There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (26 page)

“Have you seen the sun today?” she exclaimed excitedly as she looked upward at the sky. “Did ya see it? Look at that sun, so bright and warm! It’s just glorious!”

“It is,” Maye agreed, surprised—she had never seen the old woman this gregarious.

Ruby stepped forward, directly into the sun, and the light exposed her face. Maye almost gasped. The woman’s face was covered with bruises, especially around her eyes. The hues of hematomas surrounded them, and her skin reflected shades of green, fading into blue, then purple, drifting into black, and each side of her face had either been scraped raw or had suffered a sudden inflamed rash of some sort.

“Oh my God, Ruby!” Maye said as she gasped, covered her mouth, and stepped forward to see the extent of her injuries. Upon closer look, she saw that the damage was so severe she didn’t think Ruby should even be standing and was about to insist on an ice pack when she noticed a twinkle in the sun that bounced off Ruby’s cheek, almost like a minuscule shard of glass. Had she broken a window, Maye wondered, but with her head? Did she get that drunk last night that she put her face through glass—without getting cut? Then there was another glimmer, up higher on the same cheek, and as Ruby turned slightly to look at Maye quizzically, both of her eyelids began to glimmer and gleam.

“What?” Ruby finally asked, looking a bit annoyed.

“Your face!” Maye shrieked, taking another step closer only to comprehend that the glass dust on Ruby’s skin was not from a window or a door at all—it was eye shadow. And blush. It was makeup. Ruby had dolled herself up, only her rendition was much like what a four-year-old would do if presented with the bounty of Mommy’s cosmetics drawer and an unsupervised hour.

Maye stumbled, aware that she had been a bit too dramatic for her own good, and now had to cover for the fact that she had mistakenly interpreted the results of Ruby’s Beauty Day for a face that had been jumped in a back alley by guys carrying pipes.

“What about my face?” Ruby said carefully, her eyes, or what Maye could see of them, narrowing.

“It’s so pretty!” Maye responded with an extra dose of enthusiasm, at which the old woman’s face relaxed.

“So what’d ya bring me, Girl?” Ruby asked with a wide smile, exposing all of her lipstick-streaked teeth. “Is it chicken salad?”

“Absolutely,” Maye said, then from behind her pulled out one of Charlie’s old lunch coolers. “And a chocolate malted.”

Ruby stopped in midreach for the bag and looked at her with soft, sinking eyes that Maye had never noticed before. “You brought me a malted?” she asked slowly, just about as shocked as Maye was to see her smiling. “I haven’t had one of those in years. In about fifty years. Do you think they’ll taste the same?”

“Give it a shot,” Maye said, handing over the cooler that had kept the malted from melting. “I bet it will be delicious. Straw is in the bag.”

“I thought we could eat outside like we did yesterday,” Ruby said, pointing to the sheet that covered the old, graying wood. “Kind of like a picnic. It’s such a nice day. Whaddya say we take the blanket and spread it out under that old redwood?”

Maye nodded and helped Ruby bring the sheet down the steps and under the only tree left alive in front of the house.

“There,” Ruby said, smoothing out the sheet. “This is such a good idea.”

She opened Charlie’s little cooler, lifted the lid off the tall Styrofoam cup, and sucked in her breath with delight. After unwrapping the straw and sticking it slowly into the center of the cup, which still, remarkably, had some whipped cream sitting on top, Ruby wrapped her wrinkly crimson lips around it and sucked in her first malted in fifty years.

“Oh, that’s good,” she said, dragging her finger through the whipped cream and tasting it. “I don’t know how I managed to live without that for so long.”

“I don’t want to be one of those nosy bodies, and you tell me straight off if I am,” Maye started, taking the opportunity of Ruby’s good mood to settle some things that had been bothering her. “But how do you manage? I mean, it’s just you out here, and I know that you breed the dogs on occasion, but by the looks of Puppy, it’s been a while since you had a litter. How do you manage, Ruby? How do you live out here on your own?”

“Oh,” the old woman said as she unwrapped her coveted sandwich. “There’s always a way. Papa built this house, I’ve never had to make a payment on it, and he owned some property in town that he rented out, like Hopkins Market, for instance. It’s Hopkins’s place, but it’s my father’s property. Property was always better than stocks, he’d say. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me to get by. And then, when I need to, I’ll just sell something I don’t need anymore to get a little extra. Things like old thirty-three records, or an antique lamp, or even—old clothes. Can you believe it? People actually buying your old clothes! And then those people sell them again to other people! I was never going to fit into any of that stuff again, anyway, even though some of it was real nice. So you do what you gotta do, that’s all.”

Maye attempted to visualize Ruby trying to sell her incinerated sweat suits to resale shops, and she grinned. And then she realized that it meant Ruby had been in town—Ruby had been in Spaulding—without consequence. Without anyone noticing her, much less lynching her. She thought then that perhaps she should tell Ruby of her run-in with Rowena, but decided not to ruin the old woman’s good mood. Maye had learned firsthand that Miss Ruby had a temper like Mount St. Helens—one moment, it seemed she was resting peacefully, and the next thing you knew, a red, glowing cinder was flying toward your head with the speed of a comet. With things going so well during their picnic, Maye certainly didn’t want to push her luck.

“So you’ve been to Spaulding to sell records and lamps and clothes,” Maye asked, smiling at Ruby wryly. “How did you manage that?”

“Eh.” Ruby laughed slightly. “It’s easier than you think. People are too wrapped up in themselves to pay attention to anything else these days. Everyone is invisible to everybody else. You just gotta know how to dress to blend in.”

Maye knew that all too well herself. Unless she was disrobing or performing magic tricks with her protruding abdomen at parties, hardly anyone in Spaulding had ever noticed her at all.

“Now, you think you’re the one with all the questions,” Ruby continued as she ate her lunch. “I have some for you.”

“Okay,” Maye shrugged, unable to imagine what Ruby wanted to know of her.

“How did you find me?” she asked. “How did you know I was out here?”

Maye paused for a moment, trying to decide how honest she should be, then realized quickly there was no decision to be made at all. If she and Ruby were going to be a team, she needed to be up-front and lay everything out on the table. You have to respect the other half of your team, she understood, and if she respected Ruby, then she needed to tell her the truth.

“I drugged a cop,” she finally said. “I drugged a cop with his favorite organic donuts and got him to talk during a sugar rush. I bumped into him at the library when I first found your file in the archives, and I had a feeling he knew more than he was telling. I already knew he was addicted to those donuts, so…I just performed the necessary evil and asked him questions until he spilled it. I know it wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how else I could find you. I tried the courthouse, I looked in every old phone book back half a century, and I asked around. It wasn’t easy; he ate almost a dozen before I broke him. He was even hallucinating by that point. He slept off the rest of the afternoon on my couch before he was okay to drive again, and he almost threw up.”

Ruby was quiet for a long time. She stopped eating her sandwich, stopped slurping her malted, and looked off into the distance.

“This cop,” she said slowly after she finally took another sip from her malted, gurgling it. “He wouldn’t happen to also be a plumber, would he?”

Maye nodded and winced. “I know that you know John Smith,” she confessed. “He said he got his dog Rocky from you. Please don’t blame him. I knew his weakness and I pounced. He never knew what hit him.”

“Some excuse for giving me up,” she said as she shook her head, her voice brittle. “He sang like a bird for a donut. What a stoolie.”

“He put up a fight for quite a while,” Maye relayed. “He fought like a swordfish, but he sadly underestimated the power of a jelly.”

“If those things are so powerful, I hope you bring some for the judges,” Ruby commented, and by her tone, Maye couldn’t exactly tell if she was irritated or not. “If it could make John Smith spill a secret he was sworn to keep, something that to my knowledge he has never told another living person, well then, you have a royal flush in a baker’s dozen.”

“I’m sorry, Ruby,” Maye said honestly. “If there was another way to find you, I would have taken it. I looked all over the place, but you hid your tracks pretty well. I have to give it to you. You wiped yourself off the map of Spaulding.”

Ruby laughed choppily. “I had some help there,” was her reply. “But I’m in the phone book—under Royal Loyals.”

He must have been one hell of a man, Maye thought to herself as she finished her lunch; he must have been something else to make Ruby turn and run all the way out here with a broken heart and nowhere else to turn, spending the rest of her life alone on this old, barren farm. And then there were Rowena’s harsh words from this morning. Maye didn’t trust anything Rowena said, and knew all too well that she loved to invoke fear in anyone she couldn’t outwardly control. That was Mrs. Spaulding’s strength and great talent—she was a marvelous distributor of alarm and trepidation; she spread it like peanut butter. If there was anything Rowena loved, it was that people feared her, and if they didn’t, she was certain to come up with a reason indeed. Before Maye could give the threat any more thought, Ruby had smacked her on the arm.

“Hey, Girl!” she yelled. “Did you hear what I said?”

“What?” Maye replied, rubbing the sting with her other hand. “No, I didn’t hear you.”

“I said, can you do the splits?” Ruby shouted. “Because if you can do the splits, you can win this thing. Everybody loves the splits! Let me see you try.”

“No, I can’t do the splits,” Maye yelled back. “And I’m not going to try, either. I like my lady parts right where they are, thank you. There’s no need to relocate them by choice or foolishness.”

“Come on, just try,” the old woman croaked, in an attempt to coax.

“You have got to be kidding,” Maye replied stoutly. “I can barely cross my legs. No way. Let’s see you do the splits if you think it’s so easy.”

“Oh,” Ruby said, looking straight at Maye. “Sure.” The old woman put her malted aside, stood up, and with her soiled slippers heading in opposite directions, she slowly slid down to the ground like a Barbie doll in the hands of a four-year-old.

Maye tried to scream but nothing came out, and as she looked at the wrinkled, skinny old lady with a huge red mouth and fiery red corn-husk hair with her legs apart like the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, her stomach did a flip. She knew that experienced drinkers could fly in the face of quantum physics with their unexpected and zombielike physical flexibility at times—such as, say, getting flattened by a bus and managing to make it to the next bar before last call despite the fact that their knee is bent around their neck—but Ruby’s splits were incredible and revolting at the same time.

“Please tell me one, and hopefully both, of those legs can come off with an Allen wrench,” Maye whispered.

“Ta-da!” Ruby garbled as she lifted one arm above her in an act of showmanship and smiled wildly, exposing a whole set of canary-colored teeth. Papa sauntered over and drew his big juicy tongue up the side of her old face, and she laughed.

“Let me guess,” Maye began. “You did the splits for your talent segment in the pageant. And I’m going to have to carry you back to the house.”

“Psshh!” Ruby replied as she bent her back leg in and brought it around until she was back in a sitting position. “I didn’t just do the splits, Girl! I
tumbled
. I did cartwheels, I did flips, backward and forward; I had a whole routine. Of course, dropping the splits was the grand finale. I had a lit slow-burning sparkler in each hand, and I slowly went down, and I tell you, the crowd went mad. Right when I got down to the floor, Lula—who was hiding in the back—threw a handful of lit poppers that shot off red sparks and big, rising plumes of red smoke. I brought the house down, I tell you. Got a standing ovation. But really, how can you top the splits?”

Maye laughed. “Was Lula your sponsor?” she asked, thinking it sweet that Ruby had named a dog after her.

“No!” Ruby screeched. “Lula, my
sister
. She was in charge of what we would call nowadays ‘special effects.’ Her timing was impeccable. She threw those poppers right at the perfect moment—it really put the fire in the routine, so to speak. Now, what big plans do we have for your talent segment? What are you good at?”

“I write a mean hard-news story,” Maye confessed. “And I’m a decent detective. But that can hardly be translated to the stage.”

“Well, then,” Ruby continued, thinking. “What can you do that nobody else can? What do you have that no one else has?”

“I have a singing dog,” Maye offered. “And he also happens to play the piano.”

“You don’t say,” Ruby said slowly with a sly look on her face. “That could be as good as a flip. It’s not the splits, I’ll be honest with you, but it could be a flip. Is he afraid of flame? Because I could really see a flaming hula hoop in here somewhere. Fire is always the cherry on top. It’s a nice touch.”

“I’m not so sure about the fire part,” Maye said, trying to extinguish Ruby’s penchant for pyromania. “I’m not so sure Mickey would do that well with an uncontrollable element of nature that could envelop the outdoor, dry wooden stage with a wall of red death if the wind was blowing the wrong way. I was thinking more along the lines of a duet, like ‘I Got You, Babe,’ or ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.’ Something like that.”

“Hmmm, I like it,” the old woman said, scratching her chin and nodding. “We could certainly do something like that. It’s traditional, yet different. It has a nice twist. I’ve got some old records. I’ll dig through them and see what we can come up with.”