Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“Peaches,” Liberty said. Clem was always reminding people of things, possibilities, better times, imagined pleasures, suppressed woes. Clem stimulated the meridians. The highs, the lows. Peaches.

“I had a dog like that once,” Duane went on. “He hung himself. It’s the truth. I had him tied up inside a shed because he was a rambler, you know. Rambled all around. So I had to tie him up, and I tied him inside a shed because he was a rambler. Rambled all around. A roamer. So I had to tie him up and I tied him inside a shed and he jumped out a window there and the rope wasn’t long enough to reach the ground and the poor guy hung himself. Actually he didn’t resemble your dog at all, but I get reminded, when I see a dog, I see a rope. Now when I see a rope it don’t remind me of a dog. Funny.”

A headache cupped Liberty’s skull. The light still shone red.

“God damn light,” Duane yelled. He gunned the truck and danced it halfway through the intersection. He looked at Liberty and smiled. “Do you know anything about lesbians?” he asked.

“I can get out anywhere along here,” Liberty offered.

“Nah,” Duane said. “I’ll take you right to your door. You’re always doing me favors, right? You watch Teddy real good.”

Liberty felt as though she were on a long hot ride with a lunatic to a honeymoon room in Racine, Wisconsin. Clem turned and pressed his nose against her neck’s artery. Peaches. She was relieved actually that Duane had quit the peaches business.

“I have some suspicions about lesbians,” Duane said. “I mean I have some theories about the way they might be spotted. I would think that might be worth something, don’t you?”

“Why what would that be worth?” Liberty asked.

The light changed and they peeled off. “A checklist,” Duane yelled, “like the seven danger signals of cancer! So a lezzie could see it coming on and do something about it. Number one on my checklist!” Duane shouted. His left arm was dangling out the window and he slapped the car door smartly with his hand. “Dream of black triangles. All the time dreaming of black triangles. Number two on my checklist!” He smacked the door again. “Don’t like their momma, can’t stand their momma. Three on my checklist, forgets to flush the toilet. Number four on my checklist …” Southern civility finally grabbed hold. He blushed. “I can’t go on,” he said. He slowed the car meekly and they drove for a moment in silence. Then he shook his head and began darting smartly in and out of traffic once more, cutting a swath, forcing to the side less-committed individuals.

A BMW with tinted windows abruptly snaked around them. The window rolled down, and a white-shirted masculine arm, its wrist adorned with a large gold ID bracelet, was extended. The hand on the arm gave Duane the finger.

Duane’s mouth flapped open like a lid on some ill-omened box.

“Did he throw me the bird?” he demanded of Liberty. Traffic flowed around them, but Duane had slowed almost to a stop and sat behind the wheel as though in a trance.

“He’s just a jerk,” Liberty said. “Ignore him.” She looked with alarm at Duane’s disordered face.

“Well, this particular jerk’s little glass of happiness is just about to be knocked over,” Duane said.

The truck pitched forward and homed in on the BMW. Duane reared it up to within an inch of the car’s rear bumper. Then he knocked it. The driver of the BMW braked and leapt out, a fit fellow with a blond mustache, well-dressed, with shiny shoes. Duane gazed at him for an instant, smiling faintly, then hurled himself out the door, but to Liberty’s surprise, he did not go forward, but retreated backward, to the bed of the truck. She turned and saw Duane grabbing a chain saw as long as his arm. He set his legs in a crouch, choked the saw, and started yanking on the cord. The man from the BMW stopped, his face turning first red, then white. It was an amazing thing to see. It was as though he were trying to withdraw all his limbs into some secret compartment of his torso. Duane was yanking away at the cord.

“God- damn saw,” he was saying.

The man fled back to his car, stalled it twice, then strained away in second gear.

Duane put the saw down in the truck bed and climbed back into the cab. Traffic was allowing him a large berth.

“Asshole like that makes the highway a dangerous place to be.” Duane composed himself and said cheerfully, “Guy won’t be able to get it up for a week. Now what were we discussing, oh yeah, the fact that Jean-Ann is queer. I feel I can talk to you, you know. I never told no one but Teddy that Jean-Ann was queer. My lady Janiella don’t even know. It’s bad enough she knows the damn woman left me. Janiella’s a woman of culture. She’d probably faint if I told her.”

“We’re almost home, Duane,” Liberty reminded him. “We’ve got to take the next right for Suntan.” Duane was the rugged, forgetful type, Liberty decided. The type who might go into a 7-Eleven for a beer and a bag of fried pork rinds and end up robbing the place instead.

Duane swerved across three lanes of traffic.

“You know, I’ve lived in this town my whole life. Smashed up my first car in this town, had my first drunk, got my first feel of titty, everything. I don’t like it here much anymore, but once you leave a town you can’t have lived there your whole life, know what I mean? Where you going to be from then? Got no place to be from.”

Suntan was a street in an area of town where the other streets were named for fun fruits — Kumquat, Tangerine, Mango, Java Plum — in an unfinished development which had been conceived in the fifties and failed in the fifties. The developer had been so out of step with the times that he hadn’t even bulldozed the trees, pumped out the mangrove lowlands, flattened the hammocks and seawalled the river. There were a few stucco, Spanish-style houses there in faded rose or white, and some frame houses set up on blocks with tin roofs and wraparound porches, but mostly there was shade on Suntan. Immense dappled shifting dark beneath the high crown of palms and oaks.

“You think Teddy resembles Jean-Ann?” Duane mused.

“I was never acquainted with Jean-Ann,” Liberty said.

“He favors her some,” Duane said. “He’s got her dark hair. Ugh. I love that little boy, but sometimes he gives me the creeps.”

The truck cortèged bleakly down Guava, than made a turn on Suntan. One of nature’s most sacrosanct laws is that one can slow time by motion. Liberty felt the truck speeding in place, the street yawning ahead of them like an animal’s short, dark throat.

“It seems like one day Jean-Ann was normal and the next …” Duane sucked in his cheeks, choosing his word carefully. “Abnormal,” he finally said. “Jean-Ann just took our marriage and chucked it out the window.”

Liberty envisioned marriage. A homely paper sack, aloft.

“It’s hard to know what’s normal and what isn’t sometimes,” Liberty said.

Duane looked at her with irritation, as though she were a girl who had burped while he was kissing her.

“Now that it’s all over between Jean-Ann and me, I wish she was dead,” Duane said. “It’s nothing real personal, I just wish she was dead is all.”

“Here we are!” Liberty said.

“That rubber tree you got is some big mother all right,” Duane said.

Liberty agreed that it was.

“I been cutting holes in mothers like that for the last week,” Duane said.

“Why?”

“They been smaller than that,” he admitted. “That’s got to be one of the biggest trees around here.”

“But why have you been cutting into them!”