"She was a long-haired girl, and long-haired girls never
returned phone calls.
We hadn't heard from her since the postcard,
but we still expected Ruby on the flight from Butte
to Minneapolis to LaGuardia.
Dad liked to pick people up at the airport instead of asking
them to take the bus, and so we all
went with him to surprise her.
We didn't see her among the boxes wrapped
in Christmas paper or the fur-festooned holiday revelers,
and the wrinkle-free folks in navy had no information at all.
Something gathered in me during the next three weeks.
We were of the official opinion that she was just pulling
a Ruby, that we'd get a call and a giddy apology,
but a weight started bearing down on me
when I tried to sleep or focus on the balance sheet at work.
She needed me.
I could find her.
The snow, sharp and dry as mica, could
have been new or just dislodged from rooftops and circulating.
The wind blasted over the buildings
on Park Street and Montana, all different sizes
and crouched together in a funny way.
My nostrils had sucked shut into slits,
so I breathed through my mouth and squinted up the street.
Half the streetlights were burnt out.
I didn't know if my ears were frozen
or if it was the wind that filled them,
but I heard nothing.
And that limited my possibilities.
It was 8 o'clock, and there was no sign of life,
except the murmuring lure of the shanty bar
and cafe down the block--
Paris of the West, the man on the plane had said.
Champagne in a tin cup, according to the Chamber
of Commerce brochure.
Ruby said it had frisson.
To me, Butte looked desolate and unyielding, not pretty,
not Western, no swinging, salon doors, or horse ties,
or even reassuring tourist traps up here
in the old part of town.
I had driven the rental car from the airport and through
the valley of K-Mart and Hardee's and Progress,
then crept up the frosty hill, past cross streets with
a theme--
iron, aluminum, platinum, gold, silver,
mercury, all the way to quartz, copper, and finally, Caledonia.
I drove up and down Montana twice before I saw it--
painted on the wall near the recessed entry,
a white, gloved hand pointed toward the hotel door
like a magician's invitation.
I parked down the street.
I locked the door and carried my suitcase up the hill,
stepping lightly on the half shoveled sidewalk.
I passed an old brick house, bright orange brick sealing up
the windows on the first floor, charred shadows radiating
from the windows and door.
The second story wasn't sealed up like the first,
and glass shards hung from the window frames,
shining like wet white leaves
A man lurched toward me from between this building
and the next.
He wore a wrinkled pea coat, buttoned but not in alignment.
His face was long and pocked, his orange beard thinning.
He held a small, ceramic statue, a man in a headdress
on a Pinto pony.
He waved the thing in front of me.
Do you want to buy?
Rare, for sale, Indian chief.
I veered away, and he spun off in his own direction,
a half-hearted huckster.
I stopped in front of the white, red and white hotel,
a rooming house really, upstairs from a music store.
The painted lettering on the glass door was chipped,
but you could still make out a frail scrawl.
Ruby and I braided each other's hair.
I gathered hers up from in front of her thin, capable shoulders,
brown and round, and exposed by a green cotton tank top,
and dropped it in a pile down her back.
I began at the bottom in rabbit, paw strokes and later,
smoothed the brush down the full length of the strands.
'High or low?' I asked, and then separated it into three coils
and braided them together.
My hair had always been longer.
It twisted on the pillow beside me at night.
I held my hand up to it as if it were a pet or hand mirror.
It was a year after the fat man from the Christian Salvation
League came to graduation and gave half a dozen of us
the once over.
I saw Ruby Claremont walking down
Court Street in a long white dress,
with a green ribbon tied under her breasts
and a little snatch of purple flowers.
She had the silliest hairstyle I had ever seen.
Her brown hair was tightly drawn to the top of her head,
then twisted into a pyramid with a little curlicue on top,
ringlets on both sides of her face.
Her skin was pale and smooth as a river stone,
but on the round swell of her cheeks,
were these gentle wisps of disorganized color.
She wore dark lipstick, and her eyes were darkened as well.
She was tall, made taller by black, lace-up boots
with heels that curved in and out again, like her own waist.
The way she walked was not natural.
It was a dance.
She twirled her ribbon purse and placed
one foot in front of the other in an exotic roundy-round hip
and ankle turned dalliance.
She was an entirely artificial creation.
My own body was a tree, a layering from inside,
never a carving.
Her body, too.
Underneath the clothing and if the hair came down,
would yield a small, careful life,
like a milk pod houses a seed.
I wanted to go inside those yards of embroidery and lace,
under the paint, within the clasp of shoes.
I wanted to touch the places where
silk met sweat, blood lace, sweet milk, a spin of cotton.
You could say it was just chance that she strolled
by with her near gimpy artifice and her hair like a party hat,
when I was poised anyway to fall in love with white whiteness.
But really its blackness I loved,
the black blast of mining.
I wore a shirt made of thin, white fabric,
small, smooth buttons down the front and at both wrists.
Around me were swarms of people, white just about covers it,
buildings boxing us in, and beyond them, the little houses,
and then the mines.
The haze from smelting was so thick you couldn't
see where you were going, but I thought
I knew what I was doing.
Some were crippled by the brain-squeeze smiling
disaster of Indian training school,
but I had thrived under the lash.
Lenore Robbins checked in after Mrs. Olson was already
in her robe and the light show on TV
had ceased making sense to her.
She went to the room and closed the door.
She didn't take off her coat.
She just sat in the purple chair.
Her hair was all clipped up with combs and bands.
It puffed up and crests on either side of her face,
a disheveled elegance reminiscent of the era my Ruby
and I had together.
Lenore was less brilliant than her sister.
Her hair was darker.
Her lips a little paler, a little thinner.
Something about her irritated me.
She wasn't quite there.
You had to look at her for more than a minute to see her.
She rubbed her fingers together, and then she
took to digging them in the chair's fat arms
and the stink of dust there.
A quilt, tattered and hand-sewn, spread over the lumpy bed.
The pillowcases were smoothed over
from years of nested bald heads and hairdos crumpled up
in dream.
If she looked under the bed, she might have found
a bunched up leg of filmy hose.
The sink faucet dripped.
Ancient cigarette stains tarnished the white porcelain
basin.
She stared at the wallpaper, bouquets
or the faces of monkeys, a sad monkey
holding an urn, repeated in a diamond pattern
up from the floor.
I was in the furniture, but she couldn't see me,
couldn't hear me, didn't know she
was crowding me and twisting my guts together, making
me have to, again, remember.
I would have destroyed her sister and now her,
but when I died, I didn't gain any power.
I was the ghost of a mouse, tumbling spools of thread,
gnawing a bit on an invisible corner.
As if she could make things better,
make anything new and orderly here,
she got up and straightened the mirror over the dresser.
Finally, she took off her coat and hung it in the closet,
buttoning the collar.
She reached up to the pull chain on the lamp by the bed,
her white ringless hand touched the copper,
and she lingered there for a moment.
That's when I squeezed a current through the metal
string of beads.
The wire crackled.
The light glimmered feebly, and then kicked in,
shocking her in the finger.
She jumped back and stared.
'I am the ghost of love', I wanted to tell her."
And that's the first chapter of that novella.
[APPLAUSE]