Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“Truck’s stopped,” Carl said.

They coasted to the side of the road and Carl fiddled with the ignition.

“Alternator’s shot, I bet,” he said. He took Jack’s sunglasses off, wiped them with a handkerchief and carefully hooked them back over Jack’s ears. Underneath her elbow, the metal of the door was heating up.

“You check into the hotel,” Carl directed her. “Jack and I will walk down to the garage. He likes garages.”

Carl helped Miriam get their luggage from the back and carried it into the hotel’s lobby. She arranged for two unadjoining rooms. They were the last rooms left, even though the hotel and town appeared deserted. The museums were closed and everyone was at the bar, the manager told her. One of the museums displayed only a petrified wedding cake, a petrified cat, some rocks and old clothes. It was typical and not worth going into, he confided. But people came from far and wide to see the other museum and speak to the taxidermist on duty. He was surprised that they had come here without having the museum as their destination. The taxidermist was a genius. He couldn’t make an animal look dead if he wanted to.

“He can even do reptiles and combine them in artistic and instructive groups,” the manager said.

“This museum is full of dead animals?” Miriam said.

“Sure,” the manager said. “It’s a wildlife museum.”

Miriam’s room was in the back of the hotel over the kitchen and smelled like the inside of a lunch box, but it wasn’t unpleasant. She rearranged the furniture, plugged in the lamp and gazed out the single window at the bar, a long, dark structure that seemed, the longer she stared at it, to be almost heaving with the muffled sound of voices. This was the Horny Toad. She decided to go there.

Miriam had always felt that she was the kind of person who somehow quenched in the least exacting stranger any desire for conversation with her. This, however, was not the case at the Toad. People turned to her immediately and began to speak. They had bright, restless faces, seemed starved for affection and were in full conversational mode. A number of children were present. Everyone was wildly stimulated.

A young woman with lank, thinning hair touched Miriam with a small dry hand. “I’m Priscilla Dickman and I’m an ex-agoraphobic,” she said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Yes,” Miriam said, startled. People were waving, smiling.

“I used to be so afraid of losing control,” Priscilla said. “I was afraid of going insane, embarrassing myself. I was afraid of getting sick or doing something frightening or dying. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

She went off to the bar, saying she would return with gimlets. Miriam was immediately joined by an elderly couple wearing jeans, satin shirts and large, identical concha belts. Their names were Vern and Irene. They had spent all day at the museum and were happy and tired.

“My favorite is the javelina family,” Irene said. “Those babies were adorable.”

“Ugly animals,” Vern said. “Bizarre. But they’ve always been Irene’s favorite.”

“Not last year,” Irene said. “Last year it was the bears, I think. Vern says that Life is just one thing but it takes different forms to amuse itself.”

“That’s what I say, but I don’t believe it,” Vern said, winking broadly at Miriam.

“Vern likes the ground squirrels.”

Vern agreed. “Isn’t much of a display, but I like what I hear about them. That state-of-torpor thing. When the going gets rough, boom, right into a state of torpor. They don’t need anything. A single breath every three minutes.”

Irene didn’t seem as fascinated as her husband by the state of torpor. “Have you gone yet, dear,” she asked Miriam. “Have you asked the taxidermist your question?”

“No, I haven’t,” Miriam said. She accepted a glass from Priscilla, who had returned with a tray of drinks. “I’m Priscilla Dickman,” she said to the old couple, “and I’m an ex-agoraphobic.”

“He doesn’t answer everybody,” Vern said.

“He answers the children sometimes, but they don’t know what they’re saying,” Irene said fretfully. “I think children should be allowed only in the petting zoo.”

A gaunt, grave boy named Alec arrived and identified himself as a tree hugger. He was with a girl named Argon.

“When I got old enough to know sort of what I wanted?” Argon said, “I decided I wanted either a tree hugger or a car guy. I’d narrowed it down to that. At my first demonstration, I lay in the road with some other people in a park where they were going to bulldoze two-hundred-year-old trees for a picnic area. We had attracted quite a crowd of onlooking picnickers. When the cops came and carried me off, a little girl said, ‘Why are they taking the pretty one away, Mommy?’ and I was hooked. I just loved demonstrating after that, always hoping to overhear those words again. But I never did.”

“We all get older, dear,” Irene said.

“Car guys are kind of interesting,” Argon said. “They can be really hypnotic, but only when they’re talking about cars, actually.”

Sometime later, Alec was still in the midst of a long story about Indian environmentalists in the Himalayas. The tree-hugging movement started long ago, he’d been telling them, when the maharaja of Jodhpur wanted to cut down trees for yet another palace and a woman named Amrita Devi resisted his axmen by hugging a tree and uttering the now well-known statement “A chopped head is cheaper than a felled tree” before she was dismembered. Then her three daughters took her place and they, too, were dismembered. Then 359 additional villagers were dismembered before the maharaja called it off.

“And it really worked,” Alec said, gnawing on his thumbnail. “That whole area is full of militant conservationists now. They have a fair there every year.” He gnawed furiously at his nail. “And on the supposed spot where the first lady died, no grass grows. Not a single blade. They’ve got it cordoned off.” He struggled for a moment with a piece of separated nail between his teeth, at last freed it, examined it for a moment, then flicked it to the floor.

“You know, Alec,” Argon said, “I’ve never liked that story. It just misses the mark as far as I’m concerned.” She turned to Miriam. “Tree huggers tend sometimes not to have both feet on the ground. I want to be a spiritual and ecological warrior but I want both feet on the ground too.”

Miriam looked at the white curving nail on the dirty floor. Jack wouldn’t have had much to go on with that. Even Jack. Who were these people? They were all so desperate. You couldn’t attribute their behavior to alcohol alone.

Other people gathered around the table, all talking about their experiences in the museum, all expressing awe at the exhibits, the mountain lions, the wading birds, the herds of elk and the exotics, particularly the exotics. They had come from far away to see this. Many of them returned, year after year.

“It’s impossible to leave the place unmoved,” a woman said.

“My favorite is the wood ibis on a stump in a lonely swamp,” Priscilla said cautiously. “It couldn’t be more properly delineated.”

“That’s a gorgeous specimen, all right. Not too many of those left,” someone said.

“…so much better than a zoo. Zoos are so depressing. I hear the animals are committing suicide in Detroit. Hurling themselves into moats and drowning.”

“I don’t think other cities have that problem so much. Just Detroit.”

“Even so. Zoos—”

“Oh, absolutely, this is so much nicer.”

“Shoot to kill but not to mangle,” Vern said.

“A lot of hunters just can’t get that part down,” Irene said. “And then they think they can bring those creatures here! To him!”