeth gone soft as Play-Doh. What teeth were left. Always, always after, he begged for her mercy till he looked like a shot-up rabbit. What choice did she have but to stroke his cheek and turn her own?
One rainy night when he’d done no hunting, when they’d finished what little they wanted from a can of soup heated to lukewarm, she picked up the two sloshing bowls and put them in the sink. But as she turned, he cried out: “Stop looking at me like that!”
She didn’t think she’d been looking at him, though she was high enough that she couldn’t say for sure. She was high enough that she didn’t know what to do but stand there, two steps away from the little metal-rimmed table, as he grabbed up the rifle propped by the door. He’d never before threatened her with the knife, much less the gun. Her brain went full to the floor. Like the bobcat like the fairies not real not real.
He cocked the rifle. She knew not to run—couldn’t have anyway. He blocked the door. He aimed his barrel straight at her right eye, but how’d she seen him do that? She must have been looking at him. This always happened. She always saw how really it was her fault. She turned her head and they stood like that for a thousand years till Randy threw the rifle down and scrunched against the door, sliding down, sobbing.
She knew better this time than to try to comfort him. Silent as could be, she backed up on her bare feet, eyes averted, all the while wanting to crash past him out the door but knowing she had to hide in a spaceship with nowhere to hide. Every inch of her trembled. Only a few steps to what Randy called the head but it was miles through a jungle like the one he must have dragged himself through in Nam, a tangle of vines and roots where now she hovered, a diaphanous fairy, who despite the force vibrating her veins and her blood and her very skin could still, once she made it safely inside the bathroom, slide the space-age door into its lock without making a sound. Randy could kick that lock open in the time it took her to squat down and shield her head from his blows. Still she squatted.
Her bare foot tapped against the floor, loud as a war drum that would give her away. She couldn’t hold the squat. Her knees would snap. They were already snapping. She pulled herself up and sat on the toilet, bare foot still tap tap tapping, while time did its terrible thing. Decades later, she heard his sobs and curses subside. Hours or minutes or seconds later, the door slammed. For all she knew he was lying in wait right outside. For all she knew he still had the rifle. More hours minutes seconds before she left the bathroom and circled round the Airstream. The rifle was missing from its place by the door. Nothing to do but sit in the red space-age chair, wait for the door handle to turn. Wait for the verdict.
When the door finally creaked and she saw that his face was set midway between the need to kill her and the remorse that was already overcoming him, she thought she might be safe. The rifle was not in his hand and not in its place. He wouldn’t look at her but scuttled to the sink, where he stood with one hand on the metal. With the other, he scratched himself all over. She went looking for the calamine lotion that wasn’t in the bathroom because they never thought to buy practical things. She came back to the sink with the best she could find, the baby oil she put on her legs, and held it up, a peace offering. She coaxed him to bed without a single word, curled up beside him, oiled his back to stop the itch till he threw her off.
All that night she kept her vigil, her own body itching all over. He stopped shaking and then he must have slept. She didn’t, not for ten seconds, though who knew about time anymore? She’d already forgiven Randy, after all he’d seen, but she’d have to go at first light.
When dawn threatened, she turned the handle oh so silently and left the door ajar—she couldn’t risk a click. Into the foggy morning, down the dirt road to another, then the main drag. A Little Debbie delivery driver passed her on the side of the marsh. She saw herself hurrying along, a wispy vision in the wispy fog. In his rearview the driver must have seen that vision too, because he pulled over on the spongy shoulder and waited.
Safe in the cab, she saw her bare feet and the dress she’d slept in. Maybe the driver saw the bruises too. Maybe he realized, as she was starting to realize, that she’d left without even keys. He told her she looked like she’d had some crazy night. Did she want him to take her to the ER in town? They could help her, he said, though he didn’t sound that hopeful.
She begged him instead to drop her off at her mama’s house, and watched his face lift a little at that word mama. Soon enough she watched him steer the wide delivery truck through the narrow back streets. Her family lived in the border zone between the white part of town and what most white folks still called the colored streets. Having grown up practically next door, Ruby knew that Black folks had gotten a deal even lousier than the deal her mother got when she married Ruby’s father. The driver, who was white, didn’t seem surprised by the houses. Maybe his street wasn’t any great shakes either.
He was a good man to keep the truck idling outside till he made sure she found the key under the brick. She waved at the open door and he waved back, but as soon as he took off she let out a whimper. A good man and who knew when she’d find another?
She crept through the living room, making the sound of a high-tension wire. Her conscience burned a hole through her right eye. The house might have been shabby on the outside—some of the asbestos shingles were cracked, the roof checkered with bald spots from the last big storm—but inside it was tidy, cereal bowls stacked in the sink the way she’d left those soup bowls. Her mother had a regular ride to the crab factory, and her brothers had already caught the bus to school, but she felt the three of them in the house the way she’d felt her father’s absence after he slunk off again.
In her little curtained nook, she saw that her brother Fuller had moved his things in. She climbed into the narrow unmade bed, where she smelled Fuller’s boy smell, sweat and semen and pot, different from Randy’s man smell but close enough. Would he come looking for her? Fetch the rifle he’d thrown in the woods? No, no, he was always, always overcome with sorrow. In a few days, he might go looking in the Yankee, but she wasn’t going back to the Yankee anytime soon, not with these teeth.
She wept bitter tears that she hadn’t left with a handful of bennies, but finally she slept. The big birds came then, pelicans and wood storks and herons, some wading in the water and some diving for their daily fish-bread and some unfolding their wings for takeoff, which she knew, even while she was still in her dream, augured well.
The sun’s behind the clouds and the boy finally realizes it’s winter, so he goes in for a jacket just as Olive Ann appears from behind the shack in camouflage overalls, a rifle held low at her side. At least she has no dead rabbits in her hand. Still, the rifle freaks Ruby out. “You look like a cross between the Beverly Hillbillies and the National Guard.”
Olive Ann harrumphs. “Where’s—”
“The bastard? He’s fetching a jacket.”
“She.” Diamond is back, covered with a sky-blue shawl. “She was fetching.”
“She was fetching,” Ruby repeats. She looks Olive Ann’s way. “What’s your story?”
“I’m discerning, Grandmama.”
Ruby raises an eyebrow at discerning. “How’d you even get out here?”
“Hitched. We can’t go back.” Olive Ann plants the rifle in the ground. “School’s hell.”
“High school’s hell no matter who you are. You think I liked it?” She’s lying through her dentures. She loved school, the order of it, the way they all went back to homeroom at the least hint of a hallway fight so they could talk it out or—what usually happened—sit in safe stony silence.
“I promised your mama I’d get you home. I’ll give that school what-for.”
“It’s not just the school. The other kids.”
“You could pass the GED tomorrow. Does Princeton take the GED?”
“I don’t want to go to Princeton.”
One thing about Olive Ann, you know when you’re getting nowhere. Ruby turns to the bastard. “You can’t stay out here, Diamond. Let’s get you back to your folks.”
“Kicked me out.”
Is that even legal? Maybe Myrt—but Myrt doesn’t have the room. Doesn’t even like the bastard.
Oh no. Oh hell no.
Spent the better part of her life trying to save people in the back of an ambulance, and now she’s supposed to take this one into her little house? The neighbors are mean sons of bitches who call themselves Christians. As she often does when panic threatens, Ruby imagines the taste of a Heineken, the fourth or fifth sip after the sting, and tells these two she has to head back to town for a meeting. Olive Ann knows what meeting means.
She rises, unsteady after the long sit in the folding chair. “Buy y’all a shrimp basket on the way home?” Diamond looks ready to roll for a shrimp basket, but she’ll have to wait on Olive Ann to make up her mind. While she’s waiting, Johnny Cash sings the apocalypse song, the one with the father hen calling his chickens home.
Olive Ann pouts. “Where’s Diamond supposed to go?”
Ruby feels the adrenaline surge the way it did when that old man’s artery was spurting every whichway. Baptized in the blood, she told him, and made him smile. He hung on for sixty seconds, might have been, after that. “I don’t want that rifle in my Nissan.”
Olive Ann gives her a look, drags the rifle along the ground, and disappears with Diamond into the dark of the cabin. They come back wearing their backpacks.
“You don’t have any drugs in there, do you?”
Olive Ann’s face distorts with disdain, and Diamond says: “They won’t even give me hormones.” Ruby can’t read her dark eyes. Maybe the hope that Ruby will take her in? Maybe just the hope that nobody will beat her up today.
“Come on, you two. Got to get a move-on.” She doesn’t know what her next moves are, but she’s already giving the neighbors what-for.
Valerie Sayers, Kenan Professor of English emerita at Notre Dame, is the author of The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories as well as six novels, including The Powers (Northwestern) and Brain Fever (Doubleday). Her prose appears widely in magazines and anthologies. Among her literary honors are an NEA fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. Her books have been on best-of-the-year lists at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune.
Photo by T I M E L O R D on Unsplash
