Joy Williams: Breaking and Entering

“Teddy and that crazy daddy of his were sitting right over there,” Sally said to Liberty. “He still had that little smudged egg.”

Liberty looked at an empty table filled with bottles and glasses. Standing behind it, leaning against a wall, was Poe.

Sally was saying cheerfully, “I’ll go see if I can find where they’re at.” She moved off toward JJ. People were touching him here and there for luck.

The bar smelled warm and fertile. Liberty had not expected to see Poe again. She supposed that she had expected this preposterous person to restore Willie to her in some way and be consumed in the effort. But it was Willie who was not here. The floor was slippery. “Hey, baby,” someone said. She walked toward the table, people’s faces bobbing like dark balloons. She was close to the tall, coarse-faced man before she saw quite clearly that it was not Poe. She looked away, down at the table where a cigarette floated in a glass of wine.

“You think that dog’s gonna go to heaven?” the tall man said. His voice was high pitched and excited, but his face was impassive.

“Was there a little boy at this table?” Liberty asked.

“Little boys aren’t allowed in bars. What did you used to be? I used to be a rattlesnake preacher.” He moved closer. “When I say that to most people, they say, ‘Ever get bit by a snake?’ and I say, ‘Did I ever get bit, I sure did!’ I had a rattlesnake in a box behind the pulpit, and I always said if the Lord told me it was all right to hold it, why there it would be handy. I grabbed a hold of that snake a couple of times when I was feeling real good, and that snake was just as tame as could be and I’d just wave it around for a few minutes and then put it back in the box. But the people were always after me to do it again, they’re just like children, you know, those people, always asking me things like Will there be sex in heaven? and Is it true all angels are male? and Will there be pets in heaven? I swear that was the most frequently asked question of my career — will my dawg get to heaven, will my kitty be with me in paradise … If I told them once, I must have told them a hundred times, their damn dogs and kitties were not going to make it there, but it was just like they were deaf in that regard when it come to their pets, some old mean cat or the like. Now, there was this character I worked with, he was my beater, see, he’d get the crowds in, beat ’em up out of the bushes as it were, and people just followed him in and it was unbelievable because he was the meanest little man I’ve ever met. He would steal little children’s pets and sell them to the vivisectionists for drinking money. I swear to you that this is true, and yet they would just follow that mean little man right up to me. Now, I got a good heart, but it got so after a while I just didn’t care much. I found I just couldn’t relate to dumb suckers. My congregation everywhere I went was so literal-minded. There was this one woman I recall who’d been to Yellowstone Park and never gotten over it. She thought Heaven was going to look like Yellowstone Park! Well, anyway, these people were always after me to take out the snake, and one day I didn’t feel much like doing it, but I did, I reached into that box without no desire or conviction and, of course, I got bit and almost died. I was dead for eleven minutes and was brought back to life only by heroic measures. When I get to this part, most people say, What was it like those eleven minutes? and I say: I SAW DEATH COMING TOWARD ME AND I COULDN’T LOOK. WHEN I LOOKED AGAIN I SAW DEATH GOING AWAY. HE HAD HAIRY HEELS.” The eleven-minute man drew back after saying this. “I left preaching directly after that. I just couldn’t stand that pet-in-paradise business no more.”

“I was looking for a little boy with dark hair,” Liberty said.

“I used to be a little boy with dark hair myself,” the eleven-minute man said. “The world’s no place for them. You don’t act like a girl who’s curious, but I can see that’s just an act. You got the look of someone who’s real curious, someone who might fall for the old Death’s-a-bright-shining-net-vibrating-with-cold-energy malarkey, but I’m telling you, and I’m a man who knows, Death’s just an old hairy-heeled fart.”

His dry breath hammered against her, his words like nails fixing her face in place so he could stare at it.

“What did you say you used to be?” he asked.

“I just used to be myself,” Liberty said.

“You look half-starved,” he said abruptly. “You should eat some of this free chicken.”

The littered table, she now saw, was covered with small white bones.

A disheveled figure shambled toward them, glissading across the floor for the last few feet. “O dog of my dreams,” the figure said to Clem. “Scat, scat,” the figure said to the eleven-minute man.

“Charlie,” Liberty said.

“Recreant …,” Charlie said to the man’s departing back, “… toady, ca-ca head, pygmy.” He gazed sorrowfully down at the table of little bones and empty glasses. “It used to be so nice here,” Charlie said. “There were mountains and wildflowers and tubs of chocolate ice cream. Easter chicks and bunnies were hopping around. Everything.” His mockly mournful face turned toward Liberty and brightened. It was like a fist flowering into a hand. He bent forward and kissed her cheek. “Uummmmuh,” he said.

Her eyes watered from the light and smoke of the bar.

“Why can’t I cheer you up,” Charlie said. “It’s all I want to do.”

A couple tucked in at a table beside them. The man took a fifth of rum out of a paper bag and poured it over ice in two tall glasses. He put the bottle between them. It stood there like an old and not altogether trustworthy friend.

“Well, darling,” the man said, “how was your day?”

“Oh, my day,” the woman said musically. “I defrosted the fridge.” She took a long swallow of rum and said, “That kid at the end of the street did the same thing to me tonight as I was driving here.”

“What thing was that, darling?” the man said, looking at her intently.

“I knew I’d find you because I’ve been looking,” Charlie said to Liberty.

“He dashes through that empty lot just after the curve and runs right up to the edge of the road and then he stops,” the woman said.

The man slowly shook his head.

“He doesn’t look at the car, so you think he doesn’t see the car, but it’s a game with him, see, the little brat. The first two times he did it, I braked and swerved and my heart was pounding, believe me, but this time, I neither braked nor swerved. I didn’t even give him the satisfaction of a glance. I just sped right on by.”

The man nodded. “How old is this terrible child, darling?”

“Oh, he’s little, four or five, a little brat a couple of feet high.”

Charlie was busily pushing the bones to one side of the table with the heel of his hand.

“Remains,” he muttered. “Man, I hate remains.” His hands shook as he pushed the mess around. A waitress appeared out of the gloom and put the things on a tray. “More beer?” she bawled at Charlie.

“Beer only, beer only. I’m coming off it, coming down, going to do it,” he said. He gave Liberty a big shaky smile and kissed her cheek again. “I haven’t had a drink since we were on the phone and you heard the glass drop. What a sound huh, doll? The end of the world as Charlie knows it. You heard that sound.” He shuddered.

The sound Liberty was hearing now was more like the sound of a bird, a bird warbling, a prolonged and plaintive trilling in the distance. The bar was dark. Turning ceiling lights swung erratically through it. Two filthy yard boys streaked with dust ambled by and stared at her with large white eyes. The feeling was that of being in a cave or a mine, going deeper, into the ever darker, and the improbable bird in the distance with its strange song didn’t exist to lead any of them out but to inform them when the song stopped that the air had run out.