Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“I was a swimmer,” Charlie said. “I waded in. Soon I was out of my depth. Ever since then, I have been dead.”

Teddy put a napkin in an empty cup and placed the egg in it.

“My man,” Charlie said. “Why are you carrying around an egg?”

“I have to take care of it. Wherever I go, the egg has to go.”

“Wow, man, how did you get talked into something like that? Is the egg boiled?”

“Boiled!” Teddy said in alarm. “No!”

“I just thought it would be easier to take care of, if it was boiled, but you’re right, what a deplorable suggestion. What would be the sense of that, right? Let’s not even think about boiling that egg. Do you know that an egg knows when it’s about to be boiled? Its terrified acknowledgment can be measured.”

“How can it be measured?” Teddy asked cautiously.

“With one of those terrible instruments of modern times that records impulses on a graph,” Charlie said.

Liberty shook her head and smiled.

“Look at this pretty lady smile,” Charlie said to Teddy. “I love this lady. I’ve loved her for a long time. It’s been a secret, but now you know too.”

Teddy whispered in Liberty’s ear, then slipped something out of the bag he had put on the table. “Don’t you want some ketchup?” he said to Charlie.

Charlie looked at the red plastic bottle. It looked just like restaurant ketchup.

“I believe in bringing my own condiments too, man. See how alike we are! Always bring your own condiments. I chugged a bottle of ketchup once. Won a dollar.”

“No, no, put it on your food,” squeaked Teddy.

Charlie squeezed the bottle. A long red string leaped toward his lap.

“He didn’t jump,” Teddy said.

“I’ve been wounded.”

“He knew,” Teddy said.

“It’s just that my pulse is slow, sixty-eight, maybe sixty-nine, always. I should have been a pilot. Cool in the pitch, roll and yaw. Imperturbable when controls break down. This is great. Do you have the snapping pack of gum, the blackening soap, the fly in the ice cube?”

Teddy nodded.

“You got the lady in the bathtub?”

Teddy shook his head.

“You just can’t keep her in the bathtub,” Charlie said. “She keeps popping out. Well, I guess that’s something else.”

“If you run away with Liberty, I want to come too,” Teddy said.

“A beautiful woman, a little kid, a dog, and yours truly,” Charlie said. “We can do it! We will become myths in the minds of others. They will say about us …” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “… that we all went out for breakfast and never returned.”

“Good,” Teddy said.

“So where shall we go?” Charlie said. He kissed Liberty’s face. The line of people waiting to be seated, old women in bonnets, holding one another’s hands, looked at them.

“There’s no place to go,” Liberty said.

“There are many places to go,” Charlie said. “Hundreds.”

“Let’s make a list. I love lists!” Teddy said.

“We’re the nuclear unit scrambling out, the improbable family whose salvation is at hand,” Charlie said. “We’ll go to Idaho, British Columbia, Greece. No, forget Greece. The Greeks are mean to animals. We’ll go the Costa del Sol, Venice. We’ll go to Nepal. No, forget Nepal, all those tinkly little bells would drive us crazy. What do you say, we’ll go to Paraguay. That’s where Jesse James went.”

“Jesse James didn’t go there,” Liberty said. “That’s where the Germans went.”

“You’re right,” Charlie said. “It wasn’t Paraguay. It was Patagonia where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid went.” He was fidgeting now. His dark eyes glittered.

“They were outlaws,” Teddy said.

“They were outlaws,” Charlie said. “Successful outlaws.”

“Why are you crying?” Teddy asked Liberty. “Are you crying?”

“We’ve got to move along, it’s later than we think,” Charlie said. “How about some lunch?”

L iberty sat on a metal chair behind the house, near the riverbank. Stenciled on the back of the chair were the words LOPEZ PRE-ARRANGEMENT AND FUNERAL PARLOR. Dice River gave off a sweetly rotten smell. Crabs darted around in the green mud. The river was still quiet, clogged with water hyacinths and plastic six-pack rings. Later in the day it would be clogged with motorboats. Willie had been gone part of a day, a full day, part of another day. Liberty sat in the chair, breathing conscientiously, gazing at the winding, sluggish water. Dice River was a river all right, but it was not the kind of river you’d want to have in your mind.

River you’d say to Teddy, and he’d think of the river in the Just So stories where Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake knotted himself in a double clove hitch around the baby elephant’s hind legs to save him from Crocodile.

River you’d say to Willie, and he’d probably think in terms of the wide path and the narrow gate, the river would be a philosophic religious construct, the great broad self-mirroring delusionary stream of the ordinary.

River you’d say to Charlie, and he’d think of the creek trickling past his Cajun home to merge eventually with the swamp that lay beneath the two-lane, pit-bull, jai alai highway down which his daddy had disappeared for good.

River . Liberty marveled at how properly people conducted themselves for the most part, greeting the world each morning in a spirit of bemused cooperation and polite assumption, agreeing on words, sharing words, acceding to the same reality of one thing or another.

As a child, Liberty had very much wanted her own words, made enthusiastic by a phrase much employed by the adults of the time— tell it in your own words . But they hadn’t meant it. Having your own words just wasn’t feasible. Having your own words isolated you from the rest of humanity. A personal vocabulary indicated a distrustful spirit, a lack of faith in the way things were.

River .

She and Willie had lived on a river once before. It had been just after they married. They spent the days in a massive mahogany four-poster bed above which was a navy-blue bubbled-glass window. The windows of the room had green louvered shutters brought from Barbados. It was a beautiful house on a river that had been ditched and dammed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The river was a spiritual and biological abattoir. Willie had said, “We will make up everything. Nothing will be the same.”

Everyone gazed on his river alone.

River you’d say to Little Dot. River … Liberty missed Little Dot. She sat on the chair, her knees up, the backs of her hands pressing against her eyes. The chair from the funeral parlor was gray and sturdy. How had it escaped, Liberty wondered. How had it made its way to the riverbank, a refugee from preparation and mourning.

She remembered another river she had known, a river in a room, winding through a wood. The room had been wallpapered with this sight and the view had appeared seamless, but it was not seamless. Liberty knew that there had been twenty-one wallpaper sections in all, for she had counted them often. There were no windows, but there was a door, and the door was papered too so that when someone came through the door, it always seemed surprising.

This had been in a hospital, in a wing of the hospital called Five North. She had been there, but Willie had not, for she had been sicker than Willie. Willie had never known the room with the river in it, for he had been outside while she had been inside. No one thought that this was unusual.

When Liberty had been in Five North, there had been a girl there who looked like Little Dot, but Little Dot grown older. She was there because she had carved YUCK on her stomach with a screwdriver. She had done it in front of a mirror, and to some, the markings on her mutilated flesh appeared foreign, holy and serene. They would ask to touch her stomach for luck. This girl, who looked like an older, more sorrowful Little Dot, had hurt herself in other ways at other times. She had broken her ankle once with a hammer. She said that these things that she did to herself always cleared her thoughts and she felt better after. Didn’t everyone want to feel better after?