This is something very different.
It's the first chapter of a novella, at the moment
unpublished.
But I plan on publishing it soon.
Actually, I plan on writing some stories to go along with it
and making it into a book.
But anyway, there are a couple of things about it
I'd like you to know.
The story takes place in Butte, which is a small mining
town in Montana.
It's very much like your Bisbee.
Butte is down on its heels at this point,
and it's home to an extraordinarily large
toxic lake, where a mountain has been mined to nothing.
And the story is told from two perspectives.
One is that of Lenore, a woman who
has come to Butte to find her recently disappeared sister.
And the other is that of the ghost of a Native American man
who haunts her hotel room.
The missing sister's name is Ruby,
and the ghost was also once in love with a Ruby
70 years before.
And I'm going to--
we begin with the ghost section.
Lenore has a section, and then we end again with the ghost.
It's called Two Halves of a Dead Fox.
"I was a ghost of a man before I found her.
I had been touched by women, first
for the boys on the reservation, then
for the ones I called friends at the government boarding school.
I went for the joke of it, the words for it.
I wasn't so impressed with women.
They're soft, turning over like a puppy letting
a larger dog sniff everywhere, nudge anywhere.
Cigarettes reminded me of Ruby because I
used to smoke while I waited for her on the cobblestone streets
that crisscrossed Butte, watched the front door of her father's
big house on the corner, followed her
along Granite to Main, left on Mercury, down Venus Alley.
She didn't smoke, of course.
No lady would then.
But the full, empty feeling of smoke in my lungs
and throat as I caught sight of her was all I
could hold on to later, mopping the brew house floor,
sucking down a scoop at the bar.
The cigarettes made me sick, but I thought idiotically
that death would release me.
My insides finally did twist together,
puckering up like the insects I killed
with boric acid, the beetles tiptoeing
between the bottles of Butte lager.
The worst moments hadn't been nose down
at the Arizona or the M&M but when
I glimpse some small beauty.
Beauty killed me, not the lace influenza made of my lungs.
That winter morning, silky fumes billowed from the seven grade
stacks of the Never Sweat, and I could just
see the outline of some of the others--
mountain consolidated Cora Colusa parrot.
In a half hour, the first shift of miners
would begin their journey from the scattershot shacks
up toward roll call, a whole congregation of devotees,
a herd of animals walking toward water.
The sun came up like a spider--
golden, gangly legs reaching around the blacked out hill.
I weakened at the knees and toppled over.
My mouth open to the grit of the road outside my boarding house,
a crust carved out of the soil, the memory
of hooves and wheels.
That sparkle of sun over the mountain
cut me like a second string of vertebrae, a fault running
the length of my body--
the communion we might have had, the way
it could have been if we were together.
When I heard the name again, Ruby, it had already
been in me 70-something years.
That was all I had become--
an echo, a stuck dream.
Then this one ricochets down the hall, cowboy and Indian time,
carnival freak out, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
She was one of those white chicks with the Spirit Call
oil and the silver bangles.
She nearly knocked old Emily Olsen over on her way in.
Then she kept running back and forth
between the front desk and room eight,
my room, my fucking room, asking Mrs. Olson where
she got her pretty dress, and wasn't this neat old furniture,
and where again was the shower?
She opened all the dressers to--
she opened up all the drawers to the dresser
and slammed them shut again.
And when she did that, I sat up, so to speak.
Bang, bang Ruby.
She heaved her backpack onto the bed
and flung clothes out until she found
what she was looking for--
a smudge stick, something she had bought at the airport,
maybe, authentic Indian artifact written on the wrapper.
Now this old hotel would get what it didn't need.
She lit the dried sage with a purple plastic lighter
and waved it around.
No smoking in here, I wanted to mention.
And her long blond ponytail swung,
and her little T-shirt cinched up to show her waist,
and her cowboy boots hit the floor.
She stayed with me two or three weeks, whispering Ruby, Ruby,
Ruby.
And when I could, I'd collect dust
by her eyes and nose and mouth to make her sneeze,
or I'd hold back the water from the faucet
and then release, splashing and startling her.
And I spent all my time thinking of ways to bother her,
to erase her.
When she left, life went on in the empty hotel room
at the Red and White--
day, night, day, night--
and I didn't care about Ruby Robbins.
And I tried not to think about what
happened to her a few months later until one night,
in crept her sister.