Cynthia Hawkins
Half-past nine and Ruby decided thirty-minutes late was late enough. Ten-minutes late would hardly be suspect, but thirty. Celine and Sal would stand together, two thick old women standing shoulder to soft shoulder and hip to hip tapping their shoes in sync, the way they do when they're collectively mad at Ruby. They'd press together and become one sputtering lecture that ends with a deep "we won’t tell Harry this time." They never do. Usually the morning news on the all-news channel ran an entertainment segment from nine to nine-thirty, something easy to walk away from. But as Ruby sat on the tattered ottoman with pen and notebook in hand that morning, Hollywood was pre-empted by a twitchy, wind-blown reporter standing to the side of a highway. He pushed a finger against his ear and squinted as he tried to hear the news anchor, smug at the station on split-screen trying to be heard. "Jim ¼ Jim? Have you spoken with any of the investigators?"
"Spoken with ¼ um, what was that?"
"Investigators."
"No. No, they haven't been available for comments as of yet."
The field-reporter's side of the split-screen collapsed making room for the anchor to take over the space. "There you have it. The origin of the strange configurations of lights in the sky outside of Mesquite, Texas that have appeared two nights in a row remains a mystery. No one knows," he reported solemnly, "if the lights will appear on the Texas horizon again tonight."
With her bound notebook opened to a blank page, Ruby pecked at the paper with her pen, writing in small, staccato strokes, "Mesquite, Texas. Lights, unexplained. Not alien. A warning. The sparks of a combustible society. We're about to blow." She was compiling a book of news flashes, facts, drawings, and bad poetry, all of which pointed, as she figured, to the eminent end of the world. The field-reporter reappeared on-screen interviewing a local in a backward-turned hat with his finger resting on the bridge of his nose, "a microscopic implant they monitor my bodily functions and whereabouts with."
Ruby leaned to the television to turn the volume down with a knob she had to reinsert in its former hole just over the small circle of a speaker. She looked up at the cat clock, moving its eyes, ticking out the seconds with its tail. Half-past nine. Ruby clamped her teeth together, curled her lips away from them, and gave the clock her best growl punctuated with a quick snap of teeth. "Conspiring against me, you and the TV," she said shoving the notebook and pen in the backpack. Balancing the bag on her knees, she held her breath for a second, closed her eyes, sniffed at the oatmeal burnt to its pan on the roll-away microwave cart that served as a kitchen counter. This was her moment of gathering up all strength and speed that, when summoned, she imagined sprawling through her limbs made tense with anticipation for the big run. It was something she did now and then to stay in top form. Always in training. She opened her eyes to the stopwatch hanging from her neck by a cord, clutched in her hand. She circled her thumb over the "go" button. "Ready. Set. Bingo!" She popped up from the ottoman. The watch ticked and bobbed against her stomach. She fumbled for the straps of the backpack, took them in hand with the stopwatch swinging from her neck, pendulum-like, side to side. The shag carpet always proved a resistance to her rubber-soled, unlaced sneakers that flopped against her heels. She almost stepped out of them, but she recovered her balance and the slipping-off shoes with tight, curled up toes pressing and pushing the shoes back into place. She tripped past the front door, shut it, and jingled the ring of keys to the lock. "I'll have to shave a few seconds off for this," she said as she locked the door and dropped the keys in the deep pocket of her carpenter pants. "If the world’s gonna end, no sense locking your door."
"What was that?" At the foot of the stairs, below Ruby, an elderly woman tucked into a matted fur coat called up to her.
"Nothing, Mrs. Ellerby," she answered, pounding the steps on her way down.
"Careful there, girl. You’ll bust on through." Mrs. Ellerby pressed with a delicate palm her shoulder-length white hair that curved up at the ends as a row of oversized rings clicked together.
"No time!" Ruby raced past Mrs. Ellerby, brushing fur with her bare arm, and out the front door of the apartment building. She could hear Mrs. Ellerby straining her voice to say loudly, "You’ll never beat twelve-and-a-half! That was your best yet!"
Ruby blinked away sun and scrubbed at her inch-long hair as she ran with the backpack dangling off her shoulder and the stopwatch bobbing. She ran past the short row of older homes with their wide front porches and gum trees and oaks stretching over the street to meet the outreaching limbs on the other side. It was the middle of May. Ruby rose and fell with the concrete sidewalk that had cracked and buckled in waves. Her arms began to glow with sweat. On the same street, houses quickly gave way to small, one story businesses, some boarded up. She ran past the whir of a dozen washers and dryers at the laundromat with the door propped wide open. She made way for a car that honked and sped by with the twang of Hank Williams momentarily smothering out all other sounds. To her left, the ice cream shop was not yet opened. She could see Jack, as she ran past, in a red shirt moving behind the counter inside, moving between the fat yellow letters of "Jack D’s Ice Cream" painted on the picture window. To the right, just ahead, Dash's Fabrics. Ruby smashed the stopwatch to her chest and paused to pull the glass door back with a jingle.
"Why, here she comes," Celine eased a plump elbow to the cutting table as she watched Ruby slip across the linoleum, past bolts of fabric and through a backroom doorway. Sal, color-coordinating thread across the room, set her work aside to join Celine. They looked at each other and listened to the clatter of Ruby rushing down the basement steps.
"Think she beat it?" Sal asked which was followed by a moan radiating from somewhere beneath their feet.
"Nope. She’ll never beat twelve-and-a-half, anyway."
Sal nodded and was on her way back to the threads when Celine caught the tie of her apron and pulled her back. "Come on, let’s get ready now."
"Oh, she never listens."
"We're in charge when Harry's not here," Celine answered. "Come on."
They stood side by side in their matching, high-waisted dresses. Ruby emerged from the back room to face them. Celine and Sal had opened their mouths ready to begin berating when Ruby, with her hand patting her bristled hair, interrupted. "I know I'm late," she said, "later than usual, but have you seen the news?"
"What is it this time?" Celine, for once, gave up on her lecture.
"Lights," Ruby said.
"I better get back to sorting," Sal said, smoothing her apron, resuming her spot at the rack of thread.
"Lights!" Ruby threw her hands in the air and remembered the backpack pulling at her shoulder. She searched for her notebook and dropped her bag to the floor. "Lights outside of Mesquite, Texas. At night. Two nights in a row."
"That's someone playing a trick." Celine crossed her arms.
"Three weeks ago, strange lights were reported outside of Reno," Ruby consulted her notes, "and two weeks before that, outside of Santa Fe." Sal, from her corner, went on to explain how there used to be a strange light floating along the street she grew up on close to the tracks. It was merely some dismembered engineer, the ghost of him, searching for his limbs in the night with the glow of his lantern. "Ghosts are always looking for things, all over the place," Sal added. "It always seems mysterious to us, but that's just what they do."
"That's right," Celine laughed, "just some ghosts about. Nothing strange about that, Ruby."
"Hush," Sal sulked a minute and gave Ruby a wink, "You should write a poem about that one." Celine and Sal thought Ruby was the best poet there ever was. On slow days, they’d have her recite some from her notebook, and Sal would say, "I'm not sure what it means, but it's lovely dear."
"Well, I'll have no more of this being late," Celine lined up scissors on the counter. "Now, you have some half-off signs to put around, so get to it."
Studying the various colors of thread, Sal added, "and we won't tell Harry this time."
The only out-of-place lights illuminating the fields outside of Mesquite that night were those of the news crews along with their vans and satellites and antennas. Ruby, sitting on the ottoman, curled her bare toes into the deep-piled carpet and contemplated the developing scenes on the all-news channel. The strange lights had given way to the spectacle that was the full-fledged media. The second-shift reporter, a young woman with bobbed, blond hair and a red sash of a mouth hovering over the microphone, tried to appear comfortable in the heat that curled sweaty strands of hair to her cheeks. "We are just ¼ waiting for the lights to reappear," she said. The reporter stared sternly into the camera for a whole minute as Ruby stared back over her TV tray, a little suspicious-like, with a forkful of food teetering between fingers. The reporter looked at the field behind her packed with the other news reporters, then up at the blank sky, then back at the camera. She swept wet hair from her face and said, "It is unusually hot out here tonight." Ruby continued to eat, dipping squares of pancakes in the busted yolk of her eggs, sunny side up. The reporter continued to speculate about the weather when suddenly, behind her, a man with a "Where’s the beef?" T-shirt barely stretched over his full belly ran by squeezing beer cans in his hands, beer and foam gushing out as he screamed, "We're all going to die!" Ruby slowly set her fork down on the plate freeing her fingers to needle through her hair as she bit her lip. The reporter was about to comment when the hum of a machine began and bands of interference scrolled over the TV screen warbling the reporter's face and distorting her voice. It was coming from the first floor apartment.
"Ruby, you have to try something besides vanilla sooner or later." Jack was always persuading Ruby, tempting her with other flavors, but she would never budge. At first, he tried because it wasn't natural to favor just one kind of ice-cream. But day after day, during her fifteen-minute break from the fabric store, dissuading Ruby from vanilla became a challenge just for the sake of making someone so stubborn change her mind. "Chocolate banana nut? Hmmm?" He stood behind his ice-cream counter, lifting an ice-cream sample on a tiny, wooden paddle.
"No thanks, Jack." Ruby stood opposite him, drumming her hands against glass. "One scoop of vanilla, please."
Jack frowned, defeated again, as he worked the metal scoop with a thin hand and a long, tattooed arm wiggling in the red sleeve of his "Jack D's Ice-Cream" T-shirt. She told him about the lights outside of Mesquite and how nothing happened last night. Jack twisted his brow in interest as she explained. With a flick of his finger, Jack gently knocked the cup of vanilla across the counter to Ruby. "It's a sign of things to come, like a spark before a fire," she explained, "I need to speed up my time, to the basement. It's the closest thing, you know. The nuclear shelter under the courthouse is too far. Besides, I hear they haven't kept up with the emergency supplies since the Cold War." This didn't surprise him since he had heard it all before, recited in her poetry. "A little bundle of talent," he always called her, but only because her poems seemed better than what he wiped off the bathroom stalls at night.
While she slurped ice-cream off the spoon, licking it off her lips, she told Jack how she was going to write a new poem about the lights, but she couldn't keep her mind off of the neighbor below that she had never seen but had finally heard last night. In a matter of hours, she had filled the visual void of her first-floor neighbor with an image of him, something like a bleary-eyed, Sasquatch-like figure. She tried to convince Jack that the neighbor was cutting up bodies with an electric saw as she tried to watch the news.
"Now, Ruby. Don't let that imagination of yours fly," Jack laughed.
"That's what I do, Jack," Ruby licked the last of her ice-cream off of the spoon. She looked over her shoulder, out of the window, at the fabric store diagonal from them. "I mean, besides working there." She handed Jack the empty cup. "I sent a couple of poems off--one for a national poetry prize and another to the Newsleader."
"Something will come of that, sure," he nodded, running his hands over his tattoos. He was already thinking up a new flavor to offer next time, something irresistible.
"A meteor drops like an acme weight on the planet," Ruby lowered herself to the six-year-old standing with her on the front stoop of the apartment building. Pete had stopped playing his Game-boy to listen as he watched Ruby through a fringe of blond hair and held his breath. Ruby continued, "Pulverizes every Tom, Dick, and Janet. We’re all going to die,
damn it."
"Ruby!" Mrs. Ellerby, standing by her car, dropped her cell phone through her rolled-down window and rushed to the front porch, wobbling on her high-heels, fanning her hands by her sides like a little bird. "I could hear you from over there, cussing at my little grandson like that."
Ruby stood straight with her palm to her back, the other touching her hair. "It’s my poem, the one I sent to a national contest."
"They accept profanity?" Mrs. Ellerby took Pete’s hand and sucked her lower lip in just a little.
"I suppose."
"Hmm," Mrs. Ellerby replied sharply, straightening the collar of her fur coat. She wore it year round, never seeming to be bothered by heat, to keep up an elite sort of appearance for her tenants whom she visited regularly.
"I’ve been meaning to ask," Ruby said finally after considering her basement dilemma all day, "do you think maybe I could switch apartments, to the one below? It has a basement, doesn't it?"
"What do you want with a basement? You only have three belongings to your name that I remember," Mrs. Ellerby said.
"Three things," Pete laughed.
"I have more than three."
"Oh you aren't counting that old TV tray I gave you!" Mrs. Ellerby and Pete laughed together.
"If you must know," Ruby sniffed, "I need a shelter, close by, for emergencies."
Pete’s smile shrank to a thin line. "For meteors?"
"Yes," Ruby answered, "For meteors and more."
"Fine by me," Mrs. Ellerby examined the rings on her sprawled-out hand, "if it's okay with Mr. Morris. You'll have to ask him."
"Me?"
"Well you’re the one who wants it and he’s the one who lives there."
"Me?" Ruby looked through the screen door to the first-floor tenant's door. Then she whispered, "He was running some machine last night. It made interference on my TV."
"Oh a quick turn of a fork could cause interference on that old thing," she laughed through closed lips as Pete repeated "turn of a fork" with a laugh, and then Mrs. Ellerby added more seriously, "You go complain to him if you want."
"I don't want to cause trouble. Look, I’m just saying," Ruby whispered lower, "he's weird."
"Bologna!" Mrs. Ellerby burst, "He’s harmless. You want that basement? You go ask him yourself." Mrs. Ellerby tilted Pete's face to her with a finger and brushed his long bangs aside. "We have some other properties to visit."
"One two three. One two three four five. One two. One two three." Ruby flipped through cards of buttons, taking inventory on a ledger pad that made her feel official. Sal was still at her thread rack, a week later, trying to decide what follows dark green in the color spectrum. Ruby had suggested blue, but Sal insisted on testing various colors, rearranging, staring, starting over. Celine was at the register clicking up totals in rhythm to Ruby's verbal strings of numbers.
"You know," Sal hollered from her corner after the customer had gathered her purchase and left, "I've been thinking about those lights."
"There are no more lights. They never came back," Ruby continued, "One two three ¼ "
"Well, that's a shame because I was thinking that they weren’t ghosts at all but maybe headlights."
"What's that Sal?" Celine leaned to the counter, reading the morning paper crinkling between her hands. "What do you mean headlights? They'd of known that."
"No, headlights reflecting, like off the cows' eyes."
"Well forever more," Celine muttered.
"No Sal, it’s just a warning, about our society."
"A spark before a fire, I know." Sal stared at fistfuls of spooled thread and said to herself, "This khaki color, this might be the one."
While Ruby was counting, thumbing at buttons, she was thinking of the basement in the first floor apartment. She was thinking of sending Sal to ask Mr. Morris, the tenant, when Celine gasped and held the paper up to her face. "Ruby, get your butt over here!" Ruby sent the ledger fluttering to the floor beneath rows of buttons and rushed to Celine at the register. She thought maybe it was something about lights. "This is you! The End! You made it!"
"What's the hubbub?" Sal met Ruby and Celine at the counter and all three twisted their necks for a view of the paper in Celine's fists, tightening with excitement, crushing the edges.
"Look here," Celine said, directing their attention to the lower corner of the last page of section "D" in the Newsleader. "In the Poet’s Corner."
"That's me. That's me." It was all Ruby could say with both hands cupped to her neck and her mouth dropped crooked.
"You made it kid," Sal squeezed Ruby's shoulders and shook. "Next, a whole book of poems. You'll be famous like you always thought."
"We all knew it," Celine interjected.
"And you'll have to sign all your books right here in Dash’s Fabrics," Sal went on.
"Oh, Harry would like that," Celine nodded.
"That's me," Ruby said.
"Well, what are you waiting for? Read it to us." Celine shoved the paper at Ruby.
With the newspaper in hand, Ruby walked over to the cutting table, climbing up on top with her head near the florescent lights. "I should be up here for effect," she explained and Celine and Sal agreed. Ruby cleared her throat, straightened her skirt that hung all the way to her shoes, and closed her eyes with an upturned face. When she opened them once more, her body loosened from a straight line to something like a warrior stance achieved with a little jump on the table. She crouched just a little, feet apart, and looked severely at Celine and Sal who suddenly felt for each others hands without looking away from Ruby’s thin, stern face. Ruby glanced now and then at the poem on the page and read deeply, "The End. By Ruby Marie Duncan ¼ Underground. Safe and sound. Food. There is food in the shelter. We are not rude in the shelter. We brood for food. But there is ¼ enough. I'm in a bad mood. The world is gone. Blown up like a firecracker only much much bigger – like a gigantic Black Cat. Boom! There are no more dogs on the earth, no more frogs, no more logs, not even Lincoln Logs. Just us underground in the shelter. Together forever. Pass the beanie-weenies please." Ruby stood straight again with her face warming with a shy grin as she looked at her shoes, waiting for the praise. Celine and Sal dropped hands, and finally Sal said in awe, "It’s lovely dear."
"Lovely," Celine added as she helped Ruby down with an outstretched hand.
"I did it!" Ruby looked up at nothing and sighed. "I'm on my way."
"Of course you are," Sal agreed throwing a one-armed hug around Ruby's neck.
Ruby had walked up and down, up and down the flight of steps inside the apartment building. She pinched at her legs, pinched at her cheeks, pinched at short strands of hair. With all the excitement the day before, she had forgotten to ask Sal to ask Mr. Morris. Ruby would stop in front of Mr. Morris' door on the first floor and go back up to her own, then come down again. She had her fame. Now she needed a basement. "Your apartment? May I have your apartment? Wouldn't you like to be upstairs? Wouldn't you? With a Murphy bed and a view?" Ruby whispered through barely parted lips. "This is ridiculous. He's harmless. Harmless." She stopped at his door and examined the little brass "A" that was about to drop off and leave its clean, white outline. She knocked. The hinges of the door rattled and squeaked as it opened with a jerk.
"Yes?" Mr. Morris filled the gap between door and door frame. He was almost tall enough to duck under it. Two blood-shot eyes peered through the long curls of hair that hung to the length of his long beard. "Yes? What is it?" He almost growled. He shook a little when he spoke as if it were an effort to speak at all.
"I ¼ my name is Ruby Duncan. I live up-"
"Ruby Duncan?" He opened the door a little wider.
"Yes. I live upstairs-"
"Ruby Duncan?"
"Yes. And I wanted, well, Mrs. Ellerby said to ask-"
"Ruby Marie Duncan?"
"Yes," Ruby answered again, struggling to finish without looking at him, "Would you switch apartments with me?"
"You’re the poet," he said, "from the paper."
"Yeah," she said, beginning to slouch again, "but, I wondered if we could switch apartments."
"I read The End," he said, "and I thought, hey, this is good stuff. I taped it to the wall. And I highlighted your name with one of them yellow markers."
Ruby stood straight again. "What about switching?" At this point, she began to think of what state he would leave his place, what she might find taped to the walls, or hidden behind them. But still, she hoped for a basement of her own. "Would you switch?"
"You want a basement, right? Like your poem talks about, a shelter. Well, I’m thinking now, that's why I need the one I got."
"It's just ¼ it’s a" she was going to say "just a poem." She was going to pretend it didn't mean anything at all.
"The way I see it, your welcome to run down here and use it too. It'd be okay to have company anyhow, like your poem says. It says ¼ 'we.'"
Ruby shut her eyes for a second to the thought of this man and herself, survivors of nuclear devastation, trapped in his basement, sharing a can of beans. Ruby nodded and tried to step back a little without him noticing. She looked down at her hands shoved into pant pockets, down at her shoes, but she could still see him, his hair bigger than the gap in the doorway he allowed for his face, and his beard moving as he chewed on his lip.
"Besides, that's where I keep all my tools," Ruby looked up at him as he said this and then, under a jagged curtain of hair, he raised a brow, "for woodworking."
"Okay. I understand. That’s okay." Ruby backed up, still nodding, still pinching herself, making her way to the stairs, taking one step at a time as she said, "I better get back to my writing." She could see, in the slowly narrowing space between the door and doorframe, his knotted beard, his red eye, and the door clicked shut shaking the little brass "A" back and forth.
At 12:03 on Saturday afternoon, Ruby laced up her new Nikes and began her run from her doorway on the second floor, starting her time on the stop watch. As she passed Mr. Morris' door, she gave the "A" a knock and sent it spinning around its brass nail, protesting the loss of a basement. Out the front door, flying off the stoop like a seasoned hurdler, Ruby made her way to the sidewalk. Her skirt clung tight to her knees moving beneath and waved behind her. The hem of it floated up with the wind. All she could think about was The End and her name in print.
"Ruby!" Jack hurried out of his ice cream shop when he saw her running past pumping her arms. "Ruby! Hold up!"
She stopped at the oddity of Jack, leaving his store and standing in the street. "What is it, Jack?" Ruby asked, shaking her legs out, back-tracking to the ice cream shop.
"Well," Jack stood with his hands against his arched back and squinted at the sun behind Ruby, "I was wondering, since you're a celebrity around here now, if you might do the shop an honor." Jack led Ruby into the ice cream shop and they assumed their usual spots on opposite sides of the chest-high, glass encased ice cream counter. Through the slanted glass Ruby examined the circular tubs of ice cream in every color. She watched Jack's hand wrap around a metal scoop and carve a line in a brown and white swirled ice cream that curled against metal and rolled into a ball. Ruby shook her head as Jack explained that she just had to taste the new creation. It wasn’t ice cream but an ice cream float. He plopped the ice cream in a glass of root-beer. "Peanut butter, white chocolate, and root-beer," Jack said, and Ruby shook her head "no." He wanted the newly famous poet of The End to name the latest flavor, "but," he insisted with a half-grin, "you have to taste it to name it."
Her first task of fame. She was pleased the more she thought about it. Besides, there were bound to be more christenings and ribbon-cutting ceremonies and so forth. She might as well start with "Jack D's Ice Cream," she reasoned. "Alright," she said, reluctantly reaching for the glass. She held it to her nose smelling peanut butter and foam. Jack clasped his hands at his chest and rolled his lower lip in and out of his mouth. Ruby held the rim of the glass to her lips. First she dipped the tip of her tongue in foam, tasting air. Then she sipped a very small sip of a little root-beer, a little melted ice cream. She stared into the glass, thinking of a name, a clever, poetic name that everyone would expect of her. Meanwhile, Jack rubbed his hands together victoriously and tried to keep his smile at a moderate width. "Meltdown," Ruby said with certainty and handed the full glass back to him.
Jack printed the new flavor out on a slender white label and had Ruby sign it in her tiny writing. He took a Polaroid of Ruby in her spotless white running shoes, her stopwatch hanging from her neck, and a cone of vanilla ice cream in her fist, and wedged it beside the new label behind glass as a monument to The End and the fame to come.