“Give it a shot,” Maye said, handing over the cooler that had kept the malted from melting. “I bet it will be delicious. Straw is in the bag.”
“I thought we could eat outside like we did yesterday,” Ruby said, pointing to the sheet that covered the old, graying wood. “Kind of like a picnic. It’s such a nice day. Whaddya say we take the blanket and spread it out under that old redwood?”
Maye nodded and helped Ruby bring the sheet down the steps and under the only tree left alive in front of the house.
“There,” Ruby said, smoothing out the sheet. “This is such a good idea.”
She opened Charlie’s little cooler, lifted the lid off the tall Styrofoam cup, and sucked in her breath with delight. After unwrapping the straw and sticking it slowly into the center of the cup, which still, remarkably, had some whipped cream sitting on top, Ruby wrapped her wrinkly crimson lips around it and sucked in her first malted in fifty years.
“Oh, that’s good,” she said, dragging her finger through the whipped cream and tasting it. “I don’t know how I managed to live without that for so long.”
“I don’t want to be one of those nosy bodies, and you tell me straight off if I am,” Maye started, taking the opportunity of Ruby’s good mood to settle some things that had been bothering her. “But how do you manage? I mean, it’s just you out here, and I know that you breed the dogs on occasion, but by the looks of Puppy, it’s been a while since you had a litter. How do you manage, Ruby? How do you live out here on your own?”
“Oh,” the old woman said as she unwrapped her coveted sandwich. “There’s always a way. Papa built this house, I’ve never had to make a payment on it, and he owned some property in town that he rented out, like Hopkins Market, for instance. It’s Hopkins’s place, but it’s my father’s property. Property was always better than stocks, he’d say. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me to get by. And then, when I need to, I’ll just sell something I don’t need anymore to get a little extra. Things like old thirty-three records, or an antique lamp, or even—old clothes. Can you believe it? People actually buying your old clothes! And then those people sell them again to other people! I was never going to fit into any of that stuff again, anyway, even though some of it was real nice. So you do what you gotta do, that’s all.”
Maye attempted to visualize Ruby trying to sell her incinerated sweat suits to resale shops, and she grinned. And then she realized that it meant Ruby had been in town—Ruby had been in Spaulding—without consequence. Without anyone noticing her, much less lynching her. She thought then that perhaps she should tell Ruby of her run-in with Rowena, but decided not to ruin the old woman’s good mood. Maye had learned firsthand that Miss Ruby had a temper like Mount St. Helens—one moment, it seemed she was resting peacefully, and the next thing you knew, a red, glowing cinder was flying toward your head with the speed of a comet. With things going so well during their picnic, Maye certainly didn’t want to push her luck.
“So you’ve been to Spaulding to sell records and lamps and clothes,” Maye asked, smiling at Ruby wryly. “How did you manage that?”
“Eh.” Ruby laughed slightly. “It’s easier than you think. People are too wrapped up in themselves to pay attention to anything else these days. Everyone is invisible to everybody else. You just gotta know how to dress to blend in.”
Maye knew that all too well herself. Unless she was disrobing or performing magic tricks with her protruding abdomen at parties, hardly anyone in Spaulding had ever noticed her at all.
“Now, you think you’re the one with all the questions,” Ruby continued as she ate her lunch. “I have some for you.”
“Okay,” Maye shrugged, unable to imagine what Ruby wanted to know of her.
“How did you find me?” she asked. “How did you know I was out here?”
Maye paused for a moment, trying to decide how honest she should be, then realized quickly there was no decision to be made at all. If she and Ruby were going to be a team, she needed to be up-front and lay everything out on the table. You have to respect the other half of your team, she understood, and if she respected Ruby, then she needed to tell her the truth.
“I drugged a cop,” she finally said. “I drugged a cop with his favorite organic donuts and got him to talk during a sugar rush. I bumped into him at the library when I first found your file in the archives, and I had a feeling he knew more than he was telling. I already knew he was addicted to those donuts, so…I just performed the necessary evil and asked him questions until he spilled it. I know it wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how else I could find you. I tried the courthouse, I looked in every old phone book back half a century, and I asked around. It wasn’t easy; he ate almost a dozen before I broke him. He was even hallucinating by that point. He slept off the rest of the afternoon on my couch before he was okay to drive again, and he almost threw up.”
Ruby was quiet for a long time. She stopped eating her sandwich, stopped slurping her malted, and looked off into the distance.
“This cop,” she said slowly after she finally took another sip from her malted, gurgling it. “He wouldn’t happen to also be a plumber, would he?”
Maye nodded and winced. “I know that you know John Smith,” she confessed. “He said he got his dog Rocky from you. Please don’t blame him. I knew his weakness and I pounced. He never knew what hit him.”
“Some excuse for giving me up,” she said as she shook her head, her voice brittle. “He sang like a bird for a donut. What a stoolie.”
“He put up a fight for quite a while,” Maye relayed. “He fought like a swordfish, but he sadly underestimated the power of a jelly.”
“If those things are so powerful, I hope you bring some for the judges,” Ruby commented, and by her tone, Maye couldn’t exactly tell if she was irritated or not. “If it could make John Smith spill a secret he was sworn to keep, something that to my knowledge he has never told another living person, well then, you have a royal flush in a baker’s dozen.”
“I’m sorry, Ruby,” Maye said honestly. “If there was another way to find you, I would have taken it. I looked all over the place, but you hid your tracks pretty well. I have to give it to you. You wiped yourself off the map of Spaulding.”
Ruby laughed choppily. “I had some help there,” was her reply. “But I’m in the phone book—under Royal Loyals.”
He must have been one hell of a man, Maye thought to herself as she finished her lunch; he must have been something else to make Ruby turn and run all the way out here with a broken heart and nowhere else to turn, spending the rest of her life alone on this old, barren farm. And then there were Rowena’s harsh words from this morning. Maye didn’t trust anything Rowena said, and knew all too well that she loved to invoke fear in anyone she couldn’t outwardly control. That was Mrs. Spaulding’s strength and great talent—she was a marvelous distributor of alarm and trepidation; she spread it like peanut butter. If there was anything Rowena loved, it was that people feared her, and if they didn’t, she was certain to come up with a reason indeed. Before Maye could give the threat any more thought, Ruby had smacked her on the arm.
“Hey, Girl!” she yelled. “Did you hear what I said?”
“What?” Maye replied, rubbing the sting with her other hand. “No, I didn’t hear you.”
“I said, can you do the splits?” Ruby shouted. “Because if you can do the splits, you can win this thing. Everybody loves the splits! Let me see you try.”
“No, I can’t do the splits,” Maye yelled back. “And I’m not going to try, either. I like my lady parts right where they are, thank you. There’s no need to relocate them by choice or foolishness.”
“Come on, just try,” the old woman croaked, in an attempt to coax.
“You have got to be kidding,” Maye replied stoutly. “I can barely cross my legs. No way. Let’s see you do the splits if you think it’s so easy.”
“Oh,” Ruby said, looking straight at Maye. �
��Sure.” The old woman put her malted aside, stood up, and with her soiled slippers heading in opposite directions, she slowly slid down to the ground like a Barbie doll in the hands of a four-year-old.
Maye tried to scream but nothing came out, and as she looked at the wrinkled, skinny old lady with a huge red mouth and fiery red corn-husk hair with her legs apart like the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, her stomach did a flip. She knew that experienced drinkers could fly in the face of quantum physics with their unexpected and zombielike physical flexibility at times—such as, say, getting flattened by a bus and managing to make it to the next bar before last call despite the fact that their knee is bent around their neck—but Ruby’s splits were incredible and revolting at the same time.
“Please tell me one, and hopefully both, of those legs can come off with an Allen wrench,” Maye whispered.
“Ta-da!” Ruby garbled as she lifted one arm above her in an act of showmanship and smiled wildly, exposing a whole set of canary-colored teeth. Papa sauntered over and drew his big juicy tongue up the side of her old face, and she laughed.
“Let me guess,” Maye began. “You did the splits for your talent segment in the pageant. And I’m going to have to carry you back to the house.”
“Psshh!” Ruby replied as she bent her back leg in and brought it around until she was back in a sitting position. “I didn’t just do the splits, Girl! I tumbled. I did cartwheels, I did flips, backward and forward; I had a whole routine. Of course, dropping the splits was the grand finale. I had a lit slow-burning sparkler in each hand, and I slowly went down, and I tell you, the crowd went mad. Right when I got down to the floor, Lula—who was hiding in the back—threw a handful of lit poppers that shot off red sparks and big, rising plumes of red smoke. I brought the house down, I tell you. Got a standing ovation. But really, how can you top the splits?”
Maye laughed. “Was Lula your sponsor?” she asked, thinking it sweet that Ruby had named a dog after her.
“No!” Ruby screeched. “Lula, my sister. She was in charge of what we would call nowadays ‘special effects.’ Her timing was impeccable. She threw those poppers right at the perfect moment—it really put the fire in the routine, so to speak. Now, what big plans do we have for your talent segment? What are you good at?”
“I write a mean hard-news story,” Maye confessed. “And I’m a decent detective. But that can hardly be translated to the stage.”
“Well, then,” Ruby continued, thinking. “What can you do that nobody else can? What do you have that no one else has?”
“I have a singing dog,” Maye offered. “And he also happens to play the piano.”
“You don’t say,” Ruby said slowly with a sly look on her face. “That could be as good as a flip. It’s not the splits, I’ll be honest with you, but it could be a flip. Is he afraid of flame? Because I could really see a flaming hula hoop in here somewhere. Fire is always the cherry on top. It’s a nice touch.”
“I’m not so sure about the fire part,” Maye said, trying to extinguish Ruby’s penchant for pyromania. “I’m not so sure Mickey would do that well with an uncontrollable element of nature that could envelop the outdoor, dry wooden stage with a wall of red death if the wind was blowing the wrong way. I was thinking more along the lines of a duet, like ‘I Got You, Babe,’ or ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.’ Something like that.”
“Hmmm, I like it,” the old woman said, scratching her chin and nodding. “We could certainly do something like that. It’s traditional, yet different. It has a nice twist. I’ve got some old records. I’ll dig through them and see what we can come up with.”
“That’s would be wonderful, Ruby, thank you,” Maye said. “Now I have a question for you. What puts you in such a good mood today? I’ve never seen you quite like this.”
Ruby laughed heartily. “Are you kidding? Why wouldn’t I be in a good mood this afternoon?” she replied as she stood up and gathered the ends of the picnic sheet. “I’m getting my fence painted today! And for free! Who wouldn’t be happy about that? And you’d better get hoppin’. That fence is longer than it looks. The paint and brushes are right over there on the side of the porch. Chop, chop, Girl!”
Ruby was right.
The fence was far longer than it looked. As Maye finished up her best Tom Sawyer impersonation, the sun was sinking quickly into the tree line. She was covered in white—from her shoe, which the paint can had tipped over on, to the speckled spray that dotted every inch of her arms and hands—and resembled a giant marshmallow. She had been painting for hours. Her arms were sore, and she was tired of standing, crouching, and standing again, and all she wanted to do was wash off as much of the latex color as she could and head home.
She knocked on the front door, and when no one answered, she glanced in the living room window and saw the two grimy, matted feet twitching on the kicked-up footrest of Ruby’s recliner. She went back to the front door and tried the knob; the door was unlocked. She could either wake the old woman up from her afternoon slip into unconsciousness, she realized, or go quietly into the house, wash up, and be on her way.
Maye chose the easier option, and with the cleaner of her two hands, turned the doorknob slowly so as to not make too much noise and startle the dogs, who were lying like a herd of sea lions all around their snoring, drooling master. Papa was the first to lift his head to see who was breaking into the house, and Maye smiled, then whispered, “Good boy!” to put him at ease. He dropped his head back down.
She tiptoed through the living room and into the kitchen and headed directly for the sink. Quietly, quietly, she turned the “cold” handle on and waited for a moment, but the faucet was dry. Maye tried the “hot” handle as well, but it, too, released no water. She turned both handles off and sighed, leaning up against the counter. Her hands and arms were covered in paint—there was no way she was going to get in the car like this, she’d get smudges of white all over the interior.
Suddenly, she heard the clicky toes of a dog behind her on the old, cracked linoleum floor, and she turned to see Papa in the doorway, nudging his empty water bowl. He licked the last droplets of water from the bottom and turned to climb the stairs.
Ah, Maye thought to herself, a thirsty dog will always know where to find water if there’s any around, but at the same time she prayed she wouldn’t have to dip any part of her body into Ruby’s toilet. She followed Papa up the creaky, spongy stairs, completely fearful that she had could drop through them at any minute. These stairs were used to supporting an old, skinny woman who weighed as much as a fifth grader, not a girl who could create a rhythm section when she walks, complete with castanets, with her plentiful thighs strangled in the prison of a spandex girdle.
Against the laws of gravity, Maye made it up to the dark landing where she could see only the outlines of two doors on her left and two doors on her right. One of them had to be a bathroom, she said to herself, hoping that Papa would show her to the right one. He just stood directly at her side. She remained on the landing for a minute or two, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the shadows and the absence of light, because this was Ruby’s house after all, and if the stairs were any indication, there might be floorboards missing or a trapdoor left open or any number of unimaginable horrors just panting with anticipation to break her leg. When she was confident that she had a straight shot to the door closest to her right and that the floor before her seemed intact, she took the necessary number of steps to reach it, turned the doorknob, and pushed.
Maye knew immediately she was not in the bathroom.
She was not in the bathroom.
This was not the bathroom.
Because, Maye reasoned to herself, when you go to the bathroom, there shouldn’t be two people in there already. The outline of two people, standing and looking at you.
Christ Almighty, Maye thought to herself in a split second, that old bat has been killing people and mummifying their bodies, and posing them like they’re at a party! In the next second, her
mind flashed to an alternate scenario—Holy shit, these are crazy relatives she’s hidden in the attic, but if she’s the sane one out of the bunch, I’m in real trouble here. Then, in the following moment, she reasoned, they’re dead, they’re dead victims, and she’s going to keep me as her prisoner and I’ll spend the rest of my days picking up dog shit and my nights chained up in this room with dead bodies looking forward to picking up dog shit.
Thankfully, Papa whined precisely then and more or less broke Maye from her Janet Leigh moment. She took a deep breath, calmed down, and berated her irrational side for thinking that there were mummies of crazy relatives having a party in a dark, spooky, rotting old house. She felt along the wall until she came to a lightswitch and flipped it on. As the room was illuminated, it took Maye just as long to comprehend what she was seeing in the light as it did to try to figure out what it was in the dark.
In the room were two figures in what looked to be a neat, tidy, and undisturbed bedroom; dressmaker’s dummies, each adorned with an exquisite gown. One was a striking sky blue, a capsleeved satin dress with tiny beads and rhinestones dotting the neckline. It was cinched tightly at the waist, from which the blue material spilled over into a wide, generous, sweeping skirt that barely reached the floor. There would be only two purposes for a dress of its stature: a ball gown fit for a debutante, or a pageant gown, fit for a hopeful queen.
The second dress was a soft, light ochre color. It still held the shimmer of a good-quality silk, reflected in the light that shone brightly from the fixture directly above it. Its skirt was not nearly as broad; it was more subtle, more fluid in its lines, with the silk flowing instead of billowing to the floor; the entire bodice was gently shirred. Abundant cream-colored pearls were meticulously sewn to the rim of the sweetheart neckline. Maye thought there must have been thousands of them. They also gathered on the cuff of the wrist-length sleeve, making nearly a bracelet. Maye stepped closer to the dress, admiring the hours and hours of work it must have taken to attach all of those tiny little pearls. It was then that she noticed that only half of the neckline had been embellished; the other half was naked silk, looking plain and simple. The other sleeve, too, was not yet completed; pieces of it were pinned to the side of the dress, as if not to lose them. As Maye brought a piece of the sleeve between her two cleanest fingers and felt the texture of the silk, a whiter, fresher color showed itself beneath it. She lifted more of the unfinished sleeve up and realized the dress was not ochre at all; it had been white, and had aged into a deeper hue with time.
There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 Page 21