State of Grace

by Joy Williams

  Grady runs raggedly, crouched, as though he is in a war. Something disquieting has caught in his hair. He turns the ignition off and stands beside the Jaguar. He looks fierce and sad and lopsided. Perhaps the engine can be salvaged. Everything else is a ruin. The frame is bent. The pretty metal pocked like a waffle.

  He loved his car. He loved the language of it and the feel of its oily gloamy parts. Once he took the engine out and apart, only for his edification. It fluttered from a tree for days in a canvas sling. The dirty jargon would make me laugh. Camshaft sprocket setscrews. Cotter pins and slotted nuts. Idler sprockets fitting to eccentric shafts. Starter jaws retaining with locking washers. Some madman went and named them all and expected me to follow along. It made me angry in a way. I refused to be educated to it. However, he did teach me how to adjust the carburetors—there were three—and I could also correct valve clearance for he bought me a feeler gauge. .006 inches for the intake, .008 inches for the exhaust. It is so depressing to know that this knowledge will stay with me always.

  He knew the Jaguar perfectly. It was his only inconsistency. Stalls and shelters dotted the yard, housing soaking parts, tools, fluids and hoses. I remember him working on it on beautiful nights, the trees impossible ash, the river fat and white beneath the moon …

  I remember him working on it the last time. I called to him but he only pressed deeper into the engine. His only movement was when he exchanged one wrench for another. When he was finished at last, he came in, smelling of soap and kerosene. He went to bed. We did not kiss the last time. We gripped our bodies as one learns to. Feeding cutlery.

  But why do I speak so myopically? There has been an accident. The deputy looks at me as though he would like to hit me. He lights a cigarette that seems absurdly long. I wrap my fingers more tightly around the paper bag that rests in my lap. “Let me rectumfy something …” I begin and know I have made another mistake. “Rectify,” I say. There is a big star painted on the hood of the Ford as though we were part of a circus train. The deputy seems not to be listening. He pulls up to a White Tower and glares angrily inside for a few minutes at the people bent around the counter, eating fries and eggs. He puts the car in gear again. He seems displeased with everything.

  He says, “There was only one accident and you left it. You wasn’t about to report it. There was only one accident and only one car.”

  I agree with him as much as possible. “I saw the whole thing.” It was true. It wasn’t happening to me for, after all, it was Grady’s accident. I can’t be expected to assimilate everyone else’s events. A suppository of junky remembrances is pressed upon me by them all and I can’t forget a bit of it. I can remember everything and no one fact complements the other. It feels the same whether you’ve pretended it or not.

  “You’re lucky,” the deputy says. “I seen accidents where nothing on the vehicle is broke save the headlight but the people inside is deader than bricks.”

  He is so bewildering, this angry man. He is driving with prideful slowness through the town. He lingers particularly outside Mr. Porky, Mahalia Jackson Fried Chicken and John’s Bar-Bee-Q. We cruise in and out of the parking lots. The deputy breathes through his teeth and taps his fingers against the steering wheel.

  Why am I lucky? I don’t understand. I am unable to make inferences, but nothing ever seems to come to a conclusion and that isn’t my fault. The deputy doesn’t mention Grady. I try to think of him, once and for all.

  It is warm and the top of the Jaguar is down. I am following him in the other car, passing and falling back again on the thin blacktop road. I feel like a little girl and happy. The night is warm and smells so good and we are going out for dinner. The Jaguar rockets down the road, the wind puffing out his shirt like a sail. He moves his head up and down to the music that he hears.

  He has washed in the river. His chest and arms shine like a fish but the parts of his body that are covered with the river are yellow and dented like a chewed pipestem. I interrupt him and he drops the soap. It floats down into the mud and is lost. He hoists himself up onto the dock and walks naked to the trailer. Water splashes from his hair onto my hands. It feels like nothing—the same temperature as my skin—but it smells nicely of weeds. The woods in the dusk are dappled like an appaloosa. There are shadows everywhere and splinters in my hand. I try to work them out with my teeth. Everything I touch hurts.

  On the road, he is driving very fast and well. We travel for miles and see no one. The Jaguar flows tightly around corners. The air is cool and damp on my face but our hips and thighs, pressed against the transmission tunnel, are warm. The engine throbs so heavily and the wind noise is so high that we would not be able to speak to each other even if we wished to. There are so many dials and needles, all telling him that he is progressing well.

  … I will admit I’m not stylish, but I want to tell you something further. Intimacy brings its own alleviations. It substitutes for a great deal that would otherwise have to be carefully worked out. We are young and secret newlyweds, cutely expecting a baby. I am allotted a certain recklessness of feeling in such circumstances and I might as well use it. The wreck was spectacular and I enjoyed it. I know it’s not stylish but I refuse to chastise myself for this as I might have at a more impressionable age. I felt a sort of sick exultation, as in making love. Now I feel merely sickish for it’s quite apparent that I am in some frame that is in process after the accident, that the accident did not include. The wreck was interesting while it was going on because of its promise of finality—graceful, very honest and so soundless, for Grady did not once touch the brakes, which was commendable, I see it all now—flying, turning, settling—in black and white stills. As though taken from an exhibition. But now I realize … that is, it seems apparent …

  He tries to shield it from me, although this is quite impossible for the car lies in several sections on the curve. The top half of the steering wheel has disappeared into the ground. The exhaust system lies in the road but one tailpipe has become embedded by its pointed end in a tree. It falls as I approach. I touch Grady’s face. He tries to assure me that what has just happened doesn’t matter. Of course I know this but he is so insistent that I have to pretend to disagree so that he can convince me. I touch his face and it moves oddly across his jaw …

  The deputy drives faster and faster as we approach the courthouse. We tear around a corner with two wheels in the air and lunge into an underground parking lot. He strikes the brakes and the tail of the Ford leaps up into the air and settles with a grind. There are prisoners down there, working on motorcycles and sweeping the concrete floor. They do not even look up as we roar in. One has only one eye and is drinking an Orange Crush. The deputy leans across me and opens my door. I step out with my paper bag of wine.

  We walk to an elevator and soar softly upward. Everything is very new. Modernization begins here and tramps southward along the coast. South of the courthouse is the college, the pretty bay, yachts, condominiums and dazzling subdivisions where no tree grows. North of the courthouse, the country shifts and simplifies. It is noisy and brackish, the shoreline messy with skiffs and abandoned appliances and pickup trucks. We arrive on the second floor but nothing happens. In the elevator is a picture of the Governor and a small rotating fan, mixing the air. I smell like a cheese for I didn’t have time to bathe once Grady was through in the river. The deputy kicks the door with his boot and it slides back and we step out into the sheriff’s department. Three young boys shivering in plastic chairs look up. They are all rib and muscle and long bleached hair. Each has a generous cluster of pimples on his cheek in an ornate and purple curve, like a tattoo.

  I sit down in a chair by the window and look out onto the street. My deputy is talking with some other men, all in uniform, and writing something down in a notebook. They talk very softly except when they are calling each other by name, then their voices boom and roll toward the surfers and me. My deputy is named Ruttkin. There is Tinker the jailer and Darryl at the desk. They call out the
ir names and laugh and answer to them. They are solid presences in the room, more solid than the soft drink machine, certainly more solid than me sitting by the window and watching the wide white street. Ruttkin brings me a form to fill out and a folded newspaper to write on.

  I want to say, “Besides I’m true, so why do I need an alibi.” I would like to tell them that good-humoredly but they would never know that it came from Mae West and it would be wasted. Besides, they don’t ask me for an alibi. They ask me if I would like a glass of water.

  I fill in the blanks the best I can. The questions seem extraordinary even though I have seen them many times before. The ink from the pen soaks in a widening dot as I hesitate. Age Blood Address Kin Make and Model, numbers intentions past employments and explanations. All of these forms insist upon excuses as though life were only a succession of apologies, an aftermath of error. I would like to depend upon memory rather than instinct at times like these, but if thoughts are acts, as so many maintain, my answers would be just as useless. I am true but guilty, ready to admit everything. I grip the pen fiercely. I am misspelling words and wrinkling the paper. It’s gone all damp beneath my fist. I am unable to recall my birthday. They were in the winter months. Snow, blizzards blue in the morning … and I making myself sick each year with restraint and decorum. Once Mother ordered magicians but Father barred them at the door …

  I suck in my breath and try to co-operate. The point of the pen sinks wetly through the paper. I concentrate. I simplify.

  … I see myself barefoot in a short cotton dress, carrying my food stored in my cheek, abroad at dawn and afield in winter, and …

  I discard and reject. There are hundreds of reasons for the wreck, even more for Grady’s absence in the county courthouse. If he were here, he would reply imaginatively, taking into account what happened, but I am trapped by the immobility of events. I cannot shuffle them about or alter them. That’s not up to me. The answers remain the same when the reasons for them being true are gone. If Grady were here, the pen would move determinedly and fill this form up with signs. Somewhere, Grady is being polite and respectful. His mouth is wet and sweet and his hair the color of sea oats. He said that before he met me, it was true that he had kissed other girls.

  Outside, a Trailways pulls up to the curb. The driver jumps out and runs into the building. Underneath CAUSE OF ACCIDENT I write, The rubber grommet on the steering column was not replaced, causing the wheels to lock. The box was not topped with oil the track rod was loose the curve banked improperly the road greased with the fat of a wild animal struck down before we came. A clear case of metal fatigue of misadventure driver passivity and a choked fuel line.

  We are young marrieds, wed almost yesterday. Grady looks at me lovingly and I strike him down with my fabulous eyes. Like the basilisk. The Jaguar soars off the road and into the scenery.

  I am writing faster and faster, blushing and panting with relief. I am thinking as Grady would, abandoning myself to possibilities. A deputy that I have not seen before walks out of the building and into the bus below me, reappearing a few moments later with his arm locked around a black man’s neck. The man is small and slight and wears tight bright clothes. He seems to be strutting with his spine arched and his head flung back against the deputy’s chest. His sneakered feet paddle slowly in the air and he strikes awkwardly at the deputy’s hip with a pillowcase. I halfway get out of my chair and watch them as they cakewalk beneath me and out of view.

  I resume. Refitting is the reverse of the removal procedure and perhaps Grady left something out of the car when he was putting it together. Why not? Someone left something out of Grady. His face is a bit out of focus. He fell too soon from his mother’s womb, being born beside a gas station on a Labor Day jaunt to Key West. The family had planned nothing more than a picnic lunch and some bonefishing, but there came my husband, perfectly formed and scarcely breathing but smarter than they knew. For if he had waited six more weeks as he was supposed to have done, his mother would have already been dead for two. It cannot be surprising that he is obsessed with time and chance and orphanage and fell in love with me. Such thoughts make him gentle and grateful. He thinks of Time as his chum and accomplice. He is a swimmer swimming in his element. While I … It is a black and steel diving bell anchored to the bottom of the sea.

  I am feeling a little giddy and would like to raise my hand and ask to be excused. The Jaguar turned on its nose and Grady popped up like bread from a toaster. In the trailer, the sheets are damp where Grady wraps his mouth, the thin cotton full of holes where he has punched his feet.

  Under ADDRESS, I write Hemo Globin Rho House 122 5th St. That is a good joke I think on the sheriff’s department even though they will never be able to puzzle out my wretched penmanship. Everything asks pretentiously Where Can You Be Reached? I see Hemo Globin Rho, which I have made, and I feel my mouth widening in a rubbery grin. I look around for someone to smile at. The surfers could be smiling but they are not looking at me but at the elevator. They look wolfish, flat and opaque. The arrangement of their lips could foggily evaporate should circumstances allow. Tinker the jailer cocks his head and sniffs like a deerhound and the elevator door is open, the deputy that I do not know is wading across the room with the black man from the bus. His wide red arm is squeezed tightly across the man’s neck and he steps on the heels of the man’s sneakers and raises his knees high as he walks so that they punch the man’s buttocks. I cannot see his face. The pillow case that he carries is dirty on the bottom and heavy with pointed objects.

  Sweat drips from my armpits and falls down my sides. The air is full of ozone, like it was before the accident. I could smell it then—something about to let go—and it has come back. My eyes float and bump against the scene, trying to organize it, for I am afraid that freakily this is my friend, Corinthian Brown. I cannot see his face. I get up from the chair and step solidly on my paper bag of wine, our party gift. I drag my foot up quickly but the wine is gone, the bag flat, a hole in the bottom and the brown paper stained. Beneath my sandal straps, my toenails are broken and my feet ache. I sit back down again. This cannot be my friend, Corinthian Brown. Though his arms beneath the plum blue jersey are a honeycomb of scabs, though his hands windmill wistfully in space, it is not him at all.

  “John here has been messing around all the way since Chiefland,” the deputy says. “Ain’t you?” and he jiggles the black man, rearranging him to face us like a sack of feed. The man’s face is round and middle-aged, his chin and eye pouches pale, two stringy lines of white descending from his mouth and his lips jammed shut as though he were holding a jawful of milk. “Drunk and stinking up that pretty bus. Bothering them nice people.”

  He looks serene and amused and grips the pillowcase like a strangled hen. He is not Corinthian. My friend is young and morose, lovely with his nervousness. He is sick, Corinthian. He would never be traveling on a bus.

  I should be relieved but I’m not. Something flutters in my stomach. The baby moves and jabs my spleen with his watery head. I touch myself there. My belly is crooked and there is a hard ball on the left where it has settled for a while. At night, I lie with my stomach against Grady’s flank. It beats against him and makes him dream. Sleeping, Grady moans and trembles like a dog, ill from the straw and dust he has eaten under the impression that it was marvelously delicate food. No one mentions him here.

  “You nothing but a bother to us all, John,” the deputy says and drops his arm. He walks over to where Darryl is sitting, reading the Sunday comics. The black man looks around the room, swallowing. Swallowing, it seems, once for each thing his busy eyes rest upon. There is an open door and behind it the cells. The windows are single high plates of glass. There are filing cabinets, a tree in a pot bearing real oranges. The floor is a set of different colored tiles, like a game, and the man sets one sneaker down lightly on a new tile and then brings it back again. He spits between his feet. He shifts the pillowcase from his left hand to his right and swings it around like a bat,
hitting the departing deputy in the ass.

  Darryl drops the funnies in the paper plate of food he’s eating from and my man Ruttkin’s face turns gray as a sheep on the spot.

  No one makes a sound and no one moves except the surfers who back their shanks deeper into the bucket seats. They stare and look adventurous, as though they’d been brave, squinting and hunching their shoulders like gangsters. I would like to say a few words or make a noise of some sort, a cough, hiss or clap, but something seems to jam me up. The thing slips membranous over my head and my mouth fills up with air. It is too late, it is ritualized. The moment turns from chance to rite and the four deputies are together now, for Darryl has run from behind the desk. He has an enormous torso but tiny sick legs and there is a stain on the fly of his pants. But they are all together now and circling the black man who still looks distant and bemused, who swings lightly the guilty pillowcase. He isn’t even watching them—he is an audience like me, watching this in some far-off balcony—and they walk around him in a tight circle, walking faster and faster and I think perhaps that they might turn to butter like the tigers did and we will sit down to stacks of pancakes. We will swallow them up and later void them in the scrubbed latrine, over the scented bulb that is wired to the bowl, and flush them into the holes beneath the town … I smell a small smell of whiskey now and flame and the black man smiles and gives a happy growl.

  “Mother,” he says.

  And the deputies fall on him, softly and without noise like dogs on a barnyard duck. There’s a dull splash and smack and the man’s ear begins to bleed, the pillowcase slides across the floor and out of it falls a clock,

  a comb

  and a can of pears.

  I can’t even see their hands moving, they’re jammed so close, but I see the two white sneakers planted in the thicket of professional country blue and Tinker’s thighs churning up and down as though he’s peddling a bicycle. I tell you, I can’t feel a thing. I’m a wastebasket, and if you were honest, you’d admit it too.