Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Read online

  Why is she coming back for me? Another question with no answer. When I hear the door close behind her, I pull the sheet over my head, turn my face away from the window, and let myself sink under the dark currents to search for the elk. For some reason it’s important to find my way back to the elk.

  Instead, I go time traveling. Tonight, for once, the Alibi features live music in the lounge. Three young guys on the bandstand play while one or two couples leave their drinks to dance on the tiny dance floor. For all the live music it’s a slow night in the restaurant, so in between carrying trays of dirty dishes to the kitchen, I can hang out in the archway between the restaurant and lounge and listen.

  Not that I’m into their music. I’m a smart-ass sixteen-year-old, and I know everything worth knowing, and this summer I’ve been listening to Nirvana and Eminem. From these guys’ clothes and their long hair, I hoped they’d be into rock, but no, they’re playing covers of country songs, mostly popular shit like “Unbroken,” George Strait and that, the overly produced crap I hear blaring from other people’s car radios, but occasionally something older and better. They’re pretty good. The lead guitarist is damned good, in fact. At some point in the unforeseeable future, I’ll learn that he’s had classical training but turned his back on it to start his own garage band in Boise. Now the band’s been all over the West, and they’ve got their name on a poster in front of the bandstand, The Idaho Rivermen, and they’re headed for fame and fortune.

  I can tell they love some of the older, crossover classics when the lead guitarist, also the vocalist, sings “Hickory Wind” in a sweet sad tenor. He’s wearing blue jeans and a dark-blue satin shirt unbuttoned halfway down, and he’s got long tawny hair and a jawline my fingers want to trace. I will hear the hickory wind in my head for a long time after tonight.

  I’m too young to wait tables or serve cocktails, and there’s an invisible line between the restaurant and the lounge I’m forbidden to cross. Dave the bartender doesn’t have much to do on this slow night, and he’s keeping an eye on me. He knows I’m underage and Brad Gilcannon, my policeman foster father, will give him hell if I’m late getting home. Brad’s already unhappy with me. Brad hates that I’ve quit school, hates that I’m busing dishes in the Alibi two nights a week, hates that I spend so much time with my piano teacher, and he holds as strict a line on me as he can. Still, Dave may not realize how young I really am. Even at sixteen, I’m a tall girl.

  When their set finishes, the guys in the band head for the men’s room. The drummer and the rhythm guitarist come back and sprawl in a booth so close to my invisible line that I smell their sweat and beer fumes. Maybe that was their last set for the night because Dave the bartender wipes his hands on his pants and gives me a dirty look as he serves them a round of beers.

  The lead guitarist brushes my shoulder on his way back from the men’s room and looks down to see who he’s bumped into.

  Hey, darlin! He’s a head taller than I am and so lean and rangy that his blue satin shirt hangs from his shoulders. He smiles, and I melt, and he puts an arm around me and leads me to the booth where the other two guys have started on their beers and are talking about breaking down their gear and loading it in the van.

  Dave looks up sharply and comes around the bar, wiping his mustache. He’s had one or two himself on this slow night.

  Ruby, you’re outta line, you know you’re not supposed to be in here!

  Hey! She’s fine!

  Dave looks around at his last paying customers and then at the guys from the band who have paychecks to spend.

  Just so you don’t order nothing for her.

  The boys tell me their names. Brazos Keene, the rhythm guitarist; Bill Jamison, who everybody calls Bill the Drummer; and Gall. Gall Margarus, the lead guitarist and vocalist. I tell them I’m Ruby. Gall keeps his arm around me, and I feel heaven in his warmth through his blue satin shirt.

  Another round of beers, and then Bill the Drummer leaves the booth and starts striking the set on the bandstand, unplugging speakers and winding up electrical cords. Gall and Brazos watch him work and talk about learning to read music. For some reason Brazos is trying to learn, but he’s finding it hard after years of picking everything up by ear.

  Lazy, says Gall.

  Oh hell! Easy for you to talk. You learned what, when you were about six?

  I pipe up: I can read music.

  They both seem to remember I’m there.

  Do you know how to play?

  Yes.

  Aw, I bet you don’t.

  An old piano stands closed and battered at the back of the bandstand. I’ve never seen anybody touch it, but I slide out of the booth and run to the bandstand and open the lid of the piano. Even Bill the Drummer stops working to listen as I dash into Tarantella.

  Holy shit, I guess you really can!

  *

  The nurse who comes to check me out of Versailles Memorial Hospital has a bristle of bright-red hair over an eroded face. “So you’re Ruby Gervais,” she says, pronouncing my name in the old Versailles way, Jarvis. Szcher-vay, Brazos had taught me to say.

  “I always wondered what became of you,” she adds. I know from her tight smile that she remembers all the old stories, and I suppose in returning to Versailles, population something under ten thousand, I’m bound to bump into others who remember. Brad Gilcannon for one. My mother for another.

  She takes my blood pressure and checks my temperature while I sit on the edge of the bed. She makes quick chart notes with a pen that jabs the paper, and then she hands me my boots, which look as though the Alaska mud has been scrubbed off with a brush, and also a plastic bag.

  “Your clothes. She washed them for you. Go ahead and get dressed. I’ll walk you to the door. Hospital regulations.”

  My blue jeans, my shirt, my socks, and even my underpants, clean and neatly folded. I’m embarrassed at the thought of Mrs. Pence seeing the stained crotch of my underpants and laundering them; I can’t look up or even slide off the bed to get dressed, although the nurse taps her clipboard with her pen while she waits for me to get on with it.

  “Sorry.”

  Again the tight smile. “You ought to be. You have a lot to be sorry for.”

  Mrs. Pence waits in front of the gift shop, across from the admissions desk. Under the harsh overhead fluorescents, I see her face clearly and am shocked at how she has aged. In my young eyes she always was old, of course, but now her face is scored and drawn over her cheekbones, and her skin looks transparent.

  “I’ve parked the Pontiac right by the curb,” she says, while I try not to look at the potted flowers and grinning stuffed toys as she leads me past the gift shop’s display window. Automatic plate glass doors open in front of us. “Are you all right? Can you walk?” she asks, and I nod, although I feel tottery.

  Sure enough, there’s the old green Pontiac with the chrome Indian head on its hood. It can’t be the same car, or can it, after ten years? When I’m a month from turning twenty-seven? Or am I already twenty-seven? An old woman? My birthday is in late July, and surely this is late May, but I lost track of the seasons in Anchorage, where the only constant was the wind.

  I’ve never seen the Pontiac moving, much less ridden in it. Mrs. Pence kept it parked in the little detached garage at the end of the driveway next to her house, where she grew a row of hollyhocks in summer—but how do I know that, when I’ve never been inside that garage?

  Yet here is the Pontiac, and here is Mrs. Pence, behind the elegant steering wheel with the head of the Indian carved on the chrome horn button. The late afternoon sun through the windshield has turned the air stuffy and the upholstery hot. I take a deep breath and automatically reach for a seat belt, but of course the Pontiac is too old for such amenities, and so I lean back in the bench seat as we pull out of the hospital’s parking lot and turn up the grade at a stately twenty miles an hour.

  3

  The foyer of Mrs. Pence’s house looks exactly as I remember and yet disturbingly a
ltered, as though disguised as its former self. Wallpaper in a dim damask stripe, a rack for coats, the first actual umbrella stand I ever saw, and the framed and faded photograph of the famous Ray Pence, the decorated American airman who met and married the young English pianist and brought her home to Versailles, Montana, with him. Ray Pence gazes toward the door in his uniform cap and jacket, handsome and impervious to time. His faint smile seems to expect goodness to walk through the door toward him. It’s me, Ruby, I want to warn him.

  Jonathan patters to greet us, wagging the stump of his tail. Like Ray Pence, Jonathan expects goodness, and I feel sad for them both.

  “I’m sorry about the stairs,” says Mrs. Pence.

  The flight of uncarpeted stairs leads to a landing and the shadows of the second floor. During the years I walked through Mrs. Pence’s front door with my backpack of music for my weekly lesson, right up until I turned sixteen and ran away with the Idaho Rivermen, I always continued down the hallway to the sunny room where the pianos waited, never up those stairs, although I used to imagine climbing them and sliding down the walnut bannister. But now I follow Mrs. Pence, who insists on carrying my backpack, while Jonathan runs back and forth in his excitement. My incision stings with each step, and I’m glad for the bannister rail.

  Mrs. Pence sets down my backpack against a white-painted dresser. “The bathroom is next door, and you’ll want to get some rest, dear. Come along, Jonathan.”

  I think of curling up on that bed and pulling the comforter over my head. But I turn and startle nearly out of my skin at a shape that glares at me through an uncombed mass of dark hair. It moves when I move, and I catch my breath and see the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

  So it’s come to this. I was sixteen years old, Gall held me in his strong warm arms, and the music he and Brazos and Bill the Drummer played was rich. The throb of guitars, the lyrics—dream a dream . . . safe in his arms . . . until the end of time—the length of a measure of music was all that mattered. Now, in a second-floor bedroom in my old piano teacher’s house, I see a tall gaunt woman with tangled dark hair and a witch’s face. If the sight of myself scares me, what will it do to everybody else?

  *

  Isaiah must have been looking for me that night. I realize that now. No reason he would have wandered into the Alibi and just happened to spot me sitting in the booth with the guys from the band.

  Ruby, get outta here. Brad’s looking for you, says Isaiah.

  Gall bristles up beside me. He’s in Isaiah’s face—And what’s that to you?

  Whoa, says Bill the Drummer, always the level head of the Rivermen, which I will learn later, of course. Bill reaches around me and lays a hand on Gall’s shoulder.

  Isaiah isn’t having any peacemaking. You guys know how old she is?

  And I’m telling you to back on outta here!

  Dave is watching us from behind the bar. He sets down the glass he’s been polishing and braces himself for trouble. I can make plenty of trouble for him, and Isaiah can too, for that matter. Dave can’t have underage kids hanging out in the Alibi, and if I’m an underage sixteen, Isaiah’s an underage nineteen, although he’s been out on his own since he was younger than me, emancipated from foster care by a judge after yet another fight with Brad Gilcannon.

  Isaiah bends over me to speak into my ear. Makes me look at him. Ruby. Brad’s driving his prowl car around with his bubble on, checking all the streets. He’ll have your ass if he spots you.

  Gall’s ready to fight—And who the hell is Brad?

  I got a car parked in the alley. If you get in the back seat and lay down—

  We can do a damn sight better than that for her, says Gall, and somehow I know what’s going to happen next. Bill has the amps and instruments and other shit all packed and loaded, and now everybody is getting up, and Brazos is laying down bills to pay for the beers. And Gall hugs my shoulders, comforting me.

  *

  The guys had been planning to leave Versailles the morning after they finished their gig at the Alibi. They would drive west over Lolo Pass to Lewiston, Idaho, where they had a week’s contract. But they already had their amps and instruments packed in the van that night. Brazos had objected; there was a girl living in Versailles he’d once known in Boise, and he’d hoped to see her, although she told him she loved somebody else. But Gall had laughed at him—heartbroken!—and it took less than a minute of exchanged glances and few words for the guys to bundle me under their sleeping bags and head out of town. It was years before I realized what a chance they were taking, driving with a sixteen-year-old over a state line with her policeman foster father looking for her. But they hadn’t been old enough themselves to worry overmuch.

  Who, that girl that played the piano? No, I dunno where she went. Do you, Gall?

  She said something about walking home, didn’t she?

  That’s probably what she did.

  The van rumbles around the sharp curves of Highway 12, making better time now that we’re over the mountains and safe in Idaho. Brazos hasn’t said any more about the girl in Versailles. He’s driving the van. Later I will learn that he always drives. Bill the Drummer has pulled an acoustic guitar from behind the second seat. He plays, and they all sing a song I’ve never heard, about a girl who ran away from her husband, whose big mistake had been buying her a Ford Econoline, although we’re not in an Econoline but an old Volkswagen van, where I nestle with Gall in the sleeping bags and breathe in his sweet skin while he kisses me along my hairline.

  I’m warm and contented and drowsy, and I drift in and out of sleep until suddenly the brakes screech and we’ve come to a halt.

  Not Brad, don’t let it be Brad, is my first thought.

  Holy Christ, would you look at that!

  And now we’re all awake and sitting up and staring out the windshield at the giant in the headlights. Its head with its heavy, branching crown of antlers turns to stare back at us with eyes as fiery as though it were sending us a flaming message from the world of the wild: My blessing on your way!

  Or so I perceive in the moment. Later Brazos will explain that the bull elk couldn’t possible have seen us, couldn’t have seen anything but the blinding headlights, but in the now Brazos cuts the headlights, and the beast makes its stately way across the highway, followed by another and another and another: huge shadowy beasts in no hurry.

  Brazos finds his voice. That was the Selway elk herd. Glad I saw that. What a sight!

  Bill the Drummer lets out his breath—I’m just glad the brakes were good.

  We drive on toward Lewiston. In the hum from the heater, in the stink of male bodies and the comfort of close and sheltering arms, I feel blessed and safe, as though nothing bad can happen to me as long as Gall holds me and Brazos drives and Bill plays the guitar and sings softly about rain and snow and loss and love.

  What did I think? That the Selway elk herd could save me? I have no answers. I kick off my boots, drop my blue jeans, drag the comforter over me, and shut my eyes against the light.

  *

  I wake to angry shouts below my window. At first, as I struggle out of the tangle of sheet and comforter, I think I’m in the motel in Anchorage, in the room with the wallpaper elk. You bitch! You fucking whore! But it isn’t Gall who is shouting under my window. This is a woman’s voice, hurtling words like nails being driven into a board. She’s interrupted by a softer voice, but she breaks in with a furious rattle of words I can’t make out but know are meant to hurt.

  In my underpants and bare feet, I run to the window and look down over the shingled roof of the porch. The day has darkened. A streetlight illuminates the cottonwood leaves and the foreshortened figures of two women, one on either side of the gate in the picket fence. Mrs. Pence has her back to me, but I see the face of the dark-haired woman clearly, and I know who she is, although fury distorts her features, and I know she has reason to hate me but not why she would hate Mrs. Pence.

  From her diatribe I pick out a single phrase
—You’ll be sorry you took her in—and I watch, naked and bereft, as the dark-haired woman turns and runs away, leaving the gate in the picket fence swinging behind her. She tears open the door of a car parked by the curb, gets in, and slams the door. Headlights burst on, tires squeal on gravel, and she’s gone, although the gate still swings until Mrs. Pence reaches out and latches it.

  My mother.

  4

  Rosalie, the latest one-name girl to sing at the festival, has a voice like a bell was what a columnist wrote about my mother’s performance at the Monterey music festival. Not the famous festival, of course; she was born too late to have run away from Montana and sung with Jimi Hendrix and Janis and the Airplane and the other legendary names. But at some time in the late 1970s she sang in Monterey and was written about in the papers, and she saved the clippings in a cardboard box in a closet in the rented house where she lived after she came back to Versailles.

  At the thought of my mother on some interminable Greyhound journey back to Montana, wounded and sick, with her feet leading her because her mind had given up on her, I’m stricken by the sense that, unknowingly, I’ve followed the same byways on the circular course that led her to that rental house on the north side of the Milk River and me to this second-floor bedroom in Mrs. Pence’s house in the Orchards.

  At least I haven’t come back pregnant. Or with a new baby in my arms. I’ve never known whether I was born before she left California or after she came back to Montana.

  *

  Time traveling. I am eight years old, and I should have gone to school today, but my mother has been gone for a long time, and I am lonely and hungry. The milk in the refrigerator tastes bad, but I have found some crackers to nibble while I wander out of the kitchen to find traces of her. In the living room, a couch and a TV on a tubular stand. In my little bedroom, a cot and a chest of drawers that hold my school clothes. In my mother’s bedroom, where I am not supposed to be, the tumbled bed and the guitar in its zipped black case. I open her closet door, where dust balls have found the corners but her few clothes still smell of her. On the shelf is a faded orange cardboard box with a picture of a cowboy hat on its side. Curious, I lift it down.