Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [110]
“I can’t ’call your name,” he says to her. “But I know I know you.”
“I don’t know you,” says Ruby. Embarrassed, the man backs away.
The day is already growing hot. Ruby buys a Coke from a man with a washtub of ice and holds it with her right hand, testing the tension on her right side. The Coke seems extremely heavy. She lifts it to her lips with her left hand. Buddy’s truck is not there.
Out in the sun, she browses through a box of National Enquirers and paperback romances, then wanders past tables of picture frames, clocks, quilts, dishes. The dishes are dirty and mismatched—odd plates and cups and gravy boats. There is nothing she would want. She skirts a truckload of shock absorbers. The heat is making her dizzy. She is still weak from her operation. “I wouldn’t pay fifteen dollars for a corn sheller,” someone says. The remark seems funny to Ruby, like something she might have heard on Sodium Pentothal. Then a man bumps into her with a wire basket containing two young gray cats. A short, dumpy woman shouts to her, “Don’t listen to him. He’s trying to sell you them cats. Who ever heard of buying cats?”
Gladys has rigged up a canvas canopy extending out from the back of her station wagon. She is sitting in an aluminum folding chair, with her hands crossed in her lap, looking cool. Ruby longs to confide in her. She seems to be a trusty fixture, something stable in the current, like a cypress stump.
“Buy some mushmelons, darling,” says Gladys. Gladys is selling banties, Fiestaware, and mushmelons today.
“Mushmelons give me gas.”
Gladys picks up a newspaper and fans her face. “Them seeds been in my family over a hundred years. We always saved the seed.”
“Is that all the way back to slave times?”
Gladys laughs as though Ruby has told a hilarious joke. “These here’s my roots!” she says. “Honey, we’s in slave times, if you ask me. Slave times ain’t never gone out of style, if you know what I mean.”
Ruby leans forward to catch the breeze from the woman’s newspaper. She says, “Have you seen Buddy, the guy I run around with? He’s usually here in a truck with a bunch of dogs?”
“That pretty boy that bought you that bracelet?”
“I was looking for him.”
“Well, you better look hard, darling, if you want to find him. He got picked up over in Missouri for peddling a hot TV. They caught him on the spot. They’d been watching him. You don’t believe me, but it’s true. Oh, honey, I’m sorry, but he’ll be back! He’ll be back!”
—
In the waiting room at the clinic, the buzz of a tall floor fan sounds like a June bug on a screen door. The fan waves its head wildly from side to side. Ruby has an appointment for her checkup at three o’clock. She is afraid they will give her radiation treatments, or maybe even chemotherapy. No one is saying exactly what will happen next. But she expects to be baptized in a vat of chemicals, burning her skin and sizzling her hair. Ruby recalls an old comedy sketch, in which one of the Smothers Brothers fell into a vat of chocolate. Buddy Landon used to dunk his dogs in a tub of flea dip. She never saw him do it, but she pictures it in her mind—the stifling smell of Happy Jack mange medicine, the surprised dogs shaking themselves afterward, the rippling black water. It’s not hard to imagine Buddy in a jail cell either—thrashing around sleeplessly in a hard bunk, reaching over to squash a cigarette butt on the concrete floor—but the image is so inappropriate it is like something from a bad dream. Ruby keeps imagining different scenes in which he comes back to town and they take off for the Rocky