Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

He was nine.

“Nine,” his father would say, “there’s an age for you. When I was nine…” and so on.

His father’s name was Walter and he was a mechanic at a Chevrolet garage in Tallahassee. He had a seventeen-year-old brother named Walter, Jr., and he was Tommy. The boys had no mother, she’d been killed in a car wreck a while before.

It had not been her fault.

The mother had taken care of houses that people rented on the river. She cleaned them and managed them for the owners. Just before she died, there had been this one house where the toilet got stopped up. “I told the plumber,” Tommy’s mother told them, “that I wanted to know just what was in that toilet because I didn’t trust those tenants. I knew there was something deliberate there, not normal. I said, You tell me what you find there and when he called back he said, Well, you wanted to know what I found there and it was meat fat and paper towels.”

She had been very excited about what the plumber had told her. Tommy worried that his mother had still been thinking about this when she died, that she’d been driving along still marveling about it — meat fat and paper towels! — and that then she had been struck, and died.

She had slowed for an emergency vehicle that was tearing through an intersection with its lights flashing and a truck had crashed into her from behind. The emergency vehicle had a destination but there hadn’t even been an emergency at the time. It was supposed to be stationed at the stock-car races and it was late. The races — the first of the season — were just about to begin at the time of the wreck. Walter, Jr., was sitting in the old bleachers with a girl, waiting for the start, and the announcer had just called for the drivers to fire up their engines. There had been an immense roar in the sunny, dusty field, and a great cloud of insects had flown up from the rotting wood of the bleachers. The girl beside Walter, Jr., had screamed and spilled her Coke all over him. There had been thousands of these insects, which were long, red flying ants of some sort with transparent wings.

Tommy had not seen the alarming eruption of insects. He had been home, putting together a little car from a kit and painting it with silver paint.

Tommy liked rope. Sometimes he ate dirt. Lightning storms thrilled him. He was small for his age, a weedy child. He wore blue jeans with deeply rolled cuffs for growth, although he grew slowly. Weeks often went by when he didn’t grow at all.

The house they lived in on the river was a two-story house with a big porch, surrounded by trees. There was a panel in the ceiling that gave access to a particularly troublesome water pipe. The pipe would leak whenever it felt like it but not all the time. Apparently it had been placed by the builders at such an angle that it could be neither replaced nor repaired. Walter had placed a bucket in the crawl space between Tommy’s ceiling and the floor above to catch water, and this he emptied every few weeks. Tommy believed something existed up there that needed water, as all living things do, some quiet, listening, watching thing that shared his room with him. At the same time, he knew there was nothing there. Walter would throw the water from the bucket into the yard. It was important to Tommy that he always be there to see the bucket being brought down, emptied, then replaced.

In the house, with other photographs, was one of Tommy and his mother taken when he was six. It had been taken on the bank of the same river the rest of them still lived on, but not the same place. This had been farther upstream. Tommy was holding a fish by the tail. His mother had black hair and she was smiling at him and he was looking at the fish. He was holding the fish upside down and it was not very large but still large enough to keep, apparently. Tommy was told that he had caught the fish and that his mother had fried it up just for him in a pan with butter and salt and that he had eaten it, but Tommy could remember none of this. What he remembered was that he had found the fish, which was not true.

Tommy loved his mother but he didn’t miss her. He didn’t like his father much, and never had. He liked Walter, Jr.

Walter, Jr., had a mustache and his own Chevy truck. He liked to ride around at night with his friends and sometimes he would take Tommy along. The big boys would drink beer and holler at people in Ford trucks and, in general, carry on as they tore along the river roads. Once they all saw a naked woman in a lighted window. The headlights swept past all kinds of things. One night, one of the boys pointed at a mailbox.

“Look, that’s a three-hundred-dollar mailbox!”

“Mailbox can’t be three hundred dollars,” one of the other boys yelled.

“I seen it advertised. It’s totally indestructible. Door can’t be pulled off. Ya hit it with a ball bat or a two-by-four, it just busts up the wood, don’t hurt the box. Toss an M-80 in there, won’t hurt the box.”

“What’s an M-80,” Tommy asked.

The big boys looked at him.

“He don’t know what an M-80 is,” one of them said.

Walter, Jr., stopped the truck and backed it up. They all got out and stared at the mailbox. “What kind of mail you think these people get anyway?” Walter, Jr., said.

The boys pushed at the box. “It’s just asking for it, isn’t it,” one of the boys said. They laughed and shrugged, and one of them pissed on it. Then they got back in the truck and drove away.

Walter, Jr., had girlfriends too. For a time, his girl was Audrey, only Audrey. She had thick hair and very white, smooth skin and Tommy thought she was beautiful. Together, he thought, she and his brother were like young gods who made the world after many trials and tests, accomplishing everything only through wonders and self-transformations. In reality, the two were quite an ordinary couple. If anything, Audrey was peculiar looking, even ugly.

“If you marry my brother, I’ll be your brother-in-law,” Tommy told her.

“Ha,” she said.

“Why don’t you like me?” He adored her, he knew she had some power over him.

“Who wants to know?”

“Me. I want to know. Tommy.”

“Who’s that?” And she would laugh, twist him over, hang him upside down by the knees so he swung like a monkey, dump him on his feet again and give him a stale stick of gum.

Then Walter, Jr., began going out with other girls.

“He dropped me,” Audrey told Tommy, “just like that.”

It was the end of the summer that his mother had died at the start of. Her clothes still hung in the closet. Audrey came over every day and she and Tommy would sit on the porch of the house on the river in two springy steel chairs painted piggy pink.

Audrey told him, “You can’t trust anybody.” And, “Don’t agree to anything.”

When Walter, Jr., walked by, he never glanced at her. It was as though Audrey wasn’t there. He would walk by whistling, his hair dark and crispy, his stomach flat as a board. He wore sunglasses, even though the summer had been far from bright. It had been cool and damp. The water in the river was yellow with the rains.

“Does your dad miss the Mom,” Audrey asked Tommy.

“Uh-huh.”

“Who misses her the most?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “Dad, I think.”

“That’s right,” Audrey said. “That’s what true love is. Wanting something that’s missing.”

She brought him presents. She gave him a big book about icebergs. He knew she had stolen it. They looked at the book together and Audrey read parts of it aloud.

“Icebergs were discovered by monks,” Audrey said. “That’s not exactly what it says here, but I’m trying to make it easier for you. Icebergs were discovered by monks who thought they were floating crystal castles.” She pointed toward the river. “Squeeze your eyes up and look at the river. It looks like a cloud lying on the ground instead, see?”