Ruby (18 page)

Ruby was relieved. He was to now take what he’d come for. She knew he would clean her up, wipe her down. The world tilted back to normal. The sound stopped as she imagined Ephram—a lonely, docile man who jacked off behind his “Mama’s” bathroom door and hated his sin later. Ruby just stood there and waited.

He handed her his jacket and said, “Interesting you asked ’bout that ox. It’s what Jesus say to the Pharisee when they give him a hard time ’bout healing a man on the Sabbath. Jesus say, if your ox fall down in a pit, whatever the day, you’d fetch him out. If it’s important enough you got to do it.”

She nearly yanked the jacket from his outstretched hand. “So my house is an ox.”

“I’d say so.”

She began cleaning her face and mouth in a kind of shock.

Ephram dipped the broom into the pail of lye water and commenced to scrubbing the bed. Then with a simple ease, he moved back to the floors.

Ruby watched Ephram cleaning and could feel the old house stretching under his hands, sighing and adjusting itself to better meet his efforts. The broom all but fell apart as he worked, but he mopped on with the handle and the shredded nub until Ruby could see the tan of the floor. Then he tackled the ceiling with a found rag. Small cubbies of dust and web disappeared from the corners, carrying with them the carcasses of forty or fifty house-flies. The stilt legs of spiders flew to the floor.

Ruby watched as Ephram disturbed the coiled shadows of men and women lining the baseboards. The homeless dead had been using her place as a squat for the past nine years, fully grown spirits who were not Ruby’s kin. While they were a nuisance she had let them stay, no reason to refuse their entrance. They insulated the rooms and cushioned the alone.

Ephram began humming as he cleaned. Ruby gasped at his knowing. Perhaps a preacher’s son knew something about haints. Maybe it was the lavender rings around his pupils or a lucky coincidence. Ruby watched as his voice vibrated against their parasitic intrusion. He did not stand up or billow out his chest. He simply hummed and the treble of his voice said, “Get.” They yawned awake and slowly filed out her door.

Fuck
, Ruby thought. He was more than she had imagined. This was not the man she had seen approach last night, the frightened man with only a puddle of life in his chest. Something had grown wide in him. It had a tide and a rhythm to it.
Fuck
. It smelled acrid and bitter, like the mattress. The scent was heavy in the room. Why was this man here? What did he come to take? Ruby’s eyes squinted tight to better see him. What right did he have to flip her home over like a flapjack?

Ruby almost barked, “Hey.”

He looked over.

“Hey.” She smoothed the cut of her voice to better fit her purpose.

He was starting to tackle the potbelly stove. Something sticky and tar black had cooked to the iron years ago.

“You ain’t got to do all that.”

“Yeah, I do.” He kept scrubbing.

“No, you don’t.” Ruby walked up to him. Once she was there, he turned to face her. She was close enough to smell his salt, and placed her hand over his. It burned yet she held it. She put her chin in the crook of his neck and slid her arm around his back. She tiptoed and pressed her groin ever so gently against his. Felt his lungs catch. Would he push into her with temerity? Or would he aim higher? Unzip his pants over the apple of her throat? A jaded anger rose from her gut. She wanted to swallow him whole and when he was properly trained she would release him.

The room creaked as the day brought warmth under her arms, between her legs. Ruby felt Ephram’s hands around her waist. He all but lifted her off him and half carried her to the lone chair in the place. He leaned over her, lips close. She could see the oil that had collected along the curves of his nose. She closed her eyes.

“We already got one ox in the ditch. Let’s leave it at that for now.”

Ruby blinked. In that instant she saw what he saw. Her rib cage loose with skin. The spirit of meanness poking out of her like nails. The corrugated filth of her hair. But more. The broken femur of her soul, reset without a proper splint. She could accept anything on earth from a man except his pity.

“Faggot,” she spat out, and ran from the house.

He caught up to her on the first step of the porch, his hand firm about her wrist.

She tugged against him, “Let me be.” But he did not. He held tight to her arm so she spit out: “You ain’t the only man I know.”

“I know that.”

“You just scared.”

In kindness he said: “Maybe.”

But Ruby knew that that was only partly true. Shame spread under her skin as she smelled the stench that rose from her dress, her scarecrow body. Blood caked in her thumbnail, sludge caught in the creases of her palms. And if that were not all Ruby was suddenly aware of the twisted knot of her features, the madness streaming out of her eyes.

For a moment Ruby grasped at the girl she had been, the one who had arrived in New York, fresh from Neches, scrubbed and eighteen. Haunting eyes, beauty mark painted by God, angled jaw, a tight sway in her hips. A dipping smile that men and women were drawn to, collided with one another to be near, handing over money and liquor and ready drugs. All that and more.

The year was 1950, when the town’s literati adorned themselves in token colorful accessories. Ruby had been a bright bangle on the arm of one of their esteemed patrons. But that came later; first Ruby had had to kneel at the city’s gate and decide what she would sacrifice for admittance. Her culpability had been an easy choice.

I
t hadn’t been difficult for Ruby Bell to find the ripe center of the city. Having never fully entered the house of her body, she had no difficulty finding boarders. Mr. Hubert Malloy was the first man to offer her ten dollars and change for sex. She had been sitting in Brewster’s, a small jazz piano bar in the mid–West Twenties, listening to a tepid rendition of “Lush Life.” That morning, Ruby had spent six of her remaining twelve dollars on the brushed satin dress that cinched midnight at her waist. She sipped water with an olive and a wink, until Mr. Hubert Malloy joined her.

He was a fur merchant whose second-floor business peered across Seventh Avenue to Penn Station. Monday through Friday he watched women and men crowd into its belly at dinnertime. Today he had stayed late and watched his mother-in-law, his wife’s son from her first marriage, and his wife Bea, swarm down with them to the A train, Far Rockaway bound. He had entered the bathroom near his office, wetted a ball of toilet paper and wiped himself extra clean below. Then made his way to where Colored girls and White pretended to be equal in the creamy black hollow of a basement bar.

He had slipped his hand onto the small of Ruby’s back and when she hadn’t moved it, even to see who he was, he knew he’d found his girl. He was too round and belted to be hip, but the
dark gave him courage. He’d bought her a Manhattan, because she said she’d never had one, and he fucked her two hours later by a threaded Blaster machine, mink pelts half stitched under its needle. Feet swinging inches above discarded black pumps. Bent at the waist, breasts scrunched against the giant spool of thread. Panties school girl white. No stockings. The scent of cured skins beside her white fingernails. He loved the feel of her. Nasty black and tight. The way she arched her young buttocks to allow him. The way her head never turned when he farted low and sticky. How he pulled her then to the floor upon scraps of rabbit and wolf, her face almost in the dustpan. Mouth open on still hide. She had no tits. Her padded bra lay like small lace hills on the ground beside her. It had been his one disappointment. But she was stringy and astringent and felt like a young boy with lipstick smeared down his throat. She was a nigger drag queen with a pussy. So it was easy to fuck her mouth and her anus. She opened to all of it and drank in his wadded semen. He gave her a rabbit stole and a whiskey kiss on her cheek. After. He pressed a folded ten-dollar bill to her palm, wrapped neatly around a “Bea’s Furrier” card. Then he gave her two bits—a quarter, “for fare home,” he explained. “Ten cents to spare.”

It was the easiest money Ruby had ever made.

Ruby walked home. She carried the quarter close to her, then opened her palm. The word “Liberty” hung like a banner over the White man’s head, which made it easy for Ruby to know whom it was promised to. Both word and coin. With God’s trust and blessing.

Then she thought about the other Liberty, her Liberty. Red roads and piney woods. The sun yawning across the Texas sky,
too tired to keep pace with the rolling earth. She thought about the
Carolina South
, which had taken her to Manhattan, the same train that had taken her mama seventeen years before. But her mother had chosen to pass. She’d stepped on Colored and walked off White in New York, shedding Liberty along the way, including her Blackness, her papa and a brown-skinned baby named Ruby Bell.

Ruby was constantly amazed by the gush of life pressing against her on the street. The theater marquees towering over her head. The bands plunking away on corners, crooning jazz, Southern blues and swing. The scream of taxi drivers, the sounds of rubber on concrete and hundreds of feet landing on pavement, then pushing off again with purpose. The eyes that raked over her, some approving, some not. The crush of Colored and White pressing shoulder to shoulder on streets, buses and subways. The enormous billboard with a stunning Negro woman named Katherine Dunham surrounded by Black men in feathers and masks, books standing tall in shop windows with the brown-skinned writers Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks and J. Saunders Redding smiling back. And the people! Sure Ruby passed Colored men and women with their heads bowed, dressed as maids in loose overcoats, or men in coveralls with ashen, scraped hands. But there were also the immaculately groomed Negro women in matching olive skirts and scarves, cigarette holders and poodles on green leashes, hair coiffed and pressed perfectly under leaning hats. There were dapper chocolate men in brown velvet suits with piles of books stuffed under their arms. Along with hot dog vendors and pretzel men who glared at her, there were also thin White men with goatees who smiled warmly at Ruby and young, young White men with
shaggy hair and baggy slacks and stark women in loose skirts, passing out pamphlets about socialism and social reform, looking her right in the eye and inviting her to meetings. Ruby was lost and found, all at the same time. She scanned the many, many faces as she had for five months, looking for the red hair, cream skin and green eyes of her mother, Charlotte Bell, like the painted photograph that had lived above Papa Bell’s mantel. She felt her mother there, closer to her than air, on the periphery of her gaze. Since Ruby had arrived she followed each woman she spotted with red hair until she saw her face. This hope kept Ruby in Manhattan after months of fruitless searching, that and a new seeded liberty, a sharp-edged freedom that seemed to have taken root inside of her when she first arrived in the city.

Ruby held the furrier’s coin tighter. When she reached the maid’s room she rented in the Roger Williams Hotel on East Thirty-first she clinked the man’s quarter into an empty Band-Aid tin in the medicine cabinet, behind the aspirin and the Dixie Peach.

After the furrier, Sherman Monty, the owner of Monty’s delicatessen on Fifty-third, gave Ruby a case of provolone and five dollars for a blow job. The night manager of the Roger Williams Hotel gave her free towels and sheets for the use of Ruby’s hand and her bottle of lotion. Her neighbor Mr. Moskowitz gave her five pairs of panty hose for Vaseline sodomy. She gathered their change as well.

Ruby thought about walking along the Hudson, but the other women had razors, better shoes and pimps. She had seen the women on corners, dangling like coat hangers—wearing deep V-necks, red bandannas around their necks, and purple bruises barely hidden from view.

Unwilling to trade sovereignty for the brutality of protection,
she passed three years walking into bars where, sitting on silver gray stools, she could hide her feet in the shadow of the bar. She learned what to wear, how to speak, and shifted and slipped into and out of the mouths of men and darkened her beauty spot and lips and brows and uncovered the night Village throb. It was 1953. The hip and the beat crowd pretended to pretend that skin color was a frock you donned for the evening. Ruby was more than beautiful, causing men and women to pause in their stride, to bump into light posts and whistle long and low. She was younger than everyone and dangled easily and brightly from ears and throats. Until one night a stocky White woman at a table in Jim Atkins’s Restaurant invited her to Julia’s Place, a hidden, second-string lesbian club. There she learned about Swing Rendezvous, Stonewall, select house parties and the Pony Stable, where women in seersucker suits smoked like steam rising from a boiling kettle.

Ruby would never have discovered Page Three and Abby, had it not been for the ease of older women. Nothing to wash. No gummed knots to comb out of her hair. No lipstick cum on her gloves. And they were kind, most of them, and when they were not, how easy to defeat them. One glance at a man, a pair of slacks, a pillow of breath in the right direction and they crumbled. The slackest, firmest mountain would quake and the avalanche always brought compensation.

Then there were the arms. Firm, cuffed, creamed, soft, wide, beneath crisp white and linen. Elbows bent against brass or wooden bars. Or stretching for a filterless behind a ducktail, pomade darkening a narrow strip of tobacco roll. Reaching for bourbon and melting ice. Arms rising, banded, weighted and swift. Ready for protection and pain.

Then there were the hands. The old dykes carried countries in
the valley of their palms. Rivers ran from the rise of their fingers, the blunt of their nails. Thumbs jutting out, peninsulas coasting the sweat of a glass or thigh. Pinching the edge of a Camel or clit. They walked sex in the crook of their smiles, in the cut of their eyes. Ruby discovered that they were the best men she had ever known. For their manhood coagulated in the raw shimmer of spirit, not groin. It electrified the thrust of their tongues and fingers.