In dreams he sees waving sea fans and milling schools of grouper and underwater shafts of light. He sees Ruby Hornaday push open the door of his closet. She’s wearing a copper diving helmet; she leans over his cot and puts the window of her helmet an inch from his face.
He wakes with a shock. Heat pools in his groin. He thinks, Blue, blue, blue.
—
One drizzly Saturday, the bell rings. When Tom opens the door, Ruby Hornaday is standing on the stoop in the rain.
Hello. Tom blinks a dozen times. Raindrops set a thousand intersecting circles upon the puddles in the road. Ruby holds up a jar: six black tadpoles squirm in an inch of water.
Seemed like you might be interested in water creatures.
Tom tries to answer, but the whole sky is rushing through the open door into his mouth.
You’re not going to faint again, are you?
Mr. Weems stumps into the foyer. Jesus, boy, she’s damp as a church, you got to invite a lady in.
Ruby stands on the tiles and drips. Mr. Weems grins. Tom mumbles, My heart.
Ruby holds out the jar. Keep ’em if you want. They’ll be frogs before long. Drops shine in her eyelashes. Rain glues her shirt to her clavicles. Well, that’s something, says Mr. Weems. He nudges Tom in the back. Isn’t it, Tom?
Tom is opening his mouth. He’s saying, Maybe I could—when Mother comes down the stairs in her big, black shoes. Trouble, hisses Mr. Weems.
Mother dumps the tadpoles in a ditch. Her face says she’s composing herself but her eyes say she’s going to wipe all this away. Mr. Weems leans over the dominoes and whispers, Mother’s as hard as a cobblestone but we’ll crack her, Tom, you wait.
Tom whispers, Ruby Hornaday, into the space above his cot. Ruby Hornaday. Ruby Hornaday. A strange and uncontainable joy inflates dangerously in his chest.
—
Mr. Weems initiates long conversations with Mother in the kitchen. Tom overhears scraps: Boy needs to move his legs. Boy should get some air.
Mother’s voice is a whip. He’s sick.
He’s alive! What’re you saving him for?
Mother consents to let Tom retrieve coal from the depot and tinned goods from the commissary. Tuesdays he’ll be allowed to walk to the butcher’s in Dearborn. Careful, Tomcat, don’t hurry.
Tom moves through the colony that first Tuesday with something close to rapture in his veins. Down the long gravel lanes, past pit cottages and surface mountains of blue and white salt, the warehouses like dark cathedrals, the hauling machines like demonic armatures. All around him the monumental industry of Detroit pounds and clangs. The boy tells himself he is a treasure hunter, a hero from one of Mr. Weems’s adventure stories, a knight on important errands, a spy behind enemy lines. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his head down and his gait slow, but his soul charges ahead, weightless, jubilant, sparking through the gloom.
In May of that year, 1929, fourteen-year-old Tom is walking along the lane thinking spring happens whether you’re paying attention or not; it happens beneath the snow, beyond the walls — spring happens in the dark while you dream — when Ruby Hornaday steps out of the weeds. She has a shriveled rubber hose coiled over her shoulder and a swim mask in one hand and a tire pump in the other. Need your help. Tom’s pulse soars.
I got to go to the butcher’s.
Your choice. Ruby turns to go. But really there is no choice at all.
She leads him west, away from the mine, through mounds of rusting machines. They hop a fence, cross a field gone to seed, and walk a quarter mile through pitch pines to a marsh where cattle egrets stand in the cattails like white flowers.
In my mouth, she says, and starts picking up rocks. Out my nose. You pump, Tom. Understand? In the green water two feet down Tom can make out the dim shapes of a few fish gliding through weedy enclaves.
Ruby pitches the far end of the hose into the water. With waxed cord she binds the other end to the pump. Then she fills her pockets with rocks. She wades out, looks back, says, You pump, and puts the hose into her mouth. The swim mask goes over her eyes; her face goes into the water.
The marsh closes over Ruby’s back, and the hose trends away from the bank. Tom begins to pump. The sky slides along overhead. Loops of garden hose float under the light out there, shifting now and then. Occasional bubbles rise, moving gradually farther out.
One minute, two minutes. Tom pumps. His heart does its fragile work. He should not be here. He should not be here while this skinny, spellbinding girl drowns herself in a marsh. If that’s what she’s doing. One of Mr. Weems’s similes comes to him: You’re trembling like a needle to the pole.
After four or five minutes underwater, Ruby comes up. A neon mat of algae clings to her hair, and her bare feet are great boots of mud. She pushes through the cattails. Strings of saliva hang off her chin. Her lips are blue. Tom feels dizzy. The sky turns to liquid.
Incredible, pants Ruby. Fucking incredible. She holds up her wet, rock-filled trousers with both hands, and looks at Tom through the wavy lens of her swim mask. His blood storms through its lightless tunnels.
He has to trot to make the butcher’s and get back home by noon. It is the first time Tom can remember permitting himself to run, and his legs feel like glass. At the end of the lane, a hundred yards from home, he stops and pants with the basket of meat in his arms and spits a pat of blood into the dandelions. Sweat soaks his shirt. Dragonflies dart and hover. Swallows inscribe letters across the sky. The street seems to ripple and fold and straighten itself out again.
Just a hundred yards more. He forces his heart to settle. Everything, Tom thinks, follows a path worn by those who have gone before: egrets, clouds, tadpoles. Everything everything everything.
—
The following Tuesday Ruby meets him at the end of the lane. And the Tuesday after that. They hop the fence, cross the field; she leads him places he’s never dreamed existed. Places where the structures of the saltworks become white mirages on the horizon, places where sunlight washes through groves of maples and makes the ground quiver with leaf-shadow. They peer into a foundry where men in masks pour molten iron from one vat into another; they climb a tailings pile where a lone sapling grows like a single hand thrust up from the underworld. Tom knows he’s risking everything — his freedom, Mother’s trust, even his life — but how can he stop? How can he say no? To say no to Ruby Hornaday would be to say no to the world.
Some Tuesdays Ruby brings along her red book with its images of corals and jellies and underwater volcanoes. She tells him that when she grows up she’ll go to parties where hostesses row guests offshore and everyone puts on special helmets to go for strolls along the sea bottom. She tells him she’ll be a diver who sinks herself a half mile into the sea in a steel ball with one window. In the basement of the ocean, she says, she’ll find a separate universe, a place made of lights: schools of fish glowing green, living galaxies wheeling through the black.