Shiloh and Other Stories (32 page)

“Me and Gladys go way back,” he said, embracing the old woman flamboyantly.

“Don’t believe anything this old boy tells you,” said Gladys with a grin.

“Don’t say I never gave you nothing,” Buddy said to Ruby as he paid for the bracelet. He didn’t fasten the bracelet on her wrist for her, just as he never opened the truck door for her.

The bracelet cost only three dollars, and Ruby wondered if it was authentic. “What’s
Mexican
silver anyway?” she asked.

“It’s good,” he said. “Gladys wouldn’t cheat me.”

Later, Ruby kept thinking of the old woman. Her merchandise was set out on the tailgate of her station wagon—odds and ends of carnival glass, some costume jewelry, and six Barbie dolls. On the ground she had several crates of banties and guineas and pigeons. Their intermingled coos and chirps made Ruby wonder if Gladys slept in her station wagon listening to
the music of her birds, the way Buddy slept in his truck with his dogs.

The last time he’d come to town—the week before her operation—Ruby traveled with him to a place over in the Ozarks to buy some pit bull terriers. They drove several hours on interstates, and Buddy rambled on excitedly about the new dogs, as though there were something he could discover about the nature of dogs by owning a pit bull terrier. Ruby, who had traveled little, was intensely interested in the scenery, but she said, “If these are mountains, then I’m disappointed.”

“You ought to see the Rockies,” said Buddy knowingly. “Talk about mountains.”

At a little grocery store, they asked for directions, and Buddy swigged on a Dr Pepper. Ruby had a Coke and a bag of pork rinds. Buddy paced around nervously outside, then unexpectedly slammed his drink bottle in the tilted crate of empties with such force that several bottles fell out and broke. At that moment, Ruby knew she probably was irrevocably in love with him, but she was afraid it was only because she needed someone. She wanted to love him for better reasons. She knew about the knot in her breast and had already scheduled the mammogram, but she didn’t want to tell him. Her body made her angry, interfering that way, like a nosy neighbor.

They drove up a winding mountain road that changed to gravel, then to dirt. A bearded man without a shirt emerged from a house trailer and showed them a dozen dogs pacing in makeshift kennel runs. Ruby talked to the dogs while Buddy and the man hunkered down together under a persimmon tree. The dogs were squat and broad-shouldered, with squinty eyes. They were the same kind of dog the Little Rascals had had in the movies. They hurled themselves against the shaky wire, and Ruby told them to hush. They looked at her with cocked heads. When Buddy finally crated up four dogs, the owner looked as though he would cry.

At a motel that night—the first time Ruby had ever stayed in a motel with a man—she felt that the knot in her breast had a presence of its own. Her awareness of it made it seem like a little
energy source, like the radium dial of a watch glowing in the dark. Lying close to Buddy, she had the crazy feeling that it would burn a hole through him.

During
The Tonight Show
, she massaged his back with baby oil, rubbing it in thoroughly, as if she were polishing a piece of fine furniture.

“Beat on me,” he said. “Just like you were tenderizing steak.”

“Like this?” She pounded his hard muscles with the edge of her hand.

“That feels wonderful.”

“Why are you so tensed up?”

“Just so I can get you to do this. Don’t stop.”

Ruby pummeled his shoulder with her fist. Outside, a dog barked. “That man you bought the dogs from looked so funny,” she said. “I thought he was going to cry. He must have loved those dogs.”

“He was just scared.”

“How come?”

“He didn’t want to get in trouble.” Buddy raised up on an elbow and looked at her. “He was afraid I was going to use those dogs in a dogfight, and he didn’t want to be traced.”

“I thought they were hunting dogs.”

“No. He trained them to fight.” He grasped her hand and guided it to a spot on his back. “Right there. Work that place out for me.” As Ruby rubbed in a hard circle with her knuckles, he said, “They’re good friendly dogs if they’re treated right.”

Buddy punched off the TV button and smoked a cigarette in the dark, lying with one arm under her shoulders. “You know what I’d like?” he said suddenly. “I’d like to build me a log cabin somewhere—off in the mountains maybe. Just a place for me and some dogs.”

“Just you? I’d come with you if you went to the Rocky Mountains.”

“How good are you at survival techniques?” he said. “Can you fish? Can you chop wood? Could you live without a purse?”

“I might could.” Ruby smiled to herself at the thought.

“Women always have to have a lot of baggage along—placemats and teapots and stuff.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You’re funny.”

“Not as funny as you.” Ruby shifted her position. His hand under her was hurting her ribs.

“I’ll tell you a story. Listen.” He sounded suddenly confessional. He sat up and flicked sparks at the ashtray. He said, “My daddy died last year, and this old lady he married was just out to get what he had. He heired her two thousand dollars, and my sister and me were to get the homeplace—the house, the barn, and thirty acres of bottomland. But before he was cold in the ground, she had stripped the place and sold every stick of furniture. Everything that was loose, she took.”

“That’s terrible.”

“My sister sells Tupperware, and she was in somebody’s house, and she recognized the bedroom suit. She said, ‘Don’t I know that?’ and this person said, ‘Why, yes, I believe that was your daddy’s. I bought it at such-and-such auction.’ ”

“What an awful thing to do to your daddy!” Ruby said.

“He taught me everything I know about training dogs. I learned it from him and he picked it up from his daddy.” Buddy jabbed his cigarette in the ashtray. “He knew everything there was to know about field dogs.”

“I bet you don’t have much to do with your stepmother now.”

“She really showed her butt,” he said with a bitter laugh. “But really it’s my sister who’s hurt. She wanted all those keepsakes. There was a lot of Mama’s stuff. Listen, I see that kind of sorrow every day in my line of work—all those stupid, homeless dishes people trade. People buy all that stuff and decorate with it and think it means something.”

“I don’t do that,” Ruby said.

“I don’t keep anything. I don’t want anything to remind me of
any
thing.”

Ruby sat up and tried to see him in the dark, but he was a shadowy form, like the strange little mountains she had seen outside at twilight. The new dogs were noisy—bawling and
groaning fitfully. Ruby said, “Hey, you’re not going to get them dogs to fight, are you?”

“Nope. But I’m not responsible for what anybody else wants to do. I’m just the middleman.”

Buddy turned on the light to find his cigarettes. With relief, Ruby saw how familiar he was—his tanned, chunky arms, and the mustache under his nose like the brush on her vacuum cleaner. He was tame and gentle, like his best dogs. “They make good watchdogs,” he said. “Listen at ’em!” He laughed like a man watching a funny movie.

“They must see the moon,” Ruby said. She turned out the light and tiptoed across the scratchy carpet. Through a crack in the curtains she could see the dark humps of the hills against the pale sky, but it was cloudy and she could not see the moon.

—

Everything is round and full now, like the moon. Linda’s belly. Bowling balls. On TV, Steve Martin does a comedy routine, a parody of the song “I Believe.” He stands before a gigantic American flag and recites his beliefs. He says he doesn’t believe a woman’s breasts should be referred to derogatorily as jugs, or boobs, or Winnebagos. “I believe they should be referred to as hooters,” he says solemnly. Winnebagos? Ruby wonders.

After the operation, she does everything left-handed. She has learned to extend her right arm and raise it slightly. Next, the doctors have told her, she will gradually reach higher and higher—an idea that thrills her, as though there were something tangible above her to reach for. It surprises her, too, to learn what her left hand has been missing. She feels like a newly blind person discovering the subtleties of sound.

Trying to sympathize with her, the women on her bowling team offer their confessions. Nancy has such severe monthly cramps that even the new miracle pills on the market don’t work. Linda had a miscarriage when she was in high school. Betty admits her secret, something Ruby suspected anyway: Betty shaves her face every morning with a Lady Sunbeam. Her birth-control pills had stimulated facial hair. She stopped taking the pills years ago but still has the beard.

Ruby’s mother calls these problems “female trouble.” It is
Mom’s theory that Ruby injured her breasts by lifting too many heavy boxes in her job with a wholesale grocer. Several of her friends have tipped or fallen wombs caused by lifting heavy objects, Mom says.

“I don’t see the connection,” says Ruby. It hurts her chest when she laughs, and her mother looks offended. Mom, who has been keeping Ruby company in the afternoons since she came home from the hospital, today is making Ruby some curtains to match the new bedspread on her double bed.

“When you have a weakness, disease can take hold,” Mom explains. “When you abuse the body, it shows up in all kinds of ways. And women just weren’t built to do man’s work. You were always so independent you ended up doing man’s work and woman’s work both.”

“Let’s not get into why I never married,” says Ruby.

Mom’s sewing is meticulous and definite, work that would burn about two calories an hour. She creases a hem with her thumb and folds the curtain neatly. Then she stands up and embraces Ruby carefully, favoring her daughter’s right side. She says, “Honey, if there was such of a thing as a transplant, I’d give you one of mine.”

“That’s O.K., Mom. Your big hooters wouldn’t fit me.”

—

At the bowling alley, Ruby watches while her team, Garrison Life Insurance, bowls against Thomas & Sons Plumbing. Her team is getting smacked.

“We’re pitiful without you and Linda,” Betty tells her. “Linda’s got too big to bowl. I told her to come anyway and watch, but she wouldn’t listen. I think maybe she
is
embarrassed to be seen in public, despite what she said.”

“She doesn’t give a damn what people think,” says Ruby, as eight pins crash for Thomas & Sons. “Me neither,” she adds, tilting her can of Coke.

“Did you hear she’s getting a heavy-duty washer? She says a heavy-duty holds forty-five diapers.”

Ruby lets a giggle escape. “She’s not going to any more laundromats and get knocked up again.”

“Are you still going with that guy you met at Third Monday?”

“I’ll see him Monday. He’s supposed to take me home with him to Tennessee, but the doctor said I can’t go yet.”

“I heard he didn’t know about your operation,” says Betty, giving her bowling ball a little hug.

Ruby takes a drink of Coke and belches. “He’ll find out soon enough.”

“Well, you stand your ground, Ruby Jane. If he can’t love you for yourself, then to heck with him.”

“But people always love each other for the wrong reasons!” Ruby says. “Don’t you know that?”

Betty stands up, ignoring Ruby. It’s her turn to bowl. She says, “Just be thankful, Ruby. I like the way you get out and go. Later on, bowling will be just the right thing to build back your strength.”

“I can already reach to here,” says Ruby, lifting her right hand to touch Betty’s arm. Ruby smiles. Betty has five-o’clock shadow.

—

The familiar crying of the dogs at Third Monday makes Ruby anxious and jumpy. They howl and yelp and jerk their chains—sound effects in a horror movie. As Ruby walks through the oak grove, the dogs lunge toward her, begging recognition. A black Lab in a tiny cage glares at her savagely. She notices dozens of blueticks and beagles, but she doesn’t see Buddy’s truck. As she hurries past some crates of ducks and rabbits and pullets, a man in overalls stops her. He is holding a pocket knife and, in one hand, an apple cut so precisely that the core is a perfect rectangle.

“I can’t ’call your name,” he says to her. “But I know I know you.”

“I don’t know
you,
” says Ruby. Embarrassed, the man backs away.

The day is already growing hot. Ruby buys a Coke from a man with a washtub of ice and holds it with her right hand, testing the tension on her right side. The Coke seems extremely heavy. She lifts it to her lips with her left hand. Buddy’s truck is not there.

Out in the sun, she browses through a box of
National Enquirers
and paperback romances, then wanders past tables of picture frames, clocks, quilts, dishes. The dishes are dirty and mismatched—odd plates and cups and gravy boats. There is nothing she would want. She skirts a truckload of shock absorbers. The heat is making her dizzy. She is still weak from her operation. “I wouldn’t pay fifteen dollars for a corn sheller,” someone says. The remark seems funny to Ruby, like something she might have heard on Sodium Pentothal. Then a man bumps into her with a wire basket containing two young gray cats. A short, dumpy woman shouts to her, “Don’t listen to him. He’s trying to sell you them cats. Who ever heard of buying cats?”

Gladys has rigged up a canvas canopy extending out from the back of her station wagon. She is sitting in an aluminum folding chair, with her hands crossed in her lap, looking cool. Ruby longs to confide in her. She seems to be a trusty fixture, something stable in the current, like a cypress stump.

“Buy some mushmelons, darling,” says Gladys. Gladys is selling banties, Fiestaware, and mushmelons today.

“Mushmelons give me gas.”

Gladys picks up a newspaper and fans her face. “Them seeds been in my family over a hundred years. We always saved the seed.”

“Is that all the way back to slave times?”

Gladys laughs as though Ruby has told a hilarious joke. “These here’s my roots!” she says. “Honey, we’s
in
slave times, if you ask me. Slave times ain’t never gone out of style, if you know what I mean.”

Ruby leans forward to catch the breeze from the woman’s newspaper. She says, “Have you seen Buddy, the guy I run around with? He’s usually here in a truck with a bunch of dogs?”