by Joy Williams
Ricky was reading the newspaper avidly, as she always did. Her morning homage to the newspaper. Finally she put it down.
“What?” she said. “You’re restless.”
“I have a lot of work to do.”
“You could have brought it with you. I don’t mind.”
“I better go back early. Maybe after lunch.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. She began pinching dead stems off the geraniums.
“Those things have a helluva smell,” he said.
“I like roses better but I’m not good with roses.” After a moment she said, “Don’t be unhappy with me, Cliff, with us.”
“I’m not unhappy,” he said. “Don’t start that stuff.”
—
On the ferry, the girl had been stroking the dog’s head as she read. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him again. He must have been staring at her without realizing it.
“Rilke’s my favorite,” he said. “He wrote about dogs a great deal. He wrote about going into them, you know? He’d have been fascinated with your big fellow.”
“My big fellow,” she said slowly.
“It’s apparently why Rilke left his wife, why he left home. Because he wasn’t allowed to ‘go into the dog.’ Or if he did he would have to attempt to explain it, which spoiled everything. He loved easing himself into the dog, into the dog’s very center, into the place from which the dog existed as a dog, the very place, he said, where God would have rested when the dog was complete, to watch him.” He spoke quickly. Usually he didn’t talk much. He felt a little breathless.
“I’d like to make something clear to you,” she said. “Do you think that would be possible? I mean really clear.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I think you understand me,” she said.
After she had sped around him on the road, he drove for a time, disoriented, across the island. Then he returned to the church and the graveyard. There were a few large marble stones, pink as uncooked bacon, then some low granite pillow stones, as he’d heard them called. It was not an old cemetery. There was probably an older one somewhere on the island. He couldn’t see that any earth had been freshly excavated. He hoped that they remembered, that they knew what they were doing. He got out of the car and walked toward the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the burying ground. With relief he saw some shoveled earth, some waiting earth. He returned to the car and poured a cup of coffee from the thermos he’d brought. It seemed he had known more about everything before his father’s death, which had just been six days before, and now he would know less and less. He looked at the church and the graveyard and the parking lot where gulls stood hunched. On the beak of each one was a perfect red dot like a drop of blood. He couldn’t understand any of it. The church had no spire. It had an architectural suggestion of a spire.
He walked toward the church and the gulls shuffled away from him and spread their wings but did not fly. The door was unlocked, so he went in, without looking at the sanctuary, and found the bathroom. When he came out he saw the pastor’s office and put his hand on that door too, but it was locked. The church was as cold as the outside, maybe even colder.
He sat down self-consciously in the last pew. There was a child’s mitten on the floor. Less than an hour had passed since he’d driven off the ferry. He sat in the cold. The church felt like the shell of something, something unlucky. The flowers from the Sunday service were still in their vases, browning. The silver vases, however, shone. This was Wednesday.
He could see his own breath before him and his teeth began to chatter. He nudged the child’s mitten away with his foot, under the pew in front. The pews were as heavily varnished as the benches on the ferry. He stood and walked past the pastor’s study into an open room full of rummage, games and glasses, shoes and clothes. On a coatrack there were a number of worn sweaters and jackets. He put his ungloved hand idly in the pocket of one of the jackets and touched cigarette butts and rubber bands. He wondered if any of his father’s things were in this room. He would not have recognized them; he had last been with him two years ago and it hadn’t been anywhere his father lived, just a restaurant in the city. He remembered a plate of bloody meat. Apparently the restaurant was cherished for its firm, fresh, bloody meat. The evening with his father had been all right, though he couldn’t remember all that much about it.
The hand he had placed in the jacket now felt dirty, tingling, even a little numb, as if it had been bitten by poisonous insects. Cigarette butts and rubber bands and death the promised end. He went back to his car, turned on the heater and drove into the interior of the island again. He didn’t see the crushed fox this time and kept going. There were moors with scrub pines, thickets and ponds. There were no houses here in what was common land, a conservancy, crisscrossed by rough trails. He drove aimlessly and slowly through the moors, then stopped on a high knoll. Some distance away he saw a vehicle creeping along with a dog trailing behind it. It was the Newfoundland. This was how the girl exercised him. The bitch, he thought. Oh, the lazy bitch. He sat slumped in his seat, despondent, hating her, following the lumbering dog with his eyes. They didn’t approach him. She must have seen him there, his white car on the moors, but she was selecting trails now that took her farther and farther away. They disappeared from his sight.
The water of the distant sound looked like pavement, an empty boulevard. He must not allow the girl to ruin this island for him, this unknown place where his father would be buried forever. He had to give his father his full attention; it was absolutely essential. He looked at his watch. It was still some time before the burial. He remembered thinking then that the pastor should have invited him to his house during this interval. It would have been nice.
—
The writer who could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees made quite an impression. But her agent double-crossed Cliff and her next contract was with another house. Still, Cliff was credited with having good instincts and given better opportunities. His authors respected the careful work he did while he found he admired them less and less. The best books were those uninhabited by those who wrote them.
“Fierce, tactile prose,” Loup said. “That’s what we want and are so seldom given.
“There’s no fucking energy around anymore,” Loup said. “You notice that? It’s because death’s energy, death’s vital energy, is being ignored. It’s not being utilized. The more and more death, the more it’s wasted. People just let it evaporate. But not us. We know how to husband the source. I’m sure you are aware,” Loup said, “that the soul was invented. A Greek invented it in the sixth century BC. Pindar the Greek.”
—
“They told me I was washing the diapers with too much bleach and that’s why the baby’s been cranky,” Ricky said. “Do you think that could be true?”
He had so wearied of her it was like an ache in his bones.
“I’ve found a good sitter,” she said. “It took me forever to find a really responsible one. Why don’t I come along to the service for your father?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“We never do anything important together. I hardly ever see you. Afterwards we could go out, couldn’t we?”
“We’ll have another drink and go out tonight. We’ll go to that seafood place.”
It was late afternoon and the sun was falling with haste toward the earth.
“Gramma said that when dusk falls it reminds God of the hearts of men. That’s the only time he thinks of us, at dusk.”
“Your grandmother was an amazing woman,” Cliff said.
She looked at him uncertainly.
They would quarrel later. He was relieved it was finally over.
—
He had stopped at the inn before reboarding the ferry. The girl’s car was in the parking lot and in the backseat, like a judge in his robes, sat the dog.
In the dining room the tables were set with white table
cloths but no one was there. People were eating and drinking in the bar. He went into the dining room, ordered a whiskey and soda and some soup and asked for bread. He was almost trembling with hunger. He ate most of the bread with his drink.
The girl materialized from the dimness of the bar and walked across the dining room to his table. She had on jeans and a tweed jacket and was wearing dark red lipstick.
“I’m sorry I was rude to you this morning,” she said. “I feel badly about it. It was interesting what you were saying.”
He picked up the last piece of bread in the basket and began chewing it. “The bread here isn’t very good,” he said.
“It’s better on the weekends,” she said. “Or it sometimes is.” She laughed.
“Would you like a drink?” he said.
“No thank you. I just wanted to apologize. I was so awful. I’m like a different person in the morning.”
She was being terribly pleasant. “Yes,” he said. “You seem like a different person.”
The waitress was coming across the room with the soup.
“I’ll leave you in peace now,” the girl said, and went back to her friends.
He ate the soup. A few minutes later the waitress returned with a fresh drink. “It’s on the house,” she said. He took it and ordered another. A drink someone bought for you didn’t taste any different than a drink you bought yourself. No one else came into the dining room.
As he left, the girl called out good-bye to him.
“Bye-bye,” he said. She meant nothing to him.
It was growing dark and he could barely make out the great patient bulk of the dog in the car next to his own. He thought about being watched from the inside. He would not want to be watched from the inside.
—
Now he and Loup were sitting in a corner of the bar they frequented. They had been regulars here for months. Cliff had finished telling him the story of the island, his father, the girl. He had missed the service at the graveyard. He must have fallen asleep in the car or been thinking of the girl, wishing her ill and the dog too, hoping for something to enter their lives and break her heart. When he had looked at his watch it was well past noon. Even then he had done nothing until it was hours past the moment for which he had come, the committal. He continued to sit in the car with the heater running. But then he had driven back across the island and past the deserted church without even glancing at the grave site to see if the earth was smooth or still disturbed.
It was a story meant to be told in a different way, he thought reasonably, protectively.
“You can go back for the installation of the stone,” Loup said. “There’s always the next opportunity.”
Cliff looked at him meekly but the older man was looking away, studying someone across the room, someone whom he had greeted earlier and already dismissed.
The Mission
A Mr. Hill was doing my paperwork.
“What will you take away from this experience,” he asked me.
I looked at him, a little wildly, I guess.
“What do you think you will learn from the incarceration experience?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Mr. Hill wore a pink shirt and looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot.
“Have you been swimming,” I asked.
“I haven’t been swimming,” he said frankly.
I thought of Mr. Hill doing a strenuous butterfly in a blue cool but overchlorinated pool deep in the earth beneath the Mission.
I had been in jail but a single day and night when they realized they had overlooked the wedding ring on my hand. I wasn’t married anymore but couldn’t get the ring off. My knuckles were swollen possibly because of the prednisone I’d been taking because I was tired, so tired. It was just a cheap gold band but I made a terrible fuss when they said they’d have to cut it off. Some of the girls had gathered around.
“They’re gonna cut off her wedding ring,” one muttered with amused awe.
I asked for Mr. Hill. He might tell them not to bother, I thought. I was only in for nine days.
But they couldn’t find Mr. Hill or he had in the meanwhile sickened or died, I don’t know.
They were determined to cut off my ring and after several attempts with a variety of implements they did. They took pictures. First the little ring was on my lumpish hand, then the poor broken thing was zipped up in a baggie for safekeeping and future retrieval. I didn’t regret the mangling of the ring as much as the disclosure heard throughout the dorm that I would be there for a mere nine days. Most of the girls were serving ninety or a hundred and eighty days. One girl, Lisa, who even with my paucity of instinctual knowledge terrified me, had been here since September and it was now June.
It was Sunday evening and on Sunday evenings there was Snack, a bottle of Pepsi and a packaged cookie. Usually you had to pay for this stuff out of the machines. Two inmates with magnificent hair distributed Snack, which was allocated by bunk number. Everyone except the guards had the most astonishing hair. I didn’t want to call any more attention to myself so I lined up with the others but someone had already used my number to double-dip.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“You didn’t pick up Snack already?” one of the gloriously maned girls demanded.
“It’s perfectly all right,” I assured her.
“Somebody take her cookie?” the other said, her eyes darkening.
“Some bitch took her cookie.”
“Really, it’s fine,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“I’m gonna find the bitch took her cookie!” She looked around with unsettling purpose.
“Please, please, please,” I said.
“She don’t want to get the bitch in trouble,” the first one said, not altogether approvingly.
They pushed a warm soda and a cold cookie into my hands.
“You can give me them if you don’t want it,” the girl behind me said.
I was DUI, which was so boring in the vast scheme of things and particularly in the louche gray world of the Mission. DUIs were beneath interest and I had already experienced girls looking right through me in a practiced way even though this would change if the particulars of my case became known. I had been drinking Manhattans all afternoon for reasons that remain obscure and when returning home had driven off the road into the city’s largest cemetery, demolishing seven headstones before my old Suburban stopped. If one of those girls had a friend or family member whose marker had been so desecrated, God himself wouldn’t be willing to help me.
The first policeman on the scene said, “You’re lucky you didn’t kill somebody.” Naturally, he was laughing.
This happened four months ago. I didn’t go to jail right away. First they took me to a place called the Pit, where more or less endless processing is conducted. There’s a water fountain and a phone. My only companion was a woman saying “Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom. Mom. Mom” into the receiver. I don’t think anyone was on the other end. I think she was just trying to pass time in the Pit.
Do you know that Kafka is buried with his mother and father in Prague? Their names are on his stone. He couldn’t get away from those people, not in life and not in death. I have never been to Prague but had I been and by some misfortune demolished Kafka’s headstone, the rage of the people there, indeed the rage of people the world over, would not exceed that of the kinsmen of those whose rest was disturbed here in our little city’s largest cemetery. The families Dominguez and Schrage and Tapia and McNeil and Byrne and Pennington…they hated me. They howled for my ruin. I’d been told their anguish was existential and therefore without limit or promise of closure. Reparation would never be enough.
They let me go after twelve hours to deal with all the horrid things that would occupy me for years—the sentencing and community service and judgments, the lawyers and lawsuits and probation officers and trials and plea bargains and financial penalties and loss of privileges and rights. Nine days at the Mission might very well b
e the least of my burdens.
In the bunk next to me was a girl whose eyelids were tattooed. I had never seen anything like it. She was a vandal. She went out into nature, into state parks particularly, and hacked whatever she could to pieces. She hacked up trees and spray-painted SOMA on boulders and petroglyphs and interpretive signs. She had misread Brave New World, maybe in high school, I thought, but I wasn’t going to mention that to her or anything else.
“Have you ever read Brave New World,” I asked.
She turned her head in my direction, closed her eyes, and very very slowly shook her head.
“OK,” I said. “Cool.”
You’re better off if you don’t count the days in jail. Never count the days. Time served does not go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on but Monday to Tuesday, Tuesday to Wednesday, in that manner. It’s longer that way, which is how they want it.
One girl said that when she got out there was a job waiting for her decorating cakes. But she did not have high hopes for the position. “You can’t be real creative,” she said. “It’s not as creative as you’d think.”
I just overhear these things, no one ever speaks to me. For example, I heard that Lisa was in for armed robbery and three of the five fathers of her children had restraining orders against her. One afternoon Lisa looked at a girl who had left her boyfriend for dead with a knife in his head as they were traveling by bus to Key West—just left him in the seat when she exited in Key Largo—and said, “Do you have anything you’d like to share?” Most of the girls kept food they’d bought from the machines in the drawers under their bunks. I was very frightened but the girl gave Lisa Snickers and Skittles and even a little bag of that Smartfood popcorn, all of which Lisa accepted in a gracious manner.
The next morning I saw Mr. Hill standing by the front station with some folders.
“Mr. Hill!” I cried.
“Hello, N. Frame,” he said.
“I’m not N. Frame,” I said, somewhat hurt, “unless she’s to be released today.”
“She is to be released today.”
