Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“He wants a pair of lizard boots for his birthday,” Tommy said.

“Isn’t that pathetic?” Audrey said.

Every night, Walter would come home from work, scrub down his hands and arms, set the table, pour the milk. The boys sat on either side of him. The chair where their mother used to sit looked out at the yard, at a woodpile there.

“Men,” Walter began, “when I was your age, I didn’t know…” He shook his head, his eyes filling with tears.

He had been forgetting to empty the bucket in the space above Tommy’s room. A pale stain had spread across the ceiling. Tommy showed it to Audrey.

“That’s nice,” she said, “the shape, all dappled brown and yellow like that, but it doesn’t really tell you anything. It’s just part of the doomed reality all around us.” She climbed up and brought the bucket down.

“A monk would take this water and walk into the desert and pour it over a dry and broken stick there,” she said. “That’s why people become monks, because they get sick of being around doomed reality all the time.”

“Let’s be monks,” he said.

“Monks love solitude,” Audrey said. “They love solitude more than anything. When monks started out, long, long ago, they were waiting for the end of time.”

“But the end of time didn’t happen, did it,” Tommy asked.

“It was too soon then. They didn’t know what we know today.”

She wore silver sandals. Once she had broken a strap on the sandal and Tommy had fixed it with his Hot Stuff instant glue.

“Someday we could have a little boy just like you,” she said, “and we’d call him Tommy Two.”

But he was not fond of this idea. He was afraid that it would come out of him somehow, this Tommy Two, that he would make it and be ashamed. So, together, they dismissed the notion.

One day, Walter, Jr., said to him, “Look, Audrey shouldn’t be hanging around here all the time. She’s weird. She’s no mommy, believe me.”

“I don’t need a mommy,” Tommy said.

“She’s mad at me and she’s trying to get back at me through you. She’s just practicing on you. You don’t want to be practiced on, do you? She’s just a very unhappy person.”

“I’m unhappy,” Tommy said.

“You need to get out and play some games. Soccer, maybe.”

“Why?” Tommy said. “I don’t like Daddy.”

“You’re just trying that out,” Walter, Jr., said. “You like him well enough.”

“Audrey and me are the last generation and you’re not,” Tommy said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You should be but you’re not. Nothing can be done about it.”

“Let’s drive around in the truck,” Walter, Jr., said.

Tommy still enjoyed riding around in the truck. They passed by the houses their mother had cleaned. They looked all right. Someone else was cleaning them now.

“You don’t look good,” Walter, Jr., said. “You’re too pale. You mope around all the time.”

Inside the truck, the needle of the black compass on the dashboard trembled. The compass box was filled with what seemed like water. Maybe it was water. Tommy was looking at everything carefully, but trying not to think about it. Audrey was teaching him how to do this. He remembered at some point to turn toward his brother and smile, and this made his brother feel better, it was clear.

The winter nights were cool. Audrey and Tommy still sat in their chairs at dusk on the porch but now they wrapped themselves in blankets.

“Walter, Jr., is dating a lot anymore,” Audrey said. “It’s nice we have these evenings to ourselves but we should take little trips, you know? I have a lot to show you. Have you ever been to the TV tower north of town?”

The father, Walter, was already in bed. He worked and slept. He’d saved the fragments of soap his wife had left behind in the shower. He had wrapped them in tissue paper and placed them in a drawer. But he was sleeping in the middle of the bed these nights, hardly aware of it.

“No,” Tommy said. “Is it in the woods?”

“It’s a lot taller than the woods and it’s not far away from here. It’s called Tall Timbers. It’s right smack in the middle of birds’ migration routes. Thousands of birds run into it every year, all kinds of them. We can go out there and look at the birds.”

Tommy was puzzled. “Are the birds dead?”

“Yes,” she said. “In an eleven-year period, thirty thousand birds of a hundred and seventy species have been found at the base of the tower.”

“Why don’t they move it?”

“They don’t do things like that,” Audrey said. “It would never occur to them.”

He did not want to see the birds around the tower. “Let’s go,” he said anyway.

“We’ll go in the spring. That’s when the birds change latitudes. That’s when they move from one place to another. There’s a little tiny warbler bird that used to live around here in the spring, but people haven’t seen it for years. They haven’t found it at the base of any of the transmission towers. They used to find it there, that’s how they knew it wasn’t extinct.”

“Monks used to live on top of tall towers,” Tommy said, for she had told him this. “If a monk stayed up there, he could keep the birds away, he could wave his arms around or something so they wouldn’t hit.”

“Monks live in a cool, crystalline half darkness of the mind and heart,” Audrey said. “They couldn’t be bothered with that.”

They rocked in their chairs on the porch. The porch had been painted a succession of colors. Where the chairs had scraped the wood there was light green, dark green, blue, red. Bugs crawled around the lights.

“If I got sick, would you stay with me,” Tommy asked.

“I’m not sure. It would depend.”

“My mommy would have stayed.”

“Well, you never know,” Audrey said. “You got to realize mommies get tired. They’re willing to let things go sometimes. They get to thinking and they’re off.”

“Do you have a mommy,” he asked cautiously.

“Technically I do,” Audrey said, “but she’s gone as your mommy, actually. Before something’s gone, it had to have been there, right? Even so, I don’t feel any rancor about her. It’s important not to feel rancor.”

“I don’t feel rancor,” Tommy said.

Then, one afternoon, Walter came home from his work at the garage and it was as though he had woken from a strange sleep. He didn’t appear startled by his awakening. His days and nights of grief came to an end with a shock no harder than that of a boat’s keel grounding on a river’s shore. He stopped weeping. He put his wife’s things in cardboard boxes and stored the boxes. In fact, he stored them in the space above Tommy’s room.

“Why’s that girl here all the time,” Walter asked. “She’s not still Walter, Jr.’s girlfriend, is she? She shouldn’t be here all the time.”

“Audrey’s my friend,” Tommy said.

“She’s not a nice girl. She’s too old to be your friend.”

“Then I’m too young to be your friend.”

“No, honey, you’re my son.”

“I don’t like you,” Tommy said.

“You love me but you don’t like me, is that it?” Walter was thinner and cleaner. He spoke cheerfully.

Tommy considered this. He shook his head.

At school, at the edge of the playground, Audrey talked through the chain-link fence to Tommy.

“You know that pretty swamp close by? It’s full of fish, all different kinds. You know how they know?”

He didn’t.

“They poison little patches of it. They put out nets and then drop the poison in. It settles in the gills of the fish and suffocates them. The fish pop up to the surface and then they drag them out and classify and weigh and measure each one.”