RUCKUS
GENE
When Cora finished lining me out over what to do in That Woman’s yard, Brother come got me and we went down to the jail, put twenty dollars on the commissary of this girl from church. I was still inside when I seen Hubert Jewell out in the parking lot. His hair ran across his head in stripes, his eyebrows wadded together like plug tobacco. He was rubbing his arm muscles, which was like rocks. Hubert Jewell wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t nobody to mess with neither. Cats walked the other way when they seen Hubert Jewell. His nephew, skinny Albert Jewell, stooped to talk in his ear and Hubert turned away. Albert was Dawn’s brother. You’d see him in town, moving on all the store girls, gunning his big loud truck through red lights,
I was going to stand there till they passed, but the jail woman said, “Is that it?” and before I thought, I said it was and went outside.
Hubert Jewell said to Albert, “If you don’t know how to do it, you shouldn’t do it.”
I kept my head down, walked towards Brother’s vehicle.
Albert said, “What are you looking at?”
I looked up before I thought and said, “Nothing,” then seen Albert Jewell wadn’t talking to me. Albert said, “I aint talking to you, old dude,” and Hubert said something to him I couldn’t hear.
When I got close enough, Brother said, “Get in the damn car.” When I did, he said, “What are you thinking? It’s a dumbass step in the middle of two Jewells arguing.”
Brother fanned the gas, put the vehicle in gear, bounced over the railroad tracks, and threw gravel pulling out on the Drop Creek road.
“They’s a hundred women in there,” Brother said, pointing at the recovery center next to the jail. “A hundred women separated from mankind. Aint right.” When I didn’t say nothing to that, Brother spit his chewing gum out the window, said, “I heard Albert say that Tricia Jewell is ratting on Hubert.”
I said, “Why would she do that?”
Brother felt of his back tooth with his finger, said, “I’m gonna take them rehab girls some chewing gum.”
I said, “I might go back and work some more.”
Brother said, “Let’s go get some chewing gum for them women.”
I said, “We could.” Brother stepped on the gas. I said, “But I’d just as soon go work.”
Brother looked at me, then at the road. He had his vehicle wound up to where I thought it would fly apart. Brother said, “You’re a sight.”
Brother took me back over to That Woman’s. I started in on the ivy work and yard trimming. That Woman sat at a fold-up table on the porch, wearing a peach-pop tanktop and a flouncy flowerdy skirt, drinking a beer lit up by the sunshine, beer yellow as a caution light, out of a girl-shaped glass. She wrote in the book she was reading. I’d set a load of brush at the bottom of the steps and was heading back up the hill to the backyard. I wadn’t going to say nothing, just walk on, get on with my business.
“Say, Gene,” she said.
“Say,” I said, squinting up at her.
She said, “Be careful,” and I thought, shoo, I’d be careful with her, whatever she wanted me to take care with. I went on in the backyard, fired up the weedeater, let myself get lost in that.
Before long, Hubert Jewell come up the steps, Albert trailing behind, looking down at the muscles in his arms. I kept on weedeating. A while later, I seen them go back down. When I got done edging, I cut down ivy a while, hauled it off. I got the work going good enough I could give my mind over to think about things. Spent some time trying to think like a fish, so it’d be easier to catch fish. Thinking about having eyes on either side of my head give me a headache, and I had to stop thinking like a fish, least for a while.
Sun got close to the ridgeline. Bugs started to stir. I went to see if That Woman might still be on her porch. She wadn’t, but when I come up the steps, she come out, stood in the empty doorframe, said, “Gene, what are we going to do about a door?”
I said I didn’t know. She smiled and blinked real slow. She might have had another beer. I couldn’t see it mattered much. She wadn’t no drunk. You could see that.
She said, “How much I owe you?” I named a figure and she said, “OK.”
She was easy to work with. Always was.
She said, “Do you want a glass of water?” I told her I could drink some water. She wasn’t gone a second before she come back with a glass full.
I said, “You want, I could get Brother to hang a new door for you.”
She said, “You reckon we could get it done tomorrow?”
I said, “I’m sure we could.”
We stood there saying nothing. There’s days I go without talking to nobody. I hadn’t talked much at all, really, since Easter. Not since Sister died.
That Woman’s eyes darted like dragonflies. I felt she had something on her mind, something she wanted to talk about. I figured it had to do with Hubert Jewell coming up there. Figured it had to do with what Brother said about her sister telling on people. That Woman’s eyes settled off over my shoulder.
“I start teaching my class Tuesday,” she said. “I reckon Monday’s the holiday.”
I said, “I reckon that’s right.”
She squeezed hard on the door hinge. I asked her did it bother her to stay there without no door.
“I don’t reckon,” she said. “Should it?”
I sipped on my water. “I’d keep an eye on you if you like.”
She said she didn’t need that.
I said, “Let me know. There aint nobody else there at Sister’s.”
She said, “They gone for the holidays?”
I said, “Something like that.”
That Woman set on an old rocking chair with a fake leather seat.
I said, “I seen Hubert Jewell come up here.”
The sun went behind the ridge and everything got darker in a way made my head light. In the dim, That Woman’s face turned up at me, cool as the air from a coal mine.
She said, “You know him?”
I said, “Not really.”
That Woman rocked in her rocking chair. She looked at me awhile and then she looked out over the town, said “Did you ever get in over your head, Gene?”
“Several times,” I said. “Mostly out at the lake.”
She smiled.
I said,
“Is that right?” That Woman said.
“Like a cinderblock with hair, she said.”
That Woman said, “Mine too.”
I was getting my talking ability back. I was about to sit down in the other rocking chair next to That Woman when she said, “Well, thank you, Gene,” in a goodbye way. She gave me forty dollars. I told her when I’d be back with Brother to get her a door and I went up the hill and back over to where I lived, in the little house out behind Sister’s.
DAWN
Friday night, I was going back to Tennessee, to be with my husband Willett Bilson and his parents for 4th of July. Aunt June took me up to