Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“Leave me here, leave me here,” her mother said. “It’s perfectly all right. I’m just waiting my turn.”

—

Toby sat on the porch of the next house she was about to unload and looked at the street. There would be no trick-or-treaters. It was a bad neighborhood and many of the kids were undoubtedly in jail. No one had infants here. Half-grown rollicking figures in baggy pants and jackets were produced, some of whom drove low, bullet-shaped cars with tricked-out axles that allowed them to bow tip and curtsy like circus horses. One of these vehicles rolled by now without performing. A man laughed and a can of beer shot through the air and struck the rotting steps. It was unopened, however, thus indicating to Toby a modicum of goodwill.

She had no admirers at present. Since leaving her parents’ home at eighteen she’d experienced two brief marriages — one to a Ritalin-addicted drywaller, the next to a gaunt, gabby autodidact, brilliant and quite unhinged, who drank a pound of coffee a day, fiddled with engines and read medieval history. After their parting, he flew in a small plane he had built to Arizona and found employment as a guide in a newly discovered living cave. Daily, he berated the tourists by telling them that every breath they took was robbing the cave of its life, even though each of them had gone through three air locks and was forbidden to touch anything or take photographs. People didn’t mind hearing they were well-meaning bearers of destruction, apparently. According to him, he was the most popular guide there. She was amazed to learn that people liked him. She certainly hadn’t.

She sat rocking slightly in an old roof-hung swing. One chain looked just about to snap but it had looked like that for some time. A big orange moon labored up the sky.

A limousine longer than the wretched porch drew up to the house and stopped. The inhabitants were probably seeking the gin palace several blocks over, Toby reasoned. There were often singers and bands performing there. But no request for directions was forthcoming. Instead, an immense woman emerged, dressed in red and drenched in strong perfume. The limousine pulled away.

“Are you the present owner of this property,” the woman asked. “I hope you are.”

Toby narrowed her eyes and did not reply. The woman was her own age but striking, tremendous.

“I was a little girl in this house!” the woman announced. “This used to be the only house this side of the street. Next door there was nothing but a pretty field with a shed on it and the family the next street over would raise veal calves in that shed, it was a calf hutch. The man wouldn’t let his own kids play with those calves, he didn’t want them to make pets out of them and then get sad, but he let me play with them. I loved those little calves so, each one was dearer to me than the one before. On hot nights like this I’d take my sweet pillow and lay on the little bridge out back. Oh, how many wondrous nights I spent sleepless and singing my little songs of praise beneath the great wheel of heaven as I laid on that little bridge.”

“You lived here,” Toby said, uncharmed.

“Sister, I did. And I want to come home. I want to buy this precious property.”

“I’d consider selling it,” Toby said, she hoped not too eagerly. She hadn’t invited the woman up on the porch and didn’t think she would.

“What’s your price,” the marvelous woman asked. Her dress was remarkable — a divine, shrieking crimson.

Toby paused, then named a figure that made her blush, it was so unreasonably high.

“I’ll pay you twenty thousand more. I have money. I’m a success. I say this in all modesty, believe me.”

“It needs some work,” Toby admitted reluctantly.

“We all need work, sister. We’re all of us a work in progress. And no one knows in what guise the end of the familiar will arrive. We’re like darling veal calves in that regard.”

“So they used to farm around here,” Toby said. “It certainly is different now, I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Nobody farmed, sister. It was just that one mean cracker who ran a calf hutch for the restaurants in Sarasota.”

Toby felt corrected and did not care for it. She brushed a mosquito off her knee and said, “Is this a serious offer you’re making? Because I’ve had some interest and I’d have to let these other parties know. Of course they don’t appreciate the place as much as you do.” She would concede that much to the imaginary.

“I’ve already agreed to your price and more, sister. I do appreciate it. And my mother and father, they appreciate it too. They’re right out back there. Probably just about given up hope that I’d ever get back to them.”

A moment passed and Toby said, “What do you mean ‘out back there’?”

“This is our story, sister,” the woman said, straightening her smooth brown shoulders and causing the red dress to strain and shine. “They were the finest people you’d ever have the luck to meet. They were Edenists, my loved ones was, they truly believed our days are spent in Eden, that Eden was here and now. They were good and they were grateful and one afternoon just this time that year they were taking a neighbor boy out for a driving lesson. They’d promised to teach this boy, Billy Crawford, how to drive in our truck so he could get his license. It was just a kindness on their part. My daddy was a builder and his tools, his boards and paints and such, were in the old truck’s bed. He sat in the middle on the bench seat with Billy Crawford behind the wheel and my mother by the window appreciating the breeze. She’d go for a little ride at any opportunity. Why my daddy took Billy Crawford on as a student we’ll never know. You couldn’t tell that boy nothing and he never wore his glasses as he was supposed to for he was vain. He was driving, he wasn’t speeding, speed was not a factor. But what he did was he ran over this fellow’s dog. Knocked him down with the tires, didn’t even see him, and it was a big dog. From all reports, the man who was standing beside the dog, whose dog it was, became a threatening figure right away, fearsome in his grief, for who knows how long that dog had been his only friend. He was dressed in so many rags they looked like robes and he started screaming and hammering on that truck and wouldn’t be comforted or listen to reason, not that there was any reason involved, it being an accident. Billy Crawford, who might have been following my father’s directive or not, put his foot back on the pedal and commenced to drive away. But the man, his name was Rockford Wiggins, clung to the truck and hauled himself into the bed, where he continued screaming and baying, and now that he had boards and cans and tools to do his hitting with he began to beat on the window that was all that separated him from them, from Billy Crawford and my dear ones. There was a can of turpentine in the back as well and it wasn’t long before death triumphant placed it in Rockford Wiggins’s hands. He drenched himself and all those rags were like a hundred wicks so when he set himself off with a packet of matches, the whole truck went. I was told that it looked like a parcel of hell burning, in the manner that hell is popularly pictured. Well, sister, they all of them died, burnt to the bones. And a professional reduced my dear ones further to ashes because that was getting to be the trend back then. And I took those ashes and made them into bricks, for there was no one to tell me not to and no voice was raised against it. I knew some things since my father had been a builder, as I said. It was necessary to add something — three parts sand, one part lime and clay — but now the fundaments of those bricks are my dear ones. I mortared them into the base of the little bridge we built ourselves in the days that we were Edenists. And then I had to leave, sister. I had to go out in the world and make my way and fortune.”