Shivaree (10 page)

EIGHTEEN

Last night, it had proven slippery work using Bob’s own intestines to lash his body to the Methodist steeple, but Ruby felt she owed it to the bride and groom to help decorate for the wedding. Now as she stood in the dim green light of the Cooper kitchen, using the hand pump to flush water over her fingers in an attempt to clean the rest of Bob from beneath her nails, she wondered if her efforts had yet been appreciated.

The couple would probably feel she’d already done too much for them, but still, this show of affection was merely the beginning. Ruby had been making plans from the second she’d learned Elijah was to wed.

Corinne had no friends here, so Ruby herself would serve as the maid of honor. It seemed the least she could do.

Ruby loved tradition, at least when it came to weddings. For the bride, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Between Corinne and herself, they had all four tokens covered. Corinne, she was new, at least new to Conroy. Ruby herself was Elijah’s old fiancée, the one he was now pretending had never existed. She looked down at her cornflower-tinged hand; she had the blue part covered as well. And Corinne, well, the bride was living on borrowed time.

But what about the groom? Ruby couldn’t bear the thought of overlooking Elijah. The finest tradition for the groom was the shivaree. Such a pretty-sounding word, for such a raucous affair. Stealing the groom away, to the accompaniment of the clanging of pots and pans, shrieks and bells, horns and whistles. Without a doubt, Elijah’s buddies had made plans to kidnap him after the wedding, and drop him at least a half night’s walk away from where his bride’s tender and quivering womanhood awaited.

Since she’d shredded Elijah’s two best friends, Ruby would also need to stand in as best man. Elijah needn’t worry; if he married this new woman, Ruby would see to it that he had his shivaree, and it would be a much grander event than anything poor old Dowd or Bobby could have ever dreamed of pulling off.

Ruby would wait. Give Elijah a chance to walk away from this wedding. If he called it off, if he showed that he belonged to her, she would take him to live with her forever. Let him reign beside her in the new world she was going to build right here in Conroy. But if he pledged his troth to Corinne, Ruby would still take him; she would take him apart, and take her own sweet time doing so.

Ruby felt overcome by a burning desire to meet this Corinne, to see up close the woman who could have so easily erased her memory from Elijah’s heart. She decided that tonight, right after stopping in to see her daddy, she’d pay Corinne a visit, maybe even give the woman a chance to save herself by leaving Conroy and heading back where she belonged. But it wasn’t mere curiosity or some deep-seated sense of fair play that prompted Ruby’s decision. It was a realization that when it comes right down to it, killing strangers isn’t nearly as much fun as killing the people you know. Their acquaintance would be brief, but Ruby wanted to get to know Elijah’s ladylove, at least a little, before Ruby ripped out her throat.

NINETEEN

Elijah nodded when Sheriff Bell popped his head back into the kitchen and told them he had to leave; then he focused on his own hands, wishing to God Almighty he could think of a way to make all this go away. A cold sweat broke out over him, and the room around him seemed to darken. He felt sick to his stomach, and he stood quickly and pushed past Corinne, out of the kitchen, out through the sleeping porch, falling to the earth on his hands and knees and dry heaving until his chest hurt.

Corinne followed on his heels, lowering herself so that she could drape her arm over his shoulders. Elijah reached back and pushed her arm away, standing and stumbling off to where his dad’s truck sat. He ignored Corinne’s calls as he flung the truck door open and hopped in.

A part of his brain protested. He knew what he was doing to her was wrong, but he also knew she would want him to talk, and talk and talk and talk. Like somehow yammering about any of this would fix it. He caught a glimpse of her standing in the yard and looking all helpless as he peeled away.

He shot down the drive and onto the road, no other destination in mind than
away
. He drove around, most likely in expanding circles, his hands cramping on the wheel. Somehow he lost track of direction in this area where he’d lived the better part of his life, and ended up a bit south of town, where the train tracks swung in sharply away from the river and crossed over the road before turning back north. When the bumpy and rutted lane leading to the Cooper house showed up on his right, bringing with it memories of happier days, he pulled off the paved road without thinking twice.

The old Cooper place sat two miles down a deserted red dirt road, and he sped up enough for his tires to kick up some of that copper clay onto his fenders. The house, which had been empty for longer than Elijah had been alive, sagged on its foundation. Once it had sheltered a family, but now it only played host to cottonmouth snakes and Saturday-night teenagers looking for a place to do the things they’d deny ever having done, come Sunday morning. Outside of the well-trampled front porch and the poorly hung door, kudzu had nearly swallowed the old house now, one of its few remaining bubble-glass windowpanes winking at the dying sun from behind the vine’s heavy lashes.

He killed the engine and sat for some time, might’ve been a minute, might have been an hour, his eyes tracing the weave of the twining vine. Finally he swung open the door and slid his boots to the dry ground. He slammed the truck door shut, and strode up the rickety steps to the porch, trying to remember the good times he’d had here and shut the rest of it out.

Elijah, Dowd, the Sleiger brothers, and Bobby—hell, even old Rigby before he got his badge—used to come out here to drink. They’d swing by Delmar Blount’s place for a jar of his corn liquor, then find their way to this house’s slanting porch. They’d bring girls out here, too, then scare them with ghost stories to get them to cuddle closer. One well-timed owl hoot could be credited for Elijah losing his cherry, stretched out with Kay Grimes on an army surplus sleeping bag in the back of his dad’s truck.

The plank steps bowed with too much play to be safe, but he climbed them anyway, each one groaning then sighing as they bore and then were relieved of his weight. He approached the door and tugged on the knob. It was, of course, unlocked, but it had shifted in the frame so that it stuck. He concentrated his anger, and gave the knob a hard shove. The door vibrated as it came open. He stepped inside.

The room, in spite of the sweltering heat and humidity outside, was surprisingly cool, no doubt thanks to the vines that might one day rip the house apart. He couldn’t imagine why, but someone had gone to the trouble to board up the front room’s window. The light that pierced the open door seemed to be swallowed by shadow, somehow not managing to make it more than a foot or two beyond the threshold. The light that did make it into the room did so through the filter of the kudzu leaves, leaving it dim and tinted an eerie green. He drew in a breath of the dry, dusty air. It smelled different than he remembered. There was a resinous odor, not quite like pine sap, not quite like the scent that would waft from his mother’s cedar chest. It was like both, but neither. Like the two crossed with the smell of a warm vinyl record.

He walked over to the abandoned potbellied stove that stood in the far corner. When they used to come out here, sometimes they’d hide a jar of shine or a bottle of whiskey inside. He knelt and opened the door, staring in at the empty grate. No luck. Least not today. He ran his hand over his face and stood, coming to attention as a thudding sound resounded on the floor upstairs. For the briefest of moments, he wondered whether the derelict place might be haunted after all.

Probably just a fat squirrel or some other animal hopping around. If it stayed up there and left him alone, he’d stay down here and return the favor. The place wasn’t haunted. Any ghosts around this old house now, Elijah had brought with him. He cast one final glance around the room, then returned to the porch, pulling the door closed with as much vehemence as it took to yank it open.

The floorboards squeaked as he turned around, sounding for all the world like they were asking him where he’d been all this time. He’d spent a good part of his teenage years right here on this very porch. Memories of those days, really not that long ago, passed through his mind. Layer over layer of his past crowded in on each other. So many twilight hours spent here passing the jar, talking about the world and what they believed should be their place in it. Shame crawled up from the small of his back, passing between his shoulder blades and reaching up to tickle his scalp. A lot of what they got up to—a lot of what they had planned sprawled out across this porch’s warped boards—he knew now was wrong. Hell, he knew it then, too. They’d hurt people. Good people. Just because they’d been born different. Dowd used to run on at the mouth about the natural order, the rightful position of the white man at the top of the ladder of races. Elijah had never really believed any of it himself, but he went along with it anyway. Maybe someone had finally fought back. Maybe Dowd and Bob had earned their end.

Still, Dowd and Bob were dead. Walter and Wayne—the sheriff felt odds were good they were dead, too. And then there was Ruby. These men he had been so close to. The girl he’d loved. All these people who’d gotten themselves caught up in the same bundle of lies that had sent him running off to get himself shot in Korea.

Dowd had sworn to him, sworn, that Ruby had come to him. Like a bitch in heat, he said. And he’d had her. So had Bob.

Elijah had beaten the hell out of Dowd, despite the difference in their size. Bob had stood back at first, seeming confident that Dowd could hold Elijah off. But Elijah had never felt such rage in his life. It had been like everything anyone had ever done to make him feel bad, to feel weak, boiled up all at once. By the time Bob joined in, trying to restrain him, Elijah had pretty much taken the bigger guy down. Elijah got a few good licks in on Bob, too, before leaving the pair to patch their wounds and their pride.

He’d gone straight to Ruby’s, straight to the Judge’s house, but Ruby wouldn’t see him. The maid, Lucille, met him at the door, placing a firm hand on his chest when he tried to push past. “She said she don’t want to see you,” Lucille said, pleading with her eyes. “You just go on home now, sir. You don’t want the Judge to hear about you showing up like this, and if you force your way in here, I ain’t gonna have no choice but to tell him.”

He didn’t resist her surprisingly strong backward force, but he still called out. “Ruby! Come talk with me, girl. I don’t believe them. I don’t.” No response came, though he was sure she must have heard. He waited, craning his neck trying to see into the hall. His heart began pounding, breaking. Doubt crept in. He didn’t have any money. Not the kind that Ruby should find herself marrying into. He was handsome, by Conroy’s standards, but he knew anywhere else Ruby’s beauty would place her far out of his reach. He knew the stories about her. How sadistic she could be. But he had never believed them. Now he wondered.

Had their time together been nothing more than a cruel and heartless prank? She’d ignored him for years while they were growing up. He might as well have been invisible to her. Then all of a sudden, she sought him out. Then they were together, and he was in love. He’d never let himself wonder what had turned her attention toward him, but he sure spent plenty of time going over why she broke his heart. Had she tired of him? Had she given herself to Dowd and Bob? Had she lain with his friends just to drive him away? “Ruby, please,” he had said, his voice no longer loud enough for anyone other than the black maid to hear. “Come tell me it ain’t true.”

He didn’t resist when Lucille pressed a bit harder, causing him to take a complete step back over the threshold. Before she closed the door, he caught an odd look in Lucille’s eyes, one that combined sympathy and caution and the sharpest of hatred all in one glance. In that moment, when his pain had made him human, he realized that she knew him for what he was, a weak and cowardly boy who needed to believe the color of his skin made him superior, ’cause he knew deep down he had nothing else. If his whiteness didn’t lift him above others, he was at the bottom. And so he left. He left his buddies. He left his family. He left Ruby. And he went into the army hoping to prove to himself he was somebody, or to die trying. In the end, he’d done neither. Getting shot by a sniper at the side of a garbage ditch hardly made him a hero.

He came home, a gimp in his leg and a promise from a girl he liked a lot, a woman he was really fond of. He didn’t love her, though. Not really. Not like he had loved Ruby. So he resigned himself to limping through what was left of his life, with Corinne by his side, a woman he respected, until his clock stopped ticking, and he could move on to whatever came after this life. He hoped it would be nothing. For him, Heaven would be nothing.

He’d resigned himself to the future open before him. But not long after he’d made it back to Conroy, the Judge tracked Ruby down in California and had her brought home. She wasn’t well. Not at all. But she was home, and the Judge sent along a message that she was asking to see him, if he was willing to come.

If he was willing.

He nearly flew to the Judge’s door. This time Lucille had welcomed him, and she continued to welcome him every day after that.

What Dowd and Bob had said, it was all a lie. She had been too ashamed to face him for fear he’d believe them, even a little bit. For a while there, it seemed like they might find a way to start anew. That’s what she wanted. She swore it was so.

Her health varied greatly day-to-day. Sometimes the things she’d talk about seemed crazy, but McAvoy reminded him that she might still be imagining things due to her illness. Elijah suspected it might have had something, too, to do with the drugs she’d taken in Hollywood, and the doc was too kind to rub anybody’s nose in it. But on the whole it seemed like she was getting better; then she took a sudden, unexpected turn for the worse . . . and died.

That night while Ruby lay cold at the funeral parlor, Elijah went home and read the pile of unopened letters from Corinne that had been collecting in a Phillies Perfecto box. He knew he should write her back, tell all that had happened. Give her the opportunity to rethink the commitment she had made to him. A commitment that on his part he had broken. Instead, he set the six preceding weeks aside. Treated them like they were a dream, something that never happened. And he responded to Corinne’s latest letter, just as if they hadn’t.

Elijah scanned the tops of the trees surrounding the slanting house, letting his eyes rest on the point where the blue of the sky touched the green of the highest point. He would take all this. Everything he was feeling. About his women. About his friends. He’d lock it up and put it away. Just do the best he could from this point on.

The position of the sun told him it was getting late. He needed to get home and do the milking. Elijah allowed himself one last moment before heading back. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, surprised to realize the unfamiliar scent he’d noticed earlier seemed to be growing stronger. He opened his eyes and trod down the steps, retreating quickly when this time the second one down cracked beneath him.

He stopped in the yard, casting a backward glance at the old place. It was funny, really. Although it lay miles away by road, as the crow flies the cemetery where Ruby lay was only maybe an eighth of a mile away, dead west in the direction of the sinking sun.