A Taste like Steel
Where did she come from? they asked her. They asked in bus stations, at middle-of-the-night diners, at rest areas, in the lobbies of cheap and good motels. Her hair was grown near waist length and her eyes were outlined with kohl. The truck driver who rode them for most of a day along Highway 40 East said Ruby seemed like a beautiful ghost from an old movie. She’d seen her share of haints, she said as she held his hand on her lap and traced his lifeline, a stunted thing, though she didn’t tell him so. She told him he’d end up in Ousley, North Carolina, with a house and a pit bull and four rigs all his own. He gave her a derringer with a handle covered in abalone. Won it in a card game, he said, and looked at Ruby like he’d loved her all his life. What’s abalone? she asked, and he said it came from the sea. And you ought to think more about staying safe, he said. You with that girl and all alone.
As if Miracelle wasn’t already learning to hold her cards close. She’d sit close enough to see every spread Ruby laid out. Ruby let her shuffle the cards, hand them over to the truck drivers who thought she was the queen of the world. They bought her grilled cheese and milk. They slipped dollars and spare change into Miracelle’s pockets, and they looked at Ruby like she was less than a mother ought to be. But Miracelle brought them in by the dozens. Hard-eyed men went kind when the fortune teller’s daughter was there. Men who’d laugh most times to think a line on a palm might mean good luck laid down their fives and tens when Miracelle smiled just right.
It wasn’t that safe didn’t matter. Ruby wanted a house and a fence and a little dog and her sweet girl. Down in Georgia, Miracelle shone in school. Gold stars and ribbons, and once she wrote a story about clouds. But Ruby wanted him more. Wanted Russell Wallen to hold on tight to at night and how she could reach up and touch his face. Ruby couldn’t help herself, the way she’d stop at a phone booth and call, just to hear his voice. He had that place by then. A diner they called the Black Cat, and he said it was okay, calling late at night when it was just him closing up. When she’d hear the clink of ice in a glass or a voice that must have been his wife’s, she felt a white hotness inside.
Look, Miracelle said, a town called Neon, but even with a name like light they were stuck there for weeks, waiting to see if they could turn enough fortunes or clean rooms if they had to. Make enough money to take them somewhere. Where? her daughter would ask, her eyes so pitiful. She was eight, nine, ten, just a girl still, but already she wanted the whole world. She wanted a house with a door that shut. A kitchen with sunlight through windows vinegar clear. All Ruby wanted was him, one more time. Her lips along his skin like she would know at last how to draw it out of him like breath or heat. The heart he’d never given her.
By the time Miracelle was fourteen, she left her safe, with neighbors if not friends. Left her once to her own self, in an apartment behind a store. She almost changed her plans that time, stayed put just to fill up the hurt she felt when she saw the joy in her daughter’s face at Ruby being gone a few days. She knew Miracelle well enough to know there’d be no boys, no partiers. The joy was for something else, for her mother being gone, for the world being all her own. Already Miracelle wanted everything, doors that locked behind her, drawers no one opened but herself. Already she wanted the whole world. And Ruby swore, by God, the world would be a better one soon, for one of them at least.
He finally rented himself a getaway room in a boardinghouse, and it got so she’d meet him now and again. The landlady hid a key behind a picture of Jesus nailed beside the door. Up the two flights, then the winding steps after that. She turned the doorknob to the attic room inch by inch so she wouldn’t make a sound and wake any of them, the house or the pictures and all the ghosts asleep in that room. How she’d lie there, the quilts pulled over her head, waiting, that half-sleep of waiting. One time she dreamed the ghost of her own self she was becoming. A thin ghost, a shadow light as air. Who did she belong to? Surely not to those tobacco farmers and bank tellers and auto mechanics who came to hear the stories of their lives. To Russell Wallen. How he’d throw the covers back and stand there looking down on her in the fancy night things she wore to make him love her. This place, he said, used to belong to a healer woman. She’d lay hands on you and bring you back to your own self. What self would that be? she asked him.
She brought presents when she came back home. A keychain like an “M” from a rest area gift shop. Dollar bills from Russell’s pockets. More and more Miracelle wanted nothing from anybody, and why should she have? Gifts from a ghost daddy, ghost mama, from ghosts of places she’d never seen, places that left her mother with the scent of sex. She was older than her years, old enough for sleights of hand that made customers turn their heads at the right minute so money could disappear. Fourteen years old, going on a twenty, going on forever. Gone already, in some ways, Ruby thought.
She’d see Miracelle standing at the doorway of a dive bar where they’d gone to read palms and cards, and she could feel how the distance between them had stretched, taut and ready to snap. Already Miracelle was dreaming highways of her own, dreaming byways and backways and lovers. Lovers? How a girl could dream such a thing as desire? Surely it was not too late to keep her safe. Don’t do this, don’t do that, she told her daughter again and again. Don’t look at boys like that. Don’t wear your shirt unbuttoned from the top. Don’t and don’t and don’t. Don’t disappear. Some days she’d swear her daughter had vanished already into bar light full of smoke and the face after face of strangers.
She wanted to tell Miracelle it was easy to find, what saves us from ourselves. Good strong coffee and a shot or two in a favorite cup. A stranger offering a hand up on a street where the rains fell hard and standing still was cold. Or the Holy Spirit. Maybe it wasn’t even too late for that one for Miracelle, for faith or prayers or fire.
When Ruby was four years old, she believed in Jesus. Jesus on the Cross, Jesus in a garden, Jesus kneeling in prayer. She believed in the slick patent leather of her shoes tapping against the back of a pew. She lay on a rug by the stove and listened to the tumble of wood and that hiss and sigh as the fire took hold and sent its heat and she guessed that was God, too. But she’d never been a book-learned woman. Couldn’t say all the names of God if she had to, those thousand names or more for the power that made everything. And what did she really believe, if it came down to it? Spirits sang in the trees and wind carried the name of God and she could almost hear it if she listened.
And fire? Out there somewhere there were fires so big she could only imagine. She sat in roadside motels and watched television news about it, the faces of children running, the bombs in the trees behind villages across the world. Fire was war and glory. It lit the heavens to crimson come a summer night. It roiled in the center of the earth and made promises of hell and hereafter. All those tales of those who’d gone blind with love, from Samson and Delilah to Judah, blinded by Tamar’s beauty. Ruby was heavy with blindness and longing.
When she lay with him, she loved him more than God. Every time she saw him, the world got made and remade. Fire stirred one more time under her skin, and her belly was rich and full of love. His touch was as close as she ever really got to holy. He could pick up the world and hold it in the palm of his hand, he could make her think love tasted of ash and sweet. She laid her hand against the warm skin of his chest and felt his beating heart and wished for it. The world exploding, made new just for him and her.
Tell me who he is, Miracelle said, again and again. How could Ruby tell about a man who ran through your fingers like water? He was Russell Wallen, and the name was a fact, but what else could she offer up like it was proof? He was maybe a preacher’s son, though he’d never tell about it. He was brought up to believe the world had margins. Right. Wrong. Hallelujah and amen. He knew better. Poker and shine and never let anyone steal your heart. How he’d lie beside her and meet her eyes and say, We can be anything if we believe hard enough.
She’d lay her hand on his chest alongside a scar, not one made by knives. A hurt scar only a fortune teller could see. A heart scar he would not name, but she saw how it had been. Him nothing but a small shape in a bed at night. Him a boy. The hard words of some father-man. The cold of an open window and how it began. How he climbed out and down to start his life. Child become man. Fist fights and knives to steal your heart. Man as hurt as a boy left behind so long ago.
He was made of liquor and bets and riding with the windows down in a thunderstorm. Bottles of vodka. The women he’d had. In that boardinghouse attic room, she read his body, just as he read hers. She followed the long scar on the inside of his leg that a fine-honed razor had made. When she touched him, she saw the world gone so big she couldn’t take it in. Like standing on a bridge and the L&N passing by underneath, rich and full of coal. Like the first time she saw the desert at night and the moon huge and white and lonely. That was a world, he said, that truly made a man. She was just glad, she told herself, that it was her that had given him a child, not that other woman, his wife.
The world, she told Miracelle, couldn’t be counted on much. You couldn’t find safe, like it was a stray sock or the chew of some rat inside a wall. She’d look inside her daughter’s eyes, read her eyes, looking for answers to how her life might go. She’d reach for Miracelle’s hands and lay them palm-up in her lap, looking at the lines. Your heart line, she’d say, is deeper than deep. And see that, right there? A split end to the heartline. You will always be of two minds.
In the diners where they sat of an afternoon for card readings, Miracelle sat by herself and looked as hungry as she could until some man in a business suit bought her a slice of coconut cream pie. She sat in a bar and slid coins meant for tips into her lap and dropped them into the jukebox for song after song, dance after dance, her girl hips swaying, her neck musky with cologne that said, Taste me. Miracelle, her skirts slinky, her wraparound shirts tight over her small breasts. Love me, love me, her body said as she danced with long-haired golden boys, their hands lingering along the small of her back. Miracelle, Ruby said, over and over. Watch yourself. Be safe. Safe? Miracelle said, her laughter like the rim of a glass rubbed with one wet finger. Seems like you’re the one who should have watched yourself a long while ago, she said to Ruby. If my daddy didn’t love you, then who did he love? she said as she plunked another quarter down for one more song. Who do you love, the song asked, and Miracelle played it over and over.
Ruby imagined a hundred million stories about how Russell and Della met. Her hand reaching into a cooler at the back of a store and his hand too, the ice-cold bottle, and how the two of them touched the first time. Or a job Della might have had. Desk clerk at a motel off Interstate 40. Working retail at some auto parts store. Or done up pretty and selling lingerie behind a counter. Her heart burned as she imagined Russell’s hand at Della’s waist and how the two of them spun around the dance floor at an Albuquerque bar at midnight.
Some nights as she lay there waiting for him, she let herself become his wife. She moved her hands and felt Della’s. Stretched her legs along the bed and felt Della’s. Cupped her hands at her ears and heard the words Della and Russell must have last said. Love me love me love me. It was the only thing that stilled her heart some nights. Becoming Della Wallen. And surely, she told herself, if the heat inside her chest grew strong enough, one night it would happen. Della would vanish, melt clean away, and nothing would be left but her own self. Her and him, at last, and that would be the truth of it.
She knew Russell, that was sure. He wanted love more than most and didn’t want it at all, and when he got it? He sent it hurtling over the steep sides of roads, under bridges, into trash cans at rest stops. He let it slip through his fingers like the wailing voices of women at the funerals of men they’d loved and couldn’t have. Love was the ice-cold voice of a creek at night, him lying with his ear pressed to the boards of a bridge where he’d laid down at last, tired and too drunk to care.
He’d learned love from the hands that touched him way back. When he was little and they taught him fear and not to want too much. Prayer and songs and hellfire. Words from the mouth of God that taught him to be afraid. Sent him south. West. The desert and the ocean and everywhere in between. The world taught him that love was what he could own, what he could be. After that, love got smaller. It became like parts of people left behind. An ear. An arm blown off in an explosion at a mine. Love was an eye, shut, refusing to see. A heart grown hard as a lump of coal. A heart that wanted nothing better than owning the earth and her and Della Wallen, both of them.
Why, watch her, Miracelle Loving, dancing by herself on an empty floor by midnight bar light. Watch her stand by the speakers turned as loud as they could go. Watch her putting her arms around her own self. See it around her, an invisible box. A glass case that no one could open. Tell me who I am, she said again and again. Who she was? A girl dancing alone and already loving no one. Girl keeping her self, far away from everyone and any chance of hurt. Does life make hardness a thing we are? Do wounds grow inside us from so far back we can never know the beginning of that hurt?
She wanted to think of Miracelle those times—think how her daughter’s hair caught the sun as they waited beside their broken-down car for someone, anyone to stop, and she would say, Miracelle. Hold out your hand and smile. They’ll stop for you—but she was hardly there. Ruby was nothing but a bubble riding along the surface of a river. A trick of light. Touch her too quick and she would turn to shadows. She had no name when she was with him. Neither bones nor blood nor skin without his name written there.
Night upon night. Winter and cold. Dead of a summer night and bats touching the screens of open windows. As the hours passed in that room, she could hear the least thing. Downstairs a clock chiming midnight. Outside, the streets of Smyte. She could walk there and smell the paper scent, the smoke, the slow river. She’d seen the purple neon shine of that place he owned with Della. A diner where jukebox tunes spilled out along the highway.
She lay alone in the dark and imagined the night with a taste coal black and steel. A taste like the metal of that gun the truck driver gave her that time. If a gun had a taste, it could have a sound, too. What held the world in place was thin as soap and air. Sound could tear open the skin of the world, rend all things, even herself. She imagined that, an open seam running from her mouth, across her chest, her belly. It could be that easy. Him torn apart from her and one of them disappearing forever, free. Who am I? Miracelle asked. Tell me where I came from. Tell me my father’s name.