Breaking and Entering

1

Willie and Liberty broke into a house on Crab Key and lived there for a week. The house had a tile near the door that said CASA VIRGINIA. It was the home of Virginia and Chip Maxwell. It was two stories overlooking the Gulf, and had been built with the trickle-down from Phillips-head screw money. Willie achieved entry by ladder and a thin, flexible strip of aluminum. Crab Key was tiny and exclusive, belonging to an association that had an armed security patrol. The houses on Crab Key were owned by people so wealthy that they were hardly ever there.

Liberty and Willie saw the guard each morning. He was an old, lonely man, rather glossy and puffed up, his jaw puckered in and his chest puffed out like a child concentrating on making a muscle. He told Willie he had a cancer, but that grapefruit was curing it. He told Willie that they had wanted to cut again, but he had chosen grapefruit instead. He talked quite openly to Willie, as though they had been correspondents for years, just now meeting. Willie and Liberty must have reminded him of people he thought he knew, people who must have looked appropriate living in a million dollar soaring cypress house on the beach. He thought they were guests of the owners.

Willie did have a look to him. People would babble on to Willie as though, in his implacability, they would find their grace. Willie walked through life a welcome guest. He had a closed, sleek face that did not transmit impressions. He was tight as a jar of jam. People were crazy about Willie.

The guard said, “The doctor says to me, ‘Say you want to see the Taj Mahal. You travel all the way to the Taj Mahal, but then you don’t go inside. You don’t pay the little extra to make the trip worthwhile.’ ”

“What was he talking about?” Willie asked.

“Me! The Taj Mahal was the inside of me! They go inside there to see what’s up, and while they’re inside they shine their light in all your corners. They take out whatever they want to besides. Haven’t you ever talked to a doctor? That’s the way they talk.” The guard sighed and looked around him. “If I were young, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “The big show is definitely not out here.”

“The big show is in our heads,” Willie said.

Willie and the guard got along famously.

In the house, Clem was lying in the air-conditioning, before the sliding glass doors, his breath making small parachuting souls on the glass. Clem was Liberty’s dog, a big white Alsatian with pale eyes. His eyes were open, watching his vacation.

The guard said, “You know, I’ll tell you, my name is Turnupseed.”

“Pleased to know you,” Willie said.

“That name mean nothing to you?”

“I don’t believe it does,” Willie said.

The guard shook his head back and forth, back and forth. “How quickly they forget,” he said to an imaginary person on his right.

Liberty said nothing. She supposed they were about to be arrested. She and Willie were young, but they had been breaking into other people’s houses for quite some time now. The town was a sprawling one on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and there were a number of Keys offshore. Everywhere there were houses. There was certainly no dearth of houses. They had their own that they were renting, but it didn’t seem to suit them. Anyplace they saw that appealed to them, and even some places that didn’t, they just went inside. They seemed to have a certain freedom in this regard, but Liberty thought they were bound to get caught someday.

“My nephew, Donald Gene Turnupseed, killed Jimmy Dean. You know, Jimmy Dean’s car ran into his car.”

“Well,” Willie said, “1955.”

“It seems like a long time ago, but I don’t see what difference that makes,” Turnupseed said. “We are talking about something immortal here. Young girls have made a cult of Dean even though he was a faggot.”

“Life is not a masterpiece,” Willie agreed.

“Life is a damn mess,” the guard said. He seemed genuinely outraged. He looked at Willie. “I’m somewhat of an expert on that incident. Ask me a question about it.”

“There was something definitely sinister about the Porsche,” Willie said.

“There sure was!” Turnupseed said. “A mechanic had both legs broken when the wreckage fell off the truck — a Beverly Hills doctor who acquired the engine was killed using it — another racing doctor using the drivetrain was seriously injured when his car turned over — the wreckage, with admonitory notices declaring THIS ACCIDENT COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED, was toured by the Greater Los Angeles Safety Council, and it was at such a show in Sacramento that the car fell off its steel plinth and broke the hip of a teenage spectator …” Turnupseed was out of breath, wheezing heavily. “Coincidences are a hobby of mine,” he panted. “Another hobby I got is reading cookbooks.”

Turnupseed enjoyed reading cookbooks. In inclement weather, he could be seen sitting in his patrol car, poring over colored plates of food. He and Willie would speak with fervor about chili and cassoulet and pineapple-glazed yams and pastry sucrée.

“I guess I’ve read just about every cookbook there is to read,” Turnupseed said. “I get a big kick out of it, not being able to eat much myself. I only got one quarter of a stomach. It really don’t bother me much. It’s nice just looking at the pictures. Now Mrs. Maxwell has had a cystostomy, but she’s chipper as the dickens about it, I don’t have to tell you that.”

“She’s always been a very chipper lady,” Willie agreed.

There were indications in the expensive house that an unpleasant operation had recently been endured. The Maxwells were subscribers to the Ostomy Quarterly.

“She’s a scrapper, Mrs. Maxwell,” Turnupseed said. “You know, after she come home from the hospital, she called up the paper and wanted them to send out a reporter to do an interview with her, but the paper wouldn’t do it.”

“The media prefer not to handle the subject of excreta,” Willie said.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Turnupseed said. He removed his hat and his thin hair fluttered, startled. “She got herself a Windsurfer. I’ve never seen her use it, but it’s the attitude that counts is my belief.” He looked at Liberty, his chin trembling gently. “Your wife looks sad,” Turnupseed said to Willie. “Has she had a loss recently?”

“She’s just one of those wives,” Willie said.

“What do women want, let me ask you that,” Turnupseed said. “My last two wives always maintained they were miserable even though they had every distraction and convenience known to modern times. Number Two had a four-wheel drive vehicle with a personalized license plate. Every week she’d have her hair done. She died of a stroke, at the beauty shop, under the dryer.”

“Liberty isn’t distracted easily,” Willie said.

“What would our lives be without our distractions,” Turnupseed said, “that’s the question.”

Liberty excused herself and went inside. She stared at the Gulf, which was always there, every time she looked, filling the windows. Clem was lying on his side, his legs shuddering in a dream. Perhaps he was remembering the mailbox he was stuffed into as a puppy, by unknown persons, before Liberty found him, barely breathing, years ago.

Liberty wandered through the house. Breaking into houses caused Liberty to become pensive. She would get cramps and lose her appetite. Stolen houses made her think of babies all the time. She supposed that was common enough.

The house on Crab Key had chocolate-colored wall-to-wall carpeting covered with Oriental rugs. It had five bedrooms, four baths, two kitchens, a liquor closet that contained eleven half gallons of gin, and one piece of reading material on a polished oak coffee table, a notebook containing Mrs. Maxwell’s philosophic musings. The advantages of a cystostomy are myriad, one of the musings stated. Each new day brings me increased enjoyment. Sunrises are more radiant, sunsets more glowing, flowers more brilliant. And even the grass is greener!

The handwriting was round and firm. It appeared likely that it was not Mrs. Maxwell who was the drinker.

Liberty looked down at Willie conversing with Turnupseed on the beach. From above, Turnupseed’s head looked like a vulnerable nest. Willie was wearing a sweater he had found in the Maxwells’ closet, a green and white sweater covered with daintily proceeding reindeer. Willie loved living in other people’s houses and sleeping in their beds. He wore their clothes and drank their liquor, jumped in their pools and watched himself in their mirrors. Breaking into houses and living the ordered life of someone else appealed to Willie.

In the large walk-in closet off the Maxwells’ bedroom, there were mirrors and cosmetics. There were shoe boxes and garment bags. There were hats and ties and shoes. Everything was neatly categorized. Cruise Wear. Ethnic Shawls and Dresses. Daddy’s WWI Uniforms. As in the other homes that Willie and Liberty tended to occupy, the absent owners were hopeful, acquisitive, and fearful of death.

Liberty selected a white terry-cloth robe from the closet and lay on the blue satin coverlet of the king-size bed. She dreamed of fishing, her feathered hooks catching squirming rabbits. She dreamed of rowing down the streets of a flooded town, rowing into a grocery store where they were selling ten unlabeled cans for a nickel. She woke with a start and took off Mrs. Maxwell’s white terry-cloth robe.

Liberty and Clem took a walk along the beach. They passed women searching for sharks’ teeth. The women had elaborate tooth scoopers made of screening and wood. They had spotting scoops and dip boxes. They were dedicated and purposeful, and hustling in and out of the surf they knew what they were about. Liberty admired them. They knew the difference between a spinner’s tooth and a lemon’s. They were happy women, ruthless in their selections, rigorous in their distinctions. In their bags they had duskys’ and blacktips’ and nurses’ and makos’ teeth. They loved those teeth. In their homes, lamplight glowed from glass bases filled with teeth. On their walls the best teeth were mounted on velvet and framed behind glass. The more common teeth spelled out homilies or were arranged in the shape of hearts.

The women ignored Liberty. And they regarded Clem with downright unease as though fearing he would squat on their fossiliferous wash-ins. Liberty felt that the women were correct in not introducing themselves and being friendly. She, Liberty, was a thief and a depressive. She and Willie had been married by a drunken judge at Monroe Station in the Everglades. The bridal couple had eaten their wedding supper in a restaurant that had antique rifles and dried chicken feet mounted on the wall. Their meal consisted of a gigantic snook, which Willie had miraculously caught on a doughball, and a coconut cake that the cook had whipped up special.

The women on the beach, holding their bags full of teeth, probably saw Liberty’s problems just written all over her.

As for Clem, they avoided him like shoppers swerving from a swollen can of bouillabaisse.

Liberty strolled back to her stolen home. Willie was on the beach, roasting potatoes over a little fire. Turnupseed stood nearby, his hands on his hips, his back toward the water, surveying the row of expensive houses under his protection.

“Them houses are filled with artwork and jewels and all sorts of gadgetry,” Turnupseed said, shaking his head. “It gets to be a burden just responding to it all. I’ve tried to respond to everything that’s been presented to me all my life, and I am just now thinking that I could have saved myself considerable time and effort. Response has been my bane. Number Two and I once went to Niagara Falls. You know we put on them slickers and got wet? Three days, two nights and seven meals. We slept in a heart-shaped bed. You ever try to sleep in a heart-shaped bed? Number Two said I was as exciting as a bag of cement.”

Liberty looked around her, at all that was being guarded by Turnupseed, a man obsessed with woks, dead wives and movie stars, and armed with a floating flashlight and a tire iron. He was obviously not in the best of health. His eyes looked like breakfast buns spread with guava jelly.

Willie said, “All worldly pursuits and acquisitions have but two unavoidable and inevitable ends, which are sorrow and dispersion.” He rearranged the potatoes in the pit.

“Yup, yup, yup,” Turnupseed said, shaking his head. “But each one of us has to find that out for himself.” He turned to Liberty and politely said, “That certainly is the strangest white dog I’ve ever seen. Nothing unfortunate is about to happen to you, not if that dog can help it.”

“I don’t know,” Liberty said.

“Thank God it ain’t a black dog. Black dogs are bad luck.”

“Thank god,” Liberty said. The thought of a black dog! Black as dirt and filled with blood. She would never have a black dog.

Liberty and Turnupseed gazed at one another. It seemed as though they could never build up a dialogue.

“Where’d you get that dog?” Turnupseed asked, cranking up again, his voice hoarse.

“Found him,” Liberty said.

“I’ve never found a thing myself,” Turnupseed said. “I try not to dwell on it.” He gazed at Clem, not knowing how to salute him.

Turnupseed lived on the mainland in a little cement block house on land sucked senseless by the phosphate interests. Every time he tried to plant a tree in the queer, floppy soil, the tree perished.

“I’ve had three wives, and each one of them died,” Turnupseed confided. “Isn’t that a ghastly coincidence?”

“In continuity there is a little of everything in everything else,” Willie said when Liberty just couldn’t seem to pick anything out of the air. Willie and the guard seemed to have a way of conversing that was satisfying to them both. Liberty guessed that Willie enjoyed a simple deceit more than just about anything in the world. The words he exchanged with Turnupseed rocked gently in her head, unwholesome crafts on a becalmed sea.

Liberty and Willie sat in one of the Maxwells’ several tubs. She sat behind him, her legs encircling his waist, writing words upon his back with soap.

“WIZ,” Willie said. “SKY. SEA.” Liberty erased the invisible marks with her hand and splashed water upon Willie’s shoulders. She put her lips to his warm back, then drew away and wrote a U, then an 5. “WITHHELD,” Willie said. “INCARCERATE.”

Purple, monogrammed towels hung from hooks. Liberty got out of the tub and patted herself dry with one of them. She was tanned and high-waisted. Pale hair curled from her armpits. At her throat was a soft scar that looked like a rosebud. She put on a man’s black bathrobe, rolled up the long sleeves, cinched the belt tight. She imagined Mr. Maxwell standing in this robe, breathing heavily, looking around his house at his things in it.

“Poor Chip hasn’t been able to cope very well with Mrs. Maxwell’s maiming,” Turnupseed had told Willie. “For twenty-five years she was his little singing bird, you know what I’m saying, and then she had that operation and she became his cheerful mutilated wife. She doesn’t have a morbid bone in her body, but Chip proved to be more delicate. I found him once on the beach at midnight, the drunkest man I’ve ever seen, crying and trying to stab himself with a spoon.”

“Turnupseed’s heart is going to break when he finds out what we are,” Liberty said.

“Friends are what we are,” Willie said.

Liberty went downstairs and sat alone in the living room, which was arranged for conversation. Clem lay in the kitchen, the same color as the refrigerator, his legs straight up in the air. In the living room was a fireplace containing a screen that, if plugged in, would project a fire burning. Liberty did not want the illusion of a fire burning. Liberty loved Willie. She believed in love and knew that every day was judgment day. It didn’t seem to be enough anymore. If someone loved you, Willie said, you became other than what you knew yourself to be. He did not want to become that other one. Willie was becoming a little occult in his attitudes. His thoughts included Liberty less and less, his coordinates were elsewhere, his possibilities without her becoming more actualized. This was marriage.

“Why don’t you and Willie have a baby?” Liberty’s mother demanded frequently when she phoned them at home. “What are you waiting for! If you had a baby I’d come and take care of it for you. I saw a cute little quilt for its crib the other day in town. I do wish you’d have a baby, Liberty, I’d like to have someone to eat ice cream with. Your father can’t eat ice cream, as you know. He swells up. They have some very exotic flavors these days like Hula Pie. I don’t think it would be wise to start the baby right off on Hula Pie, though. I think something simpler would be in order, like French Vanilla. How soon would it be, do you think, before the baby could have a little cup of French Vanilla ice cream?”

Liberty looked out the windows at the sunset colors rushing, funneling, toward the horizon. It was a good sunset. When it was over, she curled up on the couch and turned on the television. On the screen there was a picture of a plate with a large steak and a plump baked potato on it. The potato got up and a little slit appeared in it, which was apparently its mouth, and it apparently began talking. Liberty turned up the sound. It was a commercial for potatoes, and the potato was complaining that everyone says steak and potatoes instead of the other way around. It nestled down against the steak again after making its point. The piece of meat didn’t say anything.

Willie and Liberty went to a party given by the Edgecups of the Crab Key Association. Turnupseed had reminded them to go. He was surprised that the Maxwells hadn’t told them about it. The house was pink, and shuttered in the Bermuda fashion. Everything was pink. The phones were pink, the statuary and chaise longues. The balloons bobbing in the swimming pool were pink. The punch was pink.

The hostess greeted them with ardor. She was standing beside a gentleman wearing bathing trunks which were imprinted with flying beach umbrellas.

“You two are just cute as buttons,” she said. “Are you related?”

“We’re brother and sister,” Willie said.

“That’s adorable,” she said. “I had a brother once but he was …” she fluttered her fingers “… one of those. Very into the Greek tradition. He stole away all my boyfriends.” She looked down at Clem, who stood beside them chewing on an ice cube. “What,” she asked, “is that supposed to represent?”

“It’s a dog,” the gentleman suggested. “A pet would be my guess.”

“It certainly has peculiar eyes,” the hostess said. “My, I wouldn’t want to look at them every day. They sure remind me of something, though.” A memory knocked, then tramped muddily through her otherwise fastidious memory rooms. “Goodness,” she said excitedly. “I haven’t been this broody in years!.. Have you tried the pears stuffed with Gorgonzola? I want everyone to promise me they’ll try them.” She wandered off.

“What’s your line of work, son?” the gentleman asked Willie. He was drinking a martini from a jar. He would unscrew the cap of the jar, take a sip and screw the lid back on again. After each sip, his jaws would go slack, giving him a meaty look.

Willie shrugged.

The man nodded. “I don’t believe in work either,” he said, and laughed. “It’s my money that believes in it.” His laugh had bubbles and clots in it. He probed delicately at one of the beach umbrellas tipped at the crotch of his bathing trunks.

“I’ve saved a few people recently,” Willie said. “If you call that work. It’s what’s been coming up recently.”

“What are you, one of those Witnesses? Sneak up to a place with those little booklets, trying to make a man change his ways? A stranger comes up to my door, I greet him bare-ass, dick out, pistol ready.” He narrowed his eyes.

“I’m not doing what you think,” Willie said. “This wasn’t your redemption stuff. This was minor. Material stuff. Isolated events. Drowning. Shock.”

It was true. Willie had been saving people, though he knew it didn’t have the feel of a calling.

The first person Willie had saved was a young man struck by lightning on the beach. It was late in the afternoon of a stormy day, and they were watching the surfers enjoy the high, troubled Gulf. The sky was the color of plums and the water pale, and the surfers were dark on their bright boards. The boy had been hurled out of the water and thrown twenty feet through the air onto the beach by the force of the charge. His chest had been badly burned. The burns were delicate and intricate like the web of a spider. Willie had administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The young man’s name was Carl. He was small and blond and looked ferocious even when he was unconscious. A few days later his parents had come over to the house with a box of chocolate-covered cherries. The parents were old and grateful. They had had Carl very late in life. They said he was a wild boy whom they had never understood. They thought he had a death wish. They were old and Carl was young. They couldn’t understand his hurry.

While they were at the house, Carl’s father, Big Carl, who was an automobile mechanic, gave their truck a tune-up. Carl’s mother found a tick the size of an acorn under Clem’s chin and disposed of it without fuss in the toilet. She confided to Liberty that Carl had once called her a bugger and made her cry. She never cried about anything, she said, except her little Carl.

Willie had saved two people next, an elderly couple in a Mercedes who had taken a wrong turn and driven briskly down a boat ramp into eight feet of water. Willie had been there to pull open the door. His hand had first rested on a man’s bearded face, and for an instant, Willie said, he thought he was going to get bitten. The old woman wore a low-cut evening gown which showed off her Pacemaker to good advantage. The three of them stood dripping on the ramp, staring at the fuchsia pom-pom on the Mercedes antenna, all that was visible on the surface of the bay. They had been going to the opera.

“You’ve always been a fool, Herbert,” the old woman said to her husband.

“A wrong turn in a strange city is not impossible, my dear,” Herbert said.

To Willie, he said, “Once I was a young man like you. I was an innocent, a rain-washed star, then I married this bag.”

“Herbert’s lived in this town for years,” the man with the beach umbrellas flying over his bathing trunks said when Willie recounted the incident. “They love accidents, those two. Gets their blood going. Puts the sap in old Herb’s stick.”

The old couple had given Willie a thousand dollars, all in twenties, delivered by messenger.

“It’s good work, but it doesn’t sound steady,” the man said, clapping Willie on the shoulder. “Ruthie!” he hollered, gesturing wildly to a woman on the other side of the pool. “Come over here and meet this grand guy!” Ruthie made her way toward them, plunging her fingers in the soil of each potted plant along her route.

“She never waters anything,” Ruthie complained.

“Meet these two here,” the man said. “Ask them if they’ve got a Mississippi credit card.”

“Oh, I know that one,” Ruthie exclaimed cheerfully. “That’s four feet of garden hose to siphon gas, am I right?” She looked at Willie slyly, then turned to Liberty and showed her teeth.

Ruthie wore a great deal of jewelry. She glittered, resembling a chandelier. Willie declared admiration.

“I always wear my jewelry,” Ruthie said. “All the time, everywhere. Life is short.”

“Do you know why people are interested in jewels?” Willie asked. He touched a large red stone at the woman’s wrist. “It’s the way the visionaries experience things. Their world is a dazzling one of light. Everyone wants to see things that way. Materially, jewels and gems are the closest thing to a preternatural experience.”

“Come over here a sec,” Ruthie said and led him away from the party.

“What kind of drugs you got?” she asked, smiling. “I’m your lady. I’ll buy anything. I want to bong myself to the gills.” She clutched a little purse.

“I don’t have any drugs.”

“What’s all this lapis lazuli stuff?”

“I was just giving you some background.”

“You’re the youngest person here by at least twenty years. You don’t deal?”

“Nothing.”

“No? I can’t believe it. You think I don’t know? That I’m too old or ordinary to know?” She was still smiling. “They gave my husband heroin when he was dying. He kept telling me how profoundly uninteresting life was.”

“Good,” Willie said. “That’s good.”

“You’re a creepy kid,” Ruthie said.

Liberty watched, from a distance, Willie speaking. He looked back at her, scanning the space between them like a machine. How long would it be before they were caught, Liberty wondered. Caught, they would be separated. Separated, the contradictions between them would disappear, would vanish. No one would catch them then.

They had not fallen in love as though it were a trap, not at all. Love was not a thing that merely happened. Love was created, an act of the will, something made strong in the world, surviving the world’s strangeness and unaccountability. But Willie was inching out, his eye on something, the angling of some light coming from beneath some closed door.

All one day at CASA VIRGINIA, Willie took pictures of Liberty. He had found a camera in the house and a few rolls of film. Willie took shots of Liberty eating from a can of peaches. He took shots of her in her mildewy bikini. He took shots of her with a sea oat between her teeth. He took her hip bone, her nipples, her widow’s peak. Liberty saw that her life was being recorded in some way. Nevertheless, she was aware that her moments lacked incident.

Willie put the rolls of film in an antique brass bowl on the floor in the middle of the living room. Liberty took them outside at noon and broke the film from the cartridges. She would give the film to Little Dot, a child she knew. Little Dot found uses for useless things. She might attach the coils to her headband and pretend she was a princess from the planet Utynor. The sheets of film would be her face. Things had purposes for which they were not intended certainly. That’s what enabled a person to keep getting up in the morning.

At last Willie decided to move along. They saw Turnupseed staggering along the beach with an enormous Glad bag filled with empty beer cans.

“There’s enough aluminum on the beaches of Florida to build an airplane,” Turnupseed said.

Turnupseed looked tired. He was tired of the responsibility. “Looking back on it,” he said, “if I had to do it all over again, I just don’t know if I could.”

Willie said, “We can’t disown the light into which we’re born.”

In the uncaring light, Turnupseed gave a smile rather like a baby’s.

“You’ve got a lot of my first wife in you, son. What a sweetie she was. Number One was the one I really boogied with, if you know what I mean. She said that being sad separates a person from God.”

“She said that?” Willie wondered.

“I believe she used those very words,” Turnupseed said.

“We’ve got to be off now,” Willie said. “We’re leaving.”

“Leaving this radiant place?” Turnupseed said. “Well, I don’t blame you. Last night, you know, in town, I just could swear I saw my last wife in the laundromat. She didn’t speak to me.”

“Well, the dead can’t disappear,” Willie said. “After all, where would they go?”

“I like your manner son, I’m going to miss you,” Turnupseed said. “Take care of that wife of yours. She seems to be living in a world where this don’t follow that, if you know what I mean.”

Later, when the Crab Key Association discovered that Turnupseed had been on such excellent terms with the besmirchers, an aneurysm would smack into the old guard’s heart with the grace of a speeding bus touching a toad. Liberty could still see him waving good-bye.

2

Willie and Liberty and a locksmith stood outside the Umbertons’ house on Featherbed Lane. Willie and Liberty were not acquainted with the Umbertons, who had been away now for several weeks. Newspaper delivery had been canceled, the houseplants placed outside in filtered shade, the phone disconnected, and several lamps of low wattage had been lit, burning dimly at night and invisibly by day. The Umbertons were away, in another state, in a more vigorous clime, in a recommended restaurant where they were choosing with considerable excitement items from the dessert cart. They were absorbed and concerned by the choices offered — the napoleons, the lemon tarts, the chocolate-dipped strawberries — much as they would be weeks later, after their return home, in cylinder rim vertical deadbolt locks, hardened shackles and electric eyes.

Willie had noted that the house had no alarm system, so he had called a locksmith from a phone booth.

“Locked yourself out, huh?” the locksmith said.

“You know what happened to us?” Willie said. “Our keys were stolen. Keys to everything, stolen.”

“That’s awful,” the locksmith said. His name was Drawdy. “The stealing these days is just awful. People will steal anything. My sister come home one night and somebody had dug up every dwarf pygmy palm in her yard. She’d just had some landscaping done, and there were these four dwarf pygmy palms, except when she came home that night, there was just four holes there. Those holes were so neat she didn’t notice at first that the palms were gone. Never seen neater holes in my life. It was like little men from outer space came down and just plucked up those dwarf pygmy palms.” He looked at the lock on the front door of the Umbertons’ house. “You know what I’d give you for this,” he said to Willie. “I wouldn’t give you fifteen cents for this.” He went back to his truck and got his tool box. “I’ll tell you,” Drawdy said, returning. “You’ve got to think like a burglar these days to protect yourself. You’ve got to look at everything just like a burglar would.” He set to work on the door. Clem walked around the corner of the house and sniffed the locksmith’s leg. “God in heaven,” Drawdy said. He grew rigid, then slowly smiled. His smile was fixed and gray, lying on his mouth like a cobweb he had stumbled into.

“That’s just Baby Dog,” Willie said. “He’s one of us.”

Drawdy turned his smile on the door’s lock and picked away at it.

“Before I got into locks and such, I sold light bulbs,” Drawdy said. “I worked for a store in Mobile that sold nothing but white light bulbs. Now I bet you think that a white light bulb is nothing but a white light bulb, that white is white, but that is not the case. In Mobile I personally dealt with and sold Soft White, Warm White, Deluxe Warm White, Cool White, Deluxe Cool White, Daylight, Design White, Regal White, Natural White, Chroma White 50, Chroma White 75, Optima White, Vita-Lite, Natur-Escent, Verilux and …” he pushed open the Umbertons’ door with a flourish “… White.”

“Thanks,” Willie said.

“I would say that animal was close to a Chroma White 50,” Drawdy said, staring at Clem.

“How much do we owe you?” asked Willie.

“Twenty-five dollars,” Drawdy said.

“Could you bill us?” Willie asked. “I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure,” Drawdy said, squinting at Clem. The Umbertons’ name was given and their address. Drawdy wrote it down.

“I bet y’all don’t know how light bulbs are made,” Drawdy said.

“We don’t,” Willie agreed.

“Light bulbs are made by feeding glass in a continuous stream to the bulb-making machine,” Drawdy said somberly. “Don’t y’all want some keys made?”

“We’ll be in touch,” Willie said.

“Right,” Drawdy said. He watched Clem. “If I had that animal I’d teach him something maybe.”

“Like what?” Willie asked.

Drawdy looked puzzled. He rubbed his jaw and looked. “Like how to play an instrument,” he said. He picked up his toolbox, walked back to his truck and drove away.

The Umbertons had many possessions. The house was heavily furnished. They had glass torchères, leather couches, massive sideboards, thick carpets. And then the house was cluttered with small objects. The objects were of a different quality, as though the Umbertons had bought them for somebody else and then took them back after a quarrel. The kind of objects intended for a recipient who died before the occasion of giving.

On the leather-topped desk in the living room was a framed photograph of the Umbertons on their wedding day. They were standing on marble steps, he one step above her. He had a crew cut, her dress a long train. Their round faces were set resolutely toward one another. On the desk too was a picture of a large orange cat in front of a Christmas tree. It was obvious that a superior choice had been made that year in the selection of the tree, for in an album photos of many previous Christmas trees were mounted. The kitchen cupboards were filled with an assortment of nourishing and sensible canned goods. Large clothes hung in the closets in predominant colors of blue and beige. There was a cabinet off the bath that was filled with nothing but toilet paper.

“This is how some people prepare for nuclear attack,” Willie said, staring in at the treasury of white two-ply.

The Umbertons could be imagined as tall. The sinks and counters were set several inches higher than usual. Perhaps they had even become giants since their wedding day. The beds were oversized, the coffee mugs. Everything was heavy duty.

The Umbertons could be imagined as loving games. In one of the rooms was a pool table and a pinball machine. On the walls of this room hung a series of coconut shell heads, loonily embellished. An entire community of coconuts, masculine and feminine, mean and happy, hanging on the wall, contemplating the Umbertons’ life of leisure. In the kitchen it was clear that the Umbertons loved their Cuisinart, for which they had many attachments, and their orange cat, who had a box full of toys. Clem looked the box over. He selected a rubber pig, which squealed, and went off with it.

The sofas had pads under the legs to protect the rugs. The toilets had deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls. There was plastic on the lamp shades to protect them from dust and on the mattresses to shield them from nocturnal emissions. The Umbertons were waging a sprightly war against decline. They protected their possessions as though they had given birth to them.

“How about cutting my hair?” Willie asked Liberty. “Just a trim.”

She knew his intention and shook her head. He would gather the hair up and put it in the middle of the rug when they left, or on the table, in the center of something. Nothing would be missing, nothing out of place, but addressing the Umbertons when they returned, would be a mass of hair.

“You can’t read my mind,” Willie said. “I just wanted my hair cut.”

“It doesn’t need it,” Liberty said. “It’s fine the way it is, it looks good, I like it.”

“I could write your diary,” Willie said.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Liberty said. Then she said, “That’s not true.” Finally she said, “I wouldn’t keep a diary.”

Beyond the windows the bay winked greenly. It was sick, filling up with silt. Each day there was less oxygen in the water than the day before. It labored against the cement wall the Umbertons had erected between them and it.

Liberty went into a sewing room off the kitchen. There were patterns and folds of fabric, a sewing machine and a dressmaker’s dummy. The room was snug and painted a placid peach. A calendar on the wall showed tittering bunnies and kittens playing musical chairs in a wholesome meadow. The room was obviously Mrs. Umberton’s tender retreat from the large life she shared with Mr. Umberton. Liberty sat on a hassock covered with a cheerful chintz and felt the top slip slightly. Removing the lid, she found inside a well-thumbed paperback with a torn cover. He plunged his head between her spread thighs, Liberty read. Lunging and licking, he thrust his tongue in her sea-smelling channels and velvet whorls tasting the wine which is fermented by desire. He drew back and she whined in pleasure as she saw his glistening shaft …

Liberty threw the book back into the hassock and went into the living room. Willie was holding his hands above a spray of plastic flowers in a bud vase as though he were warming them there.

“What are we looking for here,” Liberty asked, “just in general?”

“You know, when anesthesia was first invented, many doctors didn’t want to use it,” Willie said. “They felt it would rob God of the earnest cries for help that arose from those in time of trouble.”

“Anesthesia,” Liberty said. “You can’t rob God.”

“I keep having this dream,” Willie said. “It’s a typical prison dream. I’m wandering around, doing what I please, choosing this, ignoring that. And then I realize I’m locked up.”

Liberty looked at Willie, who was turning and folding his hands. Her own hands were trembling, and her mind darted, this way and that. Once, on a sunny day, much like this day, she had been driving down the road in their truck and she had seen a male cardinal that had just been struck by a car. It lay rumpled, on the road’s shoulder, and the female rose and dipped in confusion and fright about it, urging it to continue, to go on with her. Liberty’s mind moved like that, like that wretched, bewildered bird.

During the night, it rained. The rain came down in warm, rattling sheets. It pounded the beach sand smooth, it dimpled the bay, it clattered the brown fronds of palms where rats lived. It entered the lagoons and aquifers and passed through the Umbertons’ screens. Willie was playing pinball. Liberty could hear the flap of the paddles and the merry bells. She lay on her stomach on a rug in another room, glancing through the only other reading material in the house, a newspaper, several weeks old.

The local paper was highly emotional and untrustworthy. Truth was not a guarantee made to the paper’s readers, but certain things could be counted upon. One could expect, on any given day, a picture of a lone, soaring gull, a naked child holding a garden hose, or a recipe for a casserole containing okra. The editors took paragraphs from the wires for international affairs and concentrated on local color and horror — the migrant worker who killed his five children by sprinkling malathion on their grits; the seven-car pile-ups; the starving pet ponies with untrimmed hooves the size of watermelons. In this particular edition, there was one article of considerable interest, Liberty thought. It was an article about babies, babies in some large, northern city.

A nurse had made the first mistake. She had mixed up two newborn babies and given them to the wrong mothers for nursing. A second nurse on a different shift switched them back again. The first nurse, realizing her initial error, switched them a third time, switched the little bracelets on their wrists, switched the coded, scribbled inserts on their rolling baskets. At this point, the situation had become hopelessly scrambled. Three days passed. The mothers went home with the wrong babies. This was not a Prince and Pauper-type story. Both mothers had nice homes and fathers and siblings for the baby. Four months later the hospital called and told the mothers they had the wrong babies. They had proof. Toe prints and blood types. Chemical proof. They had done the things professionals do to prove that a person was the person he was supposed to be. The mothers were hysterical. They had fallen in love with the wrong babies and now they didn’t want to give their wrong babies up. But apparently it had to be done. It seemed to be the law.

Liberty put the paper aside, closed her eyes and listened to the rain. It rang against the glass like voices, like the voices of children screaming in a playground. Children’s voices sounded the same everywhere, a murmurous growth, a sweet hovering, untranslatable, like wind or water, moving.

Liberty and Willie were wanderers, they were young but they had wandered for years, as though through a wilderness, staying for days or weeks or months in towns with names like Coy or Peachburg or Diamondhead or Hurley. Then larger towns, cities, still as though through a wilderness, for there was no path for them or way — West Palm, Jacksonville, Sarasota. There was always a little work, a little place to stay, and then there was this other thing, this thing that was like an enchantment, this energy that kept them somehow going, this adopted, perverse skill of inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything, they were just moving along, and Liberty was aware that this house thing, this breaking and entering thing — time for the thing, they’d say, let’s do the thing — became more frequent, accelerated, just before they left a town.

The rain increased, it fell in shapes, its voice children’s voices.

Liberty and Willie had not been in this town long, six months, she knew two children well, Teddy and Little Dot. In a way they were her children in this town.

Tee, Little Dot called Liberty. There was always a scrape on her cheek or a cut on her arm, for she hurt herself often and was unaware of it. Her eyes were deeply set and dark. “Tee,” Little Dot called, something glittering on her wrist, something shining that she loved, something cheap, bright and useless that Liberty had bought her from a gum machine. Little Dot had been brain-damaged from birth, for her parents had been heavy dopers, now reformed. Her mother, Rosie, had been junking up so long she hardly knew she was pregnant, and when she finally acknowledged that she was, she was twenty-three weeks along. The doctor said they probably had just enough time to slip in the saline, and that it was just as well since Rosie was so toxic that the baby would probably be a very unhealthy one. As Rosie lay on the table and the doctor was preparing to do the abortion, Little Dot slipped out. She just pushed her own way out, bawling, a little bigger than a lady’s hand. “She’s a keeper,” the doctor said. “Can’t do anything about this one now.” And no one could. Little Dot lived in world of her own, in mindscapes no one could know.

It had been Liberty’s first night in town and she had been walking with Clem on the beach when she first met Little Dot. The child was all alone, a broken rope around her waist.

“I like to pee on the sand and look at the stars,” Little Dot said.

“Well, we all like to do that,” Liberty said.

She wore a dog tag with her name and address stamped on it, and Liberty took her home. It was just across the beach in a rundown shopping center where her parents, Roger and Rosie had a pottery shop called Oh! They lived in their shop and in a van that was parked out front. Behind the shop was a kiln and a tepee, where Little Dot slept.

“Oh,” Rosie said, “you must think we’re awful tying a little kid up, but it’s a long rope and you can feel how light it is and if we don’t, at night she just goes over to that beach. My baby’s just mesmerized by that beach, aren’t you baby? You’re my little turtle, aren’t you? Rosie’s little turtle. You just love those bright lights.”

Rosie’s eyes filled with tears but then she drew them back somehow, they didn’t fall.

Liberty sees Little Dot all the time now. She takes her to the supermarket and to water-ski shows and roller-rinks. She buys her crayons and Big Gulps. But Little Dot hurts herself more and more. She goes for days without speaking. Little Dot is her own small keeper, and she is alone with an aloneness so heavy that her self can hardly bear its weight. Liberty is not like a mother to her, Liberty knows that. She may even be adding to the terrible weight. Sometimes Liberty thinks that each moment she spends with Little Dot is like a stone she gives the child, a small stone added to other stones.

It is Teddy to whom Liberty seems like a mother. “You could be my mother,” Teddy often says to Liberty. They both have brown eyes and are allergic to tomatoes. Liberty could easily be his mother, Teddy reasons, because he needs one and they like each other. His own mother is in California where she is in love with another woman, and Teddy lives with his father, Duane, his father’s four restored Mustangs and his father’s latest girlfriend, Janiella. They live in a modest cement-block house with an extensive attached garage on the same street along the same narrow river where Willie and Liberty live. Liberty first saw Teddy high in the banyan tree in their yard the day after they had moved into the house. She had wanted to rent the place because of the banyan tree, a tree of such magnificence that it had extinguished all vegetative life in its vicinity. The banyan was awesome with its many cement gray trunks and its pink pendent aerial roots. It was so beautiful it looked as though it belonged in heaven or hell, but certainly not on this earth in a seedy, failed subdivision in the state of Florida.

Teddy had played in the tree for years.

“There are twenty-eight places to sit or lie on in that tree,” Teddy told Liberty. He was too old now to play in the tree, he said, but he used it as a place to think. He would crawl around and think, or sit and think. Teddy is seven. Liberty sees him mostly at night, almost nightly, for Duane and Janiella like to go out. They like to get drunk, dance, and drive around.

“Put this pony to bed at nine,” Duane would say, instructing Liberty in Teddy’s care, slapping his little boy on the back with such enthusiasm that the child would spin sideways.

“Don’t let Little Dot play with that bowl and spoon too long,” Rosie would say, “it gets her too excited.”

Teddy and Little Dot, they are Liberty’s children in this town, for this moment. But she and Willie will be moving on soon, and there will be another town, although she cannot visualize it. Another place has no shape for her, it is still nothing to her.

The rain fell, swelling the Umbertons’ yard. A tree limb toppled with a crack.

Liberty opened her eyes. A single light glowed dimly in the room that was papered with silver flowers. Clem had become bored with the pink pig. He dropped it back in the box and selected a squeaking carrot. Liberty could hear the jingling and clashing of the pinball machine. She went to the doorway and watched Willie playing. He stood with his arms clasped over his head while the ball, sent forth but undirected, continued to rocket off bumpers, to plunge down channels that would not have it, its ultimate fall checked again and again.

“This thing is rigged for an awful lot of free games,” Willie said.

“I want to get back tomorrow.” She pushed her hip against the machine and it stopped.

“Don’t you like it here?” Willie asked.

“Here? In the home of the tricky, comfy, rank-hearted Umbertons? Of course not.”

“You have no feeling for reality,” Willie said. “I’ve suspected it for some time. You have a real contempt for it.”

“This is someone else’s reality.”

“I’ll find the place,” Willie said. “You’ll see.”

She reached toward him and ran her fingers through his hair. She wanted to kiss his cheekbones, hold him tightly, feel him once more. She feared that they both had a longing for discovery, capture. And the longing to turn oneself in was, she knew, a fascination with the buzz saw, the stove’s red electric coil, the divider strip, the fierce oncoming light.

Willie pulled her hands away and held them in his. He rubbed them as though they were cold. They were not cold. In another room, a bed loomed white and vaporous in the darkness.

“Lie down with me,” Liberty said. “Let’s comfort one another.”

“Comfort takes twenty minutes for old hands like us,” Willie said. “I’m talking averages. Growing excitement, passion, fulfillment, despair. Twenty minutes.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Liberty said.

“Not that? What comfort then?”

“I meant that actually,” Liberty said.

“I’ve always loved you,” Willie said.

Something in the Umbertons’ house ticked, as though expanding.

At daybreak, it was still raining. Rosy-fingered dawn bloomed elsewhere, in higher, purer altitudes perhaps, where the heart beats more slowly. Liberty was dreaming the things she dreamed in stolen houses — churches and flowers and suitcases, bowls and water and caves. She stirred, and felt that Willie was standing over her, staring at her. And that was part of the dream, she thought, for Willie to be studying her so solemnly, as though he were choosing something. She was a woman in a house, sleeping. She looked at Willie, safe in her sleep-looking. She looked at him and saw herself, the form he would have her assume, a woman in a house, sleeping.

Later, she opened her eyes and saw Clem’s muzzle aimed at her, several inches away, his tail wagging slowly. She knew Willie had gone. When he hadn’t returned in an hour, she and Clem left too.

The Florida sky, the color of tin, squeezed out rain. It fell on stone and seed alike. Across the street from the Umbertons, a neighbor’s lawn consisted of large white stones dumped on black vinyl. The rain fell on that. It fell on a sheriff’s car that drove slowly past. The deputy was opening a Twinkie wrapper with his teeth. He grinned at Liberty as though she shared with him the criminal goodness of Twinkies. The car went around a corner and the street was empty. Heat rose like smoke from the damp pavement.

Clem chose a hydrant painted yellow, a garbage can and a clump of ginger lilies and made them his own. Walking out of Featherbed Lane (JUNGLE LOTS YOUR PIECE OF FANTASY WITH CENTRAL SEWER AND WATER) they entered an area bristling with garden apartments. There were gun shops and establishments that dealt exclusively in sandwiches. There were auto body repair shops offering reasonable rates where gypsies who had roamed the streets denting cars with baseball bats the night before hammered out the dents today. There was an open air laundromat where surfers were gloomily drying their blue jeans. They sat in plastic chairs and stared at the heaving washers, all vacationers in this expensive resort that is life.

“Oh-oh,” a surfer said, “I didn’t mean to put that shirt in there.” A screaming red pressed against the soapy glass and was pulled back.

Liberty and Clem continued walking, over to the Trail to hitch a ride home. The Trail had once been a meandering Indian footpath over coral and limestone rock, but it was now a murderous six-lane highway that gobbled up small animals for breakfast, dreamy old geezers in walkers for lunch, and doped-up young honors students in their developer-dads’ Jeeps for dinner.

Liberty stuck out her thumb. Cars poured toward them and past. Then, a pickup truck pulled over sharply. It was Duane, Teddy’s father.

“Hey, Liberty,” he called. “Why you hitching? Old man kick you out?” He grinned. Liberty attempted to match his grin with one of her own. Her jaws began to ache. With a grin like that, Duane must drool some, Liberty thought. He was short and compact, with thick, graceful eyebrows, a ruddy, healthy, milk-and-spoonbread look. He was a genius with engine blocks. Other aspects of life puzzled him and frequently pissed him off.

“Hey!” Liberty chanted back. “Where did you get this truck?”

“It’s my buddy’s truck. I’ve been helping him with some tree work for the telephone company. Let the dog sit up here too. I’ve got my saws in the back.” He pushed open the door on the passenger side. Clem squeezed in front and settled himself. He looked like rising bread there.

A card taped to the windshield said NO ASS NO GRASS NO GAS NO RIDE.

“Don’t pay no attention to that,” Duane said gallantly. He popped the clutch and the truck tore off. “Guess who I saw today?”

“Who did you see today?”

“Everyone I looked at,” Duane said, grinning. Then his face grew somber. “You know that bitch, that wailing thorn-in-my-side bitch, the lezzie bitch I once revered as a wife, well she served papers on me yesterday.”

“I never met your wife, Duane,” Liberty said.

“Yes, she surely did. Seven-odd months to the day she left. She and her bitch girlfriend found a lezzie lawyer and they served me papers. Don’t want nothing, she says, just wants to get away from me. Can you believe that? My Teddy’s momma, my sweet boy’s momma, a lezzie. There was so much deceit in that woman! Like she used to go on about my hair all the time, talking about my hair, how much she loved my hair, how wonderful my hair was. Well what was that all about? My hair for chrissakes. Then she comes up to me one morning seven-odd months to the day and says, ‘I’m leaving, Duane, I want a divorce, Duane. I’m living a lie, honey, and I’m so bored and unhappy, my face is getting bumps.’ It’s true she used to have the nicest skin. Every night she’d put her face in a bowl of ice cubes. But she was getting bumps.”

Duane stopped for a red light. He rubbed his eyes, then looked at Clem. Clem was looking forward with distaste, his ears flattened against his skull. “You know that dog smells like peaches,” Duane said. “When I was a little boy, I just loved peaches. I’d eat peaches till I’d puke.”

“Peaches,” Liberty said. Clem was always reminding people of things, possibilities, better times, imagined pleasures, suppressed woes. Clem stimulated the meridians. The highs, the lows. Peaches.

“I had a dog like that once,” Duane went on. “He hung himself. It’s the truth. I had him tied up inside a shed because he was a rambler, you know. Rambled all around. So I had to tie him up, and I tied him inside a shed because he was a rambler. Rambled all around. A roamer. So I had to tie him up and I tied him inside a shed and he jumped out a window there and the rope wasn’t long enough to reach the ground and the poor guy hung himself. Actually he didn’t resemble your dog at all, but I get reminded, when I see a dog, I see a rope. Now when I see a rope it don’t remind me of a dog. Funny.”

A headache cupped Liberty’s skull. The light still shone red.

“God damn light,” Duane yelled. He gunned the truck and danced it halfway through the intersection. He looked at Liberty and smiled. “Do you know anything about lesbians?” he asked.

“I can get out anywhere along here,” Liberty offered.

“Nah,” Duane said. “I’ll take you right to your door. You’re always doing me favors, right? You watch Teddy real good.”

Liberty felt as though she were on a long hot ride with a lunatic to a honeymoon room in Racine, Wisconsin. Clem turned and pressed his nose against her neck’s artery. Peaches. She was relieved actually that Duane had quit the peaches business.

“I have some suspicions about lesbians,” Duane said. “I mean I have some theories about the way they might be spotted. I would think that might be worth something, don’t you?”

“Why what would that be worth?” Liberty asked.

The light changed and they peeled off. “A checklist,” Duane yelled, “like the seven danger signals of cancer! So a lezzie could see it coming on and do something about it. Number one on my checklist!” Duane shouted. His left arm was dangling out the window and he slapped the car door smartly with his hand. “Dream of black triangles. All the time dreaming of black triangles. Number two on my checklist!” He smacked the door again. “Don’t like their momma, can’t stand their momma. Three on my checklist, forgets to flush the toilet. Number four on my checklist …” Southern civility finally grabbed hold. He blushed. “I can’t go on,” he said. He slowed the car meekly and they drove for a moment in silence. Then he shook his head and began darting smartly in and out of traffic once more, cutting a swath, forcing to the side less-committed individuals.

A BMW with tinted windows abruptly snaked around them. The window rolled down, and a white-shirted masculine arm, its wrist adorned with a large gold ID bracelet, was extended. The hand on the arm gave Duane the finger.

Duane’s mouth flapped open like a lid on some ill-omened box.

“Did he throw me the bird?” he demanded of Liberty. Traffic flowed around them, but Duane had slowed almost to a stop and sat behind the wheel as though in a trance.

“He’s just a jerk,” Liberty said. “Ignore him.” She looked with alarm at Duane’s disordered face.

“Well, this particular jerk’s little glass of happiness is just about to be knocked over,” Duane said.

The truck pitched forward and homed in on the BMW. Duane reared it up to within an inch of the car’s rear bumper. Then he knocked it. The driver of the BMW braked and leapt out, a fit fellow with a blond mustache, well-dressed, with shiny shoes. Duane gazed at him for an instant, smiling faintly, then hurled himself out the door, but to Liberty’s surprise, he did not go forward, but retreated backward, to the bed of the truck. She turned and saw Duane grabbing a chain saw as long as his arm. He set his legs in a crouch, choked the saw, and started yanking on the cord. The man from the BMW stopped, his face turning first red, then white. It was an amazing thing to see. It was as though he were trying to withdraw all his limbs into some secret compartment of his torso. Duane was yanking away at the cord.

“God-damn saw,” he was saying.

The man fled back to his car, stalled it twice, then strained away in second gear.

Duane put the saw down in the truck bed and climbed back into the cab. Traffic was allowing him a large berth.

“Asshole like that makes the highway a dangerous place to be.” Duane composed himself and said cheerfully, “Guy won’t be able to get it up for a week. Now what were we discussing, oh yeah, the fact that Jean-Ann is queer. I feel I can talk to you, you know. I never told no one but Teddy that Jean-Ann was queer. My lady Janiella don’t even know. It’s bad enough she knows the damn woman left me. Janiella’s a woman of culture. She’d probably faint if I told her.”

“We’re almost home, Duane,” Liberty reminded him. “We’ve got to take the next right for Suntan.” Duane was the rugged, forgetful type, Liberty decided. The type who might go into a 7-Eleven for a beer and a bag of fried pork rinds and end up robbing the place instead.

Duane swerved across three lanes of traffic.

“You know, I’ve lived in this town my whole life. Smashed up my first car in this town, had my first drunk, got my first feel of titty, everything. I don’t like it here much anymore, but once you leave a town you can’t have lived there your whole life, know what I mean? Where you going to be from then? Got no place to be from.”

Suntan was a street in an area of town where the other streets were named for fun fruits — Kumquat, Tangerine, Mango, Java Plum — in an unfinished development which had been conceived in the fifties and failed in the fifties. The developer had been so out of step with the times that he hadn’t even bulldozed the trees, pumped out the mangrove lowlands, flattened the hammocks and seawalled the river. There were a few stucco, Spanish-style houses there in faded rose or white, and some frame houses set up on blocks with tin roofs and wraparound porches, but mostly there was shade on Suntan. Immense dappled shifting dark beneath the high crown of palms and oaks.

“You think Teddy resembles Jean-Ann?” Duane mused.

“I was never acquainted with Jean-Ann,” Liberty said.

“He favors her some,” Duane said. “He’s got her dark hair. Ugh. I love that little boy, but sometimes he gives me the creeps.”

The truck cortèged bleakly down Guava, than made a turn on Suntan. One of nature’s most sacrosanct laws is that one can slow time by motion. Liberty felt the truck speeding in place, the street yawning ahead of them like an animal’s short, dark throat.

“It seems like one day Jean-Ann was normal and the next …” Duane sucked in his cheeks, choosing his word carefully. “Abnormal,” he finally said. “Jean-Ann just took our marriage and chucked it out the window.”

Liberty envisioned marriage. A homely paper sack, aloft.

“It’s hard to know what’s normal and what isn’t sometimes,” Liberty said.

Duane looked at her with irritation, as though she were a girl who had burped while he was kissing her.

“Now that it’s all over between Jean-Ann and me, I wish she was dead,” Duane said. “It’s nothing real personal, I just wish she was dead is all.”

“Here we are!” Liberty said.

“That rubber tree you got is some big mother all right,” Duane said.

Liberty agreed that it was.

“I been cutting holes in mothers like that for the last week,” Duane said.

“Why?”

“They been smaller than that,” he admitted. “That’s got to be one of the biggest trees around here.”

“But why have you been cutting into them!”

“Why, well, for the telephone lines to go through,” Duane said. “We make a nice round circle right in the middle of the crown of the tree so the lines can go through. We got to keep them lines of communication open for people.” He chuckled as though making a joke. “But this one won’t get carved. We’re outside the city limits here.”

Liberty and Clem got out.

“I bet you don’t have a single drain that ain’t stopped up in that house,” he said. “Cut that sucker down and you’d have firewood forever.”

“It never really gets cold here, Duane,” Liberty said.

“That’s what I’m saying. Wood enough for five, six years.” Duane winked at Liberty, made two tight noisy circles in the street and sped away.

“Hello the tree,” Liberty called. She would usually say this upon returning to the house. It did no harm to keep in touch with the vegetable world.

“Hello, hello. Where have you been?”

“Teddy?” Liberty said, startled. Deep inside the banyan it still dripped rain. A curtain of rodlike aerial roots parted and Teddy scrambled down the trunk.

“Daddy brought you here,” Teddy said.

“He sure did,” Liberty said. “Why aren’t you in school?”

“Something happened yesterday. I called you and called you, but you weren’t home. Sometimes when I called, this voice would say ‘What number?’ I guess it was the operator.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here, baby, what happened yesterday?” Life must be understood backwards, Liberty thought, or was it—Life can be understood backwards.

“It happened at school,” Teddy said. “They didn’t know what to say to us so they sent us home. We don’t have to go to school all week. Janiella’s really upset that I don’t have to go to school all week. She has all kinds of projects lined up to keep me occupied.”

Teddy tucked her hand in his and they went inside the house.

“Yesterday,” he said, “Mrs. Bates was telling us about protozoa. We have an aquarium in our room and it’s full of pond water and we were going to get to look at little drops of water under a microscope, and I hadn’t gotten my turn yet because I’m a W, so I hardly ever get my turn, but Billy Adams said it was amazing, all that stuff crawling around in a drop of water. So I was waiting for my turn and this man came in and shut the door. Everyone asks me what he looked like because he just stood back there for a minute where I was, but I don’t know what he looked like. He looked like anybody. Then he ran up to the front of the room and he grabbed Mrs. Bates. Nobody outside could see because our room doesn’t have any windows, there’s just our cubbies on the wall where a window could be. Then the man knocked Mrs. Bates down and banged her head on the floor and tore her dress, but when everyone started screaming, he ran away. I took off my jacket and covered her up with it and then I got the principal. I was the only one with a jacket. Janiella always makes me wear one.”

In the silence, Liberty could hear Clem drinking from his water bowl. One has these assumptions, Liberty thought, these foolish assumptions about life. This is the day that the Lord hath made — that sort of thing. It proceeds from sunrise to sunset. Dare, don’t adapt. Rejoice. Be truthful. Get enough rest. Take it easy on the sun and salt. Love. Reflect. Praise. Learn. As a child, Liberty had learned how to write with ascending accuracy between increasingly diminishing lines. That’s a child’s life. A child starts with intense admiration for the world. It’s him and the world. But there are too many messages. Most are worthless, but they still must be received. One must select and clarify. One must dismiss and forget. One is in a lighted room, then it turns dim. Inexplicably. One’s intense attachment turns to fear, then hate, then guilt. Finally, sorrow.

“Oh baby,” Liberty said.

“Do you know what they say? They say that that man used to be Mrs. Bates’ boyfriend. Do you have any paper? I have my colored pens. I want to make her a get-well card.”

Mrs. Bates had no husband, Teddy explained. Her husband was in New Zealand making hang-gliders. Teddy sat on the couch, a telephone book upon his knees, supporting the frail paper upon which he drew. He drew a plane descending upon a beautiful green and purple island in a blue sea. The island wore palm trees and waving, smiling children. Please get well Mrs. Bates, the plane’s wings said. It was a drawing of such earnest innocence and grubby grace that Liberty knew it would pluck Mrs. Bates from the plain of depressing twilight from which she was struggling to arise and shove her right back into the valley of bleakest night.

“Tonight’s Halloween, you haven’t forgotten, have you, Liberty? You said we’d all go out. I’m going to go as a doctor. My daddy and Janiella are going to give a party so I have to be out for a long time.”

“Okay, baby,” Liberty said. “We’ll have fun. I’ll see you tonight. Come over before it gets dark.”

“I love you,” Teddy said. He watches her, he opens his arms.

“I love you too,” Liberty said and hugged him. It’s timing. He always says it first.

The phone was ringing. Someone muttered something.

“What are you saying?” Liberty asked. “Who are you calling?”

“Number seventeen,” a voice said. It was a man’s voice. He sounded old and nervous, even on the verge of tears.

“I believe you have the wrong number,” Liberty said.

There was a strangled cry, then a click. She put the phone down and sat upon the sofa. Fallen between the cushions was a folded piece of mimeographed paper from the school that Teddy had left behind. GENERAL INFORMATION FOR PARENTS the paper said.

Drugs are being sold to schoolchildren in the form of brightly colored paper tabs. They resemble postage stamps in size and have pictures of Superman, Dopey and Mickey Mouse upon them. A young child could have a dangerous reaction to these “uppers” and “downers” by licking these tabs. Absortion can also occur through the skin by simply handling the paper. Alert your children.

The principal had misspelled absorption. The school had faulty wiring, daily tornado drills, and nervous German shepherds with names like Kong and Goforit prowling the corridors seeking illegal substances. They had banned The Little Lame Prince from the library, had a nurse who spanked children in the infirmary, and had turned off the drinking fountains because there was saltwater infusion in the wells. A teacher had just been attacked in a room where children were dutifully growing radishes in egg cartons and making cameras out of Quaker Oats boxes. There wasn’t time for spelling.

Liberty went into the bathroom where she turned the water on in the shower. She undressed and stood in the small stall beneath the spray until the hot water ran out. She turned off the water and stared uneasily at the shower curtain, which portrayed soiled palm trees staggered in rows.

“Hi,” Willie said. He pushed the curtain back. His lean jaws moved tightly, chewing gum. Willie made chewing gum look like one of the great pleasures of being a human being. He was wearing faded blue jeans and a snug, faded polo shirt. His eyes were a faded blue. Liberty felt that they passed over her lightly. Communication had indeed broken down considerably. Signals were intermittent and could easily be misread.

“Why are you standing in there?” he asked.

“I was just getting out.”

“I was in a house,” Willie said, “and in a shower pretty much like this one there was …”

Liberty raised a finger to her lips wanting to hush him. She felt awkward being naked in front of this man. This was her husband. She had known him for long years and was indeed closer to him than to her own self. She shivered.

“Don’t you want to know what was in this shower?”

“I trust you,” Liberty said. “I trust you and want to be with you.” She spoke loudly.

“There was a bitch nursing six puppies. Their eyes were squeezed shut. It was cute.”

Liberty looked at him and stepped out of the shower. She wrapped a towel around herself, went to the sink and brushed her teeth.

“I was in a house,” Willie said, “where there were huge paintings on the walls of greatly enlarged amoebae, jellyfish and polyps.”

“The things people do for protection,” Liberty said, rinsing.

“People are so deceitful these days. You wouldn’t believe the number of houses that merely give the appearance of being secured. Fake tubular locks. Alarm system decals that look as though they came out of cereal boxes. It’s all an illusion, produced for the stranger.”

“And you’re the stranger,” Liberty said. She looked into the mirror. There were her lips, her teeth.

“We’re all the stranger,” Willie said.

“We should lighten up this hobby of yours,” Liberty said. “Why don’t you hot-wire a nice car and we’ll drive to New Orleans, the City that Care Forgot.”

“That’s not the plan. Do you think I’m a thug?”

“What is the plan?”

“Liberty prefers not to read between the lines,” Willie said. “The clearly visible is exhausting enough, Liberty feels.”

She could no longer see herself in the mirror which had steamed up. She drew a line down the center of the glass with her finger. At the top on the right she wrote yes and on the left no. She regarded her list. It certainly lacked qualification.

Willie took a soft mask from his jeans pocket and pulled it on. It was a duck mask, the duck’s expression registering surprise and concern. It was not Donald Duck. It was a duck personality entirely different from Donald’s.

Turning, Liberty said, “Oh, that’s good!”

“I’m set,” the duck said. “What are you going as?”

“Nothing. But I’m going.”

“Nothing is usually indicated by a dark forest, a wasteland tract, a desert, et cetera,” the duck said.

“Don’t,” Liberty said.

“But instead you’re going as the path you could take. You feel the path you could take, the path you could have taken inside you. You feel it as an unhappiness, an incompleteness.”

“Don’t, Willie,” Liberty said.

3

Liberty had never cared for Halloween. The night gave the false hope that when one was summoned to the door by an unfamiliar knock, one’s most horrible fears could be objectively realized by the appearance of ghosts, witches, ambulatory corpses and the headless hounds of hell.

Liberty and Clem were not in costume. Willie wore his duck mask. Teddy came to the house in a white gown carrying a stethoscope and a saw. They walked through the streets to the small shopping center where Little Dot lived. They passed a shop that sold sportswear. A sign in the shop window said YES! WE HAVE MASTECTOMY BATHING SUITS!

The kiln behind the pottery shop was dark. Roger and Rosie hadn’t been able to fire anything in the kiln for a month, ever since a pair of feral cockatoos had chosen to nest there.

Liberty knocked on the door. Through the window she could see Rosie bounding through a clutter of pots and bowls and cups and vases, toward them.

“Hi,” she said. “Little Dot’s all set. She has the greatest costume but she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t want to come out of her tepee.”

“What’s that?” Teddy asked, pointing at a pin on Rosie’s blouse. There was a man’s picture on the pin.

“Oh!” Rosie said, “that’s the Dalai Lama. A friend of mine met the Dalai Lama. He said he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a little button on his suit just like this one that shows the Dalai Lama wearing horn-rimmed glasses. They sell these little pins all over the place in Tibet, and my friend bought one and gave it to me. At first I thought it was really stupid but then I felt the Dalai Lama’s spirit piercing me like little arrows. It felt just like that, like being pierced by little arrows. Now I love this pin, I don’t think it’s stupid at all! But I can’t wear it very much because it gives me a great yearning for nonexistence. That’s a great feeling, very relaxing, but it’s not the kind of feeling you should have all the time. That’s why little kids shouldn’t wear this pin. It’s like they shouldn’t sit in hot tubs either.” Rosie ran her fingers through her rusty red hair and beamed at Teddy. “I used to take drugs but the Dalai Lama made me clean. It’s great to be clean, let me tell you. Then I met Roger-Dad and that was great too. I mean, I’m very accepting now.”

Roger came into the shop. He kissed Liberty on the forehead. His pigtail harbored string and dust, part of a potato chip. “Liberty,” he said mournfully. “Willie.”

“Thanks for taking Little Dot,” Rosie said. “Roger-Dad and I are just so busy tonight. You’re Christians, right? I bet you are!” Rosie had made this inference many times.

“We believe in guilt and longing,” Willie admitted. “Confession and continual defeat. The circle and the spiral.” The words filled up the room pleasantly, like boulders.

“Jesus could never have saved me from drugs. Jesus is dead.” Rosie reflected sadly upon this for a moment.

Willie walked to the back of the store and called out into the yard where the tepee stood. The tepee looked serene. Little Dot had a sleeping bag inside and a collection of soothing photographs. Rosie subscribed to a club that sent a soothing photograph each month. The subjects offered were supposed to be especially mysterious, evocative and comforting. They were black-and-white photographs of columns and foggy roads, of ladders and lambs. Within each photograph was a place where Little Dot was free to come and go.

Little Dot pushed back the flap door of the tepee and walked stolidly past Willie and into the shop. The little girl was dressed half as a man and half as a woman. Half a tie was sewn to half a frilly blouse, half a skirt to a single trouser leg. On one side of her face was glued a beard and a thick eyebrow. There was lipstick on one side of her mouth and a rhinestone earring dangling from her ear.

“Oh, Rosie,” Liberty said.

“A representation in human form of the principle of wholeness,” Rosie said with pride.

Rosie gave Teddy and Little Dot large shopping bags, then put a highly speckled banana in the bottom of each one. “Have a ball now!” she said. The children looked at the first thing in the bottom of their bags. Before, their bags had been perfect. Now each bag had a redolent banana in it.

They left the shopping center and entered a neighborhood Willie and Liberty knew well, for they had, in the past, entered many of the homes uninvited and entertained themselves there. There was the home of the retired Colonel, for example. The retired Colonel had a bazooka and a collection of thunder jugs. He had made a coffee table out of an old gravemarker. The marker was slim and weather-pocked with an angel etched upon it and the dates 1797–1798. The retired Colonel, in whose home the marker lies, covered with magazines and overflowing ashtrays, is a heavy, sallow man, a widower with blackheads around his eyes. This night, the house is dark, the shades drawn, and the children do not approach the door. Instead, they run between the ant mounds on the lawn to the house beside it, a house from which came the voice of Elvis Presley singing “Heartbreak Hotel.” Liberty and Willie were familiar with the house from which the voice of The King rolled. An enormous Oriental carpet filled the floor of the living room and climbed one wall. Pinned to the center of it was a photograph of Elvis with his curled lip, his thickly lashed eyes, his look of humorous sadism, Elvis in his prime, signing the hand of a dazed-looking girl in an angora sweater and poodle skirt. In the bedroom were two large teddy bears, both blue and eyeless with pieces of red felt for tongues. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet was filled with diet pills and expensive bubble bath.

The children ran across the grass.

“That woman made us each say ‘He was taken too soon,’ ” Teddy said. “Then she gave us both a little box of chocolate-covered cherries.”

Willie held Little Dot’s hand, Liberty held Teddy’s. Clem followed behind them. They were like any couple out with their children and dog on Halloween.

“How did you hurt your arm?” Willie asked Little Dot. From elbow to wrist, her arm was bruised. Little Dot stopped and set down her bag. With the index and middle fingers of her right hand she squeezed her arm, twisting it like a key.

“No,” Willie said. He pushed the duck mask off his face, kissed her fingers, then spread them flat and patted them.

“Do you know what a bruise is?” Teddy said excitedly. “It’s blood that’s leaked out of a blood vessel under your skin. It’s in a strange place and whenever blood is in a strange place, it begins to change. The spilled blood has to be cleaned up and you know what’s happening right now?”

Little Dot looked at him.

“White blood cells are cleaning up that blood right now. They’re like little garbage men who wander around your body looking for garbage. When they find it, they swallow it up. The spilled blood is like garbage and the white blood cells are gobbling it up and when all the blood’s been eaten, the black and blue marks will be gone!”

Little Dot hid her arm behind her back.

Cars crept along the streets, transporting small, ghastly beings. The children moved forward, grazing the landscape as thoroughly as Mexican goats. Six dwellings. Nine. The swimming pools were lit. The sprinklers cast their slow, soft arcs. Thousands of dollars of lighting and millions of kilowatts of electricity were used to make green plants red and blue. Thousands of gallons of water from the sulfurous, shrinking aquifer were pumped up to make thousands of bags of cypress shreddings dark against the pale trunks of palms.

A man wearing red trousers and no shirt opened the door of a small house. Cold air fled out into the muggy night. He feigned great horror at the sight of Teddy and Little Dot and, most particularly, the duck, and extended a bowl of candy bars.

“Can I use your toilet?” Little Dot asked.

“Sure,” the man said.

Little Dot squeezed past him and disappeared down a corridor to the right. Little Dot loved utilizing people’s bathrooms and had an unerring sense of where they were.

“Can that dog do tricks?” the man asked Liberty. “I had a dog once that was so well trained, you give him a cookie, he’d get halfway through it, you’d tell him to spit it out, he would.”

“He can’t do that,” Liberty said, looking at Clem.

“Not inclined that way, huh,” the man said.

They waited for what seemed a long time for Little Dot to reappear. “Why don’t you come in,” the man finally said, “and collect your kid.” He didn’t seem annoyed.

Inside, on a white bamboo table, were a dish of peanuts, two empty martini glasses and a ceramic dildo.

“That’s an old one,” Willie said.

“Why, yes, it is,” the man said, looking at the dildo with pride. “It’s from Martha’s Vineyard. It belonged to one of those poor whaling wives.”

“Little Dot!” Liberty called.

“The bathroom’s this way,” the man said. Liberty followed him down the corridor. The door was partially open and she saw a white towel in a ring, a mirror picturing the tiled wall of a shower, a urinal. The man she was following had a thin, young neck from behind. Liberty’s hands dangled at her sides. She felt as though she, somehow, were the threatening party. The sound of a television came from another room.

“Little Dot!” Liberty called.

“Here she is,” the man said.

Little Dot was sitting on a bed with a man in a linen suit. They were watching a documentary on the Renaissance. The large screen on the wall showed Ghiberti’s bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence.

Little Dot bounced on the bed which was covered by a dark, synthetic fur. “Eden,” she said. “The sacrifice of Isaac.”

Little Dot went to Sunday School. She knew these people. She made them out of modeling clay. She drew them with her crayons.

“You’d be disappointed in Florence, kid,” the man in the suit said. He was smoking a cigarette. “Too many cars. It’s a filthy place.”

“C’mon, honey,” Liberty said, bending to touch Little Dot’s knees to keep her from bouncing. Thank you for not hurting her, she wanted to say. She knew it was an inappropriate thing to say.

“I flushed,” Little Dot said. She patted the man’s arm. “This is Gordon.”

“They’re going to show Michelangelo’s Four Captives in a moment,” Gordon said. “I’ve seen this program many, many times.” He looked at Little Dot as though he realized she was a captive too, a part of her imprisoned in a stony, unworked region of her mind.

Little Dot looked at the screen. “A doll,” she said.

“Nah, not a doll,” Gordon said. “You like dolls?”

Smoke lay in levels in the room. “You know what I can do?” Little Dot said. “I can fix zippers. I can get them back on track like nobody.”

Gordon stubbed out his cigarette and opened the drawer of a bedside table. Blunt, blurred features in stone filled the television screen. He put something in an envelope and handed it to Little Dot. She dropped it in her bag.

At the door, the other man murmured, “That is the most generous, the most genuine human being you will ever meet.”

Outside, the street looked peculiar to Liberty, as though dipped in milk.

“One more house,” the children begged. “One more!”

A truck drove toward them, a light on in the cab. A man was driving, and there was a dog on the seat beside him. The driver noticed Clem and put one hand over his dog’s eyes as they passed by.

“All I have left is gum,” the woman said. “You shoulda come earlier.” She appeared somewhat loaded. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit and drinking a beer. The top of the suit did not resemble the bottom in its pattern. “Just gum, but even so, you got to do a trick before you get the treat.”

“I could tell your fortune if you give me your hand,” Teddy said.

“No thanks and I’ll tell you why,” the woman said, tapping Teddy’s chest with a long, painted nail. “You’re a little doctor, right? Doctors give me the shivers. They give me the heebie-jeebies. My first husband was a doctor. You know what he knew about? Livers. His whole world was livers. He was a little dark Iranian, always smiling. He was creepy beyond belief.” She looked at Willie. “What are you going to do for me, duckie?” she asked coyly.

The duck spoke without moving its beak.

All would be well

Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,

And get into their world that to the sense

Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly

Among substantial things; for it is dreams

That lift us to the flowing, changing world

That the heart longs for.

“My god,” the woman said. “That’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever heard. You wait right here.” She went into another room and came back with a bottle of Cuervo Gold. “That was truly lovely, duckie,” she said, handing the bottle to Willie. “Now I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we tell the very worst thing that ever happened to us. How about you?” she said to Little Dot. “You look as though you’ve got a tale to tell.”

Little Dot sat down beside Clem and put her thumb in her mouth.

“Okay,” the woman said, rolling the beer can across her midriff, “I will tell you the worst thing that happened to me. I was just a little kid like you and I was at the circus. I was having such a wonderful time at the circus. The thing I liked best were the aerialists. I didn’t like the clowns and I didn’t like the man who caught the lead balls on the back of his neck and I didn’t like the tigers, I liked the aerialists. I loved seeing them up so high, flying through the air, the sequins on their costumes flashing. I wanted to be an aerialist. Well I was at the circus and a man on a trapeze missed the net and fell into the audience. He fell on me and broke my collarbone. He smelled terrible. I mean, really terrible, like a big mouse or something.”

The woman chuckled. This little group depressed her. She wanted to tell them everything. The truth was, she was worried. She could still bleach her hair and meet a man in a bar, maybe even manage a little water-skiing, but before her lay increasingly untrustworthy memories, hangovers, and pain during intercourse. A tooth had cracked the last time she ate barbecue. Innuendoes were being made. Diagnoses were being written.

“That actually wasn’t the worst thing,” she said. She really was high as a kite. “That happened to a little kid. The worst thing that happened to the lady you see before you was that she was robbed. She was robbed, but they didn’t take anything. Broke into her house and didn’t take a goddamn thing.” She folded her beer can in half with a pop. “I’m going to turn the light off on you now,” she said. Turning out the light on them, standing there, shutting the door on them, their worst things unsaid, unknown, unaccounted for, made her feel a little better.

The night was still young. They returned to Willie and Liberty’s house and got into the truck. Willie drove to the newest and most elaborate hotel in town, an establishment that had six bars and a waterfall that fell three stories. On one of the patio bars, a party was taking place around an open coffin, surrounded by calla lilies. In the coffin were tiny hamburgers, barbequed shrimp on sticks, all kinds of food. Liberty and Clem and the two children sat in a corner of the lobby on the edge of the patio. Little Dot held Clem’s head in her hand, moving her mouth at him without making any sounds. She had once told Liberty that Clem was a dog because he was not good enough yet to be a child. Chains and boots and feathers seemed popular among the adult revelers this year. They were throwing small sacks of talcum powder at one another. Willie had taken the duck mask off and was standing by the reception desk. A pear-shaped man in a brown business suit approached the desk and stood next to Willie.

“Where are the cookies in this town, pal?” the man asked. “This place sucks.” He threw his room key down on the shelf behind the counter. “I’ve got to get home tomorrow. I want to be sitting on the plane in the morning, sniffing my fingers, knowing I had a good time.”

“No cookies here,” Willie said. “Give me a piece of paper, I’ll give you some addresses.” He wrote some names and numbers down. “Thanks, pal,” the man said. As he turned, Willie scooped up the room key an instant before the desk clerk appeared.

“Who can I help here?” the clerk said.

It was a suite, high up, overlooking the bay. There was little sign of the pear-shaped man’s occupancy. His bag had not been unpacked and was still locked.

“I like hotels,” Teddy said.

“They belong to everybody,” Willie said.

“This is nice, I like it,” Teddy said, hugging Liberty. “How did you know that we could come here?”

“Now has the feeling of certainty about it,” Willie said. “Yet now is not the present moment. Now is incommensurable with the present moment.”

“Incommensurable,” Teddy said. “Is that a word? I learned ‘perspiration’ yesterday. I always used to say ‘sweat.’ ”

“The deal is,” Willie said, “that things change every moment, making everything happen either later or sooner. Let’s order food over the phone.”

“I’ve never ordered food over the phone!” Teddy said.

They ordered raspberries, burritos, black-and-white sodas. On television, everything concerned mayhem or thwarted love. Liberty checked the children’s Halloween bags to make sure there were no razor blades, tacks, pills, or hallucinogenic tattoos.

“Gorden gave me an envelope,” Little Dot said. “I’m the only who got an envelope.”

Inside the envelope was a fifty-dollar bill. The bill was crisp and thin without a bit of history to it.

“You can buy something you’d like with this,” Liberty said. “Lots of things.”

Little Dot didn’t see the connection. She held the bill in her fingers, then folded it into a square. She dropped it on the carpet, hid it with her foot, disclosed it again. She kissed it. She kissed Teddy, then Willie, then Clem, all gravely.

Liberty put the bill back into the envelope. “Don’t lose this,” she said. “This is yours, you hold onto it.”

“This is very relaxing here,” Teddy said. “When I think of all the things I have to do tomorrow!” He slapped his forehead dramatically with his hand. “But I’m not going to think.”

Little Dot took hotel stationery from a drawer and drew their picture. Each picture was a line as straight as she could make it. Liberty thought of circles, degrees, levels, dimensions, perspectives, all harassing things. The line soothed her, though she was quite aware that life was not a line.

“We should leave in about an hour,” Willie said. He doodled on another piece of paper. He made the doodle of the butterfly jumping rope and the doodle of the ship arriving too late to save the drowning witch. He drew the doodle of four elephants inspecting a grapefruit.

Little Dot told them her dream. It was always the same dream she told. She had a favorite bowl, no bowl that her parents had made but a little chipped china bowl, at the bottom of which was a rabbit in a garden. The rabbit wore a little dress. When Little Dot finished the soup or cereal in the bowl, she would find the little rabbit with its little dress and shoes. Little Dot loved the bowl. She thought it beautiful, its cracks and lines, the rabbit’s musing face worn pale by the scraping spoon. Each night she dreams she breaks it, it mends itself and becomes more beautiful still …

“Sometimes I don’t think I can find my way back from these places,” Liberty said to Willie.

“Isn’t that the point?” he said.

They were just a family traveling, on their way somewhere, but for the moment, at rest. It was just a moment without the future or the past. It was the moments that took practice.

“We lie too much,” Liberty said.

They were standing by the window, eleven stories up.

“Someone’s having a little trouble out there in the bay,” Willie said. There were two helicopters. Floodlights on a slight chop.

“Well, you’re too far away to do anything about it,” Liberty said.

“That’s got the real look of yesterday to it for somebody,” he said.

When they returned to the pottery shop, Rosie was standing in the doorway watching Roger sweep the floor. Roger’s shadow drifted thinly across the rear wall of the shop, past all the shelves that held the obscure work of their hands.

“I just love watching Roger sweep,” Rosie said. “Because you know when he sweeps he’s the sweeper and the sweeping and the broom and what the broom gathers up. All at the same time!”

Ribbons of dust unfurled in the air.

“Gee, I’m really grateful to you for taking Little Dot trick or treating,” Rosie said to Liberty. “How many hours have you watched Little Dot? Why, I bet you’ve watched Little Dot hundreds of hours!” She lowered her voice in dismay. “How much do we owe you?”

“Nothing,” Liberty said. “It’s …”

“Oh that’s great,” Rosie exclaimed. “I’m really grateful to you. Little Dot gets wary around me, you know. Just a little kid and so wary …”

Roger had been advancing toward them, steadily sweeping. Now he stopped. His broom nature receded.

“See those little boxes on that shelf?” Roger asked. “They’re modeled after the boxes the Peruvian Indians use to save their teeth and hair and nail clippings in. They put them all in one place so everything can be brought together conveniently later, after they die, so they can begin their new life.”

“Can you imagine if you came across one of those little boxes by accident,” Rosie said. “Yechhh.”

“Peru!” Teddy said. “Did you go to Peru? Did you see the ground markings of Nazca?”

“Yeah,” Roger said, startled.

“They’re lines on the desert,” Teddy said, thrilled with explanation. “When you see them up close, they don’t look like anything, just a lot of white furrows in the brown ground, but when you get up real high you see that they’re big figures, mostly birds. The Indians made them. Archaeologists think that the Indians were trying to signal to something up in the sky.”

“Nazca makes me sad,” Rosie said sadly. “Those poor people waiting for someone to come to them for all those years and nothing ever came.”

“We’re all waiting for something,” Willie said.

“Yeah, isn’t that strange,” Rosie said.

“I know a lot about Nazca,” Teddy said. “I took a course last month in gods.”

“Gee,” Rosie said. “A course in gods. I’d love to take that course.”

“The woman who gave it left town,” Teddy said.

“We’re going to leave town for a few days too,” Roger said. “The cockatoos in the kiln haven’t laid yet. Rosie thinks we’re making them nervous.”

“A few days?” Liberty stroked Little Dot’s hair which was sticky and fine. She should have brushed it out in the hotel. The pink barrette she had bought looked forlorn clamped above the child’s ear. She should have done something. What should she have done?

“Maybe a few weeks,” Roger was saying softly. “Maybe even longer.”

“We’re going to look for a place for Little Dot,” Rosie whispered. “We’ve heard there are these places. They know what they’re doing there. They can handle it.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Willie asked.

“We’re not ‘they,’ ” Rosie said.

“I can handle it,” Liberty said. “I’ll watch her.”

“You’re not ‘they,’ Liberty. None of us are ‘they.’ ”

Liberty knelt down quickly and embraced Little Dot. “Goodbye, honey,” she said. Little Dot opened her mouth, which smelled of chocolate. Her thumb moved about blindly, then found her mouth. She was the thumb and the little girl sucking the thumb too.

“Don’t do that, baby,” Rosie said.

Good-bye, good-bye, everyone said.

Little Dot did not hold onto the fifty-dollar bill. She gave it to Rosie who donated it to a large charitable organization. The large charitable organization funneled it into a drug rehabilitation clinic. It was taken from the clinic’s account to purchase a toaster oven for the office staff. The owner of the appliance store where the toaster oven was purchased blew it at the track one muggy matinee on a dog named Bat Mister. The bill then commenced a round of payment for lingerie, biopsy results and brake linings. It suffered a life that the most lurid of imaginations could not conjure. It penetrated deep into the repulsive nature of banality. It traveled and was suckered more than once. It knew bright lights and dark pockets. It knew admissions to pornographic films. It bought ten pairs of Mexican boxing shoes, a cheap cashmere sweater and a down payment for a trip never realized. It went off like an orphan, wailing. The flashly coincidences it disclosed were made routine by repetition. It never looked life straight in the eye. Not once. And it never returned.

4

The next morning, the phone rang before daybreak. Clem woke with a grunt. Liberty stumbled naked into the kitchen.

“Hello, Mother,” she said.

“I have been trying to reach you for a week, Liberty. Where on earth have you been? I want to explain some of the incidents in my life to you, dear.”

Her mother’s voice was clear and determined.

“Everything is all right, Mother. I love you. Daddy loves you.”

“I had a terrible dream about penguins just a few moments ago, Liberty.”

“Penguins are nice, Mother. They don’t do anyone any harm.”

“There were hundreds of penguins on this beautiful beach and they were all standing so straight, like they do, like children wearing little costumes.”

“That sounds nice, Mother. It sounds sort of cheerful.”

“They were being clubbed to death, Liberty. They were all being murdered by an unseen hand.”

“You’re all right, Mother. It was just a dream and it’s gone now. It’s left you and I think I’ve got it.” Liberty scratched Clem’s hard skull.

“I have to tell you something. I had another child, a child before you, a child before Daddy. She was two years old. I lost her, Liberty. I lost her on purpose.”

“What?” Liberty said.

“Yes.”

“Oh Mother, I don’t want to know this.”

“Can you remember yourself as a child, Liberty? You used to limp for no reason and sprinkle water on your forehead to give the appearance of fevers. You used to squeeze the skin beneath your eyes to make bruises.”

“Mother, I didn’t.”

“You were a gloomy child, sweetie. You were always asking me gloomy riddles like, What would happen if a girl was tied up in a rug and thrown off the roof? What would happen if you put a girl in the refrigerator alongside the milk and the cheese?”

“None of this is true,” Liberty said uncertainly. She opened the freezer and took out an ice cream bar. She unwrapped it, rinsed the paper and set it aside, put the ice cream in Clem’s bowl to soften.

“It’s almost Thanksgiving, Liberty. What are you and Willie going to do for Thanksgiving? I think it would be nice if you had turkey and made oyster stuffing and cranberry sauce. It broke my heart when you said you ate yellowtail last year. I don’t think you can do things like that. Life doesn’t go on forever, you know. Your sister was born on Thanksgiving Day. She weighed almost nine pounds.”

Liberty was getting confused. The fluorescent light in the kitchen dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened. She turned it off.

“I fell so in love with Daddy, I just couldn’t think,” Liberty’s mother said. “He was so free and handsome and I just wanted to be with him and have a love that would defy the humdrum. He didn’t know anything about Brouilly. I had kept Brouilly a secret from him.”

“Brouilly?” Liberty asked, not without interest. “That was my sister’s name?”

“It’s a wine. A very nice wine. She was cute as the dickens. I was living in New York, and when I fell in love with Daddy I drove Brouilly eighty-seven miles into the state of Connecticut, enrolled her in an Episcopalian day-care center under an assumed name, and left her forever. Daddy and I sailed for Europe the next day. Love, I thought it was. For the love of your father, I abandoned my firstborn. Time has a way, Liberty, of thumping a person right back into the basement.”

“You’ve never mentioned this before, Mother.”

“Do you know what I miss a lot,” her mother went on. “Playing Ping-Pong in the cellar. I haven’t always lived in this cellarless state, you know … Your father is saying ‘don’t start trouble, don’t start trouble …’ I chose the Episcopalians because they are aristocrats. Do you know, for instance, that they are thinner than any other religious group?”

“I don’t know what to say, Mother. Do you want to try and find her?”

“What could I possibly do for her now, Liberty? She probably races Lasers and has dinner parties for twenty-five or something. Her husband probably has tax havens all over the place.”

“Who was her father?” Liberty asked.

“He made crêpes,” her mother said vaguely. “I’ve got to go now. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

Liberty hung up. The room’s light was now gray and Clem glowed whitely in it. A particularly inappropriate image crept open in her mind like a waxy cereus bloom. Little groups of Hindus sitting around a dying man or woman or child on the riverbank, waiting for death to come, chatting, eating, behaving in fact as though life were a picnic.

She poured dog food from a sack onto the ice cream and set it out for Clem. The phone rang. “I just want you to know,” her mother said, “that I’m leaving your father.”

“Don’t pay any attention to this, Liberty,” her father said on an extension. “As you must know by now, she says once a month that she’s going to leave me. Once a month for twenty-nine years. Even in the good years when we had friends and ate well and laughed, she’d still say it.”

Liberty’s mother and father were both over five hundred miles away. The miracle of modern communication made them seem as close to Liberty as the kitchen sink.

“Once,” her father said, “why it couldn’t have been more than a month ago, she threw her wedding ring out into the pecan grove and it took a week and a half to find it. Once she tore up every single photograph in which we appeared together. Often, she gathers up all her clothes, goes down to the Winn-Dixie for cartons, or worse, goes into Savannah and buys costly luggage, boxes the books and the French copper, makes a big bitch of a stew which is supposed to last me the rest of my days and cleans the whole damn place with ammonia.”

“It’s obviously a cry for help, wouldn’t you say, Liberty?” her mother said.

“I don’t know why you’d want to call Liberty up and pester her. She has her own life.”

“I am a victim of neglect,” her mother said. “Excuse me, everything’s just dandy here. I made pork chops last night for dinner.”

“Damn good pork chops too,” her father said. “So, Liberty, how’s your own life. How’s that Willie treating you?”

“Fine,” Liberty said.

“Never could get anything out of Liberty,” her mother said.

“You’re getting to be old married folks yourselves,” her father said. “What is it now, going on almost seven years?”

“That’s right,” Liberty said.

“She’s a girl who keeps her own witness, that’s a fact,” her mother said.

“I want you to be happy, dear,” her father said.

“Thank you,” Liberty said.

“But what is it you two do exactly all the time with no babies or jobs or whatever? I’m just curious, understand.”

“They adore one another,” Liberty’s mother said. “ ‘Adore’ is not in Daddy’s vocabulary but what Daddy is trying to say is that a grandson might give meaning and significance to the fact that Daddy ever drew breath.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to say at all,” her father said.

“They’re keeping their options open,” Liberty’s mother said to her father. “They live in a more complex time.” Her mother began to sob. “Keep your options open, Liberty! Never give anything up!”

“We’d better be signing off now,” her father said.

Liberty replaced the phone in its cradle and it instantly rang.

“Is that tree still outside your house?” Teddy asked. “Because I’m sure it was here last night. It was waving its arms outside my window, then it plodded away on its white roots. It goes anywhere it feels like going, I think, that tree.”

“Trees aren’t like people,” Liberty said. “They can’t move around.” Her reasonableness, she felt, bordered on the insincere.

“I forgot to tell you. I’m taking a human sexuality course, and you know what I have to do all this week?”

“Oh, honey, why are you taking a human sexuality course? Don’t do anything.”

“I have to carry an egg around all week.”

“An egg?”

“I have to pretend it’s a baby and take care of it.”

“Honey,” Liberty said, “what time is it?”

“Nineteen minutes of six. My clock woke me up.”

Janiella had bought Teddy a clock. It was wired to his bed sheets. When Teddy first began to wet his bed, shortly after her arrival months before, Janiella had long discussions with him about the need to accept responsibility for his own bladder. When Teddy continued to refuse responsibility, Janiella began smacking him with a Wiffle bat every time she had to change the sheets. Then she decided on an alarm that would awaken him every three hours throughout the night, as well as every time the bed pad grew damp.

Janiella had standards. She was not without physical imperfection herself, her personal flaw being diabetes, but she did not allow her disability to get her down. She liked to party. Her preference was for a good time. Her preference was also that Teddy spend as much time as possible away from the house. When Teddy was not wired up in the darkness, he was out somewhere, taking instruction in something. Home at night, he wets the bed. All the alarm has managed to do so far is to increase the number of Teddy’s dreams. He is always dreaming when he wakes. Most recently, he dreams that he steals the single candy bar Janiella keeps in the house in the event she has an attack and has to have sugar. He dreams of Janiella crawling through the house, not being able to find her Payday.

“Janiella and Daddy are still asleep, but Janiella left the list for the day on my desk. I have woodworking, then I have a karate lesson, then I have a flute lesson. That’s at the other end of town. In the afternoon, I have sea scouts.”

Teddy traveled many many miles when he was not in school, practically from one end of the county to the other, in an increasingly extended maze of renaissance pursuits of Janiella’s devising.

“I have to change the sheets now, Liberty. I have to wash them and dry them and put them on the bed again. Bye-bye.”

Liberty went back to bed. When she heard the phone ringing again, she pulled the pillow over her head. After a few moments, she heard Willie saying to her, “That was Charlie. He wants us to have breakfast with him.”

Willie and Liberty could never refuse Charlie when he wanted to eat. Charlie was an alcoholic who seldom ate. The last time they had the pleasure of Charlie’s company at table was in a Chinese restaurant where Charlie had eaten eight kernels of rice in the course of an hour. Late in the evening, he had taken a bite out of the glass his gin was gone from.

Willie and Liberty got into their truck and drove to a restaurant nearby called The Blue Gate. Clem sat on the seat between them. From the back, he could pass for another person with long, pale hair, sitting there. At the restaurant, they all got out and Clem lay down beneath an orange tree growing in the dirt parking lot. The Blue Gate was a Mennonite restaurant in a community of cottages with living petunia crosses growing on the lawn.

Inside, Charlie was waiting for them at a table by the pie display. He wore a rumpled suit a size too large for him and a clean shirt. His hair was combed wetly back, his face was swollen and his hands shook. Nevertheless, he seemed in excellent spirits.

“Been too long, man,” Charlie said to Willie, shaking his hand. “Hi, doll,” he said to Liberty. “Where you two been lately? I never see you at the Gator.”

“Ahh, the Gator,” Willie said. “Doesn’t that bar depress you? JJ depresses me.”

“JJ’s all right,” Charlie said. “He’s a real good listener since his stroke.”

Willie shrugged. “Brings me down. I should be ashamed, of course.”

“I love the ol’ Gator,” Charlie said. “I had a great night. Saw some movies, went to some parties, met the dawn at the Gator. Man, I love The Thing. You ever see The Thing? ‘Tell the world! Watch the skies! Everywhere! Watch the skies!’ ” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money. “I’ve been celebrating,” he said. “One sale.” Charlie was a real estate agent, the most successful agent at Ace Realty in a decade. Buyers seemed mesmerized by Charlie. His appearance before them made them desperate to purchase terra firma. “Two acres of land on a golf course to a Canadian couple. They smelled like cooking gas for some reason. They laid their dreams out right in front of me. They wanted an opulent staircase and a sauna. They wanted a special room for the missus’s collection of dolls. They wanted a special room for the mister’s aqua leather sofa. Your Charlie found them just the place. They wept with joy.” He began to tear absent-mindedly at one of the bills in his hand.

“Put that stuff away,” Willie said.

Charlie took a wallet out of his jacket and opened it. He pressed the bills inside.

“Why are you carrying around a picture of a tree?” Willie asked.

“Do you know that each person in the world needs all the oxygen produced in a year by a tree with thirty thousand leaves?” Charlie said. He looked at the snapshot of the tree in his wallet. “Isn’t that a nice tree!” he said.

He ordered eggs, fried mush, orange juice, milk and coffee cake. “I love this place,” he sighed. “These are good people, these are religious people. You know what’s on the bottom of the pie pans? There are messages on the bottom of the pie pans, embossed in the aluminum. I got a pineapple cream cheese pie here last week and it said Wise men shall seek Him. Isn’t that something! The last crumbs expose a Christian message! You should bring a sweet potato pie home, Liberty, get yourself a message.”

“There are too many messages in Liberty’s life already,” Willie said. “Liberty is on some terrible mailing lists.”

Charlie nodded vigorously. “I got a letter from Greenpeace once. They’re the ones who want to stop the slaughter of the harp seals, right? Envelope had a picture of a cuddly little white seal and the words KISS THIS BABY GOOD-BYE. You get that one, Liberty?”

“Yes,” Liberty said. She ordered only coffee and looked at Charlie, at his handsome, ruined face. He was a Cajun. His mother still lived in Lafayette, Louisiana. She was a “treater” whose specialty was curing warts over the phone.

“Well, I’m in love again,” Charlie said. “You ever give any thought as to how many people there are to love! My only fear is that I will awake one morning and be indifferent to love. Bam. It will be like forgetting Shakespeare. I knew a boy once you give him a line of Shakespeare’s tragedies and he could give you the next line. Any line, he knew what came next. And that boy was me!” Charlie spoke in wonder. “It was me who could do that! All those thousands of lines were ordered in the chambers of my mind, like little virgins dressed in white, waiting to be called upon, eager to serve whatever purpose I had. It was a gift, then Bam. Consigned to oblivion.” Charlie laughed his high, cackling laugh. The Mennonites glanced up from their biscuits and thin, pink gravy.

“You’re taking too many vitamins,” Willie said.

“I am taking a lot of vitamins,” Charlie said. “You think that’s why I’m in love all the time? Maybe it’s a side effect. It got so, well I’d have a few drinks and I’d be incited to grief and confusion. You know? I couldn’t even take a shower. The thought of standing alone under a shower, alone under those sheets, those strings of water, would give me the shakes. So I thought the old brain was shutting down, you know? So I got to taking vitamins. I still don’t take showers. I give myself little kitty-baths.” He looked at Liberty. “Oh, you’re such a good-looking woman,” Charlie said.

A waitress arrived and warily placed a pint carton of milk by Charlie’s right hand. The carton of milk had a straw sticking out of it.

“Oh, look at that!” Charlie exclaimed. “I love this place. You gotta get a pie, Liberty. Bring it home to Clem. Dog’d scarf it down. Lemon meringue, say. Lap the words clean. Be zealous and repent. Dog’d go wild!” He picked up Liberty’s hand. “Let’s talk about you for a while. Tell me something you’ve never told me before.”

“She’s going to say ‘David,’ ” Willie said.

“ ‘David’?” Liberty asked. “Who is David?”

“David is the boy you never slept with,” Willie said. “David is your lost opportunity.”

“I think we’re talking too loud,” Charlie yelled. “These are polite, God-fearing people. Their babies come by UPS. Big, brown Turtle-waxed trucks turn into their little lanes. They have to sign for them, the babies. It’s better to get babies by UPS. It’s swift and efficient. The sound of two bodies yattering together to produce a baby the other way is a terrible thing.”

“With David you would be another kind of woman,” Willie said. “At this very moment, you could be with David, cuddling David. After you cuddled, you could arise, dress identically in your scarlet Union suits, chino pants, Ragg socks, Bass boots, British seamen pullovers and down cruiser vests and go out and remodel old churches for use as private residences in fashionable New England coastal towns.”

“But David,” sighed Charlie, “is missing and presumed dead.”

“Change the present,” Willie said. “Through the present, change the future and through the future, the past. Today is the result of some past. If we change today, we change the past.”

Charlie shook his head. “Too much to put on a pie plate, man. Besides, it doesn’t sound Christian.”

“If you were another kind of woman,” Willie said, “you could be married to Clay, the lawyer, dealing in torts. You’d have two little ones, Rocky and Sandy. They’d have freckles and be hyperactive. They’d be the terror of the car pool. Clay would have his nuts tied.”

“Oh, please, man,” Charlie said.

“You and Clay would fly to your vacations in your very own private plane. You’d know French. You’d gain a reputation as a photographer of wildflowers, bringing out the stamens and pistils in a provocative way. Women would flock to the better department stores in order to buy the address books in which your photos appeared. But then a turnaround would occur. You’d stop taking dirty pictures. You’d divorce Clay.”

“I knew it, I knew it,” shouted Charlie. “There he’d be with his useless nuts.”

“You’d become a believer in past lives. You’d become fascinated with other forms of intelligent life. You’d become involved in the study of whale language.”

“Oh, I love whales too, man,” Charlie said, spilling coffee down the front of his button-down shirt.

“You’d curse the house in Nantucket that Rocky and Sandy had spent so many happy summers in.”

“Ahh, Nantucket built on blood. Let’s abandon this subject.” Charlie looked sadly at his shirt. “Whales are poets who are in tune with every aspect of their world. They sing these songs, man.”

Breakfast was placed before them on the table. Charlie looked at the food in surprise. “Our songs are so messed up. You ever thought of that? Our songs are so garbled.”

Liberty reached across to Willie’s plate and spooned up a small piece of fried mush.

“Who are you in love with?” Willie asked Charlie, pouring syrup on the mush.

“Janiella,” Charlie said.

“Janiella?” Liberty said.

“Janiella the heartless, Janiella the faithless, Janiella the demanding,” Charlie said.

“Janiella,” Liberty said.

“Janiella the indiscreet, Janiella the throbbing, Janiella the—”

“All right,” Liberty said.

“I am crazy in love with Janiella, but she has lots of lousy habits. She never shuts doors for example. I have to tell you what happened. I was there last week, right? I’m beneath the sheets truffling away and her kid comes in. Actually, he’s not really her kid. He’s her boyfriend Duane’s kid. He’s forgotten his spelling book. His spelling book! ‘Ma’am,’ he says, ‘have you seen my spelling book?’ I’m crouched beneath the sheets. My ears are ringing. I try to be very still but I’m gagging, man, and Janiella says sweetly, ‘I saw your spelling book in the wastebasket,’ and the kid says, ‘It must have fallen in there by accident,’ and Janiella says, ‘You are always saying that, Ted. You are always placing things you don’t like in the wastebasket. I found that lovely Dunnsmoor sweater I gave you in the wastebasket. That lovely coloring book on knights and armor that I ordered from the Metropolitan Museum was in the wastebasket also.’ The kid says, ‘I’m too old for coloring books.’ Picture it, they are having a discussion. They are arguing fine points.”

Liberty did not want to picture it.

Charlie sighed and looked at his food.

“Well?” Willie said.

Charlie seemed to be losing his drift. He looked at his food as though he were trying to read it.

“So what happened,” Willie insisted. “Finally.”

“Well, I don’t know man. The future is not altogether scrutable.”

“Janiella and Teddy,” Willie said, glancing at Liberty. “The spelling book.”

“I fell alseep, I guess,” Charlie said. “The last thing I heard was the kid saying, ‘I thought Daddy was in Miami at a car show.’ I passed out from the heat, man.”

“You see Janiella at Duane’s house?” Willie asked. “Who does Teddy think you are?”

“We’ve never met,” Charlie said. “I’ve only laid eyes on him in a photo cube. Cute kid. Spiky hair. Janiella wants to keep him out of the house so she’s got him busy every minute. He has soccer practice, swim team, safe-boating instruction. He’s hardly ever at home. Ask him, I bet he’s ignorant of the floor plan. After school he takes special courses in computer language, sea shell identification, God knows what all. Poor little squirt comes staggering home, his brain on fire. I think of myself as a fantastic impetus to his learning.”

“Liberty’s not happy with this situation at all,” Willie said.

“Liberty’s all right,” Charlie grinned, oblivious, showing his pale gums. “Liberty’s a great girl.”

Liberty spooned up another piece of mush from Willie’s plate.

“That’s extremely irritating,” Willie said. “You never order anything, then you eat what I order.”

Liberty blushed.

“Liberty,” Charlie cried, “eat off my plate, I beseech you! Let’s mix a little yin and yang.” He picked up a piece of coffee cake in his large hand and waved it at her.

“It’s just one of those things that’s been going on too long,” Willie said.

“Really, man, you’re losing energy with these negative emotions. You’re just going dim on us here. Your song is fading.” Charlie cupped the hand that was clutching the coffee cake to his ear. Crumbs fell. “Ubble-gubble,” Charlie said.

Outside, Clem lay beneath the orange tree, his paws crossed, yawning. Two deputies sat nearby in their cruiser, looking at him as though they’d like to write out a ticket. Circumstances had not allowed them to write out a ticket in what seemed to them to be an extraordinarily long time. Look at the size of that dog one of them said you run over him and you’d know it.

“What a great animal,” Charlie said, pointing with the diminished cake at Clem. “How did you get such a great animal, Liberty?”

“He came in on the night air and settled on her head as she slept,” Willie said.

“Gubble-ubble,” Charlie said.

“He was in the envelope with the marriage license,” Willie said. “We sprinkled water on him and he was expanded and made soul.”

“Leave this creep and come away with me,” Charlie said to Liberty.

Willie said, “We got him from the Humane Society. He ate a child. The police impounded him, but what could they do, after all, this isn’t the Middle Ages, we don’t hang animals for crimes. And he was an innocent, a victim himself, belonging to a schizophrenic, anorectic unwed mother who kept leaving her infant son alone with him, unfed, in her fleabag apartment. Clem, unfed, day after day. Although his name wasn’t Clem then, it was Sword and Pentacles. Or sometimes Sword, and sometimes Pentacles.”

Charlie said, “I mean it. I love married women. I treat them right. Your blood will race, I’m telling you. I’m also a cook. I make great meat loaf, no, forget meat loaf, I’ll make gumbo. I’m third in line for two acres of land in St. Landry Parish. Only two people have to die, and it’s all mine. It’s got a chinaberry tree on it. We’ll pole the bayous and eat gumbo. We’ll drink beer and listen to chanky-chank bands.”

“I didn’t know you could cook,” Willie said. “You were the only Cajun I knew who couldn’t cook.”

“I cook,” Charlie said, affronted.

“Actually,” Willie said, “Liberty found Clem lying partially in the road, partially in a ditch of water hyacinths, injured by some vehicle. Blood all over the place. What a mess.”

“Everything’s so relative with you, man. I don’t know how you make it through the day,” Charlie said. He gazed at Liberty, absorbed.

“I found him in a mailbox,” Liberty said. “It was at a house where we were staying for a while, inland, in the country. Somebody had hurt him and then stuffed him inside the big mailbox at the end of the drive. He was just a puppy then.”

“That’s awful!” Charlie exclaimed. “You are on some bad mailing lists.”

“A linear life is a tedious life,” Willie said. “Man wasn’t born to suffer leading his life from moment to moment.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that Janiella is not for me,” Charlie said. “For one thing, she’s mean, she’s not married and she talks too much. Even in situ she’s gabbing away. And she’s into very experimental stuff. There are not as many ways of making love as people seem to believe.”

“I’m splitting,” Willie announced.

Charlie rubbed his face hard with his hands. Liberty knew that he wanted a drink. He had that look in his dark eyes.

Willie stood up and leaned toward Liberty, his hands on the table. His hands were tanned and strong and clean. His wedding band was slender. Liberty remembered the wedding clearly. It had taken place in a lush green tropical forest in the time of the dinosaurs. “I’ve got to shake myself a little loose,” he said. “Do you want the truck?”

“No,” Liberty said.

“Just a few days,” Willie said. “Later,” he said to Charlie. He left.

“A butterfly vanishes from the world of caterpillars,” Charlie said.

Liberty saw Clem get up and look after the truck as it drove away. He trotted over to the restaurant and peered in, resting his muzzle on a window box of geraniums. Liberty waved to him.

“He can’t see that,” Charlie said. “Animals live in a two-dimensional world. For example, like with roads? To a dog, each road is a separate phenomenon that has nothing in common with another road.”

“That sounds about right,” Liberty said.

“And so it is, the truth specific to each species. To each and all, one’s own dark wood,” Charlie said. He picked up Liberty’s hand and kissed her wrist bone. “I love you,” he said. “There’s only you. I have employed Janiella only for the purposes of obfuscation.”

“You’re a bottle man,” Liberty said.

“Liberty!” Teddy called. He hurried over from the bakery counter, holding a cruller and a bag in one hand, an egg in the other. It was a small brown egg. Liberty hugged him and ran her fingers through his hair. Charlie closed his eyes.

“I’m going to learn how to build furniture,” Teddy said. “I was a little late today because I saw a joke shop on the way, but the man let me hammer a piece of wood.”

Charlie’s eyes were shut.

“Is he all right?” Teddy asked Liberty. “Is he dead?”

“I am dead,” Charlie said. “I was in the Alps, hiking. I started out on a spring day. The air was sweet and warm. As I went higher it grew cold. There was a blizzard. I took refuge in a cave and built a small fire for comfort. The small fire caused an avalanche, which flattened me. Ever since then I have been dead.”

“Who is this,” Teddy demanded.

“My man,” Charlie said, opening his eyes. “Liberty and I were just discussing running away together.”

“We weren’t,” Liberty said.

“You’re dead,” Teddy said to him somberly.

“I was a swimmer,” Charlie said. “I waded in. Soon I was out of my depth. Ever since then, I have been dead.”

Teddy put a napkin in an empty cup and placed the egg in it.

“My man,” Charlie said. “Why are you carrying around an egg?”

“I have to take care of it. Wherever I go, the egg has to go.”

“Wow, man, how did you get talked into something like that? Is the egg boiled?”

“Boiled!” Teddy said in alarm. “No!”

“I just thought it would be easier to take care of, if it was boiled, but you’re right, what a deplorable suggestion. What would be the sense of that, right? Let’s not even think about boiling that egg. Do you know that an egg knows when it’s about to be boiled? Its terrified acknowledgment can be measured.”

“How can it be measured?” Teddy asked cautiously.

“With one of those terrible instruments of modern times that records impulses on a graph,” Charlie said.

Liberty shook her head and smiled.

“Look at this pretty lady smile,” Charlie said to Teddy. “I love this lady. I’ve loved her for a long time. It’s been a secret, but now you know too.”

Teddy whispered in Liberty’s ear, then slipped something out of the bag he had put on the table. “Don’t you want some ketchup?” he said to Charlie.

Charlie looked at the red plastic bottle. It looked just like restaurant ketchup.

“I believe in bringing my own condiments too, man. See how alike we are! Always bring your own condiments. I chugged a bottle of ketchup once. Won a dollar.”

“No, no, put it on your food,” squeaked Teddy.

Charlie squeezed the bottle. A long red string leaped toward his lap.

“He didn’t jump,” Teddy said.

“I’ve been wounded.”

“He knew,” Teddy said.

“It’s just that my pulse is slow, sixty-eight, maybe sixty-nine, always. I should have been a pilot. Cool in the pitch, roll and yaw. Imperturbable when controls break down. This is great. Do you have the snapping pack of gum, the blackening soap, the fly in the ice cube?”

Teddy nodded.

“You got the lady in the bathtub?”

Teddy shook his head.

“You just can’t keep her in the bathtub,” Charlie said. “She keeps popping out. Well, I guess that’s something else.”

“If you run away with Liberty, I want to come too,” Teddy said.

“A beautiful woman, a little kid, a dog, and yours truly,” Charlie said. “We can do it! We will become myths in the minds of others. They will say about us …” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “… that we all went out for breakfast and never returned.”

“Good,” Teddy said.

“So where shall we go?” Charlie said. He kissed Liberty’s face. The line of people waiting to be seated, old women in bonnets, holding one another’s hands, looked at them.

“There’s no place to go,” Liberty said.

“There are many places to go,” Charlie said. “Hundreds.”

“Let’s make a list. I love lists!” Teddy said.

“We’re the nuclear unit scrambling out, the improbable family whose salvation is at hand,” Charlie said. “We’ll go to Idaho, British Columbia, Greece. No, forget Greece. The Greeks are mean to animals. We’ll go the Costa del Sol, Venice. We’ll go to Nepal. No, forget Nepal, all those tinkly little bells would drive us crazy. What do you say, we’ll go to Paraguay. That’s where Jesse James went.”

“Jesse James didn’t go there,” Liberty said. “That’s where the Germans went.”

“You’re right,” Charlie said. “It wasn’t Paraguay. It was Patagonia where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid went.” He was fidgeting now. His dark eyes glittered.

“They were outlaws,” Teddy said.

“They were outlaws,” Charlie said. “Successful outlaws.”

“Why are you crying?” Teddy asked Liberty. “Are you crying?”

“We’ve got to move along, it’s later than we think,” Charlie said. “How about some lunch?”

5

Liberty sat on a metal chair behind the house, near the riverbank. Stenciled on the back of the chair were the words LOPEZ PRE-ARRANGEMENT AND FUNERAL PARLOR. Dice River gave off a sweetly rotten smell. Crabs darted around in the green mud. The river was still quiet, clogged with water hyacinths and plastic six-pack rings. Later in the day it would be clogged with motorboats. Willie had been gone part of a day, a full day, part of another day. Liberty sat in the chair, breathing conscientiously, gazing at the winding, sluggish water. Dice River was a river all right, but it was not the kind of river you’d want to have in your mind.

River you’d say to Teddy, and he’d think of the river in the Just So stories where Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake knotted himself in a double clove hitch around the baby elephant’s hind legs to save him from Crocodile.

River you’d say to Willie, and he’d probably think in terms of the wide path and the narrow gate, the river would be a philosophic religious construct, the great broad self-mirroring delusionary stream of the ordinary.

River you’d say to Charlie, and he’d think of the creek trickling past his Cajun home to merge eventually with the swamp that lay beneath the two-lane, pit-bull, jai alai highway down which his daddy had disappeared for good.

River. Liberty marveled at how properly people conducted themselves for the most part, greeting the world each morning in a spirit of bemused cooperation and polite assumption, agreeing on words, sharing words, acceding to the same reality of one thing or another.

As a child, Liberty had very much wanted her own words, made enthusiastic by a phrase much employed by the adults of the time—tell it in your own words. But they hadn’t meant it. Having your own words just wasn’t feasible. Having your own words isolated you from the rest of humanity. A personal vocabulary indicated a distrustful spirit, a lack of faith in the way things were.

River.

She and Willie had lived on a river once before. It had been just after they married. They spent the days in a massive mahogany four-poster bed above which was a navy-blue bubbled-glass window. The windows of the room had green louvered shutters brought from Barbados. It was a beautiful house on a river that had been ditched and dammed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The river was a spiritual and biological abattoir. Willie had said, “We will make up everything. Nothing will be the same.”

Everyone gazed on his river alone.

River you’d say to Little Dot. River … Liberty missed Little Dot. She sat on the chair, her knees up, the backs of her hands pressing against her eyes. The chair from the funeral parlor was gray and sturdy. How had it escaped, Liberty wondered. How had it made its way to the riverbank, a refugee from preparation and mourning.

She remembered another river she had known, a river in a room, winding through a wood. The room had been wallpapered with this sight and the view had appeared seamless, but it was not seamless. Liberty knew that there had been twenty-one wallpaper sections in all, for she had counted them often. There were no windows, but there was a door, and the door was papered too so that when someone came through the door, it always seemed surprising.

This had been in a hospital, in a wing of the hospital called Five North. She had been there, but Willie had not, for she had been sicker than Willie. Willie had never known the room with the river in it, for he had been outside while she had been inside. No one thought that this was unusual.

When Liberty had been in Five North, there had been a girl there who looked like Little Dot, but Little Dot grown older. She was there because she had carved YUCK on her stomach with a screwdriver. She had done it in front of a mirror, and to some, the markings on her mutilated flesh appeared foreign, holy and serene. They would ask to touch her stomach for luck. This girl, who looked like an older, more sorrowful Little Dot, had hurt herself in other ways at other times. She had broken her ankle once with a hammer. She said that these things that she did to herself always cleared her thoughts and she felt better after. Didn’t everyone want to feel better after?

Five North with its cold, meticulous name … it was Jack Frost Land, it was Little Match Girl Land. The room with the river in it was the common room in which the patients could gather in the hours of the afternoon. Liberty had sat there with others, one of whom was a bald man who wore polished oxblood shoes. He always held a child’s plastic Thermos in his hand. The Thermos had Pluto on it, chasing his tail around it. You didn’t pay did you, the man would always say to Liberty. I’ve been watching you. You said you’d pay at the other register but you have no intention of doing that, do you … you pretend you’re browsing, making up your mind about something. Oh, I’ve been watching you …

The walls the river lay upon enclosed them, and Liberty remembered it being a washable surface for she had seen an orderly clean it with a sponge. The river glinted through the trees, but even then the trees had names that escaped her. The man in the oxblood shoes would unscrew the top of his Thermos and raise it to his mouth. Pluto was yellow and inside the Thermos it was yellow too. Yellow flecks clung to the bald man’s lips. You keep pretending and I’ll keep watching, he said. The river twisted through the trees. It might even have looked like the one her mother had been drifting down at the time, unaware that her daughter had died, almost died, Liberty forced herself to recall, for her mother’s hobby had then been to tie herself to a canoe and float down a quiet river, gazing through her face mask into the crystalline depths, collecting the white bones of mastodons.

River, Liberty thought, and imagined a stream so clear that it reflected the sky and everything growing and moving along its banks. So that drifting down it, on it, in it, she passed through the images of things. There was something repulsive about such a river. Floating in such a river, Liberty felt only the desire to get out …

She had promised Teddy they would go to the beach that day. It was almost noon and Teddy would be back at noon, fresh from instruction in something. She and Clem walked down Suntan toward his house. The day’s heat pressed against the crown of trees. A few old people moved quietly around, sweeping their yards with brooms, pinching off dead blossoms, sprinkling with big, old-fashioned watering cans. Duane’s perfect Mustangs adorned his driveway. They were black, red, white, black; a Fastback, two convertibles and a Shelby. The black Shelby had NIGHT MARE in script upon the trunk.

A large picture window exposed Janiella doing exercises in Duane’s trophy room. There were silver cups from rallies and car shows on the shelves, and on the paneled walls were the heads and hooves of deer and the bodies of fish. Liberty watched as Janiella did the Plough, the Cobra and a lengthy headstand. Snook and bass and baby tarpon gazed absently down upon Janiella as she moved on to alternate nostril breathing. With a finger pressed against her nose, her shut eyes snapped open and locked on Liberty’s. She got to her feet and sauntered to the door. Her blonde hair was twisted into an elaborate roll and her haunches were firm and heroic in their proportions. A thin line of perspiration lay prettily above her upper lip. Liberty disliked her enormously.

“Hello,” Liberty said.

“The Phantom’s not back yet.” Janiella extended an arm and slowly rotated it. “I call him the Phantom because he’s never here. He’s a busy, busy child. The Phantom. The Ghost. Kids like names. Makes them feel popular.”

Liberty rubbed Clem’s paw with her foot.

“So come in, come in,” Janiella said. “Duane said he gave you a lift the other day. You lead a peculiar life, don’t you? Have you ever been employed by an escort service?”

Liberty considered placing her knuckles in Janiella’s throat. “I have never been employed by an escort service,” she said.

“I wasn’t trying to be offensive. You just look as though you might be regarded with favor by certain men.”

“Clem’s telephone number is sometimes requested,” Liberty said. “Not mine.”

“I can see why some would want to get in touch with that,” Janiella said, frowning, “but not me. What kind of a vocabulary has he got? I was told that a German shepherd could understand eight hundred words.”

“He knows a few words,” Liberty admitted. “Love, angel, ice cream, retribution …”

“Goodness, was he raised in a monastery or what?” She raised her arms over her head and jiggled her wrists. “What do you think of Duane? Do you think he’s a little crazy?”

“He’s a little crazy.”

“He was sort of cute for a while. I’ve always been attracted to the primitive. I sometimes confuse primitive with genuine. It’s a fault of too much education, I’d be the first to admit it. Duane’s always trying to surprise me now. He can’t do it. He was cute before he started trying to surprise me. As for shocking me, I’m unshockable. I have diabetes and a partially webbed foot. The foot drives most men wild. As for my father, I loathe him. I’ve loathed him ever since the death and burial of my horse, Spritzer. This was long ago. Spritzer was old and feeble. My father dug a hole in the pasture with a back hoe. The veterinarian was called, and we led Spritzer by the halter to the hole. The veterinarian gave him an inoculation and he instantly toppled over and in. The hole was the precise width and depth, which was a great relief to my father, but I’ve loathed the man ever since the day Spritzer fit the hole. I may sound like an unhappy person but I want to assure you I’m not. Never have I considered myself an unhappy person. I have fun.” She smiled at Liberty. “You resent me considerably, don’t you, I have just the tiniest of inklings.”

“It’s Teddy I’m concerned about. You’re just passing through.”

“I probably am just passing through, but what about you?” Janiella laughed. “The family situation intrigued me for a while, but its potentialities are just something I’m going to have to deny myself. I’ve been slumming if you want to know the truth. Rednecks have always given me a flutter, but family life is paranormal in my opinion. There’s no anticipation in family life. I’ve had some nice orgasms in this house, and I’ve introduced the concept of candlelight at dinners. But that’s about it. The Phantom is cute, but he lacks immunity. His heart’s a doormat, poor kid. He’ll know everything, but he’ll never learn.”

“You do this for a living?” Liberty asked. “You just spread joy where you can?”

“Do you know that big guy?” Janiella asked. “The guy who sells houses?”

“I know Charlie.”

“Drunks are so much trouble, aren’t they.”

“He’s a friend of mine,” Liberty said.

“You do look as though you’re abstaining, but that look can be very sexy. There’s a pallor to you that a tan can’t quite hide. But pallor appeals to a lot of men. It’s that suggestion of confinement. It’s difficult to believe you’re a babysitter. I had an experience with a babysitter when I was a little girl.”

“I’d prefer not to know about it,” Liberty said.

From the river there was the sound of an outboard engine starting up, sputtering, quitting. There was silence, then cursing.

“She was a fat girl,” Janiella said, “with hair down to her waist. She was always ironing her hair. She’d come over to the house, study algebra, iron her hair, and then when it was my bedtime she’d masturbate me to get me to go to sleep. At Christmas my mother bought a little present for me to give to her. It was a bottle of perfume with a swan on the cap. Giving her that perfume was the worst, the very worst moment in my life.”

“That’s affecting,” Liberty said. “It really is.”

“I think the stress of that moment triggered my diabetes, but being able to pinpoint those two incidents from my early life was a real breakthrough for me.” Janiella snapped the fingers of her right hand. “Mother,” she said. “Father.” She snapped the fingers of her left. “I’ve felt completely in control ever since I’ve framed the perfume and Spritzer’s hole. I do what I want. I say what I want. I don’t finish what I begin if I don’t want. I just begin and begin.”

“You’ve got the keys to the candy shop,” Liberty said.

Janiella looked at her uncertainly. “You’re a little strange. Where have you been? Have you ever been anywhere?”

Liberty said nothing.

Janiella looked at Clem. “That dog would be pretty if his eyes weren’t so weird. Can he see out of those things? They look like ice cubes or something.”

“I’ll just wait for Teddy in his room,” Liberty said.

Teddy’s room was at the rear of the house and overlooked a small patio and swimming pool. Hoses had drained the pool and a man stood in it, studying a long, undulating crack in the tile. The man took a lollipop from his shirt and put it in his mouth. He shook his head at the crack. The lollipop did not make him forget the cigarette that he craved. He sucked in his stomach. He sensed there was someone in the room at his back, and he wondered if there was a naked woman standing in it, or a woman wearing just panties maybe, studying him. He didn’t look, in case there wasn’t.

Liberty dropped the tattered bamboo shade.

Teddy’s room was low-ceilinged and narrow. The walls were stained a muddy color, and there was a red rug on the floor. Half the ceiling was covered with the silver bears from Klondike Bar ice cream wrappers. Liberty took two wrappers from her pocket, found a paste pot in the desk and pressed two more bears upon the ceiling.

Teddy had begun collecting the wrappers after his mother had gone away. When she disappeared, he had first become deeply interested in cartography. He made elaborate maps and memorized airplane routes and bus schedules. He learned wilderness techniques and how to read a compass, determined to track his mother down. Then Duane had taken him aside for a little talk. He told Teddy that his mom had become a freak, that she had grown whiskers, and that he should hope that she never came back. If she came back, he should fight against her as though he were fighting against the forces of evil for his very life. Duane had told him (and he told him, he said, reluctantly) that if his mom came back it would likely be for no other purpose than to cut his little pecker off, put it on a key chain and present it to her girlfriend.

“Remember at the county fair last year, son, do you remember that tent we went into?”

“The Ambassadors from Mars were in that tent, Daddy.”

“Well, yeah, they was, but remember what was in there too was that individual who bit off hens’ heads.”

“I couldn’t see that too well, Daddy.”

“Well, that individual hates chickens like the way your momma hates us men now,” Duane said. “So forget momma, son. Be on your guard, but put her right out of your mind.”

Not long after Duane’s metaphorical chat, Teddy began breathing oddly and wetting the bed and waking in the night with terrible dreams of something gaunt and bearded, like the person he had almost seen in the tent, chuckling and tearing at him, snipping off his fingertips with its teeth and pulling his toes out with its teeth in the same way he had been taught by Liberty to get the meat out of an artichoke leaf. In the night he imagined his mother calling to him … Teddeee … Teddeee … a pale stretched-out skinny sound … calling and laughing and groaning to him.

He decided he needed a little magical protection, something he could devise for himself, so he began collecting the silvery paper bears. The phalanx of bears would protect him when he slept, when he could not be on guard. Their thick cold coats would muffle the sounds of chuckling and tearing and calling. They had already caused the dreams to change their nature, and he felt that when he had gathered enough of the bears, when the ceiling was complete, the terrible dreams would stop.

The bears marched glittering across the ceiling. Teddy was getting there, Liberty thought. He was almost there.

Teddy rushed into the room. “Liberty!” he said. “Do you know that during the Second World War, the Americans were going to use bat bombs against Japan? They were going to tie little cylinders filled with napalm to the bats’ chests and drop thousands of them from airplanes. They would be in hibernation, but as they fell from the planes they’d wake out of hibernation and then they’d go into buildings and houses and after a few hours they’d blow up.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I’m taking a course at the junior college called Oddities of War.” He took the egg out of his pocket and examined it. “Still with us,” he said. “You know, it’s hard to take care of an egg. A baby’s easier to watch than an egg, isn’t it, Liberty? It’s so much bigger. It would be hard to lose a baby. Some of the girls in my class have lost their eggs already. They think it’s a stupid assignment. Liberty, do you know that at that party Daddy and Janiella had, our pool got broken? Daddy broke it. He was just fooling around, Janiella said.”

“Let’s get out of here right away,” Liberty suggested.

“Yes!” Teddy said.

They waited at the end of the street for the bus. When the bus came, Clem leapt nimbly up the steps and settled himself on a seat beneath an advertisement for roach poison. Roaches were entering a Roach Motel, carrying little suitcases, little tennis racquets. They were wearing sunglasses and smiling.

The bus driver wore mirrored sunglasses, and there were comb marks in his hair. The big wheel moved smoothly through his hands. The bus driver loved his wheel. He would have taken it home at night with him if he could.

The only other passengers on the bus were three elderly women comparing the scenic designs on their bank checks. One had kittens, one had seashells, one had an old man and a small boy raking leaves together.

“The leaves are nice, but they don’t represent very well life in the South, what do you think?” the woman in the middle of the group said.

“Well, I’m from Cleveland,” the woman with the autumnal checks said. “I think it captures the nostalgia of a simpler time very nicely.”

“Oh, look at that dog,” the woman holding the seashell checks said.

One of her friends looked at Clem and frowned. “White dogs are so difficult to keep clean,” she said. “They show every speck of dirt. I had a white poodle once.” She placed her hand against her heart and rolled her eyes.

“I think Ethel has made the best choice,” the woman in the middle said, looking moodily at her own yellow kitten checks. “These shells are so refreshing. I can almost feel the ocean spray just looking at them.”

The three women stared at Clem. They began talking about their dead husbands.

“When Ernest passed away I was there by his side in the hospital and there was a napkin under his juice glass and I went out of the hospital with it,” Ethel said. “I left the room immediately with the napkin in my purse. It had sleigh bells printed on it because it was the holiday season.”

“Do you still have it?” the woman with the kitten checks said. She was a little embarrassed. She looked at her wrist-watch.

“I do,” Ethel whispered.

The woman from Cleveland gave a little grunt. “After my Harold died,” she said, “I found the most disturbing items at the bottom of his sock drawer.”

Her companions stirred in their seats.

“We always exchanged greeting cards on special occasions and there were cards there for the next five years, all signed by Harold and marked with the year. There were Christmas cards and Easter cards and Valentine’s Day cards and anniversary cards and birthday cards. And there was a get-well card for me in case, with no date on it …”—her eyes were fixed on Clem’s blank, benign ones—“… and Harold had written on it, ‘Hope you get your pep back soon.’ ”

Liberty and Clem and Teddy got off at the children and dogs’ beach. There was the nude homosexual beach, the nude heterosexual beach, the surfing beach and the shelling beach, as well as the beaches that belonged to the condos and the beaches that belonged to the rich. It was all the same thin, sparkling ribbon, but mind and predilection had divided the areas as effectively as shark-infested inlets. Liberty and Teddy sat on lumpy sand. There had been a sandcastle contest there the day before and the beach was humpy with failures. The sand structure contest had become a highly competitive annual event. Nonprofessionals and children were being edged out. Often there were fights. Grown men in madras bathing trunks could be observed circling one another, dying to throw a paralyzing punch. Slim, freckled ladies would be kicking. Plumper ladies, screaming. There were categories and prizes. Participants weren’t satisfied with making space platforms and cattle herds anymore. They busied themselves with cathedrals and Rolls-Royces. The winner yesterday had been The Last Supper. Judas had even had red hair.

The day was sunny, the water calm. Tiny, endless waves died upon the shore. Liberty suppressed visions of cruising barracudas, undertows, cramps, heart attacks, kidnappers bearing down in shining cigarette boats.

“Look, Clem,” Teddy said, “there’s Hermann.”

A Doberman acquaintance of Clem’s trotted by. He was a gorgeous-looking animal, but overbred. He had narcolepsy. In the midst of high-spirited play, sometimes even while eating, he would collapse as though hit on the head with a brick. He would have fallen asleep, deeply asleep. Who knows what he felt before he dropped? An indeterminate anxiety, a vague malaise, a sense of detachment, a revival of memories, a sense of harmony with the universe? He would wake up in a minute, several minutes perhaps. He had to take a tricyclic antidepressant daily so he wouldn’t get excited about things, perhaps triggering an attack. The Doberman ambled along and past them, his destination all about him.

“Poor Hermann,” Teddy said. He found some sticks and made a little awning with his T-shirt for the egg.

A woman in a large hat ran toward them down the beach, waving.

“There is someone who knows us,” Teddy said.

“Hi!” Sally Farrell said, falling down beside Liberty in a spray of sand. “Hi, everybody!” She kissed Liberty on the cheek. “I came down here to see the babies. I love the baby beach.”

Teddy looked at her with wide eyes.

“Don’t look at me too hard or you’ll wear me out,” Sally said, laughing.

He scrambled up and ran to the water.

“That didn’t scare him, did it?” Sally said, dismayed. “You’ve heard that before, haven’t you, you look at something too hard and you’ll wear it out? Maybe I don’t have a way with children. I brought my lunch. Do you want some of this sandwich? I’m making my own bread now, but I’m also trying to lose some weight. You know, I want to do different things these days.”

Sally exhibited her sandwich. Shredded carrots and a few raisins lay between two large pieces of underdone bread. The bread was damp and pale, as though it had seen something terrible.

“Sally,” Liberty said. “How are you, Sally? How’s JJ?” She felt guilty that she had not kept up with the troubles of Sally and JJ.

JJ was a retired movie stuntman who owned the Gator Bar. During his career he had broken his right leg three times, his left leg half a dozen times and his back and his jaw bone twice each. He had been a highly respected stuntman. He was a tumbler and a horseman and did cars and motorcycles and helicopters, but he liked fire gags the best. He had a muscular, battered body and a big, well-formed head. He loved his bar, which was cool, dim and loud. The walls were covered with framed stills of incredible stunts. To garrulous regular patrons like Charlie, JJ would speak about skill and pride and bravery. The two of them would yell and shout about meeting Death man to man, cojónes to cojónes, about triumphant exits. JJ Farrell had grand plans for Death. Then he had a stroke. The light went out only to flicker back on again. JJ’s grand plans for Death went right down the pipe … Sally had been running the bar for the last month ever since JJ’s stroke. They’d been married for three months now.

“Well, I had all my moles taken off, notice?” Sally pushed her pleasant square face forward and waggled it. “Remember how I used to worry all the time about those moles? I didn’t have a worry in the world back then except those silly moles and they turned out to be nothing. Six big nothings. JJ’s back from Haiti. He went over there for the herbs and the voodoo, but the herbs and the voodoo didn’t work. Still, he’s better. He’s a lot better than he was when you saw him in the hospital. Remember that! The guy on the other side of the curtain had cancer of the corneas. Cancer of the corneas, can you imagine! That hospital is so overcrowded. They send tourists someplace else now, they won’t even let them in. But JJ’s got his looks back. He doesn’t say much and he can’t use one leg and one arm, but the amazing thing is he’s got this permanent erection. He is just engorged all the time … I mean even when I help him out of the bathtub … especially when I help him out of the bathtub.…” Sally patted Liberty’s hand.

“I’m sorry I disappeared on you, Sally. I didn’t know how to help.”

“We haven’t seen you and Willie for a long time,” she said without offense. “But what could you have done? There was nothing you could have done. You know what I did all those weeks I was waiting on JJ in the hospital? I colored. I bought all these coloring books and I really went to town. I’d like to show them to you sometime. I’m not saying they’re art but they’re awfully good … It’s a pretty day to be on the beach, isn’t it? Do you know what JJ told me they do in Haiti? People offer to drown for a dollar or two. They pretend to drown.”

Liberty raised herself up on her elbows so she could better see Teddy in the water.

“They thrash around and then sink and then come up and float on their faces,” Sally said. “I mean I imagine that’s what happens. And people give them money.”

“Stay close in, honey,” Liberty called to Teddy.

Sally looked around them at all the children playing on the shore. “I’ve got to have some babies,” Sally said. “I love babies. I still want to get my babies from JJ, but who knows, I might have to get them from a man I don’t even know yet.” She made a fist and punched her thigh, annoyed. “JJ hasn’t lost his touch, but I must admit not much has happened lately. He gets confused. He says that sometimes when he feels my breast he doesn’t know what it is. Sometimes his brain says honeydew melon, you know, sometimes it says gearshift knob. But he’s better. Maybe he’ll get even better. When he got the stroke he was at the bar making somebody a piña colada. God, I hate piña coladas. I was at home and I remember the exact moment it happened. This big picture fell off the wall. There was something else too, this feeling. I knew something was happening. There was no reason for that picture to fall off the wall. Then the phone rang. Have I told you this before?”

“That’s all right,” Liberty said.

In the sky, a solitary pink cloud hurried by. It seemed just the type of cloud that would appear in answer to an unspoken prayer, dumping rain precipitously, for example, on a single, parched tree in a forest. The cloud hurried over the Gulf.

“It’s always a telephone call these days,” Sally said. She sniffled, having sad memories. She was remembering JJ. she remembered him jumping from a helicopter onto a speeding train. Actually, she had never seen this, he had told her about it. JJ was considerably older than Sally. She had been ten years old when he had done this stunt. She had been in school, learning about participles, about how light went around corners. She remembered JJ falling, his back full of arrows, JJ leaping from bridges, JJ burning up in a German tank. She was eleven or twelve when her husband was doing these things. She had no idea he existed. JJ loved to fall. She remembered him falling. He loved to die. He had different expressions for different deaths. How did light go around corners? Sally wondered.

“When I first saw JJ,” Sally said, “I got hot all over. Fate’s got that kind of heat, don’t you think? I was just burning up.” She nibbled on her sandwich, then made a face at it and buried it in the sand. “Do you know what his initials stand for? They don’t stand for anything. His parents just gave him those two lone letters for a name. I always thought they stood for something, but they’re just two lone letters. I learned that in the hospital. Actually, what I know for sure about JJ you could put in a cup.”

The small pink cloud Liberty had noticed earlier seemed to have reversed direction and was now hovering directly overhead. Liberty had the unsettling feeling that the cloud was about to rain blood on them. This was not unheard of, but it usually happened in places like Calabria or Tennessee. Homer had even written about it, although, of course, Homer had been blind. Liberty remained still, barely breathing, until the terrible feeling passed.

Black Hermann, believing himself invisible, stalked a seagull on the white sand. The gull looked at him with scorn.

Sally adjusted her hat. She wore a long, gauzy dress. She was a neat, round young woman, a measurer, hopeful. The small brown egg beneath its makeshift awning suddenly appeared to her. “What’s that!” she cried.

“Teddy’s taking a sex-education course,” Liberty said. “He has to take care of an egg for a week.”

“That’s an egg! Well of course it’s an egg, isn’t it. What will they think up next.” Her hand veered from touching it and fell lightly on Liberty’s leg. She began patting Liberty’s leg. “I like you a lot, did you know that? You’re reserved. I always liked it when you dropped in at the bar. I got so I looked forward to it. Didn’t we have some nice chats? I love the way your pelvic bones stick up like that. I think women are more genuine than men, don’t you think so?” She moved her hand up to Liberty’s stomach. Liberty removed the hand and placed it against Sally’s own stomach. The hand had taken on certain properties. Both women looked at it. Clem looked at it.

Sally blushed. “I like you. That isn’t nothing, you know. Are we friends? What are friends? I’m sorry,” she said, “all I can think about lately is sex. JJ was the most sexual man I’d ever known, but I don’t know him any more. How much do you know about Willie? He’s smart, isn’t he. Does it make sex any different?”

Liberty laughed.

“I just love that reserve of yours. I always felt Willie was sexual too, but he has sort of a malignant sexuality, do you know what I mean?”

“I don’t, no,” Liberty said.

“Sure, you know what I mean. Sort of like Pete. You know Pete. Poor Pete.”

“What’s Pete doing these days?” Liberty asked.

Sally’s brother, Pete, had been a Marine in Vietnam. There would be a Club Med in Vietnam one of these days. People would pay for drinks with beads, fuck strangers and dance beneath whispering palms. Pete had been eighteen when he had gone to Vietnam and now he was over forty. His specialty had been defoliating jungles, turning ancient forests into pancakes. He had been happy enough at the time, but now he was terribly unhappy.

“He’s still suffering a little environmental dislocation,” Sally said. “He thinks he’s still there or something. ‘Here is here, Pete,’ I keep telling him. JJ used to try to talk to him too, but it didn’t do any good. He’s pretty aggressive even after all these years. He had a job for a while at Skippy’s Cars which he really liked, but he lost it. He was the guy on the television commercial. Did you ever see it? It was wild.”

“The man in the white tuxedo,” Liberty said.

The man in the white tuxedo ran back and forth in front of a row of cars. The hoods of the cars were raised and pennants flew from the antennae. I want your attention! the man screamed. Give me your attention! He took something out of his pocket and threw it in the window of an unassuming green sedan, and the sedan blew up. Orange flames climbed skyward. What do I have to do to get your attention, the man, Pete, screamed. Do I have to hit you over the head with a shovel! Sweat poured down his face. I can make you the best deal in town!

“Pete loved that job,” Sally said. “But now he works in a juice bar. Why don’t you come down there with me sometime and say hello. We could get a glass of juice.”

“Oh, certainly,” Liberty said. Someday, absolutely, she thought, Pete was going to pour Liquid Plumber into the papaya essence and rock the retirement community by terminating two dozen social-security checks simultaneously.

“We’re all so deceived by life, aren’t we,” Sally said. “In many ways, I’ve been thinking, I’ve probably been deceived by my life of love.” She looked at Liberty earnestly. “I was very very happy with JJ, and by being so happy I became blind to my own development. I never had any satellite emotions, like fondness, say. It was a very stable, very inflexible situation. There was just JJ, and upon him I pinned all my hopes for self-fulfillment and satisfaction. I’m not saying he exploited me, but let’s face it, JJ domesticated me and made me a craven woman dependent upon his love. I’m not saying our love wasn’t unique, I’m saying it was sort of suffocating, well, not really suffocating, somewhat suffocating. It was a very deep, very unique love. Do you remember the way he used to talk to me intimately? Well, there’d be no way you could remember that, of course, I get so mixed up these days, I have to talk for two you know, I have to recall all this stuff for two, but JJ used to talk to me all the time in this sort of rapid whisper, this quick nonsense whisper, as though I were a race horse or something, like this high-strung filly or something. This was very important, this fantasy element of our love. It was very important to JJ and I cooperated fully because our love was so great, but I realize now that I was a very unfulfilled person. JJ was real even though he was acting, but I wasn’t real even though I was just going along. I wasn’t self-actualizing. I was just part of JJ, a man who doesn’t even have a proper name.”

Sally was talking eagerly with a far-off look in her eyes.

“Such language!” Liberty said. “Have you been speaking with your clergyman?” Clergymen often tried too hard, Liberty felt. They had misplaced God in the wilderness and stumbled into the neon wonderland of serial polygamy guidance.

“There’s a voice on the phone, actually,” Sally confessed, “and it gives advice. It’s very sensible. It’s general, but it applies to the particular too. I discovered a lot about my own situation, it was incredible. I discovered I wasn’t autonomous. I’ve got to become autonomous now.” Sally took a deep breath. “What if Willie just left you, he didn’t really die, but he died to you, he couldn’t help it, he just left?”

“He’s left before,” Liberty said. “What I did was wait, I guess.”

“So the waiting made sense because it finally stopped, but what if it didn’t make sense?”

“Waiting never makes sense,” Liberty said.

“We’re all asleep, aren’t we,” Sally said. “Like we’re under a spell and something keeps saying, ‘No need to think about it, nothing’s going to happen, if anything were to happen it’s not going to happen now, anyway, not this minute …’ Who says that anyway?”

“The Magician in us,” Liberty said. “The Kindly Master.”

“Ugh,” Sally said. She frowned. After a moment, she said, “You’ve still got that dog. I suppose pets give your life a certain continuity. Maybe I should get a pet. I want to lose some weight too. Fifteen pounds would be about right, I think. JJ liked for me to be an armful. ‘My squeeze’ he’d call me. Can you imagine? He called me his squeeze. What a dear man.” Sally began to cry quietly. “He isn’t able to squeeze me any more.”

Liberty reached for Sally’s hand and held it. The sky was once again cloudless and very blue. And the Gulf was blue too, but with a greenish cast. Pale schools of mullet moved through it. There were terns and plovers working the shore now, and later in the day the herons would arrive, and later than the herons, close after sunset, the skimmers would appear, flying swiftly and close to the water, shearing the water with their bills …

“That sky is aloof, isn’t it,” Sally said. “It’s hard to plan on fulfilling yourself under a sky like that.” She patted her eyes dry with the back of Liberty’s hand and stood up. “I’ve got to get back to the Gator. I wish you’d come on by. We’re having a welcome home party for JJ tomorrow night. I wish you weren’t such a stranger. You know what they say about ’gators? They say they’ve got seven emotions and they make a sound for each one of them, but it’s all the same sound.” A peculiar expression slid across Sally’s face. “Just like JJ,” she said. “Oh, god,” she said, “I didn’t say that. Don’t tell me I said that.”

“Sally,” Liberty said.

Sally closed her eyes and shook her head, giggling. “I just didn’t say that,” she said. “But you know what, you know that big Cajun? Charlie, right? He’s got such a crush on you. He talks about you all the time.”

“A crush?”

“A big crush.”

“A gin crush,” Liberty said.

“Don’t be that stranger now, you come on by,” Sally said. She kissed Liberty briskly on the cheek. “Good-bye baby beach!” she said to the beach.

Teddy ran up from the water, holding a shell in his hand. “I found a murex!” he said. “It doesn’t live around here. Somebody must have bought it in a store and then come here and dropped it. It lives in the Mediterranean. And look what I’ve got too, I got these from the trash. Will they count?”

She looked at the ice-cream wrappers. Five wrinkled bears.

“They’ll count.” She smoothed them out on her knee. “What do you think the word crush means, honey?”

“Conquer and destroy.”

“Conquer and destroy,” Liberty said. “Maybe you should drop that war course.”

Outside Teddy’s house, Duane was gazing under the hood of a matte black ’69 Shelby Cobra Mach 1. There was reverence in his eyes as he contemplated the gleaming air cleaner with its crinkle finish and polished aluminum hi-lite fins. Teddy touched a brilliantly twinkling radiator cap with his fingers. His father nudged him back a bit.

“You’re sandy, son,” he said. “Take a shower and then you can look.” He took a clean rag from his pocket and flicked it across the grille.

“You shining up the engine again, Daddy?”

“Boy, son, you sure are sandy,” Duane said. He glanced quickly at Teddy. He wished his boy were sturdy — even, perhaps, a little wild and nasty, with a face of his own.

“We’ve been to the beach.”

“Nah,” he said. “Nah you haven’t. Impossible.” Duane’s eyes were focused a little above Teddy and beyond. He cuffed the child’s shoulder playfully.

“Yes we have, we have!” Teddy said excitedly. “See, Liberty’s sandy too. And Clem! We’re all sandy!”

“Nah, you haven’t been to the beach,” Duane said, feinting a jab at Teddy’s chest.

“We have, we have!” Teddy shrieked.

“Okay, son, enough play for now.” Duane slammed the hood shut and crouched beside one of the Shelby’s mag wheels. He had just mounted four new tires — Pro Trac 60’s. He had longed for those big meats for a long time and now he possessed them. The big meats thrilled him, but he knew he was not as happy as he should have been. Duane sighed. His little boy with his narrow mouth and black wild hair looked exactly like his bitch-lezzie wife, Jean-Ann, and it made his heart sink anymore just to look at him. Duane loved his son, but whenever he showed him any affection, he now felt weird, even wicked. He had gone to a drive-in movie with Janiella a few nights ago to neck and eat fried chicken and they had seen a horror film about giant, soulless pods taking over the living, except that in this one instance the transformation was incomplete and a dog ended up having the head, the face, of a man on it. It was a grotesque sight and it had planted itself firmly in Duane’s mind. On the surface of things he was a fortunate man. Jean-Ann didn’t want a nickel from him, only a divorce and the freedom to live her own, ghastly life. He had four cherry cars and an intelligent, worldly-wise girlfriend who really liked to get it on. But all was not well beneath the surface of things. His little boy depressed him. Teddy was like a knocking in his Dad’s life’s engine.

Janiella came up behind him and blew on his neck. She was wearing high-heeled sandals, short shorts and two handkerchiefs tied around her breasts.

“I was thinking,” Duane mused, “maybe we could dye Teddy’s hair.”

“What?” Liberty said.

“That’s some idea,” Janiella said.

Duane turned around and nodded. “Dye his hair. Bleach it from one of those little packages women use.”

Janiella giggled.

“That stuff could turn his black hair white,” Duane said.

“It will come out orangey, believe me,” Janiella said.

“I don’t mean white like that dog of yours,” Duane said to Liberty. “I mean a light blond like. He wouldn’t be so partial to Jean-Ann in his looks that way.”

Teddy and the two women stared at him. Duane’s cars, sleek as rats, crouched around them.

Duane raised the thumb and index fingers of his hands and boxed Teddy’s head in the square they made. He squinted, shrinking the square.

“Getting rid of the hair would help,” Duane said. He dropped his hands and regarded Teddy thoughtfully. “If his jaws were a little fuller that would help too.”

“You’re crazy, Duane,” Janiella said appreciatively.

“How tall you believe my boy’s going to get? Jean-Ann was one tall drink of water.” Duane looked at Teddy reproachfully.

“Jean-Ann,” Janiella said. She nibbled on Duane’s neck.

“Jean-Ann, Jean-Ann. You’ve seen better heads on mule dicks, right!” Duane laughed and pinched her buttocks.

Teddy was blushing. His narrow chest was mottled with red. “That’s the way they are,” he said to Liberty. “I’m going to go inside now.”

In a slash pine, a crow perched on a branch. Smaller, frantic, brighter birds darted and swooped at it, calling. There was a nest somewhere. Everywhere, in the day’s last, lingering light, liaisons and arrangements were being made. It’s the dry season and somewhere, in the middle of the state, a pine tree blows up. Farther north, an elderly man with Alzheimer’s lives contentedly with his dead wife for three days while to the south a couple wearing scuba gear get married underwater. A teenage boy kills himself so he can donate his heart to his sick girlfriend while a homosexual whose lover has just left him goes into Woolworth’s and buys two gerbils. Love comes and goes, pitching its mansion. And on the circular track of days, it appears that Dread is gaining on Devotion every second.

6

When Liberty returned to her own house, she found it locked. She jiggled the doorknob. They never locked the house, but there it was, locked. Perhaps Landlord had come back. Landlord was, in fact, the landlord’s name, a person whom Liberty had never met, but who by his uncaring absence seemed generous enough. Willie dealt with him. Apparently the understanding was that Landlord might return, and when he did they’d have to find another place.

Webby matter fouled the jalousies. Large moths clung to the darkness beneath the eaves. Looking in the window, she saw that the room was unchanged from the way she and Clem had left it when they had gone to the beach at noon. She pushed at the door once more, then returned to the street to study the house, surprised at how neglected it looked. A rusting hot-water heater, resembling a bomb, stood on the sagging side porch. Firecracker plant spilled out of the cracks in the foundation. The mailbox, which was stationed on a black chain coiling rigidly upward, dangled open, empty.

It had been in just such a mailbox years ago where she had found Clem, a puppy barely alive, his soiled shape filling up dark space. The sun had beat down upon the box then as she looked in, and black insects had shifted in the hinges where it was damp. When she pulled him out, she saw that someone had burnt the pads of his feet, there were burns on his coat, on his soft muzzle. One eye was shut and oozed a clear liquid. She had taken him to a regular doctor because the veterinarian’s offices were farther away. The doctor, who knew her, said she hadn’t found him a moment too soon.

All the doctors knew her there, for she hadn’t been well and doctors knew her. It had been this time of year but in another place, and seven years ago, before she and Willie were actually married. They were living near an abandoned orange grove, and the rotting fruit, on the ground and still hanging in the trees, made the air smell like a sad bar. It was the fall of what was their last year of school, but neither of them was going to school. By the end of that summer, Liberty knew she wasn’t going back. That was over, school, the excitement of making connections, the doors opening in her mind, the babble of voices becoming isolated, subdued, orderly. In science she had been the only one in the class who had seen the connection between the Thermos bottle and rocketry. She had seen the line leading from picnics to atom bombs.

She had a gift, the teachers said. It was as if she’d been given a gift, the teachers said, and she was throwing it away.

She had thrown it away. She took no comfort in connections. She had learned the strange paths love followed and believed only in clamorous uproar, cruel seasons, random acts.

Where do you go when there’s nowhere to go, and the death you might have died belongs to you no longer?

She heard a phone ringing, then it stopped. She went back across the dirt yard to the banyan tree, climbed up the trunk and walked out on a limb wide as a train track. The limb, rather than penetrate the house, had accommodated it nicely by veering up only inches from the bathroom window. Liberty lay on the limb and wiggled the screen out of the rotting wood, then squirmed through the window headfirst. Two lizards darted down the wall.

“Willie,” Liberty called.

At the front door, Clem was standing on two legs like any human being. He dropped softly inside when she pulled the door back. The lock was old and had gummed itself shut. She turned it back and forth. In the kitchen she covered a plate with dog food and set it on the floor for Clem. The plate was a large plastic one that depicted the First Presbyterian Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi, with its peculiar steeple atop which a large bronze finger pointed skyward. Clem worked away at the food, exposing the shrubbery, the steps, and the door to the nave. He always saved the revelation of the finger for last.

The phone rang.

“Why did you answer so quickly? What’s wrong?” Liberty’s mother demanded.

“Nothing, nothing,” Liberty said.

“Something’s wrong,” her mother gasped.

“No.”

“I hate it when you pick up the phone on the first ring. When I called your number before, the most peculiar thing happened. I got a tape. Are you hooked up to some answering machine, Liberty?”

Liberty thought of life-support systems. Tubes and pumps. Machines that cleansed.

“No.”

“Where do you get the money for these things, Liberty. Having an answering service … the life you must lead!”

“I have no answering service, Mother. You must have dialed wrong.”

“Now how could I have dialed wrong. Really, the things you infer sometimes. I thought it was a trendy little joke you were making, something you felt was bohemian. The man was talking about friendship, how to make friends with the opposite sex or something. It was so sappy, but the man had a lovely voice. I have often wished your father’s voice was more mellifluous. Sometimes I dial Time and Temperature just to hear the mellifluous voice of a male stranger.” She sighed. “I wanted to ask you a question, dear. Do you remember Peter Marsh?”

“I don’t, no.”

“Oh, Liberty, are you on drugs or something? I sometimes wonder what has happened to your mind. You used to have such a good mind, Liberty. You were always so good with those hard questions like if there are four houses on a street and the Blakes live next to the Browns and the Burtons live next to the—”

“I’ve never heard of Peter Marsh, Mother.”

“Why when you were a child, you even knew the name of Hitler’s dog. I remember how astonished all our friends used to be at your acumen.”

Liberty lowered herself to the floor and put her chin on her knees.

“Peter Marsh used to be one of Daddy’s patients in the long ago,” Liberty’s mother began. “One day he came into the office and he was very quiet. Later, of course, everyone realized how uncharacteristic it was for him to be so quiet. He was a very handsome man and very successful with the ladies. Men liked him too. He was a city commissioner then. He always seemed to be having the best time, but that day he just didn’t smile or say a word and when anyone spoke to him he just shrugged or nodded. Well, finally he sat down in Daddy’s chair and opened his mouth and his teeth were just braided with pubic hairs. The little dental hygienist Daddy had at the time practically screamed her head off.”

“Oh,” Liberty said.

“It was a joke, Liberty. A joke! You’re so stuffy sometimes.”

“Well,” Liberty said.

“The point is,” her mother said, “that Peter Marsh is running for governor. Isn’t it a small world? I hope you and Willie are still involved in the democratic process, Liberty. I think it would be fun for you to go out and vote for someone you know for governor.”

“Umm,” Liberty said.

“Is everything all right?” her mother said coolly. “There isn’t a burglar or anyone there, is there? A burglar just waiting until you complete this call, threatening you? Is Willie helpless somewhere?”

When time permitted, her mother practiced attitudes toward disaster. She studied carefully the written or televised accounts of victims’ responses — in particular the survivors of floods, hurricanes and plane crashes. She attended with grave interest the replies of mothers whose small children had been missing in some National Park for forty-eight hours. Liberty suspected that her mother still cherished the possibility of little Liberty in some alternate world toddling away from the cheerfulness of a family campfire into the wolf-filled gorges and bottomless lakes of a vast forest so that she could react with composure and grace.

“No, Mother, no, no. A burglar.” Liberty made a laughing sound. “How’s Daddy?”

There was an affronted, momentary silence. “How do you envision my life, Liberty? Really, I’m curious. You used to be such a sensitive girl. You act as though my life was the sound of laughter carried by a breeze over a green lawn. You act as though my life took place on a sunlit balcony someplace. Daddy’s the same as ever. When I met Daddy I had twenty-two cavities and filling them was the last thing that man has ever done for me. Do you remember Tina Terrance?”

“Yes,” Liberty said. “Tina was the artist who was living with you last Christmas.”

The Christmas turkey had crouched before them on the table. There was wine and brandy. There was a sweet potato and banana casserole. There was pecan pie. There was a white mop leaning against a wall, and just outside the window, there was a collapsing septic tank. Willie had been silent and extraordinarily silent that day like someone laid out in a casket. Before they sat down to the meal, they had watched a “Star Trek” rerun on television. The episode concerned a woman named Stella Mudd who was so shrewish that her husband fled into space, creating a colony of androids, including a duplicate of Stella, which could be silenced upon command. Lucile had felt that Lamon had been inordinately amused by the plot and it had put her in a bad humor.

“Your mother’s tense, very tense,” Tina had whispered to Liberty later, above the soapy dishes. “Very into signs like tent caterpillar shapes or dead wrens at the feeder. There have been these headless wrens lying around by the feeder and it drives her wild. Your mother’s not wrapped very tight, I think.” Tina grinned. “Like her marbles are a little flat on one side.”

“You’re saying her elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top, like,” Liberty said.

“Boy, you’re a cold one,” Tina said. “Innocence is not your game, I can see that.”

Liberty said, “I can even remember the name of Hitler’s dog now, Mother. It was Blondi.”

“I don’t mean to suggest that you should remember everything,” her mother said. “Only schizophrenics remember everything. Tina isn’t living with us any more. She moved out a month or so ago. She married the largest Negro I have ever seen in my life.”

“My,” Liberty said.

“Well, you know Tina. Everything is art to her, her life is her art, but honestly, the size of that man. Sometimes he puts his hands around her head, just playfully, you know, and her head just vanishes. Well, Tina’s gone and Daddy has already got two other students living here. These are boys. They bring home the most peculiar assortment of groceries. I think they must steal them out of people’s cars.” She sighed. “You know when you know you’re really old, Liberty?”

Liberty looked at a vein tapping in her wrist. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“I never dreamed I’d just grow old like this,” her mother said.

“You’re not old.”

“Forty. I’m forty years of age, Liberty.”

Liberty knew for a fact that her mother was forty-five.

“But we have to make the best of things!” her mother said. “You know the woman who got 1.2 million from the jury, the one whose husband died in the plane crash? Pots of people died in that crash, but she got the biggest award. She was in the hospital giving birth to their second child or something right after it happened. Isn’t that always the way? These women always end up in the hospital giving birth right after their husbands die, the same old revolving door story, and the nurse comes in with the fellow’s effects in this little box and there was his watch on one of those elasticized bands. There was this stuff webbed around in the band, it was like his skin, and the nurse said, ‘Why that’s nothing, dearie, it’s just a little fuzz like caught there’ and she rubbed it off with her fingers and dropped it on the floor. The wife got 1.2 million for mental anguish. Now that’s making the best of things …”

Liberty could hear her mother breathing.

“Talking to you at times is like addressing a paper plate,” her mother said. “Well, I’ve got to go now. I have to turn the water off under the carrots.”

After her mother hung up, Liberty kept the receiver to her ear. There was a faint sound, as of waves breaking. She could hear a distant conversation murmuring across the wires. Frequently the conversations of strangers were made quite plain to her. She had heard very clearly, for instance, a woman once describing a monkey-hair jacket she had had in her youth.

It was beautiful, the woman said. I knew what I was doing. I was ten years ahead of my time.

The voices that seemed clearest were the ones most lonely and aggrieved, the bitterest, the most amazed. There seemed to be a great dark mournful web of voices that Liberty could swing into as easily, as lightly, as one of its essential threads.

She returned the phone to its cradle. It instantly rang. When she answered, the communicant on the other end dropped the receiver.

“Doll,” Charlie said. “Scusi. Phone fell. I had to call you. I have new thinking relevant to our future together. I think we should change Teddy’s name to Reverdy. What do you think? Reverdy, a good Southern name. Do you know what Janiella, that awful woman, calls him sometimes? Odd. She calls him Odd sometimes.”

“How can she call him Odd?” Liberty asked.

“ ‘Odd’, she says. ‘Put that chicken pot pie in the microwave for three minutes.’ She says, ‘Odd, pick up your feet for godssakes.’ Things along that line.”

“I hate that woman,” Liberty said. “You have no taste.”

“I have no odor. Sterile men have no odor. We’re like vodka. Didn’t you know that? That’s why we’re in such demand.”

Everything was very quiet. Then she heard ice tinkling in a glass as Charlie swallowed.

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

“Liberty, Liberty, Liberty,” Charlie said.

Liberty imagined being with Charlie — two lovers in a melting embrace floating in a glass of whiskey on a sponged Formica table in an unfamiliar town.

“I have been a drunk for fourteen years,” Charlie said. “That’s seven years twice. I have spent this day in the contemplation of this crucial number, for it’s widely known that every seven years one’s nature changes. There are seven changes of personality in each of us whether our life be long or short. There are seven faces we will eventually show. There are seven attachments that must be broken. Yet seven, too, is the number of perfection. If one does not change, one remains perfected. Completed and therefore solved. Indeed, considered finished and so—”

Their connection was abruptly interrupted by a piercing whine, followed by a hum, followed by silence. Liberty replaced the receiver and pressed her hand against her ear. She sometimes had a grim vision of herself being this ear alone, a large and pale organ attuned only to complaint, bewilderment and sorrow — the antennaed hairs rough and sturdy as swamp grass, its intricate whorls pink and cute as a nest of rat pups — her true self teetering beneath it.

She looked at the phone, a black, horrid, hunkering thing. It rang.

“I hate being disconnected like that,” Charlie said. “It brings to mind The Big Disconnect, you know? They’re teaching Death to little children now in the schools. They have to write essays on How I Would Feel If I Had to Die at Midnight and they have to write it neatly. Neatness still counts.”

Liberty wrapped the phone cord around her arm. “Death’s always been in vogue,” she said.

“How’s the kid’s egg?” Charlie asked. “Is he still carrying it around? What a cute kid! He and you and me could really make it. I’m telling you our time to change has come. I’m talking life! By my calculations you have been married to this Willie person for seven years. Clem, your holy hound, is seven as well, am I right? And so is Reverdy.”

“Why does everyone want to change Teddy’s name,” Liberty said. “Reverdy, the Phantom, Odd …”

“We give many names to the things that matter most,” Charlie said. “Like, as you know, the Eskimos and snow.”

“Duane wants to dye Teddy’s hair a different color so he won’t remind him of his wife.”

“Watch out! He’ll do it. He’s a very sincere man. I met him just the other night at a party they gave. I had to keep my distance from Janiella but I chatted up the other ladies. Turquoise, teal and aqua are the big colors for the upcoming season, I told them. Mauve is out. Peach is still holding its own. White and bleached woods are very big. Country French is still in style, but Scandinavian never caught on. Beds are being emphasized, Euro-modernist is in. Then I chatted up Duane for a while. We drank. We spoke fornication, weaponry, engines, you know, boy talk. I know my business, I told him. If you want to sell a house, you’ve got to have a house that’s happening. Anecdotes, I told him. The buyer loves anecdotes. If a house has character, you can add another five grand to the sale price. We drank. Well, something clicked. He went into the bedroom, took his twelve gauge from the closet, strode over to the pool, wherein there were people, I might add, and took a bead on this little rubber frog that was drifting around in it. The little frog trails chlorine from its bottom, you know. Nice little frog with a happy smile, his rubber legs crossed and his rubber eyes happy? Well, Duane blasted that poor little froggy to smithereens.”

“That’s how it happened?” Liberty said faintly. “The crack in the pool?”

“He had misinterpreted my remarks a little. He thinks in terms of ballads. Everyone thought it was fairly amusing once they realized they hadn’t been maimed. After that event, we were all given a hamburger, another drink and a tour of the garage. Included in the garage tour was the freezer tour. There’s a big white humming mother out there filled with neatly wrapped packages that Duane made out of various Bambis he’s bagged. Chillness, obscurity, disarray, extremis. The mind stirs with no thought of future life when it contemplates that thing, let me tell you. Did I ever tell you what my mother keeps in her freezer? It’s not her underwear. She keeps her underwear in the refrigerator, in the crisper bin. What she keeps in the freezer is the fruitcake my grandmother was bringing over to the house on Christmas Day when she was run over by a motorcycle. That fruitcake has been in the freezer for five years. It’s wrapped in green paper and has a red string around it.”

“You’ve never told me that before,” Liberty said. “I’ve never repeated myself to you, have I?” Charlie said, shocked.

“You told me that your grandmother died from plucking a wild hair.”

“That was my other granny,” Charlie said. “Everybody has two grannies. You think you know my limits, don’t you. You believe you sense my deficiencies. You think I’m the sort of fellow who would lie about his grannies. You think I’m the kind of fellow content to maintain intimacies with a beautiful woman by the fluctuation of a magnetic field, that is, the telephone. You think language is just the human medium after all, and I’m employing it because basically I’m shallow. This human business has gotten a little out of hand you think. Drinkers can’t be lovers, you think. Oh the bleak, gnawing, crushing painful things you think! Your silence is a little black garden. You know everything there by heart.”

Liberty said nothing. She listened to his voice, which seemed to be blowing to her from across some blank expanse of water.

“Silence is Liberty’s little hidey-hole,” Charlie said.

She heard more liquid being poured into a glass.

“C’mon, talk to me,” Charlie said. “With practice our language will grow to accommodate the event of you and me and Reverdy.”

“Charlie,” Liberty said. “Where are you calling from?”

“Where am I calling from? I am calling from home, specifically from Room 303 of the Paradise Hotel on the corner of Coconut and Main. Every time I wake up in this room, I think I’m a case of mistaken identity. Do you see Room 303? The linoleum floor painted red, the single window scraped by palm fronds, the hostile eye of the TV, the ant cakes in the corner, the bureau, the bed, the bottle, me?”

“I see it.”

“Room 303 is where I don’t want to be, and I have been in Room 303 for years.”

“You have plenty of money,” Liberty said. “You could move out tomorrow.”

“That palm is suffering from palm leaf skeletonizer. Have you heard of that disease? I’m sure this palm has got it. Everything’s got something these days. A guy told me his car has arthritis … I do have money. After I saw you at breakfast I made another three grand in commissions. A young couple buying their dream house, deciding in my hearing where to put the Bokharas, the highboy, their marital bed, the baby’s nine-foot toy giraffe. They stood beside the caged pool and I could see their heads practically glowing with visions of pool sex, fulfillment, happiness, dreams of God knows what. It was so depressing. Stop! I wanted to scream at them. Your destiny is one of chaos. You will find only disappointment behind these walls, beneath this roof. Your desires are petty, irrational, unattainable. Your infant will grow to detest you. Your husband will be unfaithful. Your wife will scream at you with her bathrobe open. Intimacies will only occur between you when incited by parties, alcohol or aberrant fantasies. You must change your life! Become wanderers. Possess nothing. Confront your solitude. Go forth into the world.”

Liberty held her breath, then slowly exhaled.

“This wouldn’t be us, of course,” Charlie said.

“Charlie.”

“You love me!” Charlie cried.

“I love Willie.”

“Love takes time, I’m willing to admit. Certain kinds of love. But I know you’ll be able to find a place for me in your love, and when you do, we’ll just move right into it … the hound, Reverdy, you and me. You’ve got to get the kid out of his daddy’s house, Liberty. Duane’s nuts. When I was speaking with him the other night, he said, ‘Charlie, buddy, if I ever found out that a man was messing with my Janiella, I’d tear out both their hearts. I’d tear off their hands and roast them and eat them, the palms of the hands being the only thing worth having off a human being.’ ”

“You’re the one who’d best get out of Teddy’s daddy’s house,” Liberty said lightly. But she was frightened. She heard Charlie crunching ice with his teeth.

“Everything’s cyclic,” Charlie said. “The desire to live is cyclic. Why don’t you tell me I give good phone? Come on, talk to me. Silence indicates a considerable nada. You’ve been associating with that dog of yours too much. Heavy nada there. Not that I don’t think he’s great. But the eye with which one sees nada is the eye with which one sees one. You know?”

“I’m a silent married woman,” Liberty said.

“I have the television set on here in my room,” Charlie said. “It’s a game show. Husbands can apparently win fabulous prizes by scaling a gigantic greased washboard. The husbands’ wives are at the top of the washboard urging them on. Whoops. None of the husbands seem to be making it.”

“I have to go, Charlie.”

“No, wait, I’ll change the channel. Uh-oh. Wow, that’s disgusting … heart just popped right out. When is all this supposed to be taking place? In the long, long ago. In the days of sorcerers and the bicameral mind … what’s this!..”

“Charlie—”

“No, wait, I’ll turn it off. There, it’s off. Do you want me to read to you? I used to like to read these tawdry doomsday books, the kind with virulent bacilli and climatic melt where millions die, there is sex and savagery and man’s inherent dignity never comes up?… But I’ve changed my habits. It’s all part of my alteration process. I’m working my way through seventeenth-century verse and prose now. Andrew Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir John Suckling.”

“Donne, of course.”

“ ‘If God could be seen and known in hell, hell in an instant would be heaven.’ That’s Donne.”

“ ‘Miserable riddle,’ ” Liberty said, “ ‘when the same worm must be my mother and my sister and my self.’ Donne.”

“Let’s drop the seventeenth century,” Charlie said. “Too much morbid imagery. Too much sensual asceticism. Turn the light off and I’ll turn the light off. There. It’s dark. Now let’s diffuse the dark into little pinpoints of light, tiny brief explosions of light with words of love. Seriously, when can I see you?”

“You can’t.”

“I will,” Charlie said. “I will see you. Has your old man returned?”

“No,” Liberty said.

“Where does he go? Where do you go? I saw in the paper that two kids had been saved from a burning house in the Panhandle by an unidentified man. Do you think Willie traveled up there to do that? Could that have been our Willie? He saved the children. I think he even saved the aged collie. Do you know if Willie gives blood?”

“I don’t think he’s ever given blood.”

“Too minor probably. There’ll always be blood, right? I think he’ll be donating his living organs soon, important living organs. Then he’ll open the zoos and prisons. I have a theory. I think Willie saves people as a kind of joke.”

“That would be terrible,” Liberty said.

“Really. A joke. Willie thinks abstractly. He thinks in opposition to his brain. Actually, Willie doesn’t give a shit. Now myself, I think concretely. Your past is irredeemable, but it’s not over yet. Here’s what I want to tell you. I went out and bought us a car with the money I just made, a finny old Caddy, big enough to hold us all, the means by which we will make good our escape. Blinding chrome everywhere, my favorite color. And the trunk! Wait until you see the size of the trunk! I’ve begun filling it with stuff for us. Butterfingers, hot sauce, Chuckles, hominy, potted meats. When we’re ready to go, I’ll fill the cooler with limesickles for the kid.”

“All this is impossible, Charlie,” Liberty said.

“We’ll have to start out by car. It’s only reasonable. Then we’ll determine other means of travel. The kid doesn’t like limesickles, I’ll fill it with Creamsicles.”

“He likes the ice cream with the polar bears on them, actually,” Liberty said. “He collects the wrappers.” But he wouldn’t need the wrappers if they went away, she thought. They’d leave all that behind.

“All right!” Charlie said.

“Those polar bears kind of depress me, really,” Liberty said. “I imagine the real thing. And then I see the real thing far from its ice floe home, lying flat, jaws agape, on the floor of a Dallas mansion.”

“Liberty, you mustn’t allow yourself to be brought down by an ice cream sandwich.”

She laughed.

“Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, you think going away is just a feverish fancy of mine, but it’s not. Why would I want to deceive us? We have to begin. What I’m going to do is give up drinking. This is my last drink. This one right here, this luminous lovely, unlike all the others and more precious because it is the last …”

Liberty heard the sound of breaking glass.

“Oh no, oh shit, I dropped it,” Charlie cried. They both clung to the phone in silence. Then there was a click. Charlie had hung up.

Clem gazed at her from the floor, his forepaws curled beneath him. Liberty’s hands were sweating. It was quiet. Someone could break into this house, and it would be like herself breaking into the house of another. It would be someone just like herself. What is it that you want? she would ask the intruder.

When the phone rang again, she stared at it. There was something wrong with it, surely.

“I’ve been on a very pretty inlet,” the voice began, “the tide comes in, goes slack, pours back out. Very peaceful there.”

“Willie,” Liberty said.

“One sinks gently from nothingness to nothingness. No bubbles.”

“You’ve been gone for days,” Liberty said.

“It always amazes me. There’s nobody out here.”

“There’s nobody out there, I thought that’s what we always said.”

“We have our parts, don’t we,” Willie said. “Our lines.”

“Please come back. I’m missing you.”

“Come to me,” Willie said. “I called earlier, but the line was busy. Who was that?”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie is a tragic figure, but dimly, only dimly so. Have you been seeing him?”

“No.” Liberty looked at some daisies she had cut and put in a glass.

“He believes that everything’s meant to be forgotten,” Willie said.

Liberty watched the daisies. There had been daisies in such a glass for years and years, everywhere.

“Come to me tomorrow,” Willie said. “Walk to the end of Buttonwood Beach. Go down around six in the morning. That’s when the Gulf is going to be pouring back through the Pass. Jump in, and it will sweep you about a quarter mile down Long Key to a yellow house. I’ll meet you there.”

“Jump in? There’s a bridge to Long Key.”

“But it’s almost twenty miles from you. Jumping in is the way. I’ve checked the tides. You’ll drift.”

“Jump in, then drift,” Liberty said. “It sounds like what we’ve been doing all right.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Willie said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Liberty went into the bathroom and turned the water on in the shower. She undressed, then hesitated. She looked at the pitted handles and the silver water with its sulfur smell falling from the corroded head like thousands of needles. The water swept a small brown spider from a spotted tile. She turned the water off. Charlie had a point about showers.

In the bedroom, a voice from the radio was singing

Won’t that room of mine be a lonely place to be

After I been holding you so close to me

And won’t that old stairway be a little hard to climb

To a lonely room to wait for another place, another time.

The paddles of an overhead fan threw shadows on the wall. On the bureau was a framed picture of her and Willie, taken years before, when they were children. They did not stand close to one another. They had left plenty of room for something between them.

She wanted to take Teddy out of his daddy’s house, but she was weak, she could not be trusted. She was weak, a drifter. If she took him with her, he’d be a drifter too. A baby drifter.

She set the alarm clock, darkened the room and lay down on the bed. She heard Clem drop his weight to the floor. She tried to bring to mind her ladder, but this night it was not there, the smooth, furled, endless rungs, each of which she created, then searchingly found, down into sleep. This night it was the stairway of the song, now ended, a stairway rising crookedly upward, empty, but full of voices.