Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

The photograph was of an alligator with a great white heron folded in its mouth. The bright colored feet, the long bill, everything was there, an entire large bird. Alligators shared their water-hole homes with all manner of creatures, until they didn’t. One didn’t register the bird at first, it was just another picture of an alligator with open jaws. Then came the awareness of the delicate collapsed presence within.

But people had become wary of looking into the display case, Preyman had found. There were too often pictures of plowed fields pressing at the gateway to the park, of animals caught dead on the center line, of cities and trash, of the outside crawling closer. It wasn’t Nature, it all lacked subtlety, possibility. None of it was equivocal enough. People preferred the equivocal, they found comfort in it. They were heartened by the news that more panthers were killed by one another than by mercury or cars. Preyman was doing them a favor with this picture. Even so, no one gave it a glance.

Eleven o’clock came and went. No one seemed desirous of Preyman’s expertise, his dismal numbering of extirpated plants and declining species, his depressing accounts of water, water withheld, water diverted, water dirtied and wasted. They had already taken him off the list of rangers who led the children on informative hikes. He was incapable of telling groups of fourth graders how they could save the park. They couldn’t save the park! He took off his hat and ran his shaking fingers through his soaked hair. A group of foreign tourists walked by, talking quietly. They approached the place as though it were an aspect of work, something to check off their life list — another biosphere preserve. Preyman stared past them at the photograph. He did not take pictures himself. When his mother died, there had been film in her camera and he had brought it to be developed. None of them had come out. It was the fault of someone new in the darkroom. They had apologized and offered to give him free film. It was part of the new responsibility, to admit to mistakes that had been made, to irredeemable errors. His mother had been out of her mind when she died. Out of her mind.

He unlocked the display case and removed the photograph, then, trembling, walked through the parking lot to his Jeep for a cigarette. He passed the life-size bronze statue of a panther. Two children sat on it, drinking from boxes of juice. The Jeep was parked several hundred yards away, near one of the park’s canoe trails. Preyman smoked several cigarettes and fieldstripped them. His hair tingled.

One of the girls who worked in the concession pulled up in her little car. They wore plastic name tags with their home states below their first names. This was Cynthia Massachusetts.

“It’s a small world…we’re all in this together…only the species, man, can correct what the species, man, has wrought…I am part of the web of life…I gave blood to an Everglades mosquito…wave a pint jar through the air, you’ll come up with a quart of mosquitoes…reduce, recycle…this is a park in peril…it’s worth preserving, don’t you think…” She grinned at him and put on a pair of green sunglasses. His disheveled shape was twice reflected. “It’s a full moon tonight,” she said. “Make your request early to be chained to the gates. Lock your car, secure your valuables and have a good one. Pete,” she said, “cheer up.”

Cynthia Mass got out of the car and jogged off. She was all right. So was Madeline New York and Jim Arkansas. Bruce Oregon was a pain in the butt. They were all much younger than he was.

It was quiet except for the ticking of the girl’s car beside him. Farther down the row, a raven was investigating the interior of an open convertible. It picked up a pen, then dropped it. Over the parking lot was the sky that belonged only to Florida. Immense ragged clouds moved freely past. The raven selected an empty beer huggie and flew off with it. From a break in the buttonwood trees a young couple appeared, portaging a canoe. They stopped when they saw him and put the canoe down. Preyman felt they were looking at him anxiously. His mind had been utterly blank for a few moments. He rubbed his jaw and put his hat back on. “How you doing?” he said.

“I think there’s something you should see,” the boy said.

“And maybe get,” the girl said.

“We didn’t want to get it down, we thought we should report it so you could make the right kind of notes about it. It’s a wood stork, a mile, maybe a mile and a half past Bear Lake, not on the water but deeper into the strand. It’s hanging in a tree, tangled in a fishing line. It hasn’t been dead too long.”

“It’s like something out of the tarot,” the girl said. She had made up her mind. This was the way she would remember this.

Preyman looked at them. He was behind his sunglasses too. They were all behind their sunglasses. Someone died here last night and in great pain too, his father used to say when Preyman visited him. But it couldn’t always have been true, not the night before each time he came to call, not every time, it wasn’t likely. People hung on in nursing homes, it’s what they did there. If you could get me a warm Coca-Cola, his father would say, it would give me great pleasure, I promise. He had been a minister and Preyman had been in awe of him and liked to listen to him. But then it had come down to just the someone dying business and the warm Coke business.

“I’ll take care of it,” Preyman said. What could he mean by that? The words had no possible meaning.

The boy nodded. “I could give you better directions.” He began describing the place they’d beached the canoe, the trail, the distance traveled beyond the mahogany grove. Preyman shut his eyes behind his glasses.

When the boy finished, Preyman said, “Thank you very much.” He opened his eyes.

“Wood storks used to nest in the park but don’t anymore, is that right?” the girl said. “They’re pretty rare? I read that.”

“Wood storks are an indicator species,” Preyman said. “They sort of function as a pressure gauge. That’s actually what we use them for now, almost exclusively, a pressure gauge.”

They watched him uncomfortably. Throughout all this, they had been some distance from Preyman and his Jeep. The girl rolled her shoulders. She was dressed in brown. Her bare lean legs and arms were brown from the sun and she wore a handkerchief around her neck. She bent down and picked up her end of the canoe.

Preyman smiled at them. He could still perform this vital variation on his face, he was sure of it. He stood in place a moment longer and had another cigarette. Then he climbed into the Jeep and drove away as they were tying the canoe down on the roof of an old station wagon. He drove onto the main road, then turned down an official-use road, swinging the gate shut behind him. It was wide, of crushed stone, and led to several trailers and some cannibalized swamp buggies and airboats. He stopped at the end and took out his pack, water, knife and netting. There was no trail from here to the place the boy had mentioned, but he knew how to reach it. It wasn’t far. Nothing was very far. He had probably covered pretty much every foot of the park and he’d worked here only a few years. Hurricanes would sometimes make a place inaccessible but it didn’t stay like that for long. It had all been touched by someone and not touched lightly. It had been piteously easy to find the rookeries. They set fire to the hammocks after they’d collected a few tree snails or orchids, to make them rarer. They set fire to the hammocks to drive out the game. They set fires to kill the deer who hosted the ticks they thought were killing the cattle they wanted to raise. Everywhere there were borrow pits and the remains of old attempts to drain. It was warm and still and quiet. After an hour of hiking, his head felt hot and his eyes burned with sweat. He would cut the creature down, bring it in, someone would take pictures and these would become part of an educational exhibit…