Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

In bright illusion on the ground before him was a plastic guide to the birds, slipped from someone’s pack or pocket. It was the size of a letter, the birds crowded on both sides for easy identification. He looked at it warily and did not touch it, knowing that what he was seeing had finally become only a symbol of what was now invisible. Too, he knew it wasn’t actually there. His foot passed over it and it vanished.

There was a lovely poem about a kestrel by an Englishman, a lovely, lovely poem. Florida had a kestrel and it was called a killy hawk, a killy hawk.

He was deep in the hammock now and it was still quiet, darkly green with broken light. When he saw the man in the clearing he sat down with a sigh. The man was digging a fern from the deep grooved bark of an oak. He had some sort of tool, a useful little tool to do this with. It was his father quite clearly and the fern was a hand fern, it really looked like a hand with spread fingers. Preyman’s father had preached for thirty years and never given the same sermon twice, though he frequently discoursed on the line And it was night from the Fourth Gospel. He loved the line, the immaterial night, glorious, full of promise. His father’s interests were not of this world. The Greek was en de nux. Preyman had learned some things…When his father retired he had lived in a condominium building in Miami called Ambience — they’d had a laugh or two about that — and then he’d had a stroke and died in a nursing home, an innocent, which did not keep him from dying in terrible fear. His father’s long hands cupped the fern now, the roots falling through his white fingers and dangling in the air. His father was dead, the fern was extinct, the last taken years before from the Everglades. Preyman felt the reassuring logic of this but then it passed over him, no more than a gust of rancid air.

I must arrest this, Preyman thought, I must arrest what this is, and he opened his mouth with a cry to do so.

Lillian was telling her daughter about the period in her life when she killed cats.

“I had a system going. I would bait a Havahart trap with a bit of sardine on a saucer and put it out in the yard just before retiring. In the morning, I would hurry out in my bathrobe, and if I was successful, which I almost always was, I’d place the trap with its disbelieving victim on the step at the shallow end of the swimming pool and in less than thirty seconds, maybe twenty, that would be that.”

Toby was barely listening to her. She was looking at her mother’s permed hair, which resembled molded plastic.

“Most of them seemed pretty blasé in the moment before I dunked them,” her mother said. “As though they’d been in Havahart traps before and expected delightful and challenging futures, a refreshing change of venue, maybe the country, or even the challenges of a shopping center. My last cat, though, looked much like the first. Nothing changes them. That’s their nature. I began to feel I was catching and disposing of the same cat over and over. I lost the necessary ambition. I wasn’t getting anywhere, you see.”

“You shouldn’t keep telling that story, Mama,” Toby said. “Aren’t you afraid there’s going to be an accounting?”

“Oh, you,” her mother said vaguely. “You’re just needling me.”

“You want to go over and see Daddy? Let’s go over and see Daddy for a while, then I have to go.”

“My first stroke,” her mother said. “I remember it as though it were yesterday.”

“Well,” Toby said, “it wasn’t.”

“There was a sound like cloth ripping. The thing zigged through me just like that and then I was on the floor for no one knew how long before anybody came.”

It was Halloween in the twin assisted-living facilities; her mother was in one, and across the courtyard her father was in the other. Both buildings were decorated with orange and black bunting, and cardboard witches and ghosts tacked to the walls. There was a mound of plastic pumpkins by the receptionist’s desk. What a place to be observing Halloween! Staff was crazy in here. That’s what they called themselves. They were undoubtedly hitting the pharmacy day and night in order to maintain their gay demeanor.

“Where are you now,” Lillian asked. “Whatcha up to?”

Toby sighed. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“That is not entirely true,” Lillian said. This woman before her who suddenly seemed angry was like everybody, anybody who had ever lived.

“I told you before, Mama, if you keep not knowing who I am, I’m going to stop coming here.”

“You’re my child,” Lillian said. She hoped she didn’t sound bewildered. She wanted to sound affirmative, torrentially affirmative, like a great artist.

Toby was not appeased. She felt distracted by Staff, who was spraying cobwebs from a can onto the windows.

“I sold the house today,” Toby said loudly. “I just closed on it, right before I came over here.”

Her mother frowned. “We’ve discussed that,” she said. “Was it fun?”

“A young couple bought it.”

“Why did a young couple buy it?”

“Let’s go over and see Daddy before you drive me out of my mind.”

Toby nudged the brake off the wheelchair with her sandaled foot and they proceeded down the corridor and into the courtyard. There were several benches, unoccupied, and two trees whose limbs looked smooth and severed like human stumps, with the skin drawn tightly forward and folded over into a tight tuck. Yet on the tips of these eerie branches were lovely white and still-fragrant flowers. And these trees were not at all uncommon at this latitude.

Toby had made a good profit on the house, the last one her parents had lived in together. She had capitalized on something legally exotic. Her mother and father had been in the house less than six months when they learned from a neighbor that a murder had taken place there, just one, but involving almost every room, upstairs and down, in what could only have been a long, drawn-out process. Toby took advantage of a gray area in the law and sued the real-estate agents for selling them a stigmatized property. The lawyer had been delighted by the largeness and grayness of the area. The house appeared to be making every effort to be charming and forthright, but in a court of law it was considered psychologically impacted and the real-estate company was found liable for not informing the buyers of its past. The money involved was not considerable but it was still amusing to have. After her mother’s stroke and her father’s tumble, Toby had put the house on the market herself with full disclosure and it sold eventually to a couple who’d had a loved one murdered (the relationship here was blurry) and required intensive counseling. Now they could accept sudden and untoward death, even reside with it. They made their money in video.

They signed all the papers at the house on the hood of the couple’s car. It had been hand-painted with images of fish, following one of the customs of the town to fancifully paint old cars with complex, detailed scenes of virtually vanished worlds. The fish had inaccessible startled faces and curving silver bodies. Each scale, carefully delineated, shone. It was all carefully, glowingly done; the water was rendered crystalline. The vehicle itself, however, had bald tires, a cracked windshield and a dragging tailpipe.

“Video pays the bills,” the girl said. Her name was Jennifer. “But it’s our nutty money that makes life worth living. Boyfriend sells his sperm to fertility clinics. He has the highest IQ in the business, practically.”

“Of course the doctors make a lot more,” boyfriend said.

“I can’t believe people would freak out just because this lovely home hosted a sad event,” Jennifer said. “People get so unnecessarily freaked. We’re on this earth with a part to play but instead of playing the part as an actor does, some people think the part is really them and they freak out all the time. Listen, you can hear the ocean from here.”