Ruby (14 page)

She should have known when the train stopped in Shreveport, Louisiana, instead of Lufkin, Texas, that she had overshot her Liberty.

But Ruby had been mean behind the train’s window. A low steady buzz shooting through her body. A voltage overdose that had amplified her spite and made it impossible to notice anything as benign as the world rolling and flashing in front of her. Instead she had twisted matchbook covers, unpeeled cigarette butts and shredded the moist filters. She had not spoken to the oozing
woman across the aisle, although she had been given gentle leads to do so from the woman’s cow eyes, from her chubby hand waving a chicken drumstick like a baton, holding out the grease-stained bag as a communal offering. Ruby had shaken her head no in one clean glide. Ruby’s smile had been a wince. Even her hellos had been a reproach.

She’d sniffed at the elderly conductor as he walked by, silently impugning his personal care and hygiene. He had pretended not to notice, but the next time Ruby saw him he’d smelled strongly of balsam.

Ruby had not suspected that she was off-course until the conductor called out “LIB-er-ty next stop, LIB-er-ty,” and something tickled her. That something prompted her to truly look out the window. When she saw the flat prairie land of Central Texas instead of the piney woods, a panic rose then settled in her chest. She suddenly remembered the road to Liberty. Catch the
Carolina South
to Lufkin, Texas, change to the
Buxton Limited
until you reach Newton. Then take the Red Bus the thirty-seven miles to Liberty. She had not followed the bread crumbs she’d left over a decade ago and she had unfathomably forgotten her way home. She had only been able to spit out “Liberty,” the ticket was issued, and the train had barreled south.

Twenty minutes later, angry and confused, she pushed two fat quarters into the Red Cap’s hand as he helped her from the train. The weight of her mistake pushed her down on her luggage, where she sat and contemplated her next step.

That is how Ruby came to be sitting on the train platform amidst a fortress of new pink Samsonite bags. Her black hair swept straight and high, pressed within an inch of its life. Lipstick
Persian red. The beauty mark on her right cheek darkened. The buzz in her head quieted to a hum as she secretly primped without benefit of mirror. When in distress, Ruby was certain, it was a matter of survival to look one’s best.

The last of the White folks and Negroes crisscrossed the platform to step aboard the train she had just vacated. The little stairs pulled up and the doors closed as a blue-black uniformed man walked up to Ruby, cap stiff, with a rail insignia brassed along the front. “Need help with your luggage Miss?”

Ruby raked through her purse—the Etienne Aigner purse—carefully avoiding the telegram from Maggie. The platform began to clear save a few men and women running to the train. She didn’t look at the Red Cap. Then she did. This was a man whose back had been used as a bootjack for the greater part of his life. Ruby realized that she had not breathed in this particular odor of obeisance for nearly a decade.

“Not exactly,” she answered. Her manner claimed unquestionable authority. It was one of the many things she’d learned on the Upper East Side of New York, how to use the tilt of a head, the jaunt of a chin to dictate and persuade. She found her cigarettes as the doors of the train sighed and closed. Leaving only Red Caps, the Station Master and little clusters of reunited families, lovers, White men conferring as they stepped away.

The Red Cap leaned in closer. Ruby felt the push in his voice. “Ma’am, you got somebody coming to get you?” he asked, his face creased with concern—a grandfather, an uncle, or a man with plenty of daughters.

His voice fell to a whisper, “Cuz with all this Colored March hullabaloo, Station Master ain’t gonna let no Colored woman set out here for too long without a ticket going somewheres.”

Ruby’s eyes settled on the man. The protectiveness of his voice was an affront to her. That and the bend-down-low in his carriage.

She pulled a Dunhill out of her purse. She placed the cigarette between her dark red lips, stared at the old man and waited. Ruby knew that years of habit would take his match and light the damn thing. He did just that. Ruby did not know why, but her eyes squinted in anger. She did not thank him. Just like a White woman. Just as Mrs. Gladdington had taught her—that some things were her right. That she no more had to thank the waiter or the cab driver than she would thank the air that she breathed.

Mrs. Charlise Gladdington had pulled Ruby from The Pony, a Village bar, and situated her in the maid’s quarters of her Upper East Side cooperative. Ruby was to be her companion—and that quickly, she escorted her to Bergdorf’s and brought home a world of Chanel and Emilio Pucci. Camel splashed with maroon and gold to better complement Ruby’s skin. She began taking her to the Met, the Museum of Modern Art and to quiet West Side parties where the women dressed in suits and ties. She sent Ruby, who had never gone to high school, to the City College of New York by the sheer weight of her position and the fact that she sat on the board. Ruby was one of a handful of Negro students, but the only one to be picked up by a driver at day’s end.

Ruby emptied glasses and ashtrays at the old woman’s parties, where the literati, artists and composers of the day gathered with benefactors, friends and would-be patrons. She lit cigarettes for Bukowski, Ginsberg and artist Elaine de Kooning. She brought gin and tonics to Ezra Pound, whom she had read, and Chivas on the rocks to John Hersey, whom she had not but pretended that she had.

Mrs. Gladdington’s only recompense for her largesse was the
time spent reading to Ruby in the evenings, seated on the Charles Lane love seat, her clothed thigh just barely resting against Ruby’s knee.

“Miss?” The Red Cap was still standing there.

Ruby clipped her words. “I need to reach Newton, then on to Liberty Township.” The train spit and jerked to a start a few feet away.

“Liberty Township. Ain’t that that Colored Liberty by the Sabine?”

“Yes.”

“Ain’t no direct way there this time a day ’cept by car, Miss.”

“I don’t have a car. When is the next train?”

“Won’t be a train going that way ’til morning lest you catches the one you jes got off. It was Beaumont bound. From there, Newton’s a Greyhound bus away.”

The train pulling away from the station spit a spark of malice that landed in the tinderbox of Ruby’s throat. It conjured a wall of black soot and flames that filled her mouth, making it difficult for her to speak in full sentences.

“Is there a—where can I—is there a hotel I might—”

“Ain’t no place like that round here, Miss.”

Of course there isn’t
, Ruby thought.
Of course
. Ruby realized that she had been out of the South for too long. She looked past the man at the slick green awnings, the red of the benches and the pinched face of the Station Master when his gray eyes landed upon her. It didn’t matter that she wore an original Mary Quant sundress, sky blue linen. It didn’t matter that she had winced at the spreading Negroes around her—sweating under flowered hats as they had stepped around her to get to the Colored car. None of that mattered. In his eyes she would always be a nigger.
One he might be more likely to want to fuck, but a nigger all the same.

Ruby snapped back to the moment at hand. “Then can you arrange a ride? I’ll pay twenty-five dollars.”

The man jumped to attention, “See what I can do. I’ll be back directly, Miss.”

She looked back at the
COLORED WAITING AREA
sign. Nine years after the Brown decision and it still creaked boldly. Before she’d left Manhattan, her friend Billy, a costume designer at the X Theater in Greenwich Village, had been weeping. He’d equated the South for Northern Blacks with Nazi Germany for Jews. That it was insane to go. He’d said that Ruby hadn’t seen Maggie in nearly a decade, and that she should be as dead to her as the pickaninny, backwards town. For which Ruby had slapped him.

She had met him at The Pony in the East Village one night and after three dirty martinis apiece, Billy, a pale redhead from Boston, told her he was queer. She told him she was a rich woman’s platonic whore, and the two had become fast friends. They had crashed downtown “tea parties” and smoked weed with artists who had rambled for hours about abstract expressionism versus pop art. Billy had slept with an unnamed famous on-the-road writer who pretended to be straight, and they were both in love, from afar, with the short, pudgy author famous for being gay. At night, when Mrs. Gladdington was out of town, the two had slept together in Ruby’s narrow bed, whispering their dreams, her head on his shoulder.

Ruby breathed the smoke in—hard. She was a wet smoker, filters always damp and shit brown when she crushed them. Maggie was the opposite, even though she inhaled like she was sucking in air after a hard run, the tips were as dry as straw. But everything
Maggie did was clean. She made rolling her own cigarettes with one hand an art form. Each one perfectly like the next.

Ruby tapped the ash, her lipstick bright along the end, then brought it back to her mouth.
Fucking Maggie
, she thought,
Fucking Maggie and that goddamn telegram
. The fact that she had never wanted to come back home was another matter. It was Maggie’s fault she was there. Maggie yanking her back to Liberty Township, where Black folks waved the heat away with Jesus fans. Everyone was slow. Blood flowed in veins like molasses, sweat stuck to clothes like blessing oil.

Fucking Maggie
. How she stood over Ruby before she left for New York, stiff as cast iron but crying in spite of herself. It had been the first time, to hear Maggie tell it, that she had ever cried. Ever. It was, in any case, the first time Ruby had ever seen it. She’d told Maggie she despised the town—what it had taken and how it had used her as a spittoon.

Ruby remembered how Maggie’s own mama Beulah Wilkins had hated Liberty Township. How she used to say, nearly every Sunday when they were children as she cleaned her shotgun, “Town cursed.”

She’d continue, “Not one of them fools had the gumption to incorporate with the county. So Liberty ain’t under America, God, nothing. Hell, place tweren’t never baptize by nobody’s law.” Then she would push the oil rag down her barrel. “Which is why the Devil write it down in his book, got many Liberty men soul on his roster.”

Ruby had known that Maggie would never leave. She’d known that Maggie would take in wash, catch striped bass and catfish at Marion Lake, that she would work like a plow horse, drink herself
stupid, get into scuffles at Bloom’s, and cheat at poker. That over time, creases would be smoothed like damp clay into her face, until bit by bit they would dry and harden; that her hair would become dusted gray, cheeks sinking into her teeth, her muscles shrinking to her bones. Ruby knew that one day some fevered complaint would steal through Maggie’s proud body until she could barely lift her head to swallow a spoonful of soup; that she would light cigarettes in spite of the shouts and condemnations of the sisters she had yet living. That those same sisters would crowd around her as she sipped in her last breath; they would be her pallbearers and only mourners. That Maggie would lay in a coffin, under sugar sand and red clay, until her bones blanched and her flesh wormed away. And that she would never leave the piney woods.

They had met at the edge of a cotton field when Ruby was three and Maggie five. Ruby’s grandmother and Maggie’s mama sweated oceans under the Texas sun as the two children sat under a faded umbrella and sucked on sugarcane. Ruby remembered how everyone said that the two of them had locked eyes and hearts in the time it took a star to twinkle. As they grew older, they all but lived in the chinaberry tree. The branches were low enough for a seven-year-old to easily pull herself up. Legs dangling beneath the branches. Maggie would always find her there. Even through the worst of it, when Ruby was caught like a bird under the claws of a great cat, Maggie would climb up and sit beside her. Give her gifts she’d stolen from P & K, and even more boldly, from the five-and-dime in Newton, where they would have beaten her raw. Thimbles and Butterfingers, barrettes and embroidered handkerchiefs, Cracker Jack—Maggie would always let Ruby keep the coveted prize inside the box. They would pull taffy and wrap it around
their wrists like soft bracelets before eating it. Maggie would find her clear stones down at Marion Lake, or a bluebird feather. She would bring her Clem Rankin’s peaches, because Ruby didn’t have the stomach for his buckshot. In the evening, before Papa Bell died, they sat under that tree staring into the blueberry sky, listening to his fiddle—the horsehairs thick with resin, and metal strings casting a line of sound that sailed through the trees and caught their hearts. Ruby would then put her head against Maggie’s wide chest, and feel her arms like supple steel around her. There had been a comfort to the way Maggie smelled, like Juicy Fruit and tobacco. When she got older and she began smelling like the wash she was taking in, Ruby saw it crush something inside of her. For Maggie was meant to be the king of something. She was meant to puff out her chest and conquer worlds. But Ruby watched her join the army of Black folks dragging off to Newton, their souls crumpled in their handkerchiefs until suppertime. And while Maggie didn’t droop her head as much as the rest, it still fell a bit to fit through the door of servitude.

But before that, when they were free under the chinaberry, Maggie told Ruby that she wished she had a fine ring to give to her. She said she wished for a steeple someplace that would hold them up high in the eyes of God. But Maggie could not steal a ring good enough for Ruby, for they kept them under glass at the five-and-dime, and the only rings in Liberty were on the hands of some married ladies. So Maggie had wrapped Ruby all the closer, always holding her like she was made of lace and glass, and promised she would get a ring befitting her Ruby Bell. Not long after, she had gone to work, and not long after that, Ruby had lost her.

To leave Maggie, Ruby had had to forget the chinaberry and the blueberry sky, the crickets and cicadas who accompanied Papa
Bell. The mockingbird, who came after the fiddle was put away, and sang every birdsong in the forest, the wood thrush’s and the pine warbler’s, even making up his own tunes. Ruby had to push all of that away and turn into that hard clear river stone. She had to turn her tongue into a sharp stick—otherwise she would have stayed. She had to all but kill Maggie to leave her. She had been too young to know she could have kissed her good-bye. She had been too young to know that a person can still hold on to the shared secret of love and walk away. She hadn’t known, until she reached Manhattan, that she had murdered a part of herself as well. That it would be years until that part came to life again.