Ephram felt his lips moving. “I ain’t got no money on me, Gub.”
The two had been fast friends at thirteen, but the memory of that had long since faded into the wallpaper. Now they grunted at one another if they happened to pass on the street.
“Then play me fo’ that cake.”
Percy interjected, “Cake worth more than two bits.”
Moss added, “I seen it go for as high as seven dollars at the Juneteenth auction.”
Gubber relented. “Hell, I’ll give you five whole dollars if you win, which you ain’t ’bout to do.” Suddenly Ephram wanted to be rid of the cake. Wanted it stuffed between Gubber’s large teeth, so he nodded yes and the porch leaned in to watch. Moss eased the store door open again and Miss P peeked out of the screen, ever grateful for Moss’s timely gallantry. It was almost closing time, but she would let the boys finish their dominoes.
The “cake game” lived in the mouths of men until suppertime. It wasn’t an event of great consequence, but it was something. Gubber Samuels had lain down the gauntlet and Ephram Jennings had picked it up. They’d had Moss hold the cake while the two men played. Gubber won the draw. They’d chosen their seven bones and quick as lightning Gubber slapped down a double six. Ephram hadn’t one single six and that fast had to knock. Gubber put down a blank/six combo. Again Ephram had to pass. So Gubber had started talking dirt about Ephram’s luck and added something about his flat feet. At one point Gubber was down to four bones before Ephram laid a single tile. Everyone talked about how steady and solemn Ephram had played Gubber, how even when they were down to one tile each, Ephram hadn’t once looked up from the game. When he laid out that four/two and Gubber had to admit that he was beat, Gubber got so mad that he messed up his cussing. “Fucker-mother, bitches of sons.” Until the whole porch laughed. In the end after Ephram won, folks talked about how he walked from the porch in a kind of daze.
How Gubber Samuels had followed after him and whispered something that made Ephram yank away, cake teetering, then stomp down the road. How Gubber made his way back to his seat and grinned, “Don’t mess with a man ain’t wet his wick in twenty year.”
Charlie eased the door closed as Miss P counted out her register. He bent low. “Ain’t natural.”
“Been knowing his crusty butt too long,” Gubber expounded. “Lying, carrying angel cake, sweating aftershave? Mule out courting.”
Chauncy Rankin stated fact. “Nothing more pitiful than a grown fella lose track his manhood.”
Gubber added, “Shit so backed up he like to kill some poor bitch when he let loose.”
Charlie looked out towards the darkening woods. “Who he sparking out that’a way? Ain’t nothing but Rupert Shankle’s and a patch of headstones.”
A flash glinted in Chauncy’s eye. “And Ruby Bell.”
“Jesus wept.” Charlie blanched.
Miss P easily put the game away inside of the door, then walked out of the store and put her key in the ancient lock. Her movements ushered the men from the porch.
As he stepped onto the road Chauncy whistled and said, “Like collecting brimstone in hell. Man hit the jackpot.”
Gubber spit. “Waste a good cake, you asked me.”
The men gathered close like old hens for one last scratch of sundown gossip — then scattered, each to his own dinner table to fill their bellies with the steaming, spiced handiwork of women.
FOR EPHRAM Jennings the game had been a kind of water torture of the mind. He remembered a picture book that Charlie and Lem passed around at Bloom’s some Saturday nights, of women doing all manner of things. It made him both ashamed and excited. Naked and twisting, mouths open, kneeling, waists bent, bodies like feed bags, fit to each man’s liking. Then he put Ruby’s face on each of those mind pictures and lost the fight against embarrassment, Devil lust and jealousy. And worst of all, fear. He knew in the moment that he could never, even in his dreams, fill the well of Chauncy Rankin’s voice, the gait of his stride, or the practiced slide of his touch.
So a hope that had lived in Ephram for thirty-five years against odds even Job couldn’t fathom died. Right there on the steps of P & K. With the sun yawning towards night and eleven grown men laughing around him.
It wasn’t that Ephram hadn’t sampled some bit of life for himself. When he turned sixteen K.O. had lied to Celia about a Young Men’s Bible Conference, and instead dragged Gubber and him down to Fair Street in Beaumont. He’d said it was something a boy’s daddy ought to do, but since neither boy had one, he had taken on the job.
The woman had been banana pudding yellow and as fat as a prize hog, with a pink corset pushing and shoving her flesh into place, but her face was smooth and sweet as a child’s doll, and her top lip had been painted into two little red triangles. She’d smelled like sweat, ammonia and Tootsie Pops. He’d fumbled and tumbled until her impatient hand guided him to her soft center. The release had been magnificent. Almost as great as the shame that followed.
Many years later there had been Gubber’s cousin, Baby Girl, fast, young and shaped like trouble. His one true girlfriend. She never removed her panties but let him do whatever was possible with the benefit of loose elastic around her full, plump legs. He spent every dime he made on her, until they were discovered behind P & K, where Celia had followed him. She yanked them apart so hard and fast, Baby’s panties, at long last, fell to the ground. After a night of demons being prayed from his flesh by Celia and ten good church members, that was the end of that.
Ephram walked farther into the piney woods and felt a low ebb tickling his joints, his knees. As he crossed the clearing Ruby’s gris-gris slipped to the ground and was covered by a puff of dust.
This thing Chauncy had spoken of, like in Lem’s book — this deed. Ephram tried to push this new act away from the picture of Ruby he had hanging in his chest, the one with her rising like a wave out of a mud puddle. But it stayed like a scratch on polished wood, until she became all things in his mind. And being a simple man from East Texas, Ephram Jennings did what any man would do. He walked down to Marion Lake and had himself a sleep.
Chapter 7
Ruby sat on the soft earth under the chinaberry tree and let her fingers strum the soil. She looked down the turn in the road. The evening shadows had stretched across the pathway and it seemed to fade into the black tourmaline of the forest.
Ruby had felt something coming through the pines all day. She knew it was not the Dyboù, it was not Chauncy Rankin, nor his brother Percy. It was something salted sweet like pomade and sweat.
So she had spent the day waiting. She had pushed back her hair as best she could. Gone to the pump, pulled the handle with all of her might and splashed the cool well water on her hands, then wiped it across her face. Her fingers came back dripping black, so she rinsed her face again. That was the best she could do.
Then she had pulled up a chair, wiped off the kitchen table with her forearm and sat. That day, the house was not unkind. She was used to the smell — the low dank sugar of rotting things and waste. It was a kind of comfort. The cicadas had been singing, too loudly outside her door in anticipation.
When the morning heated into afternoon Ruby had walked across the road and retrieved a fallen long dogwood branch. Back inside, her fingers slowly began pulling the leaves and peeling off the thin little squares of bark, as if she were plucking a chicken. Ruby remembered her grandmother saying, before she died, that the dogwood had blood at the roots since it was used to crucify Jesus. Ruby figured that the scale of righteousness had long since broken, and one more little curse couldn’t do much harm.