Inside the pipe, Rue drinks until her stomach is full and the rags are no longer kicking or rising or falling, and then she curls up in the wet and tucks her head into the crook of her arm, and here, where the sun cannot reach, the hunger quieted, her summer travels at an end, she roosts. She roosts and dreams darkly.
Three days later.
The Peterbilt gives a great heave and shudder where it drops her, then rolls back onto the highway, the distant lights of Fort Worth like a thin ribbon along the eastern horizon. To the west, where the big rig is headed, the sun gutters. She watches the taillights fade and the last of the color bleed out of the sky. She hears the sound of a fiddle, quick and friendly. She turns and sets off across the weed-cracked parking lot toward the long, boxy building. The word Cowpuncher’s written in big white crooked letters across the red facade. There is no porch. It might have once been a grocery store, some industrial space, now reclaimed in the name of wagon wheels and spurs, made over to look like some big metal barn at the edge of a vast prairie. The parking lot crowded with Fords and Chevrolets, new and old, the old mostly farm trucks with rust patches big as continents on the doors and tailgates tied on with chains and rope. Long-limbed silhouettes in hats lean on grilles and fenders near the entrance, smoking, spitting. She is wearing a new denim skirt and red cowgirls, a pink button-up top. She is not sallow now, her color and warmth returned. Her skin whole and moist. Her red curls kempt and glowing with an almost unnatural sheen, and she can feel their eyes upon her as she moves past them in the dim blue light.
Two of the men whistle.
Tonight, she is more than hungry.
She is rejuvenated, fresh, her spirits buoyed.
Tonight, she feels like hunting.
A fat man sits on a barrel outside the entrance. He looks her over in the manner of a man who has seen trouble in denim before. A smile slips up beneath his silver walrus mustache, and he politely opens the door. “Ma’am,” he says.
Inside, the dance floor is packed with bodies young and old. It runs the length of the hangar-like building. Its boards, Rue notices, once aqua blue, have long since been scuffed bare by the steady tramp of soles and heels. The air is a miasma of beer and smoke and perfume and sweat. Tables, small and square, and chairs with straw bottoms have all been pushed to the edges of the room, lending the whole place the feel of an arena, the men and women taking each other by the hands and onto the floor like cattle leading cattle out of pens. Rue weaves through the crush of bodies—bobbing straw cowboy hats with feathered bands and checkered shirts and leather vests and kerchiefs—and takes a free table by the back wall, where she can see the whole of the room. At the far end of the floor is the pine-board stage, where a band in yellow shirts and black boots plays against a backdrop of the lone star flag of Texas. Their sound is steel and string, their chords and harmonies sweet. She does not know the song, but it has the feel of something old and simple, and this she likes. She has always liked a fiddle. It reminds her of a man she had once called father, when she was human. A farmer with strong and knotty hands who would take up his old violin at holidays and play by the fire.
She sits and listens to the music for a while, and gradually she closes her eyes, and the rest of her senses follow.
All around her, the bodies ebb and flow, currents within currents.
She opens her eyes when the music stops, and in her hand she turns the locket at her throat, rubbing it gently with her thumb, the chain crossing the white scar where the pale man’s short blade split flesh over four decades past.
The men and women on the floor are changing out, and the band is counting off a new song, this one slow, its first note a long sad peal from a steel guitar.
Her teeth begin to ache at the back of her mouth.
Something in the room is different, she thinks. Something has changed.
She senses it the way one predator that’s come to drink might sense another across a stream and look up, its jaws dripping.
She comes straight out of her chair, standing and craning her head above the crowd, searching for something, she does not even know what, a shade, a face, a shadow. The ache in her teeth is creeping up into the cavities of her sinuses, down into the spread of her breastbone, and her heart is pumping fresh blood to her arms and legs and fingers and toes and all of these points are tingling. Without a thought she stands in the seat of her woven straw chair, and though it wobbles it holds her—she is light, so very light—and from somewhere nearby a stupid cowboy claps and calls out to her. She ignores this, can see the entire length of the barn-like space now and every man and woman here, and they are none of them special, none of them a shade or a shadow, but there is something different, something better, something she has never encountered in all her wandering—
another like me?
—no, not quite.
Not like her.
And now she sees him: against the far long wall, one black boot cocked on the cheap pine paneling, left thumb hooked in the pocket of his jeans, right hand holding a beaded can of Lone Star beer. He wears a blue denim button-up with twin roses embroidered on each shoulder, his Adam’s apple prominent, his face a scruff, eyes close together. A black hat. She follows his line of sight: a woman in her late twenties sitting across the room, tipping back a raffia straw hat and meeting his gaze with a smile—and not for the first time this night. An old scar on her upper lip, a small white slice.
Rue understands: He is not like me, but he is.
Because he is a killer.
Not just a man who has killed, but a killer.
She feels the truth of this cross the space between them and crackle like electricity, and a long-dead coil inside her begins to glow and warm, to radiate heat. Rue feels the chair beneath her begin to wobble, and she realizes it is because her own legs have begun to shake. She puts one hand down to the back of her chair, then lowers herself into it. She spills a salt shaker with the back of her hand. Takes a deep breath, wills the surge of whatever this is—not the hunger, but something else, something different—to pass, and when her hands are only slightly trembling, she gets up and moves across the room, weaving at first between the bodies but soon hooking and pushing her way through. She loses sight of him, and when she finally emerges from the crowd, the spot where he was standing beneath a neon Michelob sign is empty. She spies him crossing the floor to the girl. She picks up his beer where he’s left it on a table, smells the lip of the can. Touches her tongue to the metal.
From across the dance floor: a brief scream, crashing glass.
On stage, the band keeps playing, but several of the couples dancing have slowed, clutching each other at the commotion.
The cowboy—my cowboy—struggles in the grip of a man much larger than he, a man with muscles straining against a tight blue shirt with faux pearl buttons.
She and a handful of others follow the fight out into the parking lot, where the big man lands two, three blows on the cowboy like driving fence posts with a sledge. The girl in the raffia hat streaks from the hall and lands like a cat on the big man’s back, screeching, the cowboy in the rose-denim shirt now scrabbling out from under them, and they are all three kicking up a whirl of dust and noise.
Rue keeps to the edge of the crowd. Most of them men, some of them the same smokers and spitters who had leaned on their fenders and watched her crossing the lot less than an hour before, they take no notice of her now.
The woman in the straw hat with the scarred lip is on the ground, her short skirt hiked far up. The big man’s walking away, spitting blood and wiping at the red streaks along his cheek. “Goddamn crazy bitch,” Rue hears him say. He gets into a pickup of his own, and the engine roars and the tires spit gravel, and as the dust settles and the girl with the scarred lip crawls down to the cowboy in the denim roses, the crowd breaks up, laughing.
Rue reaches out, almost without thought, and snags the wrist of a passing smoker-spitter. He turns and looks at her, and the surprise fades from his hawkish face and
his eyes go dead, and Rue says to him, “We are going to follow those two,” and he simply nods, mouth ajar. He tosses his cigarette and reaches a wad of keys out of his hip pocket.
“I’m over there,” he says, pointing toward a pickup that, to her, looks like every other pickup in the world.
The girl with the scarred lip is helping the cowboy up, and together they laugh and falter into the dark.
Rue sits in the cab of the smoker-spitter’s truck for a long time, watching the apartment window where the cowboy and the woman’s shadows crossed a while ago behind a shade. The truck is parked in a dark corner of the apartment complex’s lot, a screen of pines between it and a dimly lit breezeway, no fluorescent lights too near.
Beyond the apartments: the dark plains west of the Brazos.
The smoker-spitter slumps forward over his wheel, a flat-edged screwdriver jutting from his throat. After he had cut the lights and the engine, he had reached the screwdriver from the musty floorboards and, upon Rue’s request, put the tip of it into his own neck. She had drawn close to him as he spasmed and kicked, and moving the wooden handle gently to loosen it where it stuck, she had put her lips to the hole and drunk, making soft sucking sounds and stroking his cheek, gently. After a while, his clock had stopped, so Rue had pushed him down across the wheel and wiped her mouth with a blue bandana she found in his back pocket before turning her attention to the apartment.
The cowboy’s truck is parked at the curb. The truck and camper on its back are bent and worn and cracked and old. Time-battered. A red Roadrunner and arrow painted along the camper’s side.
An hour passes.
Two.
She sits and watches.
Waits.
The moon is on the wane when he emerges from the upstairs apartment, waving away the moths that pop about him. Hat pulled low, moving briskly, he comes downstairs and gets into his truck, cranks it, and drives away, his fan belt screeching like the bats beneath the bridge where she killed the vagrant.
She waits a count of ten, then gets out.
Softly up the stairs, to the door.
It is unlocked.
She enters quietly, closing and locking the door behind her.
A small, ugly space, but the living room and kitchen are cheerful in a way that suggests defiance, determination. Bright yellow paint and flowered wallpaper, and in the corner of the living room, atop a card table, next to a sewing machine, where small plastic dolls and scraps of fabric are piled, is a wooden replica of an old, gondola-style Ferris wheel.
Rue goes straight to the wheel like a child and looks it over from top to bottom. Old, is her first thought. And beautiful, her second. Inside each gondola are two tiny wooden dolls, each one wearing a unique dress, the fabric cheap—chosen from cast-off scraps, by the look of the pile on the table—but the stitching very fine, very skilled.
Rue finds the girl in her bedroom, naked like the plastic dolls on her sewing table. Her body atop the bedcovers, which are smooth and made beneath her. Hands flat on the bed beside her, she has gone the white of ivory, her only color now that of her throat, which has purpled over like an April sky.
Rue stands in the doorway, staring, a strange fascination for the scene: death as she has not seen it in a very long while. She is observer, not participant. It is as if she has wandered into the room by mistake and caught some private, delicate act in progress. She lingers to examine the dolls on the dresser that runs along the wall opposite the dead girl’s bed. Small and porcelain: a baby, a girl, a woman. The baby wears a bonnet. The others are half-clothed in scraps pinned tight about them, hair frizzed. A big-headed child doll, one of her eyelids half shut, missing a shoe. All of them in progress, much as the dead girl on the bed must have seemed in life: unfinished.
He finished her, she thinks, my cowboy.
Also on the bureau, hooked by its pin to the dress of one of the dolls propped against the mirror, is a plastic name tag, the kind worn by clerks in grocery stores.
Barbara.
Rue looks past the name tag to her own reflection in the mirror.
She stares.
What she sees is a far cry from the flushed beauty the men of Cowpuncher’s had whistled at. What she sees, despite two recent feedings, is the truth as glass always shows, no matter how fresh the blood rushing through her veins: a wraith, thin and ghostly, eyes like twin red coals, skin like some ancient, cured hide. Mirrors, windowpanes, polished silver: they all tell the truth. She doesn’t know why, but they do.
Am I even in there anymore?
Then, a thought so new and piercing it terrifies her: Who was I ever?
She looks away.
She follows a lingering scent of man—smoke and leather, a dusting of sweat, a hint of metal—into the toilet down the hall, where the linoleum bears a single bright droplet of blood. She looks from this to the small wicker trash basket beside the toilet, where a wad of tissue sits atop the coils of dental floss and used tampons. The tissue is crumpled around more blood. She drops to one knee and touches the tip of her finger to the blood in the tissue and then she touches the tip of her finger to her tongue and feels—
you are not her, you are not her, you are not her
—him, suddenly, inside her. He is frantic, terrified. His heart pounding. He sits on the lidded toilet, the woman, Barbara, pressing her breasts against his shoulder as she leans into him and touches the Kleenex to his split and bleeding lower lip. Nothing below his waist stirs at her touch, not the faintest twinge. He is already thinking that he has made a mistake and should leave, that whoever he is looking for—
you are not her, you are not her, not all of her
—is not here. But, instead of leaving, when she tips his chin up and kisses him, softly, he opens his mouth and kisses her back, and soon the two of them are edging toward the bedroom, shedding garments, and when he backs her onto the bed and stands over her, and she begins unfastening his belt, Rue understands that the compulsion to do the thing he has come to do is not his own but another’s, the act of a man he knows only as the man who steals my face, a man who takes his belt in hand and bids the girl to turn, turn around, and she, smiling, certain something new and thrilling and sinful is about to happen, turns, and then the leather belt goes round the throat.
It does not go easy.
Rue opens her eyes, sometime later, and realizes she is on her knees on the bathroom floor and her hand is in her mouth, the blood on her finger gone, the blood on the floor gone, too. The taste of both upon her tongue. She is breathing quickly. She pulls herself up to the sink and splashes water in her face and takes long, deep breaths.
Feels her heart begin to slow.
She glances up at her reflection, and the change she sees there makes her gasp.
The flesh of her cheeks has grown solid, and her eyes, her pupils, have lost their dying brimstone burn. They are green, as she remembers them. Her own green eyes, bright and wet. Her face round and beautiful, porcelain. A tear wells in the cradle of her right eye and spills down her cheek, and the streak it leaves is clear, not crimson. With it comes a flood of memories, clear as the skies of her youth in Oklahoma. Her friend as a child, a girl named Louise, a fat girl picked on by her oldest brother, Matthew. The brother she loved. Kin and blood and the musty scent of hay in the barn the night they coupled. Her father, his big hands grasping the legs of a calf being born, hauling it out huge and red and slick from its mother. His own touch upon her skin, the palm cupped round the crown of her head. A chicken’s head on a chopping block. She wipes the tear and looks down and sees the water is now blood, and when she looks up she has already begun to fade, the monster with its horrid white skull and scraggly hair and red, soulless eyes returned.
“No,” she whispers, “please, no.”
She tightens her fist and puts it into the glass, cracking a spiral galaxy.
In the living room, she upends the sewing table and sends the dolls and the Ferris wheel crashing against the wall. A glass lamp shatters,
and the wheel—old and delicate—breaks into pieces. She grinds the dolls and the little wooden gondolas beneath her boots. She kicks and smashes and finally drops to her knees and hangs her head.
“Only the blood makes us real.”
Her pale man’s voice, the old refrain a new mockery.
She hunkers on the carpet.
Only a single drop of blood, she thinks. But what would an entire body do?
“Yes,” her pale man says, smiling. “Yes, what would it do? It means something, does it not, my Ruby-red girl? But what? What does it mean, child?”
Bright green eyes, she thought. My eyes.
She goes back to the toilet and removes the bloody tissue from the wicker trash basket. She pockets it and, after a last look into the bedroom at the corpse of the woman he has slain—I must protect him, she thinks, he is so precious—she leaves quietly by the front door and goes down the stairwell and back to the pickup, where the spitter-smoker has stiffened over the steering wheel. She heaves him into the passenger’s seat and climbs into the cab, starts the truck, and drives west, knowing without knowing what magic guides her—the magic of blood, the cowboy’s blood and hers, joining inside her—that her cowboy, like she, takes flight from the rising sun.
He is not only a kindred spirit, she thinks. He is kin.
South of Austin
October 1
Rue treks south, then west, then south, losing him in the daylight hours. By night, she feels for the slow, steady beat of his heart as he sleeps in his cabover in grocery store parking lots, in alleys between little brick buildings in little brick towns, along creek beds, beneath bridges. His pains and night-time whimpers like phantom calls from somewhere close across the wide, dark plains. He’s searching for something, slowly, carefully. Some days he drives in circles around the country, north and south and looping back, always a bar, a honky-tonk. Always another city on the horizon at day’s end, lights a-glitter, and there, she often thinks, searching, too, for him. There. Closing her eyes in one of a hundred dark spaces she inhabits, the blood of some recent life coursing through her—a drifter, a boy on a skateboard, a brown-skinned short-order cook smoking in a circle of lamplight by a garbage dumpster. The bond through blood, she knows, will not last forever, with so little of her cowboy’s blood inside her. When he’s found at last—she hears him sometimes crying in his sleep like a child—her heart leaps in the dark, and as brief as a flutter of wings, she is transported.
In Valley of the Sun Page 9