Joy Williams: Breaking and Entering

Liberty excused herself and went inside. She stared at the Gulf, which was always there, every time she looked, filling the windows. Clem was lying on his side, his legs shuddering in a dream. Perhaps he was remembering the mailbox he was stuffed into as a puppy, by unknown persons, before Liberty found him, barely breathing, years ago.

Liberty wandered through the house. Breaking into houses caused Liberty to become pensive. She would get cramps and lose her appetite. Stolen houses made her think of babies all the time. She supposed that was common enough.

The house on Crab Key had chocolate-colored wall-to-wall carpeting covered with Oriental rugs. It had five bedrooms, four baths, two kitchens, a liquor closet that contained eleven half gallons of gin, and one piece of reading material on a polished oak coffee table, a notebook containing Mrs. Maxwell’s philosophic musings. The advantages of a cystostomy are myriad , one of the musings stated. Each new day brings me increased enjoyment. Sunrises are more radiant, sunsets more glowing, flowers more brilliant. And even the grass is greener!

The handwriting was round and firm. It appeared likely that it was not Mrs. Maxwell who was the drinker.

Liberty looked down at Willie conversing with Turnupseed on the beach. From above, Turnupseed’s head looked like a vulnerable nest. Willie was wearing a sweater he had found in the Maxwells’ closet, a green and white sweater covered with daintily proceeding reindeer. Willie loved living in other people’s houses and sleeping in their beds. He wore their clothes and drank their liquor, jumped in their pools and watched himself in their mirrors. Breaking into houses and living the ordered life of someone else appealed to Willie.

In the large walk-in closet off the Maxwells’ bedroom, there were mirrors and cosmetics. There were shoe boxes and garment bags. There were hats and ties and shoes. Everything was neatly categorized. Cruise Wear. Ethnic Shawls and Dresses. Daddy’s WWI Uniforms . As in the other homes that Willie and Liberty tended to occupy, the absent owners were hopeful, acquisitive, and fearful of death.

Liberty selected a white terry-cloth robe from the closet and lay on the blue satin coverlet of the king-size bed. She dreamed of fishing, her feathered hooks catching squirming rabbits. She dreamed of rowing down the streets of a flooded town, rowing into a grocery store where they were selling ten unlabeled cans for a nickel. She woke with a start and took off Mrs. Maxwell’s white terry-cloth robe.

Liberty and Clem took a walk along the beach. They passed women searching for sharks’ teeth. The women had elaborate tooth scoopers made of screening and wood. They had spotting scoops and dip boxes. They were dedicated and purposeful, and hustling in and out of the surf they knew what they were about. Liberty admired them. They knew the difference between a spinner’s tooth and a lemon’s. They were happy women, ruthless in their selections, rigorous in their distinctions. In their bags they had duskys’ and blacktips’ and nurses’ and makos’ teeth. They loved those teeth. In their homes, lamplight glowed from glass bases filled with teeth. On their walls the best teeth were mounted on velvet and framed behind glass. The more common teeth spelled out homilies or were arranged in the shape of hearts.

The women ignored Liberty. And they regarded Clem with downright unease as though fearing he would squat on their fossiliferous wash-ins. Liberty felt that the women were correct in not introducing themselves and being friendly. She, Liberty, was a thief and a depressive. She and Willie had been married by a drunken judge at Monroe Station in the Everglades. The bridal couple had eaten their wedding supper in a restaurant that had antique rifles and dried chicken feet mounted on the wall. Their meal consisted of a gigantic snook, which Willie had miraculously caught on a doughball, and a coconut cake that the cook had whipped up special.

The women on the beach, holding their bags full of teeth, probably saw Liberty’s problems just written all over her.

As for Clem, they avoided him like shoppers swerving from a swollen can of bouillabaisse.

Liberty strolled back to her stolen home. Willie was on the beach, roasting potatoes over a little fire. Turnupseed stood nearby, his hands on his hips, his back toward the water, surveying the row of expensive houses under his protection.

“Them houses are filled with artwork and jewels and all sorts of gadgetry,” Turnupseed said, shaking his head. “It gets to be a burden just responding to it all. I’ve tried to respond to everything that’s been presented to me all my life, and I am just now thinking that I could have saved myself considerable time and effort. Response has been my bane. Number Two and I once went to Niagara Falls. You know we put on them slickers and got wet? Three days, two nights and seven meals. We slept in a heart-shaped bed. You ever try to sleep in a heart-shaped bed? Number Two said I was as exciting as a bag of cement.”

Liberty looked around her, at all that was being guarded by Turnupseed, a man obsessed with woks, dead wives and movie stars, and armed with a floating flashlight and a tire iron. He was obviously not in the best of health. His eyes looked like breakfast buns spread with guava jelly.

Willie said, “All worldly pursuits and acquisitions have but two unavoidable and inevitable ends, which are sorrow and dispersion.” He rearranged the potatoes in the pit.

“Yup, yup, yup,” Turnupseed said, shaking his head. “But each one of us has to find that out for himself.” He turned to Liberty and politely said, “That certainly is the strangest white dog I’ve ever seen. Nothing unfortunate is about to happen to you, not if that dog can help it.”

“I don’t know,” Liberty said.

“Thank God it ain’t a black dog. Black dogs are bad luck.”

“Thank god,” Liberty said. The thought of a black dog! Black as dirt and filled with blood. She would never have a black dog.

Liberty and Turnupseed gazed at one another. It seemed as though they could never build up a dialogue.

“Where’d you get that dog?” Turnupseed asked, cranking up again, his voice hoarse.

“Found him,” Liberty said.

“I’ve never found a thing myself,” Turnupseed said. “I try not to dwell on it.” He gazed at Clem, not knowing how to salute him.

Turnupseed lived on the mainland in a little cement block house on land sucked senseless by the phosphate interests. Every time he tried to plant a tree in the queer, floppy soil, the tree perished.

“I’ve had three wives, and each one of them died,” Turnupseed confided. “Isn’t that a ghastly coincidence?”

“In continuity there is a little of everything in everything else,” Willie said when Liberty just couldn’t seem to pick anything out of the air. Willie and the guard seemed to have a way of conversing that was satisfying to them both. Liberty guessed that Willie enjoyed a simple deceit more than just about anything in the world. The words he exchanged with Turnupseed rocked gently in her head, unwholesome crafts on a becalmed sea.

Liberty and Willie sat in one of the Maxwells’ several tubs. She sat behind him, her legs encircling his waist, writing words upon his back with soap.

“WIZ,” Willie said. “SKY. SEA.” Liberty erased the invisible marks with her hand and splashed water upon Willie’s shoulders. She put her lips to his warm back, then drew away and wrote a U , then an 5. “WITHHELD,” Willie said. “INCARCERATE.”