Joy Williams: Breaking and Entering

“Don’t let Little Dot play with that bowl and spoon too long,” Rosie would say, “it gets her too excited.”

Teddy and Little Dot, they are Liberty’s children in this town, for this moment. But she and Willie will be moving on soon, and there will be another town, although she cannot visualize it. Another place has no shape for her, it is still nothing to her.

The rain fell, swelling the Umbertons’ yard. A tree limb toppled with a crack.

Liberty opened her eyes. A single light glowed dimly in the room that was papered with silver flowers. Clem had become bored with the pink pig. He dropped it back in the box and selected a squeaking carrot. Liberty could hear the jingling and clashing of the pinball machine. She went to the doorway and watched Willie playing. He stood with his arms clasped over his head while the ball, sent forth but undirected, continued to rocket off bumpers, to plunge down channels that would not have it, its ultimate fall checked again and again.

“This thing is rigged for an awful lot of free games,” Willie said.

“I want to get back tomorrow.” She pushed her hip against the machine and it stopped.

“Don’t you like it here?” Willie asked.

“Here? In the home of the tricky, comfy, rank-hearted Umbertons? Of course not.”

“You have no feeling for reality,” Willie said. “I’ve suspected it for some time. You have a real contempt for it.”

“This is someone else’s reality.”

“I’ll find the place,” Willie said. “You’ll see.”

She reached toward him and ran her fingers through his hair. She wanted to kiss his cheekbones, hold him tightly, feel him once more. She feared that they both had a longing for discovery, capture. And the longing to turn oneself in was, she knew, a fascination with the buzz saw, the stove’s red electric coil, the divider strip, the fierce oncoming light.

Willie pulled her hands away and held them in his. He rubbed them as though they were cold. They were not cold. In another room, a bed loomed white and vaporous in the darkness.

“Lie down with me,” Liberty said. “Let’s comfort one another.”

“Comfort takes twenty minutes for old hands like us,” Willie said. “I’m talking averages. Growing excitement, passion, fulfillment, despair. Twenty minutes.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Liberty said.

“Not that? What comfort then?”

“I meant that actually,” Liberty said.

“I’ve always loved you,” Willie said.

Something in the Umbertons’ house ticked, as though expanding.

At daybreak, it was still raining. Rosy-fingered dawn bloomed elsewhere, in higher, purer altitudes perhaps, where the heart beats more slowly. Liberty was dreaming the things she dreamed in stolen houses — churches and flowers and suitcases, bowls and water and caves. She stirred, and felt that Willie was standing over her, staring at her. And that was part of the dream, she thought, for Willie to be studying her so solemnly, as though he were choosing something. She was a woman in a house, sleeping. She looked at Willie, safe in her sleep-looking. She looked at him and saw herself, the form he would have her assume, a woman in a house, sleeping.

Later, she opened her eyes and saw Clem’s muzzle aimed at her, several inches away, his tail wagging slowly. She knew Willie had gone. When he hadn’t returned in an hour, she and Clem left too.

The Florida sky, the color of tin, squeezed out rain. It fell on stone and seed alike. Across the street from the Umbertons, a neighbor’s lawn consisted of large white stones dumped on black vinyl. The rain fell on that. It fell on a sheriff’s car that drove slowly past. The deputy was opening a Twinkie wrapper with his teeth. He grinned at Liberty as though she shared with him the criminal goodness of Twinkies. The car went around a corner and the street was empty. Heat rose like smoke from the damp pavement.

Clem chose a hydrant painted yellow, a garbage can and a clump of ginger lilies and made them his own. Walking out of Featherbed Lane (JUNGLE LOTS YOUR PIECE OF FANTASY WITH CENTRAL SEWER AND WATER) they entered an area bristling with garden apartments. There were gun shops and establishments that dealt exclusively in sandwiches. There were auto body repair shops offering reasonable rates where gypsies who had roamed the streets denting cars with baseball bats the night before hammered out the dents today. There was an open air laundromat where surfers were gloomily drying their blue jeans. They sat in plastic chairs and stared at the heaving washers, all vacationers in this expensive resort that is life.

“Oh-oh,” a surfer said, “I didn’t mean to put that shirt in there.” A screaming red pressed against the soapy glass and was pulled back.

Liberty and Clem continued walking, over to the Trail to hitch a ride home. The Trail had once been a meandering Indian footpath over coral and limestone rock, but it was now a murderous six-lane highway that gobbled up small animals for breakfast, dreamy old geezers in walkers for lunch, and doped-up young honors students in their developer-dads’ Jeeps for dinner.

Liberty stuck out her thumb. Cars poured toward them and past. Then, a pickup truck pulled over sharply. It was Duane, Teddy’s father.

“Hey, Liberty,” he called. “Why you hitching? Old man kick you out?” He grinned. Liberty attempted to match his grin with one of her own. Her jaws began to ache. With a grin like that, Duane must drool some, Liberty thought. He was short and compact, with thick, graceful eyebrows, a ruddy, healthy, milk-and-spoonbread look. He was a genius with engine blocks. Other aspects of life puzzled him and frequently pissed him off.

“Hey!” Liberty chanted back. “Where did you get this truck?”

“It’s my buddy’s truck. I’ve been helping him with some tree work for the telephone company. Let the dog sit up here too. I’ve got my saws in the back.” He pushed open the door on the passenger side. Clem squeezed in front and settled himself. He looked like rising bread there.

A card taped to the windshield said NO ASS NO GRASS NO GAS NO RIDE.

“Don’t pay no attention to that,” Duane said gallantly. He popped the clutch and the truck tore off. “Guess who I saw today?”

“Who did you see today?”

“Everyone I looked at,” Duane said, grinning. Then his face grew somber. “You know that bitch, that wailing thorn-in-my-side bitch, the lezzie bitch I once revered as a wife, well she served papers on me yesterday.”

“I never met your wife, Duane,” Liberty said.

“Yes, she surely did. Seven-odd months to the day she left. She and her bitch girlfriend found a lezzie lawyer and they served me papers. Don’t want nothing, she says, just wants to get away from me. Can you believe that? My Teddy’s momma, my sweet boy’s momma, a lezzie. There was so much deceit in that woman! Like she used to go on about my hair all the time, talking about my hair, how much she loved my hair, how wonderful my hair was. Well what was that all about? My hair for chrissakes. Then she comes up to me one morning seven-odd months to the day and says, ‘I’m leaving, Duane, I want a divorce, Duane. I’m living a lie, honey, and I’m so bored and unhappy, my face is getting bumps.’ It’s true she used to have the nicest skin. Every night she’d put her face in a bowl of ice cubes. But she was getting bumps.”

Duane stopped for a red light. He rubbed his eyes, then looked at Clem. Clem was looking forward with distaste, his ears flattened against his skull. “You know that dog smells like peaches ,” Duane said. “When I was a little boy, I just loved peaches. I’d eat peaches till I’d puke.”