Chapter Two

The first rays of the sun slid over Ruby’s body, cocooned beneath the crisp white cotton sheet of her bed. One parchment-colored hand pushed the sheet down to reveal the mint-green peignoir she wore. Her fingers smoothed the material over her full breasts, her nipples tightening as memories flitted through her mind of her husband, Amos, and how he used to stroke them each morning. Sighing, her hand dropped to the empty pillow beside her, sorrow washing through her body.

She should have been accustomed to it by now. Hell, Amos had spent more nights out of their bed than he had in it during the last years of their marriage. Still, this aching emptiness was different from what she’d experienced then, the ones tinged with a dark anger as she imagined him out tomcatting in the street. Discernment was not her friend. She would swallow her emotions and say nothing, letting the darkness be her companion. Now, the memories of him swam around her, darkening her hours and days and tinting the world gray.

She remembered lying in their double bed, afraid any movement might conceal the sound of his return, wishing and waiting to hear his footsteps sliding quietly across the room, trying not to wake her. When he finally arrived, smelling of bourbon, the scent of another woman’s perfumed body lingered on his skin. Still, it was preferable to this never-ending loneliness that pervaded her days and nights. He had left her nothing but this darkness.

Rolling onto her back, she scooted to the edge of the bed, dropping her legs over the side and staring down at them as she eased her feet into her waiting slippers. His spirit was all around her today, filling her thoughts and the room with his absence. She let Good Amos’s voice tickle the back of her mind, teasing, Gal, them there ain’t legs. They’s baseball bats. See, they big at the top and skinny at the bottom.

She pressed her middle two fingers to her lips, then moved them away, placing them on her husband’s face in the photograph on the bedside table. For a moment, the image disappeared, turning completely black, forcing her to blink and bring it back into focus. When she looked again, the picture had righted itself. She saw his hat tilted at a rakish angle, his smile broad, and his eyes glinting with the mischief that always seemed to linger there.

In the picture, he was frozen in time, where he would always be her good man. When she resurrected him, her mind selectively eradicated the imperfections of the man she had buried a year ago. Pushing away the pervasive darkness that made day and night seem the same, she wrapped her thoughts with the solid cloth of denial she had built around her memories. She found herself rocking on the edge of the bed, her hands cradled in her lap, determined to push back any truth that would not align with her new reality.

The pain and the darkness felt strong today. Sometimes, she swore it lurked in the corners of the room, remnants of his passing that refused to relinquish his hold in this world, too stubborn to let her go, even in death. It tore and devastated her like it had the morning she awakened to find him cold and stiff beside her. The breath of life had fled his body during the night. That same day, he had become perfect.

Shaking herself free of her reverie—choosing to ignore the premonitions channeling their way into her mind—Ruby stood, found her balance, and shuffled toward the dressing table, her walk far older than her actual age. It was silly, she knew, to still dress herself as though her good Amos was waiting for her to join him in their bed or assessing her appearance each day. Averting her eyes from the mirror, she conveniently forgot his constant derision, his hands pummeling her when she failed again to meet his expectations, beating her for who she was not. She cast a critical eye at her reflection, noting that the peignoir showed signs of repeated wear and washings; how the translucent material revealed the sag of her breasts and stomach, which were no longer tight and supple. She twisted her mouth in disapproval, hating what she saw.

She poured water from the blue-flowered porcelain pitcher into the matching basin and began to wash her face and body. The tepid water shocked her into full wakefulness. Then she went to the closet to search for clothing for the day, her eyes searching for something that conveyed the authority of her position as the building manager. Her spirit lifted momentarily, and she preened at the title.

It had been Amos’s job before he died, leaving her with no way to support herself. But her mama didn’t raise no fools, and she knew she was the one who had been taking care of things all along, Amos being either drunk or hungover most days. She had harangued and nagged Mr. Elliott, the building owner, until he had reluctantly allowed her to maintain the title.

Once she’d proven herself by working hard—showed her capabilities of taking care of anything that came up in the building and accepted a lower wage for doing so—he had bragged as though the choice had been his all along.

Those years of dragging along behind her father from sunup to sundown, fixing up sharecropper’s shacks in Louisiana, had proven an unexpected benefit. What she couldn’t repair herself, she used a network of her husband’s old friends to do, letting her body ply them with hints of favors that would never come to pass, dangled just close enough to keep them coming back.

Sitting at her dressing table, Ruby pulled the cinnamon-red stockings up her leg, rolling the tops down and knotting them at the knee to keep them from falling. She stood and smoothed her dress down over her narrow hips, making sure the hem covered her stocking tops, then slipped on her pumps.

Seating herself again before the mirror, she began working her straight black hair into a tight bun, ignoring the silver-gray strands that wove themselves across her scalp. Her mother’s face stared back at her, and she wondered when she had become this old when her youth had fled, and how she had ended up here, alone. Her hand brushed across her lap, and the soft paunch of her stomach held the memory of the child that should have swollen within. Barren as a desert, she thought. Amos had made sure of that: empty womb, empty heart, empty life. Regret added itself to the sorrow in her eyes.

She grabbed the small can of snuff from the table, pinching a little and placing it in the pouch between her lower gum and her bottom lip. Another small sigh escaped her, this one of satisfaction, as she crossed the room to make her rounds through the building.

Air rose inside Ruby, pushing from her lips, the melancholy from the early morning clinging to her as she stared through the dusty grit of the screen door leading to the outside porch of the rooming house. Weak sunlight, now obscured by clouds, could not penetrate it, leaving a dark, murky view of the trees outside. Random thoughts of Amos framed in darkness continued to skitter in and around her mind as she considered getting a pail of water to clean the screen. The dirt was a personal affront to the cleanliness and order she usually maintained. She turned, picked up her snuff can, and moved toward the storage closet, her thoughts and gaze drifting to the spotless rose-patterned carpet in the hallway, reaffirming why Mr. Elliott believed in her. She wouldn’t let him down.

The sound of mingled voices floated up from the stairs outside, and she turned back to the screen, rubbing her open palm against the thin film of grit to get a better view. Mr. Elliott, the building owner, used one thick arm to pull his ponderous weight up the steps, the rail providing the extra leverage he required. His pale cheeks bellowed in and out, turning scarlet as he strained to reach the landing. Behind him, a diminutive, slender woman followed, sandwiched between Elliott and the hulking form of the man behind her. Her oval face, dark, almond-shaped eyes, and plump mouth seemed to glide toward Ruby, her body blocked by the two men.

Ruby shook her head to free it of the image of the woman’s flawless features and spit a stream of snuff into the small coffee can she held in her right hand before lowering it to the floor and gently kicking it into the corner with the toe of her shoe. She arranged her expression into what she hoped was a pleasant smile and swung the screen door open, stepping back to allow Elliott and the couple to squeeze past her.

“Mr. Elliott, I wasn’t expecting to see you today.”

“Got some new tenants here, Ruby, so I brought them myself. This here is Clyde and Mae Henry from Louisiana by way of Mississippi.” He nodded toward the couple and then back at her. “This is Ruby. She manages things for me. If you have any questions or need anything, you just go down and knock on her door,” he said, looking over his glasses to peer first at Ruby and then down the hall as if searching for something amiss.

Ruby took that time to study the couple in front of her. The woman vibrated, seeming to glow with energy, a look of sheer happiness radiating from her as she bounced on her toes, reaching for her husband’s massive hand. As she found it, Ruby noted the contrast between the slender pale appendage locked under the thick paw of the man beside her.

Mae looked down at their intertwined hands, her hair falling forward. Good hair, Ruby thought. Not out of a jar, but natural like her own. It was cut into a bob that framed her sharp features. She smiled at Ruby, deep dimples appearing on both cheeks, and Ruby found herself smiling back. Mae’s free hand was extended out toward her.

“How’s you, Ms. Ruby? I’m Mae, and this here is Clyde Henry, my husband. We so glad to meet you.” Her honeyed voice poured over Ruby, warm and inviting, the direct opposite of the look of the man towering over her, who glared under brooding brows.

Ruby looked fully at Clyde while he was distracted by his wife, allowing herself to stare at him, withholding a shudder. Beneath an incongruous unruly mop of thick, black curls, a broad, sloped forehead shadowed a face that looked like it had been smashed by an immense pan, squashing his nose flat so that it spread across his face, his nostrils mere slits. His mouth stretched just as wide beneath his nose, his lips thick and wet with saliva.

His head rested on a short neck connected to broad, powerful shoulders, long, heavily muscled arms, and a barrel chest. Clyde’s protruding eyes found hers, the whites yellow, the rims red, and the irises a piercing brown that penetrated bone and marrow.

He stared back, and Ruby felt her face collapse, her smile sliding downward, and her chin lowering, gravity pulling on her cheeks. Her lips quivered, endangering the snuff pocketed in her lower lip. Behind her back, she held out her right palm and folded her pinkie and ring finger in a symbol to ward off evil.

Hatefulness radiated from him, marking him with what her mother had called “ugly ways.” Ruby felt that familiar feeling of darkness gathering, pulling from the very air around her. Wisps of it drifted, then rested above Clyde, morphing his features until he resembled Amos, finally disappearing and leaving traces of her dead husband to remain in his posture.

As she continued to stare, she saw a swirling darkness in the depths of Clyde’s eyes as his hand grasped his wife’s smaller one, pulling her protectively to his side. She thought it could have been love, but Ruby only saw his possession and ownership. She saw the real Amos in him.

Clyde grunted, and Ruby took a step backward. Suppressed memories fought to surface from the locked depths of her mind, memories of Amos when he was not a good man. Dead Amos continued to grin at her beneath Clyde’s face.

Pulling away from Mae, his large hands dangled from the sleeves of the battered, faded cotton shirt he wore beneath his overalls. In them, she sensed the same subdued violence that had emanated from Amos, a darkness rushing below the surface. It would explode on those nights he came home late, lipstick smudges bright red on his shirt collar, breathing sour whiskey fumes over her just before his big, calloused hands slapped her for forcing him to leave that other woman’s bed.

Mae moved closer to Clyde and pressed her hand tight against his cheek, stroking gently and smiling. Her eyes sparkled with affection, and Clyde’s mouth lifted at the corners in a returning smile, transforming him for a moment, displaying straight white teeth. His muscles seemed to relax, and his left arm reached to encircle the tiny waist of his wife.

Looking over Mae’s head, his smile dropped, his nostrils flaring as he inhaled deeply, his nose and mouth twisting when he scented an offensive odor emanating from Ruby. His eyes locked with hers.

Ruby felt herself trembling, her knees liquifying and threatening to collapse her to the floor. She turned back toward Mr. Elliott to break the contact, apprehension congealing in her stomach. An inexplicable dread rolled through her again for herself and for the girl.

Mr. Elliott cleared his throat and moved his omnipresent cigar to talk around it, bringing her back from her thoughts. “Rent’s due on Monday of every week unless you’re paying by the month. Then it’s due on the first. I don’t take no excuses. Your rent isn’t paid, you’re out. That’s it.”

“Won’t be no problem. I works, and I takes care of my responsibilities,” Clyde growled, looking up into the man’s face, his own fixed in a rigid scowl. Mr. Elliott flinched, his eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses.

Mae watched color rise in his cheeks as she dropped her hand from Clyde’s face and pulled at his hand, still beaming at Mr. Elliott. “Don’t mind Clyde Henry. He ain’t nearly as mean as he seem. He just tired, that’s all.”

Clyde huffed and stared down at his wife. He hated it when she talked for him, making him feel like an imbecile. The urge to snatch his hand away and stalk back the way he’d come pushed to the front of his mind. She reached up again, the soft skin of her palms rubbing against his cheek, and he felt the anger deflate and recede as she stroked and stared into his eyes, soothing away the bad feelings.

“That’s just Clyde’s way,” she said as she turned her full smile back to Mr. Elliott, hoping to ease the tension from the situation. They might be in the North, but she knew Clyde had seriously overstepped his place.

“You don’t need to worry none about us paying our rent. Clyde—he work on cars, and he work for the railroad. He a mechanic and can fix anything that got a motor. He make good money.” She continued to stroke the side of Clyde’s face as she spoke. “We understand the rules here, and we be sure to abide by all of them.”

Clyde reached into the back of his overalls to pull a stained leather wallet from his pocket, and Ruby realized what had seemed so off-putting about his size. It was his legs. They seemed disproportionately short for his upper body, which was huge. Moving her eyes back to Mae, Ruby hoped they had not seen her staring. Clyde counted several bills carefully into Mr. Elliott’s hand.

“That for the first month. We have your money every month on the first.”

Mr. Elliott nodded, his aggravation forgotten as avarice danced in his eyes. He counted the cash twice before dropping the keys into Mae’s open palm. Ruby tsked internally. The bastard was double charging them, twice as much rent as anybody else paid. She tucked that information away for a time it would become useful.

“Ruby, they have the room right next to yours. Why don’t you show them the way?” he said, turning away from them, walking quickly toward the back door, and exiting the porch. He mumbled a hasty goodbye.

Ruby started moving down the hall and looked back over her shoulder to see Clyde shuffling in the same direction as Mr. Elliott, shadows swimming around his feet. Mae followed directly behind her.

“Our stuff downstairs on my uncle’s truck,” Clyde called back over his shoulder. “I’m gon’ go down and get it while you opens up the room, Mae.” He turned away without another backward glance, his hands shoved deeply into his pockets.

Clyde moved slowly, his feet barely lifting from the worn carpet covering the wooden treads of the hallway, his hands opening and closing into tight fists, and his breath filling his broad chest. The vision of Ruby’s sour face swam before him, stoking his anger. Casting his gaze downward, he watched his feet. Toes turned in to point at one another as they did when his legs grew tired from overwork. From the corner of his eye, he caught movement and hesitated. He watched as an achingly familiar darkness slid from beneath Ruby’s door, slithering his way and flowing into the shadows.

The darkness was here, and it wanted him. Clyde shuddered, quickening his steps. He’d felt the city’s wickedness as they were driving in, the darkness visible to him everywhere. It blew in on a breeze through the open window as they drove in, coating his skin. Only the nearness of Mae, her hand resting on his thigh, chattering brightly, kept it at bay.

Forcing his legs to move faster—limping and loping, his shoulders touching the wall as he swayed with each step—he held his dread trapped behind his teeth. Banging through the back door, he hurried down the steps to his uncle’s truck, leaning his head against the hot metal, breathing hard, and reliving that last nightmare scene with his mother. Her parting words rushed into his mind, bleeding into his present. “Go your ass to Chicago. You deserves what waiting for you!”

He huffed out his fear as long-dismissed temptation probed him. He turned his head from side to side, watching the darkness surreptitiously, his heart palpitating in anticipation as a faint longing for something lost planted itself within him. Deep in his spirit, he felt its siren call, pulling at the loose tether dangling from his soul.

Looking up at the red brick building and the gray weathered wood of its back porch, he shivered against the fear inundating his spirit. Maybe Fannie was right. Doubt chipped away the façade of his dreams with Mae. The silent tendrils of darkness murmured behind the locked door of his mind, begging for access. The darkness felt him weakening, filled with anxiety that this city was not and would never be his home.

Looking around the street in front of him—weeds fighting through the cracks in the concrete slabs—Clyde’s brain was a cacophony of twisting memories and terrifying prophecy informed by the darkness. As people passed him on the sidewalk, he heard their jeers and laughter carried on the wind as they hurried by, glancing over their shoulders. He sensed their derision, that they were talking about him, heard their ridicule as he turtled his head into his shoulders. Dark thoughts ran rampant. Same as always. Never any different, his mind screamed. Not in Rayville, not in Delhi, not in Jackson, and not here in Chicago.

He’d been stupid, his runaway thoughts told him, daring to let himself believe, his hopes born along on Mae’s promises of how good it would be for them when they got to the big city. For once, she assured him they would be away from all the stares and snickering laughter, away from the fear.

He pictured Mae’s mouth pressed against his ear, her soft breath against his lobe, the length of her body soft against him, making it all seem possible. The darkness that had begun to infiltrate his dreams again and threatened to return would shrink away from her, shriveling against her light, and the hungering need would scatter. He could fight it, he told himself. Mae made him believe that.

Then the vision of Ruby filled his brain. He saw her looking at him again, disgust dripping across her features. The darkness surged, pressuring the widening crack and swirling on the ground at his feet, issuing a hum of satisfaction.

The smell of Ruby remained in his nose, assaulted his olfactory memory, her stench invasive. He narrowed his eyes, searching for the window that looked into his new apartment. She was upstairs now with Mae, her stink enfolding them both and infecting his wife. He could feel her corrupting Mae, eroding her love for him with her words.

The darkness throbbed, misting up from the concrete street and ensnaring his ankles, caressing him lovingly. He breathed deeply, opening himself, and felt it leaping and leeching into him. The darkness seeped through his pores, traveling upward, and embraced him. He wasn’t afraid anymore.

Clyde pulled Mae’s trunk toward him, feeling his biceps bulge as he lowered it to the ground. He loaded two more boxes on top of it, then squatted to lift them, pushing aside the flash of betrayal that tried to assert itself.