Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin by Blew Mary Clearman;

Author:Blew, Mary Clearman; [Blew, Mary Clearman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000 Fiction / Literary
ISBN: 5448582
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

21

On the way home from campus, I stop at the big mall on the edge of the Orchards and find it crowded with summer sales racks.

The air-conditioning blows full blast, and a few tired-looking women poke around among the outsized bathing suits and dusty sundresses nobody wanted to buy when they first arrived in the shops last spring. I look at a table of limp T-shirts in pastel colors like leftover Easter eggs and feel depressed.

I had kept the red skirt and vest in a big canvas carryall, folded in newspapers to keep the suede from creasing, and whenever we’d checked into motels, I shook it out and hung it up. The canvas carryall was gone too. Strange, when I can feel its drag on my shoulder and the way its strap bit down when I had to carry it too far. There must have been a day when I saw the red suede for the last time, but there had been too much bad shit coming down for me to notice.

*

I knew where Gall had hidden his cash. I still had the key to his room—our room—and I felt behind the panel under the bathroom sink until I got my fingers around the roll of bills and pulled them out and stuck them into my brassiere. I came out of the bathroom and knew I was seeing our room for the last time: wallpaper printed with elk walking through fir trees, a couple of enlarged photographs of mountain peaks capped with snow, and a bedspread and sheet pulled most of the way on the floor, stinking of Gall and the Screamer, stinking of Brazos and me.

I kept doubling over, I felt so bad. The digital clock on the bed stand showed 5:00 a.m. in red. I must have—well, I must have known I could catch a flight from the Anchorage airport down to the Lower 48 because I called for a taxi and stuffed what I could find of my clothes into my backpack, along with Gall’s T-shirt that I found tangled in the bedsheets. I couldn’t have managed the carryall even if I’d remembered it. I threw the room key on the stand beside the clock. When my taxi, with me in the back seat, pulled past the lighted motel coffee shop, I caught sight of Brazos and Bill the Drummer in a window booth. From the way their heads jerked and hands gestured, they probably still were shouting at each other about the wild night and whatever they’d had to do with Gall and whether Bill really was bailing from the band. They never saw me. I was too sick to care.

*

“Ruth!”

I nearly jump out of my skin. I’ve been far away, and now I’m back in the Versailles mall, where the air-conditioning is brutal and the lighting so diffuse that it casts no shadows, where something resembling music plays over a sound system, where shoppers pick over racks and tables of faded goods, where I’m Ruth, not Ruby.

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