The Complete Stories (17 page)

He peered at her coming down the hall. “Good morning!” he said, bowing the upper part of his body out the door. “Good morning to you!” He looked like a goat. He had little raisin eyes and a string beard and his jacket was a green that was almost black or a black that was almost green.

“Morning,” she said. “Hower you?”

“Well!” he screamed. “Well indeed on this glorious day!” He was seventy-eight years old and his face looked as if it had mildew on it. In the mornings he studied and in the afternoons he walked up and down the sidewalks, stopping children and asking them questions. Whenever he heard anyone in the hall, he opened his door and looked out.

“Yeah, it's a nice day,” she said languidly.

“Do you know what great birthday this is?” he asked.

“Uh-uh,” Ruby said. He always had a question like that. A history question that nobody knew; he would ask it and then make a speech on it. He used to teach in a high school.

“Guess,” he urged her.

“Abraham Lincoln,” she muttered.

“Hah! You are not trying,” he said. “Try.”

“George Washington,” she said, starting up the stairs.

“Shame on you!” he cried. “And your husband from there! Florida! Florida! Florida's birthday,” he shouted. “Come in here.” He disappeared into his room, beckoning a long finger at her.

She came down the two steps and said, “I gotta be going,” and stuck her head inside the door. The room was the size of a large closet and the walls were completely covered with picture postcards of local buildings; this gave an illusion of space. A single transparent bulb hung down on Mr. Jerger and a small table.

“Now examine this,” he said. He was bending over a book, running his finger under the lines: “‘On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1516, he arrived on the tip of this continent.' Do you know who this
he
was?” he demanded.

“Yeah, Christopher Columbus.” Ruby said.

“Ponce de Leon!” he screamed. “Ponce de Leon! You should know something about Florida,” he said. “Your husband is from Florida.”

“Yeah, he was born in Miami,” Ruby said. “He's not from Tennessee.”

“Florida is not a noble state,” Mr. Jerger said, “but it is an important one.”

“It's important alrighto,” Ruby said.

“Do you know who Ponce de Leon was?”

“He was the founder of Florida,” Ruby said brightly.

“He was a Spaniard,” Mr. Jerger said. “Do you know what he was looking for?”

“Florida,” Ruby said.

“Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth,” Mr. Jerger said, closing his eyes.

“Oh,” Ruby muttered.

“A certain spring,” Mr. Jerger went on, “whose water gave perpetual youth to those who drank it. In other words,” he said, “he was trying to be young always.”

“Did he find it?” Ruby asked.

Mr. Jerger paused with his eyes still closed. After a minute he said, “Do you think he found it? Do you think he found it? Do you think nobody else would have got to it if he had found it? Do you think there would be one person living on this earth who hadn't drunk it?”

“I hadn't thought,” Ruby said.

“Nobody thinks any more,” Mr. Jerger complained.

“I got to be going.”

“Yes, it's been found,” Mr. Jerger said.

“Where at?” Ruby asked.

“I have drunk of it.”

“Where'd you have to go to?” she asked. She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard's wing.

“Into my heart,” he said, placing his hand over it.

“Oh.” Ruby moved back. “I gotta be going. I think my brother's home.” She got over the door sill.

“Ask your husband if he knows what great birthday this is,” Mr. Jerger said, looking at her coyly.

“Yeah, I will.” She turned and waited until she heard his door click. She looked back to see that it was shut and then she blew out her breath and stood facing the dark remaining steep of steps. “God Almighty,” she commented. They got darker and steeper as you went up.

By the time she had climbed five steps her breath was gone. She continued up a few more, blowing. Then she stopped. There was a pain in her stomach. It was a pain like a piece of something pushing something else. She had felt it before, a few days ago. It was the one that frightened her most. She had thought the word
cancer
once and dropped it instantly because no horror like that was coming to her because it couldn't. The word came back to her immediately with the pain but she slashed it in two with Madam Zoleeda. It will end in good fortune. She slashed it twice through and then again until there were only pieces of it that couldn't be recognized. She was going to stop on the next floor—God, if she ever got up there—and talk to Laverne Watts. Laverne Watts was a third-floor resident, the secretary to a chiropodist, and an especial friend of hers.

She got up there, gasping and feeling as if her knees were full of fizz, and knocked on Laverne's door with the butt of Hartley Gilfeet's gun. She leaned on the door frame to rest and suddenly the floor around her dropped on both sides. The walls turned black and she felt herself reeling, without breath, in the middle of the air, terrified at the drop that was coming. She saw the door open a great distance away and Laverne, about four inches high, standing in it.

Laverne, a tall straw-haired girl, let out a great guffaw and slapped her side as if she had just opened the door on the most comical sight she had yet seen. “That gun!” she yelled. “That gun! That look!” She staggered back to the sofa and fell on it, her legs rising higher than her hips and falling down again helplessly with a thud.

The floor came up to where Ruby could see it and remained, dipping a little. With a terrible stare of concentration, she stepped down to get on it. She scrutinized a chair across the room and then headed for it, putting her feet carefully one before the other.

“You should be in a wild-west show!” Laverne Watts said. “You're a howl!”

Ruby reached the chair and then edged herself onto it. “Shut up,” she said hoarsely.

Laverne sat forward, pointing at her, and then fell back on the sofa, shaking again.

“Quit that!” Ruby yelled. “Quit that! I'm sick.”

Laverne got up and took two or three long strides across the room. She leaned down in front of Ruby and looked into her face with one eye shut as if she were squinting through a keyhole. “You are sort of purple,” she said.

“I'm damn sick,” Ruby glowered.

Laverne stood looking at her and after a second she folded her arms and very pointedly stuck her stomach out and began to sway back and forth. “Well, what'd you come in here with that gun for? Where'd you get it?” she asked.

“Sat on it,” Ruby muttered.

Laverne stood there, swaying with her stomach stuck out, and a very wise expression growing on her face. Ruby sat sprawled in the chair, looking at her feet. The room was getting still. She sat up and glared at her ankles. They were swollen! I'm not going to no doctor, she started, I'm not going to one. I'm not going. “Not going,” she began to mumble, “to no doctor, not…”

“How long you think you can hold off?” Laverne murmured and began to giggle.

“Are my ankles swollen?” Ruby asked.

“They look like they've always looked to me,” Laverne said, throwing herself down on the sofa again. “Kind of fat.” She lifted her own ankles up on the end pillow and turned them slightly. “How do you like these shoes?” she asked. They were a grasshopper green with very high thin heels.

“I think they're swollen,” Ruby said. “When I was coming up that last flight of stairs I had the awfulest feeling, all over me like…”

“You ought to go on to the doctor.”

“I don't need to go to no doctor,” Ruby muttered. “I can take care of myself. I haven't done bad at it all this time.”

“Is Rufus at home?”

“I don't know. I kept myself away from doctors all my life. I kept—why?”

“Why what?”

“Why, is Rufus at home?”

“Rufus is cute,” Laverne said. “I thought I'd ask him how he liked my shoes.”

Ruby sat up with a fierce look, very pink and purple. “Why Rufus?” she growled. “He ain't but a baby.” Laverne was thirty years old. “He don't care about women's shoes.”

Laverne sat up and took off one of the shoes and peered inside it. “Nine B,” she said. “I bet he'd like what's in it.”

“That Rufus ain't but an enfant!” Ruby said. “He don't have time to be looking at your feet. He ain't got that kind of time.”

“Oh, he's got plenty of time,” Laverne said.

“Yeah,” Ruby muttered and saw him again, waiting, with plenty of time, out nowhere before he was born, just waiting to make his mother that much deader.

“I believe your ankles are swollen,” Laverne said.

“Yeah,” Ruby said, twisting them. “Yeah. They feel tight sort of. I had the awfulest feeling when I got up those steps, like sort of out of breath all over, sort of tight all over, sort of—awful.”

“You ought to go on to the doctor.”

“No.”

“You ever been to one?”

“They carried me once when I was ten,” Ruby said, “but I got away. Three of them holding me didn't do any good.”

“What was it that time?”

“What you looking at me that way for?” Ruby muttered.

“What way?”

“That way,” Ruby said, “—swagging out that stomach of yours that way.”

“I just asked you what it was that time?”

“It was a boil. A nigger woman up the road told me what to do and I did it and it went away.” She sat slumped on the edge of the chair, staring in front of her as if she were remembering an easier time.

Laverne began to do a kind of comic dance up and down the room. She took two or three slow steps in one direction with her knees bent and then she came back and kicked her leg slowly and painfully in the other. She began to sing in a loud guttural voice, rolling her eyes, “Put them all together, they spell MOTHER! MOTHER!” and stretching out her arms as if she were on the stage.

Ruby's mouth opened wordlessly and her fierce expression vanished. For a half-second she was motionless; then she sprang from the chair. “Not me!” she shouted. “Not me!”

Laverne stopped and only watched her with the wise look.

“Not me!” Ruby shouted. “Oh no not me! Bill Hill takes care of that. Bill Hill takes care of that! Bill Hill's been taking care of that for five years! That ain't going to happen to me!”

“Well old Bill Hill just slipped up about four or five months ago, my friend,” Laverne said. “Just slipped up…”

“I don't reckon you know anything about it, you ain't even married, you ain't even…”

“I bet it's not one, I bet it's two,” Laverne said. “You better go on to the doctor and find out how many it is.”

“It is not!” Ruby shrilled. She thought she was so smart! She didn't know a sick woman when she saw one, all she could do was look at her feet and shoe em to Rufus, shoe em to Rufus and he was an enfant and she was thirty-four years old. “Rufus is an enfant!” she wailed.

“That will make two!” Laverne said.

“You shut up talking like that!” Ruby shouted. “You shut up this minute. I ain't going to have any baby!”

“Ha ha,” Laverne said.

“I don't know how you think you know so much,” Ruby said, “single as you are. If I was so single I wouldn't go around telling married people what their business is.”

“Not just your ankles,” Laverne said, “you're swollen all over.”

“I ain't going to stay here and be insulted,” Ruby said and walked carefully to the door, keeping herself erect and not looking down at her stomach the way she wanted to.

“Well I hope
all
of you feel better tomorrow,” Laverne said.

“I think my heart will be better tomorrow,” Ruby said. “But I hope we will be moving soon. I can't climb these steps with this heart trouble and,” she added with a dignified glare, “Rufus don't care nothing about your big feet.”

“You better put that gun up,” Laverne said, “before you shoot somebody.”

Ruby slammed the door shut and looked down at herself quickly. She was big there but she had always had a kind of big stomach. She did not stick out there different from the way she did any place else. It was natural when you took on some weight to take it on in the middle and Bill Hill didn't mind her being fat, he was just more happy and didn't know why. She saw Bill Hill's long happy face, grinning at her from the eyes downward in a way he had as if his look got happier as it neared his teeth. He would never slip up. She rubbed her hand across her skirt and felt the tightness of it but hadn't she felt that before? She had. It was the skirt—she had on the tight one that she didn't wear often, she had … she didn't have on the tight skirt. She had on the loose one. But it wasn't very loose. But that didn't make any difference, she was just fat.

She put her fingers on her stomach and pushed down and took them off quickly. She began walking toward the stairs, slowly, as if the floor were going to move under her. She began the steps. The pain came back at once. It came back with the first step. “No,” she whimpered, “no.” It was just a little feeling, just a little feeling like a piece of her inside rolling over but it made her breath tighten in her throat. Nothing in her was supposed to roll over. “Just one step,” she whispered, “Just one step and it did it.” It couldn't be cancer. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in good fortune. She began crying and saying, “Just one step and it did it,” and going on up them absently as if she thought she were standing still. On the sixth one, she sat down suddenly, her hand slipping weakly down the banister spoke onto the floor.