Thrown-away Child

planned on hook- ln g up with you in the first place? But here we are
    anyway—married in the eyes of God, and duly witnessed by your cop universe. So deal with it. And listen to me very carefully: things you plan in life usually turn out to be meaningless, things you accumulate without knowing it become your real treasure.“
    “Quite a philosophy.”
    “It’s the human condition. Love it or leave it.“
    “Do I deserve you?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Tell me what’s deep inside of you, Ruby. What’s in you deeper than you know?”
    “Being a black woman in a white man’s country.” Ruby did not have to think about this for more than a second or two. “Or any color woman, for that matter.”
    When I made no response, she asked, “Did I shock you, dearheart?”
    “Not really. The Irish have a certain history of being on the outside of things.”
    Ruby smiled at what she doubtless took as naïveté. Sister Bertice used to give me this sort of smile when I said something goofy in her class and she happened to be in a nonviolent mood.
    “Back when I was in Madison Avenue,” Ruby said, warming to some lesson she wanted to impart, “I used to do a lot of lunch at the Twenty-one Club. Nice place.”
    “So I hear.”
    “Funny. I almost felt like I belonged. Right up until the year the agency threw a party for all the clients in a private room upstairs at Twenty-one. The Hunt Room, it’s called. Very masculine chic. You might like it. The walls are covered with Frederic Remington paintings.”
    “Fox and hounds, that sort of thing?”
    “Right. But Remingtons actually cover up this big mural, which is definitely masculine but hardly chic. All you have to do is look under a few of the paintings to get the idea.”
    “What’s the idea?”
    “The mural is a series of tableaux of white soldiers raping Indian women.”
    “Small wonder they covered it up.”
    Again with the Sister Bertice smile. “That’s the way it all is. Everything’s nicely covered up these days.“
    “So now I know what Ruby Flagg carries in her bones.”
    “Love it or leave it.”
    “You see me going somewhere?”
    “No. I see a jerk on a treadmill.”
    “I’m a jerk?”
    “Yes. But you’re my kind of jerk.”
    “You’re kind of a jerk yourself, Ruby. The kind who imagines we’re opposites who attracted.”
    It was now Ruby with the look of the class dunce on her pretty face. And me with the patient smile.
    “What you really and truly carry in your bones is the sting of poverty,” I said. “It’s mixed up with race and sex to keep us confused, but it’s poverty we’re talking about just the same. And being taught to be hated because you’re poor. Taught so well they can tell if you’ve ever been poor when they do your autopsy.”
    Ruby kissed my cheek, and whispered, “You jerk c op, I love you so.” And then her hazel eyes went big and teary, the way they do when we make love. This always makes me slightly nervous. Which I cannot help, being that I am from a tribe that scoffs at most displays of physical affection and what I have grown U P knowing as dreaded emotional talk. And so all I could manage in return was, “Me, too.”
    “Make us a bed quick, why don’t you?” Ruby suggested. She stood up and started slowly taking off her e'othes. Meanwhile, I pulled down the window shade and locked our roomette door and yanked on the couch until it spread full out. I mashed a finger in the hurried process.
    When we lay down together, naked, Ruby said, “People like us who’ve had it hard should turn soft whenever we get the chance.”
    I kissed her eyelids, tasting tears. I cupped her face in my hand, and asked what I had been wanting to ask since we left Penn Station in New York. “What’s the matter, babe?”
    “Everything’s changing, Hock... everything.“
    “What—?”
    “Never mind. Make love to me.”
    We then slow-danced pretty much through the rest of Alabama. And sometimes Ruby softly cried.
     

EIGHT
     

     
    “Well—here lies one less...” The laughing detective in the sweat-stained brown polyester suit was about to use a rude word, especially so given the race of most people present at the murder site. He stopped to edit himself. “One less African-American in the fair city of New Orleans.”
    The detective’s name was Mueller. He had a full-moon face the color and texture of cottage cheese. He was speaking ill of the dead with an equally pale and poorly tailored partner named