Almost Famous Women (25 page)

Javier nodded at Beth politely. His eyes returned quickly to Summer. He was thinking of the hushed nights when he had come to her in the shallow, dark water and they'd stood there alone looking out at the dim horizon. She worried about her future, as they all worried, and he assured her that if things got bad she could make it on her own, that he would come join her, that nothing could keep her from him. He reached for her hand and held it tightly.

“Thought we'd have to start without you, Beth,” Jade said.

“Kate and I were just hanging up the last of the laundry!” she said. “You wouldn't want us all to be wandering around naked tomorrow.”

There was polite laughter, but it died down quickly.

“Some of us have to get back to work, Clare,” Huck muttered.

“Anderson,” Clare called out. “Who's drawing for Anderson?”

“I am,” a woman said, reaching for the shell. She didn't dare peek at whatever was carved into the white, pearlescent inside. She cupped the shell facedown in her hand and receded into the crowd.

“Bentham,” Clare said. “Bentham,” she repeated when no one came up.

“He's sick,” Huck said from the back. “Laid up with some gut problem.”

“Someone has to draw for him,” Clare said. She tried to keep an emotionless face, a fair face.

“Fine,” Huck said, weaving through the crowd, reaching into the bowl. He held the shell up then laid it facedown on the fountain. “This one here's for Bob.”

“Bruce Haverford,” Clare said, thinking to herself: dear Bruce. Last of my mother's friends. Last of the original exiles. It was a dubious distinction, she thought. She loved him for his age and experience, and yet wasn't he part of the reason they were here?

Javier helped Bruce rise from his chair and kept one arm on him until he was steady. Bruce shuffled toward the bowl, reached in for a shell with a solemn face, and retreated. “Thirty years,” he said to himself. “Thirty years I've done this.”

Clare moved down the list of names: “Hutchison, Jackson, Sleeman.”

“Go on, now, Huck,” Jade said. “The moment you've been waiting for.” Each member of the family took a shell. Jade held on to Lela's.

“It seems like we just had a lottery, doesn't it?” Beth whispered to Summer, who was still clutching Javier's hand.

“Lewis.”

“Get up there, boy,” someone said. Javier dropped Summer's hand and went to claim his shell. He was an orphan, the last of his family. Sometimes that gave him the feeling that he was lucky, that he'd had his share of misfortune when it came to the lottery. He worked hard to be a trusted, valuable member of Timothy.

June stood next to her mother, silent, and watched Javier. She thought he was beautiful, and sometimes she hated Summer for having his attention the way she did. The other boys were young, too young.

“Who's ready for a residency at the Hope House?” Huck asked, smiling stupidly with his bad teeth. But no one laughed. “Shut up,” Jade hissed. “Just be quiet for once.”

“Sleep on the second floor,” he said. “Spear fish from the front door. That's my plan. Don't worry about me when it's my turn to go.”

“Shut up,” Jade said again.

You could hear someone scream from the Hope House, June thought. She'd learned that last year. That was the part she really hated. Or when people tried to come back. When people made it close to shore, all starved and raving mad.

You could see the shells burning holes in people's hands, Clare thought. It had always been this way, ever since the first time her mother had read the names. What if we just tried to get by? Outlawed children and died out gracefully? she wondered. But you couldn't keep people from getting pregnant, and they had to allow themselves the consolations of joy, didn't they? That had been her mother's thinking.

“We won't have to do this much longer,” someone said. “Next big storm and the ocean will wash right over us.”

What if they turn on me? Clare was thinking. What if the system fails?

“Watson . . . Zanini . . . ,” she read.

Javier was thinking about how he'd build his boat with the driftwood. You had thirty minutes to make a boat, and then the shells started coming at your head. Just like everyone else on the island, he'd planned for a day like this. The current moved northwest. You could take the food basket and go, but everyone knew the waves were too much for a small raft, the current too strong. There was Hope House, but no one ever lasted at Hope House. No one had ever lasted.

“I wish you'd read the number,” Beth said quietly.

Clare could hear the dragonflies. They weren't far away. She felt as if she was drifting in and out of her body. She felt as if her mother was inside of her, speaking for her, giving her the strength to do the right thing. The right thing, she repeated to herself.

Everyone was quiet because they knew it was time to turn over the shells. In a minute they would know.

Javier started to get a strange feeling in his heart, something dark and irritable, a feeling beyond sadness. Jade Sleeman lowered her gaze and began mumbling a prayer. None of them really knew how to pray but they'd been taught, and if they had not been taught they'd seen the exiles years ago bowing down in front of the driftwood cross, the one bleached by the sun and surrounded by semicircles of shells, which sometimes people kneeled upon until they bled.

No one moved, no one dared breathe until Clare raised her hand. All at once everyone exhaled except for Summer, who dropped her shell, the one that had the cross etched inside instead of a number. She began backing away from everyone, staring at them like a
startled animal, nostrils flared, mouth open. Her mother fell to the ground, crying. “It isn't fair.”

“Everyone took the same chance,” Jade said, as her eyes followed Summer down to the beach. “It's always been this way.”

“It's the way it has to be,” Bruce said from his chair, rising. “There isn't a choice.”

“Clare,” Beth said, repeating the name over and over again.

June reached for Clare, but she was distant, thinking of her own mother, her scent, something like burned skin, cooked onions, and carrots fresh from the earth. She thought of her mother's sins, and the ways she paid for them. The way they all did.

Jim Hutchison crouched as if he might be sick. Someone handed his youngest daughter, Kate, a conch shell, an old one that had an exposed, cream-colored spiral. She looked at it, and then at her sister.

June moved forward, waiting. She'd never cared so much about a lottery. She'd never had such mixed feelings.

Javier stood at the front of the crowd, staring at the beach. Summer was already down there, working to build the driftwood raft, the basket of food by her side. He guessed that she had about twenty minutes left. Jim placed a hand on his shoulder, but Javier shrugged it off. He remembered something Summer had said one night as he held her weightless in the water, kissing her neck. Her legs were wrapped around his body, her pale hair long and loose, the moonlight glinting off her damp forehead, the skeleton of the Hope House on the horizon. She'd whispered, “Sometimes I think I'd rather die fast than go it alone and die slowly.”

“But you wouldn't,” he'd said. “Because I'd find you, and we'd make it. We'd get to the Hope House. We'd survive.”

But as she looked up from the raft to find Javier's face, her fingers tying the wood together as they'd practiced, Summer saw something in his eyes, something he hadn't expected would be there himself, and she stood up from the pile of wood. She started back toward the village as she was not allowed to do, and it was an invitation. It was a request. Though she'd never seen a ballet in her life, she opened up her body like a dancer, arms out, eyes shut, and thrust her chest forward to willingly receive the rocks and shells that found it.

Tiny Davis

Photo reprinted with permission, copyright © Jezebel Productions, Inc.

T
he bus driver quit last night, and Ruby is behind the wheel of Big Bertha again, going fifty down I-95 in the dark, the bus jostling and rattling over hot tar. It's late August, and even with the windows down the sweet, muggy air hangs over the women, heating the tops of their instrument cases, warming the expired cold cuts Tiny asks Ruby to keep in a bag behind the driver's seat so she can make sandwiches and sell them to the other girls for a profit.
I gotta hustle, baby
, she says, sending Ruby out to buy the meat at the nearest grocery store while the girls practice.

The band lives on the road, gig to gig. They stay up late, practice in the gymnasiums at colored schools, do each other's hair and makeup, call home if there's a home to call. The days are starting to run together, Ruby thinks. The nights at the clubs too.

How long can it go on? Ruby wonders. Sure, there'll be an end. There always is—I just can't see it. Why work so hard? Why travel so much? We sure as hell ain't getting rich. We're getting tired.

Ruby blots her face with a handkerchief. She's thinking about
Tiny as she drives, watching the cotton undulate as the big bus passes field after field. Last night Tiny started a set with her signature line: “I make my living blowing! Horns, that is.” Ruby was having a drink—she was rarely onstage, though she wanted to be—and heard the bartender mutter something about “that fat dyke on the trumpet.” It hadn't set well with her. She'd gritted her teeth, started sweating, angry as hell. But she couldn't think of the right thing to say. No, she thinks. I
knew
the right thing to say but I didn't say it. Scared as a cat at the dog pound lately.

He don't know, Ruby thinks, shaking her head. Tiny's a prophet. A genius with no education. A lover and a fighter. A performer, through and through. Shit, man, Count Basie and the Duke want her onstage. She's a star! She can hit a high C!

A foul smell finds its way into the bus window, the unmistakable smell of pigs, hot shit, and slop that's all over Carolina. Like rotten eggs. When the Yankee girls get to squishing up their noses about it, asking, “What's that smell?” Tiny is quick to say, “Smells like money to me.” Ruby smirks. She's always Tiny's audience, not that she ever lacks one.

But no one is awake now. When it's this quiet, her ears ring. Too much horn. Too many drumbeats. It doesn't hurt when she plays, just when she listens. More playing then, she thinks, shaking her head a little.

It's just me and this long, flat road, Ruby thinks. This big blue moon.

She notices bread crumbs scattered across the bus floor from dinner; she'll sweep them up when they stop for breakfast. She can smell old smoke and the bandleader, Anna Mae Winburn's gardenia perfume, though Anna Mae has long taken off her white
gown and plumed hat and fallen asleep in a berth with cold cream on her face.

Occasionally Ruby passes a farmhouse with the windows thrust open and a light on, and she wonders what people are doing up at three in the morning, if there are sleepless mothers with children or lovers fighting. There's laundry drying on the lines, the silhouettes of cows in the fields that remind her of the farm her grandfather worked on. More driving. More pine trees. It's so flat out here, she thinks.

There's a paper mill on the horizon, smoke billowing from its stack. She thinks of the people working the late shift. People like her father. And then she thinks of nothing at all, just gives herself over to the soothing vibration of the bus, the terribly slow bus, and smokes.

She likes smoking. They all do, even the pretty girls. Cigarettes are good for the jazz singer's voice; they smooth it out.

Someone taps Ruby on the shoulder. It's Rae Lee, the manager, lipstick still clinging to her lips in the middle of the night, peering at her through cat-eye glasses.

“Any trouble?”

Ruby exhales smoke out of the open window and clenches the cigarette between her teeth. “No trouble.”

“Anyone ask you any questions?”

“No questions.”

“We'll honor our commitments,” Rae Lee whispers. “We won't upset the girls with details. Nervous girls are bad performers. Best to keep on, nail our gigs in Kinston and Rocky Mount, then head up 95 through Virginia and over past Washington, where we can rest for a few days away from Jim Crow. We can regroup and pick up some supplies.”

“Yep,” Ruby says, nodding slowly, eyes fixed on the road. “Fine with me.”

Rae Lee claps a hand on Ruby's shoulder, then turns and shuffles back to her seat in her new slippers. She's the only one with new slippers. “She's skimming off the pot every gig,” Tiny has whispered to Ruby. Maybe it's true, Ruby thinks. But I'm not going to say
anything
. I'm going to look the other way. I'm lucky to be here. I'll do what I'm told.

Ruby is the do-anything girl. It's not the best job in the world, but it's a job that keeps her close to Tiny and close to music. She sets out dinner or runs errands to buy sanitary napkins and Coca-Cola when the girls practice. She loads and unloads luggage. If Pauline gets sick and can't play drums, Ruby plays drums. If Johnnie Mae needs a break from piano, which she hardly does, Ruby plays piano. And if the bus driver quits, and several have, because he's tired of running from the law, Ruby takes the wheel.