RUBY

BarOnly thing more dangerous than women and whiskey is women and gin.

 

Ruby
By
Morgan Ayres

Sloe gin, bathtub gin, fine imported gin, it’s all the same to me and I hate the taste of all of it. Gin and Ruby get all mixed up in my mind when I drink too much, which I do from time to time when I think about that woman.

I first met Ruby on the sidewalk in front of Jesse’s, a hillbilly bar across from the train station where I used to go to watch the trains pull out and wish I was on one. It was one of those heavy, jasmine scented nights near the end of summer the week before I turned seventeen. Ruby was about twenty-six or twenty-eight, right in there, had flame red hair to her waist, go to hell green eyes and a switchblade in the hip pocket of her long legged skintight Wranglers.

Ruby snatched me off that sidewalk the way a hawk will take a backyard pussycat. Took me home with her and didn’t let go. We slept a little after dawn. Midmorning sun was streaming through the lace curtains when she woke me again and… We didn’t leave her room until she had to go to work that night and all I could think about was getting back to her.

Ruby lived in a one-room apartment over Jesse’s where she waitressed. At night the light from the red neon sign made her look like she was on fire. Hell, we were both on fire, all tangled in the sheets and each other. She played “The Wayward Wind,” night after night and it almost drowned out the music from Jesse’s. It was one of those old 33 1/3 records. We drank sloe gin, Beefeater gin, any damn gin she had. All she drank was gin.

I didn’t much like gin. But Ruby, well she was something else. So I drank with her. The juniper tasting stuff was bad enough but that sickly sweet sloe gin was the worst, except when it was mixed with the taste of her summer hot body. She would trickle some of that sweet stuff over her belly and it would run down thick and slow and mix in with her fiery tangle and then it was just fine.

It went on for weeks and I lost my job de-tasseling corn because I just couldn’t get up out of her bed in the morning. I would watch the sunrise through the arch of her knee my head on her smooth thigh and then she would turn to me and her eyes would catch a shaft of sunlight and glow devilish green with flecks of amber and it would start up again, not that it ever really stopped. We were all over each other even when we were asleep and we’d wake up pressed together so hard and tight it seemed like we were one person. I didn’t know how to say it even to myself but somehow I knew I had found something I had been looking for all my life.

In between times we looked out the window and watched the trains leaving the station and talked about going away together, maybe to New York or California. I would have left on one of those trains with her in a country minute not caring where it was going. But Ruby thought we’d travel better in a car. I had already all but left home. I only stopped by every day or so to change clothes and say hello to my folks. My Mom worried that I had lost my mind. Dad told her I was just summer crazy and that it would pass.

I never told anyone about Ruby. She was my secret and I figured the whole thing would lose something if I talked about it. But that didn’t stop me from making plans. I had my savings from working all summer and I figured I could just about afford an old Chevy that a guy I knew wanted to sell. I could see us, me behind the wheel and Ruby leaning on me as we headed out west for California or maybe back east to New York. Ruby couldn’t decide where she wanted to go, and me, I just wanted to go.

Ruby didn’t answer when I knocked on her door that last night. The bartender downstairs at Jesse’s said he had seen her in a convertible Cadillac car with a guy with slicked back hair. “Kinda city lookin fella,” he said.

I walked the streets until dawn looking for that Cadillac. Went back to her place and hammered on her door. No one answered. Finally I just flat kicked the door open and went in. The bed was neatly made. The closet was empty. Her record player was gone. The Wayward Wind was lying on top of the dresser. Next to it was a note weighed down by a bottle of Beefeaters gin. My heart clenched up and I cried like I hadn’t cried since I was five years old and my grandmother died. I broke the record tore up the note and threw that Goddamn bottle of gin right through the window.

I took it till I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I grabbed a fright train out of town. The Wayward Wind was running through my mind when I grabbed the ladder on the side of the boxcar and swung on board. I wanted to leave it all behind, the hick town and hillbilly bars, the miles wide cornfields and narrow minded people, even the Wildcat Creek with its cool fast running water and grassy banks where I tried a few times to forget about Ruby with one or another of the local girls.

Since then I’ve seen a lot of the world but I never was able to leave Ruby behind. She took up residence in my mind. Ruby, her room with the neon sign lighting the bed and us, the sound of honky-tonk music coming up from Jesse’s and mixing with the Wayward Wind, her silky skin and hair like fire and those green eyes that stole a young man’s soul.

Even after all these years if I saw Ruby walking down the street today I’d chase her down and tell her I still loved her, or wanted her and had to have her, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, or maybe it amounts to the same thing. I would grab her and drag her off not caring who she might be with or about anything else. I’m a grown man now and know a hell of lot more about women than I did when I was sixteen and I know down deep in my heart where it counts that with half a chance I could make Ruby mine.

I’ve never since drunk gin. Except for that cocktail party at the Watergate where I met Lyndon Johnson and drank too many martinis and got thrown out by those Secret Service fellows. But that’s another story.

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