“I’m sorry,” Maye said immediately. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry that I’ve upset you, but if I could just explain why I’m here—”
“You’ll be amazed at how fast an eyebrow can go up!” Ruby screeched, her jaw protruding, her eyes wide and angry. “All of that queen business is behind me. Haven’t you people had enough?”
Apparently, Maye hadn’t been the only one who had sought out the once-mighty queen for her sponsorship. Maye had over-stepped her bounds, invaded the guarded privacy of an old woman, and she felt ashamed of herself. She was shrouded in embarrassment.
“I’m very sorry,” she said, grabbing the handle of her purse and trying to launch herself off the depths of the rotting couch. “I am so sorry to have bothered you.”
“And I won’t talk to you either, no matter what channel or newspaper you’re from.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to start any trouble,” Maye tried to explain.
“The only trouble we have here is what you brought in,” Ruby shot, jabbing her tiny torch at Maye again. Slowly she moved aside as Maye walked past her and made her way to the door. The old woman seethed silently as Maye reached for the doorknob, turned it, pulled the door open, and walked out of the house.
Maye was horrified at herself. What was she doing, driving out to the middle of the woods only to wake an old woman up and bother her under false pretenses? What was she doing? Did she really just ambush an old lady who hadn’t even been seen in town for so many years that it was thought that she had run away? Just so Maye could enter a contest?
What had she been thinking? Had she ever even once stopped to think how Ruby Spicer might react to the fact that Maye had dug her up out of the library archives and snooped around until she was eventually standing on the woman’s front porch? She probably scared that drunk old woman half to death, having a stranger bring up a past that had by now been obviously forgotten and buried until Maye, like a wild animal, had dragged it out of its grave. What kind of careless, selfish person does that, Maye asked herself, especially to an elderly, wrinkled old shut-in?
“An asshole does that,” Maye answered herself out loud as she walked to her car, hot tears of embarrassment flushing her eyes. “A Rick Titball variety of asshole. This is what I get. This is what I deserve. Now I have no sponsor for the pageant, and I deserve it. I deserve nothing. Pouncing on an old woman like that! Now Melissabeth and Rowena Spaulding will walk away with the title and I will just have to suck it up. Right into the fat roll. That’s what I deserve. Every Christmas and faculty party from now on I will have to look at their gloating, hateful faces. I hate Rowena Spaulding!”
Maye had just opened the door to the car and had gotten behind the wheel when she heard a craggy, thin voice behind her croak, “What did you just say?”
Maye turned around, and there, through her blurry eyes, was a corncob with a crop of fire for a head. It was Ruby. Maye brushed away the tears with the back of her hand and tried to catch her breath.
“I said I was sorry for ambushing you, it was a horrible thing to do,” she called from her car. “I had no right to bother you. I was so determined to find you that I didn’t think that you might not want to be bothered or found or whatever it is that I did. I’m just very sorry.”
“I heard that part!” Ruby creaked with an impatient wave of her hand. “I was standing right there! What was that name you said? What was that name?”
“Rick Titball?” Maye replied. “The one-man news team, ‘We Are News to You’?”
“That jerk? No,” Ruby shot back, shaking her head quickly. “The other name.”
“Melissabeth?” Maye said, her nose still running. “She’s an opera singer and she’s awful. I mean, she’s a great singer, but an awful person. She won’t be weekend friends with me, and her husband is a root vegetable.”
“No!” Ruby screeched with a stamp of her foot, which was barely clinging to a shoddy, filthy slipper. “The one after that! You said you hated somebody! Who do you hate?”
“Oh,” Maye said, shaking her head. “Rowena Spaulding. She’s the wife of my husband’s boss, so to speak. She hates me, and I have no idea why. She was a Sewer Pipe Queen once, too. She’s Melissabeth’s sponsor.”
“The hell she was,” Ruby said, furrowing her one eyebrow and pointing her cigarette at Maye. “Blow that nose. You have shiny snot on your face. Come back into the house, I’ll get you something to wipe it with.”
Maye sat in the car for a moment, honestly not sure if she should follow a relatively unstable drunk woman who had minutes ago threatened to put a cigarette out on her forehead back into a claptrap of a house or turn the ignition and leave a trail of billowing dust behind her as she drove the hell out of there. Her survival instinct told her to flee, and just as Maye put the key into the ignition, she heard something hit her windshield with a small tap!, which was followed by another a second later and then another. Tap! Tap! She looked up just in time to see Ruby, in midthrow, lob a pebble into the air, which then sailed nonchalantly in a perfect arc to hit Maye’s windshield with a tap! and then bounce off it.
Ruby Spicer was throwing rocks at her car, her left hand holding the cigarette as well as a handful of gravel. If I sit here long enough, Maye thought, that deranged old bat is going to stone me to death like I was in a Shirley Jackson short story.
“Girl! Come on!” the crone called impatiently. “What are you waiting for? If you’re waiting for an engraved invitation, I ran out of ’em in 1957.”
So Maye, devoutly ignoring her gut and subscribing to her reporter’s instincts, got out of the car, picked up the frayed, soiled slipper that remained in the driveway after it had tumbled from the old woman’s foot without notice, and followed a pebble-throwing drunk back into her weathered, peeling gray shack.
11
No Rest for the Wicked
B oxers circled Maye like sharks as she entered the house again, and Ruby handed her a wrinkled and mostly stained paper towel that she had pulled from her sweatpants pocket. In return, Maye handed her back the dirty, matted slipper that had been orphaned in the driveway despite the indications that it had been the favored and likely only footwear of Miss Ruby Spicer for quite some time. The old woman motioned for her to sit on the couch. Reluctantly, Maye gave a decent honk into the thin paper towel, trying diligently to avoid the stained portions, wiped her nose, and then sat down.
“I’m sorry for not being honest with you when I called,” Maye said. “I wasn’t looking to stir up any trouble.”
“Yeah, well,” Ruby replied, glaring harshly at Maye. “The only trouble we have here is what you brought in.”
Maye paused for a moment, puzzled by Ruby’s returning hostility. “Well, that’s exactly what I meant. I’m still sorry, then—?”
“Eh,” Ruby said. “It’s from Johnny Guitar. Joan Crawford says that to Mercedes McCambridge, a big trouble-making woman who comes into her bar with a lynch mob, ready to throw a rope around her neck. You’ve never seen it? It’s on all the time. It’s on more than Matlock is.”
Maye shook her head.
“You should see it sometime, then,” Ruby said, taking a seat in a plaid burlap-covered rocker with maple arms that had been chewed like chum by litters upon litters of boxers dating back to the beginning of time. “Now, what’s your business with Rowena Spaulding?”
“She’s a horrible woman,” Maye declared. “Even the first time I met her, she was insulting and condescending and she made me feel so awful and for no reason. I didn’t know her, I had never met her before. It was my first bad experience in Spaulding. Do you know her?”
Ruby nodded. “I used to.”
“My husband and I just moved to Spaulding, after he got a job teaching at the university in Dean Spaulding’s department,” Maye continued. “I don’t know anyone, and it’s been hard to make friends. I know it takes time, but I tried all kinds of things. I met these witches, I stalked people, I ev
en lied, I mean, I was really trying. I had so many friends back home, and here it’s so lonely. So I thought that if I entered the Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant, I could meet people that way, especially if I won the title. But then I found out that Rowena’s sponsoring the opera singer, my sponsor got eaten by a raccoon, and now I have no one. Everything has fallen apart, and I am so afraid that I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this town where I don’t know a single person. I just wanted a friend to go to lunch with, or someone who knew me well enough to notice I was wearing a new sweater. That’s all. That’s all I wanted.”
Ruby said nothing and just stared at Maye for a long time, her red, smeared mouth puckered tightly. “So you’re not a reporter,” she finally said. “And you don’t work at the TV station.”
“Well,” Maye replied, shaking her head, “I used to be a reporter, but I’m not anymore. I came out here to talk to you because I want to be the Sewer Pipe Queen.”
“But I could swear,” Ruby rattled, “that I’ve seen you on TV.”
Maye nodded. “I was on the news once,” she admitted. “When my sponsor was supposedly killed by a woodland creature.”
“That’s where I saw you!” the old woman declared, snapping her bony fingers. “I thought you looked familiar! You were awfully nice to the rapscallion who snacked on your neighbor. I knew that girl in high school, although she was a couple of years behind me. Pretty thing.”
“No, no, no. That was Rick Titball’s handiwork,” Maye protested. “I never said those things, well, not exactly in those terms. That whole segment was pasted together like a ransom note.”
“That one-man news team is always coming out here, trying to get me to talk to him,” Ruby continued. “Doing his own makeup, setting up the camera, yelling ‘Cut!’ to himself. I won’t have anything to do with it. I usually just send a couple of the dogs out after him. That does the trick.”
“I don’t know how he found you,” Maye replied. “You were pretty hard to track down.”
“Mmmm,” Ruby said, grinding out her cigarette before lighting a new one. “They find you. Not very often, but once in a while, some nosy body comes snooping along. I guess it’s not okay with some people to leave well enough alone. It’s none of their damn business anyway!”
“I feel badly that I am one of those nosy bodies,” Maye said. “I understand why you would be so upset, but it truly wasn’t my intention.”
“What exactly is your intention?” Ruby crackled, then burped without pause. “Why would you go through the trouble of driving all the way out here just to see an old Sewer Pipe Queen? There are plenty of them left in that shithole town, I’m sure. Why did you want to see me? Everyone else has forgotten everything about me except for Dick Titball.”
Maye laughed. “I’m entering that Sewer Pipe Queen contest and I want to win,” she explained. “That’s why I’m here. I need your help. I need a coach, a sponsor to show me how to win. When I found your file in the library, it had more newspaper clippings in it than all of the other queens put together. Photographers took pictures of you everywhere you went. Every time you did something, there was a clipping of it with a photograph of you. People were fascinated by you, they had to be, otherwise why would you be in the paper so often? All those headlines—RUBY SPICER OPENS GROCERY STORE, RUBY SPICER TO ATTEND WEEKEND PARTY, RUBY SPICER KICKS UP HER HEELS AT BARN DANCE. You really were the queen of that town. No other title holder seemed to have the effect on Spaulding that you did. You were the best. You were the Queen of Queens. They loved you.”
Ruby looked into Maye’s eyes for a moment, then looked away.
“Yeah? Did you see one that said RUBY SPICER VANISHES?” the old woman finally asked quietly.
Maye didn’t know what to say. It was true, the old woman was right. She didn’t see a single clipping about Ruby’s sudden disappearance or even speculation about what might have happened to her. It was as if Ruby Spicer got sucked into a black hole one day, and no one noticed or said a word about it. It was as if Spaulding just kept on going.
“Well, I do know that in all of my asking around about you,” she said to the town’s former favorite daughter, “some people thought you moved to a big city because you were so young and pretty that you’d have more opportunities there. Or that you met some fellow, ran off, and lived happily ever after.”
“Heh,” the old woman scoffed. “I guess it never crossed anyone’s mind that I was living twenty miles out of town off a stinking dirt road in a farmhouse that my father built. No one ever thought that. Or why it might be.”
A long moment passed before Maye was able to assemble enough courage to open her mouth and say, “And why was that?”
Ruby turned her head sharply and glared at Maye. “I don’t need to tell you anything,” she hissed as smoke billowed out of her mouth. “I don’t even know you. Who are you to ask me questions? You’re in my house! A stranger in my house, asking me questions!”
“I’m sorry,” Maye said, standing up, not willing to be threatened again with the nearest item that Ruby could get her knotted hands around. “I think I should go. Again, I’m sorry that I disturbed you.”
“I’m such a fool, such an old fool,” Ruby said, suddenly weeping into her hands. “These are only tears of gratitude—an old maid’s gratitude for the crumbs offered…. You see, no one ever called me darling before.”
Again, Maye was stumped. Maybe the old woman was senile, she thought—perhaps she was hearing voices? Being stuck out in an old farmhouse for fifty years couldn’t have provided too much stimulation for mind clarity or preserving whatever was there to begin with. Oh boy, Maye thought as she looked at the sobbing woman, not knowing what to do.
“Well,” Maye said gently, touching Ruby on the shoulder as the woman sobbed. “Despite the fact that you tried to burn my face with your flaming cigarette, I can see that you may have some inner potential for a primitive form of kindness, but I’m sorry, I didn’t call you darling. I think maybe you have misunderstood something I said?”
“Oh, goddamn it!” Ruby suddenly shouted, looking up with a somewhat disgusted dry face and throwing her hands down with a fast, hard slap on her legs, followed by a sudden, rumbling shot sounding similar to ppppppppppppptt that was entirely unaccounted for. “Don’tcha ever watch TV? It’s Bette Davis. Now, Voyager. Old crazy fat lady goes on a diet and becomes beautiful, then takes a cruise and falls in love with a doctor? Have you ever seen that one? Do you even have a TV?”
Maye was still trying to figure out exactly what had just happened when she became engulfed in a smell that called to mind the essence of a stagnant swamp.
“Mmm,” she said, trying to keep her mouth closed as tight as possible to avoid inhaling the foul odor. “I have a TV. Seen Now, Voyager, but it was years ago. I don’t remember that line.”
“How could you not remember that line?” Ruby asked, incredulous. “It’s the best line in the whole damn movie! The spinster, that was Bette Davis’s part, she was once in love when she was young, to a nice fellow, too, and just like that, it gets taken away from her. Snap! Just like that because of her evil mother. She spends the rest of her miserable life cooped up in an old house going insane and getting fat because of what she lost until her psychiatrist makes her lose the weight and puts her on a cruise where she meets the doctor. You might as well not ever have seen the movie if you don’t remember that line. I remember that line. For years, I have remembered that line.”
“I’ll make a note to keep my eye out for it,” Maye said quickly as her breath ran out.
“Agh!” Ruby screeched, waving her hand vigorously. “Puppy! Christ, that was a stinker!”
Puppy, knowing all too well that he had been falsely accused and convicted, no less in front of a stranger, lowered his graying snout, climbed off the ratty sofa, and slinked down the hall.
“I really should go,” Maye said. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’m sure you have a lot of…things to do. Thank you for inviting me back
in. I really enjoyed meeting you.”
“Oh,” Ruby said, looking surprised. “So soon? You’re gonna go so soon? Well, all right then, I suppose. Don’tcha want help with the pageant? Did you change your mind?”
“No,” Maye said, smiling and shaking her head. “I’m going to do it. I’ll just keep looking for a sponsor if you’re not available.”
“I never said I wouldn’t do it,” the shriveled woman said. “Never said that. It’s just that—well, how ’bout I think about it? I’ll think about it. I’ll know by tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Maye agreed. “Should I call you in the afternoon?”
“No, no, no,” Ruby protested, seeming affronted. “Just come by. Around this time. That’s a good idea, I think.”
The thought of driving another forty-mile round trip to the middle of nowhere just so Ruby could refuse to help her didn’t sit very nicely with Maye, but she had already realized that you didn’t compromise with Miss Ruby Spicer. There was barely room to stand, let alone wiggle.
“That would be fine,” she agreed.
“Good,” Ruby replied victoriously. “Right around this time would be good.”
“Sure,” Maye complied as she headed out the door toward her car. “I’ll see you then.”
“Wow,” Charlie said that night at dinner, his face consumed by astonishment. “I can’t believe you met her. The Old Sewer Pipe Queen herself. I’m a little worried that you went out there alone, though—I don’t know how I feel about that, it makes me a bit uneasy. Next time you go, make sure you take my cell phone. And bring some hobbits with you, too.”
“Well, you’ll have to help me travel to the Shire and trap a couple, because I’m going back to Ruby’s tomorrow,” Maye said.
“That’s fast. Are you starting your…training?” he asked with a smirk, scooping a second helping of mashed potatoes onto his plate.