by Joy Williams
“It’s just the way JJ likes it,” Sally yelled, “crowded and crazy.”
Next to the bar, in a little enclosure like a child’s playpen, JJ sat in a wheelchair surrounded by well-wishers. He was drinking beer with a straw.
Clem sat with his tail swept tightly around him so that it wouldn’t get stepped on. Two men and a woman sitting on nearby stools stared at him. The woman wore a white jumpsuit. From her earlobes hung the little hands of Barbie dolls, around her throat was a Ken head on a chain.
“I’m going to buy that dog a drink,” one of the men announced.
The other man snickered. “That year I was working in Corpus as an orderly?” he said. “I come out of the hospital one night, and in the parking lot was a dog like that lying beside a Trans Am and chewing on a human finger.”
“Dog like this one here?” the other man said.
He nodded. “Might have weighed a little less.”
The woman raised the Ken head and tapped it against her teeth. Ken’s mouth was set in a tiny smile. “A human finger,” she marveled. “Where would that have come from?”
“It could have come from anywheres,” the man from Corpus said.
“Maybe bit off in a fight or something,” the other man said. “Poor bastard comes running in with it wrapped in a handkerchief and he drops the sonofabitch.”
“Teddy and that crazy daddy of his were sitting right over there,” Sally said to Liberty. “He still had that little smudged egg.”
Liberty looked at an empty table filled with bottles and glasses. Standing behind it, leaning against a wall, was Poe.
Sally was saying cheerfully, “I’ll go see if I can find where they’re at.” She moved off toward JJ. People were touching him here and there for luck.
The bar smelled warm and fertile. Liberty had not expected to see Poe again. She supposed that she had expected this preposterous person to restore Willie to her in some way and be consumed in the effort. But it was Willie who was not here. The floor was slippery. “Hey, baby,” someone said. She walked toward the table, people’s faces bobbing like dark balloons. She was close to the tall, coarse-faced man before she saw quite clearly that it was not Poe. She looked away, down at the table where a cigarette floated in a glass of wine.
“You think that dog’s gonna go to heaven?” the tall man said. His voice was high pitched and excited, but his face was impassive.
“Was there a little boy at this table?” Liberty asked.
“Little boys aren’t allowed in bars. What did you used to be? I used to be a rattlesnake preacher.” He moved closer. “When I say that to most people, they say, ‘Ever get bit by a snake?’ and I say, ‘Did I ever get bit, I sure did!’ I had a rattlesnake in a box behind the pulpit, and I always said if the Lord told me it was all right to hold it, why there it would be handy. I grabbed a hold of that snake a couple of times when I was feeling real good, and that snake was just as tame as could be and I’d just wave it around for a few minutes and then put it back in the box. But the people were always after me to do it again, they’re just like children, you know, those people, always asking me things like Will there be sex in heaven? and Is it true all angels are male? and Will there be pets in heaven? I swear that was the most frequently asked question of my career—will my dawg get to heaven, will my kitty be with me in paradise … If I told them once, I must have told them a hundred times, their damn dogs and kitties were not going to make it there, but it was just like they were deaf in that regard when it come to their pets, some old mean cat or the like. Now, there was this character I worked with, he was my beater, see, he’d get the crowds in, beat ’em up out of the bushes as it were, and people just followed him in and it was unbelievable because he was the meanest little man I’ve ever met. He would steal little children’s pets and sell them to the vivisectionists for drinking money. I swear to you that this is true, and yet they would just follow that mean little man right up to me. Now, I got a good heart, but it got so after a while I just didn’t care much. I found I just couldn’t relate to dumb suckers. My congregation everywhere I went was so literal-minded. There was this one woman I recall who’d been to Yellowstone Park and never gotten over it. She thought Heaven was going to look like Yellowstone Park! Well, anyway, these people were always after me to take out the snake, and one day I didn’t feel much like doing it, but I did, I reached into that box without no desire or conviction and, of course, I got bit and almost died. I was dead for eleven minutes and was brought back to life only by heroic measures. When I get to this part, most people say, What was it like those eleven minutes? and I say: I SAW DEATH COMING TOWARD ME AND I COULDN’T LOOK. WHEN I LOOKED AGAIN I SAW DEATH GOING AWAY. HE HAD HAIRY HEELS.” The eleven-minute man drew back after saying this. “I left preaching directly after that. I just couldn’t stand that pet-in-paradise business no more.”
“I was looking for a little boy with dark hair,” Liberty said.
“I used to be a little boy with dark hair myself,” the eleven-minute man said. “The world’s no place for them. You don’t act like a girl who’s curious, but I can see that’s just an act. You got the look of someone who’s real curious, someone who might fall for the old Death’s-a-bright-shining-net-vibrating-with-cold-energy malarkey, but I’m telling you, and I’m a man who knows, Death’s just an old hairy-heeled fart.”
His dry breath hammered against her, his words like nails fixing her face in place so he could stare at it.
“What did you say you used to be?” he asked.
“I just used to be myself,” Liberty said.
“You look half-starved,” he said abruptly. “You should eat some of this free chicken.”
The littered table, she now saw, was covered with small white bones.
A disheveled figure shambled toward them, glissading across the floor for the last few feet. “O dog of my dreams,” the figure said to Clem. “Scat, scat,” the figure said to the eleven-minute man.
“Charlie,” Liberty said.
“Recreant …,” Charlie said to the man’s departing back, “… toady, ca-ca head, pygmy.” He gazed sorrowfully down at the table of little bones and empty glasses. “It used to be so nice here,” Charlie said. “There were mountains and wildflowers and tubs of chocolate ice cream. Easter chicks and bunnies were hopping around. Everything.” His mockly mournful face turned toward Liberty and brightened. It was like a fist flowering into a hand. He bent forward and kissed her cheek. “Uummmmuh,” he said.
Her eyes watered from the light and smoke of the bar.
“Why can’t I cheer you up,” Charlie said. “It’s all I want to do.”
A couple tucked in at a table beside them. The man took a fifth of rum out of a paper bag and poured it over ice in two tall glasses. He put the bottle between them. It stood there like an old and not altogether trustworthy friend.
“Well, darling,” the man said, “how was your day?”
“Oh, my day,” the woman said musically. “I defrosted the fridge.” She took a long swallow of rum and said, “That kid at the end of the street did the same thing to me tonight as I was driving here.”
“What thing was that, darling?” the man said, looking at her intently.
“I knew I’d find you because I’ve been looking,” Charlie said to Liberty.
“He dashes through that empty lot just after the curve and runs right up to the edge of the road and then he stops,” the woman said.
The man slowly shook his head.
“He doesn’t look at the car, so you think he doesn’t see the car, but it’s a game with him, see, the little brat. The first two times he did it, I braked and swerved and my heart was pounding, believe me, but this time, I neither braked nor swerved. I didn’t even give him the satisfaction of a glance. I just sped right on by.”
The man nodded. “How old is this terrible child, darling?”
“Oh, he’s little, four or five, a little brat a couple of feet high.”
Charlie was busily
pushing the bones to one side of the table with the heel of his hand.
“Remains,” he muttered. “Man, I hate remains.” His hands shook as he pushed the mess around. A waitress appeared out of the gloom and put the things on a tray. “More beer?” she bawled at Charlie.
“Beer only, beer only. I’m coming off it, coming down, going to do it,” he said. He gave Liberty a big shaky smile and kissed her cheek again. “I haven’t had a drink since we were on the phone and you heard the glass drop. What a sound huh, doll? The end of the world as Charlie knows it. You heard that sound.” He shuddered.
The sound Liberty was hearing now was more like the sound of a bird, a bird warbling, a prolonged and plaintive trilling in the distance. The bar was dark. Turning ceiling lights swung erratically through it. Two filthy yard boys streaked with dust ambled by and stared at her with large white eyes. The feeling was that of being in a cave or a mine, going deeper, into the ever darker, and the improbable bird in the distance with its strange song didn’t exist to lead any of them out but to inform them when the song stopped that the air had run out.
Then she realized it was JJ in his wheelchair making the sound. It was something, she guessed, he had learned how to do when he couldn’t do something he wanted to.
Her thoughts drifted toward Willie, but they couldn’t find him, anywhere.
“Everything is going to be fantastic,” Charlie was saying, “you’ll see. Even my Shakespeare is coming back. Whole scenes have been bellying up to me. Yeah! You and Reverdy and the dog and me. We’ll each take parts, we’ll be a troupe. The kid can play all the messengers. You can play the ghost, man, how’s that,” he said to Clem.
At the table beside them, the woman said loudly, “You don’t love me.”
“Now, now,” the man said, “we haven’t had too much to drink already, have we?”
“You don’t love me. You never buy me flowers. You don’t wear a wedding ring and you don’t kiss my pussy.”
“I wear no jewelry at all, sweetness. I don’t like jewelry.”
“You don’t wear a wedding ring, you don’t kiss my pussy and you never buy me flowers,” the woman said. She raised three fingers stiffly in the air.
“Why do I take you out for a little treat,” the man screamed. “I could take my secretary out for a little treat.”
“Your secretary,” the woman moaned. “That Susan person!”
“She could accuse me of the same things,” the man said.
Large tears fell from the woman’s eyes. The man placed the bottle of rum back in the paper bag and put it in his pocket. He escorted her, sobbing, out.
“I know that lady,” Charlie said. “Her name is Beatrice. The only other Beatrice I ever knew was the largest lobster in Louisiana. Not a crayfish, mind, a lobster. Guy showed her at carnivals. Somebody poisoned her one summer and he went half mad with grief. Guy’s name was Jimmy Daisy. You never saw a sadder man after his Beatrice died.” Charlie pulled on his beer. “Poor ol’ Jimmy Daisy,” he said. “Drink up, doll.” He tapped her sweating bottle with his own.
“Have you seen Teddy and Duane? They were here.” Liberty picked at the label on the bottle with her fingers. “Teddy shouldn’t be here.”
“Why, Duane and I have been looking everywhere for you, Liberty. Duane and me and Reverdy looking everywhere, high and low. We’ve been to your house half a dozen times and been driving all around. Willie’s gone, right? Gone gone? Stay gone?”
She didn’t answer him. “Sally said that Duane was giving everything he had away?”
“There are just a few odds and ends left. He gave the kid a car and let him choose it himself, which I thought was nice. It’s the one with the fancy hubs and the screaming eagle painted on the air scoop. He gave the Shelby to the postman. Little flat-footed guy is standing there in his pith helmet rummaging through his pouch and Duane gives him a fifteen-thousand-dollar car. Everything in the house Duane dragged out and gave away. What a sight.” Charlie took a crumpled pack of Chesterfields from his pocket. He pulled a cigarette out, straightened it and lit it. When he inhaled, thin lines of smoke dribbled from holes in the paper.
“The bugs of Room 303,” Charlie said. “People think the bugs are in Charlie’s mind, but they are not in Charlie’s mind.”
“What exactly happened?”
“The particulars in cases of love lost are clouded,” Charlie said, “as we all know.”
“Janiella left.”
“She sure did, and left a mean note behind too. There are suspicions about the pool repairman. Duane’s sworn off human intercourse after tonight. Tonight, he drinks. Tomorrow he’s going to hitchhike into a desert.”
A skinny boy with a plate full of barbecue sat down at their table. He pressed his hands together, pointed them at the plate, muttered a grace and dug in.
“The desert,” Charlie said. “Picture it. Gulches, canyons, playas, oddities of erosion, mud palisades and Duane. Awesome stillness. Desolate grandeur. And that maniac.”
“I’ll take care of Teddy,” Liberty said.
The boy was folding the chicken into his mouth and banging his teeth noisily down upon the bones.
“The kid had no doubts,” Charlie said. “We discussed it at length. No desert for him. He wants to go to the North Pole first. He has already collected some facts on the North Pole. He says the polar bears there carry their babies around between their toes. You and me and Reverdy,” Charlie sang, “heading north. And you too, sport,” he said to Clem. “Never have I failed to include you in my master plan.”
“You want some more beer?” the waitress asked.
“No, no, no,” Charlie exclaimed. “My sweetie here and me, we’re about to start our life together.” He smiled his wild smile and put his hand lightly on Liberty’s back. “We begin,” he said. “The memories of our past existences will be but glints of light, twinges of regret, passing shadows of brief disturbances that will be gone before they can be grasped.”
“There’s Duane at the bar,” Liberty said. She stood up.
Charlie cupped his hands around his mouth. “Yo, Duane!” he called. The men at the bar remained hunched and unmoving. “Such embittered individuals,” Charlie said. “Armageddon and faithless women. Camouflage and survival. Bitch, bitch, bitch.”
They pressed through the crowd toward Duane. He sat on a stool gazing into a brown drink, his face blank as an acolyte’s.
“Where’s Teddy?” she asked.
“I just lit up my lip a minute ago,” Duane said. He pushed his lower lip out and pointed. “Thought I had a cigarette. Didn’t have a cigarette. Lit up my goddamn lip.” He looked at Liberty, then at Charlie. “There’s a woman here,” he said.
“Yeah, man,” Charlie said. “Correct.”
Duane tilted toward his drink, then tilted back. “You ain’t believing a thing this woman tells you, are you? You can’t trust a woman. They don’t stay around.”
“Life is subtraction,” Charlie said. He ordered beer.
“You know what I’m gonna miss most? My big block 428. What a monster.” He shook his head mournfully. “I thought that machine was gonna be with me for the duration.”
“Where’s Teddy?” Liberty said. She touched his arm, which was as hard as a piece of wood beneath his checked shirt.
“You gonna take care of my boy?” Duane asked. “My boy, my son?”
“Yes.”
Duane looked at her shyly. “I’m abandoning my boy.”
“Don’t be so lucid, man,” Charlie said. He drank the beer quickly.
“I’m not a scrutable man,” Duane said. “Even so, I can explain myself if I want to. I got my reasons, my theories, like with hunting. You ever hear my theory as to why hunting is so great? Well, I’ll tell you it. It’s not just that you can stop some big sucker that thinks it can go anywheres it wants to go. It’s in the gear and the preparation and the knowledge of your terrain and prey and stuff, but the great part is after you’ve shot the thing and you’re looking at
it and it’s dead, but not real dead you know, and it’s watching you. That’s when you have this incredible feeling. You feel a little bad. You feel a little sad and regretful and that’s the best part.” Duane pounded the bar. “That’s the best part, that little bit of guilt! Too late to do dick about it. Then that guilt just fades away.”
“One thing you got to learn to do in the desert is to keep your mouth shut,” Charlie said. “Very important.”
“Who’s telling Duane to keep his mouth shut! Don’t get me hostile. See these eyes here …” Duane jabbed his finger at his own face. “These eyes are the enemies of all joy and hope tonight.”
“I’m just saying, man, that in the desert you’ve got to learn to reduce your water needs. Lack of water is what makes the desert desert.” Charlie panted with enthusiasm.
Duane peered at him. “You got stuff floating around you, man.”
“Merely the nimbus that hovers around the redeemed,” Charlie said. “My life begins tonight.”
“No, seriously, man, what is that stuff?”
Charlie looked over his shoulder. Duane kept staring. Then he blinked and shrugged.
“Where is Teddy now, Duane?” Liberty persisted.
“I took him over to your house. We must of just missed you. The kid’s got his own car now. He can go anywhere, just has to learn to drive. ‘Escape’ I told him. Escape was my advice. My boy,” Duane mused. “Fruit of my loins.” He tugged at his lip.
A black man pushed his way up to the bar. He was holding a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. The baby’s fingers patted the air. The man sat several stools away, just where the bar began to curve, so that he faced them. He took a cloth from his pocket and ceremoniously wiped the counter, then propped the baby up on a slant board that had been concealed in the folds of the blanket.
