Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

He shook his head.

“I’d like a drink,” the woman said. “Something fun, not just a gin and tonic.”

“A martini?”

“That’s not fun, that’s trouble. Oh, don’t bother to make me anything.”

“Breakfast of Champions. That’s what Kurt Vonnegut called a dry gin martini.”

“Oh yes,” she said, mollified. “He’s a genius. When he speaks, it’s genius speaking.”

The dog did not recover. Within the week Nicodemus was called upon to bury him.

“I can’t do it,” the man said. “I loved Blue so much. I just can’t see him now, do you understand?”

“Yes,” Nicodemus said, though he did not.

“I don’t like that man,” the woman confided to her husband. “Do you know the story of that servant of Frank Lloyd Wright’s? He went berserk and killed Wright’s mistress and her children, others too, with a shingling ax. He served luncheon, then killed them and burned the house down as well.”

“Nicodemus is not a servant,” he said, laughing.

“Yes he is, he’s dying to serve, that one, believe me.”

Her husband laughed again and shrugged, but she had decided. She didn’t like Nicodemus, his silence, his solitariness.

“I think he’s illiterate too,” she said. “I bet he is.”

At the end of the summer, he was let go. It was all right. He found another place, a real shack this time, out by the old haulover, past the striped lighthouse that the summer residents had moved back from the eroding cliffs at enormous expense.

Fewer than a hundred people lived on the island in the winter. The library and church were closed. The hotel was boarded up and the flags put away. The numbered planks of the beach club’s pier were stacked in the ballroom. There was a single fire engine but no school. Someone taught him backgammon, baffled that he didn’t excel at darts. He drank bitter coffee at the grocer’s store.

A scalloper opened the door and announced, “I must bring back the can of corn I bought yesterday. I thought it was pineapple.”

The bakery remained open. Her specialty was still Parker House rolls.

“Maybelle come in the other day and she says she’s got two husbands. ‘Why, Maybelle,’ I start, and she says, ‘One drunk and one sober.’ ”

The ferry came three times a week in winter, sometimes not even that when ice choked the passage. But the winters were no longer as cold as they had been, the storms as dire. The dovekies had only that one year been blown ashore, the year he had arrived, now a long time ago.

He could no longer work as he once had. Sometimes, he couldn’t catch his breath and at those times he would think, You’re my breath, you belong to me. We have to work together. You need me too, he’d address his breath. But oddly, he didn’t really believe his breath belonged to him. It was a strange thought that didn’t trouble him particularly.

Each summer, more and more people arrived on the island with their enormous vehicles, their pretty children and roisterous pets. It was another season and each summer Nicodemus liked them a little less and they liked him a little less as well, no doubt. There were more creatures dead in the summer. Drowned dogs, car-hit cats and deer and foxes. All manner of birds, gulls, herons and songbirds bright as gold coins. One night in August, on one of his late strolls, for he no longer slept well, he came upon a flock of wild ducks that had attempted to walk across a road that bisected two ponds, a habit safe enough at certain hours and one accommodated mostly with tolerant amusement. But some vehicle had torn through them and continued on, leaving a crumpled wake of the dead and the dying.

Nicodemus picked them up and placed them beside the marsh’s shores. Others he put in his jacket, attempting to calm and warm them before their inevitable deaths. This was observed by some who passed by, including Brock Tilden, the owner of a new guesthouse. He admired the thoroughness with which Nicodemus returned the unfortunate site to a relative sense of serenity, even carrying some of the birds off with him, perhaps to eat, Brock thought, for Nicodemus was known to be both odd and resourceful.

Brock was a big booster of the island and its potential. He was a gracious hotelier and many who stayed in his pleasant rooms were so charmed by his enthusiasm and helpfulness that they went on to buy or build places of their own. Brock’s idealized version of the island relied heavily on the picturesque and the modestly abundant — he had organized the first daffodil festival in his gardens only that spring — and the dead animals that were increasingly littering the roads and lanes had become an aesthetic problem, demanding a solution.

He conferred with several of the other business owners and they sought out Nicodemus and presented a proposition. They would provide him with a truck, a gasoline card at the dock’s pumps and two thousand dollars a year to make the island appear as though death on the minor plane were unknown to it.

“On the minor plane,” Nicodemus said.

“Well, yeah, we can’t do anything about the big stuff,” Brock said, thinking irritably about the prep school boy suiciding by his daddy’s basement table saw in June just as the season was starting, or the stockbroker all over the news who was found with an anchor line tied around his ankle. “But we can maintain a certain look that sets this place apart. Dead animals are disturbing to many people. There’s also the ick factor.”

“What about litter,” Nicodemus asked.

“We’ve got people for litter. This job is yours alone. We’ll put it in the beautification budget.”

The truck was old but the heater worked and the clutch didn’t slip. The bed was wood and had slatted sides. Nicodemus drove slowly along the roads with a red cloth hanging from the tailgate and when he saw the carcass of a dead bird or animal that had been killed due to a momentary and fatal lapse in watchfulness or timing, he would signal a stop, paddling his arm from the window, and step down to the sand-straddled road. He would always pick them up with his ungloved hands and lay them carefully in the truck. He stroked the clotted fur, arranged the stiffening limbs and curved talons, then wrapped them in scraps of sheets and towels. He put the dogs and cats he deemed to have been pets in coffins of cardboard in case they would be claimed and restored to someone’s futile care. He printed descriptions on cards and posted them on the grocer’s public board along with the advertisements for massages, pellet stoves and dories. If they were not claimed in two days he would bury them in the meadow ringed with pines behind his shack. It was the blackness of their eyes that touched him, the depthless dark of their eyes.

In the winter nights, the sea could have been dark fields or an endless forest of felled trees.

In his room, he ate from chipped plates and forks marked with another’s initials, and kept letters that had never been for him neatly tied with string. He had a postcard of a lion in a zoo and one that spoke of a William he had never known from an Elisabeth who promised she would soon arrive. He took the letters from the dump, from the sunken spots in the ground that the flames couldn’t reach. The gulls wobbled in the smoke’s heat when the island’s trash was burned there, and the letters smelled of orange rind and ash.

All his worn furnishings came from the dump. “What do you do with your money, Nicodemus?” they teased him. He didn’t know, he had no idea where it was and didn’t need it.

He was gaunt, but clean and neat. His hands became the most remarkable things about him. They were beautiful, unworn by the work he did. “You need a good pair of gloves, Nicodemus,” they said. But he didn’t wear gloves even on the bitterest days, when even the sandpipers’ heartbreaking cries were quieted by the cold.