As Bunny munched, Mr. Brewer said to all of us, “We need to talk about the trial.”
He seemed worried. Eleanor invited him inside, where he spread his papers on the table. He showed us a witness list that he had received from the prosecutor, that’s the lawyer on the other side, the one trying to put Mother in prison.
“There’s Jerry Smith, the owner of the Okay Corral. He testified at Carl’s trial and that is the place where the robbery took place. I don’t believe that he can say anything about Barbara’s involvement in the crime. You’re sure, Barbara, that you had no idea that Carl was planning to rob the place and that you stayed in or near the car the entire time?”
“She did,” I blurted out. “She didn’t know anything. She didn’t do anything.”
“Barbara?” Joe Brewer repeated, wanting her to answer for herself. “Did you do anything that could be construed as helping Carl commit this crime? Anything at all?”
Mother squinted, looking up into her head for the memory of that night. She told him that I walked Bunny out in the bushes, using her panty hose as a leash, and she had stayed in the car until the shooting started. “I had no idea that Carl would do such a fool thing,” she said.
“Okay, good,” Joe Brewer said, and read the next name from the list. “Gus Luna. Who is Gus Luna?”
My stomach twisted with guilt. I hadn’t told Joe Brewer about Gus the gunman. If only ignoring unpleasantries could make them disappear, we’d all be better off.
Mother sighed and said, “Carl was a tumbleweed. He picked up friends everywhere. We met Gus Luna at the campsite.”
“And he worked in a doughnut shop, best doughnut cutter in Arkansas,” I added. “He gave us a box of doughnuts.”
Joe Brewer asked, “What is he doing on the witness list?”
“I don’t know,” Mother said. “He’s just a man and they had some business in Hot Springs. Ruby Clyde and I went sightseeing.”
“He didn’t travel with you?” Joe Brewer asked. “He wasn’t at the Okay Corral?”
“No,” we both said, but I knew Gus would be trouble.
“I have to know everything before trial…” Joe Brewer dragged his fingers across his forehead. “Surprises in the courtroom can kill you.”
So I took a deep breath and confessed that it was Gus Luna who had gotten that gun for the Catfish and that we had used it to steal Bunny from the IQ Zoo.
Joe Brewer drew his lips into a tight little knot and finally said, “So that explains the next name. It’s the owner of the IQ Zoo in Hot Springs, Arkansas.”
“That man! He was torturing Bunny…” Bunny backed up and grunted in disgust. The Circus God from the IQ Zoo was a horrid memory.
But Joe Brewer raised his hand to stop both of us. “We will sort this out later. Right now we have a bigger problem.”
We all waited. I thought the problems he had just described were plenty big.
He took a long breath and said slowly, “Carl is also on the witness list.”
What? The Catfish again.
“But he’s already gone to prison,” Eleanor cried. “What could he possibly say?”
Mother shook her head and said, “Carl always has plenty to say.”
Joe Brewer explained that he had already brought a motion before the court to prevent Carl from testifying. But the judge had denied the motion and Joe Brewer did not like that. He sensed the judge would be leaning against us during the trial. Jurors looked to the judge for guidance, every little smirk and smile could influence them. And what’s worse, Joe Brewer explained, the Catfish had made a plea bargain, which meant that if he testified against my mother, his fifteen-year prison sentence would be reduced by five years.
“That’s not fair!” I shouted. “He’d betray Mother for a crummy five years.” I’d thought the Catfish was gone from our lives for good, but here he came worse than before. Would we never be free of him?
“Happens all the time,” Joe Brewer said. “The prosecutor would rather send two people to jail than one. It makes them look good. And if that means reducing one sentence, then so be it. Everybody knows it, and nobody cares.”
“Is all lost?” Mother asked.
Joe Brewer looked straight into her eyes and said, “I can’t lie to you. This is bad. If they believe him, then it would be direct evidence. But all is never lost.”
THIRTY-FOUR
One evening, not long after the bad news, Eleanor called me down to the front room. I left Bunny by the bed. The stairs weren’t so easy for him anymore, all that growing. Once a day was plenty. I scampered down the stairs in my blue balloon pajamas.
Eleanor and Mother wanted to talk to me, she said. I sat on a stool facing them. They sat on the leather sofa looking at me.
Finally Eleanor said, “Ruby Clyde, this is going to seem exceedingly strange to you.”
Strange didn’t bother me, I thought. What could be stranger than my entire life? I waited.
Eleanor lifted a stack of papers that was beside her on the sofa.
She cleared her throat and said, “Your mother and I have been worried about what is to become of you.”
I knew that—nothing strange there. What was to become of me was the first thing I worried about every morning.
“Joe Brewer has informed us that it is possible that Barbara will go to prison for ten years. That means that you will be without a mother until you are twenty-two years old.”
Mother took over the conversation and said, “We have a plan.”
Silence.
“Does anybody want to tell me this plan?” I asked.
“Eleanor is going to adopt you,” Mother blurted.
Okay, that was strange.
“We know this is sudden, Ruby Clyde.” Mother took the papers from Eleanor’s hands and held them up for me to see. “But we are running out of time. And if they put me back in jail…”
“But they won’t,” I said. “You’re innocent.”
And then I remembered what Mother had said back in the jail, the first time I saw her after the robbery. She hadn’t wanted me then, and she still didn’t.
“Fine, just give me away, if that’s what you want to do,” I said. And the weirdest thing was that I didn’t mind being owned by Eleanor Rose, but I didn’t want Mother to give me away.
“Listen to the whole plan, Ruby Clyde,” Eleanor said.
Mother and Eleanor Rose looked at each other, then Eleanor Rose leaned toward me, took my hand, and said, “There’s more. First, the three of us are going into family court and arrange this adoption. Then your mother and I are going to swap places. So if anybody had to go to prison it would be me.”
Holy cow! Holy Longhorn cow!
They were going to swap places. Mother and Eleanor Rose. Mother would put on Eleanor Rose’s nun habit, and Eleanor Rose would put on Mother’s dress and … if anybody went to jail it would be Aunt Eleanor.
“Wait a minute!” I yelled. “She can’t wear your habit. Don’t you have to give it back?”
“I can take my time,” she said. And when I looked back and forth between Mother and Eleanor I saw they were dead serious.
“Your brains have walked right out the door and floated away into the clouds.”
I stomped upstairs, closed the door, and threw myself into bed. I leaned over the edge to speak to Bunny on the floor. “Oh, pig of mine, we are living in a monkey house and they are throwing bananas at us.” He pointed his piggy eyes at me as if this was old news.
The sisters followed me upstairs and sat on my bed. Holding my hands. Crowding me.
“No!” I said. “I can’t choose between you.”
That’s when Eleanor took my chin in her hand and made me look her in the eye.
“Ruby Clyde,” she said. “This is not your decision. It is mine. You are the child and I am the adult. This is my life. No matter what you say, I will not change my mind. So don’t ever look back on this day and think it was your decision.”
She explained her plan, step
by step, and told me exactly what she expected me to do.
“But you’ll get caught,” I said. I had questions and I expected to get answers. I had given the criminal-minded twins control of my life, and this was what they did. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
They had thought it all out. Nobody else knew they were identical twins except Joe Brewer, because the way they dressed disguised that fact. Mother in her summer dresses and newly short hair. Eleanor who hid her newly grown stubble under her nun’s wimple. It would be easy to swap clothes.
“What about your cancer?”
Mother explained that nobody had done a medical exam yet. If she was convicted, they would do an intake exam at the women’s prison over in Mountain View. A strip search, she called it. I thought that would be pretty embarrassing, to get naked and be searched by strangers.
Other than the cancer, she said, they were identical.
“Not the fingerprints,” Eleanor reminded her. “We are not exactly 100 percent identical. But Joe Brewer told them that the fingerprints they took of Barbara when they booked her in the jail are just filed in a national database. If they fingerprint again at Mountain View Prison it will also be uploaded to a database of millions of fingerprints. Nobody is ever likely to pull them out and compare every little sworl. So long as neither of us gets arrested.”
She turned her eyes to Mother as if to say that she expected Mother to never get arrested again.
They were going to practice swapping places beforehand. They would go to the clinic and family court. If they pulled off the adoption, then they would swap places for the trial.
“Is Joe Brewer okay with this?” I couldn’t believe that a man like that would ever agree to their scheme.
“He hasn’t been told, if you know what I mean,” Mother said.
“It’s called plausible deniability,” Eleanor said.
Deniability was a Wordly Wizard word, but I didn’t shout it out. We weren’t speaking the same language anymore. We were living in the Tower of Babel.
“He loves you, Ruby Clyde,” Mother said.
“If you can’t handle this,” Eleanor said, “tell us right now. Because if you ever tell, we all go down. It is the only thing you have to do. Keep your mouth shut forever.”
She knew that was not an easy thing to ask of me. My mouth was one of my best weapons. But if it meant keeping the ones I loved safe, then I could lock my lips closed for the rest of my life.
THIRTY-FIVE
Mother and Eleanor weren’t nervous. They’d swapped places all the time when they were little, so they weren’t worried. “Like riding a bike,” Eleanor said. “You never forget.”
They’d go to the medical clinic as each other. Eleanor was going to dress like Mother, and go back to the clinic where I had gotten my school shots. She would tell them that she had some indigestion or something. She would also tell them all about her cancer surgery and treatments in another state. Since they were a walk-in clinic they wouldn’t insist on getting all the records—after all, she just had indigestion. But she would make them write it down. Eleanor wanted to establish an in-state medical record of her cancer, just in case she went to prison and somebody said, “Hey wait, nobody said you have cancer!”
When I saw them in each other’s clothes for the first time, I didn’t think they’d fool anybody. Sure, Mother looked like a nun in Eleanor’s habit, with just her little face stuck out. Sure, Eleanor wore Mother’s dress and her hair had grown back, much like Mother’s chopped-off hair. But any fool would see the difference.
Wouldn’t they?
Apparently not.
* * *
They wouldn’t let me go into the clinic with them; they thought I would blow it. Now that’s insulting. If there’s one thing I’m very good at, it is not blowing my cover.
But I agreed and spent the afternoon with Joe Brewer. We sat by a fountain in the park.
“Tell me again,” Joe Brewer asked, “about the IQ Zoo.”
I launched off. “It was this bully boy, stupid stupid bully, you should have seen him in his stupid circus outfit and a cigarette. Only stupid people smoke cigarettes.”
Joe interrupted me. “Ruby Clyde, do you realize how often you use the word stupid?”
“So,” I said. “It’s a strong word. It feels good when I say it.”
“But it feels bad when others hear it. And you are better than that.”
“What’s a better word?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure that a girl who loves vocabulary words as much as you do will figure it out. Now, tell me the story without using the word stupid, not even once.”
I did. It wasn’t easy but I did not say the word out loud, but I thought about it a few times.
“Oh, girl. That story is unbelievable. Thank God you are safe.” Joe laughed and rubbed his hands over both eyes. “Did the owner see you?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “The—whatever you want to call him—circus teenager meanie kid picked me up and threw me out on the sidewalk.”
We sat quietly for a moment before he said, “We need to talk about your presence at the trial.”
“I have to be there,” I said. “We even bought a dress.”
“I don’t want anybody recognizing you in court. It might be a distraction.”
“I still don’t know why you won’t call me as a witness your own self. I could tell them everything.”
“It’s complicated, Ruby Clyde. You’re a child. You’d say anything for your mother.”
“Not so, I wouldn’t lie,” I said. But I would lie. It was a lie that I wouldn’t lie. But I wouldn’t have to lie—it was all the Catfish.
“I can’t put you on the stand, Ruby Clyde. And if the prosecutor knows about you, she wouldn’t either. Child witnesses are too unpredictable and sympathetic.”
“At least let me be in the courtroom, please,” I said. “Nobody has ever seen me in a dress and hair bow, that’s for sure.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “But you will have to trust me.”
I fell silent. He didn’t press.
Finally I said, “I never trusted my mean grandmother, never. I learned a lot from her. My mother? Well, trust is not the word. I love her, but … I don’t not trust her. And I know she loves me.”
“I’m glad you know that.” Joe Brewer nodded.
I sighed. “I’ve always found pieces of people to love. I guess trust is the same way, you have to do it in pieces.”
“Trust in pieces. Not bad, Ruby Clyde. Trust in pieces.”
Speaking of trust, I had not forgotten my bargain with God. Aunt Eleanor had lived and I needed to do something important for her.
I reached in the plastic bag I’d brought and scattered bread crumbs, and in just a few seconds we were surrounded by a swarm of pigeons pecking, bobbing, and flapping.
“Joe Brewer,” I said. “I need your help.”
“Anything,” he said.
“There’s one thing I can’t do for myself.”
“There’s a whole lot of things you can’t do for yourself, Ruby Clyde.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I waved him off. “I’m serious. You know I told you about Eleanor’s son, the one she gave up for adoption.”
He got respectful and said, “Yes, of course.”
The mist from the fountain blew across my arm, making the hairs stand up.
“Can you find her son?” I tossed another handful of crumbs into the middle of the flock, and they darted madly, stupidly, seeking bread.
“I don’t know. Breaking adoption records is difficult.” Joe squinted at the gray birds scratching in the dirt, at their beautifully shaped heads and deep black pearls for eyes.
I told him everything Eleanor had told me, when and where she had her son. “So why can’t you just call them? It will be easy.”
“Nothing’s easy,” Joe Brewer said. “You should know that by now. But I can try. Especially since Sister Eleanor is … not well.”
I wondered
if he had almost said dying. Eleanor had insisted that not all people with cancer die, but she was certainly training us to get along without her.
“You don’t sound very … hopeful.” I hesitated because I needed him to have hope about everything.
“Oh, girl, I live on hope. All defense lawyers do.” He reached into the bag and threw a handful of bread bits to one side of the pigeons. The shiny gray birds wheeled and bobbed as one, and sucked up the crumbs like a vacuum cleaner.
THIRTY-SIX
Then came family court. If we got caught there I didn’t know what would happen. Still, they were determined to try it—change my legal guardian from Mother to Eleanor. Only Mother would be Eleanor, and Eleanor would be Mother, so we weren’t really changing anything. I was losing track of reality fast.
My confusion was complete. The adults were going to do what they were going to do. They were in complete control and I had no choice but to trust them, dangerous or not.
Eleanor and I wore the matching mother-daughter dresses. That dress I hate to this day. It’s amazing how the wrong clothes can make you feel stupid—I mean awkward. Mother clipped that silly bow in my hair and I let her. I negotiated keeping my boots for that bow. My cowboy boots were getting snug, but I wore them anyway.
Mother put on Eleanor’s nun habit and her big heavy glasses.
We headed out in the blue van first thing in the morning, Mother driving. Eleanor directed us to the court. “Don’t say anything,” they kept peppering me. “Only speak if you are spoken to, only if the judge asks you a direct question. Then keep your answer simple.”
It was like they all thought I was … a child, which I was, but I knew how to handle myself, better than they did. You wouldn’t catch me swapping places and walking into a courtroom, that’s for sure.
We parked.
Joe Brewer wanted us to meet him in the hall outside of family court. It was not the place where Mother’s criminal trial would be held, he said. Another building nearby.
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