Rubyfruit Jungle (2 page)

“I don’t care.”

“Well, you oughta care, you horse’s ass. Just see how far all your pretty ways and books get you when you go out and people find out you’re a bastard. And you act like one Blood’s thicker than water and yours tells. Bullheaded like Ruby and out there in the woods jerking off that Detwiler idiot. Bastard!”

Carrie was red in the face and her veins were popping out of her neck. She looked like a one-woman horror movie and she was thumping the
table and thumping me. She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me like a dog shakes a rag doll. “Snot-nosed, bitch of a bastard. Living in my house, under my roof. You’d be dead in that orphanage if I hadn’t gotten you out and nursed you round the clock. You come here and eat the food, keep me runnin’ after you and then go out and shame me. You better straighten up, girl, or I’ll throw you back where you came from—the gutter.”

“Take your hands off me. If you ain’t my real mother then you just take your goddamned hands off me.” I ran out the door and tore all the way over the wheat fields up to the woods. The sun had gone down, and there was one finger of rose left in the sky.

So what, so what I’m a bastard. I don’t care. She’s trying to scare me. She’s always trying to throw some fear in me. The hell with her and the hell with anyone else if it makes a difference to them. Goddamn Broccoli Detwiler and his ugly dick anyway. He got me in this mess and just when we’re making money this has to happen. I’m gonna get Earl Stambach and lay him out to whaleshit if it’s the last thing I do. Yeah, then Mom will rip me for that. I wonder who else knows I’m a bastard. I bet Mouth knows and if Florence the Megaphone Mouth knows, the whole world knows. I bet they’re all sittin’ on it like hens. Well, I ain’t going back into that house for them to laugh at me and look at me like I’m a freak. I’m staying out here in these woods and I’m gonna kill Earl. Shit, I wonder if ole Broc got it. He’ll tell I put him up to it and skin out. Coward. Anyone with a dick like that’s gotta be chickenshit anyway.
I wonder if any of the kids know. I can face Mouth and Mom but not the gang. Well, if it makes a difference to them, the hell with them, too. I can’t see why it’s such a big deal. Who cares how you get here? I don’t care. I really don’t care. I got myself born, that’s what counts. I’m here. Boy, ole Mom was really roaring, she was ripped, just ripped. I’m not going back there. I’m not going back to where it makes a difference and she’ll throw it in my face from now on out. Look how she throws in my face how I kicked Grandma Bolt’s shins when I was five. I’m staying in these woods. I can live off nuts and berries, except I don’t like berries, they got ticks on them. I can just live off nuts, I guess. Maybe kill rabbits, yeah, but Ted told me rabbits are full of worms. Worms, yuk, I’m not eating worms. I’ll stay out here in these woods and starve, that’s what I’ll do. Then Mom will feel sorry about how she yelled at me and made a big deal out of the way I was born. And calling my real mother a slut—I wonder what my real mother looks like. Maybe I look like someone. I don’t look like anyone in our house, none of the Bolts nor Wiegenlieds, none of them. They all have extra white skin and gray eyes. German, they’re all German. And don’t Carrie make noise about that. How anyone else is bad, Wops and Jews and the rest of the entire world. That’s why she hates me. I bet my mother wasn’t German. My mother couldn’t have cared about me very much if she left me with Carrie. Did I do something wrong way back then? Why would she leave me like that? Now, maybe now she could leave me after showing off Broccoli’s dick but when I was a little baby how could I have done
anything wrong? I wish I’d never heard any of this. I wish Carrie Bolt would drop down dead. That’s exactly what I wish. I’m not going back there.

Night drew around the woods and little unseen animals burrowed in the dark. There was no moon. The black filled my nostrils and the air was full of little noises, weird sounds. A chill came up off the old fishpond down by the pine trees. I couldn’t find any nuts either, it was too dark. All I found was a spider’s nest. The spider’s nest did it. I decided to go back to the house but only until I was old enough to get a job so I could leave that dump. Stumbling, I felt my way home and opened the torn screen door. No one was waiting up for me. They’d all gone to bed.

Leroy sat in the middle of the potato patch picking a tick off his navel. He looked like Baby Huey in the comics and he was about as smart, but Leroy was my cousin and in a dumb way I loved him. We’d been sent out there to get potato bugs, but the sun was high and we were both tired of our chores. The grown-up women were in the house, and the men were off working. That was the summer of 1956, and we were in such bad shape that we had to live with the Denmans in Shiloh. I didn’t know we were in bad shape; besides I liked being out there with Leroy, Ted and all the animals.

Leroy was eleven, same age as me. He was the same height only fat; I was skinny. Ted, Leroy’s brother, was thirteen and his voice was changing. Ted worked down at the Esso station so Leroy and I were stuck with the potato bugs.

“Molly, I don’t wanna pick bugs no more. We got two jars full, let’s go on down to Mrs. Hershener’s and get a soda.”

“Okay, but we got to go down by the gully where Ted wrecked the tractor or my mom will see us and make us get back to work.” We crawled through the gully, past the rusty tractor and out the drainpipe to the other side of the dirt road. Then we ran all the way down to Mrs. Hershener’s tiny store which had a faded Nehi soda sign with a thermometer on it tacked to the door.

“Well, it’s Leroy and Molly. You children been helping your mothers up there on the hill?”

“Oh yes, Mrs. Hershener,” Leroy droned, “we spent this whole day picking potato bugs so the potatoes will grow right.”

“Now aren’t you just sweet. Here, how about a chocolate Tastycake for each of you.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hershener”—in unison.

“Can I get a scoop of raspberry ice cream for a nickel?” I grabbed my ice cream and walked out into the June sunshine. Leroy strolled out with a fudge ripple and we sat on the worn, flat wood planks of the porch. I spied an empty Sunmaid raisin box, nearly perfect except the top was torn, lying there in the irridescent tarpaper shavings in front of the store.

“What you want that for?”

“I got plans for this, you wait and see.”

“Come on, Moll, tell me and I’ll help you.”

“Can’t tell you now, here comes Barbara Spangenthau and you know how she is.”

“Yeah, right, gotta be a secret.”

“Hi, Barbara, watch you doin?”

Barbara mumbled something about a loaf of
bread and disappeared inside. Barbara was Jewish and Carrie was forever telling Leroy and me to keep away from her. She needn’t have bothered. No one wanted to go near Barbara Spangenthau because she always had her hand in her pants playing with herself and worse, she stank. Until I was fifteen I thought that being Jewish meant you walked around with your hand in your pants.

Barbara rolled out of the store. She was even fatter than Leroy; her arms full of Fishel’s bread, she started down the footpath with all the honeysuckles.

“Hey Barbara, you seen Earl Stambach today?”

“He was down by the pond. Why?”

“Cause I got a present for him. You see him you tell him I’m lookin’ for him, hear?”

Barbara, filled with importance of her message, trotted down the road. Since she lived closest to the Stambachs, there was a good chance she’d deliver it.

“What you want to give Earl Stambach a present for? I thought you hated him since forever.”

“I do hate him, and the present I got for him is something very special. You want to come with me while I get it?”

Leroy fell over himself in enthusiasm, and he trailed me back over the fields like a duck after its mother, all the way babbling about what the present’s gonna be. We went into the cool woods and I searched the ground. Leroy was looking at the ground too, although he didn’t know what he was looking for.

“Ha! I got it. Now I’m gonna fix him good.”

“I don’t see nothin’ but a pile of rabbit turds. What you gonna do? Come on and tell.”

“Just watch, Leroy, and shut your trap.”

I scooped up a handful of tiny, perfectly round rabbit turds and put them in the Sunmaid raisin box.

“Remember the dried raisins that Florence had out on the back porch? You go on down there and steal me a handful and come right back here.”

Leroy took off like a cement truck, his bulk shimmering in the afternoon sun. Within ten minutes he was back with a precious handful of honest raisins. I put them in the box and shook the contents hard. Then swearing Leroy to eternal secrecy, I started through the woods to Carmine’s fishpond to find Earl Stambach. He was down there all right, sitting there with a stick for a fishing pole waiting for nonexistent fish to bite a string with no bait on it. Earl was pretty stupid. The only way he made it through fourth grade was by brownnosing the teacher. We were now going into sixth grade and he still couldn’t get beyond five on the multiplication tables. Florence said it was because the Stambachs had so many kids that none of them ate enough, so Earl’s brain was starved. I didn’t much care why he was stupid. I was too busy hating him. He was all the time ratting on me in school because I was breaking this rule or that rule. Last time, I was sent to Mr. Beaver’s office for stealing tablets out of the supply room. That was one week before school ended and I nearly didn’t get out of fifth grade because of it. Earl might be stupid but he learned how to survive and he learned at my expense, the mealymouthed weasel.

Earl heard us coming and looked up. A perplexed shadow ran across his face because he must
have thought I was going to whip him for sure. So I smiled and said, “Hey, Earl, hey, you catching anything?”

“No, but I got a big bite just five minutes ago. It must have been a tuna because it was sure big.”

“Zat so? You must be a talented fisherman.”

Earl giggled and his left eye twitched. He couldn’t figure this no way.

“Earl, I been thinkin’ that we got to stop irritatin’ each other. Now you know I hate it when you stool on me, and I know you hate it when I get mad at you and lay for you on your way home from school. Why don’t we call a truce and be friends? I won’t beat you up if you don’t tell on me when we go back to school.”

“Sure, Molly, sure. I’d like us to be friends and I swear on a stack of Bibles I won’t tell on you ever again.”

“Well, here then, I brought you a little present to make it legal. I just got them at Mrs. Hershener’s cause I know you love raisins.”

“Thanks, hey thanks.” Earl snatched the raisin box, tore off what was left of the top and opened his mouth, tipped the box over it and gulped half the contents in one motion. Leroy started to laugh. I grabbed his left arm and gave him a pinch that would have ruined an orange, “You hush your mouth or I’ll whip your ass,” I hissed.

“I ain’t worried, Molly, I ain’t gonna laugh.”

“What you two talking about?”

“Oh, we was remarking how fast you eat, Earl. We ain’t never seen anyone eat quite so fast. Why you must be the fastest eater in all of York County. I bet you can finish off the rest of the box in half a second. Don’t you think so, Leroy?”

“Yeah, Earl Stambach has got true speed. He even eats faster than my old man.”

Earl bloated up with all this praise, and he ruffled out his feathers. “Oh, I can do it in less than half a second, you watch me.” One fierce swallow and the Sunmaid raisin box was tossed into the pond. Earl was beaming and feeling big on himself.

“Earl, how did those raisins taste?”

“Like raisins, some were mushy and bitter though.”

“Mushy, now ain’t that the strangest thing?”

Leroy exploded with laughter and fell down on the grass next to the pond. “Earl, you are so stupid. You know that, Earl, you are so stupid. Molly gave you a box full of rabbit turds mixed with raisins.”

Earl’s face crumpled under the blow. “You didn’t do that, did you, Molly?”

“You bet I did, you sneaking fart. You rat on me one more time and I’m gonna do a whole lot worse so you’d better lay off me, Earl Stambach. Let this be a lesson to you.” I took a threatening step toward him for effect but Earl was so green he wasn’t worried about the outside of his body. “I won’t ever tell on you again. I promise, I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Die’ is the right word, boy. You button your fat lip and if you even breathe a single word that I fed you rabbit turds, you’ve had it. Come on, Leroy, let’s leave him here full of shit.”

We scurried over the pine needles and Leroy was laughing so hard he could barely keep his footing. I turned around on the rim of the hill to look at Earl down by the edge of the pond retching his guts out and crying at the same time. Fixed
him good, I thought, I fixed him real good and he deserves it. How come I don’t feel good about it?

“He ain’t gonna bother you no more, Molly, you got him this time.”

“Shut up, Leroy, you shut up.”

Leroy stopped for a minute and looked at me with amazement, then shrugged his shoulders and said, “We better get on back home before Carrie and the Mouth come looking for us.”