Joy Williams: Breaking and Entering

Duane peered at him. “You got stuff floating around you, man.”

“Merely the nimbus that hovers around the redeemed,” Charlie said. “My life begins tonight.”

“No, seriously, man, what is that stuff?”

Charlie looked over his shoulder. Duane kept staring. Then he blinked and shrugged.

“Where is Teddy now, Duane?” Liberty persisted.

“I took him over to your house. We must of just missed you. The kid’s got his own car now. He can go anywhere, just has to learn to drive. ‘Escape’ I told him. Escape was my advice. My boy,” Duane mused. “Fruit of my loins.” He tugged at his lip.

A black man pushed his way up to the bar. He was holding a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. The baby’s fingers patted the air. The man sat several stools away, just where the bar began to curve, so that he faced them. He took a cloth from his pocket and ceremoniously wiped the counter, then propped the baby up on a slant board that had been concealed in the folds of the blanket.

“Oh, God,” Charlie said, “the guy with the blind baby. That’ll empty the joint.”

The light slid around the black man’s round, merry face, giving a pinkish cast to his hair. The baby was no more than a few weeks old.

“How can they know that baby’s blind?” Liberty said. “It’s such a young baby.”

“Man’s been telling everybody it’s blind,” Duane said glumly. “Man says something’s detached in its head. I mean, who even wants to think about it. I don’t know why they even serve that guy.”

“They serve him because he mean,” Charlie said.

“The hell with that,” Duane snarled. “I’m mean. Tonight I’m the meanest.”

The black man looked at them and nodded formally.

“Shit,” Duane muttered. He slid off the stool and stumbled toward the door.

“Hello there,” the black man said.

“Hello, yes!” Charlie said joyously.

The man moved closer to them, sliding the baby down the bar. Occupants of the space between them ambled away. He stopped a few feet from Liberty and looked down at Clem, who lay with his chin on her foot.

“Good evening,” he said to Clem. “How you been?”

The bartender placed a martini beside the baby. A sliver of lemon shimmered in the oil on its surface. The man ate the lemon, swallowed half the martini and placed his little finger in what was left. Then he rubbed the finger on the baby’s gums.

Charlie gazed at the drink longingly. “You’re going to make that child alcohol dependent,” he said.

“Oh, this child has many problems. This child was born in a pool hall when its whore-momma’s head was punctured by a pool cue. This child was born premature and has some other tiny baby’s kidneys. This child is blind.” He smiled at Charlie and winked, then unwrapped the blanket and placed the baby’s toes against his lips and kissed them. “This child will know nothing but darkness forever and ever,” he said.

Liberty knew that the man’s voice was Mr. Bobby’s voice, crooning and impatient, shifting and winding. A warm voice that assured freedom from pain, trouble and anxiety. A voice you could hear in a warm bath with wrist veins agape if it came to that. A voice open to wide interpretation. Somebody else’s voice.

“Blindness isn’t considered to be a severe handicap,” Charlie said.

“Is that a fact,” Mr. Bobby said. He tilted his head coquettishly.

“Heavens no,” Charlie said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“I buy the drinks,” Mr. Bobby said. He opened a wallet that was filled with credit cards. He fanned the cards out before him. Each had a different signature. “People send these in to me. They just don’t want to be accountable no more. Somebody sent this baby in to me. Wrapped in newspaper. Ain’t people something?” He ordered a double stinger on the rocks. “You are familiar with the story in the Bible where Jesus heals the blind man? Where he causes the blind man to see?”

“A very pretty story,” Charlie said. “I love miracles. Dish up the miracles I always say. There are never enough miracles in a day for my taste.”

“Now, I don’t believe that’s a pretty story at all. Whatever became of the blind man? Do we ever hear of the blind man again? No, we do not. We don’t, no, because the blind man went into a depression from which he never recovered. We are speaking here of irreversible melancholy. Giving sight to those who have never seen is no gift because nothing is as they imagined it. To have nothing be the way you imagined it, now that’s a shame.”

“But that happens all the time,” Charlie said cheerfully. “We have a friend, this lady and I, he says, ‘The things that we see are a very crude version of what is.’ ” He looked at Liberty and winked.

He was speaking about Willie. Her mind was trying to shut Willie out, she realized. Her heart was pounding.

“We all have that friend,” the man said smoothly. “A friend like that gives no satisfaction.” He smiled and his smile was like a scissors opening. “I prefer a silent friend, like this one here.” He fixed his open smile downward on Clem, then closed it. He said to Liberty, “This dog walks in your sleep, do you know that? He goes visiting. My little baby hears him all the time.”

“Dog’s a dream, man,” Charlie said.

“Now a black dog would be something else again. Some people think a black dog’s bad luck but that ain’t so, necessarily. It’s black dogs that help the dying soul make its crossing, so in a way they’re bad luck, but they’re cherished too and are forgiven everything.”

Willie was his own black dog. She had cherished him too long.

Mr. Bobby sipped his shiny green drink. “You look brand-new tonight, darling,” he said to Liberty. “You look like you done some traveling. Now my little baby’s brand new too, but even so it’s a shade too late for me to prove a little pet idea of mine. My little idea — actually, you could call it more of a belief — is that if you took a newborn thing and you deprived it from birth of all external impressions, light and sound and touch and heat and cold and whatever, taste and such, and at the same time managed to keep it alive, such an individual would not be able to perform the most insignificant action.”

“That’s grotesque,” Charlie said.

The man pushed his face close to the infant and soundlessly opened and closed his mouth. Liberty feared that he was going to start throwing his voice into the baby as though it were a ventriloquist’s doll. It was a very pretty baby with long, dark lashes.

“Are you Mr. Bobby?” she asked.

“We got one of my constituents here,” he said.

“No,” she said. “We don’t.”

“It’s just the grief business, darling. It’s a good business. You ever hear me on Identity? I-den-titty. It’s a personal favorite of mine.” He smiled faintly. “I would like that animal. What are you accepting for him?”

“He’s not for sale,” Liberty said.

“I didn’t ask if he was for sale.”

The baby gave a squeal.

“The last time I saw that animal he was in a small clearing in the middle of a jungle. That there was a clearing in such a rank and tangled wilderness was inexplicable.”

“He has never been in a jungle,” Charlie said.

“He has his journeys to make,” Mr. Bobby said irritably, “you may not.” He paused, staring at Clem. “Time before that, he was witnessing tortures. They’ve become so commonplace these days that an unbiased observer has ceased to become a luxury and is now a necessity. Someone to keep them on the up and up. I had an animal myself once, but the most interesting thing about it was that its blood was artificial. Perfluorocarbons ran through its veins.”

“What kind of dude was this?” Charlie demanded. “He sounds like an icebox or a can of Raid.”