Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [106]
After supper, Buddy gave the dogs the leftover bones and steak fat. Leaping and snapping, they snatched at the scraps, but Buddy snarled back at them and made them cringe. “You have to let them know who’s boss,” he called to Ruby, who was looking on admiringly from the back porch. It was like watching a group of people playing “May I?”
Later, Buddy brought his sleeping roll in from the truck and settled in the living room, and Ruby did not resist when he came into her bedroom and said he couldn’t sleep. She thought her timing was appropriate; she had recently bought a double bed. They talked until late in the night, and he told her hunting stories, still pretending that she was interested in acquiring a hunting dog. She pretended she was too, and asked him dozens of questions. He said he traded things—anything he could make a nickel from: retreaded tires, cars, old milk cans and cream separators. He was fond of the dogs he raised and trained, but it did not hurt him to sell them. There were always more dogs.
“Loving a dog is like trying to love the Mississippi River,” he said. “It’s constantly shifting and changing color and sound and course, but it’s just the same old river.”
Suddenly he asked Ruby, “Didn’t you ever get married?”
“No.”
“Don’t it bother you?”
“No. What of it?” She wondered if he thought she was a lesbian.
He said, “You’re too pretty and nice. I can’t believe you never married.”
“All the men around here are ignorant,” she said. “I never wanted to marry any of them. Were you ever married?”
“Yeah. Once or twice is all. I didn’t take to it.”
—
Later, in the hospital, on Sodium Pentothal, Ruby realized that she had about a hundred pictures of Clint Eastwood, her favorite actor, and none of Buddy. His indistinct face wavered in her memory as she rolled down a corridor on a narrow bed. He didn’t have a picture of her either. In a drawer somewhere she had a handful of prints of her high school graduation picture, taken years ago. Ruby Jane MacPherson in a beehive and a Peter Pan collar. She should remember to give him one for his billfold someday. She felt cautious around Buddy, she realized, the way she did in high school, when it had seemed so important to keep so many things hidden from boys. “Don’t let your brother find your sanitary things,” she could hear her mother saying.
In the recovery room, she slowly awoke at the end of a long dream, to blurred sounds and bright lights—gold and silver flashes moving past like fish—and a pain in her chest that she at first thought was a large bird with a hooked beak suckling her breast. The problem, she kept thinking, was that she was lying down, when in order to nurse the creature properly, she ought to sit up. The mound of bandages mystified her.
“We didn’t have to take very much,” a nurse said. “The doctor didn’t have to go way up under your arm.”
Someone was squeezing her hand. She heard her mother telling someone, “They think they got it all.”
A strange fat woman with orange hair was holding her hand. “You’re just fine, sugar,” she said.
—
When Ruby began meeting Buddy at the fairgrounds on Third Mondays, he always seemed to have a new set of dogs. One morning he traded two pocket knives for a black-and-tan coonhound with limp ears and star-struck eyes. By afternoon, he had made a profit of ten dollars, and the dog had shifted owners again without even getting a meal from Buddy. After a few months, Ruby lost track of all the different dogs. In a way, she realized, their identities did flow together like a river. She thought often of Buddy’s remark about the Mississippi River. He was like the river. She didn’t even have an address for him, but he always showed up on Third Mondays and spent the night at her house. If he’d had a profitable day, he would take her to the Burger