“Nope,” she replied. “She hasn’t taken me on yet. Said she needed to think it over and she’d know by tomorrow. That’s why I have to go out there again.”
“You can’t just call her?” Charlie said, a little annoyed. “Why do you have to go all the way out to the woods to find out if she’ll say yes?”
“It’s Ruby, and it’s a whole different world out there,” Maye tried to explain. She almost added that if you pushed Ruby a fraction of an inch the wrong way, you’d wind up needing a skin graft somewhere on your body, but decided against it. “She’s been out there by herself for a long time. I think it’s been quite a while since that old woman has had any kind of human interaction aside from that jackass Rick Titball knocking on her door. She’s even sort of—feral. It’s like she’s a one-person tribe who’s been living deep in the forest for years and years without seeing anyone else, just her and her pack of dogs.”
“So what you’re telling me is that you’re trying to get the Blair Witch to be your coach in a beauty pageant,” Charlie commented.
“Not exactly the Blair Witch,” Maye said, sort of laughing. She took a sip of wine. “More like a hybrid of Ruth Gordon and Witchiepoo from H.R. Pufnstuf.”
“Great,” he jeered. “If you vanish in those woods and all they find of you is some videotape and a couple of teeth, I’m making them into earrings and giving them to my next wife.”
“Listen,” she said. “If there’s even a drop of that Ruby Spicer charm buried deep in the layers of crust that she’s now become, I’m never going to find that anywhere else. She had something about her the other queens simply couldn’t touch, not even Cynthia. She’s the Obi-Wan Kenobi of Sewer Pipe Queens, I’m telling you. She has the power. I know it’s in her somewhere—a quality like that just doesn’t vanish, even if she did. I need her as my coach, because whatever it is that Ruby Spicer has, Rowena Spaulding certainly doesn’t.”
“Rowena Spaulding has pickle juice in her veins,” Charlie agreed. “She’s nothing but brine and vinegar and a tiny raisin heart. Dean Spaulding is such a nice, gregarious man. I can’t figure that pairing out for the life of me. He must see something in her we can’t.”
“Or maybe he can’t see what we do,” Maye suggested. “All I know is that I want to beat her for the title. I have to win this thing. I’d rather have liposuction in a dirty basement than see Rowena Spaulding win the right to gloat over me for the rest of my life.”
“Well,” Charlie said as he stood up and started to clear the dishes. “I guess tomorrow you’ll find out if you have a sponsor. Save these dinner rolls, Maye; bread crumbs are cheaper than GPS and far less trouble than Frodo and friends.”
The next afternoon as she was driving toward Ruby’s shack, Maye found the woods far less foreboding than she had the day before. Maybe there was more sunlight illuminating the badly worn road, or perhaps the morning rain had freshened the woods up a bit, making them look more green than dark, but when she finally got to Ruby’s house, even that didn’t seem nearly as ruinous as it initially had. On a fresh approach, it might have only needed a coat of paint and the minor talents of a handyman. And a gardener. And maybe a roofer. Still, it was clearly not what the home of a celebrated town queen should have been.
Maye knocked on the boxer head and stood there for quite some time without hearing any signs of life inside. She knocked again, this time much louder, concerned that she didn’t even hear the herd of dogs stirring. Cupping her hands around her eyes, she peered into the window next to the front door and saw two black-bottomed slippers hanging off the edge of a recliner, attached to two skinny, wrinkly legs poking out of a ragged old blue robe. Boxers lay scattered around her feet, encircling her as each breath rumbled in and out of her tar-filled lungs like a train chugging through the mountains. Maye knocked as hard as she could on the dog’s head and finally heard some shuffling from behind the door. After a couple of agitated grunts, a raspy voice shouted, “Whaddya want?”
“Ruby, it’s Maye!” she called. “It’s Maye from yesterday.”
“Who? I don’t know any Maye.”
“I’m the girl from yesterday.”
“Oh, yeah,” the gruff voice yelled back. “Whaddya want?”
Maye took a deep breath and shook her head. “You told me to come back today,” she replied firmly. “So here I am.”
“All right, all right,” the old woman conceded as the lock clicked loudly and the door swung open on dry, creaky hinges, revealing Ruby standing behind it, exhaling a cloud of smoke through her red-lipstick-smudged mouth as the light hit her. Wearing a robe that was more threadbare than the slipper she’d left in the driveway, she stared at Maye so intently that Maye was able to tell that the brittle, stubbly eyelashes the old woman had once had on her left eyelid were now gone, leaving nothing but whiskerlike stumps of charred hair.
“Did I wake you?” Maye asked. “You said afternoon, remember?”
“Of course I remember,” she snapped. “I was just resting. I had a party here last night.”
“You did?” Maye asked, looking around at the tattered couch, the overflowing ashtrays on any available flat surface, and the empty plastic tumblers that left a sticky, dark circle of residue at their bases. The place looked exactly as it had the afternoon before, only a day dirtier.
“Oh, sure,” Ruby said as she walked over to the couch and lowered herself into it. “Susan Hayward was here. We had ourselves a nice time, we did. Watched I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Valley of the Dolls, I Want to Live!, and my favorite, Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman. They had a whole marathon on last night. I thought I’d never get to bed.”
“I’ve seen her movies. Doesn’t she play a rambling alcoholic in all of them?” Maye asked, knowing full well that Ruby had passed out in the chair.
“No!” Ruby scoffed. “No! In I Want to Live! she plays a convicted murderer sentenced to the gas chamber!”
“And during which movie did you and fire have a fight?” Maye said, pointing to her eyelashes.
“What?” the old woman replied, then felt for each of her sets of eyelashes with her nicotine-stained fingers, stopping when she touched the singed, burnt remains of her left one. “Oh. Oh, that. I lost my matches. Burner on the stove must have blown me a kiss.”
With the amount of alcohol fumes currently evaporating through Ruby’s skin, Maye thought, it’s amazing that she didn’t go up like an oil tanker.
“So,” Maye started, “I was hoping that you would agree to be my sponsor for the pageant. Did you have a chance to think about it?”
“Oh,” Ruby stalled. “That. I’m pretty busy, you know. I have so much to do around here. I don’t know if I’d have the time. But, if I had another set of hands to help me with some things, that might make the decision making a little easier for me. You know. I might be able to decide faster, clear my head.”
Maye nodded, fully getting the drift of the old woman’s message. After all, she had come to this house asking for help; what was Ruby going to get in return? What was in it for her? Did Maye really expect Ruby to help her, a complete stranger, out of the goodness of her little heart when she could be watching TV and nursing her drink instead? The left hand washes the right even if one of them is a little more stained than the other—fair is fair. And the truth of the matter was that the house, despite the fresh perspective of a new day, was still a hovel in the process of tumbling down.
“What would we need to do to make your head clearer?” Maye prodded.
“Hmmm, let me think,” Ruby said without pause. “Hmmmm. Oh! I think I know. Yes. Yes, this will help me make my decision so much easier.”
She walked over to the small side table beside the recliner, picked up the garden spade and a plastic bag, and handed them to Maye, then pointed toward the back door.
“I have trouble bending over,” Ruby explained, suddenly grabbing her back and hunching her shoulders. “And my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Sometimes, I come in and find out that all I have is a
bag full of brown rocks. I can’t make decisions when I have a bag full of rocks.”
Half of Maye said defiantly that this was ridiculous; she was not going to pick up dog turds in the old lady’s yard, especially because Ruby had more dogs than most Eskimo villages. She could be out there mining poops for the rest of the week. The other half insisted that it was no big deal; that there was really nothing wrong with helping an old woman, even if it was with an unsavory chore. Didn’t she pick up Mickey’s by-products? Besides, it wouldn’t exactly kill Maye to do something nice for someone. She had some good karma to make up, not only for her vegetarian lies, ditching a drunk and obnoxious dinner date, and frightening innocent shoppers by stalking them, but now she needed to add to her Evil Deeds list drugging a cop, which Maye was pretty sure was a felony with mandatory prison time. Thus, she could consider this her community service if Officer Smith’s sugar blackout never permitted him to recover the incident in his memory and thus press charges. There’s no rest for the wicked, the good side of Maye reminded herself. Now, pick up that spade and start shoveling some shit, sister.
“Okay,” Maye said as she took the bag and the shovel from Ruby, put a smile on her face, and headed outside.
A couple of hours and ten poop bags later, the backyard was finally clean—until Puppy wandered out and promptly made a fresh deposit. Maye scooped it up, added it to the last bag, and then placed the whole load in what she hoped was the garbage can and not a laundry basket.
In the living room, Ruby was back in the recliner, her eyes closed, breath shallow in a wheezy whistle. The flickering light from the black-and-white television was the only brightness in the otherwise darkened room, despite the fact that the sun had barely begun to set.
As she passed Ruby asleep on the recliner, Maye saw that she’d been watching Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in which Bette Davis, a lonely spinster shunned by the townspeople, lives in a rambling mansion and goes more and more insane by the day. The scene showing was the one in which Davis goes completely ape-shit and begins hurling objects and verbal epithets alike.
“You’re a vile, sorry little bitch!” she roars at her quietly evil cousin, played by Olivia de Havilland.
Maye giggled a little. It was one of her favorite movies.
She lifted the still-burning cigarette from between Ruby’s waxen, saffron-tinted fingers and ground it out in the overflowing ashtray. She shook Ruby’s hand, careful not to startle her, lest the geriatric woman have the tendency to wake up swinging or trying to claw some eyeballs out.
“Ruby,” she called quietly. “Ruby, the backyard is clear of brown rocks. Is your head clear enough to make a decision now?”
The old woman’s head rolled from left to right. “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” she mumbled in a ragged southern accent, her eyes still closed, her hand still hanging limp and loose.
“It’s Maye, Ruby,” she called to the sleeping woman again.
“Come back tomorrow,” the old lady barely murmured, still not rousing.
Maye stood up, exhaled, then stepped over the pack of dogs that surrounded Ruby as she slept. As she picked up her purse and found her keys, the old woman waited in the chair, her eyes closed tight, and it wasn’t until she heard the door close that she opened one of them.
“You did not spend the entire afternoon culling poop from that crazy woman’s backyard,” Charlie said, astounded, when Maye arrived home and told him of her afternoon.
“If she helps me, that’s the least I can do for her,” Maye responded as she walked through the front door and set her car keys on the entry-hall table.
“What do you mean ‘if’ she helps you?” he asked. “I thought she was going to tell you today if you two were a team or not.”
Maye shook her head. “By the time I got done scooping up the debris field of Ruby’s dog collection,” she explained, “she’d fallen asleep again. When I left, she was muttering dialogue from A Streetcar Named Desire, then told me to come back tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry to say it, but it’s time for you to rethink this whole thing,” Charlie cautioned. “Someone isn’t playing fair.”
“If I had another option, I would,” Maye replied. “But I’m a little stuck where I am. Plus, I really do believe that once we get down to the training, she’ll come through, I know it. She’s just taking advantage of the situation, and if I was a shut-in who didn’t want to pick up dog shit, I’d certainly push that on someone else, given the chance.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should drop out and enter the pageant next year,” Charlie offered. “This way you’d have a whole year to find another coach who wouldn’t try to force you into indentured servitude.”
“No,” Maye said resolutely. “It’s going to be this year. It has to be this year. I don’t want to spend another twelve months stalking people at the grocery store, friend-dating people who down bottles of wine that have adverse reactions with their behavior-modifying medication, running away from covens, and lying to vegetarians. I won’t do it, Charlie. I am starving for friends. I have no one. I am a stranger in this place. Do you know what I want? I don’t want a bigger house or a fancier car. I want to run into people I know at the grocery store, I want to warn someone that I saw a rat scurry under the cheese case at Pioneer Market, I want someone to gross out over that rat with me. I want someone to tell the people in this town that I was not rooting for the raccoon that tried to eat Cynthia’s face. I want someone in my corner. I want friends, Charlie. And I am determined that this is how I’m going to get them, because I can’t figure out another way. And if I wait one more year, that’s one more year that I sit in this house by myself and order take-out food for lunch and eat in front of the TV. It’s one more year the phone doesn’t ring. It’s one more year of people I could eventually know eating cheese that literally came from a rat’s nest. And it will be a whole year that Rowena Spaulding will know that she was right about me, that I’m an outsider who doesn’t deserve to be let in.”
Charlie nodded. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wish I could help you. I would love to help you.”
“You can help me,” Maye replied. “By letting me do things my way with this pageant, with Ruby, with picking up dog shit or just hanging out with a lonely old lady, someone who’s even, believe it or not, lonelier than I am. I have to follow my gut, Charlie, and my gut says that Ruby is the key to my winning the Sewer Pipe Queen title. It has to be true.”
“Okay,” he said, walking over to Maye and enveloping her in a long hug. “Okay. Pick up dog shit. Empty her ashtrays, scrub her toilet bowl, whatever it takes if this is the way you think it’s going to work. I believe in you, Maye, and I want you to be happy in Spaulding. And I will support almost anything you have to do to achieve that.”
“Almost anything?” Maye asked, returning the hug.
“I know how desperate lonely women get, so no matter what she asks,” he said with a straight face, “just don’t pimp me out.”
12
A Very Lucky Thing
R uby Spicer opened the boxer-head door with a hammer in one hand and a box of nails in the other.
“Did you ever notice,” she commented as she stepped outside, her pack of dogs following her, “that the front step there on the porch is a little loose?”
A little loose? Maye wanted to laugh—it was the most stable architectural element on the whole house. It was the only thing not leaning over at a forty-five-degree angle.
“See?” the withered woman said as she put all the weight of her ninety-pound body on the step and tried to make it creak as she bounced on it. “Do you hear that?”
“Sure,” Maye lied, thinking that the creaking Ruby heard was really the sound of her own lungs exhaling.
“Here you go,” the old woman said, handing over the hardware and hammer before she disappeared back inside the house, the pack of dogs following her.
“And then I thought,” she started up again as she came back out to
the porch, this time with a large set of rusty hedge clippers in her hands along with a lit Viceroy, “well, as long as that girl is out there, she ought to take a swipe at some of those bushes.”
Maye shook her head and smiled. She had done well in speculating that she was going to be put to work and had worn her old house-renovation clothes—paint-splattered overalls and faithful work boots.
“That sounds good,” Maye said as she took a couple of steps back to the car and pulled out two small paper bags. “As long as you have lunch with me while I’m working on the step and the bushes.”
Ruby was taken aback. “You brought lunch? What did you do that for?” she asked.
“I like lunch,” Maye answered. “Everybody likes lunch. It’s just some sandwiches from Hopkins Market and a couple of sodas.”
“Hopkins Market? Well, well. I used to eat there all the time at the lunch counter,” the old woman said as she inhaled deeply on her cigarette. “They had the best malteds. My favorite was chocolate, and they’d put a cherry right on top with a mountain of whipped cream, and the real stuff, too, not the stuff in the tub. I sure do miss that place.”
“Well, I didn’t bring any malteds, but I do have a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a chicken salad sandwich,” Maye offered up. “I like both, so you pick.”
Ruby thought for a moment. “Chicken salad,” she said, taking a seat on the porch. “I haven’t had a chicken salad sandwich in years and years. We used to have chickens on this farm, up until my folks died. Got to be too much to take care of after that, so I just let them go.”
“I heard chickens were messy, but I always liked the idea of going and getting an egg whenever you needed one,” Maye said, positioning a nail where the step had the most wobble. “And fresh ones taste so much better.”
“Naw, they’re not too messy if there’s more than one person runnin’ things. We had Americanas,” Ruby said, smiling to herself as she unwrapped her sandwich and her dogs settled in around her. “Big, beautiful blue eggs, almost turquoise, they were, such a pretty blue-green. Twice the size of those silly little eggs you get at the store. Pfft. Takes four of those damn things to make a decent omelette.”