The Book of Ruth (25 page)

It was January when Ruby got a part-time job down at the can truck that sits outside of the grocery store in Stillwater. It’s open twice a month for three hours on Saturdays. It’s the place for cans and dead batteries and newspapers. Ruby weighed all the recycled stuff and paid the customers. Being the Can Man was the ideal job for Ruby. One of the check-out girls lent him her little tiny TV set and he sat in the truck and watched his favorite shows if no one came. Right after he started I asked May for some of my paycheck money. She said, “What for?”

I mumbled, “I need to buy Ruby something.” I didn’t care if we ran short at the end of the month.

She waited for me to elaborate. I held out as long as I could and then I spit it out—“A winter suit, for work.”

The next day she come home and inside her Goodwill bag was an enormous brown snowmobile suit. She said, “Go get him, see if it fits.” I couldn’t find him anywhere, but later when he came in and tried it on he said to the mirror, “Hey, it’s me, Yogi the Bear.” He scratched his head and made his teeth buck and then grinned at himself. He liked the two zippers up and down the front, which he explained were for pissing in the snow without having to take the whole works off. He liked the can truck and his special suit. He’d say to me when he came in the kitchen door, “Baby, it’s me, your sugar, the Can Man.”

When we were home in the evenings he performed concerts up in our room. He turned on the radio and sang to me, his best girl. I liked the slow songs he sang too, the one called “If You Leave Me Now,” which he’d sing mournfully to me.

My devotion to mother nature fails me when the temperature drops below zero. It was ten below for three weeks in a row that year, and our place isn’t all that cozy. There’s frost on the inside walls on winter mornings and it is almost impossible to step out of the warm spot you’ve worked so hard to make under the pile of thin wool blankets. We could see our breath in our bedroom; we could feel the wind sweeping across the fields, battering the house. The wind didn’t have any mercy for the likes of us. It didn’t care that we aren’t equipped with fur, and that May never turned the heat up far enough. She refused to waste the oil.

Winter wasn’t May’s favorite time of year either. She always said that them bones of hers felt petrified. She sat in her chair in the kitchen some days, when it was the terrible cold, and she conducted to me. She told me precisely how much water to put in the hot cereal, how many seconds to stir the orange juice. She had to conduct from her chair on account of her fossilized bones. I sure wished May and Ruby’s mother could have met. They would have had a lot to discuss. They could have compared their dying bodies.

Sometimes I felt so mixed up, being a wife and a daughter under the same roof. There was the Saturday when Ruby came in from work; he didn’t stop to take off his snowsuit; he said urgently, “Baby, I got to show you something. Come this way with me.”

We went up to our room. He shut the door and said, “Close your eyes.” I could feel him tying an object around my waist, and when I looked there was a tail, a coon’s tail, hanging down behind me. Someone threw it out in the can truck. Ruby found it under a sack of newspapers. He stood grinning at me and he said, “Now you’re my jungle kitten.” He said I should take my clothes off except for the tail, so I did it, even in the cold. We were prancing around our bedroom, laughing so hard because I bit him, nipped at his flanks. That’s what jungle kittens do. I knew their behavior instinctively. I chased him over the bed, jumped down on the floor clawing gently at the backs of his hairy knees. I trapped him in the corner. He let me. He wanted me to purr right on his favorite organ. Did I light the fire! He threw his head back and roared. He was Jungle Tom, beating on his chest and coming after me, growling deep down in his throat. I couldn’t help screaming timid screams, so delicately. The noises made Ruby growl even more; finally he pinned me to the bed and forced my legs apart while I giggled and screeched.

We did a repeat performance right away even though I knew May was down scrubbing carrots in the sink for her famous stew. Ruby and I lay in bed and I whispered to him that he was the best man I knew of in the universe, the way he could keep going two million times. Finally, when I cooled off, I went downstairs to give May a hand. She said, without looking up, “Well, well, well, if it ain’t the jungle kitten herself.”

I stood still. I wished that moment wasn’t there. I wanted to rewind and have a miracle take place; I wanted to hear May say, “Hello there, angel. I’ve never seen you look so happy.”

We sat down to supper. No one said one thing. I didn’t eat. I stared at my plate. I wanted to do something extreme to pay her for ruining our fun, to pay her for making us feel like slimy creatures who don’t have anything on their minds but mating dances. What did she wish for in a daughter—that I had been born without sensation? I wanted to wreck something special of hers, break it into pieces she would not be able to fit back together. Then I’d snip the phone cord so she couldn’t call Dee Dee. When I didn’t touch my potatoes May barked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’,” I muttered.

After that it wasn’t fun roughhousing with the tail. I hid it way in the back of the closet even though I was a star jungle kitten.

As the winter months wore on, as it got muddier and damper without warming up, our tempers frayed. After a while there wasn’t anything left of our restraint. We’d had the cold for so long, and we were just waiting, waiting for our emotions to ignite. We were sitting at supper, silent like always, except for May’s griping. It was a rainy March night, and you couldn’t see anything but black and the glittering rain catching our lights. It was cold in the house because May was trying to get by without ordering another tank of oil. Our hands and noses were raw.

She got up from the table to get some more soup and she noticed a few spots of red paint on the floor. She stooped down to examine the spots. She said, as if she was surprised, “Ruby, I do believe you spilled some paint from the birdhouses of yours on the floor.”

Ruby didn’t say anything. It wasn’t a big deal to him. He was picking dead skin off his hands very carefully. She came to the table and leaned over. She said, “You listening to me, Mr. Jungle Tomcat?”

We both had to look up into her narrow eyes. She spoke low and distinct. She said, “You clean up that paint right now or I’m kicking you out of here. All you do is build them birdhouses like a moron. That’s about the biggest laugh I ever thought of, a grown man building houses for the little birdies, now ain’t that sweet?”

He sat for a minute hearing her special tones. After only a minute or two of delayed reaction he sprang from the table, picked up two of his houses in his wide spread hands and threw them expertly, like his curve balls, against the wall. They busted apart. They aren’t made to survive a blast. He whacked the others down on the floor. I stood still in the middle of the floor. I couldn’t make sense of the wood splinters exploding in the air, May’s smirk, saliva and tears making Ruby’s face shiny, as if someone went and shellacked it. I thought that if I stood still maybe it all would stop.

After the houses were ruined and there was the near silence, the ringing from past noise, Ruby ran out of the house. I had to follow him. I ran down the porch stairs calling out into the rain, “Ruubeeeee, Ruuuuuubeeeeee, come back.”

He didn’t answer. I found him close by, in the middle of the yard, standing in the mud. He stooped so he could cry on my shoulder. He was his own rainstorm, and I held him and stroked his wet hair. He loved the houses and he went and wrecked them. No one had ever told him before that they were stupid. Everyone—that’s Dee Dee and I—always said they were extremely beautiful. He wept. It was so cold his tears were the consistency of slush.

“Baby,” he whimpered, “I just got to take a walk.”

I held him up and we started off down the road. We had nothing on but our sweaters and pants, already soaked. It was dark and misty. The cars came slowly out of nowhere and splashed us at the side of the road. I didn’t ask where we were going. We must have walked halfway to Stillwater, holding hands, not saying a word.

When we came to the house it was all lit up. I knew, by the sixth sense, when Ruby turned up the drive, that it was where Hazel lived, with her cousin, Isabel, and whoever else happened to be around. Every single light was on. Ruby walked right into the house, without knocking.

Hazel and Isabel were in the kitchen, playing gin rummy. They must have been at it for a while because there were lots of empty bottles around. Their kitchen was spacious but all they had was a small white linoleum table against the wall and two yellow kitchen chairs with the stuffing coming out. There were bottles everywhere and empty shelves, as if they never had the occasion to eat or cook in the room. When Hazel bothered to look up she said, “Well, if it ain’t the newlyweds!” Then she looked at us more carefully and said, “Hey, Izzy, do you think it’s Halloween? Don’t them two look like they’re dressed up as drowned rats?” She laughed at her joke and then got serious. “Do we have any candy?”

Isabel was quiet. She was young and blond and had a waist the size of a signpost. She was bored by everything, even jokes.

Ruby pulled up a stool and helped himself to an open beer while I stood, waiting again for the scene to evaporate. I was convinced that if I stood long enough it would just go away.

After a long time listening to the two slap their cards and shuffle and deal, and listening to Ruby guzzle and burp, Hazel looked up again and said, “I bet Mrs. Dahl would love to see the zoo.”

“No, she don’t,” Ruby said, but Hazel had me by the hand. She took me down the basement and turned the light on, and I saw the snake cages on one wall and the mice cages on the other. “We’ll get one of the constrictors for you to hold, sweetheart,” she said to me, smiling so that her smooth face wrinkled up. While she fiddled with the latch she said, “I bet Ruby’s told you all about me, all about our magic times down here.”

I whispered, “No.”

She laughed and said, “You mean he don’t brag about the time he nipped my boob so bad I was a living blood bath?” She had a puckered look come over her for a split second and then she turned to the snake and crooned, “Come on, honey bun.”

I took the thing in both my hands, wondering when I was going to wake up. “Take it to Ruby,” she said. “He loves my pets.”

I carried the python up while it slowly wrapped around my arm. It was four feet long and as big around as Isabel’s waist. I didn’t mind it so much. It hadn’t asked to be Hazel’s snake.

When I came up into the light of the kitchen Ruby took one look at me and put the whiskey bottle down. He retched into his sleeve and was gone out the door. If I’d had my wits about me I would have thanked Hazel for making him leave, but as soon as I could unwind the creature from my arm I set him on the table and followed Ruby.

I caught up with him near home. He had his pocket-size pancake syrup jug full of liquor and we drank as we walked along. I had hundreds of questions I wanted to ask him, such as “Why did we go there?” but I was afraid to ask him. I was afraid Ruby would say, “They are my best friends.” I knew that a person always got the urge to see their best friend when they found themselves in trouble.

For a while we sat with the hens. Ruby finally said, “I like birds better than people.” He took a drink and said, “I bet angels look like doves, white ones.”

“Sure,” I said.

We sat out there drinking and singing “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” and other songs by Ruby’s favorite composer, John Denver. Every now and then Ruby would start daydreaming about how he was going to climb mountains with John Denver, the tallest mountains, and all you’d have to do is take one little step off the top and you’d be in heaven.

I didn’t correct him; I didn’t say if he stepped off years later someone would find a skeleton in the darkest valley, and they’d know it was Ruby by his black front tooth.

It took me a long time to get up my nerve but when I finally got it I blurted, “How come you bit Hazel?”

Ruby laughed one of his genuine laughs, not the big ha-ha’s that mean he’s nervous. He said, “She took me down to her zoo one day, calls out, ‘Who wants to be lunch?’ Then she grabs a mousie from a cage and beats it with a ruler in the wastebasket.” He looked like he was going to be sick again. “She made me watch the snake eat it up.

“Baby,” he whispered, “she deserved to be bit. If she hadn’t squirmed so much I would have swallowed her whole.”

We didn’t say anything more. We slumped down and lay still.

Finally, we climbed the back steps clutching each other, stiff and shivering. The whiskey was long gone and the old horse blanket I’d found in the barn was soaked from our wet skins. After May went to work in the morning I called up Artie and told him I was sick as a dead pig. It was not a lie. Ruby and I were both feverish. We lay in bed throwing wads of Kleenex on the floor. We didn’t do anything but lie there side by side, throwing off the covers one minute and the next huddling under them, all the while trying to breathe.

When May came home in the evening she was prepared to be huffy and prim. She was probably dying to know where we’d been all night, but she wasn’t about to ask. We could hear her walking around downstairs, looking for us so she could show us her aloof personality. Finally she heaved upstairs. She came and stood by our door. She could not figure out what was going on. When she peered in and saw us on our bed I started sneezing and moaning. It was a good show. My head felt like a bowl full of hot applesauce. I couldn’t breathe; I felt as if I was going to suffocate from all my clogged byways. Ruby wasn’t any better off, plus he had to vomit now and then in a bucket, side effects of the whiskey.

“Don’t stand there staring, Ma,” I snorted. “Look what you’ve done to us, chasing us out of the house.” I started to cry. I said, “I think you better apologize to my husband Ruby.”

Of course May never says she’s sorry but she did make us chicken soup. She brought us Cokes. She felt halfway responsible, I know she did, for the fact that we were so miserable. She could hear our sniffles and our whimpering. She must have actually felt guilty because she took the next day off. She waited on us hand and toe. In between some of the shows she watched on TV she put trays of orange juice outside our door. We could come and fetch some whenever we were thirsty. And when I came down for lunch she made me stick the thermometer in my mouth. After she read it she shook it out so vigorously I doubted her advanced age. She could have been a head nurse easily. We never mentioned the scene in our kitchen. We put it away, inside ourselves. But those birdhouses were the last Ruby ever made in his whole life, as far as I know.