Hex: A Ruby Murphy Mystery

by Maggie Estep

  Elsie comes out of the bathroom and she seems to feel good now. She leaps onto the bed and climbs on top of me.

  I shake my head, knowing she’s going to be wanting another round of intimate activity and she’s already worn me out this morning.

  “Aw, come on, baby,” she says, tugging at my boxers.

  Sure enough, my lower body is coming to life there, even though I know going another round will probably do me in.

  I pull my boxers back up. I get out of the bed and scold my lady then pull her to her feet, telling her to get dressed, we’ve got to go see what Indio’s up to out there.

  She pouts a little but then gets excited at the thought of going down to the Inferno and bossing some nice-looking teenage boys around.

  It takes my lady a while to put on her war paint. Girl would be good-looking no matter what you did to her but she won’t leave the house without two pounds of mascara, a glossy lipstick, and red platform shoes.

  Finally she’s ready and we go on outside, where we run right into Guillotine, who’s out airing his pitbulls.

  “Ramirez,” Guillotine greets me.

  “Hello, Bertrand.” Elsie grins at the old French guy. Elsie is the only person who uses Guillotine’s first name. She’s also the only person who can get away with it.

  Guillotine nods at Elsie but won’t really look at her. Once he told me a story about some lady breaking his heart twenty years back and how he hasn’t gone near a woman since—can’t bear even looking at pretty girls.

  Now, he grumbles into his beard, tugs his dogs’ leash, wanting to get away from me and the pretty girl with me.

  “That’s a new one,” Elsie says, stopping him by indicating a new dog. This one’s not a pitbull but a very appealing looking dog with bluish speckled fur.

  “That’s Lenny. Australian cattle dog. Some creeps had him locked in their yard for a few months, and a friend of mine, knowing how I am about neglected dogs, told me about it. I went and took him.” Guillotine reaches down and fondly pats Lenny’s head. The dog seems to be smiling. “Dog just needed someone to be attached to. Plus, the pits get out of control, Lenny herds ’em.”

  Elsie oohs and aahs over Lenny a little while longer as Guillotine smiles on happily.

  Finally, I tug at my lady’s elbow, reminding her we’ve got some work to do.

  As we head over to the Inferno, Elsie babbles on about Lenny and what a good-looking dog he is, and I can see that any minute I’ll be having to get a speckled blue dog.

  The Inferno’s facade is looking a little weather-beaten. The paint is chipped on the ten-foot head of a spitting Satan that hangs down from the roof, and the zombie mural isn’t looking very scary anymore.

  The left-hand door to the Inferno is wide open; any creep who wanted to could walk in. I get a little angry to see it.

  Elsie and I go inside and find the kids all sitting down in the ride’s carts, eating and smoking.

  “No smoking in here,” I say gruffly.

  A kid with a fat face gives me a look and asks who I am.

  “I own this place, boy.”

  The kid’s eyes get angry at my calling him “boy.” He pouts but he starts putting his cigarette out.

  “Where’s Indio at?” I ask the smoker.

  The kid just shrugs at me. A different kid tells me Indio had to go home for a minute. I feel myself getting very angry.

  “All of y’all out of here,” I say, at which four pairs of confused eyes look at me. “I got business in here,” I tell them.

  Not one of them says anything as they all slowly get up and file out.

  The moment they’re gone, Elsie puts her fists on her hips and asks me what I think I’m doing.

  “Kids ain’t no good.”

  “They were taking a break, Pietro.”

  “They been taking a break for a few days,” I say, motioning around us where, clearly, not much has been done.

  Elsie surveys the inside of our Inferno and, I guess, decides I’m right. All the monsters are a mess. The witch’s face has caved in and Vomit Man is lying on the floor, not looking too happy. I go over to pick the poor guy up. He’s a life-size dummy that looks like a bum. Indio rigs him up outside the Inferno where, as Vomit Man, he continuously pukes into a big barrel. Only now his hair has fallen off and he’s naked.

  Elsie comes over and wraps her arms around me from behind. “Don’t worry, Pietro, it’ll all get done. Indio’s gonna do the right thing.”

  Though I sincerely doubt that, my lady has managed to get me seriously excited, and I turn around to grab her, careful not to ram myself into her poor swollen titties.

  Elsie pulls me back behind the dirty black curtain that covers up the storage area full of broken mannequins and carts. Before I know what’s what, she’s making me sit in one of the carts and she’s got her skirt hiked up and is climbing on top of me. As I try to hold perfectly still, not interfering with her getting hers, I think about how having the breast problems kind of seems to be making my lady extra horny. And again I think about how she’s probably gonna kill me with this amount of activity. I been with Elsie a few years now, and she’s always had some big appetites, but this is getting to be a bit much.

  Not two minutes later she’s throwing her head back and letting out a cry that sounds a lot like some of the stuff we’ve got on the Inferno’s soundtrack.

  And not a moment too soon. Elsie’s barely gotten over herself and I haven’t yet gotten mine when we hear a voice calling out “Hello” and I’m hiking my pants back up and Elsie’s trying to organize her panties and skirt.

  “Yeah, be right there,” I call out, and Elsie and I brush each other off and emerge from behind the curtain. We find Indio, looking at us with a laugh in his eyes. Indio actually almost always has a smile on his face. Between that and his crazy Don King style hair and his gold tooth, the ladies go crazy for him. And that smile all the time is part of why I like the kid too. It ain’t doing much for me right now, though.

  “Ramirez, how’s it goin’?” the kid says.

  “It’s not,” I say, frowning at him. “That was a nasty ass crew you had in here. Didn’t do shit either.”

  “Oh.” Indio shrugs. “Sorry, my man, I tried.” He smiles some more. “But look what I did,” he adds, then darts out front for a second and comes in toting a damn awful looking female mannequin.

  “I give you Vomit Woman!” Indio says proudly, standing the hideous creature up at his side like she’s his date. “No more lonely nights for Vomit Man.”

  She’s a real sight, this Vomit Woman, thin and horribly white, with Band-Aid-colored hair hanging in ugly flat wings. Indio has done a great job making oozing sores all over her arms and face. I gotta hand it to him, the kid is not only the best fire-eater Coney’s seen in a damned long time, he’s got a way with ghouls.

  I’m so impressed by Vomit Woman that I do partially forgive Indio for the useless crew of kids.

  “That’s gorgeous, baby,” Elsie purrs at the boy.

  He grins widely. “Yeah, she’s a good one.”

  “Okay, Indio, how ’bout this,” I say. “How ’bout you get rid of them no good motherfuckers and just do the paint job yourself.”

  The kid’s face falls. He loves making the special effects stuff but plain old painting doesn’t do it for him.

  “Me and Elsie will help you out some and maybe we can get Ruby to put in a few hours,” I say, throwing Ruby into the mix since I know what kind of reaction she gets out of the kid.

  “Ruby? Yeah?” he says, looking very interested. “She’s got a boyfriend these days?”

  “I don’t know, Indio.”

  I laugh at him a little. He smiles again.

  “We’ll leave you to it and come back in a couple hours,” I tell him, and he shrugs, looks sadly at the gallons of paint and then offers one last smile.

  My lady and I go outside, where the day seems awful bright after being in the dark awhile. Elsie looks very beautiful, the sun shining down o
n her, making her face look like it’s dancing.

  “You want an ice cream, baby?” I ask her as we come to Denny’s Soft Ice Cream, where Luba, the little half Russian girl, is standing behind the counter, looking eager to sell some cones.

  Elsie tells me yes, she wants a cone, and this eases my mind some, makes me think maybe she’s feeling better.

  We’re standing there, licking two cones of bright green pistachio, shooting the shit with Luba, when a white guy comes over and orders a chocolate cone. While Luba’s fixing his cone, he looks over at me and says hello.

  It takes me a minute to realize it’s Ruby’s friend, Oliver, the guy who’s sick. “How ya doin’?” I ask him.

  “Came looking for Ruby but she’s not home,” Oliver says, then takes a lick of his cone.

  “This is my girlfriend Elsie,” I say, introducing my lady.

  She smiles at the guy and starts asking him questions about how long he’s known Ruby and all that. The two seem to be hitting it off a little too well for my comfort, and so finally I suggest to Elsie that we head on back home.

  “Come with us. You can wait for Ruby at our place,” my lady says.

  Not exactly what I had in mind, but what the hell, he seems okay.

  We all head back to my place, and as soon as we’re inside, Elsie turns into a hostess the way she likes, offering the Oliver guy café con leche. Oliver says no, the coffee doesn’t agree with him so well right now. He goes explaining about his cancer, and Elsie gets all worked up talking to him about special herbs and teas and deciding to brew him some kind of crazy ass tea she’s got there in a little tin in the kitchen.

  I just sit there, sipping my café con leche and letting those two go at it, gabbing away, until finally Ruby comes up the stairs.

  “Pretty lady, you’re home,” I call out to her. “Look who we found on the street.” I point to her friend.

  The girl looks pretty surprised. Frowns some. Stares from me to Oliver and back.

  Oliver smiles at her: “Right after I called you I got the idea that I ought to try riding the Cyclone again. I feel so fucking horrible, it’s the only thing that makes sense. I got off the subway and it wasn’t open again. Then I ran into these guys.” He motions at me and my lady. “I’ve been regaling them with cancer stories.”

  “He’s been through a lot,” Elsie says. “Took my mind off my troubles.”

  Ruby takes my lady’s troubles off her mind a little more by telling us some insane story about going off and working at the racetrack all day.

  “Baby, you’re crazy,” Elsie says eventually.

  “I am?”

  “Nobody would do that. Go running around like that working at a racetrack.”

  Ruby shrugs. “You know me. I love horses. What the hell. But what about you?” she asks my lady. “Did you call that doctor of yours?”

  “Doctor?” Elsie says. “We’re talking lawyer, girl. That doctor wouldn’t see me. I went to another doctor, brother-in-law of a girl I used to dance with. Up on Ditmas Avenue. Doctor takes one look at my tatas and tells me I want to get myself a lawyer. He got me taking these,” she says, showing Ruby a huge jar of pills. “Antibiotics. Maybe I got to go in the hospital a few nights if the swelling don’t go down.”

  “You got bad implants?” Oliver asks her now.

  “Yeah,” Elsie sighs.

  “Can I see?” Oliver asks.

  At which I start to feel more than a little upset. “Elsie,” I say to her, but she just laughs and pulls her powder blue T-shirt up over her head.

  I can’t handle this, so I get up and go into the bedroom, closing the door behind me and lying on the bed.

  A few minutes pass and eventually I hear Oliver and Ruby leaving.

  Elsie comes in. “I’m sorry, baby,” she says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Pietro,” she says, making me look up at her.

  And then my girl starts dancing for me. Moving her pretty little ass and smiling.

  I feel better.

  Oliver Emmerick

  16 / Hybrid Women

  Though the chemo is coursing through my body and I feel profoundly ill, I figured the combination of forcing ice cream down my gullet and seeing Ruby would make me forget about it some. And it has. As has my little visit with Ruby’s neighbors, the nice-looking Spanish girl with the bum implants, and Ramirez, the guy, kind of inscrutable but an okay guy.

  I finish drinking the awful smelling tea that Elsie has made me, and then Ruby and I bid the neighbors a good afternoon and go across the hall to Ruby’s place. My lovely friend starts babbling madly about her day at the track, telling me about all the characters and getting particularly flushed and excited talking about some horse named Joe.

  “He’s such a sweetie,” she coos, her eyes milking over like she’s just consumed an inordinate amount of opiates.

  I just look at the girl and smile, pleased to see her so enthusiastic about something, particularly in light of how gloomy she’s been these last months, ever since her breakup with the surly live-in boyfriend who I never liked.

  Ruby finally stops babbling about the horses and notices the mess her awful felines have made in her absence. The living room is festooned with ripped white garlands, and the guilty parties are both roosting on the couch, looking at Ruby with accusatory eyes.

  “Ah, those awful cats,” I say, feigning disgust as I sit on the couch and pet the beasts. They lose interest in me when Ruby goes into the kitchen to play with the raw meat.

  I get up off the couch and follow them all into the kitchen. I stand next to my lovely, watching the felines eat their meat.

  “Do you feel horrible?” Ruby asks me.

  “Marginally horrible. I puked twice. But then I had ice cream and kept it down. And now I want a doughnut.”

  “A doughnut?” Ruby says, aghast. She has, after all, known me to thrive on downing hunks of raw tofu.

  I shrug. “My body wants a doughnut.”

  She shrugs back. “Well then, your body shall have a doughnut,” she says.

  I give her time to wash her face and put on clean clothes—including a fetching tight-fitting black skirt—and we go back out into the glories of Coney Island, heading for Dunkin’ Donuts.

  The sun is leaving the sky, trailing streaks of orange and pink as it goes. Gulls are pecking at the sidewalk near Nathan’s. Packs of kids and old people are roaming around.

  We find the Dunkin’ Donuts closed, and the way my emotions are haywire from chemicals, I have a hard time not weeping over this misfortune. Ruby promptly suggests fries from Nathan’s, though, and we cross over to that faded establishment.

  The place is empty other than a pair of chunky cops eating hot dogs and Koko the Killer Klown, a dwarf who works at the sideshow. Koko is sitting at one of the tables, ripping up a napkin and staring balefully at a paper plate of fried oysters. Ruby nods at the guy but he just stares right through her.

  We walk up to the counter, where a very wide teenage girl resentfully takes our order for two large fries. I smile and try to flirt with her, but this has absolutely no effect other than to make her frown and look even more foul than before.

  We sit down, two tables away from Koko—who is apparently having some kind of psychotic episode and is now frantically pulling napkins out of a dispenser and shredding them all. His plate of fried oysters lies neglected to the side.

  I eat about six fries before my stomach starts issuing warnings. I sit perfectly still for a minute, breathing into my belly, trying to get things to settle in there. One good thing is that Ruby got me into yoga a year ago, and it’s taught me a lot about keeping all my body parts happy. Of course, none of my body parts are happy about chemo but at least I know how to try and appease them.

  “What are you doing?” Ruby says, noticing that I’m looking a little green at the gills.

  “Breathing. Stomach not happy about fries,” I say, pushing my mostly uneaten container over to her side of the table. “Seltzer,�
�� I manage to say, and Ruby jumps to her feet and rushes over to the counter, coming back a moment later with a large cup of seltzer. I sip the stuff gingerly and send encouraging thoughts to my stomach. Which seems to grow calmer.

  Ruby and I sit there a few more minutes, waiting for everything to settle in me so I don’t go vomiting all over the place.

  As we get up to leave, Ruby tries once more to say hello to Koko, but again he fails to respond. We go back outside.

  The air smells good now. There’s a nice breeze blowing in from the water as we walk down Surf Avenue, past the bumper cars that, as ever, are open for business. Ruby and I stop and press our faces to the dark glass of the window and gaze in at a thick throng of kids inside the bumper car building. Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s cover of Rick James’s “Cold Blooded” is blaring through the speaker system. A strobe light pulses over various scary looking black kids, some standing in packs against the wall, others in bumper cars, sometimes four shoved into one car. The ubiquitous taped barker’s eternal invocation to “Bump bump bump your ass off” mixes in with the din of the ODB song.

  We stand with our faces glued to the glass for quite a long time, until my stomach starts emitting some rather ominous gurglings and Ruby and I, looking at each other and laughing, turn away and start heading back toward her house.

  As the bumper car sounds recede, I hear a snatch of classical music in the air and I start looking around because it almost sounds like it’s pumping down from the heavens.

  “Look,” Ruby says, indicating a black guy walking toward us. “It’s Rite of Spring Man.”

  I don’t know what she’s talking about, but now the guy is just a foot away from us and I see that the classical music is coming out of a boom box perched on his shoulder. He sees Ruby and smiles at her.

  “Going swimming?” he asks her.