by Joy Williams
“Feculent little bastard,” Charlie said. “Get me a beer, Liberty. Ol’ Charlie needs a beer. There’s a cooler in the back.”
The backseat was full of things. Blankets and pillows and books, a lantern, cartons taped shut, a red ice chest tipped on top of everything. Everything had been prepared for a trip. A change of venue, Liberty thought. The words pressed gibbering through her mind. She later would think that nothing seemed to be missing there. Nothing unusual. Her hands moved around the bottles and picked up shards of ice. She ran them across Charlie’s lips.
“You can’t drink anything,” she said, her voice trembling. “You’ve been stabbed. You mustn’t drink.”
He sucked on a piece of ice.
“Imagine me trying to quit drinking today,” Charlie said.
“Where are you cut? Is it deep?”
“I don’t know anything about the human body. Kidneys, pancreas, liver, intestines, who knows where all that stuff is … It’s just a scratch. ‘ ’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man …’ Mercutio. Romeo and Juliet. Isn’t that something? My head’s clear as a bell.”
They moved with majestic slowness down the highway, passing a motel which had a pink neon flamingo with a curved neck rising from the roof. The flamingo’s pink stomach said NO VACANCY. Outside a lighting store where all the lamps were lit, two bums slept on flattened cardboard.
“We’re driving too slow,” Liberty said. “Let me do the gas.” The hospital was miles away.
The Cadillac slowed further. “I’m looking for something,” Charlie said. He looked at her and smiled, his eyes blurred and dark. “Now, be calm,” he said. “My daddy always said, Be calm. He said it when we were all sitting around in the trailer while a hurricane was picking up pieces of Bayou Teche and setting them down in Bayou Louise. The whole affair put our trailer in the treetops, broke my momma’s jaw and almost drowned me, but my drunk daddy didn’t get a scratch.”
“Don’t talk,” she said, putting her arm around his hunched shoulders.
“This isn’t the desert. Or maybe it is. Could be my desert, my desolate outside, my never-never … Here it is, this is what I was looking for. I knew it was here.”
It was an unmanned car wash, twinkling and flashing with beckoning lights in the pale night. Charlie turned in, eased the car around a corner, deftly locked the front wheels into a set of tracks, and turned off the engine.
“What are you doing?” Liberty cried. “There isn’t time for this …”
The tunnel was a dripping spectacle ahead.
“I’ve just got to get that guy’s piss off my car, doll. Dog’d understand that. Piss on what’s yours cannot be tolerated. You know, in King Lear, three dogs are named. Their names are Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart. This is true.” He reached slowly for his wallet, pulled out a bill and lay it on the tongue of a squat machine. The tongue tugged the bill backward between thin lips. “Five bucks, but it’s worth it,” Charlie said. “This place does a thorough job.”
The big car inched forward. Liberty sat rigidly, not looking back because she would then see what wasn’t there. Clem was not in the car.
She tried to place him behind her, tried to fix, hold, imagine him there, but she could not. She could only imagine a prom cummerbund of red widening, hidden beneath Charlie’s coat—blood welling slowly from a gash, like something living, once imprisoned, not yet aware it was no longer enslaved to running the same dark, concealed circuits.
“Out of the vague, lazy web of life into the chute, hey doll,” Charlie said.
Water pounded against the car and its windows darkened. A ball of colored rags humped up the Cadillac’s hood and floated heavily against the windshield, writhing there for an instant before it slipped upward and disappeared. There was a whooshing roar and pummel, and a spray of warm water fell upon her bare knee. She twisted the triangular vent-window shut.
Soap blew at them in rattling beads.
“I’ve got everything right here with me,” Charlie said. “I really moved out today. It’s funny, I didn’t leave a paper clip behind, I swept that room clean, I wiped it down with an old wet shirt. Everything’s whole and just behind me. Files are complete, photographs in order, every cap has got a bottle, every sock a mate, all the pencils are sharpened. Nothing is broken, everything’s full, books in their jackets. It’s all here, it all works except for me. Oh, doll, I’m sorry, I feel weak as puppy water. It was a bad sign, a cancerous impulse, trying to start over, change my life, clean everything up. I’ve always been a clean person, though. My body’s clean, almost hairless except for my head. I could have been a clean old man with a little raked yard, oil cloth on the table always wiped, a small, well-groomed pullet as a pet. What do you think? The gift is inexplicable, isn’t it … I mean, what are you supposed to do with the damned thing …” Brushes churned against the glass. Charlie coughed. “I think the little bastard killed me,” he said.
An instant passed. Water hung suspended on the glass, there was a throbbing sound, draining.
“What’s the time, gotta know the time,” Charlie said. “I’m allergic to something in a watch, can’t wear one on my wrist, never know the time …” He turned the dial on the radio. I SEEN THE ROCKS AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, someone screamed through static, I SEEN … Liberty turned it off. “There’s a clock in the dash,” she said. “It’s eleven-thirty.” She put her arms around him. She slipped one arm behind his back and pressed the other lightly around his waist. She tried to make a basket of her arms.
“The clock’s always said that,” Charlie said, “but maybe it’s close enough. What is this? It’s supposed to be an intense, intolerable effluence, but it just looks dark and wet out there … baby, I’m dead.” The clock did not move. For anyone but them, it could have been the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow. “Baby,” Charlie said, “get me my bottle.”
She slid carefully away from him, knelt on the seat and looked behind her. A yellowish light filled the tunnel and the round black bristles of the scrubbing brushes slid back on gleaming joints against the wall. What had it been, with which she had shared her silence and which was now gone from her? Her task had once been to accomplish each day, but now there was no such task. She had been let go.
“We’ve been left, haven’t we,” Charlie said.
She picked up the bottle of gin, which was wedged between the cooler and the door, then slid over, onto the backs of things there. “Move over,” she said. “I’ll drive when we get out of here.”
“Oh, doll, you know, after we get out of here …” Charlie shrugged but shifted himself across the broad seat. He grasped the bottle she handed him by the neck. “Here’s to my love,” he said and drank. “All chance for reparations lost.” She held him as she had before, feeling now the dampness of his jacket. “You think there’s any justice in it?” he asked. “I was poking his girlfriend. I did want to daddy his boy.”
“No,” she said, “no justice in it.”
“He didn’t know any of that and stabbed me anyway. People like that have instincts. When we’re all gone, people like that will be starting all over, snug in caves, toasting roaches.” He took another swallow and shuddered. “Things come and go,” he said vaguely.
Funnels of dry air pushed against the car, and a long, black roller descended from the ceiling, touching the grille, pushing softly but firmly toward them. They would be out soon, the chocks would fall away. She was behind the wheel, but tipped toward him, holding. Sweat dripped from his face onto hers. The car grew dark again as the rolling tread passed over them, as some heavy, tattered material slid past fender and door.
“It’s going to say ThankYouThankYouThankYou soon,” Charlie said, “then, ExitExitExit. I’ve been here before. That kid and I had great plans for us, Liberty. You know that egg, the egg he’s been carrying around for a week, had to for a week, and the week’s going to be up, and I told h
im, ‘You’ve been great with that egg, God couldn’t have been nicer to that egg, but what are you going to do with it now? That egg doesn’t have a life of its own, it was meant for something else. It’s not going to end well for that egg,’ I said, but he just laughed. He laughs at what I say now, he’s a great kid. I told him the first time God carried an egg around for seven days he ended up dropping it.”
They were almost out. Charlie closed his eyes.
“Don’t close your eyes.”
“I don’t understand what’s going to happen next. I’m going to be dead.”
“You’re not. A scratch.”
“You won’t be a widow. That’s the only blessing. You know you’re never really conscious of it until it’s your turn and then you think, what do they do with all of us? The streets, why aren’t they clogged with hearses, why don’t we see what we’re seeing? If I come back, will you be frightened of me?”
“No.”
“You don’t come back. You can only stay longer, maybe. You could have stayed here longer yourself. You could have been a middle-aged lady, intense but friendly, like middle-aged ladies are, with a collection of glass balls that you shake and there’s snow. We could sit, you and I, of an evening, turning and watching. This could have been ours.”
“We’re here, still here.” She could not see the moon, but it had lit up everything.
“You think … this is splendid, this is mine, mine alone, mine … and all it is is death.”
His eyes were open.
“But who knows,” he said, “maybe I’ll be all right, after all. I see the kid out there. Everybody’s out there. Dog’s waiting … That’s one hopeless egg, but there’s a game in it still. Look at that kid, he’s playing catch with it.”
“By himself?”
“Himself alone.”
She looked, tried to see what he was seeing, drew away from him to touch the wheel, reach for the key.
JOY WILLIAMS
Joy Williams is the author of four novels, three short story collections, and a history of the Florida Keys. She has received the Rea Award for the short story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Books by Joy Williams
Novels
State of Grace
The Changeling
Breaking and Entering
The Quick and the Dead
Short Stories
Taking Care
Escapes
Honored Guest
Nonfiction
The Florida Keys: A History and Guide
Ill Nature
BOOKS BY JOY WILLIAMS
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist; Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning; Annabel is desperate to pursue an ordinary American life of indulgences. Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles—and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity
Fiction/978-0-375-72764-1
STATE OF GRACE
Nominated for the National Book Award in 1974, this haunting, profoundly disquieting novel manages to be at once sparse and lush, to combine Biblical simplicity with Gothic intensity and strangeness. It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapes—in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, and searingly acute, State of Grace bears the inimitable stamp of one of our finest and most provocative writers.
Fiction/978-0-679-72619-7
ILL NATURE
Most of us watch with mild concern the fast-disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution-related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched forests, and violence both home and abroad. Joy Williams does more than watch. In this collection of condemnations and love letters, revelations and cries for help, she brings to light the price of complacency with scathing wit and unexpected humor. Sounding the alarm over the disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created, she takes on subjects as varied as the culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, vanishing wetlands, and the determination of American women to reproduce at any cost. Controversial, opinionated, at times exceptionally moving, Ill Nature is a clarion call for us to step out of our cars and cubicles, and do something to save our natural legacy.
Nature/Essays/978-0-375-71363-7
HONORED GUEST
With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways—comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client’s wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers, Honored Guest is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-1-4000-9552-0
ALSO AVAILABLE
Taking Care, 978-0-394-72912-1
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
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