Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“Save the oleander!” she yells at both of them. “What do I care!”

In the driveway she runs around to Tao’s side of the car and pinches the child’s nose. He opens his mouth. She grabs him by the hair and carries him suspended into the house.

The yard boy walks to his truck, gets in and drives off. The world is neither nest nor playground, the yard boy thinks.

—

The yard boy lies in his room thinking about his girlfriend.

Open up, give in, allow some space, sprinkle and pour, he thinks.

—

The yard boy is mowing the grass around Johnny Dakota’s swimming pool. Dakota is into heroin and intangible property. As he is working, the yard boy hears a big splash behind him. He looks into the swimming pool and sees a rock on the bottom of it. He finishes mowing the grass and then he gets a net and fishes the rock out. It is as big as his hand and gray, with bubbly streaks of iron and metal running through it. The yard boy thinks it is a meteorite. It would probably still be smoldering with heat had it not landed in the swimming pool.

It is interesting but not all that interesting. The possibility of its surviving the earth’s atmosphere is one-tenth of one percent. Other things are more interesting than this. Nevertheless, the yard boy shows it to Johnny Dakota, who might want to place it in a taped-up box in his house to prevent the air from corroding it.

Johnny Dakota looks up at the sky, then at the piece of space junk and then at the yard boy. He is a sleek, fit man. Only his eyes and his hands look old. His hands have deep ridges in them and smashed nails. He once told the yard boy that his mother had died from plucking a wild hair from her nose while vacationing in Calabria. His father had been felled by an incident in Chicago. The darkness is always near, he had told the yard boy.

Johnny Dakota usually takes his swim at this time of the morning. He is wearing his swim trunks and flip-flops. If he had been in the pool he could have been brained. Once his mother had dreamed of losing a tooth and two days later her cousin dropped dead.

Johnny Dakota is angry. Anyone could tell. His face is dark. His mouth is a thin line. He gives the yard boy two twenties and tells him to bury the rock in the backyard. He tells him not to mention this to anyone.

The yard boy takes the rock and buries it beneath a fiddle-leaf fig at the north end of the house. The fig tree is distressed. It’s magnetic, that’s the only thing known about this rock. The fig tree is almost as upset as Johnny Dakota.

—

The yard boy lies in his room. His girlfriend is giving him a hard time. She used to visit him in his room several nights a week but now she doesn’t. He will take her out to dinner. He will spend the two twenties on a fantastic dinner.

The yard boy is disgusted with himself. The spider’s web is woven into the wanting, he thinks. He has desire for his girlfriend. His mind is shuttling between thoughts of the future and thoughts of the past. He is out of touch with the sharp simplicity and wonderfulness of the moment. He looks around him. He opens his eyes wide. The yard boy’s jeans are filthy. A green insect crawls in and out of the scapular feathers of the plover.

The yard boy goes downstairs. He gives the plover to his landlady. She seems delighted. She puts it on a shelf in the pantry with her milk-glass collection. The landlady has white hair, a wen and old legs that end in sneakers. She wants the yard boy to look at a plant she has just bought. It is in a big green plastic pot in the sunshine of her kitchen. Nothing is more obvious than the hidden, the yard boy thinks.

“This plant is insane,” the yard boy says.

The landlady is shocked. She backs off a little from the plant, a rabbit’s-foot fern.

“It has seen something terrible,” the yard boy says.

“I bought it at that place I always go,” the landlady says.

The yard boy shakes his head. The plant waves a wrinkly leaf and drops it.

“Insane,” the landlady asks. She would like to cry. She has no family, no one.

“Mad as a hatter,” the yard boy says.

—

The restaurant that the yard boy’s girlfriend chooses is not expensive. It is a fish restaurant. The plates are plastic. There is a bottle of hot sauce on each table. The girlfriend doesn’t like fancy.

The yard boy’s girlfriend is not talking to him. She has not been talking to him for days, actually. He knows he should be satisfied with whatever situation arises but he is having a little difficulty with his enlightenment.

—

The yard boy’s landlady has put her rabbit’s-foot fern out by the garbage cans. The yard boy picks it up and puts it in the cab of his truck. It goes wherever he goes now.

The yard boy gets a note from his girlfriend. It says:

My ego is too healthy for real involvement with you. I don’t like you. Good-bye.

Alyce

—

The yard boy works for Mr. Crown, an illustrator who lives in a fine house on the bay. Across the street, someone is building an even finer house on the gulf. Mr. Crown was once the most renowned illustrator of Western art in the country. In his studio he has George Custer’s jacket. Sometimes the yard boy poses for Mr. Crown. The year before, a gentleman in Cody, Wyoming, bought Mr. Crown’s painting of an Indian who was the yard boy for fifty thousand dollars. This year, however, Mr. Crown is not doing so well. He has been reduced to illustrating children’s books. His star is falling. Also, the construction across the street infuriates him. The new house will block off his view of the sun as it slides daily into the water.

Mr. Crown’s publishers have told him that they are not interested in cowboys. There have been too many cowboys for too long.

The yard boy is spraying against scale and sooty mold.

“I don’t need the money but I am insulted,” Mr. Crown tells the yard boy.

Mr. Crown goes back into the house. The yard boy takes a break to get a drink of water. He sits in the cab of his truck and drinks from a plastic jug. He sprinkles some water on the rabbit’s-foot fern. The fern sits there on the seat, dribbling a little vermiculite, crazier than hell.

The fern and the yard boy sit.

It is not a peaceful spot to sit. The racket of the construction on the gulf is considerable. Nonetheless, the yard boy swallows his water and attempts to dwell upon the dignity and simplicity of the moment.

Then there is the sound of gunfire. The yard boy cranes his neck out of the window of his pickup truck and sees Mr. Crown firing from his studio at the workers across the street. It takes the workers several moments to realize that they are being shot at. The bullets make big mealy holes in the concrete. The bullets whine through the windows that will exhibit the sunset. The workers all give a howl and try to find cover. The yard boy curls up behind the wheel of his truck. The little rushy brown hairs on the fern’s stalks stick straight out.

A few minutes later the firing stops. Mr. Crown goes back to the drawing board. No one is hurt. Mr. Crown is arrested and posts a large bond. Charges are later dropped. The house across the street is built. Still, Mr. Crown seems calmer now. He gives up illustrating. When he wants to look at something, he looks at the bay. He tells the yard boy he is putting sunsets behind him.

—

The yard boy and the rabbit’s-foot fern drive from lawn to lawn in the course of their days, the fern tipping forward a little in its green pot, the wind folding back its leaves. In the wind, its leaves curl back like the lips of a Doberman pinscher.

The yard boy sees things in the course of his work that he wouldn’t dream of telling the fern even though the fern is his only confidant. The fern has a lot of space around it in which anything can happen but it doesn’t have much of an emotional life because it is insane. Therefore, it makes a good confidant.