Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

But eventually Jack’s lack of success began to vex him. Miriam and the lamp continued to wait solemnly for his empty-handed return. He grew irritable. Sometimes he would forget to wash off his camouflage paint, and he slept poorly. Then, late one afternoon when Jack was out in the woods, he fell asleep in his stand and toppled out of a tree, critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passed through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe. A large portion of his brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent’s coat. A month later, he could walk with difficulty and move one arm. He had some vision out of his remaining eye and he could hear but not speak. He emerged from rehab with a face as expressionless as a frosted cake. He was something that had suffered a premature burial, something accounted for but not present. Miriam was certain that he was aware of the morbid irony in this.

The lamp was a great comfort to Miriam in the weeks following the accident. Carl was of less comfort. Whenever she saw him in the hospital’s halls, he was wailing and grinding his teeth. But the crooked, dainty deer-foot lamp was calm. They spent most nights together reading quietly. The lamp had eclectic reading tastes. It would cast its light on anything, actually. It liked the stories of Poe. The night before Jack was to return home, they read a little book in which animals offered their prayers to God — the mouse, the bear, the turtle and so on — and this is perhaps where the lamp and Miriam had their first disagreement. Miriam liked the little verses. But the lamp felt that though the author clearly meant well, the prayers were cloying and confused thought with existence. The lamp had witnessed a smattering of Kierkegaard and felt strongly that thought should never be confused with existence. Being in such a condition of peculiar and altered existence itself, the lamp felt some things unequivocally. Miriam often wanted to think about that other life, when the parts knew the whole, when the legs ran and rested and moved through woods washed by flowers, but the lamp did not want to reflect upon those times.

Jack came back and Carl moved in with them. He had sold everything he owned except his big Chevy truck and wanted only to nurse Jack for the rest of his life. Jack’s good eye often teared, and he indicated both discomfort and agreement with a whistling hiss. Even so, he didn’t seem all that glad to see Miriam. As for herself, she felt that she had driven to a grave and gotten out of the car with the engine left running. Carl slept for a time in Jack’s study, but one night when Miriam couldn’t sleep and was sitting in the living room with the lamp, she saw him go into their room and shut the door. And that became the arrangement. Carl stayed with Jack day and night.

One of the first things Carl wanted to do was to take a trip. He believed that the doleful visits from the other students tired Jack and that the familiar house and grounds didn’t stimulate him properly. While Miriam didn’t think highly of Carl’s ideas, this one didn’t seem too bad. She was ready to leave. After all, Jack had already left in his fashion and it seemed pointless to stay in his house. They all three would sit together in the big roomy cab on the wide cherry-red custom seat of Carl’s truck and tour the Southwest. The only thing she didn’t like was that the lamp would have to travel in the back with the luggage.

“Nothing’s going to happen to it,” Carl said. “Look at dogs. Dogs ride around in the backs of trucks all the time. They love it.”

“Thousands of dogs die each year from being pitched out of the backs of pickups,” Miriam said.

Jack remained in the room with them while they debated the statistical probability of this. He was gaunt and his head was scarred, and he tended to resemble, if left to his own devices, a large white appliance. But Carl was always buying him things and making small alterations to his appearance. This day he was wearing pressed khakis, a crisp madras shirt, big black glasses and a black Stetson hat. Carl was young and guilty and crazy in love. He patted Jack’s wrists as he talked, not wanting to upset him.

Finally, continuing to assert that he had never heard of a dog falling out of a pickup truck, Carl agreed to buy a camper shell and enclose the back. He packed two small bags for himself and Jack while Miriam got a cardboard carton and arranged her clothes around the lamp. Her plan was to unplug whatever lamp was in whatever motel room they stayed in and plug this one in. Clearly, that would be the high point of its day.

They took to the road that night and didn’t stop driving until daylight disclosed that the landscape had changed considerably. There was a great deal of broken glass and huge cactus everywhere. Organ-pipe, saguaro, barrel cactus and prickly pear. Strange and stern shapes, far stiller than trees, less friendly and willing to serve. They seemed to be waiting for further transition, another awesome shift of the earth’s plates, an enormous occurrence. The sun bathed each spine, it sharpened the smashed bottles and threw itself through the large delicate ears of car-crushed jackrabbits. They saw few people and no animals except dead ones. The land was vast and still and there seemed to be considerable resentment toward the nonhuman creatures who struggled to inhabit it. Dead coyotes and hawks were nailed to fence posts and the road was hammered with the remains of lizards and snakes. Miriam was glad that the lamp was covered and did not have to suffer these sights.

The first night they stopped at a motel, with a Chinese restaurant and lounge adjoining. Miriam ordered moo goo gai pan for dinner, something she had not had since she was a child, and an orange soda. Carl fed Jack some select tidbits from an appetizer platter with a pair of chopsticks. After they ate Miriam wandered into the lounge, but there was only a cat vigorously cleaning itself and staring at her with its legs splayed over its head. She picked up a couple of worn paperback books from the exchange table in the office and went back to her room. Through the walls she could hear Carl singing to Jack as he ran the bathwater. He would shampoo Jack’s hair, scrub his nails and talk about the future…Miriam turned on the lamp and examined one of the books. It concerned desert plants but many of the pages were missing and someone had spilled wine on the pictures. She did learn, however, that cactus are descended from roses. They were late arrivals, adapters, part of a new climate. She felt like that, felt very much a late arrival, it was her personality. She had adapted readily to being in love, and then adapted to not being in love anymore. And the new climate was, well, this situation. She put the book about cactus down.

The other book was about hunting zebras in Africa. I shot him right up his big fat fanny, the author wrote. She had read this before she knew what she was doing and felt terrible about it, but the lamp held steady until she finally turned it off and got into bed.

The next day they drove. They stopped at hot springs and ghost towns. They stopped on an Indian reservation and Carl bought Jack colored sand in a bottle. They stopped at a Dairy Queen and Miriam drove while Carl spooned blueberry Blizzard into Jack’s mouth. They admired the desert, the peculiar growths, the odd pale colors. They passed through a canyon of large, solitary boulders. There was a sign threatening fine and imprisonment for defacing the rocks but the boulders were covered with paint, spelling out people’s names, mostly. The shapes of the rocks resembled nothing though the words made them look like toilet doors in a truck stop. On the other side of the canyon was a small town with two museums, a brick hotel, a gas station and a large bar called the Horny Toad. Miriam had the feeling that the truck’s engine had stopped running.