There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (22 page)

She turned in to the driveway in front of the house and stopped the car. Ramshackle (and that was being kind), it was the sort of place you’d typically only see in documentaries about the Unabomber or people who refuse to pay taxes but then decide that shooting at government agents with rifles from their kitchen window is an appropriate avenue of recourse. It was definitely not a place you’d expect to find a former Sewer Pipe Queen holed up unless she had stopped paying taxes and was planning a hoe-down with the ATF through a scope.

Maye left the safety of her car and headed for the front door, which featured a giant carved relief of the face of a boxer. Wow, she thought, you really have to make sure your devotion to a breed isn’t a flight of fancy to chip away at your front door until the head of one pops out. Maye couldn’t find a doorbell, so she rapped her knuckles on the boxer’s forehead. For quite a while she heard only the barking of what sounded like numerous dogs, but as she was getting ready to rap on the door again, she detected a fair amount of shuffling from behind the door and finally heard a thin, nasally, crackly voice call out, a little slowly, “Hold your horses, would ya? I’m coming, I’m coming.”

Maye immediately thought she had gotten the time of their appointment wrong; the person behind the door sounded like she’d just awoken. She felt foolish, ashamed of herself for disturbing an old woman napping, even if it was in the middle of the afternoon.

But as the door with the head of the boxer swung back, an old woman was not standing behind it.

A wrinkled old crone was.

Maye was so stunned, surprised, shocked, that she was speechless and couldn’t find a thing to say or, for that matter, a tongue to say it with.

Now, to be fair, Maye hadn’t known what to expect when Ruby Spicer answered the door—she’d thought perhaps she would resemble Cynthia in her impeccable appearance, her perfect posture, and unmistakable grace, but this wasn’t exactly the case behind the boxer door number one. In the pictures Maye had seen, Ruby looked to be in her late teens to early twenties, vibrant, beautiful, and with a sparkle in her eye that suggested she was the kind of girl who wasn’t afraid to make a little bit of mischief if it meant a good story and a laugh later on. True, five decades had passed, but Maye couldn’t find any trace of that young woman in the old woman who stood before her.

That beauty queen plus fifty years had equaled a tiny, skinny, wilted, wrinkly, red-lipstick-encrusted old woman with fiery red hair and only one eyebrow—the remnant of a previous eyebrow had been singed as if in a brush fire, and she was sucking on a Viceroy cigarette, looking a lot like Bette Davis in
Burnt Offerings
but apparently way more drunk and not nearly as well kept.

“You called about the puppy?” the woman asked in a raspy voice, and after a moment, Maye nodded in the only form of communication available to her in that moment.

“Come on in,” the old bag said, stepping back so Maye could enter.

Maye tried to smile as she passed the biddy, but the combination of decades’ worth of cigarette smoke and the eau de doggie from the numerous boxers that were standing guard—even several who had come into the room since Maye’s arrival to evaluate the visitor—made smiling a challenging task indeed.

The crone, dressed in a yellow terrycloth sweat suit with several burn holes directly below the neckline, closed the door and motioned for Maye to sit on the couch. As she did, Maye looked up at the grungy yellow-stained walls, the stinky brown barkcloth curtains, and the mud-colored bald carpeting, all shellacked with a grimy, dull film of exhaled nicotine and exuding its coordinating smell. Christ, she thought, it’s like this woman is living inside of a diseased, shabby lung.

“So,” the woman said, lowering herself nearly to the ground and taking a seat on the floppy, disintegrating sofa that even Maye could feel the springs through despite her well-endowed derrière. “Have you ever had a boxer before?”

Maye shook her head.

“Well,” the woman said, taking a deep drag on her cigarette before continuing, “they’re very loyal, very strong, very smart, very tolerant around children. You can count on them. Excellent companions. Would you like to see the puppy now?”

Maye suddenly realized that she didn’t really know if this was Ruby—this woman could have been anyone, really—she hadn’t introduced herself, making it possible that there really was a beautiful, elegant Ruby Spicer somewhere locked in an upstairs bedroom who spoke in a flawless Brahmin accent and was on the verge of being fed her pet canary by her jealous, decrepit evil sister.

“I’m Maye,” she said suddenly, and stuck out her hand.

The old woman seemed to be taken off guard and looked at Maye out of the corner of her eye.

She paused for a moment, switched her cigarette from her right hand to her left, then begrudgingly held out her nicotine hand in a gesture that made her seem even smaller than she really was. “I’m,” she said quietly, “Ruby.”

“Nice to meet you,” Maye said as she shook the tiny skeleton hand with fingers that resembled twigs freshly snapped off a branch.

“Do you wanna see that puppy or not?” the old woman snapped suddenly, pulling back her hand.

Maye thought this would be a good time to come clean, but before she could muster up the courage, Ruby, with a rattle and a wheeze from her lungs, called out as loud as she could manage, “PUPPY! PUPPY, COME!”

Within seconds, a gangly, large, and quite robust dog emmerged from the dog crowd, took a bounding leap, and flew onto the couch beside Maye, where it proceeded to dance and bounce on the beaten, weary cushions.

“This is the…puppy?” Maye asked as she tried to pet the clearly very adult dog, so adult that the fringes of his snout were turning gray.

“He’s the last of the litter,” Ruby replied with her raspy voice. “Is he what you were looking for?”

“He looks a little big to me,” Maye said as Puppy took a swipe at the side of her head with his welcome mat of a tongue. “I’d put him at sixty or sixty-five pounds already.”

“Achh, he’s fifty if he’s ten,” Ruby hedged. “He’s big for his age.”

“Actually, I was looking for something a little different,” Maye started, the courage bubbling up from her stomach and finally reaching her throat as Puppy’s tongue climbed up her face again in a full-throttle slurp. “I’m looking for Ruby Spicer, the Sewer Pipe Queen.”

Within the moment that it took Maye to finish that sentence Ruby had sprung to her feet and immediately brandished her cigarette at Maye as if it were a shiv.

“Get out!” the old shrew roared as loud as her craggy voice would permit, her breath soaked in alcohol. “GET OUT or I’ll torch you!”

Maye hadn’t expected that—in fact, she realized then that she’d never really anticipated any specific sort of response, let alone a violent, angry one by a loaded woman waving a lit cigarette at her. She was entirely shocked, as was Puppy, who had stopped in midlick to stand at attention before his wailing master.

“I’m sorry,” Maye said immediately. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry that I’ve upset you, but if I could just explain why I’m here—”

“You’ll be amazed at how fast an eyebrow can go up!” Ruby screeched, her jaw protruding, her eyes wide and angry. “All of that queen business is behind me. Haven’t you people had enough?”

Apparently, Maye hadn’t been the only one who had sought out the once-mighty queen for her sponsorship. Maye had over-stepped her bounds, invaded the guarded privacy of an old woman, and she felt ashamed of herself. She was shrouded in embarrassment.

“I’m very sorry,” she said, grabbing the handle of her purse and trying to launch herself off the depths of the rotting couch. “I am so sorry to have bothered you.”

“And I won’t talk to you either, no matter what channel or newspaper you’re from.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to start any trouble,” Maye tried to explain.

“The only trouble we have here is what you brought in,” Ruby shot, jabbing her tiny torch at Maye again. Slowly she moved aside as Maye walked past her and made her way to the door. The old woman seethed silently as Maye reached for the doorknob, turned it, pulled the door open, and walked out of the house.

Maye was horrified at herself. What was she doing, driving out to the middle of the woods only to wake an old woman up and bother her under false pretenses? What was she doing? Did she really just ambush an old lady who hadn’t even been seen in town for so many years that it was thought that she had run away? Just so Maye could enter a contest?

What had she been thinking? Had she ever even once stopped to think how Ruby Spicer might react to the fact that Maye had dug her up out of the library archives and snooped around until she was eventually standing on the woman’s front porch? She probably scared that drunk old woman half to death, having a stranger bring up a past that had by now been obviously forgotten and buried until Maye, like a wild animal, had dragged it out of its grave. What kind of careless, selfish person does that, Maye asked herself, especially to an elderly, wrinkled old shut-in?

“An asshole does that,” Maye answered herself out loud as she walked to her car, hot tears of embarrassment flushing her eyes. “A Rick Titball variety of asshole. This is what I get. This is what I deserve. Now I have no sponsor for the pageant, and I deserve it. I deserve nothing. Pouncing on an old woman like that! Now Melissabeth and Rowena Spaulding will walk away with the title and I will just have to suck it up. Right into the fat roll. That’s what I deserve. Every Christmas and faculty party from now on I will have to look at their gloating, hateful faces. I hate Rowena Spaulding!”

Maye had just opened the door to the car and had gotten behind the wheel when she heard a craggy, thin voice behind her croak, “What did you just say?”

Maye turned around, and there, through her blurry eyes, was a corncob with a crop of fire for a head. It was Ruby. Maye brushed away the tears with the back of her hand and tried to catch her breath.

“I said I was sorry for ambushing you, it was a horrible thing to do,” she called from her car. “I had no right to bother you. I was so determined to find you that I didn’t think that you might not want to be bothered or found or whatever it is that I did. I’m just very sorry.”

“I heard that part!” Ruby creaked with an impatient wave of her hand. “I was standing right there! What was that name you said? What was that name?”

“Rick Titball?” Maye replied. “The one-man news team, ‘We Are News to You’?”

“That jerk? No,” Ruby shot back, shaking her head quickly. “The other name.”

“Melissabeth?” Maye said, her nose still running. “She’s an opera singer and she’s awful. I mean, she’s a great singer, but an awful person. She won’t be weekend friends with me, and her husband is a root vegetable.”

“No!” Ruby screeched with a stamp of her foot, which was barely clinging to a shoddy, filthy slipper. “The one after that! You said you hated somebody! Who do you hate?”

“Oh,” Maye said, shaking her head. “Rowena Spaulding. She’s the wife of my husband’s boss, so to speak. She hates me, and I have no idea why. She was a Sewer Pipe Queen once, too. She’s Melissabeth’s sponsor.”

“The hell she was,” Ruby said, furrowing her one eyebrow and pointing her cigarette at Maye. “Blow that nose. You have shiny snot on your face. Come back into the house, I’ll get you something to wipe it with.”

Maye sat in the car for a moment, honestly not sure if she should follow a relatively unstable drunk woman who had minutes ago threatened to put a cigarette out on her forehead back into a claptrap of a house or turn the ignition and leave a trail of billowing dust behind her as she drove the hell out of there. Her survival instinct told her to flee, and just as Maye put the key into the ignition, she heard something hit her windshield with a small
tap
!, which was followed by another a second later and then another.
Tap! Tap
! She looked up just in time to see Ruby, in midthrow, lob a pebble into the air, which then sailed nonchalantly in a perfect arc to hit Maye’s windshield with a
tap
! and then bounce off it.

Ruby Spicer was throwing rocks at her car, her left hand holding the cigarette as well as a handful of gravel. If I sit here long enough, Maye thought, that deranged old bat is going to stone me to death like I was in a Shirley Jackson short story.

“Girl!
Come on
!” the crone called impatiently. “What are you waiting for? If you’re waiting for an engraved invitation, I ran out of ’em in 1957.”

So Maye, devoutly ignoring her gut and subscribing to her reporter’s instincts, got out of the car, picked up the frayed, soiled slipper that remained in the driveway after it had tumbled from the old woman’s foot without notice, and followed a pebble-throwing drunk back into her weathered, peeling gray shack.

Boxers circled Maye like sharks as she entered the house again, and Ruby handed her a wrinkled and mostly stained paper towel that she had pulled from her sweatpants pocket. In return, Maye handed her back the dirty, matted slipper that had been orphaned in the driveway despite the indications that it had been the favored and likely only footwear of Miss Ruby Spicer for quite some time. The old woman motioned for her to sit on the couch. Reluctantly, Maye gave a decent honk into the thin paper towel, trying diligently to avoid the stained portions, wiped her nose, and then sat down.

“I’m sorry for not being honest with you when I called,” Maye said. “I wasn’t looking to stir up any trouble.”

“Yeah, well,” Ruby replied, glaring harshly at Maye. “
The only trouble we have here is what you brought in
.”

Maye paused for a moment, puzzled by Ruby’s returning hostility. “Well, that’s exactly what I meant. I’m still sorry, then—?”

“Eh,” Ruby said. “It’s from
Johnny Guitar
. Joan Crawford says that to Mercedes McCambridge, a big trouble-making woman who comes into her bar with a lynch mob, ready to throw a rope around her neck. You’ve never seen it? It’s on all the time. It’s on more than
Matlock
is.”