“Justin.”
“Yeah, I heard Justin say, ‘Why, Mary Louise, I bet you’re a fine cook.’
“Then Marshall pipes up again, ‘I hear you’re a regular hot potato, Miz Furey.’” Ruby whistled through her teeth. “He’s got a streak — I can see it.” She smiled as if this vein of nastiness was to his credit.
“Mary Louise ducked in the kitchen; I expect she hoped I’d be out before the boys needed refills. I couldn’t stall any longer.”
I pictured Ruby Holler, teetering on heels that would make her spine ache by the end of the night. She’d have to walk barefoot through the parking lot after her shift, but she wouldn’t mind. Her hair flamed under the fluorescent lights, a false red, teased half a foot above her scalp. Her nostrils looked pinched, as if something in this place always smelled bad to her. She was the kind of woman men liked and other women didn’t. Truckers caressed their mugs of coffee while they told her about the loads of lettuce in their rigs and the wonders of refrigerated trucks. Sometimes they described the pocked skin of oranges, and sometimes they whispered to her about the smell of hogs. But no matter what they said, Ruby Holler always seemed amazed, as if she were hearing this story for the first time. Aunt Arlen said that was the sole source of her charm. “Men love a woman who listens,” Arlen told me.
I knew she’d leaned over the counter toward my cousins, letting the Munter boys get a good peek down her dress, letting them glimpse her pushed-up breasts, her leathery skin. I’d watched her do the same for other men. “Why, you boys are empty,” she crooned. “Hasn’t Mary Louise been taking care of you?” Ruby Holler couldn’t stand the Furey woman. She had no sympathy for anyone who could do what she’d done. “If I had my way,” Ruby said to me, “I wouldn’t even give an Indian a cup of coffee, never mind giving him what Mary Louise Furey did. But Ike says his girls have to serve anyone who walks through that door with money in his pocket. Yeah, I have to serve them, but I don’t have to like it.” All my mother’s warnings about keeping our affairs private seemed to pay off. I didn’t think Ruby knew for sure which boy had taken Nina.
Gwen finished her fries and started on mine. Something about her mother’s story had made her unusually hungry.
“Mary Louise brushed past me on her way out the door. ‘Whatever those boys leave is yours,’ she hisses in my ear. I bet they wouldn’t have left her two cents.”
Gwen shoved her empty bottle at her mother. “How about another Coke?” she said, just as if she were some regular customer who was paying for her drinks and might leave a nickel tip besides.
“In a minute,” said Ruby. “I’m talkin’.
“Of course the boys forgot about the tip altogether,” Ruby admitted. “They went after Mary Louise.” Her brow wrinkled. “Come to think of it, they never paid for the pie and coffee either.”
I understood my cousins. Marshall Munter wasn’t accustomed to being resisted or refused, and Justin thought that an ugly woman had no right to rebuff anyone — even him.
“I have to say I started to get a little nervous when they followed her to the parking lot,” Ruby said, “so I headed outside too. Ike was in the back hacking up rib-eyes. If the situation called for a man with a cleaver to calm things down, I was ready to yell.
“Marshall shouts, ‘Hey, Mary Louise, you sure you wouldn’t enjoy a little home cookin’?’
“‘Must get mighty lonely up there on the river,’ says the other one.
“‘All by yourself in that shack.’
“Mary Louise turned to face the boys. They were right on her tail. ‘Go fry your asses,’ she says, but they inched closer, thumbs in their pockets. Her car was only a foot behind her. They knew she couldn’t get away without a fight.
“‘Maybe you only do it with Indians,’ Marshall says.
“‘Maybe you got a taste for dark meat,’ says Justin,
“‘Any woman who’d do it with an Indian would do it with a dog.’
“Mary Louise spat on the ground. ‘You’re less than dogs.’
“That’s when the short one lunged for her throat. But she was too quick for him — I saw the blade flash. ‘One more inch,’ she says, ‘one more inch and you’ll be missing a nose as well as a chin.’”
Ruby said Marshall was having a hoot, slapping his thigh and snorting. “‘Laugh it up, pretty boy,’ Mary Louise tells him. ‘I could do some work on you too, and you wouldn’t look so fine.’
“I could see the fun was over, but the Munter boys didn’t know how to back off without sticking their tails between their legs.”
“Why didn’t you yell for Ike?” I asked Ruby.
“I was thinking on it,” she said, “but just then a car rolled up behind them and Sheriff Wolfe leaned out the window.
“He says, ‘These boys causing you any trouble, Mary Louise?’
“‘Just a misunderstanding,’ Mary Louise said.
“Justin and Marshall gave the sheriff a wave and hopped into their truck. That’s the last I saw of them.”
Afterward, my cousins must have decided to go to the Blue Moon to cool down with a few beers. That was the only place near town where you could find girls like the ones they brought home. It was a good drive just for a drink, fifteen miles. I don’t know what time they got lucky and met the two girls with the big bottoms and heavy thighs, the black-haired twins in their lavender sweaters. They must have had one apiece to start out, but somehow Marshall ended up with more than he could handle, and Justin ended up with nothing at all.
6
EVEN FATHER agreed to allow me a single night of freedom before school started. He didn’t know Mother had helped me cheat on him for the past week. Gwen’s parents kept an old silver camping trailer in their backyard. Daddy wouldn’t trust me to sleep outside on the grass, but for some reason he believed we’d be safe in that tin box.
Gwen waited for me on her porch, rocking back and forth, using her thick ponytail to flick flies from her neck. She massaged her own thighs, singing to herself, high and off-key. The summer had changed her. I felt jittery, too glad to see her, like a kid come to pester some older girl. She wore a tight pink top and cutoffs with four inches of skin left bare in between. The dizzy girl had the slow eyes of a lazy woman now, and I caught a vision of her as a fat wife, sitting on the steps with her lemonade while a horde of dirty children squabbled in the yard, stamping the last life out of the yellow grass.
She promised to show me something secret if I’d go to the gully with her.
“What?” I said.
“The pond.”
“I’ve seen it.” The beavers had built a dam across the stream and the water backed up into a marshy pool.
“Everybody’s seen it, but you haven’t seen this. Trust me.”
We scrambled down the steep slope of the ravine. Pricker plants and weeds grew thick and dry; they scraped our hands and our bare legs, leaving white lines that slowly filled with dots of blood. Mosquitoes buzzed around my head and I told Gwen this had better be worth it.
Gwen turned as we approached the pond, holding one finger in front of her mouth. I wondered what she’d found: a band of mountain people setting up camp in the gully for the winter? A small tribe of Indians bent on reclaiming sacred ground? A dead body so bloated and black that no one would ever know who it was? Nothing less could surprise or interest me, so I was disappointed when we crouched in the tall reeds and I discovered Gwen had led me through the brambles just to get a good look at her brother and Coe Carson taking an evening dip.
I’d seen plenty of naked boys — down at Moon Lake the summer before Jesse drowned; all four of Arlen’s boys stripped and plunged. Nina giggled and Daddy threatened to smack her across the mouth, told her to sit in the car till we were ready to go, and stuck to his word. He wouldn’t let us go back for a whole month after that. He got it in his head that Moon Lake was a dangerous place, deeper than we knew, with gaping trenches that could swallow a body and never give it back; he said that in those crevasses too deep for light sturgeon grew bigger than men. But we learned that the deep water was safe and still, and a boy could drown in the bright shallows.