You’re still a man, she had told him, and he supposed he was, after all. The thought confused him terribly.
Chapter 13
With a quick glance, Will could see that the swelling in the old man’s ankle had gone down quite a bit, but he said he couldn’t use it.
“I ought to know if I can use the dang ankle or not,” he insisted. “I’m the one grittin’ my teeth with it.”
Will brought up the idea of going down to the doctor, but the old man flatly refused.
“I ain’t goin’,” he said, and that was that. It was clear from the set of his face that he intended to make his bed the last stand at the Alamo.
Will wasn’t going to argue with him. He had better things to do. Also, he didn’t like the way the veins stood out on the old man’s neck every time the word doctor was mentioned.
Taking him to the doctor was postponed, but Ruby Dee said she needed groceries, or she wasn’t going to be making any more biscuits, and there was enough coffee for only one more pot. Lonnie took on about the prospect of no biscuits. Lonnie could evermore act the fool.
Will said Reeves’s Quick Stop over in Harney would have coffee and flour in small containers, and eggs and bacon, too. Ruby Dee decided to go right away, before the heat of the day.
Before she left, she instructed Will to make certain he took his daddy the snack she had prepared and left in the refrigerator. Then she handed him a sheet of paper.
“Here’s a report on Hardy’s day yesterday. I do this for all my patients. It comes in handy when we need to track down causes of symptoms and things.”
Surprised, Will took the paper. “You typed it?” It was done in columns, with events, observations and times noted.
“I have terrible handwriting. You wouldn’t be able to read it.”
Will walked her out to the car. He found himself doing it, even opening the back door for her, telling her to charge whatever she needed to the ranch account. He began to wish he didn’t have to stay with the old man. It crossed his mind to holler for Lonnie to come stay with him, so he could go with Ruby Dee.
It turned out that Lonnie was two steps ahead of him. He had brought the Galaxie over into the shade of the elm, had even put the top down. His arms folded, he leaned his hip against the driver’s door and grinned at Ruby Dee. Lonnie said, “I’ll take you in to Reeves’s, Ruby Dee. I need some Skoal, and a burrito sounds pretty good, too.”
“You just ate,” Will said. He should have known Lonnie would do this.
“Hey, that was way over an hour ago.” Lonnie opened the driver’s door for Ruby Dee.
She told him he could drive and circled the front of the car. Lonnie stepped around to get the passenger door for her, but Will was quicker.
Ruby Dee slid into the seat and called for Sally, who came bounding up onto her lap and over into the back seat. Will shut the door. Ruby Dee stuck her hat on her head and lifted her face, her eyes coming up to Will’s.
“Thanks,” she said. “We won’t be long.”
Will stepped back, shoving his hands into his rear pockets. “Watch my little brother.” He nodded at Lonnie. “He thinks he’s at the Indy half the time.”
Lonnie smirked at him and dropped the shift arm. The car shot ahead, leaving Will standing there, the dust spiraling around his legs.
* * * *
The yellow hood of the convertible gleamed in the bright sunlight as the car sped over the narrow two-lane blacktop highway. The road broke through hills and dipped down into flat river-bottom land. Here they could see the broken rust-colored earth, canyons cut eons ago by the river. Grassland, no trees, except for a rare, scraggly, bent nub. The river was a flat, winding trickle now at summer.
Ruby Dee liked this land the best, liked the wildness of it.
Lonnie had the same type of wildness, she thought, looking at him. He sat relaxed, high, wide and handsome. He had tossed his hat in the back seat, and the sun glimmered on his dark hair.
What she liked about Lonnie was that he liked her, and he surely didn’t hide it. His hazel eyes told her she looked good, and that he thought she was just wonderful. That he probably looked at all women that way didn’t change the way it made her feel.
“This is one great machine!” he said, raising his voice above the roar of the wind.
“Yep.” Ruby Dee smacked her hand on the top of her hat, holding it on. She was suddenly glad to be away from the ranch, riding beside a man who thought she was pretty.
Her mind went back to Will. He had looked so forlorn she’d wished he could come with them. She knew it would help with Starr a lot to get out and have fun.
She thought then that the land was like Will, too—tough and enduring.
Ruby Dee savored these thoughts. She found them profound. It had been her experience that profound thoughts might not be any more truthful than those that are not profound, such as thinking that white toilet paper was more pristine than the colored variety, but she believed profound thoughts were a lot prettier. She really enjoyed profound thinking, and she kept it up all the way to Harney.
In fact, she was thinking so hard that it was almost a surprise to pull into the gravel lot of Reeves’s Quick Stop. Blinking, Ruby Dee threw her hat in the back seat and ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing it on top. “Come on, Sally, get up here in the shade.” She motioned for Sally to lie next to the brick building.
“She can come inside,” Lonnie said. “You aren’t in the city, Ruby Dee.” He cast her that easy grin and held open the door.
Well, the first person Ruby Dee saw was Georgia Reeves behind the cash register. Ruby Dee felt really silly, because only in that moment did the name of the store and the name of the woman come together in her mind.
Georgia had on a white blouse with silver button covers. Small silver earrings dotted her lobes, and every hair was in place. She looked more ready to host a luncheon for the Friends of the Library than to clerk in a convenience store.
Ruby Dee admired Georgia’s attention to her person, but she felt no more liking for the woman than she had the day before. And she was really glad she had put on lipstick—Summer Coral, which looked much more natural than Georgia’s fiery crimson. Probably, though, Georgia was more concerned with appearing striking than appearing natural. And she succeeded.
“Hello, Georgia...this is Ruby Dee,” Lonnie said. “I think you two met yesterday, out at our place.”
Georgia nodded. “Hi.” Speculation ripe as a juicy peach shone in her eyes, which moved from Ruby Dee to Lonnie and back again.
Ruby Dee said, “Hello,” and offered a perfectly friendly smile, to be polite, and to be one up.
Georgia just looked at her. Ruby Dee suspected no one ever got to be one up on Georgia.
“Is the grill open, Georgia?” Lonnie asked, turning Ruby Dee toward the back of the store. “I’d sure like one of your burritos, and Ruby Dee will have..." He looked at her.
“I’ll just have a Coke.”
“I’ll get your burrito, Lon,” Georgia said, following on her side of the counter.
His hand on her elbow, Lonnie guided Ruby Dee to a booth. Sally padded along beside them, tail and shoulders down, totally uncertain.
Two elderly men in overalls and ball caps sat in one of the booths. They were playing dominoes. Lonnie exchanged greetings with them, but didn’t introduce Ruby Dee. She cast them a friendly smile, and they gave her a quick, curious nod before returning to their game. They appeared intensely involved in it.
Ruby Dee slid into the booth, and Sally went under the table. Lonnie went to get the soft drinks.
When he came back, he leaned across the table and whispered, “They don’t play for pennies.” He inclined his head toward the men in the other booth. “Most of those games involve upwards of five hundred dollars. Sin City, right here in Harney.” He winked.
Ruby Dee looked at them again. Men in clean but worn overalls and thin, long-sleeve plaid shirts. Their hands were veined and weathered. She wondered i
f Lonnie was pulling her leg.
She cast quick glances at them while Lonnie ate his burrito and she sucked on the straw of her Coke. Once she saw the skinny one pull a wad of bills from the pocket of his overalls, peel off what she thought was a hundred-dollar bill and hand it to his opponent.
After she finished her Coke, she excused herself and went back to the rest room, where she could reapply her lipstick. Ruby Dee never applied her lipstick in public. It seemed tawdry, like adjusting a bra strap. And the whole point of wearing lipstick was to give the illusion that your lips really were that colorful and moist. If everyone saw you put it on, what was the point?
When she came out of the rest room, she almost bumped into Georgia, who was getting a roll of paper towels from one of the big cardboard boxes stored against the wall.
“How’s old Hardy doin’?” Georgia asked.
“He’s pretty depressed about hurtin’ his ankle. He can only get around with crutches.” Ruby Dee wondered why Georgia didn’t discuss this with Will. She also wondered if Georgia’s eyelashes were real.
“Will ought to put him in a home. It’d be a lot better all the way around.”
Well, that turned Ruby Dee to ice. “Oh?” she said. “A lot better for who?”
Georgia gave a little laugh. “I guess it wouldn’t be better for you. The Starrs wouldn’t need your... ah, services then... would they?” She arched her eyebrow like a question mark, then turned and walked off before Ruby Dee could press her about what she meant.
Ruby Dee could say one thing for Georgia: the woman said what she thought.
Lonnie had already started to get the groceries he wanted: Oreos, corn chips and mixed nuts. He followed Ruby Dee while she gathered the supplies she needed. Actually, she got more than she needed, going on to canned pineapple slices and peaches in natural juices. Seeing the price on the peaches, she put them back on the shelf, but Lonnie then snatched them up. They carried all the groceries to the front, so Georgia could tally up the bill.
A pretty young woman had joined Georgia. She had silky brown hair to her shoulders, tender green eyes and the kind of figure to turn men’s heads. She cast Ruby Dee a curious but friendly grin and nod and then poured those tender green eyes all over Lonnie.
“Hi, Lonnie...how’s it goin’?” The girl eyed Lonnie as if he were a great big chocolate sundae and she had been on a starvation diet.
Oh, dear, Ruby Dee thought. She happened to glance at Georgia, to see that woman read it all, too, and was none too pleased.
“Hey, Crystal,” Lonnie said, giving her the same charming grin he gave Ruby Dee and even Georgia.
He proceeded to make introductions, then explained that Crystal was Georgia’s sister. Ruby Dee noticed the resemblance, although Georgia was hard-ass wise and Crystal tender-reed green.
Crystal’s tender eyes clouded when she observed Ruby Dee, but Ruby Dee smiled at her, and the younger woman smiled back and said, “I hope you can help Hardy.” She meant it, because it wasn’t in the young woman to put on a face.
As Ruby Dee and Lonnie left, Georgia said, “Tell Will I said hello, Lonnie." But while she spoke to him, her eyes were aimed like bullets at Ruby Dee.
There were two sisters who were crazy for the Starr brothers, Ruby Dee thought as, half blinded by the sudden bright sunshine, she made her way around to the passenger side of the Galaxie. She and Lonnie set their bags in the back seat. He opened the door and waved her inside, as if he was a prince and she a princess. She felt self-conscious, because she caught sight of Crystal standing at the glass door and looking at them.
Lonnie slammed the door securely and flashed her one of his grins. Ruby Dee’s heart got heavy. The Lord had sure pulled a joke when he made people so they hankered after other people, she thought, jamming her hat on her head.
She wondered how serious things were between Will and Georgia. Lonnie might know, but she knew no way to ask him and not appear to be asking. Besides, it was none of her business, and she didn’t want it to be, either. It was hard enough to live her life, without trying to know about everybody else’s. Lonnie didn’t head straight for home but showed Ruby Dee the sights. The town consisted of the building at each corner of the crossroads and a number of small houses and mobile homes fanning out down the roads. To the west about a mile was the school, a combination of brick and steel buildings, elementary through high school housed in separate wings beneath the same roof.
The brick Baptist church boasted a small belltower and had a brick archway above its cemetery entry. Lonnie said the Methodist church was about four miles to the east. It was simple white clapboard and still possessed the original separate outhouses for men and women.
“Out in this part of the country, people are either Baptists or Methodists,” Lonnie said. “Any other persuasions are suspect, and to some Baptists even Methodists are suspect.”
“Are the Starrs suspect?”
He frowned thoughtfully. “Well, now, Daddy walked out of the Baptist church when he married Mama, whose family were nonpracticing Catholics from way back. He tried the Methodist church, but quit them, too, when they wanted money for indoor toilets. My Aunt Roe was a Methodist, and she made me and Will come along with her to church, but then she brought home her second husband from a missionary trip to Africa, and he was a Presbyterian lay minister, who started having services at their house, so we all quit the Methodist Church, too. My cousin J-Jean went away and came back a minister in the Church of Divine Love; she’s a circuit preacher down in Elk City and Clinton. My second cousin, Rollie, and his whole family were converted to some church on the television, and they ended up going to Chicago where the television church came from."
“You are all suspect, aren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am, we are.”
A grin played at the corners of his mouth. He was just made to laugh and to make people laugh with him. And, boy howdy, he knew how to make a woman feel like a woman.
The rodeo grounds sat out in the middle of nowhere. There was already a sign up for the annual fall rodeo, in September. Someone had hand-lettered a big sign next to it that said, “Y’all Come!”
“Are you and Will gonna ride in the rodeo?” Ruby Dee asked.
Lonnie shrugged. “We did, a few years back.” His gaze came around to hers, and he reached out and took her hand and pulled it to the middle of the seat. “Maybe we will this year... if you’ll be there.”
She didn’t know what to say, and mercy, his hand was warm over hers. “I don’t know if I’ll still be here. Your daddy will probably fire me when he gets on his feet again.”
Looking forward again, Lonnie lifted his hand from hers and returned it to the steering wheel, carefully directing the car to avoid the roughest ruts of the road that circled the rodeo grounds.
“Broke my arm the first time at this arena,” he said. “High school rodeo, ridin’ a bronc. I was sixteen.” His hazel eyes cut to her. “I won, though. I went to nationals for the first time that year.”
She could see him, high and wild on a horse. “And you’ve been ridin’ broncs ever since.”
“I did for a long time, until I discovered calf roping. I broke my arm once and my leg twice in bronc ridin’. I’ve only broken my finger in calf ropin’, and I have two cow ponies that generally make more money than I do, ‘cause so many of the guys are willin’ to pay to use ‘em. It’s a lot less work to rent out a horse than it is to ride him.”
Oh, my, how she liked it—riding around with Lonnie, listening to him, the way his eyes felt all over her.
What she could not have admitted to a living soul—didn’t even care to admit to Miss Edna and God—was the fantasy that flitted through her mind: the image of Lonnie pulling her across the seat of the Galaxie into his arms and kissing her face off.
The fantasy wanted to return, but she refused it, because it was stupid. It shocked her somewhat. She couldn’t look at it closely at the moment, since she was so distracted by Lonnie and all, but in instinctive defens
e of herself, she thought that she was a woman, one born with the normal weaknesses that threatened good sense.
And it would be difficult not to flirt with Lonnie, because doing it seemed to please him so much.
So they drove around and flirted as the sun grew hotter and little Sally drooled over the side of the car, while Lonnie showed her places and talked about them and ran his eyes all over Ruby Dee.
Over and above all the flirting, however, Ruby Dee suspected that another reason Lonnie kept driving around, thinking up places to show her, was that he wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the ranch. He didn’t turn toward home until Ruby Dee told him she needed to return, and then he drove a lot slower going back home than he had coming out.
When he turned the car beneath the Starr Ranch sign, Lonnie became downright quiet. Of course, it had gotten awfully hot. When she got out of the car, she found her dress sticking to the back of her thighs. Spreading her legs, she lifted her dress in the back and waved it, encouraging the air to circulate up her bare skin and over the nylon lace panties clinging to her rear. Whew! That felt good.
Then her gaze came up, and she saw Will striding toward her from the house. His eyes were straight on her.
For an instant she felt buck naked.
She dropped her dress in place and brought her legs together. She felt silly as could be. Silly and naked.
And then the brothers crowded around her, getting the groceries out of the back of the car. Ruby Dee would have moved, but they seemed to trap her.
Will was in front of her, snatching a bag right out of her hands. “I’ll get it.” He pulled another up from the seat, his forearm tanned and hard and straining below his brown denim shirt sleeve.
“I’ll get these, Ruby Dee.” Lonnie bent in front of her. His shirt stretched tight over his lean back.
Scents of fresh perspiration and warm after shave...and male virility. Lordy. It was unnerving. And exciting.
When she got to the kitchen, she grabbed the things she had brought Hardy from the bags and hurriedly left the room. She couldn’t really explain why, because she had no time to sort it all out, and besides, she didn’t really want to.
The Loves of Ruby Dee Page 13