Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Another night, I come out of my shop in the garage for supper and he appears without a hair on his head. Not on his arms either.

“Jesus,” I say. “What have you done now?”

“This is how you foil the drug testers,” he says.

“You aren’t ingesting drugs, are you,” I ask.

“Nah,” he says. “It’s just unconstitutional to take a sample from a man’s head, from a hair. I’m protesting the unconstitutionality of it.”

As a little kid when he wanted to curse but didn’t dare or probably didn’t even know how, he’d say, “Babies!” It was pretty damn cute. “Oh, babies!” he’d say. I don’t know where he got that from.

Did he respect his mother? I’d say yes. I mean, he didn’t pay much attention to her.

—

I fixed clocks in the garage for a while but then I stopped serving the public, who were never, ever satisfied. So it’s just a personal hobby, taking apart clocks and watches and putting them back together again. There was a Frenchman centuries ago, a watchmaker, who created a life-size mechanical duck. It could move its head, flap its wings, even eat from a bowl of grain. Then it could even shit out the compacted grain. It was all gears and springs. More than four hundred parts moved each wing. They call things like that automatons.

The boy says, “Can you learn about ducks by studying mechanical ducks?”

“Of course not,” I say. No wonder his teachers don’t like him, I think.

“It’s not a dumb question,” he says, “given where we are today, studying all these computer systems and simulations and making all these performance assessments that are no more than abstractions we try to apply to the real world. Real people are complex. A real situation can’t be broken down into abstractions. I don’t support nuclear power because there’s no place to bury nuclear waste,” he says. “Nuclear power cannot be separated from nuclear waste.”

I think, This boy just needs to get laid, but I say, “Why are you worrying about nuclear waste, you should just go out and get a job and keep it, make some money for yourself.” But I don’t have a job and haven’t for years, so my words ring somewhat hollow. Mother’s job is sufficient for us. There’s a preacher says a family of four can live handsomely on fifty thousand dollars a year before taxes and if they make more they should give that amount away to others. And we’re just a family of three. Do they still call people like us a nuclear family?

—

We went to New York City once. To this day I don’t know why she insisted on it. “Why don’t we go to the Grand Canyon?” I said, but she wanted to do something different. We’d seen the Grand Canyon. She wanted to go to that restaurant, Windows on the World, was it? And she wanted to take in some musical theater. That’s exactly how she put it, “I want to take in some musical theater.” She’s had a job for years with P & R, working with heavy machinery, loppers and saws and stuff, and first thing at LaGuardia she falls on the stairs and sprains her ankle. It’s all she can do to hobble from bed to bathroom in the crummy little hotel room we have. So I’m supposed to be showing the boy New York City. He was around nine. We had just emerged from a subway, the boy and I, totally disoriented, and this Mexican guy passes by and grunts at me and lifts his chin at this woman standing beside us waiting for the light to change and she’s blind with dark glasses and a cane, clearly blind, and the guy’s saying, without speaking — Do your duty, man, I’m going the other way.

The blind don’t grab on to you like you’d think or clutch your hand. She just put her finger on my jacket with the lightest touch.

“There’s a big grate here,” I say, thinking the last thing we needed was for her to get her stick snapped off in one of the holes in the grate. We cross the street and she angles herself to cross another one and I say, “Do you want us to stay with you for this one as well?” and she says, “Thank you very much, but only if you’re going in this direction, of course.” She had the lightest, nicest, most refined voice. It was surprising. And then the boy bawls out, “We don’t know where we are and we don’t know where we’re going!” And she says, still in that lovely voice, “Oh, now you’re beginning to frighten me.” Well, I was furious at him, very, very furious. We ushered the lady across the street and then I dragged him back down into the subway and we went back uptown to the hotel and we stayed there for two days. I was the only one who went out and that was just for crackers and Coke. The boy kept saying, “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry.” That was what he’d do. He’d do something, give somebody he shouldn’t some lip and then back right down. We didn’t see anything of New York City and that was the last time we left Arizona.

—

I go into the bird-food store for Suet. I’ve got some Suet feeders I made. The cheaper stuff you buy in the big-box places and the hardware stores isn’t rendered and can spoil. Most people don’t know this. They’re the same ones still putting that red-dye shit in the hummingbird feeders. Every time I go in there someone’s asking what they’ve got that will keep the doves away. I don’t want the doves. How can I get rid of the doves? And the clerk’s fussing around trying to sell them some contraption made from recycled materials for fifty bucks that only birds who feed upside down can get at. So I say, one customer to another, “A Taser. Try a Taser.” And they look at me sort of interested until I finally say, “I’m kidding.”

—

He found a dog out by the raytheon plant and brought her home. She looked like a puppy but who knows. Her teeth weren’t particularly white. He called her Vega.

“What the hell does that mean?” I say. “How did you come up with that?”

“It’s Arabic,” he says.

“You’re just asking for trouble, aren’t you?” I say. “Why would you give a dog an Arab’s name? It doesn’t even sound Arabic, it sounds Spanish. What’s it in Spanish?”

“Open plain,” he says.

“That’s some stupid name for a dog,” I say. “Open plain.”

I called her Amy. He stopped caring for her after a few weeks anyway and I fed her and trained her a bit. I had the time, not working. And you’ve got to have time, god knows, with the training exercises.

Sit…good girl…down…no! Stay…good girl. Twenty minutes twice a day. You’re never supposed to repeat a command.

We got all the way up to Day Fifteen, which is pretty much the end of it. That’s when you get them to sit and stay and you disappear and say hello to an imaginary person at the door and you come back and then disappear again and talk to people who aren’t there. That was amusing to me because no one ever came to our door, which was the way I preferred it. Sometimes the boy would have a friend over, but not often. Kids, they’re in a different lane. Slow. They move slow, they talk slow. Everything slows down.

—

The boy says, “What’s the point of training that dog? She’s not even good-looking.”

It’s true, Amy wouldn’t turn any heads. And I say to him, “What do you know about good-looking?” Clean up that goddamn acne, boy, I wanted to say, for I can be petty with him at times, but I didn’t.

“A man doesn’t have to be good-looking,” he says. “He’s just got to have presence, he’s got to be in command.”

“Absolutely,” I say. “You’re really in command at all the fast-food joints you keep getting fired from.” He’d been fired from one for eating salad back in the kitchen with his fingers, right out of one of those bowls big as an engine block. His fingers.

“It’d have been the same if I used a fork,” he says.