Thursday Afternoons
As far as she’d been was twenty miles the other side of Radiance with her daddy to see a man about a flattop blues guitar. Or that other time they rode to see the doctor in Morehead so they could take a picture of inside Esther’s chest. Now the world was an x-ray.
The shadow-shape of cities. Lexington. Louisville. Columbia, Missouri. Cities passing like dreams she’d had and remembered in parts of themselves later on. The bones of tall buildings at night and oddnesses she did not know by day. Tulsa, the bus driver said. Home of the world’s largest praying hands.
Mile by mile Ruby became someone she didn’t know. Beside her, Miracelle was everything, hands so small Ruby could suckle them while they looked out the bus window at passing highway signs and heat rising from the asphalt. In a rest stop bathroom, she wet her hair in the sink and then stood in the parking lot, Miracelle’s hands running through the cool strands. The world was blazing hot and she had no idea where she was going next and that was good. It was all there was.
All night in the bus seats behind her they spoke the language of birds. A big family with an old woman and a baby that cried more than Miracelle, and they had boxes and bags and baskets and picnic food that smelled of something hot. They were Vietnamese, a grandmother-looking woman with them said, and they talked to each other in singsong words Ruby didn’t know but hummed into the late bus hours. When the grandmother saw Miracelle, she offered Ruby a pickled egg the color of beets.
How the body could fold itself into the bottom of a seat, head against an armrest, a jacket as a pillow, Miracelle next to her heart, holding them steady as the bus traveled into a late night of rain. Their bodies, resting, sleeping, awake, sleeping. Ruby carrying Miracelle into rest stops for vending machine coffee and Nabs. And all the while, Miracelle, a warmness against Ruby’s belly.
A child-anchor in the moving world where sleep was deeper as it came and went. And all the while his voice in her head. He was where Ruby was going and where she’d been and all the life she’d left behind. Traveling west and west, she made up a story about him. Like this.
The way he rides up over a vista on a motorcycle in the dead heat of summer, he is a cowboy. The Marlboro Man, at the very least. How they stop at a little store for something cold to drink. She cranks the top off the bottle, hands it to him. He buys her Nabs and chocolate to eat. Look at it, he says. The desert and all those stars.
Miracelle is in a sling across her chest as she holds on tight and they ride down the highway, past cactus and scorpions and the trails of rattlesnakes. They stop for picnics of Vienna sausages and saltines. Sit atop boulders that look out over stretches of red sand and a shine he says is mica. He has a pistol in his hip pocket and he lines up bottles he teaches her to pick off, neat, from the back of a fence line. Miracelle laughs her baby laugh as they ride that fence for miles. Love. She says that word into the dusk as they stop, watching the sunset. There the movie fades to nothing.
She rubbed sweets along Miracelle’s gums and sang half a lullaby she remembered from long before. May angels keep you from harm as your daddy holds you, safe and warm. Her heart was becoming so full there was no more room left, not a heartbeat’s space. Like this they traveled mile upon mile. A hundred miles. A thousand. Traveled past the trails of lights of far towns. The names of all the states leading her away from Radiance, away from home. Tennessee. Arkansas. Oklahoma. Texas. She was miles and miles from herself now. Had traveled outside her own skin, the only skin she’d ever known, traveled toward and away from it, her own heart. Ruby shut her eyes and listened for it, the way her daddy’s fiddle would sing them peaceful back at home, but still she traveled west with Miracelle crying and hungry. All she could think of was rust-colored earth.
Desert mirrored in clouds so neat they were cutouts in a blue like she’d never seen. Cactus so tall and the sharp needles of them. Not pretty, this red world that reached so far. Spires stretching up from the earth and she thought of mighty churches and the blue, blue sky of heaven. Oil, the bus driver said, and she thought of Mary washing Christ’s feet with perfume. They were in the country of oil dredged from the ground at every turn. What looked like cities, a tangle of metal and steam, and across the sky a smudge of smoke that could have been the Armageddon from Esther’s church. A land of smoke and fire and brimstone. Land of thirsty Revelation’s creatures, tails like serpents and fire in their bellies waiting to be born.
That evening when they stopped, the air smacked her down with its weight of heat. She swayed between past and future, faint with the days of going and going and the hot sun that sent waves up from the pavement. She held on tight to Miracelle as the whole world spun. She tipped spoons of sink water into the baby’s small mouth. How she had to believe in it, this long journey that took them there. To him and Willette, New Mexico.
He met her at the bus station with flowers and a bag of peppermints, a blue stuffed cat for the baby. He said, Ruby. He swept her up and swung her around so her shoes were off the bus station floor and he held Miracelle in the crook of his arm where she looked so small. But he was not glad. She could tell that much, though she had not told a fortune in months. He’d found her a place to live, and she’d find that work was easy enough to find, though all of it was just until. Until? she asked, but he hushed her with a kiss.
They went right away to the room he’d rented, one in a circle of other such rooms around a plot of grass. She took her shoes off so she could feel the good earth, but the grass was dry and sharp enough to cut. She reached down and took up a palm full of sand, let it trickle through her fingers. Inside he wet a washcloth and she sat on the edge of the bathtub while he washed her face and kissed her eyes, one and then the other.
Early mornings, plumes of smoke poured out from the nearby factory. If there was work here, she told herself, it could never be in one of those factories, places that lit up the skies so Ruby thought of hell. She sang to Miracelle as the baby cried, unsure of the walls they now called home. She sang rhymes and love songs. Torch songs and rock ’n’ roll. She sang every song she knew as she bounced the baby along the lines of the yellow linoleum floors. Hold me in the morning, hold me at night, she sang. Hold me, Radiance, honey, till long past sweet daylight. When he came, he brought them fresh orange juice and left Ruby twenty-dollar bills.
Mornings she took the baby to that woman who kept kids. Six of them, gathered around her feet like little birds with their hungry open mouths, toys and diapers across the floor. Miracelle looked afraid, but Ruby kissed her cheek and said, hush. She laid Miracelle in the woman’s arms while she went out walking, walking. Making her way down sidewalks and filling out the paperwork for jobs as this, that. Waitress. Maid. Checker at a liquor store. She’d nod and answer their questions about what she’d done before. Sweeping up? She was good at that. Or counting down a register at night, not so much, but she could learn. She was a good learner, and she’d pick up quick on working the breakfast line, cooking eggs with a shake of oil and a flip, but she never got much farther than the application. They looked at her like she was swimming under water. We’re full up, they said. Or, we’re not hiring until next month, and maybe try back. But she knew she wouldn’t. In the desert the tall wells pumped oil but she could feel it in her own self. Fear oozing from her palms as she filled out one more empty space. Her name. Her place of birth, a million miles from this place of dust and pavement that burned her feet. Like that she got to know the streets of Willette.
Some days she dropped Miracelle off and did nothing at all but go to a restaurant and order coffee with spoon after spoon of sugar. Or she went to one place that played old movies. Casablanca. Dark Victory. She loved the stars, their waves and pin curls, the way their men loved without question in the end. Often she stayed through all the showings, curled herself up in the seat and slept, deep and dreamless. There was no excuse for it. She couldn’t seem to come awake at all, her body was so full of longing for the one long afternoon that was hers.
How he moved against her skin, light from the refineries sweeping like searchlights across the gray skies and across the bed. The sweat of them. His taste. The rich scent of after, when he’d hold her close and tell her about how things could be if only she was patient.
Don’t you see, he said. A man could be anything he wanted in a world like Willette, New Mexico. He could live cheap and make his money fast. Start out at nothing, unloading trucks and emptying drums of chemical waste and then, who knew. In a few years, Civil Engineer or better than that. Save his dollars and head east. Big bucks in timber and coal back there, once you learned what was what. Once you became a man they’d listen to.
Ruby laughed when he told the name of the town where he wanted to settle. Smyte. Isn’t that something the Lord does? she said. Taking an eye or striking you down for a no-good deed? He was serious. The desert was beautiful, how it reached for miles. Reached forever, really. But Smyte, he said. There was a river there, back east. Trees and coal and what-all.
Am I a plan too? she asked. She did not say love, though he knew what she meant and he danced his way around the word. He was a graceful dancer.
I love how we are. I love that red dress, how it makes me want you. I love what we have. I love what we could have been if.
She’d get up with the sun so she could work as a temp. Folding towels for a week or typing in numbers for pension plans and how many owed what. Once she weeded yards until the ground swayed and bent with the heat. Honey, a girl working beside her said. Her front tooth had a chip and she worried at the place with her tongue when she reached over and caught Ruby’s arm. You look poorly, she said, and Ruby told her no. Well, she said, even so.
She was hungry and what she wanted was a miracle to fill her up. Winged horses out of the desert to pick her up in their mouths. All the desert’s hidden oil, catching fire. She wanted all of it back again, before the bus ride and its miles and miles, before the sad fiddle sounds off their porch at night, before the egg in Esther’s breast. Back and back and back to a time before she loved him or anyone ever, before love at all.
Three o’clock. Four o’clock of a Thursday, and when he left she couldn’t help herself. She lay still, listening to nothing in particular. The sound of planes across the sky. Dozers fixing the pipes along the streets. It was six o’clock, seven, by the time she picked Miracelle up, though the woman who kept children warned Ruby again and again. Six o’clock was too late and she’d have to charge more, an extra twenty bucks, but Ruby lay on and on those afternoons once he’d gone. It wasn’t his leaving exactly. She knew plenty about that. She’d left Radiance and those walls back home and their one sad picture above the bed of Jesus, in the garden, the night before he died. She felt like it was her own self who died those Thursdays afternoons, and that was how the time drifted on and on, as if she was herself some holy ghost rising and leaving her body, the body of a woman alone on a bed.
One afternoon there was a sign at the matinee place that said they were playing Dark Victory. She’d seen it again and again, loving how Bette Davis feels the sun but can’t see it and flies down to die as the world goes dark. She was almost the only one there for the showing. A teenage couple in a back corner, their faces so close. An old woman with a grocery bag full of towels. And a man smelling of old clothes and a sad she could taste.
His thigh pressed against her leg and she should have said, Mister, and moved two rows ahead, but right then the picture started and she was so surprised. There wasn’t a sign of Bette Davis and her pretty black eyes. It was a silent movie, and as near as she could tell it was a story about someone thrown out of a house, then walking the streets, then rescued and living in a boardinghouse with a woman with her wrists full of bracelets and eyes so fierce they shone. A fortune teller.
Black scarves and a long string of beads. Her hands waving a warning and pictures of black skies and war. And beside her a stranger, just an inch of touch, his movie seat and hers, his leg next to hers. Later she told herself it was then and there that she became who she really was, or at least then was when she took those words in and held them, turned them over and over on her tongue, tasting them for what they really were. Fortune teller. Teller of lives. As the stranger’s hand moved from her arm down to her leg, stroked her thigh, she seemed to hear all the things in that stranger’s heart, and what she saw frightened her.
She saw a door slamming shut. A woman calling out. Him saying he was never coming back. The next night and the next. A day becoming a year. The long dust of a street and then rain and night. Long afternoons of sun that burned. A hunger from inside out.
The stranger reached for her, touched just the sleeve of her dress at first, and she could smell him. He stank from his unwashed skin, but he also had a smell like leaves she remembered from a rainy night long before. She balanced between these scents, hardly breathing as his hand traveled down her leg, back up, inside her thigh. She shut her eyes and held her breath, willing all of it to go away. The world was made of dark gods, and this stranger beside her was one of them. Her lover was one of them, and he made and unmade her every Thursday afternoon, telling her about the beauty of her face, her hands. How beautiful she was, he said, and she floated above his naked body like she’d bring love alive. But that never happened. He owned it. He owned love and he parceled it out in his own good time.
She opened her eyes then as the film wound down. As strangers looked for the Gypsy fortune teller in the shadows of some street. “No,” she said, and the stranger pulled his hand back quick as being stung. How pale and small he looked as the theater lights came on and she got up, ran outside into the hot, hot streets. Ran, wishing against wish. A job. Magic. A spell. A potion. Anything better than no-love in the dark.
What lives had she told before that moment? Surely not her own. She’d sat at a Radiance lunch counter flipping cards, promising things—names, possibilities, outcomes. What good had it done? What had she really foretold about the sound of her own wanting? Ruby Loving, Fortune Teller. Maybe the one true fortune was that the world was made of glass and it could break at any moment, her own breaking most of all.