They drove out of the mountains and into the city, right up to the door of the big hotel where all the contestants were supposed to stay. Mama made Ruby sit in the car in the garage under the hotel until after she got them registered and had the key to the room in her hand. Then she went down to the car and had Ruby ride up in the service elevator so no one’d get to see her.
That’s how she always did it. That’s how it’d always worked before.
This time he was watching, and Mama, who always seemed to know everything, never even knew.
He’d heard about Ruby, seen the tapes of all the other pageants. At first he told himself he was just doing it for the story—“Secrets of Mystery Glamour Queen Revealed!”—but the splinter of his soul that still believed he was a real writer told him another story.
He’d seen the tapes: the judges, almost evenly divided between the ones who looked ready to let their next yawn send them all the way off to dreamland and the ones who devoured the girls with their eyes; the audience, papered over with politic-perfect neutral smiles, playing no favorites, putting their own faces on the runway bodies or else imagining those bodies in their own beds; the girls themselves, shining, bouncing, gleaming for their lives. And her.
No hope, once she took the stage, no hope for anyone at all to take it back again. She’d always come in wearing whatever it was the contest demanded — bathing suit or business suit, evening gown or kitschy cowgirl outfit, furs, sequins, fringes, fluff, leather, lotion, vinyl, sweat — it didn’t matter. She wore them all, always with that one accessory that didn’t belong but that she could no more forget to wear than her bright bloodred lipstick.
All it was was a scarf. Just a wispy chiffon scarf the color of a summer garden’s heart, a scarf she wore wrapped tightly around her head like a turban.
Not for long. He’d seen the tapes. She’d make her first appearance in the pageant with the scarf tied around her head, go one-two-three across the stage to deadliest center, reach up, give the tag end of it the merest twitch, the slightest tug, and then …
BAM! Hair. Roils and curls and seething clouds of hair erupting anywhere you’d think it could be and a whole lot of places you never imagined. Down it came, all the waves of it, the golden spilling wonder of it, the flash flood of thick, endless, unbound tresses that drenched her from head to toes in impossible glory, bright as a polished sword. Hair that mantled her in the ripples of a sun-kissed sea, remaking her in the image of a new Venus, born from the heart of the foam. Hair that boiled down to hide the swell of her breasts, the jut of her ass, and every tantalizing curve of her besides just enough to say, It’s here, baby, but you can’t have it, and oh my, yes, I know that only makes you want it more.
Hair that was the sudden curtain rung down over the beauty of her body, a sudden, sharp HANDS OFF sign that made the half-slumbering judges wake up to the realization that they’d missed out, made the ravenous ones howl for the feast that had been snatched away from their eyes. And while they all gasped and murmured and scribbled their thwarted hearts out on the clipboards in their hands, she did a quick swivel-turn, flicked her trailing mane neatly, gracefully aside, out from under spike-heeled foot, and made her exit, clipping a staccato one-two-three from the stage boards, each jounce of her hair-swathed hips nothing more than a whisper, a promise, a deliriously wicked little secret peeping out from under the glimmering veil.
Sometimes the other contestants raised a fuss, but what could they do? Nothing in the rules against a girl wearing a scarf in, on, or over her hair; let them wear their own if they wanted.
As if that’d give them more than a butterfly’s prayer in hell! He knew. He’d seen the tapes, and once — just once, by the sort of accident that slams a man’s legs out from under him and smashes a fist through his heart — he’d seen her. A reporter’s supposed to cover police calls, but when it’s a false alarm about a stickup at the box office of the auditorium where the pageant’s happening, well, what’s a man to do? Toss it all up and go home when there’s something else worth seeing? Of course he stayed to see her. He’d seen the tapes, but this was something else again.
And how. Seeing her pull that stunt with the scarf in person burned all the tapes to ash in his memory. He stood there, at the back of the auditorium, and felt the air conditioner dry his tongue as he gaped, blast-frozen in an impact of hair and hair and hair. Down it came, every strand taking its own tumbling path through spotlight-starred air, even the tiniest tendril of it lashing itself tight around his heart.
That night he dreamed about her and woke up in a tangle of love-soiled sheets. That morning he went in to see his editor and asked to leave the crime beat for just the shortest while to dog a different sort of story.
He pitched it hard and he pitched it pro. Human interest, yeah, that’s the ticket! Everyone knew about this girl but nobody really knew a goddamn thing. Shame if the state’s next Miss America shoo-in got to hold onto her secrets. There were no secrets anyone could hold onto once she headed for the big-time, the biggest pageant of them all, and wouldn’t it be a shame if the honest citizens of this great state got left with egg on their faces in case this girl’s secrets were of the sort that smeared the camera lens with slime?
His editor bought it and bit down hard. He set his hook and ran before second thoughts could intrude. That was how he’d come to be down there, waiting in the shadows of the hotel’s underside, standing watch over the elevators in a borrowed busboy uniform, pretending to fix the cranky wheel of a food service cart. He’d done his homework, he’d checked out all the talk about how no one ever saw her before the pageant. He knew she had to get into the hotel somehow, that you couldn’t just pluck that much woman out of thin air. Simple, really, the way it was done. He didn’t waste much time thinking over why it was done at all.
Her mama never even noticed him when she came down in the service elevator to fetch Ruby from the garage. He was the “help,” invisible to her until called for. Women of a certain age would sooner give a nod of recognition to a potted plant than to the man he was pretending to be. When the two women came out of the garage and he managed the supposed miracle of fixing the food service cart just in time to share a ride up with them, he saw the old bitch’s mouth go a tad tight, but she never so much as acknowledged his presence in the elevator.
He punched the button for five, she punched twelve. “Oops.” He grinned and punched fifteen. That prune pit mouth hardened even more, but that was as far as the hag would go to admitting his existence. A fat lot he cared! He’d seen what he’d come to see … nearly.
Braids. God damn it all to hell, she was wearing braids.
Mama hung up the phone and snorted, mad. “Of all the nerve.”
“What is it, Mama?” Ruby came out of the bathroom, dewy and glowing from a hot shower, her wet hair trailing down her back, a golden serpent sinking into the sea.
“Can you believe the gall of those petty-minded creatures?”
“Who?” Mama was so upset she didn’t even bother yelling at Ruby to put a towel around her nakedness.
“The judges. They want to know why you can’t room with one of the other contestants.”
Ruby’s big blue eyes opened wide and melting-sweet with hope. She looked just like a dog that sees a house door left just a crack ajar and all the wide world beckoning sunlit beyond. “Room with …? Oh! That a part of the official rules, Mama? I wouldn’t mind doing it, if that’s so. I wouldn’t want to get disqualified just for—”
“I know what you wouldn’t mind.” Mama was a thin slice of steel, edged, flying down straight to cut off all foolish notions. “I’ve made it my business to study the contest rules. There is no such a one. Most likely one of the judges has a favorite — some little chippy who’s not too particular about who she does to win what’s your rightful crown. Only thing is, the judge must’ve seen your past wins, he knows his pet whore hasn’t got a prayer going up against you honestly, how she can’t begin to compete with what you’ve got to show. So he wants the two of you shoved together so she can check out your weak spots.”