by Joy Williams
“We weren’t,” Liberty said.
“You’re dead,” Teddy said to him somberly.
“I was a swimmer,” Charlie said. “I waded in. Soon I was out of my depth. Ever since then, I have been dead.”
Teddy put a napkin in an empty cup and placed the egg in it.
“My man,” Charlie said. “Why are you carrying around an egg?”
“I have to take care of it. Wherever I go, the egg has to go.”
“Wow, man, how did you get talked into something like that? Is the egg boiled?”
“Boiled!” Teddy said in alarm. “No!”
“I just thought it would be easier to take care of, if it was boiled, but you’re right, what a deplorable suggestion. What would be the sense of that, right? Let’s not even think about boiling that egg. Do you know that an egg knows when it’s about to be boiled? Its terrified acknowledgment can be measured.”
“How can it be measured?” Teddy asked cautiously.
“With one of those terrible instruments of modern times that records impulses on a graph,” Charlie said.
Liberty shook her head and smiled.
“Look at this pretty lady smile,” Charlie said to Teddy. “I love this lady. I’ve loved her for a long time. It’s been a secret, but now you know too.”
Teddy whispered in Liberty’s ear, then slipped something out of the bag he had put on the table. “Don’t you want some ketchup?” he said to Charlie.
Charlie looked at the red plastic bottle. It looked just like restaurant ketchup.
“I believe in bringing my own condiments too, man. See how alike we are! Always bring your own condiments. I chugged a bottle of ketchup once. Won a dollar.”
“No, no, put it on your food,” squeaked Teddy.
Charlie squeezed the bottle. A long red string leaped toward his lap.
“He didn’t jump,” Teddy said.
“I’ve been wounded.”
“He knew,” Teddy said.
“It’s just that my pulse is slow, sixty-eight, maybe sixty-nine, always. I should have been a pilot. Cool in the pitch, roll and yaw. Imperturbable when controls break down. This is great. Do you have the snapping pack of gum, the blackening soap, the fly in the ice cube?”
Teddy nodded.
“You got the lady in the bathtub?”
Teddy shook his head.
“You just can’t keep her in the bathtub,” Charlie said. “She keeps popping out. Well, I guess that’s something else.”
“If you run away with Liberty, I want to come too,” Teddy said.
“A beautiful woman, a little kid, a dog, and yours truly,” Charlie said. “We can do it! We will become myths in the minds of others. They will say about us …” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “… that we all went out for breakfast and never returned.”
“Good,” Teddy said.
“So where shall we go?” Charlie said. He kissed Liberty’s face. The line of people waiting to be seated, old women in bonnets, holding one another’s hands, looked at them.
“There’s no place to go,” Liberty said.
“There are many places to go,” Charlie said. “Hundreds.”
“Let’s make a list. I love lists!” Teddy said.
“We’re the nuclear unit scrambling out, the improbable family whose salvation is at hand,” Charlie said. “We’ll go to Idaho, British Columbia, Greece. No, forget Greece. The Greeks are mean to animals. We’ll go the Costa del Sol, Venice. We’ll go to Nepal. No, forget Nepal, all those tinkly little bells would drive us crazy. What do you say, we’ll go to Paraguay. That’s where Jesse James went.”
“Jesse James didn’t go there,” Liberty said. “That’s where the Germans went.”
“You’re right,” Charlie said. “It wasn’t Paraguay. It was Patagonia where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid went.” He was fidgeting now. His dark eyes glittered.
“They were outlaws,” Teddy said.
“They were outlaws,” Charlie said. “Successful outlaws.”
“Why are you crying?” Teddy asked Liberty. “Are you crying?”
“We’ve got to move along, it’s later than we think,” Charlie said. “How about some lunch?”
5
Liberty sat on a metal chair behind the house, near the riverbank. Stenciled on the back of the chair were the words LOPEZ PRE-ARRANGEMENT AND FUNERAL PARLOR. Dice River gave off a sweetly rotten smell. Crabs darted around in the green mud. The river was still quiet, clogged with water hyacinths and plastic six-pack rings. Later in the day it would be clogged with motorboats. Willie had been gone part of a day, a full day, part of another day. Liberty sat in the chair, breathing conscientiously, gazing at the winding, sluggish water. Dice River was a river all right, but it was not the kind of river you’d want to have in your mind.
River you’d say to Teddy, and he’d think of the river in the Just So stories where Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake knotted himself in a double clove hitch around the baby elephant’s hind legs to save him from Crocodile.
River you’d say to Willie, and he’d probably think in terms of the wide path and the narrow gate, the river would be a philosophic religious construct, the great broad self-mirroring delusionary stream of the ordinary.
River you’d say to Charlie, and he’d think of the creek trickling past his Cajun home to merge eventually with the swamp that lay beneath the two-lane, pit-bull, jai alai highway down which his daddy had disappeared for good.
River. Liberty marveled at how properly people conducted themselves for the most part, greeting the world each morning in a spirit of bemused cooperation and polite assumption, agreeing on words, sharing words, acceding to the same reality of one thing or another.
As a child, Liberty had very much wanted her own words, made enthusiastic by a phrase much employed by the adults of the time—tell it in your own words. But they hadn’t meant it. Having your own words just wasn’t feasible. Having your own words isolated you from the rest of humanity. A personal vocabulary indicated a distrustful spirit, a lack of faith in the way things were.
River.
She and Willie had lived on a river once before. It had been just after they married. They spent the days in a massive mahogany four-poster bed above which was a navy-blue bubbled-glass window. The windows of the room had green louvered shutters brought from Barbados. It was a beautiful house on a river that had been ditched and dammed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The river was a spiritual and biological abattoir. Willie had said, “We will make up everything. Nothing will be the same.”
Everyone gazed on his river alone.
River you’d say to Little Dot. River … Liberty missed Little Dot. She sat on the chair, her knees up, the backs of her hands pressing against her eyes. The chair from the funeral parlor was gray and sturdy. How had it escaped, Liberty wondered. How had it made its way to the riverbank, a refugee from preparation and mourning.
She remembered another river she had known, a river in a room, winding through a wood. The room had been wallpapered with this sight and the view had appeared seamless, but it was not seamless. Liberty knew that there had been twenty-one wallpaper sections in all, for she had counted them often. There were no windows, but there was a door, and the door was papered too so that when someone came through the door, it always seemed surprising.
This had been in a hospital, in a wing of the hospital called Five North. She had been there, but Willie had not, for she had been sicker than Willie. Willie had never known the room with the river in it, for he had been outside while she had been inside. No one thought that this was unusual.
When Liberty had been in Five North, there had been a girl there who looked like Little Dot, but Little Dot grown older. She was there because she had carved YUCK on her stomach with a screwdriver. She had done it in front of a mirror, and to some, the markings on her mutilated flesh appeared foreign, holy and serene. They would ask to touch her stomach for luck. This girl, who looked like an older, more sorrowful Li
ttle Dot, had hurt herself in other ways at other times. She had broken her ankle once with a hammer. She said that these things that she did to herself always cleared her thoughts and she felt better after. Didn’t everyone want to feel better after?
Five North with its cold, meticulous name … it was Jack Frost Land, it was Little Match Girl Land. The room with the river in it was the common room in which the patients could gather in the hours of the afternoon. Liberty had sat there with others, one of whom was a bald man who wore polished oxblood shoes. He always held a child’s plastic Thermos in his hand. The Thermos had Pluto on it, chasing his tail around it. You didn’t pay did you, the man would always say to Liberty. I’ve been watching you. You said you’d pay at the other register but you have no intention of doing that, do you … you pretend you’re browsing, making up your mind about something. Oh, I’ve been watching you …
The walls the river lay upon enclosed them, and Liberty remembered it being a washable surface for she had seen an orderly clean it with a sponge. The river glinted through the trees, but even then the trees had names that escaped her. The man in the oxblood shoes would unscrew the top of his Thermos and raise it to his mouth. Pluto was yellow and inside the Thermos it was yellow too. Yellow flecks clung to the bald man’s lips. You keep pretending and I’ll keep watching, he said. The river twisted through the trees. It might even have looked like the one her mother had been drifting down at the time, unaware that her daughter had died, almost died, Liberty forced herself to recall, for her mother’s hobby had then been to tie herself to a canoe and float down a quiet river, gazing through her face mask into the crystalline depths, collecting the white bones of mastodons.
River, Liberty thought, and imagined a stream so clear that it reflected the sky and everything growing and moving along its banks. So that drifting down it, on it, in it, she passed through the images of things. There was something repulsive about such a river. Floating in such a river, Liberty felt only the desire to get out …
She had promised Teddy they would go to the beach that day. It was almost noon and Teddy would be back at noon, fresh from instruction in something. She and Clem walked down Suntan toward his house. The day’s heat pressed against the crown of trees. A few old people moved quietly around, sweeping their yards with brooms, pinching off dead blossoms, sprinkling with big, old-fashioned watering cans. Duane’s perfect Mustangs adorned his driveway. They were black, red, white, black; a Fastback, two convertibles and a Shelby. The black Shelby had NIGHT MARE in script upon the trunk.
A large picture window exposed Janiella doing exercises in Duane’s trophy room. There were silver cups from rallies and car shows on the shelves, and on the paneled walls were the heads and hooves of deer and the bodies of fish. Liberty watched as Janiella did the Plough, the Cobra and a lengthy headstand. Snook and bass and baby tarpon gazed absently down upon Janiella as she moved on to alternate nostril breathing. With a finger pressed against her nose, her shut eyes snapped open and locked on Liberty’s. She got to her feet and sauntered to the door. Her blonde hair was twisted into an elaborate roll and her haunches were firm and heroic in their proportions. A thin line of perspiration lay prettily above her upper lip. Liberty disliked her enormously.
“Hello,” Liberty said.
“The Phantom’s not back yet.” Janiella extended an arm and slowly rotated it. “I call him the Phantom because he’s never here. He’s a busy, busy child. The Phantom. The Ghost. Kids like names. Makes them feel popular.”
Liberty rubbed Clem’s paw with her foot.
“So come in, come in,” Janiella said. “Duane said he gave you a lift the other day. You lead a peculiar life, don’t you? Have you ever been employed by an escort service?”
Liberty considered placing her knuckles in Janiella’s throat. “I have never been employed by an escort service,” she said.
“I wasn’t trying to be offensive. You just look as though you might be regarded with favor by certain men.”
“Clem’s telephone number is sometimes requested,” Liberty said. “Not mine.”
“I can see why some would want to get in touch with that,” Janiella said, frowning, “but not me. What kind of a vocabulary has he got? I was told that a German shepherd could understand eight hundred words.”
“He knows a few words,” Liberty admitted. “Love, angel, ice cream, retribution …”
“Goodness, was he raised in a monastery or what?” She raised her arms over her head and jiggled her wrists. “What do you think of Duane? Do you think he’s a little crazy?”
“He’s a little crazy.”
“He was sort of cute for a while. I’ve always been attracted to the primitive. I sometimes confuse primitive with genuine. It’s a fault of too much education, I’d be the first to admit it. Duane’s always trying to surprise me now. He can’t do it. He was cute before he started trying to surprise me. As for shocking me, I’m unshockable. I have diabetes and a partially webbed foot. The foot drives most men wild. As for my father, I loathe him. I’ve loathed him ever since the death and burial of my horse, Spritzer. This was long ago. Spritzer was old and feeble. My father dug a hole in the pasture with a back hoe. The veterinarian was called, and we led Spritzer by the halter to the hole. The veterinarian gave him an inoculation and he instantly toppled over and in. The hole was the precise width and depth, which was a great relief to my father, but I’ve loathed the man ever since the day Spritzer fit the hole. I may sound like an unhappy person but I want to assure you I’m not. Never have I considered myself an unhappy person. I have fun.” She smiled at Liberty. “You resent me considerably, don’t you, I have just the tiniest of inklings.”
“It’s Teddy I’m concerned about. You’re just passing through.”
“I probably am just passing through, but what about you?” Janiella laughed. “The family situation intrigued me for a while, but its potentialities are just something I’m going to have to deny myself. I’ve been slumming if you want to know the truth. Rednecks have always given me a flutter, but family life is paranormal in my opinion. There’s no anticipation in family life. I’ve had some nice orgasms in this house, and I’ve introduced the concept of candlelight at dinners. But that’s about it. The Phantom is cute, but he lacks immunity. His heart’s a doormat, poor kid. He’ll know everything, but he’ll never learn.”
“You do this for a living?” Liberty asked. “You just spread joy where you can?”
“Do you know that big guy?” Janiella asked. “The guy who sells houses?”
“I know Charlie.”
“Drunks are so much trouble, aren’t they.”
“He’s a friend of mine,” Liberty said.
“You do look as though you’re abstaining, but that look can be very sexy. There’s a pallor to you that a tan can’t quite hide. But pallor appeals to a lot of men. It’s that suggestion of confinement. It’s difficult to believe you’re a babysitter. I had an experience with a babysitter when I was a little girl.”
“I’d prefer not to know about it,” Liberty said.
From the river there was the sound of an outboard engine starting up, sputtering, quitting. There was silence, then cursing.
“She was a fat girl,” Janiella said, “with hair down to her waist. She was always ironing her hair. She’d come over to the house, study algebra, iron her hair, and then when it was my bedtime she’d masturbate me to get me to go to sleep. At Christmas my mother bought a little present for me to give to her. It was a bottle of perfume with a swan on the cap. Giving her that perfume was the worst, the very worst moment in my life.”
“That’s affecting,” Liberty said. “It really is.”
“I think the stress of that moment triggered my diabetes, but being able to pinpoint those two incidents from my early life was a real breakthrough for me.” Janiella snapped the fingers of her right hand. “Mother,” she said. “Father.” She snapped the fingers of her left. “I’ve felt completely in control ever since I’ve framed the per
fume and Spritzer’s hole. I do what I want. I say what I want. I don’t finish what I begin if I don’t want. I just begin and begin.”
“You’ve got the keys to the candy shop,” Liberty said.
Janiella looked at her uncertainly. “You’re a little strange. Where have you been? Have you ever been anywhere?”
Liberty said nothing.
Janiella looked at Clem. “That dog would be pretty if his eyes weren’t so weird. Can he see out of those things? They look like ice cubes or something.”
“I’ll just wait for Teddy in his room,” Liberty said.
Teddy’s room was at the rear of the house and overlooked a small patio and swimming pool. Hoses had drained the pool and a man stood in it, studying a long, undulating crack in the tile. The man took a lollipop from his shirt and put it in his mouth. He shook his head at the crack. The lollipop did not make him forget the cigarette that he craved. He sucked in his stomach. He sensed there was someone in the room at his back, and he wondered if there was a naked woman standing in it, or a woman wearing just panties maybe, studying him. He didn’t look, in case there wasn’t.
Liberty dropped the tattered bamboo shade.
Teddy’s room was low-ceilinged and narrow. The walls were stained a muddy color, and there was a red rug on the floor. Half the ceiling was covered with the silver bears from Klondike Bar ice cream wrappers. Liberty took two wrappers from her pocket, found a paste pot in the desk and pressed two more bears upon the ceiling.
Teddy had begun collecting the wrappers after his mother had gone away. When she disappeared, he had first become deeply interested in cartography. He made elaborate maps and memorized airplane routes and bus schedules. He learned wilderness techniques and how to read a compass, determined to track his mother down. Then Duane had taken him aside for a little talk. He told Teddy that his mom had become a freak, that she had grown whiskers, and that he should hope that she never came back. If she came back, he should fight against her as though he were fighting against the forces of evil for his very life. Duane had told him (and he told him, he said, reluctantly) that if his mom came back it would likely be for no other purpose than to cut his little pecker off, put it on a key chain and present it to her girlfriend.
