Checking his foolish impulse, he walked on to the bathroom.
While he was showering, having forgotten about his wound, he proceeded to scrub his face. The touch caused his wound to hurt so bad tears came to his eyes. Out of the shower, he studied it in the mirror, then applied ointment from a tube in the medicine cabinet, too tired to fool with it further.
Wearing boxer shorts, he stretched atop the spread on his bed, stared at the patterns the moonlight made on his wall and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette. He had come across the makings in his underwear drawer. He’d long forgotten about it and the tobacco was stale, but it was better than nothing.
His door was pushed closed enough for privacy but not fully shut, because he hated to be closed into a room. Made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. He listened to his clock ticking, the old man snoring, and the faint music coming from Ruby Dee’s room. A couple of times he heard the squeak of her bedsprings, so he figured she was in the bed.
She apparently had a fondness for Elvis. Will’s taste ran to the Eagles, Bob Seger and southern jazz. Mostly he liked silence.
Watching the spirals of smoke rise silvery in the moonlight, he mentally counted the number of strides down the landing from his room to Ruby Dee’s. Four long strides would probably do it, maybe five.
She was there, not more than five strides away, just on the other side of the door. A couple of times, Will thought he could even catch her scent.
* * * *
Late like it was, Georgia Reeves, who ran the place now for her husband, turned out the lights except for one over the cash register and two at the grill and tables. The only light near the pool tables came from the lamps hanging above them, illuminating soft green tops, leaving everything else in shadow. Lonnie leaned over a table, took aim with the smooth cue and, with one play, sank his last two balls into separate corner pockets.
“Aww, shit..." Cletus Unsell moaned.
Straightening, Lonnie grabbed his long-necked beer with one hand and dropped his cue stick in the rack with the other. “Pay up, Cletus.”.
Cletus counted out the bills and handed them over. “Give me a chance to get even?”
Lonnie shook his head. He was bored with the game. He sauntered over to the booths, where several guys were sitting, killing time until Georgia closed up. Georgia sat on a stool at the cash register, counting money.
Reeves’s Quick Stop was the hub of little Harney. It was on the southeast corner of a crossroads. On the northeast corner was Pruitt’s full-service Texaco, on the northwest corner the post office and the Style Shop, which did men and women’s hair, and the Dairy Freeze, and on the southwest corner the Harney Lumber, Feed, and Hardware. Spreading out from the business square were a few houses and mobile homes.
Reeves’s was open in the summer from 6:00 A.M. until midnight, and, like a thousand other such places that dotted the rural areas of the state, it was a combination gas station, grocery, cafe, and general hang-out.
A year ago Frank Reeves had put in three pool tables. They had doubled his profits and broken up at least one marriage, when Polly Spivey was given the ultimatum to chose pool or her husband. Polly went off to Las Vegas to play professional billiards. She had even been in a tournament on ESPN, dressed in a black sequined gown and doing trick shots.
Lonnie felt restless, like he had jumping beans in his pants. He stood and talked for a while with Roman Torres and Royce Hall.
Behind them, Crystal Hewitt was cleaning the grill and fountain. Royce tried to talk her into making him a hamburger, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t so much as spare him a glance, but she sent several looks and smiles Lonnie’s way.
He had known Crystal since she was a plain, skinny kid. She had gone off for a year of college and had returned to work for the summer in the store for her sister, Georgia. She wasn’t so plain anymore, and she wasn’t skinny. Lonnie had dated her a couple of times, and had also run into her at a club down in Elk City once or twice. He knew she liked him. What he liked about her was the way she looked at him, like he was really something.
When she started to get the trash bags out of their containers, Lonnie hurried to help carry the bags outside. He heaved the two he carried into the Dumpster, then took the other two from Crystal and tossed them in.
“Thanks, Lon.”
“Sure.” They stood there, looking at each other, teasing each other. “You might give me a reward.”
“Oh, I might.”
She looked at him for another few seconds. He and Crystal had made out before, which consisted of hot kisses and her letting him feel her with her clothes on. He wondered what she would feel like under those clothes.
Then she stepped forward, lifted her face and gave him a quick kiss. Lonnie grabbed her hand and tugged her over to his pickup truck, around to the driver’s side, where they couldn’t be seen from the store.
“Now, Lonnie... I got work to do.” Crystal laughed breathlessly, and didn’t stop him when he pulled her into his arms.
“You been lookin’ at me all night,” he said, warming her with his eyes and rocking his pelvis against hers.
Her gaze fell to his mouth, and she said, “Well, considerin’ what else there was to look at, I don’t think that’s much.” He heard the desire vibrate in her voice, and she played her fingers at the back of his neck. “Georgia says you got a girl out at your place who claims to be the nurse for your daddy.”
“She is.”
“Georgia says she didn’t look like any nurse.”
“I didn’t know they looked a particular way.”
He did not want to talk about Ruby Dee. He pressed Crystal against him and kissed her, first quickly, then more thoroughly. He licked her lips and felt her shudder.
She drew back and gazed up at him, her eyes heavy with desire. “Everybody says you play with all the girls,” she whispered in a ragged voice.
“Do they? Do you always listen to what everybody says?”
“Oh, Lordy, Georgia’ll have my hair,” she said as her mouth eagerly sought his.
Lonnie hadn’t expected this. He had just been teasing, looking for a little flirting and maybe a feel. A diversion.
But Crystal came at him hot and wild, and the kiss boiled his blood. He sank into it, letting the heat melt away the restlessness that gripped him. Letting it melt away the wanting and the loneliness that gnawed at him when Ruby Dee had refused him.
Lungs burning, he broke away, gasping for breath. Gazing downward, he saw Crystal’s breasts heaving.
She said, “Lon, I got to get back,” and pushed away, but he grabbed her, kissed her again and shoved his fingers between her legs.
“Lon...” she protested, but she only struggled about half a second, and then she was pushing against his fingers.
That surprised Lonnie, but he got past it.
He felt her muscles throb right through her denim jeans. He was doing some throbbing of his own. Painful, delicious throbbing. He kissed her, and she moaned deep in her throat and shoved hard against him. She was suddenly wet and hot between her legs.
Lonnie pretty much lost it, having the wild idea to haul her up into the seat of his pickup.
“Crystal! You and Lonnie quit foolin’ around out there, and you get in here.”
Georgia’s voice was like a bucket of ice water. Georgia’s voice had that quality even when she was talking normal.
Crystal broke away with a moan of disgust. “I’ll be there in a minute!” she called, and gave a little stamp of her foot. Her woeful eyes came up to Lonnie’s, and she reached for him. “I’m sorry, Lon.”
He gave her a crooked grin and kissed her softly. “Crystal.” Georgia came out from the doorway, coming toward the dumpster.
“I said I’m comin’.”
Crystal paused to look back at Lonnie. In the dim, silvery light from the store, he saw her eyes, heavy with desire, her lips bruised from his kisses. He silently cursed Georgia.
Crystal said, “You can call me sometime.”
>
“I will.”
He opened the door of his truck and hopped up into the seat. He had not been with a woman for a number of months and was frustrated as hell. But deep inside he felt as if he had just escaped something. There was a light in Crystal’s eye that made him cautious.
As he slowly turned the pickup and headed around the store, Georgia came striding out the front door and flagged him down. He lowered his window.
“Look, Lonnie, I don’t want you fooling around with my sister.” She fixed him with a stern eye. “She isn’t like so many of the girls. She hasn’t been around a lot—I don’t care how she acts. I don’t want you takin’ advantage of her. Do you hear me?”
Lonnie said, “Okay.” That seemed to be the safest thing to say, considering her stern eye.
Georgia gave a little shake of her head, pivoted and walked back into the store.
Lonnie pressed on the gas pedal and sent the truck flying up on the blacktop, headed home. He didn’t want to go home. He was feeling much more restless now than he had before he’d gotten all worked up with Crystal. But he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
Chapter 12
Ruby Dee awoke so early, the eastern sky wasn’t even hinting at light. She smelled coffee, though. When she got to the kitchen, she found Will Starr peering into the mirror hung inside a cabinet door, poking at the wound on his face. He winced and let out a curse.
“Oh, mercy sakes, why don’t you just let me tend that?” She gave this off as she went across the room to let Sally out the door.
She came back and pushed close, watching in the mirror as Will dabbed at the cut on his face with a swab.
“It is festerin’,” she said. “You need to clean it out.”
He cut his eyes to hers in the mirror. “It’s not festering. It just has a little bit of pus.”
“Wouldn’t you wash a wound like that on a horse? Here, sit on this stool and let me take care of it. Then you can forget about it.”
She dragged over the kitchen stool. Then she stood there, hand on her hip, and looked at him, waiting. She let her eyes tell him that she could wait all day.
With a resigned expression, he handed her the swab and sat.
While Ruby Dee ran the water warm from the tap, she studied the wound and took in his whole face. He was freshly shaved, his hair combed. It was shaggy, though, above his ears. She liked the way his thick mustache curved downward at the corners of his lips.
She wet a cloth and pressed it against the wound. “Here, hold that, while I go get my kit.” She took his hand and put it where she wanted it.
She hurried upstairs and brought back her medicine kit. Using surgical soap, she went to work to soften the wound and wash it out. Will Starr didn’t say anything, but he squinted, and his eyes watered.
Talking to draw his attention from the pain, she said, “Why is it that men have to endure a certain amount of suffering before they have their hurts attended to? It’s like a man thinks he is more of one by suffering. Every man I’ve ever known has been that way.”
“How many men have you known?”
“Don’t cock your eyebrow.” She took hold of his chin and tilted his head downward. “Lots. Patients, you know.”
“Oh,” he said, and Ruby Dee had the idea he had been thinking along the lines of lovers.
“I’ve had one lover,” she said.
His eyes came up and met hers. “And did he turn you off men?”
She looked back at his wound. “Pretty much. This is gonna leave a scar. If you would have let me stitch it in the first place, it wouldn’t have, but it will now."
“I’ll be lucky you don’t kill me,” he said thinly.
“Lockjaw can sure kill you. Have you had a tetanus shot?”
“Sometime.”
“Is that how you treat your horses? You give them tetanus vaccines, don’t you?”
“I’ll see the vet soon as I can.”
Ruby Dee blotted the wound with a soft, dry cloth and leaned close to peer at it, looking for any lingering pus or foreign substances.
Then she was looking into his eyes, only inches from her own. Slashes of brilliant blue, with silvery flecks and long lashes set in a sun-toughened face.
She looked at him, and he looked at her. Heat swirled between them. Enough heat to make her quit breathing.
Ruby Dee stood up straight, her back stiff, and turned to her kit. “I think you still need a couple of little tucky stitches.”
She dabbed antiseptic on the wound and took two small stitches. She had to make her hands not tremble. Will Starr winced and his eyelashes flickered, but his hands remained palms down on his knees, and he didn’t say a word. He was smart enough, and disciplined enough, to keep his facial muscles totally relaxed.
The silence between them seemed strangely loud. Ruby Dee thought Will Starr surely had beautiful hair, the way it swept back from his temples. And she thought about how here she was, touching him all over the face, and how her thigh was brushing his, and how her belly touched his arm, and how she wished he would put his arm around her and kiss her, and do a whole lot of other things, too. Then she put a firm stop to those thoughts.
She said, “I’m gonna put some castor oil on this, and maybe that will help keep the scarring down.”
His steely blue eyes flashed over at her, but she only glanced at him. His eyes made her nervous. She was afraid he could read exactly what she was thinking.
* * * *
The scent of coffee awakened Hardy. He was somewhat annoyed at smelling it, because he figured if he could smell it, he was still alive. He had counted on being dead.
He was further annoyed when he came out of the bathroom, looked through the dining room and saw Will and the gal in the kitchen, illuminated by the light over sink, their heads just about touching.
The two were so intent on each other that they hadn’t heard him clattering around on his crutches. Dillydallying, just like he had expected all along, by God! Furious, he was just about to go in there and put a stop to it, when the gal turned Will’s head, and Hardy realized she was working over the cut on his cheek.
The cut had looked pretty bad last night, Hardy thought, and guilt stabbed him. He’d done that.
But he hadn’t done it on purpose. It had just happened. The guilt faded as he balanced there, watching them. There was something about the two of them that struck him, as if he had seen such a scene before.
Then it came to him that he had better get back to his room before they heard him or saw him. He did not want them, or anyone else, to know that he could get around as well as he could. No, sir. He wanted them to think of him as an invalid.
Using the crutches and tiptoeing on the foot with the sprained ankle, he headed as quietly and quickly as possible to his bedroom. He caught the door frame with one of the crutches and almost went sprawling. He bit back a string of curses and got himself over to the bed. He set aside the crutches and positioned himself, reclining on the pillows, his ankle again resting on the rolled up towel.
Through the window he saw the sky getting lighter. That he had lived to see another day depressed him.
The whole day and night before, Hardy had tried his best to die. He had thought that if he told his heart long and hard enough to quit beating, it would. Sort of like throwing a leg over the fence, and the rest of the body followed. He’d kept throwing his mind into heaven, thinking his body would follow.
He considered keeping at it, but he felt like he might be fighting a losing battle.
He could, of course, take more drastic action. The option of blowing his brains out was gone, since he couldn’t get his hands on a gun, but there remained his pocket knife or drinking the drain cleaner in the bathroom.
Drain cleaner took a little while. His cousin Mason had drunk it to kill himself. The theory was that Mason had counted on his wife finding him in time to save him, but his wife had gone off to the hairdresser. Mason never had been very smart.
However, Hardy
considered thinking himself dead an entirely different thing than using more violent means. Thinking was honorable and within the realm of God. The other—guns and knives and drain cleaner—Hardy considered dishonorable and weak, which was why Mason had done it. Mason had been a weasely, weak man, and Hardy didn’t want to put himself in the same category.
He considered the honorableness of starving himself. Just quit eating, passively protesting against his life. But if he did that, they would surely take him to the hospital and hook him up to tubes. He might eventually die, but not until he had undergone untold discomfort and indignities. It wouldn’t be worth it.
He heard the back door open and close, then some movement from the kitchen. Hardy found it poor on their part that neither the gal nor Will had come in to check on him. He could be dead and start stinking for all the attention they paid him.
“Hey! Gal!” he called.
He reached for a glass left on his nightstand and his pocket knife. He clanged the knife against the glass.
“Hey, gal!”
He kept up the clanging until the gal appeared in the doorway.
“Well, good mornin’, Mr. Starr...and my name is Ruby Dee, not gal.” As she came forward, her dress outlined her legs and fluttered down just above her ankles.
It suddenly came to Hardy why seeing her and Will together earlier had seemed so familiar. He had a similar image in his memory—of him and Jooney, when Jooney had cut his hair.
“How’s your ankle this mornin’?” she asked, bending over it.
“It hurts,” Hardy said. “Go get me some coffee, with sugar and cream."
“You aren’t supposed to have sugar.”
“Yeah, and what’s gonna happen—I might die?”
She laughed aloud at that, and then she did a really fool thing. She bent and kissed his cheek.
“Get the hell away from me!” Hardy stammered.
The gal laughed again. “I guess if you didn’t die from me doin’ that, you ain’t gonna. I’ll get your coffee.”
And she flounced out of the room, leaving Hardy staring after her. A second later, he realized he had been watching her swaying hips.
The Loves of Ruby Dee Page 12