much damage, or be as sneaky, with biology and anatomy. What would I do? Send secret messages in blood and bones?
Ruby Jo’s made up of ions and electrons and chemicals, too. She’s got more energy in her than—as she would put it—a rutting jackrabbit. It strikes me that the bus we’re on could have made it from Maryland to Kansas on Ruby Jo Pruitt power. She keeps talking, changing from one subject to another, keeping the conversation alive and keeping me sane. Finally, she stops and asks me a question.
“Think you could teach me to talk nice like you?”
“What’s the matter with the way you talk?” A list of epithets, every one of which I’ve heard from Malcolm’s mouth, floats up in a cartoon thought-bubble: cracker, yokel, redneck, hillbilly, white trash. Never mind that “hillbilly” might even make some sense, since half of the Scotch-Irish Protestants who set up home in the mountains named their firstborn sons after William of Orange. Maybe more than half. All these words Ruby Jo has probably heard at one time or another. I wonder how much they sting.
“You know. Like what them folks from town call poor white trash.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Hell, I mean, we are poor. My granddaddies worked in coal mines and came home black as midnight for a sack of nothin’. But poor ain’t dumb.” Ruby Jo gazes out the window at another crappy, depressed town. “Well, not all the time, anyway. But the way I talk, that’s the first thing people think.”
I want to tell her accents are pretty much fixed once a kid hits her teen years, but Ruby Jo beats me to it.
“Look at Madonna. She’s from Michigan, right? But now she sounds all English.”
“Sure, hon,” I tell her, thinking Madonna’s linguistic affectations probably necessitated a small army of dialect coaches. “We can work on it if it’s important to you.”
Another smile, another one of those happy-warm-sunshine feelings floods through me.
When we reach the Kansas state line, there are only three of us left on the bus. Ruby Jo, me, and an older woman who keeps her head down and her mouth shut.
“About five hours to go,” the driver says.
Five hours to go. Five more hours until I see Freddie.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Kansas is flat as a pancake. No, it’s flatter than that. It’s so flat, it might as well be concave. And I’ve never seen as much corn as I have in the past few hours. I can’t think how anyone could possibly use this much corn.
We turn off about fifteen miles west of nowhere, onto a gravel road leading up to double gates. A low sun slices through the window where Ruby Jo’s head is resting. When the bus swings wide to the left, the light moves across the iron rails of the gates and rests on a small hut. A gatehouse.
“Looks grim,” she says.
“Grim” is a nice word for what this shithole looks like.
“Just like my old granny said it would.” Ruby Jo shades her eyes and peers out toward the gatehouse.
“Huh?” I ask, but she hushes me.
A man heaves himself up from his chair behind the small building’s window, pulls open the door, and swaggers out, beer belly swaying in a rhythmic plop-plop over the beltline of his uniform. He’s dressed in gray, and the two patches on his left shoulder are familiar. One is the sunshine-happy Fitter Family Campaign’s emblem; the other is the Department of Education’s tricolor peace symbol with the words Intelligentia, Perfectum, Sapientiae. From where I sit, the guard doesn’t look intelligent, perfect, or wise.
“All right, people. I need to see tickets and ID cards,” the guard says, like he’s addressing a mob of anxious concertgoers at Madison Square Garden instead of three high school teachers at the entrance to a crumbling complex of nineteenth-century buildings in Winfield, Kansas. He climbs aboard, checks the bus driver’s manifest, and looks us over, one by one. “Mm-hmm. You first.”
The old woman with the bent head stands and picks up her purse. She’s not too steady on her pins, but neither the driver nor the guard seems to give a shit.