Free The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell Page A

his face on the surface and see through himself to count individual rocks on the riverbed.
    The cabin was built of raw wood from trees felled nearby, sawed into wide planks and pegged into place neither varnished nor rubbed altogether free of curled shavings or splinters. The pioneer roughness of the cabin oddly gave it considerable appeal as a love nest. The bed was near to ground with a fat mattress and the dabbling pan sat on the dresser. Ruby dragged the sponge from the pan under her arms and through her pungent narrows, smiled his way, said, “Okay, yup, I do like their hats. But it’s their shoes give me shivers. People notice shoes. You think it’s rings or necklaces or maybe just eyes—but it’s shoes that make ’em look close and get a first idea of you.”
    “I’ll give shoes some thought.”
    Ruby came bedside and knelt, laid the sponge onto him where it mattered and rubbed. “Can’t have her catchin’ my smell left on you.”
    “She won’t smell it there.”
    “It might soak into your britches.”
    “She won’t there, either.”
    “Maybe I just like washin’ you.”
    “I didn’t say stop.”
    Buster sober and alone had to regrow his life from the dirt up, and it was a harrowing process but a solemn duty, too, rising from flat on his face to his knees, to standing, to standing upright and walking on with a lessening wobble to his stride. Different clothes helped, gave him a different posture. He became straighter and taller when resplendent in a cloth cap from Galway, tweed jacket, flannel slacks—in return for secret chauffeuring he received favors from Mr. Glencross, whose greatest favor of all was to share Buster’s height and waist size and to quickly tire of excellent clothes. Buster in recent times wore fine and sporty threads with labels from New York, London, Boston and Havana. Glencross sometimes teased him with the aroma of scotch whisky (a political figure supplied him with Teacher’s Highland Cream by the case throughout the years of Prohibition) raised and passed beneath his nose, sometimes teased too much and meanly appealed to Buster’s gross familiarity with defeat, but otherwise they got along swell and there were the woven benefits that fit so well and modest tips in cash. Glencross could not have his Lincoln Phaeton seen parked in front of country hotels, highway motor courts, cabins at the river, and under no imaginable circumstances would it be proper for Ruby DeGeer to be seen alone in his company—any scandal provoked by his Phaeton being noticed where it ought not be, or even whispering of a possible scandal might cripple or sink a banker in a town so small, and he found his public ease now at no other level but the heights and was not willing to fall.
    During the week before the Arbor Dance Hall blast, Alma pleaded with Ruby in the shack to drop this new fella and return to Glencross, he kept weeping so in empty rooms and neglecting business, disrupting his own household with sadness and unaddressed odd talk. Buster’s drunken death was yet so ugly and fresh and she craved calm, calm, why won’t you see Arthur Glencross loves you as best he can? Ruby sat listening with her shoulders down but hopped up with eyes averted and with a weak toss sent her last hat toward the nearest wall. It fell short and went down limp as a harvested dove. She said, “This will be sorry news to hear, sister, and I didn’t want to say it, not ever say it for you to hear, but it’ll give you the answer you’re huntin’”: Buster would not drink. He would not drink and drove very carefully on those slender bumpy backroads, eased over sections that had washed out and become rolling wrinkles of dirt or eroded to a steep tilt that required he drive at a slant. Glencross sometimes had one too many and other parts of who he truly was inside slipped out and went on display. He liked to taunt folks just a little bit when pie-eyed. He and Ruby were riding in the back so they could duck from