Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“I don’t know what that policeman was talking about,” Richard said.

“He was trying to express something spiritual.”

“Don’t you get tired of that out here? Everything’s sacred and mysterious and for the initiated only. Even the cops are after illumination. It wears me out, to be quite honest.”

She wished she had gotten out of the car. She hadn’t even gotten out of the car. She was wearing high heels. “Let’s go back,” she said. “Let’s try it again.”

“Janice,” Richard said.

After some miles he said, “I forgot to take a leak back there.”

“Really!” she exclaimed.

“I’m going to pull into this rest stop.”

“To take a leak! How good!” she said. She fixed an enthralled expression upon him.

Outside, the heat was breathtaking and the desert had a slightly lavender cast. People were standing under a ramada, speaking loudly about family members who smoked like chimneys and lived into their nineties. Farther away, someone was calling to a small dog. “Peaches,” the woman called, “you come here now.” The dog seemed sincere in its unfamiliarity with the name Peaches. This was clearly a name the dog felt did not indicate its true nature, and it was not going to respond to it.

The road led past the toilets and ramadas through a portion of landscape where every form of plant life was explained with signs, then back out onto the highway. Janice walked along it toward a group of vending machines. She loved vending-machine coffee. She felt it had an unusual taste and wasn’t for everyone. While waiting for the cardboard cup to sling itself down and fill with the uncanny liquid, she noticed a chalky purple van parked nearby. Two beautiful children stood beside it with their arms folded, looking around as though they had a certain amount of authority. They were rather dirty and blond and striking. A man and woman were rummaging around inside the open van. Both the man and the boy were barefoot and shirtless. The woman, who had long, careless hair, said something to the girl, who climbed inside just as the man triumphantly produced what appeared to be an empty pizza box. Janice could hardly take her eyes off them. She finished the coffee, which was now cold and tasted even more peculiar, and returned to Richard and their rental car, which had a small scratch on the hood that she had taken great pains to point out to the agency so they would not be held responsible for it. The grille had collected a number of butterflies. Without speaking, she got in and shut the door. She’d like to tell Richard how much she refrained from saying to him, but actually she refrained from saying very little.

As they passed the van, the man raised the scrap of box on which was now printed in crayon PLEASE: NEED GAS MONEY.

The colon in this plea touched Janice deeply. “Richard,” she said, “we must give that family some money.”

The man held the sign close to his chest, just above an appendectomy scar, as the children looked stonily into space.

“Richard!” she said.

“Oh, please, Janice,” he said. “Honestly.”

“Go back,” she said.

They had reached the highway, and Richard accelerated. “Why do you always want to go back. We’re not going back. Why don’t you do things the first time?”

She gasped at the unfairness of this remark. She considered rearing back and hammering at the windshield with her high-heeled shoes. “I want to give that poor family some gas money,” she said.

“Someone will give them money.”

“But I want it to be us!”

Richard drove faster.

“Look,” she said reasonably, “what if you were in the hospital and you needed a new liver and the doctor finally came in and he said, ‘I have good news, the hospital has found a liver for you.’ Wouldn’t you be grateful?”

“I would,” Richard said thoughtfully.

“Someone would have given you a second chance.”

“It would be a dead person,” Richard said, still thoughtful. “It would have to have been.”

“I wish I were driving,” she said.

“Well, you’re not.”

Janice moaned. “I hate you,” she said. “I do.”

“Let’s just get to Santa Fe,” Richard said. “It’s a civilized town. It will have a civilizing effect on us.”

“That tie makes you look stupid,” she said.

“I know,” he said. He wrenched the knot free, rolled down the window and threw the tie out.

“What are you doing!” Janice cried. The tie was of genuine cellulose acetate and had been painted in the forties. It depicted a Plains Indian brave standing before a pueblo. That the scene was incorrect, that it had been conceived in utter ignorance, made it more expensive and, they were told, more valuable in the long run. But now there was no long run. The tie was toast. She shifted in her seat and stared breathlessly into the distance ahead. She thought of the little family with grave compassion.

“I’m afraid I have to stop again. For gas,” he said.

He was pitiless, she thought. A moral aborigine. She hugged herself.

They rolled off an exit into a town that stretched a single block deep for miles along the highway and pulled into a gas station mocked up to look like a trading post, with a corral beside it filled with old, big-finned cars. Richard got out and pumped gas. Then he cleaned the windshield, grinning at her through the glass.

She did not know him, she thought. She was really no more acquainted with who he was than she was familiar with the cold dark-matter theory, say.

He tapped on the glass. “Want to come inside?” he said. “Shot glasses, velvet paintings, lacquered scorpions?”

He was a snob, she thought.

He sighed and walked away, patting the breast pocket of his jacket for his wallet. Janice moved across the seat quickly, grasped the wheel and drove off in a great rattle and shriek of sand. She was back at the rest stop in fifteen minutes. The children had climbed the van’s ladder and were lying on the roof. The woman was nowhere visible. The man was still rigidly holding the sign. Janice pulled up beside him.

“How you doing?” he said. He had bright, pale eyes.

“I want to give you twenty dollars,” Janice said. She opened her purse and was disturbed to find she had only two fifty-dollar bills.

“Rose!” the man yelled, lowering the sign. He had a long, smooth torso, except for the appendectomy scar.

The woman emerged from the van and regarded Janice coolly.

“Yes?” she said.

“I saw your sign,” Janice said, confused.

The children rose languidly from the roof and looked down at her.

“We have to travel seventy miles to our home and get these children in school tomorrow,” Rose said formally. “What we do, what our policy is, is we drive to the nearest gas station and at that point you give us the amount you’ve decided on. That way you’ll be assured that we’re using it for gas and gas only.”

Janice was grateful for the rules they had worked out.

“People will give you money at a rest stop whereas they wouldn’t at a gas station,” the man said. “It’s just human nature. They’re more at peace with themselves in rest stops.”

Introductions were made. The man’s name was Leo. The children were Zorro and ZoeBella. Janice identified herself too.

“Skinny Puppy’s my gang name,” Zorro said, “but use it at your peril.”

“Gang name my ass,” Leo said. “He doesn’t know anything about gangs. He signed a lowrider last week. Practically got us killed.”

“I didn’t know I was signing,” Zorro said. “I just had my hand out the window.”

“Bastard about run us off the highway,” Leo said.

Janice realized that she was gazing at them openly, a little stupidly. She suggested that they drive to the gas station so they could all be on their way.