Joy Williams - State of Grace

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.