“Catina called in sick again. At least somebody did. Some guy.”
I take the cover off my computer. Some guy. The reason for Dustin Murray’s suspicions.
Jamie pours her cup and mine and sits at Catina’s station, next to mine.
“She’s been looking at that new business degree program. The way it works, you sign up and take evening and weekend courses, so it doesn’t get in the way of your job, and if you’re a college employee, you don’t pay fees, and after a few years you have a master’s degree in business.”
“She could do that?”
“Sure. She’s already got a degree, you know. In sociology. She’s bright, even if she doesn’t act like it. With the master’s degree she can get a grade three or four levels higher than what she’s got, and she can get out of data processing.”
“And she’d earn more?”
“Oh yes. Quite a bit more.”
“Dustin came by my house. He was looking for her.”
“The little shit. I wish she’d unload him.”
“I wish I’d tried harder to find her and tell her about him.”
“Ahh, don’t worry. He’s a nothing.”
I think of poor Dustin with his desperate eyes and his fine taut body, all six feet of him. A good-looking couple, people would say about him and Catina. If only she didn’t want to move up three or four grades and make more money. Why wouldn’t she rather have Dustin? Poor Dustin, I catch myself thinking. He’s like the song lyrics that want so badly what they can’t have. Somebody should write him a new I can’t get what I want song.
“Don’t,” says Jamie, reading my mind. “The way they hang onto us is making us think they need us.”
21
On the way home from campus, I stop at the big mall on the edge of the Orchards and find it crowded with summer sales racks.
The air-conditioning blows full blast, and a few tired-looking women poke around among the outsized bathing suits and dusty sundresses nobody wanted to buy when they first arrived in the shops last spring. I look at a table of limp T-shirts in pastel colors like leftover Easter eggs and feel depressed.
I had kept the red skirt and vest in a big canvas carryall, folded in newspapers to keep the suede from creasing, and whenever we’d checked into motels, I shook it out and hung it up. The canvas carryall was gone too. Strange, when I can feel its drag on my shoulder and the way its strap bit down when I had to carry it too far. There must have been a day when I saw the red suede for the last time, but there had been too much bad shit coming down for me to notice.
*
I knew where Gall had hidden his cash. I still had the key to his room—our room—and I felt behind the panel under the bathroom sink until I got my fingers around the roll of bills and pulled them out and stuck them into my brassiere. I came out of the bathroom and knew I was seeing our room for the last time: wallpaper printed with elk walking through fir trees, a couple of enlarged photographs of mountain peaks capped with snow, and a bedspread and sheet pulled most of the way on the floor, stinking of Gall and the Screamer, stinking of Brazos and me.
I kept doubling over, I felt so bad. The digital clock on the bed stand showed 5:00 a.m. in red. I must have—well, I must have known I could catch a flight from the Anchorage airport down to the Lower 48 because I called for a taxi and stuffed what I could find of my clothes into my backpack, along with Gall’s T-shirt that I found tangled in the bedsheets. I couldn’t have managed the carryall even if I’d remembered it. I threw the room key on the stand beside the clock. When my taxi, with me in the back seat, pulled past the lighted motel coffee shop, I caught sight of Brazos and Bill the Drummer in a window booth. From the way their heads jerked and hands gestured, they probably still were shouting at each other about the wild night and whatever they’d had to do with Gall and whether Bill really was bailing from the band. They never saw me. I was too sick to care.
*
“Ruth!”
I nearly jump out of my skin. I’ve been far away, and now I’m back in the Versailles mall, where the air-conditioning is brutal and the lighting so diffuse that it casts no shadows, where something resembling music plays over a sound system, where shoppers pick over racks and tables of faded goods, where I’m Ruth, not Ruby.
It’s Catina, of course, sucking through a straw on something thick and green in a clear plastic container. For once she’s wearing ordinary jeans and slides, and she hasn’t bothered with eye makeup, which in a strange way makes her look both older and younger, but she’s smiling, and she smells of her favorite citrusy perfume.
“You didn’t come to work today.”
“I called in sick.”
I don’t believe her, either that she was sick or that she called in, because it would have been Jamie who took the call, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Something is coming down. I can feel it, like thunder waiting to break over the bluffs beyond the river.
“So, what are you doing here?” Catina asks, and I explain Jamie’s idea of a girls’ night out and the Three Hundred Club and the Working Poor and needing something to wear.
Catina glances around at the sales racks. “You don’t want any of this crap.”
“No, I already decided that.”
“You got your car here? I’ll show you a place.”
As we leave the mall, I notice Catina’s quick sweeping look across the parking lot, checking the entrances, and I wonder if she knows Dustin has been looking for her.
“Drive up the grade and turn right on Fifteenth,” she directs me. “There’s a great little shop next to the liquor store.”
The right turn at the top of the grade leads into a neighborhood of rental houses and strip malls, and I can’t think what kind of a great little shop would open its doors there. It turns out to be a Goodwill, and Catina is out of the car and taking a quick look in each direction before I can turn the key in the Pontiac.
“You have to get here at the right time,” she explains when I catch up with her. “The stuff gets picked over pretty fast. We might have to come back.”
A woman seated at the back of the store glances up as we enter and goes back to whatever she’s reading. One good thing about the Goodwill, nobody follows you around asking if they can help you. I’ve visited my share, and this Goodwill has the same dusty, musty smell that makes me think of stale popcorn and the dregs in soda cans. The bare floorboards creak with all the depressed things people have gotten rid of. Racks and racks of clothes. Shelves of paperback books lining the walls. On the far side of the store, a household goods section with stacks of cups and dishes and toasters and griddles. I wander over and spot a wok that can be purchased for fifty cents and think I might take it home to Mrs. Pence’s.
“Over here!” hisses Catina, and I leave the wok and join her at a rack of shoes and boots.
“Red cowboy boots?”
“What size are you?”
“Those look pretty small.”
She reluctantly sets the boots back on the rack. “Let’s look through the shirts,” she says. “Sometimes you can find a bargain. I got my turquoise shirt here, real silk, for five dollars.”
As she riffles through the shirts, I try to remember the last time, or any time, I’d gone shopping with a girlfriend. Not in high school, after all the convictions had been appealed and the sentences overturned and Brad’s investigation was under suspicion and I was an outcast. Later, with the band, I didn’t have friends who were girls.
What about the Screamer, whose real name was Sharyn? Was there a time I would have called her a friend?
Why is Catina my friend? True, she’s part of the united front at the Office of Student Accounting, her and me and Jamie and to some extent Dr. Brenner against the Queen and the various campus tittle-tattlers and stuffed suits. But when have I spent time with her out of the office before today? Is Catina a nice girl who has a bad thing going with Dustin? Could Sharyn have been seen as a nice girl who had a bad thing going with Gall?
A h
unter-green shirt with a dull sheen catches my eye, and I pull it off the rack.
“Yes!” breathes Catina. She takes it away from me and holds it at arm’s length with her head cocked to consider. “Great color for you. You’re so pretty, Ruth. You just need to smile more.”
“Twenty dollars!”
“It’s real silk.”
“You paid five dollars for yours.”
“Yes, but that was then. It all depends on the day you find it.”
The sleeves look a bit short, but I can always turn back the cuffs. With my blue jeans and a coat of polish on my old boots, I’ll look good enough for the Three Hundred Club.
“Okay,” I agree and carry the green shirt back to the counter, where the woman lays down her book, rings up the sale, and folds the shirt into a secondhand paper bag.
“Do you need a ride home?” I ask Catina on our way to the door. I have some idea she and Dustin live in one of the big apartment complexes overlooking the shopping mall, and I think she probably had walked down to the mall when I ran into her.
“I’d appreciate it. I’m staying with my dad and grandma. They live over in the South Orchards. I just had to get out of the house for a while, so my dad dropped me off at the mall. I was super glad to spot you.”
After the dust and must of the Goodwill, the parking lot feels fresh, even in the heat and the lingering traces of smoke. We climb into the oven that is the Pontiac after being parked in the sun, and I toss my new shirt into the back seat. I can always come back for the wok if I want it. It didn’t look as though it was going anywhere.
I put the Pontiac into reverse and am backing out of the parking slot when Catina throws herself down on the floor under the passenger seat.
“Don’t look down! Don’t look around! Just drive normally!”
“Drive normally where? To your dad’s house?”
“No! What you’d normally do! Drive home!”
“To Mrs. Pence’s?”
“Wherever!”
I wheel the Pontiac around and drive past the liquor store and out of the parking lot with the hair on the back of my neck tingling with the effort not to look anywhere but straight ahead.
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t look down!”
Don’t look down, don’t look around, don’t look back. But as the Pontiac carries us up the avenue at its stately pace, I do steal a look into the rearview mirror and see the black Mustang pull out from the curb by the liquor store and fall in behind us. Its windows are too heavily tinted for me to distinguish the driver. I can’t help it—I glance down at Catina and see that her face is tear streaked.
I drive along the avenue with the broad Pontiac taking up more than its half of the traffic lane and its sporty black tail following at a discreet half a block. When I signal to turn into Mrs. Pence’s neighborhood, I see the Mustang signal for the same turn. Down the dip where the side street turns into little more than a graveled lane, down into the gully and through the horse pasture and up again, and then another turn on Mrs. Pence’s peaceful street, where nothing ever happens, except for the cottonwood leaves that meet overhead and whisper among themselves and the boys who hang around the mailboxes doing wheelies on their bikes.
I start to pull up beside the picket fence but change my mind and instead turn into the two-track gravel driveway that leads to Mrs. Pence’s detached garage. The garage door, of course, is closed.
Now what. I risk a glance and see the Mustang has paused by the mailboxes, where the bicycle kids observe it with interest. On the floor on the passenger side, Catina has rolled herself into a ball with her arms wrapped around her head.
I get out of the Pontiac and go to open the garage door, which is a heavy rough-carpentered wooden door that moves, if enough effort is put into it, on an iron slide. I’m putting my shoulder to the door to force it along its slide when Isaiah comes around the side of the garage. His mouth drops.
“Ruby! What are you doing?”
I’m too surprised to reflect that I could just as well have asked him the same question. As to his question, I have no ready answer. I give the garage door a heave, and it moves a few grudging inches, and Isaiah leans against it and shoves it the rest of the way open for me. As though on signal, the Mustang eases away from the mailboxes and draws even with Mrs. Pence’s driveway, where it idles until Isaiah gives the invisible driver a two-finger wave. The Mustang accelerates in a spin of gravel up the street, where it turns at the next corner and disappears.
Isaiah opens the door on the Pontiac’s passenger side, and Catina falls out.
“Hey!” He gives her a hand up, and she throws her arms around him.
I watch as the sun beats down and Catina sobs in Isaiah’s arms while he strokes her shoulders.
“How about we take you to your dad’s house?” he says after a minute or two, and she nods.
Isaiah turns to me. “I walked over here. You think—”
And I hand him the keys to the Pontiac.
When they’re gone, I walk around the garage and find the little garden freshly tended. A handful of wilting weeds has been left on the grass. I kneel and pull two or three maple seedlings that the gardener missed and gather up the handful to toss on the compost heap.
What have I seen? A truly frightened Catina? Or Catina, the princess of drama?
22
Catina doesn’t come to work the next morning or the next, and no one calls her in sick.
“When did you see her last?” asks Jamie, and I tell her about the trip Catina had taken with me through the Goodwill, the green silk shirt I’d bought, and Catina’s fear when we left the Goodwill.
“God. I wonder if her father knows where she is.”
Her voice trails off with her thoughts.
And just then Dr. Brenner arrives, and he doesn’t head for coffee and his office as usual.
“What’s going on?”
Jamie takes a deep breath, lets it out, and glances around as though she hopes Catina will materialize where she belongs on a weekday at 8:00 a.m. I know Jamie is torn between her loyalty to Dr. Brenner and her loyalty to Catina, but what can I do—
“We don’t know what’s become of Catina,” I admit.
Dr. Brenner’s face is expressionless, as always, the robot turning thoughts through the nuts and bolts and cogwheels in his head. “I wonder if Jim Belasco knows where she is,” he says after a moment.
He goes into his office, and we see his telephone line light up. Soon he’s back at his door.
“Jim doesn’t know where she is either. She hasn’t been home for two nights. I told him to call the police.”
I should have called Isaiah.
*
Someone, maybe the mother of a piano student, had given Mrs. Pence a loaf of homemade bread, a braided loaf with a crusting of poppy seeds that would trouble her dentures. Rather than waste the loaf and the thought, she wanted to pass the gift on to Isaiah, and she asked me to take it over to him that evening.
Isaiah’s apartment was on the second floor of one of the old gingerbread mansions a few blocks from Mrs. Pence’s house. When the mansion had been converted to apartments, an exterior staircase had been attached to the siding. The staircase led to a smallish landing and a window that had been cut down to the floor to make a door. That first door, Mrs. Pence had said, would be unlocked and open onto a corridor, where Isaiah’s door would be No. 2. I dutifully carried the loaf of bread up the unlighted stairs, grumbling to myself about breaking my neck in the dark, opened the door on a corridor lit by a forty-watt bulb, and knocked on No. 2.
It took a long time to open. I was pretty sure Isaiah was home because his white pickup was parked along the side street, but I was about to leave and take the loaf of bread back to Mrs. Pence when a crack widened and he peered out.
Seeing me, he opened it a little wider. He was barefoot and clad only in boxer shorts, and he looked a little dazed. Had I wakened him?
“Ruby, what’s up?”
I knew what I had smelled on him. Citrus and semen.
*
On Saturday nights Mrs. Pence likes to settle down by her radio with her eyes closed and listen to whatever musical performance is featured on the classics station. Since I’ve taken over most of the cooking and washing up, her radio sessions begin earlier, and sometimes she naps through the andante movements with her head against the side of her old rose velvet wing chair and her breathing hardly discernible. It’s her way of making up for some of her middle-of-the-night assignations with the Steinway grand.
I wait until I’m sure she’s asleep before I slip upstairs to change clothes for the Three Hundred Club. As I feared, the hunter-green shirt is too short in the sleeves, but with the cuffs rolled back, it doesn’t matter. I brush my hair and from force of habit start to twist it into its workday bun, then let it fall over my shoulders. When I look in the mirror, I see a tall woman with long dark hair, a green silk shirt and blue jeans and boots with scuff marks the polish doesn’t quite cover.
Good enough for the Three Hundred Club, though, where the lights will be dim. Even with the thought, I’m seeing myself in another mirror, in the leather wear shop in Jackson Hole, and then in the mirror of Gall’s eyes, and what I see is a girl who matters, who is cared about, a girl whose name is Ruby Red. There was a time, when that reflection faded from Gall’s eyes, I would have done anything to get it back.
His tenderness for me lasted quite a while. His featherlight kisses, never on my mouth but on my throat and my eyelids and especially around my hairline. His arms around me, also featherlight but with the hard-clenched muscles always just behind the embrace. And it was enough for me to sleep curled in his arms, absorbing his warmth and the scent of his body. It was months after Versailles and Lewiston, months after Jackson Hole, maybe even after Spokane and Bellingham, maybe during the first tour in Anchorage, that I began to wonder why he never went further with me.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 12