Thrown-away Child

never heard of called pitty-pat. Then when everybody finally left the house (Uncle Bud took along a basket of leftover food), Violet shooed us upstairs to her bed. She would have it no other way. She slept on the parlor couch. Perry’s mess of a room stayed empty.
    Ruby and I lay awake in bed for twenty minutes or so. We spoke of small things I cannot now remember. I do remember looking at the softly curving outlines of Ruby’s face in the New Orleans darkness. And I remember us both looking up at the window when we heard the night scratchings. Fast and graceful creatures with spiny tails and darting tongues skittered over the outside screen.
    Warm though it was, Ruby snugged herself against me. She asked softly, in a voice strangely unsure, “You love me?”
    “You know I do, Ruby.”
    “Am I everything you want?”
    Ruby’s breath warmed my shoulder. She draped an arm over my chest, and stroked at my skin with her hand, which moved slowly and gradually lower.
    “I should turn on the light,” I said. “You don’t sound like my wife. She wouldn’t like my being with somebody else.”
    “Tell me what I want to hear.”
    “I love you, Ruby.”
    “Are we going to grow old together?”
    Maybe it was not the time to be talking about an old lady, feeling so elevated as I was with Ruby touching me warmly in the dark. But anyway I said, “Sometimes I think I’m going to love you most of all when you’re old, Ruby. When we’ve had a long life together. One day years and years from now, when we imagine we’ve told each other all the stories of ourselves, you and I are going to be very surprised by something.“
    “What would that be?”
    “That there’s still mystery to us.”
    “I like that, Irish. Love me now.”
    And so I turned toward my wife and kissed her lips. Ruby slipped beneath me. There was urgency in the way she moved, in how she wrapped her legs around mine, and clutched my back.
    But slowness and delicacy came in all that followed. And when we were through, perspiring and lying quietly, we heard the scratching sounds again. We Watched something streak across the screen.
    Ruby’s voice was husky. “When I was a girl, that’s what I wanted to be.”
    “You wanted to be a lizard?”
    “A chameleon.”
    “Chameleons change colors.”
    “Yes, they do that.”
    I took Ruby into my arms and held tight to her, and knew that what I had just heard was one of the saddest things I know. During the next few minutes we both shed quiet tears.
    “Thank you,” Ruby said, before drifting off.
    “For what?”
    “For crying. When men cry, women feel less alone.” I lay awake for an hour thinking about that.
    And then from downstairs in the kitchen I heard the telephone.
     

TWENTY-FIVE

     
    “So I’m calling you, man, like you ak’st.”
    Perry said this halfway into my own Hello, like he could see me answering the phone.
    “Who is it?” Mama asked. But of course she knew. She was up from her couch and into the kitchen right after me, hair oiled and pressed in a cloth, robe belted tightly, snapping on the light.
    “Perry’s all right,” I said softly, a finger to my lip. Mama’s hands flew to her flushed cheeks. To Perry, I said, “Where are you?”
    “Never mind that. I was just thinking... How you fixing to help me?”
    I thought, Perry’s come halfway to trusting me, and
    I was halfway to seeing the big picture. I felt a haze lifting, I felt like my old self again—like a detective. “You want to square things with Zebediah Tilton?’ “Him and Hassie Pinkney, too. I just imagined what’s been missing from the mystery. Hassie a snake handler, see. She’s the one—”
    “That day Ruby’s father was bitten!”
    “Had to be that old witch Hassie.”
    “Stay in touch, Perry. I believe we’re all going to church on Sunday.”
    “What you got in mind?”
    “Extracurricular justice.”
    “I don’t follow.”
    “Church is a fine place for all hell to break loose.”
     

TWENTY-SIX

     
    Miss LaRue and her maid were in the backyard talking girl talk as usual. And as usual, Hippo sat up in the balcony off his bedroom, in a wingback wicker chair.
    Hippo looked down and across an expanse of lush green grass to where his wife and the maid chattered. In this private setting, Alderman Giradoux was not his hail-fellow-well-met politician self.
    As a matter of fact, there was more than a flicker of repugnance in his face, this being his general expression when pondering the