by Joy Williams
“Then sure I am,” I said.
“No,” he said, studying me with his bloodshot eyes, “I see you are not.”
“Have you been swimming?” I said, trying to resume our old intimacy.
“You’d better go back to your bunk now,” he said, “and tuck your shirt in.”
“But it’s been nine days! I know you’re not supposed to count.”
“Whoever told you that?” he said. “Of course you’re supposed to count the days.”
Not long after, the girls who distributed Snack were released and the girl who would have the job at the bakery and even Lisa. She strode away, her mighty bronze and black hair swinging.
I started counting the days.
When I counted a certain way I had not been there anywhere near nine days.
New girls arrived. They didn’t need to know me either because the reality is DUIs will never be among the elite at the Mission. One of the new ones—she was just in for violating probation—managed to hang herself. No one could figure out how she got away with it. Like everyone else she had been asked a dozen times throughout the admission process if she harbored suicidal thoughts but she must have lied.
For a while afterward there were more guards, even men, boys really. The boy guards always looked uneasy. There’s a shitload of girls in the bathroom, we heard one of them say anxiously. Somehow the numbers had gotten away from them. There are supposed to be only seven of us in the bathroom at any given time.
The girls gave one another facials at the picnic table in the little cement yard where we were allowed to go at erratic times. The times became even more erratic, if that was possible, after the hung girl. Her name had been Deirdre, but no one mentioned her by name. It was just too weird to call her by her name.
A facial was just squeezing blackheads and whiteheads. Even so, I was not invited to participate, neither as extractor nor as extractee. I felt so isolated and alone, though no more than usual.
My lawyer said, “You’re better off where you are for the time being. The environment out here is not conducive to…” She paused.
“To what?”
“Conducive to your privacy, to your ability to come and go.”
“I want to be able to come and go out there.”
“Don’t we all,” the lawyer said. “I mean in the deepest sense.”
From the very first I had found her annoying.
“But I didn’t hurt anyone.”
“A felony’s a felony,” she said.
I spent my days attempting to read a little pamphlet entitled The Room. It was about file cards and Jesus. It was pretty depressing. It was trying to provide hope but I didn’t find it hopeful. Too, the problem might have been with the lighting, which was deliberately terrible. It took forever to read anything.
Then I saw Mr. Hill again. I rushed to the red line painted on the floor. He nodded for me to advance.
“Hello, N. Frame,” he said.
“Hello!” I said. Thinking quickly, I added, “I am to be released today.”
Then I wanted to take it back because by my calculation N. Frame had been released many days before.
“I’m afraid not,” Mr. Hill said. “You’re a recidivist and your time with us starts all over again.”
Despite myself I thrilled to his use of the word recidivist, which is a lovely-sounding word.
“I’m really not N. Frame,” I said. “But for my own actions I take full responsibility. I am so contrite.”
He looked at me wearily.
“I am,” I said.
“Nothing you do will be enough,” he said. “No compensation will suffice.”
“I know, I know, I know,” I said.
He shifted the folders he held from one hand to the other. “Enhanced punishment,” I heard in part.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, for enhanced was a lovely word as well, though I believe in this context it wasn’t as nice as it sounded. “Am I a recidivist or did my sentence just get worse regardless?”
Even before I finished I felt the unworthiness of my question. I retreated to my bunk and I thought of Mr. Hill returning to his residence beneath the Mission, where the light was good and where water moved as if it were alive and where possibly dozens of the pressed pink shirts I admired were in orderly rows. Our clothes smell of metal—our soap and socks and even the candy that we keep. It all smells unconsolingly of metal.
It was very late and all was quiet. There wasn’t a dream moving.
The girl with the tattooed eyelids said to me, “There is no Mr. Hill.”
I felt better immediately.
Her eyes were shut, of course. There was a design on her lids but I had always felt that any attempt to determine what it was would be most unwise and I feel that way still.
Another Season
He had taken the boat from the mainland when he was still a young man and stayed on. He remembered the first night being the hardest, as they say the first night of being dead must be. But he was not newly dead, he was entering for the first time what would become his life. He slept that first night on the beach, curled behind a boat, and his dreams were no longer those of his childhood—the plastic ball enclosing a plastic lion crushed by the doctor’s car as over and over the doctor’s pale car arrived at the anguished house.
He woke to a stinging rain and a strong east wind. The road to town was dark with little birds, dovekies he was later told, little auks blown in from the storm. He scooped up as many as he could catch and placed them in the bushes.
“Not there, not there!” a man in yellow oilskins shouted. “They live only on water, they can’t lift their bodies into flight from land!”
Together they carried dozens back to the sea but as many others died exhausted in their hands.
Later the man in oilskins said to him, “What is your name?”
“Nicodemus.”
“Not Nick?”
“Nicodemus.”
“He was the gentle one.”
The man was long retired from some successful industry. Now he was a hobbyist, a birder. He offered to hire Nicodemus as a handyman for his own grand residence, which he would vacate after Thanksgiving. In a matter of weeks, Nicodemus knew everyone on the winter island. He fixed pumps, caulked boats, split wood. He shingled roofs with the help of the waning moon.
Still, nothing was familiar to him here, neither morning nor evening. In the southern dusk, the dark grew out of the sky like a hoof of mud dissolving in a clear pool. But on the island, dusk seemed to grow out of nothing at all. Dusk and night being a figment of fog, an exhaustion of wave, the time when blackness sank into the town as if buildings and trees were a pit to be filled.
A deer fell on the once friendly hillside, the crack of the gun sounding a playful instant later.
His benefactor died on the mainland in a traffic accident. The great stone house was sold immediately. Nicodemus stayed on, in a single-room cottage on the grounds. In the South it would have been called a shack. He became more solitary; his health was not good, but his strength never failed him, he was very strong.
The new owners’ big Airedale had had surgery. Nicodemus carried the dog into the house and laid him on pillows and comforters that had been arranged on the floor by the fireplace.
“When do the stitches come out,” Nicodemus asked.
“They don’t take them out anymore,” the new owner said. “They dissolve on their own when their work is done.”
The man’s wife was slouched in a wing chair reading a paperback book. She looked at the dog and said, “Poor guy, poor Blue.” Then she glanced at the book again. “Lem hated the film Tarkovsky made of Solaris. I want to see Stalker again. I think it’s his masterpiece. What a genius.”
“Would you like a drink,” the man asked Nicodemus.
He shook his head.
“I’d like a drink,” the woman said. “Something fun, not just a gin and tonic.”
“A martini?”
“That’s n
ot fun, that’s trouble. Oh, don’t bother to make me anything.”
“Breakfast of Champions. That’s what Kurt Vonnegut called a dry gin martini.”
“Oh yes,” she said, mollified. “He’s a genius. When he speaks, it’s genius speaking.”
The dog did not recover. Within the week Nicodemus was called upon to bury him.
“I can’t do it,” the man said. “I loved Blue so much. I just can’t see him now, do you understand?”
“Yes,” Nicodemus said, though he did not.
“I don’t like that man,” the woman confided to her husband. “Do you know the story of that servant of Frank Lloyd Wright’s? He went berserk and killed Wright’s mistress and her children, others too, with a shingling ax. He served luncheon, then killed them and burned the house down as well.”
“Nicodemus is not a servant,” he said, laughing.
“Yes he is, he’s dying to serve, that one, believe me.”
Her husband laughed again and shrugged, but she had decided. She didn’t like Nicodemus, his silence, his solitariness.
“I think he’s illiterate too,” she said. “I bet he is.”
At the end of the summer, he was let go. It was all right. He found another place, a real shack this time, out by the old haulover, past the striped lighthouse that the summer residents had moved back from the eroding cliffs at enormous expense.
Fewer than a hundred people lived on the island in the winter. The library and church were closed. The hotel was boarded up and the flags put away. The numbered planks of the beach club’s pier were stacked in the ballroom. There was a single fire engine but no school. Someone taught him backgammon, baffled that he didn’t excel at darts. He drank bitter coffee at the grocer’s store.
A scalloper opened the door and announced, “I must bring back the can of corn I bought yesterday. I thought it was pineapple.”
The bakery remained open. Her specialty was still Parker House rolls.
“Maybelle come in the other day and she says she’s got two husbands. ‘Why, Maybelle,’ I start, and she says, ‘One drunk and one sober.’ ”
The ferry came three times a week in winter, sometimes not even that when ice choked the passage. But the winters were no longer as cold as they had been, the storms as dire. The dovekies had only that one year been blown ashore, the year he had arrived, now a long time ago.
He could no longer work as he once had. Sometimes, he couldn’t catch his breath and at those times he would think, You’re my breath, you belong to me. We have to work together. You need me too, he’d address his breath. But oddly, he didn’t really believe his breath belonged to him. It was a strange thought that didn’t trouble him particularly.
Each summer, more and more people arrived on the island with their enormous vehicles, their pretty children and roisterous pets. It was another season and each summer Nicodemus liked them a little less and they liked him a little less as well, no doubt. There were more creatures dead in the summer. Drowned dogs, car-hit cats and deer and foxes. All manner of birds, gulls, herons and songbirds bright as gold coins. One night in August, on one of his late strolls, for he no longer slept well, he came upon a flock of wild ducks that had attempted to walk across a road that bisected two ponds, a habit safe enough at certain hours and one accommodated mostly with tolerant amusement. But some vehicle had torn through them and continued on, leaving a crumpled wake of the dead and the dying.
Nicodemus picked them up and placed them beside the marsh’s shores. Others he put in his jacket, attempting to calm and warm them before their inevitable deaths. This was observed by some who passed by, including Brock Tilden, the owner of a new guesthouse. He admired the thoroughness with which Nicodemus returned the unfortunate site to a relative sense of serenity, even carrying some of the birds off with him, perhaps to eat, Brock thought, for Nicodemus was known to be both odd and resourceful.
Brock was a big booster of the island and its potential. He was a gracious hotelier and many who stayed in his pleasant rooms were so charmed by his enthusiasm and helpfulness that they went on to buy or build places of their own. Brock’s idealized version of the island relied heavily on the picturesque and the modestly abundant—he had organized the first daffodil festival in his gardens only that spring—and the dead animals that were increasingly littering the roads and lanes had become an aesthetic problem, demanding a solution.
He conferred with several of the other business owners and they sought out Nicodemus and presented a proposition. They would provide him with a truck, a gasoline card at the dock’s pumps and two thousand dollars a year to make the island appear as though death on the minor plane were unknown to it.
“On the minor plane,” Nicodemus said.
“Well, yeah, we can’t do anything about the big stuff,” Brock said, thinking irritably about the prep school boy suiciding by his daddy’s basement table saw in June just as the season was starting, or the stockbroker all over the news who was found with an anchor line tied around his ankle. “But we can maintain a certain look that sets this place apart. Dead animals are disturbing to many people. There’s also the ick factor.”
“What about litter,” Nicodemus asked.
“We’ve got people for litter. This job is yours alone. We’ll put it in the beautification budget.”
The truck was old but the heater worked and the clutch didn’t slip. The bed was wood and had slatted sides. Nicodemus drove slowly along the roads with a red cloth hanging from the tailgate and when he saw the carcass of a dead bird or animal that had been killed due to a momentary and fatal lapse in watchfulness or timing, he would signal a stop, paddling his arm from the window, and step down to the sand-straddled road. He would always pick them up with his ungloved hands and lay them carefully in the truck. He stroked the clotted fur, arranged the stiffening limbs and curved talons, then wrapped them in scraps of sheets and towels. He put the dogs and cats he deemed to have been pets in coffins of cardboard in case they would be claimed and restored to someone’s futile care. He printed descriptions on cards and posted them on the grocer’s public board along with the advertisements for massages, pellet stoves and dories. If they were not claimed in two days he would bury them in the meadow ringed with pines behind his shack. It was the blackness of their eyes that touched him, the depthless dark of their eyes.
In the winter nights, the sea could have been dark fields or an endless forest of felled trees.
In his room, he ate from chipped plates and forks marked with another’s initials, and kept letters that had never been for him neatly tied with string. He had a postcard of a lion in a zoo and one that spoke of a William he had never known from an Elisabeth who promised she would soon arrive. He took the letters from the dump, from the sunken spots in the ground that the flames couldn’t reach. The gulls wobbled in the smoke’s heat when the island’s trash was burned there, and the letters smelled of orange rind and ash.
All his worn furnishings came from the dump. “What do you do with your money, Nicodemus?” they teased him. He didn’t know, he had no idea where it was and didn’t need it.
He was gaunt, but clean and neat. His hands became the most remarkable things about him. They were beautiful, unworn by the work he did. “You need a good pair of gloves, Nicodemus,” they said. But he didn’t wear gloves even on the bitterest days, when even the sandpipers’ heartbreaking cries were quieted by the cold.
In the summer, the children called him the Undertaker. They would sometimes kill small things for sport and say, “The Undertaker will take care of them now.”
He slept little. He didn’t think he slept at all, but that was an illusion, he knew. He would think of himself as resting beneath a large black wave, just before it curled and fell, wondering: Why am I this Nicodemus? Why am I not another? When I die, will I become another? Does God love all equally? Does he love the living more than the dead?
It seemed to him that God must love the living more, but could he love the dead less, havi
ng made them so?
That summer was the hottest anyone could remember. The flowers browned against the white fences, the berries withered before they were blue. At the ends of the roads, there were dark mirages and the boats seemed to ride on glass.
One night, as he buried a shattered animal, he placed a note in its grave.
Later, he thought, I must not do that again.
—
He wore his wool shirt, his heavy serge trousers, and he was shivering from the heat as he drove down the road. The boy who always begged to travel with him when he worked was waiting as he always was and Nicodemus, for the first time, stopped and picked him up. Everyone knew the boy. He wasn’t a bad boy, but if someone asked if they liked Peter their answer would be, Not yet.
They found a deer first, then two raccoons, small and large, the warm wind still purling through their fur. Nicodemus stayed in the cab while the boy heaved the bodies into the back. The following day he picked the boy up again, though he could barely look at him. But after that, no more.
They found him in his shack, his beautiful hands crossed on his chest, his mouth agape in the awful manner of the dead. He was old and he’d had a strange life. It was unsustainable, really, the life he was leading at the end, the kind of work he’d devoted himself to.
They missed Nicodemus. And Peter was no more than an epigone, they agreed. Still, they had to say that the boy managed to keep the island just as clean.
Dangerous
A year after my mother moved farther out, she became obsessed with building a tortoise enclosure. This was in preparation for receiving a desert tortoise—Gopherus agassizii—or, as the Indians would say, or rather had said, komik’c-ed—shell with living thing inside. That’s the Tohono O’odham Indians. My mother said she’d read that somewhere.
I was recently at a party and found myself talking to a linguist who told me that we had been pronouncing komik’c-ed incorrectly but that it meant pretty much what my mother claimed it did.
Sometimes I drink too much but mostly I don’t. I go to AA meetings on occasion but I can’t really bond with those people and never see them socially. They’re nice enough but some of them have been sober for twenty-five or thirty years. I have a copy of the Big Book and sometimes I read around in it but it never makes me cry like Wordsworth’s Prelude, say. I don’t have The Prelude anymore. I misplaced it, unbelievable, but it was falling apart with my looking at it so much and I moved away too after my father died so it was probably misplaced then. My mother is a widow now for two years but she never worries about her situation or talks about it like some people would. She never let on to me or others that she was sorrowful or lonely. I’m twenty-one. It could be argued that there are worse ages to lose your father than in your twentieth year but I found it to be a difficult time, mostly because I was just old enough to try to take it in stride. Sometimes I think it would have been worse if I was eight or even twelve and I don’t know why I indulge myself like that. It doesn’t make me feel better and I admit I have no imaginative access to the person I was then. I can’t imagine that girl at all. I certainly can’t imagine having a conversation with her. My mother told me that when I was eight all I wanted to do was swim. Swim, swim, swim. Then I stopped wanting to do this. When I was twelve she said that my most cherished possession was a communication badge I’d earned in Girl Scouts. It showed a tower emitting wiggly lines.
