Joy Williams - State of Grace

The boy is taking off his shirt. “What is it? What’s the matter?” He hands her the shirt. “Tear it up in strips.”

The girl looks at him closely. He is still a stranger. She doesn’t really know what he should mean to her. She can’t remember anything about him. She feels as though she has wandered into a painting. The dog smells like straw. The sun burns her neck.

She rips the shirt in four pieces and the boy takes them and ties the dog’s legs to the branch. The dog makes a hissing sound but doesn’t show his teeth. The pads of his paws are torn and there are large ticks buried in the fur around his mouth. The exposed guts tremble fretfully with the movement and something oozes out and onto the ground like batter.

THE YOUNG COUPLE walk through the woods, the hound between them, swaying upside down on the pole. Sometimes, the boy holds the pole with only one hand and uses the other to slap at the flies which hover across his back. The girl uses both hands always and pants with the weight. She tries not to look down at the dog but it is all that she can see. The open belly swings and shines below her. The tail droops down, exposing the brown bud of the anus. A pellet of turd appears and slips to the ground. The hound has great dignity. His great eyes unblinkingly study the sky.

They are almost two miles from the trailer where they live and they walk without speaking. The woods slowly change. They become thicker, primal, cooler. The boundaries of the paper company are left behind. The girl is lost but the boy knows the way back. He has always paid so much attention to these woods that he no longer has to be familiar with every part of them. They reach the river and follow its course until they come to the trailer. It’s very old. Battleship gray and shaped like an egg. Tiny windows like machine-gun slits in a bunker.

The boy wedges the pole in the crotches of two young pines and runs to the trailer for fishing line and needles. The dog’s tongue hangs out of his mouth. It seems to run for yards. The boy sews skillfully — tight short stitches. The girl does what she must without questioning him. His presence, his essence is beginning to return to her. She suspected his gestures and now she feels terrible. Of course he would not kill the dog. He is to be trusted more than herself. Everything she does is unfaithful to him.

She is unreliable, she says.

“Oh no.” He looks at her briefly and then down again to his work. Her face is clear and shiny as though she has just awakened. She holds the belly together as he sews, pinching it together with the tips of her fingers. “You’re fine. You’re doing everything you have to do.”

His hands are greasy and spotted with blood. He wipes them distractedly across his chest. He knows that this is not what she means but he does not want to talk about it.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He finishes stitching up the dog and knots the line. He lowers the animal to the ground and unties the legs from the pole, carrying him, then, into the trailer. The hound looks huge yet shrunken, like an empty gourd. The girl throws a pile of blankets and towels on the floor and the boy arranges the dog upon them.

“I’ve got to wash,” the boy says. He looks like a butcher. She watches him run through the woods and dive into the river. In a few minutes, he throws his jeans and shoes upon the dock. He swims to the far bank and returns, again and again, a blunt chopping stroke. It seems that hours have passed. The girl moves an ice cube around the dog’s jaws and the dog sighs and closes his eyes.

She walks to the river and takes off her clothes. The dock is made of six planks, set half a foot apart, floating on oil drums. She lies on her stomach and the boy drifts on his back beneath her. He flows down the length of her. A breast falls slimly through the planking, a long strip of rib, waist, hip, thigh. He sees one fourth of her precisely, no more. She can see nothing of him, her face is turned aside, one cheek resting on the wood, her eyes somewhere in the scenery. At some point she falls asleep. The boy floats beneath her. It gives him an odd and hurtful feeling to be there in his tarred and barnacled cage. Above him, the girl becomes nothing — a piece of hanging bait. She is a pastime for him like the stars. He cannot believe that always there will be this love which consumes him yet which changes nothing. He cannot believe his need. Or why when gratifying it, he is not satisfied. What can be beyond love? He wants to get there. With the girl. Together, they could arrive at this point. But he feels that she does not know the way. She merely represents the way, and they are lost, somehow, with each other.

When he gets back to the trailer, the boy lies down on the couch. In a corner, the hound is breathing lightly in a heroic whisper. The air of the room hangs in dusty layers. Lizards skid across the glass. Everything smells unused. It is something he cannot understand. Everything here seems to be used slightly for the wrong purpose, although, he would admit, the results seem to be the same.

The walls of the trailer are cardboard. They buckle out like sails. The girl has taped up colored pictures torn from magazines. None of her selections are original, but she has insisted upon explaining them to him. There’s a picture of a sculpture of James Joyce beside his new grave in Zurich. There are recipes for rich desserts, ads for movies, clothes, hardware. Her favorite, she told him, is the photograph of a tropical bird. She loves it, she says, and describes it to him. It requires high temperatures and is gregarious. Its massive soft bill is a puzzle, as is its long bristled tongue, as it only eats fruit and has no need for such equipment. The bird is actually seven different colors. Mauve, she says, one, blueberry, rose, purple, four, she tells him, emerald green and smoldering orange. That’s only six she realizes, but the other is merely white. Flaming and liturgical colors but the photograph is black and white and fading. It wasn’t dipped in the proper solution. It’s almost gone but will probably not disintegrate further. She insists that the bird is truly as depicted. It possesses the requirements of another creature.

The boy despises metaphor. He grows irritable. To think of her is maddening. He wants to reach some point of reference, something marvelous about them as lovers, but his mind dwells only on the commonplace.

He wakes once. It is dark but close to morning. The night has passed and he is making love to her. It is so good; she is smiling and her body is cool. He feels cured, rediscovered. He turns on the light and the hound blinks at them, feebly raising its tail and letting it fall, and everything seems beautiful, full of hope and lucky chance and love. He tells the girl this and she agrees. The animal closes his eyes once more and sleeps. Together they watch him mend. No man has ever died beside a sleeping dog.

THE UNIMAGINABLE PRETENDED TO BE INEVITABLE. Inevitable it was. Unimaginable it was not. Kate has a young man. They may or may not be married. If so, it is a secret. Married girls, past, present or future, are not allowed to reside in sorority houses. Uxorial vagaries are not permitted. How archaic the idea of a sorority house, how truly peculiar! All the references made within can be construed as sexual ones. When in doubt, snicker. Nihil est sine spermate they shriek over their tuna fish.

Kate is living with the girls at Omega Omega Omega. Not just yet, but in a little while. They do not know there that she has a young man. When she returns, they will recognize her as the girl who had been with them before, scrubbing herself with a bar of tar soap in the shower stall. Tar soap — the funniest thing they’d ever seen. She was queer as the girl from Massachusetts. Things that Northerners did seldom caught on. Things either caught on or they didn’t. Your boy friend had either a Porsche or a Pinto. You either knew how to do all your Christmas shopping in Goodwill stores or you did not. They will know Kate when she returns. In her absence, the girl from Massachusetts had left for good. The peachy complexion of the girl from Massachusetts had gone all to bumps in the South. She attributed it to the fact that she couldn’t rinse her face in her baby brother’s pee any more. Diluted. Five to one. Among themselves, the others agreed that Northerners were the oddest things and fast and filthy in their ways.