Saving Ruby King

by Catherine Adel West

  Sara moves slightly aside and tries to dodge Saul’s hand, but it quickly grabs her and throws her across the floor near Naomi’s feet.

  Reaching for her friend, Naomi meets Sara’s gaze, a trickle of blood ornamenting her full lips as she mouths the word “No.”

  Viciously hauling Sara up by her shoulders, Saul shakes her. “You leavin’ me girl? You leavin’ me?”

  There’s a low moan from Sara, somewhere deep within, an unfixable place. Naomi listens for footsteps, voices, any sign of deliverance, but she hears only the thud of her friend’s body hitting the floor and the smack of hand across skin as Saul strikes Sara again.

  Naomi feels her fists hitting Saul’s back before her brain tells her she can’t help her friend like this. They do no more damage than a mosquito does with an elephant; Saul tosses her off just as easily as the insect. Naomi crashes to the ground, toppling over the pine table, the air in her lungs hovering somewhere above her body for the moment. Sharp knives of glass from the overturned table glisten in her blurred vision.

  It always amazes Sara how soft Saul’s fingers are, even as they are squeezing her throat, ten velvety light brown digits bruising and crushing her fragile windpipe. He shouldn’t have beautiful hands.

  Sara stops struggling. What good does fighting do anyone? Let go. She’d see her mom, Sophia. She misses her mom. She misses looking at her calming, golden-brown eyes. She misses reading to someone she loves.

  But she’s not dying. She’s breathing, easier. King Saul’s grip loosens. His eyes, green as spring grass, go wide, close and he falls forward. A heap of dead muscle and bone that she pushes off her.

  Behind him, Sara sees Naomi, a large shard of glass in her hands baptized in blood.

  CHAPTER 9

  JACKSON

  FIVE DAYS BEFORE ALICE KING’S DEATH

  These walls close in on me after church ends, when the Benediction is delivered, hands are shaken, hugs and parting words spoken. As the congregation slowly filters outside, I gather myself alone in an office once occupied by my grandfather, Andrew Morrison, and for a very brief time, my father, Thomas Potter. The books and shelves, framed pictures and degrees, I find it suffocating. Its history and expectation alone could be crushing. The unyielding guilt inside of my heart at my inability to stop it. I never wanted this office, this title Pastor.

  I know the weight of it. I saw how it aged my father in the short time he stood behind the pulpit where I now plant my feet Sunday after Sunday.

  Mom knew how to carefully navigate the city, its invisible rules, and somehow keep her dignity. I remember going with her once to the Chicago Theatre. The ticket taker was smiling, handing each ticket to each white patron, but flung it at Mom when it was our turn. She promptly turned around and left the tickets. She took us for ice cream instead.

  Mom and Dad witnessed Chicago at it’s very worst, boiling with hate. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. Our hopes for self-sustaining pride or peaceful resolution bled out on the wood floors of the Audubon Ballroom and the concrete balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Civil rights leaders, a president and his brother were bloodied and murdered before television screens. America was on fire.

  I asked Dad once, it happened to be the week before he died, why he did any of it. Why serve when it doesn’t make a difference, to congregants who’ll constantly let you down, who don’t see the burdens you bear on their behalf day in and day out? And, my dad, deep thought creasing his skin of burnt umber, answered, “God does it all the time for us, son. And I guess it’s about courage, too. The courage to love despite loss of any kind. If you can’t see anything good in yourself or the world right now, see that part. See courage. That will guide you like it guides me.”

  Knocking on the door interrupts my thoughts. Alice King rushes past the threshold, a manila folder clutched in her hands. She normally waits for permission to enter. She normally waits for permission to do most everything.

  “Pastor, I know I’m disturbing you and I greatly apologize, but it’s important. It’s Lebanon.”

  “Yes?”

  “You know, I’ve been doing the accounting for the church. Making sure everything is correct, orderly, honest.”

  “You do a wonderful job, Alice. Couldn’t ask—”

  “No. No I don’t.”

  Alice sits down across from me, wringing her hands. “I’ve stolen, from the church, for Lebanon...so he could keep up payments for the bakery, to pay it off. The mortgage payment is due on Thursday.”

  The folder now meekly lies on my desk, thick with papers, ones and zeroes, facts and figures, ripe with the possibility of sending Lebanon, and Alice, to jail for God knows how long. Is she intentionally wanting to ruin her life? Does she want me to escort her to the police station? The church would never forgive me for not taking action. If I’d manage to keep it quiet, Lebanon still would know I’d helped Alice and he’d take the opportunity to make me pay for doing so. Even from a jail, he could do damage. He could talk, get others gossiping. He could still turn the church against me. Just an accusation, true or not, has devastating consequences. A small crack in trust becomes a gigantic fissure, decimating a once rock-solid foundation.

  “What are you asking me to do?”

  “I was hoping you’d have an idea,” she says, her eyes wide in anticipation; she’s waiting for an answer to it all, a way to leave Lebanon for good, to give Ruby and herself some hope. Freedom. She wants me to come to her aid by taking action against Lebanon. She’s waiting for an answer to her freedom.

  “You should go home. On Sunday, I’ll announce to the church board you’re stepping down from the treasurer position, for personal reasons. Maybe I can use my savings or something to cover the missing money.” Walking over to the desk, I take the folder and place it in the top drawer. My hands are shaking. “I’ll figure some way to put the money back. Don’t worry. I won’t tell Lebanon you came here with this.”

  She bows her head low, takes deep breaths. “You weren’t gonna help me. Part of me knew that, but I hoped, I prayed I was wrong.”

  “He’s my friend, Alice. What good would locking him up do?”

  “He’s no more a friend to you now than he ever was a husband to me or a father to Ruby.”

  “So, this is worth you going to jail, too? Because that’s what would happen. You wouldn’t last a day there, Alice. You’re not strong enough to—”

  “Twenty years with Lebanon King. I’m stronger than you’ll ever know, Jackson. If those files put me in jail, so be it. But he’d be put away too, and at least Ruby would be safe!”

  She seems to be talking to herself more than having a conversation with me. “I tried. I prayed for him. Did what God asked, what my vows demanded. I loved him. Some broken part of me still does, but he can’t be saved. You made me believe once he could be, but he can’t.”

  Walking quickly back to the door, Alice opens it and adds, “You choosing him this last time over me and Ruby, maybe you can’t be saved either.” The suddenness of her departure is punctuated by the dull thump of the door closing behind her.

  If you can’t see anything good in yourself... See courage.

  I wait for a few minutes making sure Alice has left the church. Then I turn off the lights and head home.

  LAYLA

  My thighs are still burning as I leave the bus and run downstairs to catch the train at the 95th Red Line Station. Signs boasting a new station coming soon have been here for months and they haven’t so much as put a new tile down yet.

  A man peddling from one train car to the other offers candy, headphones, bootleg DVDs and tube socks. Body oils are fastened in bandolier-type belts crisscross on his chest. A younger man enters the opposite way, proclaiming, “Got dem squares. Eight-dollar packs. Got dat loud.”

  A hustler sits in the middle of the aisle and tries enticing us to play a shell game, alre
ady rigged in his favor. The train is a mobile market, squeezing together the good, the needy, the savage and the gullible.

  There is a man on the train who keeps looking for something in his bag. He takes out coins and old newspapers and used tissues. He mumbles to himself and I can’t really make out any of the words. He can’t find what he’s looking for so he keeps searching.

  I call Ruby’s phone. Straight to voice mail. Damn it.

  After Ruby tried to kill herself, she had a copy made of her house key and gave it to me. You know, just in case, she said. After the hospital, Ruby stayed with me. Becoming as much of a fixture at our house as the leaking faucet, the cracked third stair, the buckled roof tiles where the squirrels would get in and scurry about.

  I hated her. I loved her. I love her. I’m angry with her, for not doing more, the ways she harms herself. I’m scared of Ruby’s pain and how that pain consumes everything, how it consumes me.

  Memories and regrets and hopes are the annoying song on repeat in my head. The train flies down the tracks. I rock side to side and look through the graffiti-decorated window. This place, these gatherings of neighborhoods and streets and people are so easily dismissed by others and sometimes myself. The South Side. It is still magic. Troubled, but still magnificent. Dark and light and loud mingle, and I wish we could see our purpose, our gathered meaning. I wish I knew myself with some kind of certainty. I want to help her better. I want so badly to help Ruby.

  A bright voice declares my stop, 79th Street, is next. I don’t move from my seat. I still sit. I don’t want to leave, but the voice of the Three Women tell me to Go!

  The train stops. Doors open. Young men beat on upside-down ten-gallon buckets in the station, and a primal beat pulses through me, from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. The Bucket Boys move back and forth, twirl the sticks through their nimble, ebony fingers and wooden knocking provides a rat-tat-pop-boom over and over on those buckets. The blocks on this side of the city might stay this way forever, this violent and this beautiful and this hopeful and this tortured.

  Each street leading to her house shows some sort of contradiction of wealth and class. Broken beer bottles and plastic containers for cheap wine litter some properties. Other streets are pristine with perfectly cut grass and landscaping.

  There are boarded-up buildings and cellular stores boasting they accept Link cards. Through the asphalt canals of brick homes, side-by-side storefront churches, barbershops, hair salons and fast-food parlors that make up rowdy ’hoods, I see glimpses of a past imperfect and distant. I weave a familiar path of blocks as I make it to Ruby’s house.

  It’s so pretty. The nicest house on the block in fact. That’s what gets me every time I stand in front of it. One of the many brick bungalows, this is the only one on this stretch made of red brick. Shy buds of the apple blossom tree in the front yard yield tiny bursts of green.

  When Ruby and I were girls, we ran around the lawn and J.P. would watch us and sketch on blank pieces of paper. When you’re a kid there are details that are going to stick with you, but you don’t know the significance. You just remember silly games, the feeling of wet grass under your feet.

  As an adult, the things I remember now: we didn’t really go into the house. Momma and Auntie Alice sat on the front steps. Auntie Alice would wear long-sleeved sweaters even in the summer and I could see sweat on her forehead. Momma always held her hand. And they watched us. Then Momma and J.P. and I went home.

  Ruby looked sad and Auntie Alice looked even sadder when we left, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t know. When I did know, I still didn’t feel like I could do anything. If my father didn’t get involved, if he was seen as powerful in our community, but he felt powerless, what the hell could I do?

  That was the way I kept myself in denial. The easiest thing to do is nothing and we were all guilty of it. My parents. People in church. Our community. We sang our songs and prayed our prayers and talked in pleasantries, but very few of us really knew the business of the other. Though gossip would flow, secrecy also flourished. All the evil we find and leave be, we can’t be surprised when it visits, shows up all sharp teeth and vileness.

  The lock to this door doesn’t stick and seize up. I can easily fit in the key and I walk right in. Uninvited, just like that night when I found Ruby. I pray I won’t find her the same way.

  Go!

  “Ruby! Rue, you here?”

  No answer.

  The wind from the door feels like it’s pushing me farther into the house. I know where her room is and I move toward it. I see the portion of the floor where Auntie Alice lay dead a week ago.

  Crimson, in muted shades, still binds itself to the wood. There was an Oriental carpet there, but they probably had to throw it out or maybe it is evidence in her murder and locked up in a dusty lab. I don’t know the procedure. Most of my criminal or legal knowledge comes from movies and television shows.

  My legs work where my heart falters. I try to make no sound. No one seems to be home, but this house is watching. These walls know things I don’t know; things that would make a lesser person turn and leave.

  There are two breakfast bar stools knocked over in the kitchen and a sink full of dishes. A pearl necklace lies on the table.

  Auntie Alice’s craft room is the first door I come to. I enter. Gardenias. It smells like gardenias. A half-finished blanket, folded in thirds, lies across a wood chair. I know Auntie Alice loved to sew. She put tattered things back together in this little room. I close the door.

  Lebanon and Auntie Alice’s room is on the other side of the house beyond the bathroom where the door is open. I step quickly, lightly. The bed is unmade and Auntie Alice’s clothes hang in the closet. Limp ghosts of cotton and silk and chiffon in dull colors lightly billow from a weak draft in the floor. Long sleeves and even longer skirts, low heels. She didn’t like to be dressy, said it was vanity and being showy displeased God.

  She liked quiet things, flying under the radar. Everything Auntie Alice did was to avoid notice. Attention brought Lebanon and if he was in a mood, pain and trouble would follow. That trouble brought phone calls to my home in the middle of the night or early in the morning.

  Momma would answer those calls. Always. Dad stayed in their bedroom, but I know he was awake. I heard the floors creak as he paced back and forth. What are you supposed to say when a friend says her husband beats her? What do you do when you know your friend suffers? There are no rules, there is only listening. That’s what Mom did, that’s what I tried to do, but I can leave my ears open for only so long before my brain churns, makes plans.

  The room is humid and dense with an odor of musky, rotting leaves and incense. There’s a picture of Auntie Alice in a bronze frame smiling with Lebanon. I didn’t know she could do that. Smile. Normally the roundness of her face perpetually sagged, and it seemed her mouth could never turn upward. She was always crying or about to cry. The whites of her eyes, slightly yellowed like old lace, held water; a never-ending flow of tears just waiting to free themselves.

  I have all these bad memories of her.

  Memories, the good ones, are the ones Mom told me about when they were young, before Auntie Alice met Lebanon. Auntie Alice was witty and wanted to be a doctor and was a really good dancer. But that changed, not all of a sudden and at once, but gradually and irreversibly.

  Between the bedpost and the wall near the window something dully glints in the fading sunlight. My brain tells me what it is, my heart just doesn’t want to acknowledge the stiff, cold thing I hold in my hand. A bullet. But I can’t change what I see. Bend the shape of it into something pretty. A small thing causing such destruction, and it’s in his room. Which means Lebanon has or had a gun. Which means he very likely killed Auntie Alice. He certainly had the means to. Jesus, I knew it!

  And even telling this to my father, saying I found a damn bullet in Lebanon’s bedroom perhaps won�
��t be enough to convince him that Lebanon is someone beyond his reach.

  Out of Lebanon and Auntie Alice’s room, a smaller bedroom lies across the hall—and that room, that tiny box of a world, is Ruby’s.

  I open her door with the bullet still in my hand. There’s nothing on the walls but old pink paint. To the right is her small, creaky bed and a Bible in the middle partially covered by her grandma’s blanket. An ugly purple lamp. Her laptop. No Ruby. I want to wait for something, some clue as to where she is, but I also want to get the hell out of here before Lebanon comes back. I quickly pull open drawers and rummage superficially. A slightly open window allows a small breeze to animate the room. The hum of the laptop pulls my attention and I open it. Greyhound bus schedules from Chicago to Memphis, one way. The next one leaves in four hours. I scribble the bus number and time on a scrap piece of paper I pull from my pocket.

  My hand accidentally brushes a piece of paper on the nightstand that falls and floats under the bed. As I try to reach for it, I hear him laugh. I stuff the bullet and my scrap paper into my coat pocket.

  My bones melt and I start to tremble. I know my friend’s terror.

  CALVARY

  September 23, 1960

  Saul looks asleep on the floor. Sara stole the large yellow blanket from the desk of the church secretary, Sister Coates. Sister Coates kept it on hand as she always got “god-awful cold” in the building. Sara covered Saul, and she did so delicately. Crimson calmly soaks the wool shroud, a macabre sunset. She hates herself, for keeping some tattered remains of love for someone who did what he did to her. She still somehow loved the man who lied and beat and stole and raped and was her father.

  A voice from behind shakily says, “Tell me this is how you found him, Sara.”

  “You know I can’t do that Violet.”