It begins with a tickle on the soles of your feet. Then that high-pitched whine you hear from broken telephone wires before the lineman comes. Notes that make the small hairs on your arms stand on end.
A jive beat thrumming through the door of a Honky Tonk, up through the street, up through the heel of your shoe. Making you tap your toes and dance despite yourself, feeling the heat of it. A lover leaving red hot smooches on your forehead. An August day when the fan’s not working and you melt together, your bodies on fire.
That’s how it feels in my dreams each night. I’m jitterbugging, my heart exploding in stardust that falls down onto my eyelids like the first tiny flakes of snow.
***
Something was dropping on my eyes. I forced them open.
“Time to wake up, pretty girl,” said a hoarse voice that could’ve been a man’s.
It was the prison guard, Maxine, come to blow my morning nicotine fix in my face.
“You unlocked my cell very quiet,” I said.
The words caught in my dry throat and I started to cough. Maxine pulled me up by the arm, thumping my back like she cared if I lived or died.
“You were shouting in your sleep again. I came to check on you,” she said and jingled her keys in front of my eyes.
My hacking cough died down to a faint splutter.
“I was having that dream…”
“Oh…the one where you’re melting and dancing and having hot sex all at the same time? That’ll be a good one for your memoir…show the punters your soft side and your hot side. Less of Ruthless Ruth, the Granite Woman, more of…”
I stopped listening to her pleasantries, my attention caught by the murmur of birds and bees outside my window. Unseasonal in January. Something was definitely buzzing. As I strained my ears, it took on a rhythmic quality, a single word, chanted over and over.
“Firefly,” I said, "listen. You can hear it coming through the bars."
Maxine tipped back her head. Her black, short-cropped hair was so heavily pomaded it was barely affected by gravity. I watched some silent emotion ripple through her flat chest and up the thick column of her neck until it tumbled out, a pure guffaw of joy. After a moment or two, she recovered herself.
“Honey, it’s your fanclub out there. They had to bus them in today. Thousands of them. We’re selling tickets. Listen closer.”
“I'm trying to.”
This time I heard it unmistakeably.
“Fry, Ruth, fry. Fry, Ruth, fry. Fry, Ruth, fry, Ruth, fry Ruth, fry Ruth FRY!”
***
The melting dream – all that jiving. That’s what that’s about. In two days’ time they’ll dip me like a donut. I may seem to you to be a dumb broad because I’m in here, but in actual fact I’ve got smarts. I know how it works and I've had plenty of time to think about it here in this worn, grey eight-by-ten with its smelly bunk and potty hole.
“It’s a sure-fire way to go,” Maxine had said to me one day when she was eating my leftovers, “the humane solution.”
“More humane than that cornbread,” I said, “you wouldn't find a rock like that at my house...”
“Save it, Sister. There’s no ‘my house’ now. It's the property of the state. You koshed your husband with a sash-weight and wrung his neck with picture wire, just to be sure. Oh and you chloroformed him too, remember? Then, like a genius, you hid your best jewels under the mattress, three feet from the corpse.”
“That’s not how it happened,” I said flatly. I was tired of saying it.
“You’ve sung that song a million times and you had your day in court. The jury didn't take to you.”
“Go to hell!” I shouted and figured it would bring the other wardens running.
But it didn’t, because they aren’t afraid of me. They all just think I’m a dope. Maxine sat brushing her stained teeth with her fingertip.
“Do they ever throw the switches wrong?” I asked.
“No. They’ve tested it out on cats and dogs. On Irish men, black man, Italian men. Worked on all of ‘em so far.”
“And women?”
“Well you’re special, ain’t you? Not all women love to cook and clean and raise their kids. A lot of chickens want to peck the rooster's head off. You’re just the first one for a while that was blonde enough to go through with it...and get caught.”
I felt myself go quiet inside, like I was sitting with some belching, thick-necked, muscled version of my Ma and she was telling me a crummy kind of bedtime story.
“How will it be?”
“Well…they’ll come for you in the evening, diaper you up like a baby and take you to the Death Room. There will be people there - reporters, the vic’s family cursing your name, and people who like watching other people die. The Executioner’ll strap ya in a chair and put the muzzle on you. And then he’ll dip the ol' battery wires in salt-water, stick the first one on your leg...”
“Stop it!”
“The second one…oh yes, and I forgot…we shave your hair…second one goes on the head like a top hat or a copper mixing bowl you might use for baking pound cake. Except it’s not cakes we bake...”
“Please stop.”
Maxine pressed her scabby knuckles up to her mouth like a child on Christmas morning. Her presents? My sense of dread. My fear.
“As for the rest,” she said, spit spraying through the gaps in her clenched fingers, “your guess is as good as mine. Number of people that have lived to tell the tale? Zero.”
I must've dozed off from her little tale and she must've got bored and left. Because I woke up alone in a hell-sweat, hot as a spit-roast pig, thinking they'd done the deed and I was already burning in everlasting damnation. I thought of my little girl, my Lorraine, and how I wasn’t nice enough to her. How we never seemed to have enough time together, even though we shared the same house every day.
The light was fading, but I had a firebug in me like you do sometimes right in the middle of the night. A need for something, be it dancing or drink or just to laugh until you get a gut-ache.
I’ve always been at the mercy of bugs such as those. This one demanded that I set the record straight, tell it all like it really happened. The truth about the tangle I got myself into. One day, an ordinary housewife. The next, deep in a world you can't possibly know about.
There are things I did there I was once too ashamed to tell a living soul. Worse than whatever's waiting for me down there in the Death Room.
I write them here, my memoir, my last confession.
***
It all began the day I met Judd. A warm June day when I didn’t have much except dress-shopping on my mind. I had a luncheon date with my neighbour Karen, a nosy so-and-so who always kept an eye on all the goings-on around us and consequently had the best gossip. She’d told me the ins and outs of the Robinson’s marriage as if she were living down the block in their bedroom bureau drawer. She practically notaried their decree nisi.
I knew she dined out just as often on the rows coming through the walls of my house. But fair is fair. If I was giggling at other people’s business, then I'm sure they deserved a hoot or two from mine.
I got up before everyone and went downstairs in my nightgown and slippers to make breakfast. Pancakes and syrup for Lorraine, bacon and eggs for Arnold. The sky was dark and vague, like Lorraine’s eyes when you’ve just woken her for school and she can’t quite seem to place you, as if you were a stranger perched on the end of her bed. It used to make me laugh to see her doze right off as soon as I’d woken her.
Standing at the kitchen sink, beating batter in the copper mixing bowl, I watched the moon fade and heard our resident blackbirds stirring. A pair of jays were nesting somewhere nearby. I’d seen one startle from under a rosebush when I was carrying washing to the line a few days before. The spread of its wings made my heart thrill. Later on, the same bird was hunched over the blackbirds’ nest with something pink and wriggling stuffed in its beak. It caught me looking and I realized what beady eyes it had. Then it flew off to its mate with the chick still struggling and squeaking, the wings spreading out, bright as lapis.
My father was a carpenter by trade. He carved and joined and stained our round kitchen table as a wedding present. That day there were crumbs of dried-out mince on it from last night’s meatloaf. An omen, maybe, of something mincing and crummy about to come into my life.
I scooped them into my palm and wiped the table clean, laid out the second-best placemats, napkins, cutlery. Meanwhile, bacon sizzled and popped under the broiler and the eggs shimmied in the pan. On the griddle, steam rose up from dirt I hadn't quite scrubbed off. I poured the batter on in four full moons, watching them bubble, flipping them with a flourish, singing under my breath they say that Spring means just one little thing to little lovebirds.
“For goodness sake Ruth, your voice is about as melodious as a rusty drain in a rainstorm,” said Albert.
Like a dose of Hill's Bromide, I swallowed down his big words along with the notes he hated so much. I could imagine his face, the nostrils curling in disgust, the thin-lipped scowl.
“I wanted to fix you your favourite.”
“Oh, there’s that little girl simper I so adore. Your favourite, Albert. It’s greasy eggs and blackened bacon. You know I have heard tell of blackened chicken when I’ve traveled South on business, but I have never heard...”
It was as much as I could stand. I spun around to face him, my hand still clenched around the frying pan handle, “Don’t start with that again, you bastard.”
Lorraine stood in the doorway, hugging her arms around her thin chest. It was too late. The eggs were over easy on the floor. The bad word was out of my mouth.
“It saddens me,” said Albert, “to hear you use that language.”
“I’m sorry. I…”
“Don’t waste your breath. I’m going out.”
I turned back to the stove. I didn’t want Lorraine to see me looking beat-down. The bacon was indeed black and the pancakes were getting there. I scraped them off the griddle and slid them onto a plate.
“Sit to the table, Laney,” I said.
“I already am.”
“Well, here.”
I set the plate in front of her and passed her the syrup. She hesitated.
“Eat up, kiddo. I'm not made of pancakes.”
She stared up at me, those wide eyes the colour of the jay’s wings. I expected her to sass me about the mess I’d just handed her. But she just picked up her fork and started eating the damn things.
The door slammed. Albert gone for the day. Normally I would’ve breathed a sigh. But something was coiled up inside me like a rattler and it wouldn't let me be easy. Lorraine nibbled at her pancakes, not fit for a dog to eat. A teardrop splashed onto her fork and rolled into a puddle of maple syrup.
“I’m sorry. I’m in a terrible state,” I said.
I knelt down on the floor beside her chair and laid my head in her lap. She patted my hair like I was one of her dolls. I breathed in her familiar smell and heard the tell-tale slurp of her wiping her snot on her sleeve.
“Anne’s got a new kitten. Can I sleep over there tonight?”
Just like me, shining up quick as a shoe.
"Of course you can," I mumbled, my voice muffled by her nightdress, “I hope I didn’t frighten you."
“No. I’m not scared of you,” she said.
to be continued...
Sure, test it out on the eye-talians.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff ... but what's this "to be continued ..." business?
Tease.
Cheeky sod! This is part of a longer piece...more to come later...
ReplyDelete