I got to go to the butcher’s.
Your choice. Ruby turns to go. But really there is no choice at all.
She leads him west, away from the mine, through mounds of rusting machines.
They hop a fence, cross a field gone to seed, and walk a quarter mile through
pitch pines to a marsh where cattle egrets stand in the cattails like white flowers.
In my mouth, she says, and starts picking up rocks. Out my nose. You pump,
Tom. Understand? In the green water two feet down Tom can make out the dim
shapes of a few fish gliding through weedy enclaves.
Ruby pitches the far end of the hose into the water. With waxed cord she binds
the other end to the pump. Then she fills her pockets with rocks. She wades
out, looks back, says, You pump, and puts the hose into her mouth. The swim
mask goes over her eyes; her face goes into the water.
The marsh closes over Ruby’s back, and the hose trends away from the bank.
Tom begins to pump. The sky slides along overhead. Loops of garden hose
float under the light out there, shifting now and then. Occasional bubbles rise,
moving gradually farther out.
One minute, two minutes. Tom pumps. His heart does its fragile work. He should
not be here. He should not be here while this skinny, spellbinding girl drowns
herself in a marsh. If that’s what she’s doing. One of Mr. Weems’s similes comes
to him: You’re trembling like a needle to the pole.
After four or five minutes underwater, Ruby comes up. A neon mat of algae
clings to her hair, and her bare feet are great boots of mud. She pushes through
the cattails. Strings of saliva hang off her chin. Her lips are blue. Tom feels dizzy.
The sky turns to pure liquid.
‘Incredible’, pants Ruby. ‘absolutely incredible’. She holds up her wet, rock-filled
trousers with both hands, and looks at Tom through the wavy lens of her swim
mask. His blood storms through its lightless tunnels.
He has to trot to make the butcher’s and get back home by noon. It is the first
time Tom can remember permitting himself to run, and his legs feel like glass.
At the end of the lane, a hundred yards from home, he stops and pants with the
basket of meat in his arms and spits a pat of blood into the dandelions. Sweat
soaks his shirt. Dragonflies dart and hover. Swallows inscribe letters across the
sky. The street seems to ripple and fold and straighten itself out again.
Just a hundred yards more. He forces his heart to settle. Everything, Tom thinks,
follows a path worn by those who have gone before: egrets, clouds, tadpoles.
Everything everything everything.
***
The following Tuesday Ruby meets him at the end of the lane. And the Tuesday
after that. They hop the fence, cross the field; she leads him places he’s never
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