He smiled, feeling his unshaven chin crackle in the heat. Her voice was a bit raspy, husky with the thickened, arid air. Yet it was still lovely. If she lost the rural plain’s twang then she might have an agreeable talent there. He hadn’t heard anything so beautiful in a long time, even if she was no Jeanette MacDonald.
“There’s a couple of mason jars of applesauce there if you need to eat somethin’,” Jake offered, knowing it might well be all he had himself for a long time to come. He’d no idea how many days or weeks it would take him after his stop in Cobbieville to drive to California state.
She blinked and whispered, “No, thanks. I ate already.”
“What? That last bean in the pot?” he asked, amazed that anyone these days could refuse an offer of food.
She turned away and replied wistfully, “Blood, sweat and tears.”
And he couldn’t help putting a hand to her cheek, as he’d done with Martha before he left the farm for good. Ruby’s skin was roughened by its coating of earth but it was warm. Curious. Was it possible that it could be a mixture of both heavies and lights? The way that air could feel like nothing but softness or like a solid force of wind?
Blood, sweat and tears. Exactly what Jake figured the dust people thrived off of. Vampires who took you slowly over the course of choking days and nights until you went to sleep in their arms having swallowed their essences willingly. Or who came in suddenly in a rush of filthy, avalanching earthswell to take victims whole in minutes without the courtship of particles.
The black edge was now across a full third of the sky. Jake drove the Ford ’29 up Cobbieville’s unpaved Main Street. He couldn’t see anyone, not a single solid or indefinite soul in sight. The windows were boarded shut on every house and shop, and there weren’t even any other vehicles.
“Looks like a ghost town,” Ruby murmured. She leaned over to put her hand across his on the steering wheel. She squeezed his fingers, her eyes large and round. “Do you think we’re the last two left?”
He tried not to look at her. Her touch was hot, steam seeming to rise when their skins met.
Such a woman’s hand, even if a very young woman. It made him ache, thinking of Martha. Thinking of the dust women who’d rolled over him in some erotic, dirty dervish.
It was just that he was so lonely. He hadn’t seen another living person since Martha had gone to sleep. Hadn’t seen one other than Martha in a month or so before that.
This had been when the last great wall had swept over the county. Tom Menkin had stopped by then, that four to six weeks ago, to tell Martha and Jake that two dozen people had died in the black roller, damp washcloths pressed over their faces as they tried to hurry home. The Menkins with a lot of townies had called it quits after this, getting up a caravan to the promised land of the San Fernando Valley.
And didn’t Jake and Martha want to come, too?
God, Jake wished they had gone. As he sat there with Ruby Semple holding his hand all hot and earth-solid like Martha. Her round, luminous eyes were the color of polished jasper stones and newly minted pennies.
Jake stared at Ruby’s eyes.
The wind rose sharply, the Ford tilting in it, rocking. The dust which was layered over everything lifted, swirling. The approaching storm’s rampart now filled half the sky.
“We gotta git inside fast,” he told the girl as he disengaged from her fingers and jerked open his door.
Ruby joined him in the street. The wind dropped, rose, fell, eddied the loose coats of fine silt in gurges and dry-baked whirlpools.
And then Cobbieville wasn’t empty anymore.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jake mumbled as he saw the shapes moving around them. Airy and indistinct, they were people in powder, in varying shades of nothing, graceful without edges of any kind.
Ruby leaned against him as if for support. Her hand pressed firmly against his chest, over his stomach in a downslide, to the rising tube of muscle in his patched jeans. She seemed to supplicate but was really only keeping him from running toward the banging door of the Cobbieville Dry Goods.
Her dull hair flared, billowed to come alive into something not unlike gold. Her drab little hand-me-down dress fluttered like a sultana’s veils, the edges disappearing, nonexistent.
“Sacrifice anything come what might for the sake of having you near. In spite of the warning voice that comes in the night that repeats and repeats in my ear…” she sang in her sandy thrush. “…you know you never can win…”
Same Cole Porter number.
“Just the sight of you makes me stop, before I begin…” Ruby stroked him, voice soft as the salt which pours from the top of an hour glass into the bottom.
All around him the dust couples whirled, melded, reformed into stronger images. Pretty as pictures. Not Fred Astaires or Eleanor Powells but Gurneys and Websters, Randals and a flash even of his own Martha in a sheet-nightshirt-ballgown of filmy beiges and rusts from washed out topsoil and Oklahoma red clay. It was Mr. Semple Marty was waltzing with, his tuxedo in cream and sepias.
Better than mirages that teased in green trees when all you wanted was a drink of water. Because Jake didn’t want water. He wanted the world back. He wanted people. He wanted Martha.
Ruby put an arm up on his shoulder and took his hand with hers, facing him like a doll of sudden gauze. Slowly she began to dance him into the tapestry of the other figures. He felt them glide by. Could see how gorgeous Ruby really was, body a dream of absolute weightlessness. He coughed, worked to suppress it, felt it gather gagging momentum in his chest and throat in threads and pillows. He bent to put his face into Ruby’s hair, knowing he was choking, his shoulders shaking. His heart only seemed to make a percussion sympathetic to Porter’s melody.
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me.
Ruby’s voice purred into Jake’s ear and he could taste her in the wind. Could taste all of them as if they were a flavor from the same wisp of drought and summer and graveless sleeps. Her breasts might have come from his own fields. Her womb might have been his final, struggling crop.
Jake held Ruby tightly. Or she held him as weakness came drowsily in time and pace to the music.
The black reached the edge of town. Hovered in layers, swooped down like a ferocious flock of starving crows, and finally boomed in thunder that raced up Main Street, up every street in sheets.
Of rain.
He and Ruby had just kissed, her mouth full of sand like Martha’s, rough and sweet as brown sugar grains. He’d only begun to understand how easy it was to join them. To live off the blood, sweat and tears of the survivors after you’d given the same of yourself.
It wasn’t really murder just like it wasn’t really quite death. You went from the suffering of starvation and poverty to help other strugglers away from it as well. He was ready for that all right.
The scent of ozone burned. The water was as heavy as mallets.
Fresh as only much-missed rain could be.
Ruby melted in his arms.
All of them dissolved.
He leaned his head back in shock to cry out, sobbing. The rain washed into his mouth, down his throat, clearing out all traces of them.
They crumbled, not into dust and ashes but away from it. Faces ran, bodies which had been all grace and intangible form disassembled as the storm bathed them out of the air and back to the earth.
Jake held out his empty arms, water in his eyes, plastering his hair down, gluing his rags to his wasted body.
He looked down and saw that he was standing in mud.
Jake waded through it back to his Ford ’29. He would drive to another county, another state. Where farms were devastated in the drought. Anywhere there was dust. It couldn’t all end with this single rain.
Even with a deluge, seasons of thunderstorms and flood and inundations, there would always be dust.
| — | — |
RED MEAT
It was the breakfast of champions.
The midday meal of the driven.
&n
bsp; The supper of wolves. The staple of carnivores.
Bobbi may not have had much schooling but she knew what that meant as she sat on the sofa and listened intently to what the guest doctor on her favorite talk show said. It meant that red meat wasn’t good for you.
“You check the diets of people who are very aggressive, to the point of being predatory. A good case in point is nomadic tribes, who hunt and subsist chiefly from game as opposed to their agrarian neighbors who grow their food. Soldiers have traditionally been fed rations high in animal protein to give them the instincts and stamina to fight an enemy. Murderers are another example. Most of the condemned on our nation’s death row had too much red meat in their diets.”
Bobbi thought about the little roast she had thawing on the kitchen counter. Why, they ate meat every single day. Roy insisted on it. Aggressively.
“My studies conclude that vegetarians are more likely to be peaceful, while meat eaters are inclined toward belligerence,” the doctor said.
“Right.”
Bobbi got up wearily and turned off the television, shaking her head.
“As if I got anythin’ to say ‘bout it,” she muttered aloud. “Wouldn’t that be like tryin’ to yank a juicy steak from a pit bull? Then I’d git bit fer sure.”
Was this why she lived the way she did? Because Roy ate too much of that red meat? No, it didn’t take smarts to see that concepts didn’t matter one whit to the tone and shape of her life. Things were the way they had been for generations. And always would be. It had more to do with tradition than with diet.
Still, that roast thawing on the counter was making her think twice. It was as if it was a symbol of something that Bobbi had never thought of before. It was a symbol of her own ravenment. Being little more than meat and bones and…
Her ears pricked as she heard that sound at the window again. A scrape. The kind a branch would make in the wind. Only there was no wind. And no tree that close to the house. She wouldn’t bother to investigate. Not that she knew what it was even though she’d spied it a couple of weeks before, loping off towards the woods. It was red all over, marbled with fat, chunky raw in its nakedness.
Meaty.
Like an animal without its hide.
She heard it and almost changed her mind, went to the window to try and catch a glimpse of it again when a pinch of pain caught her unexpectedly below the stomach. There was warmth. A gentle tickling/trickling down her legs. Looking down, Bobbi saw blood. It situated itself first in the threadbare crotch of her cut-offs, oozing down between her legs. It went down from her feet in a dappled trail across the floor.
She looked back across her shoulder at the tawdry sofa, where she’d left a stain on the center cushion. It showed up like a murder against the faded and sagging fabric.
“No. It can’t be time. Not already.” She moaned as her heart sank.
Dribbles. Splatters. Then a thinly continuous rusty stream. There was going to be a lot of clean up for the next several days. Bobbi choked, wanting to cry. She was sure it hadn’t been a full month. Couldn’t have been. Please, God, don’t do this to her. She wasn’t sure she could take the humiliation.
Not that Roy would think twice about the blood, here and there, showing up in all places possible because she couldn’t keep up with where it might fall. He could shrug, use that grin of his that was innocent and condescending at the same time, figuring it was another good way to degrade her. By refusing her the simplest things with which she might maintain some delicate personal dignity. Like sanitary napkins. Bobbi would have to make do with stuffing toilet paper into her underwear. That bled through in no time. Left stains on all her clothes until she had nothing decent to wear.
Besides, Roy rationed the toilet paper. Gave Bobbi only so many squares per day. Yeah, he knew lots of ways to keep her in her place.
As when he decided to remove the toilet seat. After all he was a pointer, not a setter. And by putting a lock on the shower stall so that she couldn’t use that until he came home. It was ostensibly so that she wouldn’t waste water.
She stared at the blood spotting the floor and at the stain on the sofa. She felt so dirty. The shame burned holes in her cheeks until she put her bunched-up fists to them. She ground her knuckles against her jaws. It wouldn’t have been any worse had she been a toddler shitting all over the floor because she didn’t have any more sense than that.
“Hardly better than an animal,” she whimpered to herself. A primitive being, venally unclean.
Standing near the entrance to the short hallway, she doubled over with cramps. Uterine muscles contracted viciously until Bobbi almost couldn’t stand it any longer. But she would have to ignore the pain—like she always did—if she was to have any chance of cleaning it up before it got any worse. She couldn’t bear seeing pools and splotches of herself everywhere she turned. Reflected in so much stringy scarlet, swirls indicating where she had turned right or left.
Bobbi couldn’t meet Roy’s eyes when she was like that. Even if it was his fault. And when he brought his friends from the mill over for one of their frequent barbecues, she just wanted to crawl away. Maybe to the river where drowning would be such a clean death.
Not that Roy minded the blood. Just meant that Bobbi wasn’t pregnant again.
“If’n they’re old enough to bleed, they’re old enough to breed!” he joked.
And all his buddies laughed even if it was a very old joke.
Times were too hard to be having kids now, he’d say. And medical abortions were expensive. Had to go clear to Little Rock for one of those. Home remedies were better and easier. All it took was a bit of imagination. Hitting her repeatedly in the abdomen didn’t always do the trick. A stubborn baby might manage to cling to the mother’s insides until its time came. Be born. It might be born dead or it might be all convoluted, body parts scrambled out of their proper order and a visage straight out of a carny tent. Vaginal electric jolts produced with a bare wire and sparking up between the thigs worked real well a couple of times. So did massive douching with Epsom salts and baking soda mixed until it fizzed in whiskey.
Some of it was old lore. Henry Davies from up the street had given Roy that last method used by his family for years. Passed down from generation to generation. In return for Roy swapping to him that neat voltage tip. Another old joke: Incest is best but only as long as it’s kept in the family.
Bobbi leaned against the wall near the hallway, doubled over so far that she was close enough to really smell herself. Pensively, her arms encircled her throbbing abdomen. Having a bad period was like taking a beating, she thought. You bleed and you hurt, and you think it’ll never end.
She smelled the beans boiling in the kitchen, concentrated on that so she wouldn’t think of the other—more personal—odor. They would taste better if she put a few slivers of that roast in with them. Roy liked them that way. Best to keep him happy so he might be partial to being generous since she was in pain. Maybe even leave her alone tonight.
She wondered if he’d even notice if she squeezed a bloodied cleaning rag into the pot instead. Red was red. Was meat.
Bobbi gagged at the thought. She had to eat that same grub. But she would love to sit at the table and watch him taking mouthfuls, wolfing it down. And only she would know.
The supper of wolves, Doc?
Big deal. He’d eaten it before. In bed. Didn’t bother him none. No wonder he was the way he was. All that aggression. He’d look up goofily from between her legs with a red smeary mouth and leer at her in the half-light. The half-dark. He’d giggle like a loony and pretend to slaver, howling into her flesh. Holding her back flat on the bed so she couldn’t cramp double. The guys at work made jokes. And wore blood like a badge.
The mill had been closed down for ten years. Since the last real recession. She didn’t remember that too much since she’d only been four. But their father had lost his job then. Most of the folks in town had gone out of work. Many moved away. The old man hung on because this
was where all his family had lived since the last century. But then he and their mother had died about two years ago. Roy had taken up as the man of the house.
The state started to put in a highway but never finished the artery which would have connected them to Belleville and Ola. It just sort of turned a deep asphalt corner and dead-ended, not far from where the busy trucks used to pull in to load textiles for the outside markets. A smart guy with binoculars and an accurate rifle could make himself some money and goods with the few tourists who fucked up and missed the detour signs. Thirty smart guys could really keep a little town on its feet.
“You know the definition of an Arkansas virgin?” asked one of Roy’s mill buddies. “That’s a three-year-old who outran her brother.”
Just before inching the hall, Bobbi glanced out the window and saw it again, crouched down low, peeping at her with its cloudy eyes barely above the window sill. Bobbi was so startled that she cried out without meaning to at all. The eyes swiftly went away, down, as it must have fallen backward.
She staggered to the window, saw it hopping toward the trees, shambling lopsidedly. It paused once to look back at her, and Bobbi could tell that it was simply too timid to be any sort of danger.
In a town full of threat (that made its living the way it did), here was a creature she didn’t fear. Its eyes—set lidless within its fresh-wound face—were a calf’s, a lamb’s. So innocent that it pained her to look at them. The rest of it jiggled in its huge body, too soft, too ruddy, as if it was the stuff of unleavened life.
Bobbi hobbled into the bathroom, whimpering as she left clotty, bare footprints across the tile. She peered glumly at the forbidding padlock on the shower doors. She wanted so badly to rinse herself off. Just to stand under the water and let it wash away the stains, every speck of blood. She self-consciously slipped out of her jeans shorts and ruined underwear until all she wore was her tee-shirt. It sported the latest NRA slogan: Politicians Prefer Their Peasants To Be Unarmed.
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