Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Well, of course it ain’t a drawbridge. Did she think I’d been here for all these years paid by the country, here every day with no vacation and never no real quitting time without knowing that the goddamn thing wasn’t a drawbridge?

I didn’t say nothing but just gave her a look telling her that she should tend to what she knows about and I’ll tend to what I know about.

The beach was full of eggs. She kept steering me around so I wouldn’t step on them. All them eggs cooking in the heat and the birds going crazy over us as we walked along. Diving down and screaming, shitting on our heads. I went down to the water to get away from them. I was still put out with the girl and wasn’t paying her any mind. She was trotting up and down the beach, slaving like a field hand, writing things down in her book. Finally she run right by me and fell in the water. Tried to tease me in. Took off her suit and tossed it in my face. Skin there like the cream in a chocolate éclair. But I paid her no mind. That day was so white my eyes ached. I was floating and felt sick. All that sun, it never bothered me before. She come out and sprinkled water all over me from her hair and even that wasn’t cool. It was hot as the air. I was mad because I felt she was thinking my thoughts weren’t real. But then I said, Come on, I been without loving too long. Because I thought her loving would pick me up. And we went back to the shack, me with my eyes closed and my arms resting on her because it hurt so bad looking out on that day. It ain’t never been that bright here before or since.

So we went back. And I was a professor and she was a dance-hall cutie. And I was a big black lake and she was a sailboat tacking over me. But that night she and that dog was gone.

There are sharks, I know. I seen them rolling out there. And the bars sometimes are tricky. They change. Fall off one day where they didn’t the day before. But it don’t really seem dangerous here. I just don’t know where she went to. Leaving nothing except that car, which like I say is sort of fading out. Rats building their nests beneath the hood. I hear them in it when I walk close.

So it’s over but I can’t help but feel it’s still going on somewheres. Because it hasn’t seemed to have ended even though it’s stopped. And I don’t know what it was she gave me. Maybe she even took something away. And I don’t really even know if she’s dead and it’s me sitting here in the pilothouse or if I was the one who’s been dead all the while and she’s still going on back there on the gulf with all them birds.

This is in England, in Cornwall, and a more weird dreary spot could scarcely be imagined. Nevertheless, tourists were beginning to arrive in ever-increasing numbers because they had been everywhere else. The inhabitants of the place were in many respects peculiar, poor and cruel with extraordinary dark eyebrows, but the cream teas were excellent. The dogs were polite. The gulls were big, the crows enormous.

The weather was foul.

The graveyards weren’t as full or as mossy as those in Wales, the lanes not as snug. The cooking not as delightful; few turnips, no leeks. Actually, the dogs, though courteous, didn’t work as hard as the dogs of Wales. The ones without heads were the devil’s dogs. Even the most unobservant tourist had no problem in identifying them.

Most of the ghost stories in Cornwall involved ships and drowned sailors. And these drowned people, these ghosts, were always coming back, coming back to harass the living. Or to drag a beloved into the grave with them. Sometimes they came back to smile at their mums. The stories were a little tiresome.

In the old days, ships were always going down. The people on land liked it best when fruit ships went down. Oranges floated in. Grapefruit.

In King Arthur’s town in Tintagel, there was a big run-down hotel on a cliff. The drinking room there was called the Excali-Bar. It was for tourists. The locals wouldn’t be caught dead in the place. A group of travelers were sitting this night in the Excali-Bar drinking Adiós Amigos — gin, brandy, white rum, red vermouth, bit of lemon juice, shake and stir.

A frightful storm lashed the windows.

The locals were in the chapel eating pancakes because it was Shrove Tuesday. In a few hours Lent would commence.

The locals didn’t care for the tourists. Never had. As for the tourists, they were beginning to believe what they’d been told — that Cornish culture was nothing but ghost stories and meat pies. Not that they were here for culture. They were here for a bit of the odd, a bit of the creepy.

There were seven species of seagulls in the area. That was somewhat creepy. And a village called Lizard, an odd name indeed.

The locals had polished off their pancakes and were tidying up, preparing to play their Lenten prank. This year it fell to Paul and Paul, two old men. They staggered out of the chapel into the windy, rainy night and tottered along the cliff road to the Excali-Bar.

The travelers had stopped drinking Adiós Amigos and were now experimenting with Sheep Dip — gin, sherry and strong sweet cider, stir and strain. There were two boy hikers, several married pairs, three ladies from Ohio, a transvestite, and a French couple who sat apart (quite aware that the others were thinking…The French…The French eat horses but they don’t eat corn). The transvestite was having a quiet holiday alone, if you could say that a transvestite was ever quite alone. The imagination it takes to be one…It must be exhausting…

She was dressed sensibly, sensible shoes.

Paul and Paul lurched, dripping, into the revelers’ midst. They both had suffered strokes in the past. One hand on each was cold and crabbed. Their eyes were bulging and clouded.

They weren’t going to tell any scary stories, not these two. Weren’t going to tell this crowd about the vanishing hitchhiker or the man with half a face. Or the ones about the boiled baby’s revenge and the body of water that likes to break little boys’ backs. They were just going to play a few games, give these tourists something to remember. What did they think life was, a vacation?

The travelers had been playing a game of sorts before the old buzzards’ arrival. They were secretly assigning zoomorphs to everyone present. Of course privately they all thought of themselves as cheetahs. There was not a single exception to this.

Paul and Paul had wide, rotting smiles. Once they had been young and vigorous. Clever. Handsome. Their lives before them. But they’d had to give it all up. It seemed to have been the deal that had been struck at birth.

The tourists made an effort to find them engaging. They so terribly wanted to be amused. They bought them beverages, having moved from Sheep Dip to Blimlets to Blue Skies by then. Blue Skies are gin, lemon juice, a dash of unflavored food coloring and half a maraschino cherry, if available. After a few Blue Skies it was clear to all that the two Pauls were the cabaret.

It all began innocently enough. They proceeded to engage their audience.

Each among them had to confess to a loss.

“I lost my skill at baking cakes,” one of them ventured.

“I lost a rucksack once.”

“A ring.”

“My hair.”

“My trigger finger.” The fellow raised his hand, and it was true. It was maimed. There was no trigger finger.

“My beech trees outside Lyon. Every one!”

“My driving privileges.”

“My husband.”

It was amusing how this had slipped in there, and they chuckled.

“My memory.”

They howled at this one.

“It’s true. Can’t remember…get everything mixed up!”

“You never know when the last time for anything might come!”

“Now we’re cooking,” one of the Pauls cried.