Joy Williams: State of Grace

Why it went when you were sleeping, he says. It come and saw you dreaming and it went back to where it was.

Some memories have no past. This town for example, this setting. I have mentioned the frame that held Grady and I. There, goats were often seen climbing in the trees. They preferred live oaks because of the low sturdy branches. This is not peculiar. It is an invisible landscape. Everything, more or less, is invisible upon it.

Don’t sulk. Everything is over. Here is the place. There are Grady’s woods and river. Then there is the logging road. Rattlers slide down the colored gullies. Great cattails rise from clear yellow pools. There is the blacktop that meets the coast. Black people live here in low and fragile houses with tile roofs. Sea grape shields the windows from the sun. They farm. There are a few calves and chickens. Some of the livestock are hobbled to the docks at low tide. The cormorants rest on the pilings, drying their wings. Everywhere there are glistening unnatural mountains of oyster shells. They spill into the road, cracking beneath the car’s wheels, shining like oil. Then there are palmists, bars and spaghetti houses. There is a sign that points the way to BRYANT’S BEASTS. There is a sign that points the way to the college. It is futile and oppressive — the entry to a southern town. It is hot. The streets are empty. Huge fans move the air in restaurants. You watch the blades turning as you pass. The town is irreconcilable to its space. Dismiss it. If you must, think of the cheap motels, the drugstore luncheonettes, the hospital. Once there were more cats in the corridors than doctors. Think of the bars, the empty De Chirico train station, the grassy subtle tracks that fade to the north. Think of the highway that moves to other places.

Don’t become impatient. Here is the time. It is late in the year but summer will soon follow. My friend Corinthian Brown comes out of a small café. He is digesting their weekday special which is pizza, chicken, roll and potato. The time is shown in a clock set in an electric waterfall on a wall beside the pies. The water is a shiny neon blue falling from shadow-box mountains. The scene clicks and hums from the current that keeps it operating. Corinthian patronizes this café because of the waterfall clock. It is popular with others as well and a source of speculation. “It’s the Adironeracks,” someone is saying. “I been in that area in 1953. It’s the Adironeracks for sure. Water’d freeze your pecker off.”

It is early morning. The pizza is still cold from the day before. Corinthian carries a book, Heart of Darkness . I will have given it to him. He walks toward his job at Al Glick’s Automobile Junk Yard. Now the job of guarding objects that people no longer feel the need to molest is far too much for any one man. Corinthian realizes this. He realizes that, in particular, guarding junk should be the job of presidents, of congressmen, of those with far more power and influence than himself. It is not the task for one with no resources, no persuasive menace, no continuing stake in the eventual outcome. Nonetheless, those who could perform the function best are not called. Or do not answer. So Corinthian serves. In return, Al Glick allows him to sleep anyplace he wants to and to use his hot plate. Corinthian hardly ever takes advantage of the last benefit because he doesn’t want to be pushy. Some of the wrecked cars are quite well-appointed and it is a joy for him to sit in the plush seats, particularly on a rainy day, and read a good book or two. Corinthian has become attached to some of these cars. He is broken, after all, and these machines are as well, although he realizes that he is still using himself up whereas someone has finished them long ago. This is not to say that he deals in endings. Who could claim that? He simply protects the things whose defeat and destruction have already occurred. Like us, he keeps a feckless guard, one with the resting objects.

But objects need not detain you. Forget them. Remember instead the picture of Corinthian Brown. He is running now, he is late. His mind is on the menagerie that he has just left. Corinthian labors continually. He works at Bryant’s Beasts as well. It is a terrible job that affects and grieves him. He worries that he has not given the ostrich enough water. He loves the bird’s eyes which have long thick lashes. He loves its poor wings. Think of lovers. That’s where stories lie.

It is morning in the South, on the Gulf Coast. On the empty beach there are two girls. They are eating powdered donuts. One is bare chested and pretty. She is lying on her back and eating. The sugar crumbs fall on her chest. The other girl removes the crumbs, sometimes with her moistened finger, sometimes with her mouth. It is an obvious attempt at an unspeakable practice. The pretty girl has a dogged and sincere expression. The other girl is charmed. Her name is Cords. She kisses her friend’s hair wryly. A helicopter beats toward the coast from inland. It flies low over the girls, turns, hovers. They can see the Navy men inside it. Cords raises her middle finger and waves it stiffly. The chopper clatters angrily above them.

To the north, a train is moving toward the town. Everything is amiss on southern trains. There is no ice water. There is no meat, no flowers. There is no service at all. The train does not speed but it’s never not arrived. There’s no timetable available but it is never late. The train bears doom and Daddy through a swamp. Part of the swamp is burning. There’s a smell of toast. People are filing into the dining car.

The sun moves up a mite, startling no one. Tradesmen sit on the curbs outside convenience stores and eat their snacks of raisins. In the hospital, the new babies are wheeled out of the nurseries for their feedings. They are like fancy pastries offered in their aluminum cart. The mothers in the wards try to be clever with one another but what is there to think? Down in the basement, in the emergency room, a few college students are being given tetanus shots by a moody intern. The intern is brooding because he is monorchid. The college girl that he had had a date with the evening before had been discomfited when he had pulled off his boxer shorts. She had been coolly disapproving throughout, but her surprise had not curbed her speech. “Well, that’s really interesting,” she had said. “At school, they’re always putting the vegetables on my plate that look like a man’s parts and everyone teases me about this, but never in my life have I ever seen anything that could be construed to look like that.” He had bought her all the shrimp she could eat and then he had bought her five brandy alexanders and listened to her ballad of interminable immutable opinions. She was a girl with a great deal of gorgeous wavy hair and she wore expensive clothes. Her aunt owned the controlling interest in the country’s most popular baking soda. He learned that her aunt had sent her to Venice in, as luck would have it, the year of the flood. “It was beyond belief,” she had told him, “I couldn’t buy Tampax. No one anywhere had Tampax.” She was so beautiful and he had taken her back to his apartment and pulled off his boxer shorts. “Well, that’s really amazing,” she had said, but not in a special way.

The intern angrily inoculates another student and entertains grisly notions. His patients have punctured and scraped themselves with nails and chicken wire while building the floats for the college’s big Homecoming parade. The injured are predominantly waffle-thighed energetic girls with dazzling and insincere smiles. The floats are lined up in a dead-end street, covered with parachutes, waiting for tomorrow.

The sun is getting white and old. Grady double-clutches as he rounds a corner on the woods road. He slows still further and the Jaguar thuds across an old wooden bridge. A boy about his age is fishing with a drop line. The river is purple with water hyacinths. The boy’s car, a broken-down Ford with a smashed rear fender, is parked on the bank. OUCH is painted on the fender. Grady chews on the sweet end of a blade of grass. He enters the town and finds a parking space before a movie theatre. There are no pictures on the poster advertising the film. There are black stars painted on the sidewalk. The day yawns before Grady. He might go to a movie, perhaps not today but soon. He feels aimless and wasteful and anthropomorphic. The theatre seems a greater orphan than he. The walls are mildewed. The entranceway smells like a recent excavation. Grady moves off, combing his hair with his hands.