Joy Williams: Breaking and Entering

“You’ve always been a fool, Herbert,” the old woman said to her husband.

“A wrong turn in a strange city is not impossible, my dear,” Herbert said.

To Willie, he said, “Once I was a young man like you. I was an innocent, a rain-washed star, then I married this bag.”

“Herbert’s lived in this town for years,” the man with the beach umbrellas flying over his bathing trunks said when Willie recounted the incident. “They love accidents, those two. Gets their blood going. Puts the sap in old Herb’s stick.”

The old couple had given Willie a thousand dollars, all in twenties, delivered by messenger.

“It’s good work, but it doesn’t sound steady,” the man said, clapping Willie on the shoulder. “Ruthie!” he hollered, gesturing wildly to a woman on the other side of the pool. “Come over here and meet this grand guy!” Ruthie made her way toward them, plunging her fingers in the soil of each potted plant along her route.

“She never waters anything,” Ruthie complained.

“Meet these two here,” the man said. “Ask them if they’ve got a Mississippi credit card.”

“Oh, I know that one,” Ruthie exclaimed cheerfully. “That’s four feet of garden hose to siphon gas, am I right?” She looked at Willie slyly, then turned to Liberty and showed her teeth.

Ruthie wore a great deal of jewelry. She glittered, resembling a chandelier. Willie declared admiration.

“I always wear my jewelry,” Ruthie said. “All the time, everywhere. Life is short.”

“Do you know why people are interested in jewels?” Willie asked. He touched a large red stone at the woman’s wrist. “It’s the way the visionaries experience things. Their world is a dazzling one of light. Everyone wants to see things that way. Materially, jewels and gems are the closest thing to a preternatural experience.”

“Come over here a sec,” Ruthie said and led him away from the party.

“What kind of drugs you got?” she asked, smiling. “I’m your lady. I’ll buy anything. I want to bong myself to the gills.” She clutched a little purse.

“I don’t have any drugs.”

“What’s all this lapis lazuli stuff?”

“I was just giving you some background.”

“You’re the youngest person here by at least twenty years. You don’t deal?”

“Nothing.”

“No? I can’t believe it. You think I don’t know? That I’m too old or ordinary to know?” She was still smiling. “They gave my husband heroin when he was dying. He kept telling me how profoundly uninteresting life was.”

“Good,” Willie said. “That’s good.”

“You’re a creepy kid,” Ruthie said.

Liberty watched, from a distance, Willie speaking. He looked back at her, scanning the space between them like a machine. How long would it be before they were caught, Liberty wondered. Caught, they would be separated. Separated, the contradictions between them would disappear, would vanish. No one would catch them then.

They had not fallen in love as though it were a trap, not at all. Love was not a thing that merely happened. Love was created, an act of the will, something made strong in the world, surviving the world’s strangeness and unaccountability. But Willie was inching out, his eye on something, the angling of some light coming from beneath some closed door.

All one day at CASA VIRGINIA, Willie took pictures of Liberty. He had found a camera in the house and a few rolls of film. Willie took shots of Liberty eating from a can of peaches. He took shots of her in her mildewy bikini. He took shots of her with a sea oat between her teeth. He took her hip bone, her nipples, her widow’s peak. Liberty saw that her life was being recorded in some way. Nevertheless, she was aware that her moments lacked incident.

Willie put the rolls of film in an antique brass bowl on the floor in the middle of the living room. Liberty took them outside at noon and broke the film from the cartridges. She would give the film to Little Dot, a child she knew. Little Dot found uses for useless things. She might attach the coils to her headband and pretend she was a princess from the planet Utynor. The sheets of film would be her face. Things had purposes for which they were not intended certainly. That’s what enabled a person to keep getting up in the morning.

At last Willie decided to move along. They saw Turnupseed staggering along the beach with an enormous Glad bag filled with empty beer cans.

“There’s enough aluminum on the beaches of Florida to build an airplane,” Turnupseed said.

Turnupseed looked tired. He was tired of the responsibility. “Looking back on it,” he said, “if I had to do it all over again, I just don’t know if I could.”

Willie said, “We can’t disown the light into which we’re born.”

In the uncaring light, Turnupseed gave a smile rather like a baby’s.

“You’ve got a lot of my first wife in you, son. What a sweetie she was. Number One was the one I really boogied with, if you know what I mean. She said that being sad separates a person from God.”

“She said that?” Willie wondered.

“I believe she used those very words,” Turnupseed said.

“We’ve got to be off now,” Willie said. “We’re leaving.”

“Leaving this radiant place?” Turnupseed said. “Well, I don’t blame you. Last night, you know, in town, I just could swear I saw my last wife in the laundromat. She didn’t speak to me.”

“Well, the dead can’t disappear,” Willie said. “After all, where would they go?”

“I like your manner son, I’m going to miss you,” Turnupseed said. “Take care of that wife of yours. She seems to be living in a world where this don’t follow that, if you know what I mean.”

Later, when the Crab Key Association discovered that Turnupseed had been on such excellent terms with the besmirchers, an aneurysm would smack into the old guard’s heart with the grace of a speeding bus touching a toad. Liberty could still see him waving good-bye.

W illie and Liberty and a locksmith stood outside the Umbertons’ house on Featherbed Lane. Willie and Liberty were not acquainted with the Umbertons, who had been away now for several weeks. Newspaper delivery had been canceled, the houseplants placed outside in filtered shade, the phone disconnected, and several lamps of low wattage had been lit, burning dimly at night and invisibly by day. The Umbertons were away, in another state, in a more vigorous clime, in a recommended restaurant where they were choosing with considerable excitement items from the dessert cart. They were absorbed and concerned by the choices offered — the napoleons, the lemon tarts, the chocolate-dipped strawberries — much as they would be weeks later, after their return home, in cylinder rim vertical deadbolt locks, hardened shackles and electric eyes.

Willie had noted that the house had no alarm system, so he had called a locksmith from a phone booth.

“Locked yourself out, huh?” the locksmith said.

“You know what happened to us?” Willie said. “Our keys were stolen. Keys to everything, stolen.”

“That’s awful,” the locksmith said. His name was Drawdy. “The stealing these days is just awful. People will steal anything. My sister come home one night and somebody had dug up every dwarf pygmy palm in her yard. She’d just had some landscaping done, and there were these four dwarf pygmy palms, except when she came home that night, there was just four holes there. Those holes were so neat she didn’t notice at first that the palms were gone. Never seen neater holes in my life. It was like little men from outer space came down and just plucked up those dwarf pygmy palms.” He looked at the lock on the front door of the Umbertons’ house. “You know what I’d give you for this,” he said to Willie. “I wouldn’t give you fifteen cents for this.” He went back to his truck and got his tool box. “I’ll tell you,” Drawdy said, returning. “You’ve got to think like a burglar these days to protect yourself. You’ve got to look at everything just like a burglar would.” He set to work on the door. Clem walked around the corner of the house and sniffed the locksmith’s leg. “God in heaven,” Drawdy said. He grew rigid, then slowly smiled. His smile was fixed and gray, lying on his mouth like a cobweb he had stumbled into.