Breaking and Entering

1

The voices went on and on. This was years ago. Liberty’s father, Lamon, had once been a successful dentist. He was popular because he administered gas when he cleaned teeth and he used his prescription pad in an imaginative manner. Every afternoon after school, Liberty hurried to his office to observe his patients under the influence of nitrous oxide. Her mother thought she was there reading the magazines.

Liberty’s father was handsome and carefree, prone to minimalize the importance of the waning of love and the passage of time. His patients adored him.

“Your daddy,” Lenore Biddle said one hot morning in Liberty’s childhood, just before she reeled out the door, “highly resembles both William Holden and Father Johnson of St. Luke’s.”

In fact, there was something priestly about Liberty’s father’s ministrations. No matter how discouraged or tired his patients seemed when they entered the little rooms, they always left in high spirits, refreshed and confident, absolved, for the moment, of both care and carious lesions. The walls were blue, the color of peace; the tone of her father’s smock, green. The combination elicited confidence and confession. The need for confession seemed paramount among the men.

“I’ve been thinking, Doc, about time. We spend time as if we had too much time. We complain that the day is long and the night is long and then we complain because our days and nights are gone too soon. I’ve also been thinking about boredom. I have discovered that I am a boring man. It dawned on me yesterday when I walked into my office and realized that all the women I’ve hired look like Linda. Dark, sort of frizzy hair, so-so breasts, sweet personalities. You know my little wife, Linda. Well, it was a humbling realization, Doc, it was a boring realization. I can’t believe I was put on this earth just to be faithful to Linda …”

That was the lawyer. And there was the butcher, the gardener, the boat broker.

“I worry about being locked up. I can feel it, the pressure. Like being buried in mud, or frozen solid in a block of ice, or crushed beneath stones. Do you think I’m going to do something awful …”

There was the man who owned the old hotel, Oversea — where Liberty and her parents dined freely and badly once a week in the deserted dining room — who had the need, under gas, to recite limericks.

“There was a stout lad name of Pizzle,” he’d begin. “Oh, the little girlie’s here. Hi, sweetie,” he’d say to Liberty, who was slumped behind her copy of Jack and Jill.

He’d suck on the gas a moment more and puddle his bib a little. He couldn’t keep himself from continuing. “The best one of all,” he’d say. “There was a young plumber of Leigh …”

He seemed the cheeriest of the patients, but he killed himself one night, laying his head in one of the Oversea’s big dirty ovens.

The women seemed less philosophical. Even when the nitrous oxide took hold, they’d be talking about dinner and movies and what they’d read in the papers.

“D’jall see that article on those Siamese black girls joined at the head? They’re alike in every thought and mood except that one worries about her hair all the time, always fussing at it with brushes and combs and all, and the other one couldn’t care less … Joined at the head, I swear. They try to lead as normal a life as possible, the article says. They want to marry and have babies and they like Italian food and yard sales …”

Eventually, though, all would grow calm. Feet and knuckles would relax, eyes would shine, and mouths would move languidly around pic and pad and paste, as their terrors and concerns were absorbed for a moment in the vastness of the vision of a healthy mouth.

Liberty’s father lost his practice through prescription misuse and income tax fraud, but grateful patients kept the family going. Her father could always get a free haircut; her mother could have a chair reupholstered for next to nothing. Appliances and wine and citrus and quartered beef continued to arrive for months after the suspended sentence. Their house filled up with bad art. The gratitude of a man named Bobby String, who had been cured of trench mouth, knew no bounds. He owned a shop that specialized in Western Wear and Furnishings, and Liberty had a closet full of fringed jackets, chaps, leather vests and boots and belts with brass buckles the size of fists. Her books were clamped together with horse bookends, the shade of her bedside lamp depicted horses grazing and her bath towel hung from a ring gripped in the mouth of a bronze horse’s head. There were horses on her curtains, there were horses on her rug. She had a frightening milk mug where the handle was in the shape of a hysterically rearing horse. Liberty did not ride and actually had no longing for or opinion about horses, but her room resembled a shrine to the symbols and codes of puberty.

Lamon kept his good looks throughout his professional troubles. He kept his smile and his thick head of hair. Liberty’s mother, Lucile, fared less well. She detested being married to a failed man. She spent most of her days clad in silk pajamas, sitting in the breakfast nook. She brooded and let her housekeeping slip. The house became somewhat tacky to the touch. Plants withered. Even cast iron plants, even cacti, began to drop before Lucile’s devastating disregard.

Lamon took up painting. Lucile paced around in her darkening silk pajamas. Liberty concentrated on her homework.

“For special credit, I’m going to make up a country,” Liberty said. “I’m going to have a page on education and a page on religion and a page on weather. I’m going to make up a flag and a language and I’m going to draw the clothes they wear and their methods of transportation. I’m going to—”

“Oh, can’t you relax,” her mother said.

Liberty was an avid student. She loved school, she loved her teachers. She longed to tell her mother that the flowers depicted on her silk pajamas were four-o’clocks. Four-o’clocks had been one of the answers on her science test. Four-o’clocks hinted at the fathomless mysteries of genetics and fate, dominance and happiness. Liberty refrained from mentioning the four-o’clocks.

One evening during the long spring of the family’s disgrace, Liberty went outside to the picnic table and sat down beside her father who was tracing Elihu Vedder’s The Lair of the Sea Serpent out of an art magazine.

“That’s nice, Daddy,” Liberty said.

The painting was a pleasant landscape of sand dunes, beach, water and brilliant sky. Everything was rendered realistically, even the gigantic griseous lizard slithering toward the sea.

Lamon looked at the painting and then at Liberty. He poured bourbon into a tall orange glass that said FLORIDA THE SUNSHINE STATE on it. On the glass, the sun had a face. It had no nose or ears but it had a big smile and eyes with eyelashes.

“You understand life, don’t you Liberty?”

“I don’t think so, Daddy.”

“You understand that lurking in the heart of each pure, pretty day that is given to us is a snaky, malevolent, cold-blooded, creepy, diseased potentiality.” He patted her head, then cleared the picnic table of brushes and paints and set out plates for supper. It was a warm night with thunder, and the grass was long and yellow. Her father lit the charcoal in the grill and made another brown drink in the happy glass. Liberty went into the house to sharpen her pencils for school the next day. On the patio just to the side of the sliding glass doors was a planter in the form of a ceramic burro pulling a cart. The planter was full of leggy geraniums and the tip of the burro’s left ear. When Liberty had been smaller than she was then, she had sat in front of the burro every morning and attempted to feed him grass.

“Mommy,” Liberty called upstairs, “do you want one hot dog or two?”

“Two,” Lucile answered.

“Potato chips or potato salad?”

“Chips,” Lucile said and descended the stairs, smiling grimly. She wore nylons and heels, her good linen suit and the top to her flowered pajamas. A stole of several minks was draped around her shoulders, and she wore gloves.

“Are you going out, Mommy?” Liberty asked, perplexed.

“Yes, I am,” Lucile said, raising her eyebrows, which had been recently and severely tweezed. “I am going out.” Her thin, annoyed face was rouged, and her neck shone with perfume.

Well, if she is, she is, Liberty thought.

She followed her mother outside and the three of them sat down at the picnic table. Lucile pressed her gloved fingers together and gave a long, rambling, conversational grace that was equal parts prayer, complaint and nostalgia. She complimented God on certain things, expressing her appreciation of night-blooming flowers, the color violet and the vision of the world offered through snorkeling. She recalled Liberty’s birth and her craving, after its accomplishment, for a coffee malted. She remembered a vacation she and Lamon had taken to Mexico in the days when they had money.

“I thought I would have adventures,” her mother said. “I thought I would have experiences and make memories. But all I met there was Mr. Hepatitis. Your father took me all the way to Mexico to meet Mr. Hepatitis.”

This recollection seemed to stop her. She said “Amen,” nodded, opened her eyes, adjusted her mink, and began to eat her hot dogs. She ate ravenously. Ketchup dotted her gloves. The light dimmed and they finished their meal. A child in a house nearby began practicing the trumpet.

“I think we need a change,” Lucile said. She stood up. There were moth holes on the sleeve of her jacket and bun crumbs on her lap.

“Please, darling,” Lamon said. “I’m drunk and unhappy and I’m sure I won’t be able to react as swiftly as I would like.”

Her mother walked in her mink through the warm grass into the garage from which she emerged a moment later with a red six-gallon gas can.

“Oh please, Lucile, please, please, please.” Daddy lay his head on the picnic table.

“Do you have any matches, Lamon?” Lucile asked smiling.

“No, darling, I don’t.” His head was pressed against the picnic table as though glued. “I used them all up lighting the charcoal. There are no matches here or anywhere in the world.”

“Things come to an end,” Lucile said. “You have made us pariahs in this town. There is nothing in this town anymore for us but pity.”

“I bet you haven’t taken your pill,” Lamon said.

“Liberty’s teachers give her A’s out of pity,” Lucile mused.

“Please take your pill, darling, and you’ll go to those nice movies. You know that you enjoy that, darling. It will be like going to a pleasant movie.” Lamon sat up and tipped the ice from his empty glass into his mouth. Lucile turned abruptly and tottered toward the house, tipped toward the weight of the gas can in her right hand.

“Just remember that I love you, Lamon,” she yelled without looking back. “I love you, I love you, I love you!” The sounds of the trumpet ceased. Dogs began to bark. She went into the house.

Liberty hurried in after her. The gas can sat on a wicker love seat at one end of the living room and her mother sat in a chair at the other, smoking a cigarette.

“Mommy,” Liberty said. “What’s the matter? What are you going to do?”

“Do you know about the Buddhists, Liberty?”

“They meditate.”

“What else?”

Liberty chewed strenuously on her thumbnail. “They believe that there’s something other than existence.”

Her mother sighed. “What do they do to themselves sometimes, Liberty?”

“I don’t know,” Liberty said.

“You’ve never understood me,” her mother said.

Liberty, nine years old, bowed her head.

Lucile stubbed out her cigarette and twisted the little scowling minks from her shoulders with a strangling motion that, Liberty thought, must have terminated any illusion of life they might have had left.

“What the Buddhists do upon occasion is immolate themselves, Liberty.” She looked at Liberty expectantly, then sighed. “You’re too young to understand love,” she said.

Things seemed better the following day. The gas can was back in the garage where it belonged, beside the lawnmower. When Liberty returned from school, her father was standing in the backyard at an easel facing a blooming poinciana tree. Liberty approached the canvas, expecting to see a likeness.

“Daddy,” she said after a moment. “That’s a lot of teeth.”

“Fred Huxley’s mouth from memory,” her father said with satisfaction. “I’ve never seen such a mess before or since. He was playing catch with his son and the ball hit him smack in the mouth.”

Liberty wandered into the house and into the kitchen where she went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of 7-Up. Her mother stood washing dishes in the sink. She wore a pair of dazzling white shorts and a clean, blue shirt. Her hair was washed and neatly braided. She seemed happy and relaxed.

“Honeybunch,” Lucile said, “did Daddy tell you? We’re moving. Daddy’s going to get a job teaching in a little college up in the north of the state.”

“What’s he going to teach?” Liberty said. She looked at the girl in the bathing suit and cap on the dark green bottle, preparing to dive. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU the bottle said.

“Art, I think.” Her mother sniffed loudly. “It’s not much of a college.”

Liberty looked through the window at her father painting landscapes of teeth and gums from memory. “I don’t want to move,” Liberty said. “I’d miss school. I’d miss my teachers.”

“Now, honeybunch,” her mother said.

“I’d miss my friends.” Liberty clutched her knapsack and her bottle of 7-Up and widened her eyes to keep from crying. The thought of going off into some strange place with her parents terrified her.

“Well, actually, we thought you’d feel that way,” her mother said. “So Daddy spoke with Calvin Stone who apparently is very grateful for all the root canal work that Daddy did for him. Very grateful. And Mr. Stone said that you could live with his family.”

“Live with them,” Liberty said. “Live with Willie Stone?”

“Isn’t that nice?” Lucile said, cheerfully scrubbing the sink. “They have a little boy who’s in your class and you can be their little girl for a while.”

“Live with Willie Stone?” Liberty repeated faintly. Willie’s head and hands looked too big for his skinny body. He was so pale he looked as though he dusted himself in flour each morning, and his hair was dark and lanky. He wore boots and cuffed jeans like a redneck, although his father was a banker and his house had a swimming pool. Willie chewed on gum and a toothpick at the same time and always gave replies to the teacher’s questions that were wildly inappropriate without being exactly incorrect. At recess in the schoolyard when the girls combed one another’s hair and talked about the boys, no one ever talked about Willie Stone. No one wanted him in their heads at all.

“I think that a person thinks differently at night, Liberty,” Lucile said, “and last night I had a good think, and Daddy and I came up with this plan. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. That’s my feeling.”

Liberty pressed the bottle of 7-Up against her cheek.

Lucile looked radiant. She moved about the kitchen as though it were a ballroom. “Now, Mr. Stone is well off, I gather, and Mrs. Stone is quite religious. I don’t mean crackpot religious, the type who claims that Jesus enters them through the vessels of their ears and tells them what color to paint the kitchen cabinets, I mean Sunday morning services, Wednesday luncheon prayer, Friday evening faith healing type religious. So we may have to go to the expense of getting you a pair of black patent leather shoes or something. A realtor is coming over this afternoon so the house will be listed tomorrow. We’re selling it furnished, so if you want anything from your room, you should get it out. It will be a breath of fresh air for all of us, I’m sure. Daddy will teach and I hope to get a position with the Forestry Service. I believe that one can outwit Time if one pretends to be what one is not. That’s my feeling.”

“Mommy,” Liberty said.

“Some of us weren’t meant to be mothers, Liberty. But as far as I can gather, Doris Stone is a fine mother. She plants flowers from seeds — something that’s always impressed me — and she knows how to sew. These are good signs. Of course, I’ll call you every week, and after Daddy and I get settled, we can make other arrangements, but I know you’d prefer staying behind for now with your school and your friends.”

Liberty sat in the kitchen, which she had sat in more or less off and on since she was a baby, and felt it becoming increasingly unfamiliar. The improbability and injustice of her parents’ plan did not really occur to her. She arranged her books and papers in neat stacks, then examined the contents of her purse, a cheap and cherished zippered bag, which pictured a pink, sequined flamingo. In her purse was a snapshot of her mother and father taken at some cocktail party where they appeared somewhat flushed. There was also a pyramidical folded paper predictor, several shiny pennies minted the year of her birth, and one gummy quarter.

“I don’t have any money,” Liberty said.

“Oh, you don’t need any money!” her mother said. “From what Daddy told me, he absolutely recreated Calvin Stone’s mouth — made it better than new!”

Liberty did not receive calls every week from her mother. During the first year, her parents telephoned half a dozen times. Her father’s vague and cheerful tone was much as she remembered it being with his patients, while her mother related with breathless excitement her volunteer work for the Forestry Service. Liberty listened, holding her own phone in her own little room in the Stones’ house.

“The Florida black panther is, as I’m sure you know, Liberty, almost extinct, and my job is to go into the wild, deep into his habitat, and find out more about him or her, as the case may be. I find out more about him by finding his feces. Yes, that’s right. Yes, it is difficult. It takes a good eye. And I examine his feces and I find the hairs and little things of whatever he’s been eating and I analyze the hairs and whatever to determine his diet. And do you know what his feces tell me? Everything speaks to us, Liberty, remember that. His feces tell me that he eats rabbits and deer and armadillos.”

Liberty imparted this information at the Stones’ dinner table. It was received with respect. Conversation was encouraged at meals as well as any insight into God’s sometimes troubling ways. For some time, the subject discussed was Doris Stone’s daily struggle, through prayer, against a growing lack of confidence in her pastor who had cited wisdom from the cartoon character Charlie Brown in eighteen of his last twenty sermons.

Both Calvin and Doris Stone had always wanted a daughter and they were thrilled with Liberty’s presence in their moody home. Willie was a puzzle to them, as mysterious as a Communist. Calvin brought Liberty barrettes and comic books, taught her how to drive and how to fillet a fish. He wanted to teach her how to stuff an owl, something he had learned as a boy, but Liberty didn’t want to know. He taught her to dance by letting her stand on his feet, and he gave her a silver dollar for each of her years on earth. He taught her how to swim underwater with her eyes open. Whereas, once Liberty had stopped off at the dentist’s office on her way back from school, she now stopped off at the bank. They discussed the vile William Tecumseh Sherman and played a game of their invention called Beg-A-Loan in which Liberty would plead for large sums of money that would be used to put trees back together after they had been chopped down, or toward the invention of a new animal. At the bank, Liberty counted and added. She stuffed pennies into paper tubes and wrapped white bands around stacks of bills. Liberty was good and Calvin loved her. He was a simple man and he loved goodness. Choices had never been difficult for him to make.

Doris was kind to Liberty and told her many things. She told her that the way to prevent God’s anger was to be angry with oneself, and she advised her never to stumble over that which was behind her. Doris wasn’t a chatterer, but she told Liberty about menstruation and the idiosyncrasies of the Four Evangelists. She taught her calligraphy and stain removal and how to trim a rose bush.

The Stones lived in a development of two-acre tracts called Pelican Estates. The door knocker on each house was in the form of a pelican. Doris Stone had been drawn to this particular development because of the pelican motif. Pelicans were the bird of Christ, Doris Stone said, the bird of resurrection. The iconical pelican, as Doris had explained to Liberty, returns to its nest to find its young dead. Slashing its breast with its beak in grief, it draws blood which brings the young back to life. Pelican Estates had been built by the Abcoda Corporation, a fertilizer and insecticide giant, which had recently gotten into construction. Abcoda had no more connection with the bird of Christ than a tennis ball, but Doris lived her life by religious clue and inference, and it was Pelican Estates where inference had led her.

Each night Doris would come into Liberty’s little white room, set out her blouse and jumper and socks for the next day, smooth the bedsheets, plump up the pillows, remind her to keep God as a judge in her heart, and kiss her good night. She would then go down the hall to her son’s austere room where she would often find him, not in bed at all, but lying on an empty bookshelf, as cool and as still as a reptile, “just thinking” he would tell her. She would remind him that his evening thoughts should be an image of the day of judgment. She would urge him to recall the conversations and events and errors of the day and see if he could do better tomorrow. Then she would kiss her Willie and go downstairs where she would set out the breakfast things. This habit of Mrs. Stone’s always dismayed Liberty. Coming down in the middle of the night for a glass of water, Liberty would see the table set with its bowls and plates, its juice glasses and bottles of syrup. The kitchen would be dim and empty, clean and slightly humming, like a tomb in which comfy familiarities had been placed to accompany the dead into the unknown. Seeing clothing set out for the morrow or a table set out for a future meal would, years later, still fill Liberty with melancholy. But for Doris Stone, it was just another in the small acts of faith that enabled her to inch her way through the days.

After establishing, as far as she was able, the probability of a tomorrow that would proceed much in the way of the known today, Doris would make her own night preparations and slip into bed beside her husband. “Calvin,” she would say, “now, it’s too quiet outside to snore tonight. It’s a lovely, quiet night.” Calvin, half-asleep, would mutter, “I’m not as hard-hearted as people think,” in his mind already in the morning, in the bank, weighing and calculating, counting. The house would slowly grow still as each in their manner counted their own way into sleep.

Doris counts the foundations of the wall of the city of God. The first foundation is of jasper, the second, sapphire, the third a quartz of the palest blue, the fourth emerald, the fifth — the fifth she can never recall — the sixth and seventh are strange ones too, although sometimes they come to her, the eighth, beryl … and she sleeps. Below them all the table is set. Liberty lies with her cheek on the crisp pillowcase and counts. She counts the number of children she will have, their names and talents. And Willie counts too, counts something, perhaps the days ahead, the houses and voices and faces in them, their boredoms and luxuries and terrors …

When Liberty was twelve, Willie gave her a heart pendant for her birthday. It was a pretty little heart, thin and gold-plated.

“I was looking for a locket,” Willie said. “Something you could open up, but they were all too big. I wanted just a tiny one so you could maybe wear it all the time, so you’d hardly even know that you were wearing it.”

“I like it,” Liberty said. She was still a little frightened of him, but now she thought it was love. She clasped the necklace around her neck and kissed him.

“You don’t know how to kiss,” Liberty said.

“Sure I do,” Willie said.

Liberty giggled. “No, you don’t. You don’t kiss like that with your mouth just hanging open.”

“Well, where did you learn to kiss?”

“Travis kissed me once at school, but I’m sure I didn’t learn anything from that.” She made a face.

“Whores won’t let you kiss them. That’s why I don’t know.”

“Oh, Willie, you’ve never been to a whore.”

“One of them told me that the Devil was Jesus’ older brother. She insisted upon it.”

“You’ve never,” Liberty said.

“I might have,” Willie said. “But it’s a secret.”

“Just because you’ve told a secret doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve told something true,” Liberty said.

That night, on her birthday, Calvin took them all out to dinner. They went to Liberty’s favorite restaurant, a place called The Dollhouse. The building had once housed a loud, mean bar until, after a series of maimings and maulings, it had been shut up by the town, then bought by ladies of the Garden Club, an organization of which Doris was an active member. In the center of the restaurant was a five-foot, twenty-room, elaborately decorated dollhouse with over two thousand pieces of tiny furniture, the collective hobby of the Garden Club ladies. Doris had sewn the draperies for many of the rooms and the cabbage rose slipcovers for the chairs on the sun porch. Calvin himself had carved out a small plaque that was mounted near the front door of the dollhouse, because besides being a banker, he was a devoted fan of history. The plaque said:

On This Site

in 1865 Nothing

Happened

The Club was divided in their enthusiasm for Calvin’s addition. Some thought it too flippant an accord for all the work they had put into the project. Calvin Stone was a peculiar man, most of them agreed. He seemed to have no more pretense than a broom, but you never quite knew where you stood with him.

“How you all doing,” Calvin said to the diners to his right and left. He knew almost everyone in town. Doris followed and Liberty and Willie ambled behind. The hostess seated them at a round table near the dollhouse. She was a Frenchwoman with a fine bosom and round, fragrant arms.

“Ah,” she said, “it’s so good to see you and it’s an occasion, I can tell. May I bring you some wine?”

Doris placed her hand on her heart and shut her eyes, weakened by the very suggestion.

The hostess laughed and quickly removed the wine glasses. Her lips blossomed into a pout. “My car today, it just stopped on the road. You might have see it. It didn’t want to be a car anymore. My life, at times, seems planned by enemies. It’s an effort to live gracefully a life that seems planned by enemies, don’t you think?”

Calvin looked at her, bewildered. Liberty smiled.

“You look good today,” the woman said to Liberty.

Liberty had straw-colored hair, the white straight teeth of a dentist’s child.

“And your necklace, it is so beautiful. Is it a gift from your boyfriend?” She tousled Willie’s hair. “Un monsieur qui est par hasard un enfant,” she said. “It’s only chance that such a man is still a child.”

Calvin shook his head and grinned. “You sure are one heck of a hostess,” he said. “Do you believe we could all have some Coca-Cola?”

Whenever Liberty came to the restaurant, she would kneel on the padded platform encircling the dollhouse and raptly study its cluttered contents — its satin pillows, its variety of windows and cupboards, its closet hung with tiny clothes. The grand staircase in the hallway was papered with an optical deceit of gardens and flowers stretching into the distance. The parlor had wooden wainscotting and blue walls and in the corner was a New Year’s tree — a twig from a tree festooned with confetti. The ceiling of the nursery was painted with stars. In the kitchen was a black stove that flickered with paper flames and on the table was a plate of donuts. The donuts were toy automobile tires coated with baking soda. On the table too was a tiny knife and a pink-and-white roast on a platter. There was a gilded haircomb for the headboard of a bed, and there was water in the sinks and books on the shelves. There were a man and a woman sitting on leather chairs in the library, sprawled rigidly as though dead. There was always a lady writing a letter at a desk and always a child being given a bath by a girl in a white uniform. In the dining room, someone was always dining. In the pantry, a maid was always looking in horror at a plate just dropped and broken.

Liberty always examined the dollhouse carefully, noting what had been added and what removed. That night, as she knelt there, touring it carefully with her eyes, the Frenchwoman came up to her.

“You are a romantic, I know,” she said. “You remind me of myself when I was your age, when I was just beginning. Lots of things can go wrong with girls, you know, with boys not so much. Girls lose sight of themselves more quickly. Your little boyfriend, he is just a little boy, but he has many men inside himself. Perhaps you will not love them all.”

“Tonight’s my birthday,” Liberty said.

“Yes, yes,” the Frenchwoman said. “Everything is just beginning now.”

For dessert they had cake and ice cream. A sparkler flared from Liberty’s portion.

“This was so nice of you,” Liberty said, “all this.”

“What was in that package you got from your momma today?” Doris asked. “I’m just curious. Curiosity is something I just can’t stamp out of myself.”

“Well,” Liberty said, “it was a Fry-Pappy.”

“A Fry-Pappy!” Calvin said, slapping at his jacket pockets to call forth his wallet. “What you want with a Fry-Pappy?”

“We could make some banana fritters,” Doris said. “Maybe that’s what she had in mind.”

“Was it supposed to be a present or what?” Calvin asked.

“I guess,” Liberty said.

“We’ll make some banana fritters in it,” Doris said with determination.

“I’m not sure if it works,” Liberty said.

“It’s not a new Fry-Pappy?” Calvin said, puzzled.

“It might have come from a yard sale,” Liberty said. “It looks like it might have. My mother likes to go to yard sales.”

“Terrible advantage can be taken of a person at those places,” Doris said.

“Where’s your heart?” Willie said to Liberty. He put his hand against his own throat.

The heart Willie had given her was no longer there. The pendant had fallen from the cheap clasp. They all searched for it, on the table, on the floor, but it could not be found.

The Frenchwoman helped them look. “I know, I know,” she said to Liberty. “It’s just as though it were real. It is very important.”

Liberty thought that the woman did not know anything, although she was very pretty, very nice, crouching on the floor, searching, wrinkling her pretty skirt. She would later die of cancer, a year after she refused to have her breasts removed. She would die alone, the lonely death that disease had prepared for her.

“It is a great loss,” the woman said, trying to comfort Liberty, “but a romance like yours requires obstacles, dangers, fantasies. Always. Again and again.”

Then the locket was found. Willie found it. It was by the dollhouse on the lip of one of the staggeringly intricate rooms. After holding it in her hands for a moment, Liberty put it in her mouth and swallowed it.

“What a metaphor!” exclaimed the Frenchwoman. “What lovers they will be!”

“She is just a little girl,” Doris protested.

Afterward, they made Liberty eat a piece of bread.

But this was long ago. Liberty is not a little girl now, she is a woman, wedded to the boy who shared her childhood. She still has a beautiful hand and the power to render blood, wax, oil and grass stains invisible, but the mornings once spent in Doris and Calvin Stone’s house have darkened and become the afternoon. Years pass as moments do. And the moments of the past are stones behind her, over which she stumbles forward.

2

It was not yet light. The heavy, fish-scented air felt like a curtain falling, instead of rising, on the day. On the road to Buttonwood Beach, just before the macadam gave out, was a twenty-four-hour grocery and tackle store. There was a gas pump and phone booth in front of the store and a set of swings and some animal cages to the rear. By the pump was a large camper with a sedan in tow. Inside were a man, a woman, and a little thing in a terry-cloth playsuit eating a Ring Ding.

There were lots of things for sale inside — rods and lures, dirty greeting cards, food and wine, and souvenirs of all kinds including stuffed and varnished possums wired to pieces of driftwood. The possum creations were made by the owner, who had one arm. Whenever people asked him how he had lost the other one, he said he had lost it as a prank.

When Liberty went into the store the man who owned the camper was reading loudly from a printed tag tied by a rubber band to the varnished possum’s tail.

“ ’Because possums have spurred the imagination of man over a period of four centuries, a great deal of folklore exists concerning this common little animal. The forked penis of the possum is doubtless responsible for the long-held belief that copulation took place through the female’s nostrils, these openings being the only obvious dual orifice!”

“Argghh,” his wife said.

“I’ve got to buy one of these things for Woody,” the man said. He read on. “Since the mother was frequently seen pushing her snout into the pouch shortly before delivery, country people believed she was blowing the babies out of her nose into it!” The man looked up, baring his teeth. “Is this for Woody or is this for Woody!” he yelled.

The owner leered at them.

Liberty bought a container of coffee and two cheese sandwiches. Behind the counter, the schedule for the high school football team was posted. On the left side of the poster it said HERE, on the right, THERE. Beside the playing schedule was a flyer advertising the services of something called CounselLine, a tape service for the distraught. LET MR. BOBBY HELP YOU the flyer said. The tapes were categorized and numbered, and there were dozens of them available. There were commentaries on fear — fear of women, men, foreigners, heights, disease, success — and on loneliness, rage, alcoholism, depression and unwanted things. New topics would be added all the time, CounselLine stated. The number to call was the same as Liberty’s except for the final digit, which was a three instead of a four.

“How long have these things been up?” Liberty asked.

“ ’Bout a week,” the owner said. “I tell you, I use it all the time. That Mr. Bobby’s been so helpful I’d give him my other arm if he asked for it.” He flailed his good arm around to show it off.

“Can you think of anybody other than Woody?” the man was asking his wife. “How about Diane? Diane’s got a sense of humor.”

“Diane’s got a big nose,” the woman said. She leaned over and nibbled soft Ring Ding off her child’s fingers.

“I’d like to give my dog some water,” Liberty said to the store’s owner. “Do you have a bowl I could use?”

“Sure I do,” he said. He gestured with the shoulder his missing arm hung from. “There’s a faucet and a couple pans out back where the deer is at.”

Clem was lying beneath one of the swings in a furrow caused by children kicking the earth away. The morning was brightening and Liberty could see the cluster of cages, which seemed to be emerging step by step from the dark. Clem ate his cheese sandwiches. The family walked out of the store and headed toward their camper, the man swinging his possum basket.

“This is such a sick idea,” he said happily. “I love this sort of crud. It’s what this state is all about.”

The cages were empty except for one that held a single deer. The deer was a delicate pecan color and shared its home with a great many flies and a hubcap full of chopped-up watermelon. The pans by the water spigot were pie pans from The Blue Gate. Liberty filled one with water. BE THOU PREPARED, it said. Clem drank, and then they walked toward the road, but Liberty hesitated by the phone booth, which had another CounselLine flyer glued to it. The phone booth was like one anywhere with its books of names dangling on a chain, an obscure stain defacing its curved plastic. She dropped in a coin and began dialing her own number. It was like calling a grave, she thought, thinking of those people who buried a phone with their loved one in case an error was perceived by the dead. She shortened the last digit by one. The phone rang once, then twice.

“Yes,” a woman’s voice said. “Which number please.”

“What?” Liberty said.

“Yes,” the woman said.

“I’m sorry,” Liberty said.

“Did you call CounselLine by error?”

“No,” Liberty said.

“I could give you our most popular number if you don’t have a specific one in mind,” the woman said.

“Thank you.”

“We’re glad you called CounselLine,” the woman said.

A moth fluttered against Clem’s head. He snapped at it. The moth flew into his open mouth.

“Grief,” a man’s voice said into Liberty’s ear. “Dealing with grief.” There was a pause. “One can experience grief not only over the loss of a loved one, but over the loss of an opportunity. Even the loss of one’s youth, or a pet. We should not be ashamed of our grief. We have survived much before arriving at grief. We have survived fear, for grief is beyond fear. It is even probably difficult for you to remember what it was like to be fearful or apprehensive. All that was but a state of mind, and it is behind you now, as is the long night of sorrow with its twin moons of sadness and regret. Fear, sadness, regret, even anguish, which so terrify the spirit, are all behind you. You have lived through that long night that you thought impossible to live through, and have entered the dawn of a new day where you have been embraced by grief.”

There was another long pause suggesting that this was not a recording at all, but an intimate personal dialogue depending upon response, query and agreement. There were timed silences, like those on tapes giving instruction in a foreign language, giving one the moment to assimilate and repeat, but what was one supposed to do in the silent interstices of this running monologue on grief — accede? protest? scream?

“So we can consider grief to be almost our friend, but a friend, like all friends, who will not be with us forever.” The voice was a black man’s voice. “Grief will provide for you. You should be grateful to grief.” It was a river voice, laden with promise. “How best can I describe grief to you? I want to describe it in a picture sort of way.” There was another beat of silence. “What I want you to do is think for a moment of those quilted rugs that moving companies wrap around furniture for long trips in their vans. And I would like you to imagine a particularly fine piece of furniture. And a soiled, heavy, ugly cover draped around it. Now imagine that this piece of fine furniture being transported from one place to another is your …”—the voice hesitated—“… your heart, and that the cover is grief. The grief protects you in a way for the journey that must be made. For the time before grief is far away and in a different place than the time after grief, and the journey seems long. Indeed, sometimes the journey seems endless, and it is a frightful, difficult journey as we know, yet we know too in our heart that this must be so, that the journey cannot be easy or comfortable lest its significance be lost. The journey will end when it is time for the journey to end. And grief will be cast off.”

The voice dipped and soared like something hunting in an endless sky over a secretly teeming field. Then it dropped. It became light, confident, intimate.

“Mr. Bobby loves you,” the voice said. “Mr. Bobby has heard it all and he still loves you, each and every one. Now if you want to help Mr. Bobby reach others, lonely as yourself, just send on a little something. It need not be cash. You all know where Mr. Bobby is … Don’t be frightened at the silence that will follow now. Mr. Bobby is just on the other side of it and you can reach him anytime.”

The man with one arm was standing midway between the store and the phone booth, squinting at her.

“Ain’t he something,” he called. “You can get hooked on Mr. Bobby.”

“I don’t believe I want to,” Liberty said. “There are too many hooks around as it is.”

“I like to think of him as just being a voice, you know, not attached to nothing. You wouldn’t want to swap that dog there for my deer, would you? I need me a dog out here.”

“No,” Liberty said.

“Deer’s name is Elfina. She’s survived three assassination attempts by asshole hunters. Sure you don’t want to swap? She’s lucky. She’ll bring you luck.”

The deer stood watching them from the cage, flicking its gnat-gnawed ears.

“What’s that dog’s name?”

“Clem.”

“Not much of a name there. Where you off to anyway?”

“We’re off for a swim.” It seemed unlikely. She started out of the booth.

“I can’t believe you ain’t moved by Mr. Bobby. Here, try another one. My treat. The number of your choice.” He removed a coin carefully from his pocket.

Liberty dropped the coin in, dialed. “Thirty-nine,” she said.

“A later one!” he crowed. “Mr. Bobby really hits his stride with the later ones!”

With a click, the voice began. “Wanting,” it said lazily. “You got Wanting and Loving here. You want what you don’t got, which is the definition of wanting, and you love your clean kitchen floor don’t you or you love your blow and you want that clean kitchen floor to be cleaner still and you want more blow, and Mr. Bobby is not going to be the one to pardon you this nasty wanting and false loving. You don’t call Mr. Bobby for pardon, do you, no you don’t. You call Mr. Bobby because you suspect he’s got the ways and means to your damaged and enfeebled heart, and you know that Mr. Bobby don’t want a thing, just what you want to give—”

“Lemme hear now!” the man cried. He used the empty space of his gone arm artfully. Liberty felt its weight as he pushed past and grabbed the receiver from her. His face was full of expectation.

Liberty and Clem walked along the path through palmetto scrub to Buttonwood Beach. It was a pretty path, but toilet paper dangled from branches and there were several abandoned campsites with their nests of charred stumps and blackened cans. It was quiet in the pine and palmetto wood and the path was empty now, though obviously well traveled. Ahead, the Gulf was like a window placed between the dusty thatch of palms. The Gulf seemed swollen the same color as the sky and the beach lightened and darkened as long waves fell upon it then drew back. Liberty stared toward the Pass almost a mile away. It was narrow but fast-running, and from where she stood the severance between the Keys was barely visible. They startled plovers and terns working the shore into flight as they moved along, but a great blue heron standing hunched near the Pass remained motionless. As they came closer to it, Liberty saw that it was emaciated, fishing line tangled around its neck and head. The pale blue monofilament lay like fine cracks across its beak, and dangled down its neck in the long feathers there. Small twigs were caught in the line’s snarled end, even a shard of dark shell. The heron turned slowly and fixed Liberty with its yellow eye, but still it did not move. Liberty stopped, then inched forward. The heron shifted weakly, dipping its head and raising one leg to claw briefly at its beak.

A smaller heron, a green one, zigzagged toward them, then alarmed, veered chattering away. The blue stood like sticks a child had carelessly arranged. She should pass it by, she knew, for she possessed nothing with which to free it, yet she pulled her sweatshirt off and held it only for an instant before she rushed the bird, throwing the shirt over its head, clutching at its wings, trying to enclose its length in her arms. Its beak felt like an iron striking her with heat, its long bones felt like brittle grasses. She smelled the nutty, parched smell of dying on it as it flailed at her, making hoarse, barking sounds. The shovel of its chest glistened and was hot beneath her hands. She pushed its wings back close to its body, dragging the sweatshirt away from its head to bind them, and pressed the bird as lightly as she could against the cold sand. She leaned against its breast which rose in scatterings, like pebbles being thrown, and began picking away at the line with her fingers. She looked at the flecks of darkness in the bird’s bright eyes and felt that the moment was already over, that she was remembering it, that this was the moment that there had been just before it had become hopeless. The baggy line dug painfully into her fingers as she tried to snap it, then it suddenly broke. The heron’s head struggled back, the feathers beneath the broken line’s turnings frayed and damp. She was able to unravel several feet of the line, but there was so much of it, webbed and snarled like the matter glimpsed in some dreadful drain. Suddenly, the heron lunged, bringing its beak up and across Liberty’s cheek, tearing out of her grasp. Her hand slipped over its slick back, and then, with a last surge of strength, it was flying, its legs dangling, nicking the water, its long neck extended, trailing still the crippling line. Liberty held her hand to her face. She expected blood but there was no blood. The heron flew to Long Key.

She remembered a poem she knew as a child about an injured hawk who was able to fly only in his dreams. The child in her remembered everything.

She felt sleepy with failure and watched the rolling waters of the Pass without enthusiasm. The mist of early morning was rising, and she could see the silver Ts of docks on the sheltered side of Long Key. A red boathouse glimmered on water that looked flat and wooden.

There were scratches on Liberty’s arms, embalmed by drying salt, and her lips tasted of salt. Clem lay in streamers of railroad vine close by. When she stood up, he rose and trotted toward her.

They stepped into the water, let the water suck them down. Liberty opened her eyes and saw the emptiness of the water moving her. She couldn’t see herself, but felt her limbs aching dully, her eyes burning. Her body held her back, she felt its stubborn weight. It’s all a misunderstanding, she thought, like almost everything. The speed of the water was terrific. Her shoulder ground against sand and then she was flung upward and floating in calm yet moving water curving toward Long Key. She wanted to fix on something, a tree, the way the land fell, something that would remind her of something else. It had not been too far a distance, but she felt somewhat ahead of her body. Her body seemed to be behind her, still holding hard to nothing in the quick water. This is remarkable, she thought, the air, the muted sun … Her body caught her with a jolt. She coughed and shaking the water from her eyes, she saw Clem already waiting for her on the shore.

Liberty climbed from the water and sat for a moment, catching her breath. She wore only a bathing suit and a pair of shorts. She took the shorts off and wrung the water from them. Her arms and face stung from the scratches the heron had made. She felt afraid, and it was not a belated fear of the bird’s fierce beak but of the moment that had brought it to be doomed on such a fine morning, the moment that is the fatal one, which lies close and cold next to each thing’s heart.

Down the beach, she saw Willie, his trousers billowing out with the wind. He had his arms raised. She realized she hadn’t been thinking about Willie, only about reaching him. When she touched him, he kissed her. We are lovers, Liberty thought. We love. His kiss pushed against her like the wind and the sun. Then he pulled away and looked at her, saying nothing, but she saw herself as though she were fifteen years old again and listening to him, nodding her head, agreeing. She saw herself from somewhere, watching this girl in love, this sun-burnt girl, her ear close to this boy’s moving lips. One should listen. And yet … No, one should listen. It is one’s duty, one’s gift to listen.

Watching left her feeling sad and weary. She couldn’t remember. She didn’t want to. She remembered too much.

A low and rambling yellow house was behind a hump of dune over which a walkway of weathered boards was laid. They passed through a gated courtyard to the south where everything bloomed in profusion. The hibiscus were the size of dinner plates. Heavy brass wind chimes hung beneath the eaves, too heavy to stir in the wind that rustled the fronds of the Cuban Belly palms. Liberty touched one of the elaborate wind bells and it sounded dully. Behind the house, concealed from the road, was a curving, pebbled driveway. Each pebble seemed to have its place.

“Where’s the truck?” Liberty asked.

“I left the truck somewhere,” Willie said. “We don’t need the truck.”

Willie smelled of hot weeds and soap. There was a silky look to him, as though he’d been born in a cocoon. He looked incorruptible.

“You’re all scratched up,” Willie said, running his fingers across her arm. “You look thin. Have you been eating?”

“Sure,” Liberty said. “Sure I’ve been eating. You look thin too.”

“I need you. I need you to be with me.”

“I need you too,” Liberty said.

She was enchanted by him, she couldn’t look away. This was the long vacation in a rented world. This was their life.

“I went into a lunchroom yesterday,” Willie said, “but before I could order, the woman sitting beside me at the counter started to choke. She was eating a piece of cherry pie. She had her children with her. They weren’t eating anything, they were watching her eat. She was a fat woman, perhaps the fattest woman I’ve ever seen.”

Liberty raised her fingers to her throat. “You saved her from choking.” Willie saved people. There was nothing wrong with that. He covered, for a moment, their shadow with his own. And left them to the baffling light of days that should not have been.

“It wasn’t difficult,” Willie said. “She didn’t choke. Then she wanted to talk. She told me she was crazy about space. She had only completed the tenth grade, but she had some knowledge about galaxies and moons. She was raising her children to be astronauts. One kid wanted to be an aquanaut, which, she told me, had brought her to the brink of despair more than once. The kids sat there and didn’t say a word. She kept the kids around primarily to remain ambulatory. She didn’t believe in the soul, she told me, but she believed in immortality in an oscillating universe. She believed in bounce and re-expansion and the separation of mind from matter. Her mind, she told me, was not the mind of an obese woman. She assured me she knew how it would all end. She said if more people loved a vacuum, the world would be a happier place.”

Clem came into the garden with a turtle in his mouth. He placed it carefully in a bird bath and sat down to watch it. The turtle was shut tight as a tomb.

“Were there any other incidents?” Liberty asked.

He shook his head.

“You aren’t looking for these people, are you? You don’t try to find them?”

“Aren’t they coming to me?”

“They’ll start depending on you, Willie.”

“That would be a mistake, wouldn’t it.” He was still stroking the scratches on her arm. “Don’t you want to come inside?”

They went into a large, interior patio. Everywhere there was the faint, comforting sound of water. The water fell along a sluice cut in the marble floor and emptied into a long pool tiled in dark blue. One wall of the patio was a rocky grotto in which orchids bloomed. The water in the sluice sparkled like snakes, like barbed wire, like sunlight.

Liberty stepped up into the living room, onto thick, whitish carpeting. The walls were the same color as the carpet — a peculiar shade, like the glabrous skin of some animal.

“You always choose such decorous homes, Willie,” Liberty said.

“This isn’t decorous. This might be it, actually.”

“Might be what? It’s just another rich person’s house.”

“We could belong here. We could stay here.”

She saw the end of it, returning.

“There’s someone here already.” Liberty said. “What are you doing?” She was sure there was someone in the house.

“No, there’s no one. I was here all day yesterday and at night. There’s no one.”

The house had a cool, medicinal smell. There was a dark painting on the wall, which Liberty did not approach. She went instead into the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator. There were a dozen bottles of Taittinger, several sealed jars of bee pollen and a box of granola. She found a bowl in the cupboard and poured some granola into it. She uncorked a bottle of champagne and let it foam into the granola. In the wastebasket was a single, desiccated orchid.

“This is not real trash,” Liberty said. “The real trash is kept somewhere else.”

She put the bowl on the floor for Clem, then made another for herself. Clem lapped the champagne, then sneezed.

Willie laughed and picked up the bottle. He tipped back his head and let the champagne run down his throat. Liberty saw his strong throat working, swallowing. Champagne spilled and bubbled upon his chest.

“Champagne and granola,” Willie said. “Liberty’s porridge. You’re just like Goldilocks.”

“Goldilocks, the first housebreaker.”

“The blonde and appealing outsider. The bears come back. She jumps from a window and runs away. There’s something wrong with that story. That story doesn’t end.”

“Someone’s here,” Liberty said. “Why don’t you think someone’s here? How did you get in?”

“An aluminum jimmy. Don’t you want to see the other rooms?”

For a time, as a child, Liberty had desired a career as a chambermaid. She saw herself going from room to room, rooms silent and dim, terrible in their confusions, the causes of their disarray beyond her knowledge, their secrets both blatant and incomprehensible. And the child had cleaned them and brought order and even light. Room after room. Again and again. In an eternal, successful repetition. But she who was not a child had no order to confer, no pretense of design.

Besides, here there was order, even emptiness.

He had his hands on her hips, steering her. They went into a bedroom filled with gymnastic equipment, some free weights and a machine using stacked weights and a cam. Bolted close to the ceiling was a bar with inversion boots. Liberty felt that the person whose house this was lived a life of both hazard and comfort and never felt sorrow about anything.

In the bathroom by the sink there were hairbrushes, a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. There were no hairs in the hairbrushes. Liberty glanced into the mirror. She was the outsider, the onlooker, the eavesdropper. Even the image reflected before her was something she felt she could not occupy. Behind her, she could see the edge of a bedroom wall, which was painted a dull red like cranberries, and an open closet door. There were three coats on hangers in the closet. They looked terrible, like apparitions. But they were just three coats.

Willie lay on the bed and Liberty felt that she should move toward him, smile or burst into tears, put her tongue in his mouth, cover him with her wounded body, perform the blind rituals of women. She turned toward him, but her eye caught instead a white sculpted head on a bureau. It had zippers for eyes, two rectangular drawers for a mouth. It was a jewel box, she supposed.

“What’s this, do you think?” Willie said. He had opened the drawer of a table and was holding what appeared to be a flashlight. It was black and cylindrical, with a checkered pattern on the handle. It had a lens, but looked oddly malignant, as though it had been manufactured not for the purposes of light at all.

“It almost looks like a weapon,” Liberty said, “but it’s so small.” She touched a button on it and wafers of light struck and fluttered across the red walls.

“Anything can be a weapon,” Willie said. “In the house I was in on that very pretty inlet, there was a water pistol filled with ammonia in every room. Fear. There’s so much fear.”

Liberty put the object on the table. She sat down beside Willie and put her head in his lap. He stroked her hair. She parted her lips and pressed them against the khaki cloth of his groin.

He desired what she was still not. The weight and warmth she touched had nothing to do with desire for her. Charlie had told her that he once got an erection from contemplating an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. He told her that the moment, which had not been fleeting, had appalled him.

“What?” Liberty said.

“You were right,” Willie said. “There is someone in this house.”

Liberty sat up quickly and turned. A tall, muscular woman stood looking at them. She wore a bikini with a wide leather belt around her narrow waist. Weights hung from the buckle of the belt. Her features were fine, even aristocratic, but her face was deeply pock-marked, and the pulse in her neck quivered and jumped. She was old. The long muscles in her thighs bunched as she moved around the bed toward the table and picked up the cylinder lying there.

“You don’t know how this works?” she said. She seemed amused. She held it downward in the palm of her hand. “You cock your hand like this, as though you were playing with a child and making shadow images of a duck on the wall.” She tilted her head, inches from Willie.

Liberty thought of Teddy with a quick dismay, as though she had misplaced him, as though he were in her charge in this house but that she had forgotten where. Little Dot was already gone. She had allowed her to be gone, like a part of herself, twice gone.

“Then just flick your hand toward your target …”—The lower end of the cylinder flew out and hammered Willie on the arm. He grunted and turned pale—“… catch it as it reaches its fullest extension and snap it back to striking position again.” She snapped the thing several times in the air. “Little cobra-like flicks, see.”

There were a dozen small bleeding lacerations on Willie’s arm.

A telephone rang somewhere in the house. “Well, answer it,” the woman said to Liberty.

Liberty walked from the room in the direction of the ringing. She couldn’t see the phone. She felt faint and believed she was going to fall before she reached the ringing. On the beach she saw Clem, amusing himself by rolling rocks about with his nose.

The phone was covered with a wicker basket stacked with books. The World Was My Garden was stamped on the spine of one of the books.

She pulled the phone from beneath the basket.

“Yes,” she said.

It was the police. The police were selling chances on a bass boat. The bass boat would benefit bad boys who the police were trying to rehabilitate by sending them to camp. Liberty had heard about the camp. The bad boys cleared brush, made trails and learned how to put their thoughts down on paper. They took apart four-cylinder engines and put them back together again. The bad boys liked doing all these things but what they really enjoyed doing was catching armadillos and cutting off their front feet for luck. The police didn’t tell her that but Liberty knew it as a fact.

“I don’t believe I’ll take a chance today,” Liberty said, speaking in such a way, she hoped, as to leave the future open.

3

Willie came into the room, followed by the old woman. She was tanned and balding. She was oiled up, her hair was short, gray, and grew in tufts. She squatted down and looked upward at them as though to view them better, gazing at them as though they were forlorn, barely sentient creatures in a hutch. Thick, crisscrossing bands of muscle moved in her legs. Her face was gaunt and cruelly scarred, and her breasts were as high and round as a girl’s.

Liberty covered the phone once again with the basket. She performed this simple task soundlessly. It calmed her somewhat.

“Who was it?” the woman asked.

“Actually, it was the police,” Liberty said.

“I hope you told them everything was under control.”

“They were just selling chances,” Liberty said. “On a boat.”

“A boat!” she exclaimed. “How interesting! A boat to sail away in.”

Clem had appeared at the glass door. The woman looked at him with delight and let him in.

“This,” she said, pointing her bare, slender foot at him, “is a disguise, correct?” She smiled at Clem.

“The disguise of a repressed idea,” Willie said. He was still pale. He held his arm behind his back as though it embarrassed him.

“I understand,” the woman said. “He probably knows too much to have an actual personality. I like him very much.” She unbuckled the weighted belt from around her waist and laid it on the floor. “What were you planning on taking?” she asked Willie.

“Nothing.”

She looked at Liberty. “Why don’t you sit down, dear.”

Liberty sat down.

“Is this your husband?”

Liberty nodded.

“I’ve marked him now, dear, you know. He’ll never forget me.”

“These marks,” Willie said, looking at his arm, “will last a week at the most.”

She turned her back on them and flexed her muscles.

“You’re really ripped,” Willie said. “Your definition is spectacular.”

“Why, thank you,” the woman said. “That’s true. I’m peaking today. I like to peak each year on my birthday. It takes about four months. I stick with a basic split system routine. Monday, chest and back; Tuesday, shoulders and biceps; Wednesdays, legs and triceps. I train each body part twice a week. At first I was consuming thirty-five hundred calories a day but I gradually decreased that to four hundred. I also lightened the weights on some of my lifts. For example, I’ve been doing only two hundred pounds in the squat recently.”

“Today is your birthday?” Liberty asked. She felt disturbingly like the woman’s birthday gift, delivered.

“Yes it is. I am seventy-five years of age today.” She hit a pose, one leg flexed, hands clasped, smiling. Then she bent over and picked Clem up in her arms. She held him for a moment, then put him down again.

“He really is extraordinary,” she said. “I can lift twice my body weight, but no more. Of course, he’s not twice my body weight. He weighs around one forty, I would imagine.” She picked Clem up again and walked around the room with him. She thrust her arms out straight and held him close against the wall for a moment. It was an unnerving sight.

“He’s very close to being the shade of the walls, isn’t he, and the shade of the walls is exactly the color of the inside of Rothko’s forearm. That’s the color he always wanted as the backdrop for his paintings, you know. Pale ivory with a slight, yellowish cast, the color of Cellutex.” She pursed her lips. “It was the crook of the arm where he slashed himself, severing the brachial artery on February twenty-fourth, 1970.”

She set Clem down and stroked the tip of his ear. “Well,” she said, “we all have our February twenty-fourth. Even this one.” She turned her eyes toward the luminous painting on the wall. “I’ve always thought it was criminal the way Rothko painted pictures. Each time he made a picture, he committed a crime against the belief in the unquenchability of the human spirit.” She stared at the painting and sucked in her stomach. Liberty stared at the painting. Willie stared. Liberty felt that they were all on the verge of gulping for air in its presence.

“You’ve come here to make me happy,” the woman said, turning to them, smiling.

“Excuse me?” Liberty said.

“You’ve come here to make me happy,” she said. “Just this morning I was out on the patio drinking my water and protein powder and I realized that I felt better than I had in weeks. It was my birthday in my seventy-fifty year and my energy was in the morning. I felt so good I exclaimed aloud, The Purst Furfect Day!”

Willie laughed.

“Yes,” she said. “You might not have come a moment too soon. I may be on the verge of a vessel occlusion.”

“Your abs are razor-sharp,” Willie said. “Fantastic.”

“Thank you,” she said. She made a circle with her arms over her head and extended her right leg. Her calf did not tremble. Her pitted face showed no strain.

“How long have you been building up your body?” Willie asked.

“Only since the age of sixty-five,” she said in a formal tone. “I must confess I have grown to enjoy my body very much. I despised it as a young woman, but I’m interested now in putting it in the proper condition to be received. It’s the way I conceive of the journey. Rather, the way I conceive of the journey is in the way the journey ends.”

Willie looked at her as though hypnotized. His color had returned, but he was sweating.

The woman crouched, then bounced on the balls of her feet. Her sleek and bulging body was quite monstrous. “I love doing hack and sissy squats,” she said. “I could do them all day.”

Willie cleared his throat.

“I know, I know,” she said, “you believe that physical beauty isn’t everything, even that true beauty isn’t physical at all. Jesus, for example, was supposed to be quite ugly — small, ill-favored and insignificant, perhaps even a leper, at least up until the fifth century. Infirmus, inglorious, even indecorus, some said. My husband insisted that he saw him in World War II and that he was far from being handsome.”

“Where is your husband today?” Willie asked.

“Dust,” she said.

Willie raised an imaginary glass. “To dust,” he said.

“How rude of me,” the woman said. “Let me get us something to toast with.” She went to the kitchen and returned with a fresh bottle of champagne and three glasses. She popped the cork expertly into her closed hand and filled the glasses. “To all the gloomy dead,” she said. They all three drank.

“My husband was in the Navy when he saw Jesus,” she said. “It was in March of 1944. His ship had been torpedoed and he and fourteen other men had been adrift off Luzon in the South China Sea on a hatch cover eight feet long and no more than two feet wide for three days. He saw terrible things, men drinking their own urine, men drinking their own blood, men going crazy and dying all around him, men talking to the waves, thinking the waves were soldiers in ponchos going toward the cookhouse. His best friend was on that hatch cover with them, his very best friend, a red-headed freckled boy by the name of Billy Oakley. Billy Oakley couldn’t hang on after the second day. He was almost blind from burning oil and he kept saying to my husband, ‘I’m going below for a cup of coffee.’ He could see this large chrome coffee urn in the water. My husband couldn’t stop him. He tried to hold him back, but Billy Oakley untied himself from the hatch cover, slipped over the side and sank like a rock in the South China Sea. Other men were seeing ships or women or islands with neon bar lights blinking. Shortly after Billy sank, my husband saw Jesus. He maintained that he was fat, had green eyes and bitten nails and that he was dancing. He danced with my husband. My husband said that he had never known such happiness.”

“To happiness,” Willie said, drinking.

“I must have that dog,” the woman said. “May I have him?”

“No,” Liberty said.

The woman took a bowl of carnival glass from a table, poured champagne in it and set it before Clem. Looking more closely, Liberty saw that it was not carnival glass but Tiffany. Clem lapped it up.

“You don’t really need this fabulous creature, I’m sure,” the woman said. “Are you sure I can’t have him?”

Willie didn’t say anything. Liberty shook her head.

The woman sighed. “He can have that bowl if he wants it,” she said.

“We should be leaving now,” Liberty said.

The woman came closer and looked into Liberty’s face. She had a deep, loamy smell, like shade. “Your eyes are very dark and deep. I suppose people are always trying to get messages across to you,” she said to Liberty.

“Liberty’s brown, earthbound eyes are famous,” Willie said. “Children, alcoholics, the mad and the isolated, all of them think those eyes are the dust to which they must return. Every day, Liberty must fight the tendency to return to the inorganic.”

“I knew a girl like that long ago,” the woman said. “She was very close to the homeostasis state. She had amazing control. I adored her, but she felt nothing for me, nothing at all. I was a student at the time, bicycling through Europe. I met her in Rome on the Ostian Way, at that place where the three fountains are, that place where St. Paul lost his head. I’m sure you’re familiar with that story. When Paul was decapitated, his head bounced three times and wherever it bounced, a fountain sprang up. Well, I met her there. She was a splendid girl.”

She smiled at Liberty, then turned to Willie. “My name is Poe. It’s a name my nursemaid gave me when I was a baby. For years it was thought that I was retarded when the fact was I was merely exceptionally ugly. Your names are …”

“Willie,” Willie said. “Willie and Liberty.”

“ ‘Po’, po’ thing,’ she would say to me. ‘Po’ lamb.’ Her name was Lola. She was devoted to me. I had pustular eruptions on my face since birth. You could put nickels in some of the holes on my forehead. I sometimes think Lola, who died sixty years ago, was the only person who ever loved me. I’ve had so many lovers and so little love. Of course, I’m dreadfully afraid of Lola now. It would break her heart, but fear of the dead is common to all the races of mankind. It can’t be helped. How long have you been breaking into houses?”

“For a long time,” Willie said.

“One always thinks there are dreadful secrets to be learned, but there aren’t really,” Poe said. She looked at Willie and Liberty happily. “Burglars on my birthday!” she exclaimed.

“We’re not burglars,” Liberty said.

“My father once entertained a burglar,” Poe said. “We lived in a quite elaborate house in Connecticut. My father came upon this man skulking about in the foyer in the middle of the night, and he invited him into the kitchen. He made him a cup of coffee and cut him two large pieces of cake. They chatted about this and that. The burglar was of the high-strung, fox-faced, bad-breathed sort. He told my father that he recited the Jesus prayer all the time he was committing a robbery. You know the prayer? ‘Have mercy on me, a sinner, have mercy on me …’ He said that it kept his courage up. After they ate the cake, father suggested that he go next door where his neighbor had a considerable collection of gold coins. The man went next door and was immediately ripped apart by the neighbor’s vicious, barkless dog, a dog my father knew perfectly well was in residence. My father had an engaging but somewhat incoherent personality.”

Poe bent backward and supported herself on one arm. She flexed the other.

“You’ve had no difficulties?” she asked. “People are committing themselves more and more these days to self-protection and self-defense. You haven’t come up against any attack dogs or booby traps? No shotguns? No housewives skilled in aikido?”

“You misunderstand what we’re doing,” Willie said.

“No, dear, you misunderstand what you’re doing, but you don’t have to seek further. You’re here now, dear.” She bounced erect and smiled. “I have a friend, a lady who’s eighty if she’s a day, who’s made two muggers do the chicken in the last year.”

“Do the chicken?” Liberty said faintly.

“The carotid chokeout,” Poe said.

Silence attended these last remarks.

“Don’t be so glum!” Poe cried. “This is a lovely moment, a perfect moment, but you’re quite right. One must not trust happiness too much. Dancing with Jesus, for example, simply ruined the rest of my husband’s life.”

“What did he die of?”

“He died of nothing in particular, dear,” Poe said. “His life wasn’t very satisfactory. That incident on the South China Sea was just one of those things — the dancing, the harmony, the bliss of illumination, all that was just an instant, followed by years of mental bewilderment and profound misery.” She moved gracefully over to Clem, picked him up in her arms and sat down with him in her lap. “My husband came from a wealthy family like my own, and after the war, he invested his money in lodgings by the sea all over the world. Africa, the Caribbean, England, California … He was a collector. He loved fragments. He was always collecting ceilings and cornices and chimney pieces, grilles and gates and portals. He’d buy a place and make it quite lovely, modernize it, stick in these peculiar mixtures of things, hire good help, put in a pool and such, and in each place he’d erect a large cross on the roof right beside a satellite dish. I’m sure you realize what he had in mind. Daily, he’d expect Jesus to return on a giant, screaming asteroid that would rend the waters, enabling the sea to give up her dead. We would be able to witness the resurrection on television, he was sure of it. He was waiting for Jesus and Billy Oakley. Well, you can imagine how tiring it all became. He tired of waiting, I suppose, and then he died.” She gave Clem a hug and adjusted his choke chain carefully, as though it were a string of pearls. “Memory is dust’s only enemy,” she said.

“Did you love him?” Liberty asked.

“No, I didn’t, dear,” Poe said. “It’s not that I was jealous of Jesus or Billy Oakley, but I just never admired the shape of my husband’s mind. He believed that life was an objective process revealing God and naturally he was frustrated and offended every day of his life. He also had a ghastly habit of shooting Reddi-Wip directly into his mouth. He would never place it on a piece or gingerbread or anything, he would just shake it and shoot it directly into his mouth.”

She gave Clem another hug. “What would this wonderful creature like to eat on my birthday?” she asked. “Tournedos? Duck? Veal?”

“He’s a vegetarian,” Willie said. “He doesn’t eat anything that used to have eyes.”

“Why that’s wonderful,” Poe said. “Do you know that the thought of the eye made Charles Darwin turn cold all over? Yes. Cold all over. He said so himself. Eyes weakened Darwin’s theories considerably. One can go only so far with reason, a little further possibly always, but ultimately only so far.”

She walked with Clem in her arms to the pool. “Life is remarkable, isn’t it? Everything can change in an instant. Imagine me finding you all here on my birthday. Possibilities endlessly arising, that’s life.”

She walked across the room and down the steps into the swimming pool. She stood up to her waist in the bright water, Clem floating in her arms. It was like some dreadful baptism.

“I like animals so very much,” Liberty heard her say. “They’re so unanxious. They don’t weep. They don’t hoard up their dead in cemeteries.”

“I’m sure she’d let us go,” Liberty whispered to Willie. “I’m sure she’d just let us walk right out of here.”

“She’s going to ask a favor,” Willie said. “At the proper moment. Even, perhaps, a shade before the proper moment.”

Liberty went out to the patio and said to Clem, “Come here. Come.”

Clem paddled toward her. He clambered up the steps and stood beside her without shaking the water from his coat. Water pooled against his eyes.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it, the things one acquires,” Poe said. “But you should give him up, dear, really you should. We have to give things up.” She did a half somersault and swam the length of the pool underwater, then vaulted up and out on one massive arm. Her arms exhibited vascular genius. Her veins were like objects that should be personally addressed.

“I hope you’re still not in any pain,” she said to Willie.

He was standing next to the stone from which orchids clung. The orchids were white and yellow and scarlet and had black, scattered features that seemed like faces. There were dried flecks of blood on Willie’s arm. The reptilian pattern of the weapon was clearly visible.

“No,” he said, “it doesn’t hurt now.”

“The stigmata of the thief,” Poe said happily. “I adore thieves. The world is divided, I think, between thieves and those who wait, wait for fate to step in, like my husband. In one of our homes — it was in Italy, on an island — we built an enormous fireplace with a glass back so that we could see the ocean through the flames, but it meant nothing to him, for he was waiting, you see. He could see nothing through the waiting.”

“We can’t wait,” Liberty said. “We can’t wait here.”

“Oh, my dear,” Poe said. “You don’t realize what your Willie has done, do you. He has found the day in which he will solve himself. Please excuse me for a moment. I must get a wrap or I’ll catch a chill.”

“Let’s go,” Liberty said to Willie after Poe had left.

“In a moment,” he said. “Just one moment.”

She remembered feeling once that anything was possible. The sky was bright and blue and she was walking fast and could go anywhere. But that had been a moment years ago, and since that moment she had felt that her life was like someone else’s garden she had wandered into, something she could care for or not, like one did another’s garden.

There was a knocking on the wooden door of the courtyard. When Willie did not move and Poe did not appear, Liberty went to the door herself. A man stood holding a long white box of flowers. “I’m the florist,” the man said. He had a beard and a small head, and behind one ear was a pink hibiscus. “I see you’re noticing this flower,” the man said. “What this flower is doing is distracting you from the smallness of my head.” He looked at Clem for a long moment, then slowly extended the long white box to Liberty. “I want to tell you something right up front,” he said. “I was an oil tanker pilot for fourteen years and I didn’t have a single incident until one morning I crashed into a bridge, the same bridge I’d cruised under a hundred times, I crashed into that bridge and I sent twenty-three people to their deaths. I want to tell you that right up front. I don’t want someone to tell you later that the man who delivered the flowers you are about to enjoy was the cause of an incident that caused the death of twenty-three innocent people.” He gave Clem a loose, apologetic smile. He had a wet small mouth within his beard, a mouth such as bearded people often have.

“They just floated down into the ocean on a Greyhound bus,” he said. “I don’t think any of them could believe it.”

Poe appeared and signed the bill the man presented with a flourish.

“Jimmy,” she said. “How are you, Jimmy?”

“I’m not so good,” Jimmy said. “I’ve got these bad tunes playing in my head today. I’ve got these mean melodies.”

“Let me give you a little extra today, Jimmy,” Poe said. “Perhaps for some girl, some pretty girl.”

Jimmy shook his head. “Don’t need a girl. What I want is my own vessel back. I want my vessel.”

He drove away, his truck leaving a puddle of oil behind.

“You and your dog elicit confessions, don’t you?” Poe said to Liberty. “Who do you yourself confide in?” She was wearing an outrageous snakeskin jacket that seemed to double the size of her massive shoulders. She stroked Clem’s paw with her foot. “He has lovely large feet,” she said. “Like Greta Garbo. How long have you had him?”

“Not long,” Liberty said, as though it were the truth. “What, dear?” Poe asked.

“It hasn’t been that long. There was a while before I had him.”

“I would like you and Willie to perform fellatio in front of me sometime, would you do that?”

“Certainly never,” Liberty said.

“Pardon me, that was possibly an uncouth request,” Poe said. “Let me tell you about a friend of mine. She got the most gruesome headaches, simply unbearable headaches. And they finally discovered that the cause of them was a dislocated jaw. The jaw would just pop in and out. So the physician said, Absolutely no oral sex. So my friend engaged in no more oral sex. And the headaches vanished, but of course she was miserable. She died a miserable woman, her head clear as a spring morning.”

Poe laughed, looking at Liberty. “You find me depressing, don’t you, dear, well I’ll tell you, I have found that one can learn the most from depressing people. Jung and Monet, for example, were both very depressing individuals to be around. I knew them both. I drank champagne with Jung on several occasions. We discussed the first thought of the One and Absolute Being. Monet had a lighter heart. He could look at anything. Anything! I knew him at Giverny. Still, he had his failings. He was very argumentative. He was always arguing with the gardeners. It was understandable. Their concerns were fertilizers, acidity, overburdening the soil and such. He had five gardeners. He was always screaming at them.”

“What did Jung think the first thought of the Absolute Being was?” Liberty asked.

“He believed His first thought was the consciousness of utter loneliness,” Poe said.

4

The sun was in the exact center of the sky. It was the time of day when things are poised and cast no shadow because they seem so familiar. It was the time of day when the noontide demons are out. On the beach, dragonflies landed on the sea grasses, their transparent wings beating, their square helmeted heads secretive and pitiless. Beyond the beach, the Gulf sparkled and heaved. No one commented upon it.

The three sat around a massive limestone table in the center of which were the roses in a vase. Poe sent white roses to herself every year on her birthday. They were tightly budded and long-stemmed. Each stem had a plastic rod twisted to it to keep it upright. Liberty remembered roses such as these in a room she had been in once. There was something that a nurse had dissolved in the water on the first day to keep the petals from discoloring and falling. In this way, their passage had been arrested.

Poe had slipped a cut-off T-shirt over Clem’s head and forelegs. “The Disguise in disguise,” she said. Clem looked discomfited. He lay beside Liberty, his nose beneath his paws.

It appeared that a considerable amount of time had passed in which Liberty had not been paying attention. Months and years. She guessed that she had been distracted. She stared at the tabletop before her. The fossilized remains of ancient sea creatures stared back. Worms — they were worms. Worms and mollusks and sea fans. She touched their delicate tracings, their white and twisted shadows, with her fingertips.

“You must tell me everything about yourself,” Poe said. “Do you love him, this Willie?”

Love is the great distractor, and she had been distracted. Liberty cleared her throat to speak but it was as though the turtle that Clem had found in the garden had miraculously entered her throat and lay there, heavy, still, tight as a tomb, in the slick passages behind her unruly tongue, a thing almost acceptable, but terrible too, and cold, cold as what can never be known is cold, and she could not speak around it.

“It must be arduous,” Poe mused. “But if love were easy, what would be the point?”

“She loves a child,” Willie said.

“It’s far too easy to love a child,” Poe said, looking at Liberty critically. “At the very least, is there something terribly wrong with it? Does it have an extra chromosome? Is it epileptic or drug-addicted? A mongoloid perhaps?”

“No. He’s a great child,” Willie said.

“There must be some risk, dear. As they say in the bodybuilding game, if it doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it right. Is it your own child, dear?”

“No,” Willie said. “We don’t have any children of our own. We never will.”

“It’s not a tragedy you know. No sense in mooning and fussing about barrenness. The days are coming perhaps when we might say, Blessed are the barren!”

Willie pulled a rose from the vase. Tiny drops of moisture beaded its furled bud. The tips of the furl were already tinged with brown. He touched Liberty’s arm lightly with it.

“Jesus said that actually. He said more than his prayers, didn’t he.” Poe looked at Clem. “Does he say his prayers? You’ve seen those dogs, haven’t you? Well, perhaps they’re more common in Europe at those little street fairs. They count, they play dead, they say their prayers.”

“He doesn’t know a single trick,” Willie said.

Liberty pushed her fingers through Clem’s fur. She rubbed her foot up and down his spine.

“Let me tell you this little story,” Poe said. “I delivered a baby once. It was in an automobile graveyard in Alabama where I was looking for a bumper for my Studebaker. A cheerful and filthy child escorted me through the yard, reciting the history of his favorite wrecks. There was the VW van with the canvas sunroof through which a motocycle had hurtled, decapitating a passenger when the van failed to negotiate a curve. There was the Buick that had held six in a thunderstorm, all killed when a lightpole fell on them. There was the Olds 88 where the woman lingered for hours while they tried to carve the twisted metal away from her legs. The backseat was full of violets, which she had just purchased from a woman who had Parkinson’s disease and was selling her entire collection. The violets were still packed in the back as neat and unviolated as though they were growing peaceably on the forest floor, not a crumb of earth out of place. There was the Chevy in which the fourteen-year-old foul-shooting champion of the county had lost all feeling below his neck forever. The usual, but the little boy was thrilled by it. He had the widest eyebrows, wide as yours, Liberty. Well we came to this Studebaker, and I was pleased because the bumper was unblemished, but there in the backseat was a girl, crowning. She was a very young girl, pale and thin. Her stomach didn’t seem much larger than a cranshaw melon, but here was this baby coming out. She wasn’t moaning, but she looked terrified when she saw me, and the little boy, who wasn’t more than six or seven, said, ‘Oh Bobbie-Ann, when are you going to grow up!’ He was very angry. He had been such a good guide, you see, escorting this old lady through the junkyard, telling his wonderful stories, and then here was Bobbie-Ann, showing off again. Well, I delivered the baby. She was a very healthy, pretty baby. After she stopped wailing, I lingered for a moment and listened to the wind in the trees. They were whispering something that at the time made an enormous deal of sense. Never have I heard the susurrus of branches so clearly. There were mirrors everywhere on the jumbled cars … all the world seemed bright to me, yet falling, as though it had exploded. Bobbie-Ann didn’t say a word. She clutched the baby and stared at me, and the little boy had vanished. And then … I simply walked away, out of that graveyard of machines. I dreamed of that infant for some years. I traveled with her, into childhood, but I could take her only so far, or she, me, into her imagined life. I became quite adept at the process. I’m told I wasn’t exactly well during that period, but the things I could see! I could see her little shoes and dresses. I could see her pencil cases, I could see the light shining in her room at night and I could see her running in the grass … I kept everything. I was such a hoarder then. I kept the crusts I had cut from her bread, the skin from the hot dogs she favored. I kept the ringlets of her hair, the stuffed toys worn thin from her embrace. I was particularly good at visualizing her hands, at the little drawings she made for me, the houses with smoke pouring from the chimneys, the hearts and suns and so forth. We drove everywhere in my old Studebaker. We loved to drive fast, late at night, with the lights out. It was very beautiful, the speeding and laughing. She was fearless. I even went so far as to take her to the fair one night. We saw the world’s smallest horse, we ate blue sugar, she found a dime on the ground, her weight was guessed. Of course, we didn’t enter the exhibit that housed the two-headed calf. We didn’t see the collection of guillotines or the bedspread made from butterfly wings. Some things I wanted to keep from her. But a sailor gave her a rose, a rose much like one of these. He was a rather dangerous-looking sailor, but his gesture, I was confident, was innocent. We went on the bumper boats and the Ferris wheel. The wheel, which was all aglow with tiny lights, turned, and we were borne upward, and then the wheel stopped. You are familiar with the way the wheel stops? The moment when one can go no higher, the moment before the curving descent begins? I felt the coldness of the bar we clutched and the coldness of the stars above us, and then she left me … She left me there. I never saw her after that night, and I could never create another child in my mind. I had my menses punctually for three decades, a veritable tide table of the possible, once a month for one hundred hours, but then one day they left me as well.”

Liberty felt as though she were dreaming. She saw her hands on Clem’s coat as though dreaming them. But she moved her hands and the hands moved.

“I apologize for being so voluble, but you are my first visitors in many years,” Poe said. “It’s been almost as long since I’ve had a lover. My relationships with my lovers always went on too long. I always had difficulty extricating myself. My last lover drank a bottle of mercurochrome in front of me one evening. I had just said, ‘You don’t excite me anymore, Helen. One can’t be excited by the same individual indefinitely. People tend to be hypocritical about long relationships, and not to face the truth.’ She begged me to be hypocritical, then she swallowed mercurochrome. Nothing happened. We were both disappointed. Gesture had become the very heart of our affair. She had succeeded in poisoning her husband years before we met. It was arsenic. If you dug that man up this moment he’d be perfectly preserved. Like Napoleon. Helen was a theatrical woman, devoted to radical thought processes. For some, you know, the temptation is to play, to dream, to hang on to substitution forever.”

“I could understand Helen,” Willie said. “What became of her?”

“She disappeared, as many living people do,” Poe said.

“I could understand that too,” Willie said. “Living people disappear. It happens every day.”

Liberty closed her eyes. She had disappeared long ago, she knew, and so had Willie. But it was time to come back. It was time to come back or vanish. And yet what this was about was that it was too late to come back. The noontide demons were all illusion and error playing a game of outlaws and hermits, hiding behind the apparently real, the stubbornly real. The other couple appeared to her. There had been another couple, a horrible couple, tricked out to deceive, a man and a woman, then just a woman, through some accident.… Liberty opened her eyes and fixed her gaze outside, at the clear, vacant light there. The beach was still. Poe was saying,

“… and those who are left are usually so puzzled by it, the children, the lovers, the parents, the friends. They can’t believe it. I’ve never understood their confusion myself …” She looked at Liberty. “You’re admiring the light, dear? There is an extraordinary light here, isn’t there? It only reveals, never explains.”

“It’s just daylight,” Liberty said. “It falls on us all.” She hated the talk. Talking never explained anything, it was like the light, like one’s life.

“You can tell me anything,” Poe said. “Whatever you tell me will be the truth.”

“It’s not possible,” Liberty said slowly. “You are not a possibility.”

She saw the other couple again. She was aware of the mirrors, the loud music at the critical moment, the sweetness of the food.

“You don’t know what you want, do you dear?” Poe said. “Willie knows what he wants.”

“I don’t want anything,” Liberty said. She was close to tears.

Poe drew back. “And this animal,” she said, smiling at Clem, “who is always with you. Has he ever indicated what it is he wants? Would he care for my jacket, do you think?” She rose and took it off. The scales of the jacket caught the light and shook like oil. She lay it before them on the table. “I knew this snake. He was a companion of mine for many years. You mustn’t be alarmed. He died a natural death. He was enormous. An entire room here was devoted to his habitat and glassed off. He made such a lovely sound — the sound of a hundred castanets. When the little girl I was telling you about first saw him, she pressed her little hands against the glass and said, ‘Goodness.’ ”

“She spoke?” Willie wondered.

“That was the only time. ‘Goodness,’ she said.” Poe’s smile widened and she turned toward Liberty. “Why so glum, my dear! We should all be enjoying this rather sinister moment.”

“Liberty believes that freedom consists in being inaccessible,” Willie said.

“I’m not sure that’s true at all,” Poe said. “Perhaps your Liberty is trying to make an object of her life. It’s very difficult, you know, far more difficult than merely longing for what comes after — to try to make one’s life into an object for a sort of knowledge.”

Poe was pumped up, sharp, with not a single, blurred line. Her face was spectacularly, peacefully ugly.

“You’re a boy who likes to tell lies, aren’t you?” she went on. “Why is that? The truth is so much more frightening. I watched you here for a long time in this house. Oh, I didn’t watch you every moment, but I was here. You’re a boy who makes promises. You promise to make up everything. You’re the one who has dreams of serving the inconceivable.”

The day had a terrible sweet heat to it. Small black butterflies wobbled through the air.

“For a moment just then,” Poe exclaimed, “I was seeing us all from a great distance. The first time it happened to me I was with my husband, but it’s occurred dozens of time since then. My husband and I had just gotten into bed when I suddenly found myself suspended just beneath the ceiling, looking down on him in his pajamas, sipping his nightcap. My husband said afterward that he himself had seen nothing unusual. This from a man who had danced with Jesus! Well, perhaps he had seen nothing unusual. But I enjoy seeing my own body, as well as others, from a distance. I don’t dwell upon my head, but my body is good looking and I know it. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that autoscopy was a rather vulgar practice.” She stretched her hand toward Clem, but he stepped backward, out of reach.

“He displaces space so effortlessly,” Poe said. “He’s so sure-footed. Has he ever broken anything?”

“He has never broken anything,” Liberty said softly. The feeling persisted that there was something in her throat, that there were stitches of coarse brown thread holding the flesh together there, keeping something in, not letting it spill out.

“And you are never lonely with him, are you dear. And yet it is our duty to be lonely, don’t you know? One must strive to be more and more perfectly lonely. The heart grows indifferent, but one must push upward continually, more and more alone, toward the surface, like a blind, wild seed.”

She took the rose from Willie and brushed it against the razored darkness of her breastbone.

“Tell me about your lovers, dear,” she said to Liberty.

“There’s only been Willie.”

“Only is such a step into darkness, dear. The house of darkness throws wide its doors to ‘only.’ Do you know what I would like very much? If you would give me a day of your past, some summer day when you were just beginning, somewhere in that time when there were moments for you.”

Liberty was silent.

“You don’t want anything, dear, but you go on. That’s because your life wants, it wants you to discover it.”

“It was in July,” Willie said, “in the year when we were fifteen.”

“This is wonderful,” Poe said. “It was July. Really, I couldn’t ask for more.”

“Liberty and Willie,” Willie said.

“Lovely,” Poe said.

“They vowed to be different.”

“Of course,” Poe said.

“And never to be at the mercy of events.”

“Give me the twisted shape of the day,” Poe said. “The form that dissembler love took that day. That green and sour, fabulous, tedious day. Slim twins, golden children, your lips blistered, sweat running from your hair …”

“They were capable of any crime,” Willie said.

“The young, bless them, they want so to be damned.”

“They loved dangerous games.”

“There was something final in that day that doomed you,” Poe said. “I can see you then. You had the full lips of anarchists. Ringless, reckless hands. Your love was romantic, in defiance of life.”

Outside, the sun was descendant and pressed fiercely against the window glass. Clem lay on the cool rim of its sprawl. On the water, light lasted the longest. It was a day that was never going to end was the way it had once seemed to Liberty. But now it was beginning to end. She saw an image before her of her father, the blank canvas before him, beyond the canvas, the brilliantly flowering tree. He raised the brush … There was a moment, and beyond that moment was where the dead began.

“Perhaps we should pray, dear, before you begin,” Poe said.

“What would we pray for?” Willie asked.

“The usual,” Poe said. “Understanding.”

5

The summer that Willie and Liberty were fifteen was the summer that someone was mutilating the pelicans. Someone was capturing the birds, slicing off half their bills with a saw, and releasing them

Liberty saw such pelicans once; flying heavily through the bright air, flying with their dreadful injuries home. Once, she saw one closer. This was years ago.

Under everything that summer — the summer that they were fifteen — under the heat and the fitful breezes, the slide of leaves against one another and the soft, whipping sound the water made as it was flung in an arc from the sprinkler, under everything was the voice that says, Are you ready?

Willie’s mother had two gardens. She had her greens garden, but she had her flowers too. The flowers took up almost a quarter acre of their land and were Doris’s pride and joy as well as being the cause of her only moral transgression. She devoted a great deal of time to her flowers and did not want people to know exactly how much, for it was a considerable amount. She would often slip from the house before dawn, just as the stars were fading, to weed, to pick and pinch and dust for insects. Her head would be clear, her movements stealthy, and her heart would pound with excitement at her secret labors. Next to the flower beds, Doris had a little grove of flourishing fruit trees. When she had first planted them she had stone mulched them, and all her friends thought she was stone mulching them still, but the fact was, she wasn’t. Doris was only pretending to stone mulch her fruit trees. Any time one of her friends bought a young tree and commenced to stone mulch it, it would sicken and just about die, which confirmed everyone’s belief that Doris had a gift with things because she was so Christian. What Doris was actually doing was caring for her trees the usual way but rolling stones back around the trunk when her friends came to call.

There was a yard girl who worked for Doris three times a week but the flower garden was not part of her duties. The yard girl, a tall beautiful black girl named Mercury, did not know much about plants but she was strong and dependable and a tireless raker. Actually, she did know some things and these she shared with Liberty. She knew that poinsettia sap could take the hair off your legs. She knew that epsom salts would green up a sick palm and that a woman’s pee could force a jacaranda to bloom. But what Mercury enjoyed far more than plant care was raking the long winding driveway of crushed shells to make, over and over, longer and more numerous lines with the rake tines through the fine shells.

Mercury thought Willie and Liberty were brother and sister, though Liberty was always telling her she was just visiting.

“You sure been visiting for some while,” Mercury said. “Years, like.” She believed Willie to be the best looking white boy she’d ever seen. “That boy is some arresting in his looks,” she’d say, using the word arresting like a dollar she had to spend. “And he must be loaded with hormones too. I like watching his hair grow.” They would giggle together, girl and girl. In the mornings she would come to work, singing, on a pink bicycle.

Doris had a bird bath in her garden. It was a child’s plastic wading pool set in the ground and rimmed with coral rocks, its waters kept fresh by a circulating pump hidden behind some tuberous lilies. It was here, at the edge of the wading pool, where Liberty saw the pelican. She saw it, looking out the window of her room, a window through which light streamed in moteless rays. A pelican, miles from the sea, come to Pelican Estates.

The bird was full-sized although its head was still streaked with the downy yellow of the nestling, and it rested on the damp grass beside the pool, its head drawn back between the cleft of its folded wings. When it finally moved, it did so with a lunge, as though to capture the solace of the water unaware. Liberty saw the malformed, purpled pouch. Her eyes escorted her there, and there abandoned her.

She walked from her room, down the hall, leaving the coolness of the house for the quiet, breathtaking heat of the outside. She could hear the water lapping at the sides of the little blue pool. The heat had a whisper to it that summer, even the rain when it came had the whisper, like the stirring of flies. The pelican had come to drink and it could not drink. It seemed to her that she had closed her eyes, and when she had opened them again, the bird had vanished.

Liberty felt the pulling within her that was the knowledge she had — the something different from her which was the same, but further, pulling.

Mercury came up the driveway on her bicycle, her long black legs turning, the line the wheels’ wobble made following her lightly in the dust.

“Hey!” Mercury bawled.

“Hey.”

“I got a question for you, if you please.” She leaned the bike against a tree and walked over to Liberty. “This sure is a pretty garden, I wish I were accountable for it. Okay, then,” she said, “my question is, if a person is unconscious like from the sipping and he’s lying in his bed and you say something to him, can he hear it?”

“I don’t think so,” Liberty said.

“It’s not gonna all come back later to him? He’s not going to be visited by the total recall?”

“He was really unconscious?”

“My Chester was hardly breathing like,” Mercury said. “Dead drunk out.” She mopped her throat and forehead with a man’s big white handkerchief.

“No, then.”

“I said some things, oh! I had me a time. I worked myself up so I about could have killed him. He was lying there all defenseless and kind of cunning really, but I could have liked to drop an iron on him.”

“Oh, why!” Liberty said.

“I shouldn’t say why to a nice little white girl like yourself.”

“That’s all right,” Liberty said. She felt queasy and took tiny sips of the hot, heavy air, swallowing, trying to calm herself.

“Lipstick on his underwears,” Mercury said promptly. “My Chester’s an infidel.”

The girls stood there, mulling.

“An infidel is an unbeliever,” Liberty said, still distraught.

“Chester don’t believe in much, it’s true,” Mercury said, “and maybe that’s his biggest problem, he don’t have any standards, although he do have nice clothes. He gotten suits, all different colors. But you know the only reason I didn’t drop the iron on him and murder him on the spot? After I took his clothes off and seen the lipstick on his underwears? I seen the electric chair. Right in the corner of my eye. It was a little tiny thing about the size of a postage stamp and it was red but otherwise it looked just the way you know it looks, and the sight of that electric chair deterred me from my actions on the spot, just the way they say.” She nodded somberly and daubed at herself once more with the handkerchief. “This is some cruel weather, isn’t it,” she said.

Pressed in the corner of Liberty’s eye was the bird she had seen, the dreadful poor and feathered thing.

“There was a pelican over there just before you came,” Liberty said, pointing at the little pool. The pump whirred secretively, behind the fleshy, drooping lilies. “Somebody had hurt it.” She tossed her head in dismay.

“Uhh,” Mercury said. “You seen one of them. I heard about them. Some fisherman doing it, correct? This heat makes people mean. Days like this, they’re false days. It’s best to let them go right on by.”

“I went over to it thinking I could help it, but it flew off. I had some idea about fixing it somehow.”

“Naw,” Mercury said. “You try to fix a wild, hurt thing like that and what happens is, the same thing happens. You take them home and keep them warm and feed them things and you look at them and they look at you and in three days they die. You wouldn’t happen to have some ice for the ice tea I bought, would you?”

They went inside the house, to the kitchen. Liberty cracked apart the ice from the trays and dropped them into Mercury’s jar.

“Do you like that soft, mushy ice they give you sometimes in a cup that gets all colored up with what you’re drinking?” Mercury asked.

“No,” Liberty said. The coldness of the house made the bones around her eyes ache.

“Neither do I,” Mercury said. “So,” she said, “I’d best get started. I don’t want the lady to see too many of them dead leaves.” Mercury had put too much fertilizer around the trees near the swimming pool and the leaves were dropping. They floated, green and gold, on the surface of the pool and cluttered the trap. “I should have rinsed down into the roots more,” Mercury said.

“They’ll come back.”

“Sure they will!” Mercury agreed. She unfolded her long self from the chair she’d been sitting on and went outside. Heat clawed its way into the kitchen before the door swung shut. The heat had a force and a sound to it that summer, a smell and even a language to it — a dry and erratic click like a foreign tribe speaking, the sound of parched leaves and hot air stirring and clicking, the sound an animal’s untrimmed nails would make tapping and clicking on some polished floor.

Liberty went down the hall to Willie’s room. The bed was neatly made, the sheets pulled tight without a crease. Above it was the only decoration in the room, a poster of the planet Saturn and its mysterious rings. Willie had bought it the year before when their class had visited a planetarium. Liberty remembered how trapped she had felt there, in the darkness, beneath the expanding dome. The days had hurried by in the planetarium. Celestial bodies rose, moved toward the west, set. The heavens turned round and round. Sunrises followed one another more and more rapidly. Liberty had clenched the armrests, feeling she was going to be spun away. Then the sky had become dense black. In the place of stars, question marks appeared. “This,” a voice had said, “is the Universe as we know it.”

Liberty lay on the bed and looked at the poster. Saturn was cold and gloomy and peaceful. For a moment or two she lay composed, her mind blank. Then she thought, this is the way Willie feels alone here, everything quiet and still and far away, and then she wasn’t peaceful anymore for her mind had started to run, trying to capture what it was that Willie felt when he was feeling nothing. It wasn’t her own voice she heard but just the mind’s running in a rapid cold and clotted circle like Saturn’s rings.

She was fifteen and she was going to have a baby, she was going to have a baby, she was going to have a baby.

They hadn’t done it all the time. There was the first time, but then they grew cautious and there were other times but not always. There were good days and bad days, safe and dangerous ones, even as Mercury had attested, false days and true. But now there were just days that multiplied.

Liberty got up and smoothed the sheets tight again. She sniffed the pillowcase, which smelled of Willie, a soft palmy smell like a lake, then went back to her own room where she took off her clothes and put on her bathing suit. The suit was a faded one from the summer before that had lost its shape and begun to nubble. She felt childish and obscure in it and for a while picked abstractly at the beaded material, rolling the balls in her fingers and dropping them into the wastebasket on top of the calendar that she — sick of seeing the numbered days — had discarded there that morning. The calendar was one from church — there were several scattered throughout the house — and above the days that month was the Red Sea being parted, a picture that Liberty had come to dislike intensely. It was a quite ordinary interpretation. The blessed marched between towering but submissive walls of water behind which the creatures of the sea gazed forth, in wonder, with troubled, babylike faces, innocent and isolated.

She walked around her room. It was a pretty room, cheerful. The one window was filled with the view of the garden and it caught her eye once more, like a nail catching the sleeve of a blouse, but the garden was empty except for the massed colors of its flowers trembling in the heat. She was the only one at home. Calvin and Doris and Willie, too, were down at the church with other volunteers, painting the nave. She had been with them, but the fumes from the paint had made her sick. Honey, get away from that can and put your head way back, a lady had said. She was one of Doris’s friends. Her hair was in a bun and she had a dagger of dried paint on her cheek. Liberty had put her head way back and had seen the single fan in the vertex of the church, its paddles beating in a blur, whirling silently far above her, like a bat. And that had comforted her a little, for it was a familiar thing and something she had thought long ago for a time to be a bat before she knew it was a fan.

She had felt sick and she had come home. She would be all right. Everyone would be all right, she thought. Her life would be different. Very different, that was all. And that was fine. That’s what life was, the whole purpose of it was not to be left behind. And she and Willie and the baby would all three just go ahead and not be left behind, and it would be different, which was fine. She would be happy and stoical about it. Could one be happy and stoical at once?

Sweat crawled through her hair. She went out to the swimming pool.

“Ah,” Mercury said, “I been waiting on you for some company here.” She had tied herself up top and bottom in two big handkerchiefs, the knots riding like rabbit ears on her bony hips. The two girls went to the edge of the pool and fell flat out in.

“This water warm as buns,” Mercury screamed. They paddled around, Mercury kicking the water like a can before she stepped back out. “This is not the refeshment I imagined at all,” she fretted. “How’s it doing you?”

“It’s doing me all right,” Liberty said.

Mercury drew on her clothes, shook the corn rows of her hair. Liberty lay floating on her back, watching her through her spread out feet. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Mercury said, “hold on, day after tomorrow.”

“Bye then,” Liberty said.

“Bye.”

Liberty swam back and forth the length of the pool, first rapidly, then doggedly. Then she swam leisurely, as though she had all the time in the world, back and forth.

They had all come home by early suppertime, spattered with paint in an earthly camouflage of divine works. Liberty begged off supper by saying she still felt too hot to eat. She wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the canvas of the diving board, watching Willie and his parents moving about in the kitchen and settling around the table, bowing their heads momentarily in prayer over the fruit cup. The table was covered with layers of old clean cloths, for Doris and Calvin did not believe in throwing things away. When a person dropped his arm on that table, it would just about bounce off the padding.

Their motions seemed slow and insubstantial to her, as though they had been interchanged with wavering holographs and as she watched, a shiver moved slowly like a hand with outstretched fingers up her skull. Everything would not be all right, not all right at all. She had lived in this house like a child, like a daughter, for years. And now, wrapped in her towel, watching, she felt like a thief, but what was it she had stolen? She felt like a thief in a large coat, a coat with many pockets. But what was it that was missing from others, exactly, that she had so artlessly taken? Oh, but of course it was their love, and their trust, misplaced. In her. She strained forward a little, watching them eat. They seemed a circle, but there was her place, not set, but her place, empty. They were her family. Doris and Calvin were like Lucile and Lamon, but of course they were not, and Willie was like a twin to her, but he was not. He was not her brother, he was her lover, her first and only lover …

She didn’t belong to any of them anymore. She belonged to something else. She watched them, her mind turning slowly, falling. Willie was thin, as thin as she, they were both tall and skinny, as though the life they led that others did not see or know was wearing them away, the real life feeding on the merely visible one, the real life being secretive and inward and hidden. Their real life was exhilarating and artful and treacherous. It was invisible, but it was growing, growing away from them, and they could not be left behind, they would not be. They would have to follow it, leave with it. They would be driven out, they would not be fine, they would be led now by this life that others could see, and what kind of life was that?

Liberty’s mind turned and turned, hearing herself again, her own voice saying Don’t give yourself away, don’t give yourself away. The night sounds of insects were beginning, gently pulling in the dark.

Willie walked from the house toward her. He was not wearing swimming trunks but black trousers and a T-shirt that was very white. She pulled the towel more tightly around her shoulders. He was her first and last and only lover, she thought, and felt a thrill of sadness.

“I’ve got a job starting tomorrow,” Willie said. “Roofing. Tar and gravel. It’s going to be miserable.” He seemed pleased with himself. “In this heat it’s going to be murder. I’ll be working with four boys from Blossum.”

Blossum was the black part of town. Mercury lived there, all the blacks did. Blossum had a sewer winding through it that once had been a creek. The blacks didn’t want to make a fuss about it. The town was proud of the fine way they got along with their blacks, they were good blacks. On occasion, someone would get upset over there and kill some people, but they were usually his own people. They were his to kill was more or less the opinion when something like this happened. The boys who made good in Blossum played professional basketball. Some of the investments they made went right back onto the streets there. Anything you wanted you could find in Blossum. If you knew what you wanted, you could find it there. You could buy a machine gun or a child. And it had some of the finest gospel singing in the state. “Bread of Heaven,” sung almost every Wednesday night at The Church of the God of Prophecy on Marigold Street, had long been known to cause even the merciless to weep.

“I’ve got to tell you something,” Liberty said.

Don’t give yourself away the voice still said to her. Don’t give yourself away, which meant everything and nothing in a comforting and hopeless way. Liberty said the other words, the words that were not the real words, without even thinking she was about to.

“I saw a pelican in the garden today, one of the maimed ones, one that’s had part of its bill sawed off. It was so close … it was … I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“Birds are thoughts,” Willie said.

“Oh,” Liberty exclaimed, hurt. “Don’t be so indifferent. ‘Birds are thoughts.’ They’re not thoughts.”

“Why, sure they are,” Willie said. “You didn’t think that birds were all they were.”

His words, his presence, so familiar and yet so distant, had a peculiar effect on her. She thought that perhaps she had been the one stolen, after all.

“It was a real thing,” she said sadly.

“That’s a very old notion, you can’t blame it on me,” Willie said. “There’s a second part too which follows logically enough. If birds are thoughts, the mind is a birdcage.” He shook his head and made twittering sounds. Then he said, “You shouldn’t see such birds, Liberty. Poor Liberty.”

“Why would people do anything like that, why would they … I know you don’t know, it’s just I can’t imagine how they could do something like that, and do it over and over again.”

“They hate,” Willie said. “They’re good haters. They want to finish up things before they’re finished up.”

“Do you ever think about the future?” Liberty asked.

“How can you think about it?”

“Imagine it then.”

“Did you ever kiss a picture?” Willie asked. “Like a photograph or something in a magazine?”

“I guess,” Liberty said.

“The future’s like that. You’d be crazy to think it was real.”

“That’s not all craziness,” Liberty said. “I mean, it’s more deliberate. You let yourself go a little.” She was embarrassed about the photograph. She couldn’t even remember doing it exactly. But it was the sort of thing she might do.

“I’m ready for something though,” Willie said. “I’m ready.”

The summer night pulled and whined around them with its sounds and Liberty looked at him, thinking, why he knows this, he knows what there is next for us.

“I’m going to have a baby,” she said.

He said nothing. She fixed her eyes on his shirt, white as an egg in the darkness. Nothing. She pushed the towel from her shoulders and slipped into the water. It was cooler now, and dark. Her own voice said you’ve given yourself away … She let her head slide back and let the water hold her. Her body, floating, felt draped as though over a stone, and she felt peaceful, as those, she imagined, about to be sacrificed, felt peaceful. She floated, looking upward, a little breathless as though she had climbed many, many steps, and the terrible but peaceful image came to her of her beating heart being seized from her breast, being plucked like a carp from a pond, wriggling and rising into the night, becoming a star.

In the house, Doris and Calvin were listening to hymns on the record player. Calvin was dozing. Somewhere, in his dream, a toilet was overflowing. Money, he thought. Half awake, he rattled his newspaper.

And He walks with me,

And He talks with me,

And He tells me I am his own …

“I’ve always worried about this hymn,” Doris said. “It sounds so flirtatious.”

“Good night,” Liberty called to them from the hall.

“Good night,” Calvin said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “Good night.”

Doris blew her a kiss on her fingertips.

Willie was waiting for her in her bedroom. She opened the door and he said in the dark, “We’re so happy. We’ll never be this happy again.” She turned the light on because she didn’t want to hear the words he was saying in the dark. The light fell between them. “We’ll never be this happy again,” Willie said, “that’s what you don’t understand.”

“I don’t.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I don’t want to.”

Liberty took off her bathing suit and got into bed, raising the sheets to her throat. Willie went to her bureau, pulled a red scarf from the drawer and draped it over the little lampshade by her bed.

“Just the light,” she said. “I don’t like that rosy light.”

“It’s pretty,” Willie said.

“It’s lurid,” Liberty said fretfully. “Oh, I don’t care about the light,” she said. She pushed the pillow up behind her back and studied the hem of the white sheet. A hole in it had been mended with a circle of bright cloth.

“Are you frightened?” Willie asked.

“No.”

“Remember the planetarium, how frightened you were?”

“You said it was all done with machines.”

“You can’t remember the way you were, always frightened.”

“I’m not frightened now.”

“You’re not making this up?” Willie said. “You’re not just trying to make yourself up in another way?”

Liberty shook her head. “It’s a baby.”

“What’s it feel like?”

“Like me, but a moving away from me too. It’s nice.”

“It’s got gills still, and a tail.”

“Not anymore.”

“I’ve heard you can feel their fingernails scratching inside you.”

“No, no, not yet.”

“Like this,” Willie said. He slowly moved his hand toward her face and drew a long nail lightly down her cheek.

“Don’t,” Liberty said.

He put his hands to his own face and drew the nails heavily down. She saw red lines obediently follow the gesture across his skin.

“Your nails are too long,” she said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

He picked a paper punch from her desk and made a perfect moon in his thumbnail, then moved it, punching circles in the nails of each hand.

“That’s gruesome,” Liberty said.

“It doesn’t hurt.” He gathered the cuttings in his palm and closed his hand over them.

“You know what the worst thing is?” he asked. “The worst thing is to lead another’s life.”

“You mean the baby? The baby’s not going to be leading my life.”

“There’ll be three of us,” Willie said. “Before, there’s just been one of us, you and me.”

“We can do anything still.”

“You’re making plans. You’re making agreements. You make too many agreements with the world, Liberty. Something’s trying to murder you and you’re helping it choose the time and the place.”

“It’s not a murderer,” she said. “What are you saying? I’m not going to hurt this baby, it’s what’s happened to us now.”

“Happened to us,” he said. He shook the full moons of his nails into the wastebasket. That’s filling up, Liberty thought, filling up quite sensibly. “I want myself and you,” Willie was saying. “Not children. I don’t want this circular stuff.”

“Circular stuff,” Liberty said. “Circular stuff.” She was astonished.

“You want to become your own mother, instead of your own self.”

“I certainly don’t want to become my mother,” Liberty said. She tried to smile. His words were a net of abstraction, falling, settling. “You’re just scared is all,” she said miserably.

“We can’t just let things happen,” he said. “I’m not scared.” He wandered around the room, touching things, books and jars, with his strange fingers. He sat down beside her on the bed and pulled the sheet from her breasts, ran his hands across her ribs and belly. “We’re so beautiful,” he said.

“Ugh,” Liberty said, “those hands. You’re not as beautiful as you used to be.”

“Look at us, we’re beautiful. Haven’t we made up everything perfectly so far?”

“Well,” she said, “I guess not, no. There were a few things we didn’t learn when we should have, I guess.”

“You can’t learn everything.”

“Sure you can. You can share with anything too, love anything. And that’s what you’ve got to learn.”

“You can’t learn love, you can’t learn death.”

“Sure you can,” Liberty said. It was as though words were a bridge and the bridge had abruptly broken and she was falling. She touched Willie’s shoulder — the sensation was that real — to keep herself from falling.

“You’re the one who’s scared,” Willie said. “You shouldn’t be scared.” She clung to his white shirt, which was falling with her in her eyes. “If I died, would you follow me?” Willie asked.

“How could I follow you. I wouldn’t know you.” She was falling, there was no sense to it. “I don’t know any dead people,” she said. It seemed to her a failing, even somewhat disrespectful.

“We’ve used each other up here,” Willie said.

“No,” Liberty said faintly.

When they had been younger still, Willie’s mother had told them about death, and she made it sound so exciting they had wondered aloud if it was as much fun to keep on living. And Doris had said, Why of course it was. You had to get the living over with first. The important thing was to let God use you up every day. It you struggled against Him and didn’t allow Him to use you up, then the next day couldn’t be used up either, nor the day after that and you’d always be left with less than a whole life to get rid of.

“You still think it’s an amazing thing to be able to die,” Liberty said. “There are things that are a lot harder, almost everything.” She tore the scarf from the shade, but his face appeared the same to her, bony and known, a hungry face which seemed to crave nothing.

“I’m free,” he said, “and you’re free, but now, not later. I’ve always wanted it this way, and haven’t you really? And Mama’s God won’t have a single part to play in this, that God she thinks she knows so well.” He lay down beside her, cupping her face in his hands. His breath was sweet. “I’ve never believed in anything,” he said, “except you and me.”

They talked each other through that night so that in the morning they were slick, brand-new twins at last, sliding out of the same dark and purling womb of incoherent happiness. They talked their way out of that night right into the dawn where the world pulled back in golden halves like a peach does from a pit, disclosing the pit’s dark and ragged heart.

“You know what I’ve had all these years?” Willie said. “Your Daddy’s pills. He gave them to my Daddy when he was working on his teeth, for the pain, but you know Daddy, he wouldn’t reduce by a twinge the discomfort he felt was his to bear, and you know too that things never strike him as being suspicious, only people, and so he kept them. Mama moved them around so much she’d forgotten where they were by the time I had them. There are a lot of them, but there’s still probably not enough. And they’re old, so they’re not as strong either.”

“We want them strong,” Liberty said.

He showed them to her. There were black capsules with slim red bands. There were pink capsules full of scarlet grains. There were plump pills that looked like matrons in pancake make-up, and there were skinny, reckless ones that looked fast as race cars. A silent instrumental orchestra of pills, each containing its own dreams and intentions. A circus of pills, each containing its bears and tigers, its glittering globes and toothful acrobats. There were Miltowns and Equanils, Serax and Tranxene. All the pills had real names and then they had other names, like everything else. The other names, the names they had in Blossum, were Christmas Trees and Bluebirds, Rainbows and Green Dragons. The other names, like everything’s other name, suggested more light, more air, something furious and beautiful.

The new day brought a sky that was a cloudless ashen blue and soon the air began to click once more with the heat, with the clicking secretive language of heat.

Willie went off early to Blossum. Liberty tried to talk to the baby. The baby, she thought, knew nothing, but understood a lot, but the baby wasn’t listening to her. The baby wasn’t going to have anything more to do with her. The baby had picked the wrong person all right! Liberty tried to explain things to the baby as Willie had been explaining things to her, but this did not intrigue the baby. Liberty thought that the love she had for the baby was natural and instinctive and that the love she had for Willie was more intentional. Deliberate love was supposed to be more profound because it committed the soul, even though to Liberty such commitment had the rotting color of eternity tinging its boundlessness. And that was where they were headed, right into those rotting, blue and black colors. She tried to tell the baby that, personally, she felt that the other love, which she had wholly for the baby, was what was going to see them through, but the baby wouldn’t listen. What the baby understood was that it had climbed into the wrong spaceship.

Willie came back at noon, hazed with tar and grime. In a bakery sack, he had more pills. “Interaction,” he said. “Our hearts will burst upon command.” She reached in and making spittle with her tongue, she swallowed one. “Not yet,” Willie said. “We’ll lie down together in the shade. I have champagne.”

“We need ice,” she said, “and cups.”

He laughed and kissed her on the mouth and laughed again. His lips were hot and dry. She walked past the swimming pool, which lay still, grasshopper green on the lawn, and toward a patch of shifting shade cast by fig and pepper trees. She was wearing a skirt she had last worn to a dance and a yellow blouse. She folded her hands on her stomach. It was so still she could hear a phone ringing, the choked rattle of its call, and somewhere, a door slamming shut. Willie brought ice in a silver bowl, a bowl Doris used to float flowers in, two dark and sweating bottles of champagne and glasses from a set that Calvin had received with fill-ups from the gas station.

“I brought your favorite glass,” he said.

“The Invisible Girl,” she said. “Sister to the Human Torch and wife of Mr. Fantastic.” I had a favorite glass, she thought, and here it is. The Invisible Girl could be seen. She wore a silver jumpsuit and her lip was curled.

They drank champagne. He scattered the pills in the lap of her skirt where they gleamed like candies. There were so many there — she put one in her mouth and it had a greasy, purpling taste. Another had a flavor of metal, as though she’d pressed her tongue against a chain. She thought of the coat that had many pockets, but it was an imaginary coat.

“You’re a natural thief,” she said.

“We’re both thieves,” Willie said, “stealing God’s day.”

Soon all the pills were gone. She saw him swallowing and she swallowed, but there was nothing left. Her head was pounding. She said, “Sssshh, I’m trying to remember everything.” Snow, she thought, I want to remember snow. But she had never seen snow. Beaches, she thought. Water falling upon water. She thought of the little glittering pool in the garden, then thought of a well, filled with the bones of luckless creatures. But beneath everything, deep down, the freshness, she felt it, the freshness, the sweetness there. She stretched out in the shade. Willie held her, but she didn’t want him to for the first time. The Invisible Girl, she thought, wife to Mr. Fantastic. They were dying, she thought. She smiled and said to Willie, “I know better than this.” Her eyes were burning and through them she saw the raked driveway winding to the blacktop road. It was just the road that wound past other houses into town, but it seemed strange. The trees seemed taller alongside the ditches, their green and gold leaves trembling from the heat of her burning eyes. She started to walk down the road but there was a dog guarding it.

She was all alone, and she stopped.

Mercury found them. She had come back to talk to Liberty about her Chester, for she liked to talk to Liberty, she liked the way Liberty listened. She saw them there, sleeping hard, leaves lying on their faces. Mercury giggled and touched Willie’s hair, the long, soft hair of a white boy. But when she turned to Liberty, she saw green foam around her mouth like you’d see on a horse, and when she touched her she felt cold. She managed to slap and shake Willie awake. He vomited with his eyes open, becoming unarresting forever more in Mercury’s mind.

The sheriff’s men were called and Liberty would think later that she could remember them, the colors of green and gold weaving in the heat, the leaves’ sick colors blending into the deputies’ shirts. And she thought later she could remember them asking her questions. People always asked the dying questions, Liberty thought, and the dying probably lied and didn’t even know it. Having the same words available as they’d had all their lives and no new ones probably made lying pretty much inevitable. The click of the heat had become their questions, which had then become a clatter, like utensils being stirred about, being rattled in a pan. Her throat was opened, like a window, she thought, being flung open wide, although they said she could not remember such a thing. But she did remember. She was alone with them in a white room, the men in green and gold, and the days passed. Once, she heard one musing …

I surely wish I could catch that boy that keeps robbing them banks. That boy just seems to float through them drive-in windows, waves a paper bag he’s got wrapped around his hand and the ladies just start heaving the money out. Four banks in a week and a half. That boy could steal the stink off shit and not smell.

The other said Shut your mouth, Hicks. There’s a sick girl in here.

Hicks said She’s in a coma. She won’t take no offense.

She was brought back, then almost lost to septicemia, but her poisoned blood was taken from her drop by drop and she was brought back again. Mistakes were made, but in the end, infection simplified her. It unadorned her. There would be no more babies for Liberty. Liberty’s babies all went to live in that world where mistakes aren’t made.

There was one floor on a wing of the hospital where certain people went for a while and Liberty went there. It was called Five North. Willie was not allowed to visit her, but he sent her things. No one else came. Willie sent her perfume once and once he sent her a game where there were numbered black and white plastic pieces sliding in a frame. There was one empty space. Each piece had a number, but the numbers were all mixed up. The person who was playing the game was supposed to use that empty space to make order.

On Five North there was a lady who came once a day to talk to Liberty. Her name was Miss Tweedie. Miss Tweedie enjoyed working with people on this wing because they were so polite. Being back in the world seemed to hypnotize them.

You look upon your nondeath as a threatening danger to you, Miss Tweedie said. She had bitten nails, which must have been a drawback professionally, but she had a birthmark on her jaw that could be interpreted by the ill at their leisure. Liberty almost expected her to point to it and say What does this represent to you?, but she never did. Liberty did not look at Miss Tweedie’s face much. Instead, she watched the gnawed, scrubbed nails lying in the woman’s lap, sometimes on the coverlet, sometimes daubing in the air. Love can sometimes be a curse, Miss Tweedie said, even a sickness.

There was a common room on Five North where people could gather for coffee in the morning. On Sundays, there were cookies with the coffee and a Bible was placed out. On the day Liberty was going to be released, a woman in the common room screamed out His children are far from safety and they are crushed in the gate! She poured scalding coffee over her arms with joy. A man shouted Amen, Amen, we’re Job’s children we’re all of us Job’s children! The people stirred and flung themselves back and forth like fish in the waters of a shrinking pond. Some shouted and wept. Liberty pressed herself against the wall and played the plastic game, hearing the others but not watching them. Her fingers quickly moved the plastic pieces back and forth, up and down. Her fingers flew across the moving pieces. The woman who had burnt herself with such happiness was led away, and the room grew calm again, and stilled. There was no outside to the room, that is, the outside could not be seen. The room was wallpapered to appear like a long, wide view of trees — a young forest of slender trees with the glint of a river winding deep within the dimensions of it. It was a glade, Liberty thought, or a copse. She could look at it for a long time. The colors were green and gold like the deputies’ uniforms. She thought she could remember the deputy who was a philosopher, or was that the other one? The one who was writing something down, his big hand cupped as though he were writing on the palm. She is a felon, he was writing, who attempted to break into the house of death …

Once a day, Miss Tweedie came to see Liberty. Miss Melanie Tweedie had been employed to help her. You almost died, dear, and at times you feel you did die. That’s a very common feeling, it’s been well documented. In times of war when a man survives and the buddy right next to him does not. That’s where most of our documentation comes from. Or from multiple car crashes or tornadoes. The word buddy sounded strange on Miss Tweedie’s lips. But in your case, dear, no one died. That little thing, bless it, wasn’t anything you must think died.

Liberty sat on a bed in a seersucker bathrobe and stared at the nubs of the cloth. She counted the nubs on one sleeve and then the other. The numbers never came out the same. The nubs of the seersucker gave the appearance of something missing. You are preceiving your life, which you really look upon as your nondeath, as a spectator Miss Tweedie said. Oh, it’s possible to know so much today.

There was, of course, a doctor. He told Liberty that there was a chemical substance similar to morphine produced naturally in the brain when death was near, when the other systems began to fail. Everything, the doctor said, can be explained eventually. The doctor’s son had won a jingle contest sponsored by a cereal company and the whole family was going to Hollywood for a week. Doctors can’t afford to take things too seriously, the doctor said. Miss Tweedie was short and the doctor tall. They came to her each day like the hands of a clock.

Then on that day Liberty was to be released, it was Willie who came to her. Miss Tweedie helped her pack her things in a brown paper grocery bag. The bag had a hurricane-tracking map on it, for it was the season. The sky was gray with big hot rain clouds massing. It was the fall now. Willie had been outside and she had been inside all this time and no one thought it was unusual.

She stood outside the hospital with him, looking backward at the windows of Five North. There were holes for windows there, but there was no glass. There were louvers, and behind the louvers, concrete block.

“Where have you been?” she asked him.

“I haven’t been home,” Willie said. “They won’t let us live there anymore. I’ve been living in Blossum in a trailer.”

“Are we going there?” she asked. She shaded her eyes with her hand against the stolid light. She felt that she had a job to do, that she had just been hired for this job. She had to live out each day, one after another, until her days were gone.

He shook his head. “We’ll go outside town.” He wore jeans, a jacket without a shirt and a beautiful and incongruous pair of wing tips from a thrift shop. She knew they were a dead man’s shoes.

“I still trust you,” Liberty said.

“We missed, didn’t we.”

“Part of us didn’t,” she said.

“My father gave us money. It will last us a while.”

Liberty remembered Beg-A-Loan. She remembered a drawer in Doris’s kitchen filled with clean dishtowels, the smell of her embrace like fresh biscuits. Everything had been in order there, loving and illusionary. “Are your mother and father all right?” She tugged at her hair, a habit she had picked up in Five North. Broken strands of it fell through her fingers.

“No,” Willie said, “they’re not all right.”

“They’ve shut the door, have they?” she said, pulling her hair.

“Old-fashioned banishment,” he said. “The result of too much Bible study.”

“My parents don’t even know anything about this, I guess.”

“I don’t think so,” Willie said. He took an envelope out of his pants pocket. “We have to get a car. I know where we’re going to live.”

“All right.”

A school bus went by with younger children on it.

There was money in the envelope and a tape. “They sent us this too,” Willie said. “I haven’t listened to it.”

“I can imagine,” Liberty said.

“Hurt and sadness,” Willie said. “Fear and panic. Regret.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“We could go over to Tape Ape and listen to it.”

Across the street from the hospital was a record store called Tape Ape. Beside it was a florist, then a bakery, then a bar. Liberty and Willie had often gone into the record store after school and played records in the cubicles there. She had forgotten about it. They had gone there all the time. A lot of the kids from school did. She tried to remember if she had any friends at school, if she had ever done anything with these friends, like listen to a record in a booth at Tape Ape, wondering whether to buy it or not. She thought she probably hadn’t. She had gone there with Willie. She held the bag with her things in it against her stomach. She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that she had been hired for the job of accomplishing this day and the day after. The thought picked away across her mind like a buzzard on a highway, its ragged wings raised, its frightful head daintily moving. Across the street in the bakery, cardboard cakes filled the window in tiers. There were birthday cakes and wedding cakes, samples of what could be done.

Liberty looped the tape out with her fingers, then bit it in two. She wound the tape round and round her finger and dropped the plastic casing into the street.

“We don’t want this song,” she said. “We don’t want this to be our sad song.” But she knew that it was, that even unheard it would be their song.

Willie watched her somberly. He was large and young and almost grown, and in his youngness he seemed larger than a man. He frowned a little, full of what seemed manly reserve and self-control. Or perhaps he simply felt nothing. The girl with him had a fallow look. She appeared a little irresponsible, her hair was wild, her face drawn, although she did not look close to tears. Her heart, big as a baby’s head, beat on. It was going to beat on.

They stood, two suicides, blinking at one another in the day’s ashy light.

6

Down the beach came a rider on a gray and golden horse. The rider passed.

“You poor children,” Poe sighed. “You’ve given up lust, love, even life in order to remain together.”

“She’s forgiven me,” Willie said. “She didn’t mention that.”

“Forgiveness,” Poe said. She shrugged, dismissing it, then pushed herself away from the table and stood up. Her arms swung wide from her powerfully sloping shoulders. “Love,” she said. “It hounds us every day of our lives, baying at us with its hound voice. It follows us and runs before us and beside us, it doesn’t leave us in peace for a minute, but at the hour of our greatest need, our death, it lies curled meek as rags in some dark corner.” She sighed. “Well, that’s a sad, sad story and now that you’ve told it, there’s nothing left for you but to stay here, with me. It happened a long time ago, but that was when you entered your life, dear. And that entrance allowed you to go so far and no farther. You won’t go any farther.”

Willie’s eyes were blank. He seemed to accept this.

Liberty reached down and pushed Clem’s legs out of the T-shirt. She worked it over his head and dropped it on the rug. It had a chemical smell, a burnt smell, like hurt earth, hurt air. She pressed her wet eyes against his coat.

“He’s such a comfort, isn’t he,” Poe said. “Are you familiar with the works of Melville? There was a man who knew a great deal about whiteness, its quality of absence, ‘its dumb blankness, full of meaning’ ….”

Liberty stroked Clem’s coat and glanced at Willie. His eyes were half-shut now. The eyes are drawers, she thought, smoothly sliding drawers that open and close, filled with things that are put in, taken out.

“I could teach you a great deal,” Poe said to her. “You are always endowing nothing with attributes. You know so little of life. You’ve known only a man who has betrayed you and an unborn baby. You have him still, of course,” she said, nodding at Clem, “but that’s not something you can know. That’s his whole purpose, after all.”

“We’re leaving,” Liberty said.

“You think your life is more than just the story of it?” Poe asked.

It was nonsense the woman was speaking. She was just an old, rich, crazy woman.

“I’m tired,” Willie said. “We have to stay a while.”

Liberty saw him and he did not look tired. He looked as though something had been released in him. He was forgetting her, had forgotten her. She looked at her hands. It had something to do with hands she was sure. She had simply taken his hand and they had left. She had known how to do it. But she could not remember. The other couple had been in chairs and they had been in chairs. They were eating dinner or had just eaten dinner and moved to other chairs. The man had a round, protruding stomach that made him look off balance when he moved. He had stopped smoking or had been on medication that was the wrong medication. The man was a developer — effusive, a manipulator, cruel. The woman cooked. It had been a dinner invitation. The woman wore tight jeans and a bright red shirt and had a lined, childish face. Where had Willie found these people? Where had they been then? It was not a place she could quite remember. They were not near water, but there had been water against one wall. An aquarium filled with fish, the water a sapphire blue. It had been in a town on their endless travels, in the South. Outside the door was pasture with nothing grazing in it. How had this couple known Willie? People liked Willie, they were drawn to him. He had a calmness, he seemed quite selfless. He had the charisma of one to whom one thing was equal to any other. The evening had ended badly, in confusion. It wasn’t quite clear how it had ended.

Poe was gazing at her. “It must have been terrible for you,” she said, “to come back, to make that long journey back and find him …” She hesitated.

Willie stirred in his chair. “Wanting,” he said.

“Wanting.” Poe nodded. “Yes, wanting something still. Wanting something very close to me. Always.” Poe cocked her ragged face primly. She seemed to have shaken out her body, which was now as smooth as a bullet.

“Don’t picture me,” Willie said.

“I picture you perfectly, more than you had ever hoped. You’re a boy in love with lustral death. You can empty yourself again and again in me. It will never be enough. You’re inside now. For years you’ve tried to cling to the outside, but it wouldn’t have you, would it? I’ve brought you inside now.”

“I found you,” Willie said. “It was me who found you.”

“That’s just your pride saying that, dear. I know, I know, I’m not beyond pride myself. Today my body looks quite glorious, but by tomorrow, well, by tomorrow it will have lost its edge, and then the process must begin again.”

There had seemed something staged about the evening with the other couple, as though they had done it before. But how could they have done it before? They had settled down after dinner as though waiting for something to play itself out. The man with his hard, horrible little stomach. He had rested his hand on it as he spoke. Willie had seemed apathetic. It was as though he had lost interest and they were trying to interest him, particularly the woman.

Liberty stood up. “Let’s leave,” she said. “We’re leaving.” Her legs felt numb. She was exhausted. Yet the talk of the lost baby had released something — the broken waters of memory. The waters breaking should have meant a deliverance, but there had been no deliverance. And now it seemed as though there would just be the waters, breaking.

“Stay, dear,” Poe said, “stay with your Willie. See how beautiful he is. He has the look of those hermits portrayed in the frescoes of the monasteries of Athos. He is old, your Willie, he was born old, and has always been more ingenuous than you thought. He has their face, the ones who have always believed in the last temptations, the last miracles. Centuries ago he could have been a static. He could have been an anchorite in those rock abbeys of Turkey, in Cappadocia, living in that fantastic landscape of stone, carving from rock his table and bed. You made him struggle to live in the world and he never wanted the world. It held no astonishments for him. You had come back and you were always bringing him back. He didn’t want love, he wanted mortifications. And all you could give him was love.”

Liberty stared at her.

“Your Willie’s heart’s a tomb, but it was big enough for the both of you. That’s all he could ever do, you see, was to make it big enough for both of you.”

“She’s going to ask the favor of us now,” Willie said.

Liberty thought of children at a birthday party, some secret token wrapped on the table before them. She had no idea what the favor was, but Willie seemed to know. It was too much to know.

“Why, yes,” Poe said. “I would like to give you this house. This house is yours.”

It was an abhorrent idea, preposterous. Liberty was conscious of them all breathing in the room. She was finding it hard to breathe.

“You would like us to kill you,” Willie said, “for you want to die now.”

“Willie!” Liberty cried.

Poe smiled. She arched her back lazily. “Each year, I peak on my birthday. Then the day passes. Such a tiresome process. I wish to have my body killed because my body is killing me. Self-defense,” she said merrily.

The planes of Willie’s face had taken on the last hard light of the room and his face looked crystalline, intractable. His face lacked expression. It indicated nothing. Looking at his beloved face was like looking into a pit. Then he stood and walked away from her, back through the house to where Poe had found them.

The big room filled with silence and for a moment Liberty simply stood there.

“I’ve lived my life, you see,” Poe said. “He can deal with that. You mustn’t blame him. Few of us know how to love.”

Liberty went to the glass doors and pushed them open. She and Clem stepped outside. The air was buoyant and dark. The splintered walk boards angled up the dune.

Liberty began to pick her way up the boards.

“ ‘You are saved, you are saved,’ ” Poe called after her. “ ‘What has cast such a shadow upon you!’ ”

Liberty walked away, turning toward the Pass, which lay flat and vaguely brighter ahead, walking with her head down, watching her feet moving along. She was not stopping, she was moving along, but soon she would go back, she thought, because it was not finished, how could it be finished? She thought of Little Dot, her small sneakers, one of which said LEFT, the other, RIGHT. She thought of Teddy, who could make traveling noises. He made the sound of truck wheels slapping through rain. He made the sound of parachutes snapping thickly open.

The beach was still. She walked, trying to focus only on the beach now. There was a dark shape in the distance, like a palm log, appearing darker, more vegetative than she knew it was. Beside it was a smaller thing in motion, slowly moving, weaving around it, a cat, its head gravely misshapen from long ago battles, its head both shrunken and swollen at once, as though it had been chewed upon for years in some larger thing’s mouth, at the mouth’s own convenience. It limped around the dead heron, which it had not yet touched. Liberty threw a shell at it and it hobbled over the dunes back toward the trees.

Hours ago, the heron had flown with its last strength away from her and now it lay on its side, one wing spread artlessly, its beak open. Liberty stroked its still feathers. She moved her fingers across its back, felt the welts and twistings of the tangled line.

It’s all right, Liberty said to it. See how easy it is now, she said. She knew she should not be talking to dead things. It was not something she should allow herself to do, and yet it had seemed natural to her for a long time. No one would admit how natural it was to speak with the dead.

She raised the heron’s head and looked into its eyes, which were strangely divided, even in death, one eye, it seemed, belonging to a creature still flying hard, hoping for the best, the other knowing there was another world but it was in the one just taken away. She lay down and spread the heron’s wing, moving it so it fell across her stomach. Cold seeped into her back. The bird’s dead soft wing covered her. I was a suicide, she said to it, and this is my dog. We move like ghosts, my dog and I. We are seen, addressed, even desired, but we are as ghosts. She talked to that which lightly covered her, and looked at the night through which a full moon steadily rose.

One of life’s hopeful mysteries was supposed to be that everything that happens keeps on being a beginning, but what kind of hopeful mystery was that?

Ghosts can speak most readily with the dead, she assured it. They know no boundaries. They wander but are not free. They long for lives that never were and live outside them, close as they can, outside them. It’s easy there in many ways.

The feathers of the bird’s wing stirred in the breeze, then settled. She said to it, I must tell you I have always been frightened of birds.

Something was pounding, beating at the edges of her mind. She was with Willie, trying to tell Willie something. It was about the bread, the bread she did not want to leave behind because she feared the birds would find it. The birds would come and eat it and then they would not be able to fly over the dark waters they must cross. They would avoid the waters and then the waters would become more frightening than the birds.…

She was with Willie. She had always been with Willie. This was not so long ago.

“Come in, come in,” Howard said. “Chrissie has built this meal from the ground up. Believe me, this is going to be one of the meals of your life.”

The house had been built in the fifties. It was all angles and hidden ducts in turquoise and gray. The lights resembled torpedoes. A Southwestern look had been imposed upon it. Cactus. Kachina dolls. Bent willow. Roadrunner appliques on the throw pillows. And the aquarium.

“Chrissie’s pride and joy over there,” Howard said.

“None of them are rare or anything, but they’re good fish,” Chrissie said earnestly.

“You’re not browsers, I hope,” Howard said. “No place for browsers here tonight. This is supper! The Big S.”

Drinks were mixed. The bar was behind a rotating bookcase that Howard exposed with a flourish. We all have to go sometime, a cartoon above the bottles said. Try the first door on your right.

“The fifties were a gleefully secretive time,” Howard said. “It wasn’t all just raba-raba-ding-dong.”

“I’m sorry I had to ask you to leave your dog in the truck,” Chrissie said in a small voice. “It’s just that my little doggie isn’t feeling well.”

“He’s fine out there,” Liberty said. “It’s all right.”

“He seems like a very nice dog,” Chrissie said. “Big.”

“So,” Howard said, “you’re traveling. No obligations, no commitments. Footloose and fancy-free.”

Chrissie had put out little bowls of nuts, of olives. She was spreading cheese on crackers. “This is the nicest cheese,” she said to Liberty. She smiled shyly. Her teeth were not good. They were all drinking. Music was being piped in from somewhere. There was the sound too of something like a toilet running.

“Living up to your names,” Howard went on. “Try living up to our names — Howard and Chrissie — it’s difficult.”

Willie was looking at a display of Indian baskets on a shelf. “You’ve got some nice things here,” he said. “Man in the maze, lightning bolts, spider webs.”

“It’s still a relatively easy thing to cheat an Indian,” Howard said.

“Apache, Pima, Hopi.” Willie shook his head. “These are old. The makers of these are long dead.” He picked up a conical basket that was woven in a design of diminishing concentric rings. At the bottom was a single dot. “These are valuable.”

“He’s casing the joint, honey,” Howard said.

Chrissie looked a little alarmed. She prepared more crackers with cheese.

“I’m just holding them for a friend actually,” Howard said. “I don’t know shit from Indians. They all mean something, but it’s simple beyond belief. See that one hanging? The one with all the crisscrosses? Indian thought she was copying the Milky Way.”

“A lot of the designs are based on the patterns wind makes on sand,” Willie said. “Designs made by no visible agency.”

Howard looked into his glass. “Let me freshen our drinks,” he said.

“It was wonderful of you to stop when our car broke down,” Chrissie said. “It was just genius what you did.”

“It was a jump start,” Willie said.

“But no one was stopping and when you stopped, I thought—‘I am going to be raped!’ ” Chrissie widened her eyes. Howard looked at her.

“Giving you a great meal is the least we can do,” he said. “I can give you a job too.”

“Howard’s in development,” Chrissie said.

“No thanks,” Willie said.

“We like meeting new people,” Chrissie said. She looked at Willie and smiled. She uncrossed her legs. “Howard’s paved over a good deal of Arizona,” she said absently.

“That was then,” he said. “This is Louisiana.”

“Howard enjoys a challenge. Wetlands are a challenge to Howard.”

“A swamp don’t generally stand much of a chance around me,” Howard said. “Concrete is honest. It’s a lot more honest than a swamp.”

Chrissie leaned forward, her knees almost touching Liberty’s own. “Is this your first marriage?” she asked. “Howard’s been married twice.” She seemed to find this amusing. She squeezed Liberty’s arm.

A spotted puppy staggered in from the kitchen. Liberty scooped it up and put it in her lap. The puppy was listless. Its heart pounded wetly beneath loose skin.

“I don’t think she should have been spayed so soon,” Howard said. “I don’t think she’s going to make it. What did the vet say?”

“I just took her over to the school,” Chrissie said. “A friend of mine did it. No charge.”

“No charge,” Howard said. He rolled his eyes.

Chrissie picked the puppy up. It gave a small yip, then fell silent. “I just have a few tiny things to do in the kitchen before we eat,” she said.

Liberty walked over to the baskets. She picked up a flat-backed breast-shaped basket. It was a rich earthen color, tightly coiled with a zigzag pattern. A Hopi woman, if she was a virgin, would not finish off a basket. The grasses would flow out from the last stitch of the coil. The flowing gate. A married woman who could have children would cut the strands a little closer. Open gate. The barren woman would tie off the grasses, stitch it tightly shut. Closed gate.

“She’s casing the joint, honey,” Howard called out cheerfully.

Liberty returned to her chair and looked at the aquarium, at the fish moving languidly back and forth.

Willie and Howard were talking about the Southwest. Howard was speaking animatedly about the saguaro. “They’re like condos,” he said. “All kinds of shit live in them.” Howard was clearly fond of the saguaro.

Willie seemed to be enjoying himself. It was as though he had entered a satisfactory game, one still wide open to choice and interpretation. Liberty constructed a yawn, wondering vaguely why she had chosen to do so. She finished her drink, noting that her ice cube harbored a hair. They ate dinner. Howard uncorked several bottles of wine.

“I’m a woman among women and a man among men,” Chrissie said to Liberty, “but sometimes I like to be a woman among men.”

“Chrissie’s a great little homebody,” Howard said. “You gotta take back a loaf of Chrissie’s bread. She makes all her own bread, our Chrissie does.”

In the candlelight, Chrissie smiled with abandon. Liberty drank bemusedly. After they ate, they returned to the living room, clutching their glasses.

“Toot time,” Howard said. “Want some toot?”

“No,” Willie said.

“You’re right,” Howard said. “Toot’s passé.”

Willie stretched his legs out. He rubbed the back of his neck with his fingers.

“You want a massage?” Howard asked. “Chrissie gives great massage. Guys don’t even get erections when she does them. It’s real pure stuff.”

“Howard,” Chrissie said shyly, “… really …”

“She’s a penitent at heart,” Howard said. “Our Chrissie’s got a zeal for penance.”

“Howard’s got an appetite for life. It’s like a real hunger,” Chrissie said.

“Mutual admiration time,” Howard said.

Willie looked around, his legs outstretched. He smiled at Liberty.

“How about a little tour of the house?” Chrissie said. “It’s such a nice house. I love my little house.”

“House tour time,” Howard said. He giggled, then blew his nose.

Chrissie stood up and put her hand on Willie’s shoulder. They all walked through the kitchen, where the spotted puppy lay panting on a pillow in the corner. Howard carried a wine bottle, brandishing it, pouring erratically. The rooms were in disarray. More baskets. Cardboard boxes and drawn drapes. Television sets ran soundlessly. Liberty watched as James Cagney had a headache in White Heat.

“What do you think of them adding color to the classics?” Howard asked her.

Jimmy Cagney clutched his head, he spun around, sagged to the floor, crawled to cover.

“In this case, it makes the fire brighter,” Liberty said.

“That’s some fire at the end of this all right,” Howard said. “A big, bright fire. Say, play the question game with old Howard.”

“I don’t know the question game,” Liberty said. She was deeply repulsed by Howard.

“Sure you do. I say, ‘I am in torment’ and then you say, ‘What kind of torment?’ then I say ‘There is a river of fire bubbling above our backs, as high as the sky, and another such river beneath our feet and we are in between these fires. We are back to back and cannot see one another’s faces. But occasionally we are given a little rest,’ and then you say, ‘What kind of rest?’ and then I say …” Howard rested his tongue on his upper lip.

Liberty heard Willie’s voice behind her, some distance from her, and Chrissie laughing, saying, “Isn’t that a howl!”

“We four have a lot in common,” Howard said to Liberty. “We could become very close. You’re unhappy, I’m unhappy.” He watched her expectantly, raising his eyebrows. Chrissie laughed again.

“You know how to play the question game,” Howard urged Liberty. “Don’t try to fool old Howard.” He took a step forward and bumped his hard distended stomach against Liberty’s hip. “You say, ‘What kind of rest?’ and I say, ‘For a very brief moment, we see each other’s faces.’ ”

“Honey,” Chrissie called, “I’m showing Willie the little man. He thinks it’s a howl.”

“I see you,” Howard said to Liberty. “Howard knows.”

“Honey,” Chrissie was calling, “I think he looks particularly arch tonight.”

“You should be touched by the question game,” Howard said to Liberty. “Your compassion should be aroused.” He turned and practically lunged toward Chrissie. “What is this ‘particularly arch’ shit,” he said. “Since when has it been the ‘little man’?”

Chrissie and Willie were looking at a skeleton painted in gay colors in a balsa wood box a foot high. They were the same bright colors as the fish in the aquarium — vermillion and green and blue. The pelvis was a chalky, scaly white. The skeleton came complete with an hourglass and a scythe, and a scroll at its feet said Heute Nacht, vielleicht?

They were all looking at it now.

“Keeps you alert, I imagine,” Willie said. “Keeps you awake and vigilant at night.”

“Sure does,” Howard said.

“You know, when I die, I want to be buried by lions,” Chrissie said. “I’ve always wanted that, ever since I was little.” She smiled at Liberty.

“It never occurred to me to want that actually,” Liberty said.

“They could do it, you know,” Chrissie said. “They got these big claws.” She curled her fingers and pawed at the air.

“Our Chrissie is certainly being saucy tonight,” Howard said.

Chrissie turned to Willie. “We don’t sleep much. Sleep is disgusting, don’t you think?”

“Got to keep our eye on one another,” Howard said.

“Where’s the goal in sleep? If you’re goal oriented, you’re not fond of sleep,” Chrissie said dreamily.

“Is house tour time over?” Howard asked. “Is it fish training time?”

“They’re coming along,” Chrissie said. “It’s not easy for them but they are coming along.”

“You’re training your fish,” Willie said. He looked relaxed. It was just a night at the theater for Willie.

“Fish give me the willies,” Howard said. “Bet you get that stuff all the time — you give me the willies, Willie—.” Howard laughed, leaving his mouth ajar.

“I’ve established little goals for them,” Chrissie said. “They like it.”

“She dumps ’em out on the rug for a while each night,” Howard said. “Wants to have that kind of fish.”

“Each night, a little longer on the rug,” Chrissie said happily.

Liberty was disturbed by this prospect.

“She doesn’t really leave ’em out longer each night,” Howard said, “she just thinks she does.”

“Maybe not tonight,” Willie said.

Chrissie’s smile faded but she rallied quickly. “Well, I’m glad you got a chance to see our little man at least. We got him in Mexico.”

“Jesus, Chrissie,” Howard said. “What does it say? Is that in Spanish? Jesus.”

Chrissie’s lip trembled. “We could have gotten him in Mexico, anyway.” She said to Liberty, “I like your shoes.”

Liberty looked at her feet. There was nothing going on with her shoes. They were sandals, actually, broken and repaired with staples.

“Don’t go yet,” Chrissie said. “Please stay a little while.”

“You’re a little stupid, Chrissie, you know that?” Howard said.

“It isn’t what you think,” Chrissie said to Liberty. “Howard loves me deeply. There’s something in me, see, that Howard would love anywhere.”

“Tell us,” Willie said.

Liberty was afraid.

“Story telling time,” Howard said. “It’s take your places time.”

“I have to let the dog out of the truck,” Liberty said. “He’s been there all night. He needs a run.” She went hurriedly back through the house, past the dirty dinner dishes stacked haphazardly, the guttering candles. She felt a little calmer in the room where they had sat earlier. She could see the truck outside, and Clem’s head in the cab, big as a medicine ball.

Chrissie had scampered after her. She was holding a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. “You’ve got to take some bread. It’s hard to get good bread in stores. This is the old Pullman loaf recipe. I make all kinds but this is my favorite. It makes excellent toast,” she said formally.

Howard rushed in, seemingly contrite. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, “a heedless display of my bad nerves. Or it’s this shitty wine. Let’s have a decent drink. We’ll have a nightcap. You can’t go now and miss story telling time. It means a lot to our Chrissie.” He fussed about, making drinks. Liberty stood awkwardly, holding the bread. It felt waxy, somewhat heavy. Howard pushed a glass at her and she shook her head. “Your hubby,” he said somewhat mysteriously, “is a cool cookie.” He appeared disarmed by this insight.

Willie flicked a switch on a copper-plated console recessed in a wall. There was music. Strings. A mawkish movement in progress. Willie’s gesture was too smoothly casual to be insolent.

“Aren’t those little toggle switches nice?” Chrissie said. “They’re so much nicer than knobs.”

“Yeah, put on some music. Mi casa su casa, or whatever the hell it is they say,” Howard said.

Willie accepted a drink. Liberty sighed. It was cold out and they just had the truck and nowhere to go exactly. They could stay a while, she supposed.

Chrissie had, at some point, tied an apron around her waist. There were tiny blue flowers on a white background and the pockets were edged in lace.

“You’ll like this story,” she assured Liberty. “I know you will, it’s a love story. Now, Howard,” she said coyly, “you just let me tell it now.”

It seemed to be a story about love. There were a lot of details involved. Disappointments. Misunderstandings. Matters of no importance. Lust. Monotony. The landscape this was all played against was a little blurry. Squalid places sometimes that produced a sense of freedom. Other places. The weather … There didn’t seem to be a sense of weather. Not much sickness. Trials. Days. Days of it.

“It got so I could have killed the bitch,” Howard said good-naturedly. “My little Chrissie.”

“We were just like almost everybody, but I took it upon myself to change.”

“She abducted herself,” Howard said.

“It took a while, but inside and out I changed completely.”

“Down to the color and curl of her snuffy,” Howard said.

“Howard, don’t make it ugly. I’m telling.”

Howard pouted.

“So inwardly was I transformed, I became unrecognizable,” Chrissie crooned.

“The weight loss helped,” Howard said. “And the face lift. To say nothing of the tucks both tummy and eye.”

“Howard, Howard,” Chrissie said. She paused, thoughtful.

“You assumed a new identity and became dead to your old world,” Willie said. His tone was optimistic.

“Yeah, help her along. She needs help,” Howard said.

“My return was met with neither joy nor sorrow. It wasn’t even met with surprise.”

“That’s because you were so successful,” Willie said.

“Sometimes I think I’ve done it,” Chrissie said. “Sometimes I’m not so sure.”

“She wants to be all the other bitches there have been for me. Well I’ll tell you, sweetheart, you can’t.” Howard tipped toward her, caught himself, worked his way back into the chair.

“He makes it all sound like sex,” Chrissie protested.

“You got mushy edges, Chrissie, you know that?” Howard said.

“I’m not talking sex!” Chrissie wailed.

“We all want our lost nature restored,” Willie said.

Liberty wished that he would not participate in Howard and Chrissie’s evening quite so keenly.

“If we could just take a sleep cure, like,” Chrissie pondered. “I really need a little more sleep than I get. I’m kind of afraid of sleep.”

“Afraid I’m going to get her,” Howard said without much interest.

“Shapes,” Chrissie said earnestly, “it’s all shapes.”

Willie agreed.

Liberty thought that this was becoming dangerous.

“Chrissie,” Howard said, “we got guests tonight. Liven it up, will ya.”

“Don’t push me Howard.”

“Some simple pleasures are just a bit too simple, Chrissie, you know,” Howard said.

“You were telling the story of the avenger’s return,” Willie said in the same kindly, oddly optimistic tone. “But you’ve got to go beyond that. You have a new power.”

Chrissie looked at him gratefully. But she was troubled. “I want to start over,” she said.

“Our Chrissie can really ball up a story,” Howard said.

“Howard is older than Chrissie, you might have noticed,” Chrissie began. “When she was a child, just a child, she was molested by this man Howard. She was where she was, he took her away, he put her back. It was a matter of moments.”

“Seduced,” Harold said. “Not molest, seduce, Miss Malaprop. Jesus, our Chrissie gets younger every year. What’s your driver’s license say, huh? What’s your driver’s license say?”

Sentimental music swirled and swelled around them.

“She was just a child, he stole her innocence,” Chrissie said doggedly.

“I would suggest just gliding over this part if I were you,” Howard said, “this part never having worked for you particularly well in the past.”

“He can’t touch you,” Willie said. “He’s a voice in your head.”

Chrissie smoothed her apron. “He can’t touch me,” she said. “He thinks he knows me but he doesn’t know me.” She seemed to be speaking to the apron.

“She’s playing with her own head tonight,” Howard said.

Chrissie raised her eyes and nodded at Willie happily. “I’m falsely known but that’s my power. I’m the other one he thinks I’m not. I’m both myself and the other person.”

“The other person was better built actually,” Howard said. “She wasn’t so stupid.”

“Words,” Willie said. “Shapes. You want to leave them behind. You want to climb clear of your wrong beginnings. You want another life.”

“I want to win,” Chrissie said.

“You won,” Willie said. “Everything is valid tonight.”

“I’m victorious,” Chrissie said. “I won. I didn’t lose.”

“We are all contestants,” Howard said, “but we are not all winning contestants. Our Chrissie will never be a winning contestant.”

Chrissie looked vexed. Then she put her hand in her apron pocket, took out a gun, leveled it at Howard and fired. A fan of blood struck the aquarium glass. Howard fell from his chair onto his back. Liberty’s ears were ringing. She was standing, she thought. Willie was standing. They were all standing except Howard, who lay unmoving on the floor. His eyes and mouth were open.

“I don’t like temptations,” Chrissie said. “I don’t respond well to temptations.”

“You can deal with them in several ways,” Willie said. “This, perhaps, wasn’t one of the better ones.”

“They come at you … they don’t quit …” Chrissie tossed her head. “If they’d just quit sometimes.”

Willie had his arms around Liberty’s shoulders and was moving them backward toward the door.

“You’ve got to be strong,” Willie said.

Chrissie looked discouraged.

Howard lay on the floor in what seemed a parody of death, but he was dead.

“You two have done this before,” Willie said reasonably.

“Yes, yes,” Chrissie said. “But this isn’t good, you know.”

Willie was sympathetic.

“We’ve lost a lot of ground here,” Chrissie said. She was speaking carefully again, covering her bad teeth.

“Well …” Willie said.

“Yeah, well … see you.” Chrissie scratched her head. She looked at her fingernails, then at Howard.

Willie and Liberty were in the truck, traveling fast on a raised, graveled road winding through marsh. Drowned trees fled from the twisting headlight beams.

Liberty was crying. “You weren’t in control of that. Something happened there. You were encouraging them, directing them, but you weren’t in control.”

“But you were the one who got us out of there. You were wonderful. It was you.”

She couldn’t remember.

“The two of us together,” he said, “but mostly you. It was an accident and you calmly dealt with the accident. You were extraordinary.”

“I couldn’t have,” she said. “I did nothing. We should have done something.”

“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do.”

“You made that happen. You could tell that girl was sick. She was disturbed, both of them, why did we stay there?”

“They do something like that weekly. There was the feeling of cozy ritual.”

“But that man’s dead. She shot him.”

“Maybe,” Willie said.

“He’s dead.” She wanted this to be something that Willie realized, that was the truth.

“She’ll get a good night’s sleep for a change. When she wakes up in the morning, she’ll feel she did the right thing.”

Fog hung in gauzy patches along the road. The truck whipped through it. Willie had bewitched those people, Liberty thought absently. She couldn’t quite picture Howard anymore, or the house, the woman alone in it.

“You kill things,” she said quietly.

For an instant he looked stricken. “I’ll make up for it,” he said. “Never the other, but this. I’ll make up for this.”

“How can you?”

“I will.”

Liberty pushed her knuckles against her mouth. “Stop,” she said.

He pulled the truck off the road and she stumbled out, Clem leaping after her. The darkness rustled. She knelt on the gravel, clutching weeds, opening her mouth, wanting to throw up, but nothing happened. She crouched there until it came to seem a little artificial to her, this posture, this waiting. It couldn’t have happened, she thought. It was a game the other couple had played, with music and mirrors and words. If they went back there now, those frightful people would open the door, they would be standing there. But she knew that this was not what would happen. Howard would not be standing there. Howard would be dead. Willie had attained something there, somehow.

She was losing her mind, she thought. Going back to the truck she saw with dismay the loaf of bread lying on the floor and she began talking to Willie about the bread and how they must not leave it for the birds to find for that was the important thing now, that the waters should be crossed, that they should not become too frightful to be crossed. She was losing her mind, her mind that didn’t want to be tied down to her confusions, her terrors and mistakes. But Willie understood. He knew her, he assured her, he understood. But she couldn’t remember what they had done with the bread. The bread, after all, hadn’t been the point. He put his arm around her. The night had passed for Willie. He was looking down the road, his arm around her, his Liberty.

This had not been so long ago, after almost everything else but before the saving. Saving people had been relatively recent. Opportunities that were parts of a promise Willie couldn’t keep. Neither of them were very good about keeping promises. She had promised the baby that it would not be alone. Beneath the bird’s wing, she was cold. She ran her fingers across the feathers, the thready insubstantial body. The bewitcher Willie had been bewitched. He had never had a penchant for the saving. It was the details of final things to which he’d always been drawn. And in the end it was all the same to Willie — a matter of details. He was impersonal about it. He had put their new beginnings behind him now.

She pressed the heron’s wing back against its body, gathered its ungainly parts together and carried it to the trees where she dug a hole with her hands and buried it. There comes that time for everything, she said to it, when you have to put the beginning behind you.

There was a ragged line of brown foam on the harder sand of the beach just before the cut that wound between the two Keys. The water of the Pass rocked swiftly past. Liberty stepped into the water, and it was deep at once. She swam a dozen strokes, then counted in tens but stopped counting and just flailed ahead. The water was warm and heavy, trembling with phosphorescence, which struck her in jellylike clots. The current was sweeping her away from land. She saw it gliding by. Then they were in slack water, further from shore, but it was calm. She stopped to rest and Clem’s leg bumped hard against her own. He circled her. She heard him breathing through shut jaws. She pushed off again, her eyes and throat burning. After a while she dove downward and felt the bottom, a person’s height beneath her, then drifted up and swam hard toward the shore. Minutes later, her hands hit the sloping sand shelf. On the beach, Clem shook himself, the water flying from his coat like little lights, quickly extinguished.

Inside the house, the phone was ringing.

“Liberty!” her mother said. “Liberty, I have the most amazing news. Your sister called and came over. Yes! She got in touch with me! She tracked me down, can you imagine!”

Liberty didn’t know what to say. “Is she there, Mother?” she finally asked.

“I was wondering, Liberty, do you still have that lazy Susan I sent one year on your birthday, the one with the little dishes?”

“I can’t remember receiving that.”

“Well, I’d like it back, dear.”

“Have you seen Brouilly? Did she really call?”

“Brouilly?” her mother said. “Oh, I’m afraid I have a little confession to make, dear. I named you both Liberty. I suppose that’s not done much, but I did it. Yes, she was over here. She just left, but she’ll be back. Goodness, she turned out well. A beautiful girl, she makes me very proud. Liberty, I’ve been going through some of your things. Gracious, dear, what a lot of junk! I’ve thrown away big bags of it. Big bags. All those tests you used to take in school. The questions you answered, Liberty, honestly. Listen to this. ‘Mr. Jones and Mrs. Jones both have the ability to roll their tongues. They have a daughter, Marie, who can’t roll her tongue. Mr. Smith has the ability to roll his tongue. Mrs. Smith does not. They have a son, John, who does have the ability to roll his tongue. Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith die.’ ” She paused. “Really, Liberty, I find this type of thing quite shocking, I find this hard to believe. ‘Mrs. Jones and Mr. Smith get married and have a son who does not have the ability to roll his tongue …’ ”

Liberty heard the sound of crumpling paper.

“This is what I’m faced with,” her mother said, “disposing of this kind of thing.”

“It was probably a question about genotypes, Mother. You were supposed to list them or something.”

“You did, you did,” her mother said impatiently. “There’s something sick about that question, Liberty. I don’t want to remember you that way.”

“How do you want to remember me, Mother?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said sulkily. “I suppose as a little tiny baby with all your life before you. You were so helpless as a little tiny baby. You were just the dearest, simplest thing. If I gave you beets, your poopie would come out red, if I gave you string beans, your poopie would come out green … And then one day you weren’t a baby anymore. It happened just like that!”

More paper was crushed. It sounded like flames crackling, quite close, coming closer still.

“Do you know how many children your sister has? Four! She has four, two girls and two boys. That’s enough, I told her. More than that, you get mixed-up. And it’s more than likely that one of them will turn out funny. One of them already is a little strange, I think.”

“Where did sister go, Mother?”

“Oh, she’ll be right back. She went with Daddy. The children are playing in the pecan grove. I can see them from here.”

“It’s nighttime.”

“You’re so literal, Liberty. I’m quite aware it’s nighttime. But we have big lights strung in the trees, dear, to discourage thieves. The lights are there to let them know we know what they’re up to. There have always been lights in the pecan grove. I didn’t think this up yesterday. Honey,” she said, “aren’t you happy for me?”

“I love you, Mother.”

“Thank you, dear, but you’re as different from your sister as a rainy day is from a sunny one. It’s astonishing that you both came out of the same womb.”

“But I guess we did,” Liberty said.

“Honestly, dear, I’m the one who knows that! You know what Daddy used to say? Daddy used to say he’d just like to crawl up in my womb and live there. Only come out when he felt like it.”

Liberty was silent. The house was silent. In the moonstruck yard, the banyan directed a new pink-nosed root around its humped and twisting elders into a slender, mold-filled crack.

“Have I offended you, again?” her mother said. “When did you get to be such a prude! I’m not allowed to make references to my husband of many, many years and your own father?”

“I’m just a little tired, I guess,” Liberty said. “All this news has tired me.”

“News is tiring,” her mother agreed. “They executed someone last night at the prison and reading about that really wore me out. This man had done everything heinous there was to do — kidnapped, murdered, raped, dismembered, everything. Then for his last meal, he orders all this food. He orders lobster and chicken-fried steak and dirty rice and french fries and peanut butter cups, and then he doesn’t eat it. Not only doesn’t he eat it, he refuses to eat it. Isn’t that the last straw! Good riddance to that one, I say.”

“What does sister look like?”

“You should call her ‘Liberty,’ dear. After all, that’s her name.”

“That’s difficult for me to do, Mother. Just at this moment.”

“That’s such a peculiar question, anyway, what does it matter what she looks like? What’s important is the lost has been found. The burden of my indiscretion has been lifted. I’ve felt remorse about this for years, it wasn’t just when I told you about it. You know how sometimes some little thing will just keep nagging at you? Well, that’s the way the abandonment of my child was with me all these years. And it took its toll, let me tell you. Recently, I had taken up spitting. I let all my hobbies go and just went around expectorating all the time. That was my body’s way of censuring me for my past. But now that she’s back, I feel that there’s a tall glass in me filled with clear, cool water.”

“I’m very glad for you, Mother,” Liberty said.

“I realize that I’ve encouraged some misconceptions, and we should probably straighten them out slowly. I’ve been lavishing all my attention on you for years, and now I have to spread it out a little more evenly. Did we ever frost a cake together?”

“I don’t think so,” Liberty said.

“Well, I was going to use that as an analogy, but I guess I can’t.” Lucille paused. “Darn,” she said. “You know, I get this voice on the telephone at times when I’m dialing you. His name is Mr. Bobby. He doesn’t live with you or anything, does he? Are you taking in roomers? No? Well, you must know him somehow or else why would I be getting him on the phone all the time? Mr. Bobby makes the most wonderful use of metaphors, doesn’t he? I live in such a prosaic world with your father. Life with your father is life in a starved universe, but Mr. Bobby sees everything in terms of something else. I have a feeling he’s blind. The blind are a certain kind of people, just like the deaf and the sick and the dead, and Mr. Bobby has that certain something. Don’t you agree? Are you sure we never frosted a cake together? I don’t know how you can be so sure …”

Liberty had shut her eyes and was rubbing them gently. Small faces howled soundlessly behind her lids. They loomed out of the darkness, then fell back, into it.

“What are you going to do now?” her mother asked.

Liberty’s eyes flew open. All of the windows of the house were raised and the leaves of the banyan, large as men’s hands in the moonlight, were pressed against the screens. For an instant, she felt as if she and her mother had been carrying on some other conversation.

“Mother,” Liberty said, “what if I came up to see you again, would that be all right?” She wanted her mother to be well, to be free. Tears filled her eyes.

“Why would you do that! Don’t come up here! Can’t you leave me alone!”

Liberty heard her father saying, “Oh stop, Lucile. Can’t you stop … please, please, please stop.”

“When I stop that will be that,” her mother said. “I’ll stop like a clock.”

“Please, please, please,…” her father said.

“Are you there?” her mother said.

“Yes,” Liberty said. “I am. Yes.”

“A taxi brought her here, a blue taxi. It seemed so natural to me, that blue taxi coming up to the house. And my first instinct when she got out was to get in and be taken back to where she had come from. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Liberty said. “You could have gotten in. I’m glad you didn’t get in.”

“I let it leave. It left empty. It was a lovely color, a robin’s egg blue. I pray it won’t come back, but I’ve been expecting it for so long, I’m afraid I’ll imagine it now coming back. I may not be calling you for a while. I have to work some things out with myself and with Liberty, but I must do it in solitude.”

“She loves you, Mother.”

“Yes, she loves me. I can feel it. She loves me without even knowing me. Just like Mr. Bobby. Mr. Bobby loves me too, and I’ve never told him word one about myself. You don’t talk to Mr. Bobby, you know. No, you’re quiet as a little bunny in a meadow. You listen. Have you ever heard him on the Seven Sorrows? I think he’s better on the Sorrows than he is on the Sins. The Sins are a little old-fashioned, don’t you think? They’ve been around too long. Mr. Bobby doesn’t pay much attention to them, he says they’re so easily replaced by their opposite, that all it takes is a little dignity and self-reliance and self-control, but the Sorrows! They’re more modern, and Mr. Bobby warms right up to the Sorrows. I’m working on Regret now, trying to turn it into Rejoice. Your father, of course, goes on his merry way, oblivious to my efforts, which he thinks can be maintained twenty-four hours a day without a bit of stratagem. Don’t I sound better to you?”

“You sound a little better now, Mother.”

“It’s hard rejoicing all by yourself. You have Willie. You have that big animal, whatever he is. You’re not alone.”

“Daddy …”

“Liberty, you have this habit, this most annoying habit of persisting in the belief that life with your father is conducted to the tinkle of spoons on ice cream plates, that our only worries are fire ant mounds on the croquet court.”

“Could I speak with Daddy for just a moment?”

“Do you know why your father married me? He married me for my headlights. He couldn’t get enough of them.”

“Headlights?”

“My shakers, my knockers. That was the level he was working on.” She did not sound displeased. “You’ve always thought Daddy had sense. The man’s never had a grain of sense.”

Liberty stretched out on the sofa and pushed a cushion behind her head. Beneath the cushion on a scrap of paper was a doodle. This was the doodle of the determined worm crawling over a razor blade.

“Now I hope you’ll take care of yourself,” her mother said. “I’m not going to call anymore. I have to sort this all out. I’m afraid you’re the cause of my depression, dear. I probably shouldn’t even think of you for a while. When you think of me, I wish you’d think of me with this look of ineffable joy on my face because that’s the look I’m working on. I’m hoping that that look will percolate down to become the real me. I will become a sorrowless woman, who knows, maybe even the sorrowless woman, and then we’ll talk again.”

Without hanging up the receiver, Liberty put the phone beneath the cushion. She felt a certain diminishment. She looked at herself — breasts, belly, legs — in amazement. Still there. Although she felt that large portions of her had been carried off like so many mouthfuls. She could have been born in a dish.

Clem stood in the room with his eyes shut, dozing like a horse. Yes, she felt herself reduced, small, growing smaller. With a little more effort on the part of others and a bit of inattention on her own, she would be the size to climb upon her white dog’s back and ride away, ride madly away, in full career through the rest of life without stopping.

Everyone has their form of transport. She supposed the point was not to use it, not to use it as long as possible. Keep sending the taxi of robin’s egg blue away.

The phone emitted a frantic, muffled signal. She pushed the cushion to the floor and replaced the receiver. There was a moment of silence as though the thing were catching an outraged breath, and then it rang.

“Who is this!” a woman’s voice demanded when Liberty answered. In the background were shrieks, groans and laughter. “I was dialing Mr. Bobby. They haven’t stopped Mr. Bobby have they? Has someone murdered him! Why is it always the good who are cut down, why …”

It was Sally’s voice that Liberty recognized.

“Sally,” she said. “What’s the matter, Sally?”

“Liberty, is that you? I was just about to call you. I was calling Mr. Bobby for a little pick-me-up. They’ve eliminated the human intercessor, and now you don’t even have to ask for anything specific. The tapes just run on, and you’re able to tap in where fate will have you tap.”

“What’s all that noise?” There were wails followed by loud percussion.

“This is the night of the party at the Gator. It’s just the ol’ Gator bawling. It’s JJ’s homecoming party, remember I said? You’ve got to come over here right away.”

“I can’t Sally. I just can’t tonight.”

“Duane was in here with Teddy. They were looking for you. I think Duane wanted you to keep the little boy for a while or something. Give him to you? I was barbecuing the chicken wings, I couldn’t really follow it.”

“Give him to me? Duane can’t give me Teddy.”

“He was giving things away. He gave away his watch. He’s wild because his lady left him, I think.”

“Where are they now?”

“I don’t see them here now but the place is jammed. The Gator’s jumping like the old days.” She laughed. “Things will be out of control any minute.”

“Maybe they went home. I’ve got to call them.”

“I’ll hang up,” Sally said.

No one at Duane’s house answered the phone. Liberty let it ring. She paced back and forth, trailing the long cord of it. On the sofa, the paper doodle lay. There was the worm, proceeding zealously over the razor blade, with faith and will, increasingly in pieces. She paced, passing a mirror. She was sunburnt, her hair was tangled. She thought she looked alarming. She left the phone still ringing, tugged off her bathing suit and put on clean clothes. She pulled a brush through her hair. You can’t think straight when your head’s in tangles, Willie’s mother had said, long ago.

Willie had gone and entered someone’s life now. He had entered someone’s life because he couldn’t find his own anymore. He would have lived in her life, she realized, had she not lost hers as well. He had to live somewhere. They had lost their lives beneath the damaged trees years ago. She could still see the dappled light of that morning. It was the way she had seen everything since, stained and scattered.

She went outside and stood with Clem beneath the coolness of the banyan, feeling the sweat dry on her throat. In Duane’s house, the phone rang tirelessly. Far away on a connection that had been made, people were speaking, linked through other lines.

I read how he died, someone said. It said, ‘He yawned and then he died.’

The street was quiet, dark with trees. In the sky, a small plane droned overhead, its lights twinkling merrily, heading inland, away from the blankness of the Gulf. Sally’s old Volvo, one headlight out, turned a corner toward them.

“I thought I saw the oddest thing, but it was just your dog,” she called. “I came to get you. I figured if they weren’t here, they must be there, and I just missed seeing them. It seems like the whole town’s in the Gator tonight.” She pushed the door open for Liberty. “Look at the T-shirts JJ had made. Aren’t they great!” Sally’s T-shirt said SHIT HAPPENS. “He had a couple hundred made.”

“JJ has a lot of style,” Liberty said.

“He does. I could never fall for another guy. I was worrying about being autonomous, but I realize I’m really autonomous because I take care of him. It’s going to be a twenty-five-hour-day job which is great by me. I had too much idle time before. I was on the verge of being bored. Mr. Bobby says it is hip to serve. Mr. Bobby says just about everything on those tapes. You get to pick and choose. I’ve learned I’m the nursey type. See these hands …”—she held up her large hands, rimmed red with barbecue sauce—“… these hands are nurse’s hands.”

Clem had pushed his way into the backseat. Liberty sat in the front and shut the door.

“That dog makes me almost remember something,” Sally said. “It’s the funniest feeling. Could I brush his coat sometime?”

“He’s not shedding,” Liberty said. “He won’t leave hair in your car.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Sally said. “This old car, who cares. I’d just like to brush out his coat sometime.”

“All right,” Liberty said.

“Just brush it and brush it.” Sally sounded puzzled. She put the Volvo in gear and they creaked off.

7

The Gator Bar was on the bay. In the near distance were mangrove islands white with cormorant droppings. The bar was small and dark and its parking lot was vast and dark. There were a number of yard boys’ trucks there, parked at carefree angles, battered big Dodges with rainbow decals, heaped with dead branches and yellowing fronds. In the bar, on a long stage at the rear, they were having a bathing suit contest. Scrawny yard boys strutted in tiny trunks. The place reeked of beer, barbecue, Sevin, and yard boy sweat. Two women crowded in behind Liberty and Sally, looked around in a pantomime of horror, and left.

“It’s just the way JJ likes it,” Sally yelled, “crowded and crazy.”

Next to the bar, in a little enclosure like a child’s playpen, JJ sat in a wheelchair surrounded by well-wishers. He was drinking beer with a straw.

Clem sat with his tail swept tightly around him so that it wouldn’t get stepped on. Two men and a woman sitting on nearby stools stared at him. The woman wore a white jumpsuit. From her earlobes hung the little hands of Barbie dolls, around her throat was a Ken head on a chain.

“I’m going to buy that dog a drink,” one of the men announced.

The other man snickered. “That year I was working in Corpus as an orderly?” he said. “I come out of the hospital one night, and in the parking lot was a dog like that lying beside a Trans Am and chewing on a human finger.”

“Dog like this one here?” the other man said.

He nodded. “Might have weighed a little less.”

The woman raised the Ken head and tapped it against her teeth. Ken’s mouth was set in a tiny smile. “A human finger,” she marveled. “Where would that have come from?”

“It could have come from anywheres,” the man from Corpus said.

“Maybe bit off in a fight or something,” the other man said. “Poor bastard comes running in with it wrapped in a handkerchief and he drops the sonofabitch.”

“Teddy and that crazy daddy of his were sitting right over there,” Sally said to Liberty. “He still had that little smudged egg.”

Liberty looked at an empty table filled with bottles and glasses. Standing behind it, leaning against a wall, was Poe.

Sally was saying cheerfully, “I’ll go see if I can find where they’re at.” She moved off toward JJ. People were touching him here and there for luck.

The bar smelled warm and fertile. Liberty had not expected to see Poe again. She supposed that she had expected this preposterous person to restore Willie to her in some way and be consumed in the effort. But it was Willie who was not here. The floor was slippery. “Hey, baby,” someone said. She walked toward the table, people’s faces bobbing like dark balloons. She was close to the tall, coarse-faced man before she saw quite clearly that it was not Poe. She looked away, down at the table where a cigarette floated in a glass of wine.

“You think that dog’s gonna go to heaven?” the tall man said. His voice was high pitched and excited, but his face was impassive.

“Was there a little boy at this table?” Liberty asked.

“Little boys aren’t allowed in bars. What did you used to be? I used to be a rattlesnake preacher.” He moved closer. “When I say that to most people, they say, ‘Ever get bit by a snake?’ and I say, ‘Did I ever get bit, I sure did!’ I had a rattlesnake in a box behind the pulpit, and I always said if the Lord told me it was all right to hold it, why there it would be handy. I grabbed a hold of that snake a couple of times when I was feeling real good, and that snake was just as tame as could be and I’d just wave it around for a few minutes and then put it back in the box. But the people were always after me to do it again, they’re just like children, you know, those people, always asking me things like Will there be sex in heaven? and Is it true all angels are male? and Will there be pets in heaven? I swear that was the most frequently asked question of my career — will my dawg get to heaven, will my kitty be with me in paradise … If I told them once, I must have told them a hundred times, their damn dogs and kitties were not going to make it there, but it was just like they were deaf in that regard when it come to their pets, some old mean cat or the like. Now, there was this character I worked with, he was my beater, see, he’d get the crowds in, beat ’em up out of the bushes as it were, and people just followed him in and it was unbelievable because he was the meanest little man I’ve ever met. He would steal little children’s pets and sell them to the vivisectionists for drinking money. I swear to you that this is true, and yet they would just follow that mean little man right up to me. Now, I got a good heart, but it got so after a while I just didn’t care much. I found I just couldn’t relate to dumb suckers. My congregation everywhere I went was so literal-minded. There was this one woman I recall who’d been to Yellowstone Park and never gotten over it. She thought Heaven was going to look like Yellowstone Park! Well, anyway, these people were always after me to take out the snake, and one day I didn’t feel much like doing it, but I did, I reached into that box without no desire or conviction and, of course, I got bit and almost died. I was dead for eleven minutes and was brought back to life only by heroic measures. When I get to this part, most people say, What was it like those eleven minutes? and I say: I SAW DEATH COMING TOWARD ME AND I COULDN’T LOOK. WHEN I LOOKED AGAIN I SAW DEATH GOING AWAY. HE HAD HAIRY HEELS.” The eleven-minute man drew back after saying this. “I left preaching directly after that. I just couldn’t stand that pet-in-paradise business no more.”

“I was looking for a little boy with dark hair,” Liberty said.

“I used to be a little boy with dark hair myself,” the eleven-minute man said. “The world’s no place for them. You don’t act like a girl who’s curious, but I can see that’s just an act. You got the look of someone who’s real curious, someone who might fall for the old Death’s-a-bright-shining-net-vibrating-with-cold-energy malarkey, but I’m telling you, and I’m a man who knows, Death’s just an old hairy-heeled fart.”

His dry breath hammered against her, his words like nails fixing her face in place so he could stare at it.

“What did you say you used to be?” he asked.

“I just used to be myself,” Liberty said.

“You look half-starved,” he said abruptly. “You should eat some of this free chicken.”

The littered table, she now saw, was covered with small white bones.

A disheveled figure shambled toward them, glissading across the floor for the last few feet. “O dog of my dreams,” the figure said to Clem. “Scat, scat,” the figure said to the eleven-minute man.

“Charlie,” Liberty said.

“Recreant …,” Charlie said to the man’s departing back, “… toady, ca-ca head, pygmy.” He gazed sorrowfully down at the table of little bones and empty glasses. “It used to be so nice here,” Charlie said. “There were mountains and wildflowers and tubs of chocolate ice cream. Easter chicks and bunnies were hopping around. Everything.” His mockly mournful face turned toward Liberty and brightened. It was like a fist flowering into a hand. He bent forward and kissed her cheek. “Uummmmuh,” he said.

Her eyes watered from the light and smoke of the bar.

“Why can’t I cheer you up,” Charlie said. “It’s all I want to do.”

A couple tucked in at a table beside them. The man took a fifth of rum out of a paper bag and poured it over ice in two tall glasses. He put the bottle between them. It stood there like an old and not altogether trustworthy friend.

“Well, darling,” the man said, “how was your day?”

“Oh, my day,” the woman said musically. “I defrosted the fridge.” She took a long swallow of rum and said, “That kid at the end of the street did the same thing to me tonight as I was driving here.”

“What thing was that, darling?” the man said, looking at her intently.

“I knew I’d find you because I’ve been looking,” Charlie said to Liberty.

“He dashes through that empty lot just after the curve and runs right up to the edge of the road and then he stops,” the woman said.

The man slowly shook his head.

“He doesn’t look at the car, so you think he doesn’t see the car, but it’s a game with him, see, the little brat. The first two times he did it, I braked and swerved and my heart was pounding, believe me, but this time, I neither braked nor swerved. I didn’t even give him the satisfaction of a glance. I just sped right on by.”

The man nodded. “How old is this terrible child, darling?”

“Oh, he’s little, four or five, a little brat a couple of feet high.”

Charlie was busily pushing the bones to one side of the table with the heel of his hand.

“Remains,” he muttered. “Man, I hate remains.” His hands shook as he pushed the mess around. A waitress appeared out of the gloom and put the things on a tray. “More beer?” she bawled at Charlie.

“Beer only, beer only. I’m coming off it, coming down, going to do it,” he said. He gave Liberty a big shaky smile and kissed her cheek again. “I haven’t had a drink since we were on the phone and you heard the glass drop. What a sound huh, doll? The end of the world as Charlie knows it. You heard that sound.” He shuddered.

The sound Liberty was hearing now was more like the sound of a bird, a bird warbling, a prolonged and plaintive trilling in the distance. The bar was dark. Turning ceiling lights swung erratically through it. Two filthy yard boys streaked with dust ambled by and stared at her with large white eyes. The feeling was that of being in a cave or a mine, going deeper, into the ever darker, and the improbable bird in the distance with its strange song didn’t exist to lead any of them out but to inform them when the song stopped that the air had run out.

Then she realized it was JJ in his wheelchair making the sound. It was something, she guessed, he had learned how to do when he couldn’t do something he wanted to.

Her thoughts drifted toward Willie, but they couldn’t find him, anywhere.

“Everything is going to be fantastic,” Charlie was saying, “you’ll see. Even my Shakespeare is coming back. Whole scenes have been bellying up to me. Yeah! You and Reverdy and the dog and me. We’ll each take parts, we’ll be a troupe. The kid can play all the messengers. You can play the ghost, man, how’s that,” he said to Clem.

At the table beside them, the woman said loudly, “You don’t love me.”

“Now, now,” the man said, “we haven’t had too much to drink already, have we?”

“You don’t love me. You never buy me flowers. You don’t wear a wedding ring and you don’t kiss my pussy.”

“I wear no jewelry at all, sweetness. I don’t like jewelry.”

“You don’t wear a wedding ring, you don’t kiss my pussy and you never buy me flowers,” the woman said. She raised three fingers stiffly in the air.

“Why do I take you out for a little treat,” the man screamed. “I could take my secretary out for a little treat.”

“Your secretary,” the woman moaned. “That Susan person!”

“She could accuse me of the same things,” the man said.

Large tears fell from the woman’s eyes. The man placed the bottle of rum back in the paper bag and put it in his pocket. He escorted her, sobbing, out.

“I know that lady,” Charlie said. “Her name is Beatrice. The only other Beatrice I ever knew was the largest lobster in Louisiana. Not a crayfish, mind, a lobster. Guy showed her at carnivals. Somebody poisoned her one summer and he went half mad with grief. Guy’s name was Jimmy Daisy. You never saw a sadder man after his Beatrice died.” Charlie pulled on his beer. “Poor ol’ Jimmy Daisy,” he said. “Drink up, doll.” He tapped her sweating bottle with his own.

“Have you seen Teddy and Duane? They were here.” Liberty picked at the label on the bottle with her fingers. “Teddy shouldn’t be here.”

“Why, Duane and I have been looking everywhere for you, Liberty. Duane and me and Reverdy looking everywhere, high and low. We’ve been to your house half a dozen times and been driving all around. Willie’s gone, right? Gone gone? Stay gone?”

She didn’t answer him. “Sally said that Duane was giving everything he had away?”

“There are just a few odds and ends left. He gave the kid a car and let him choose it himself, which I thought was nice. It’s the one with the fancy hubs and the screaming eagle painted on the air scoop. He gave the Shelby to the postman. Little flat-footed guy is standing there in his pith helmet rummaging through his pouch and Duane gives him a fifteen-thousand-dollar car. Everything in the house Duane dragged out and gave away. What a sight.” Charlie took a crumpled pack of Chesterfields from his pocket. He pulled a cigarette out, straightened it and lit it. When he inhaled, thin lines of smoke dribbled from holes in the paper.

“The bugs of Room 303,” Charlie said. “People think the bugs are in Charlie’s mind, but they are not in Charlie’s mind.”

“What exactly happened?”

“The particulars in cases of love lost are clouded,” Charlie said, “as we all know.”

“Janiella left.”

“She sure did, and left a mean note behind too. There are suspicions about the pool repairman. Duane’s sworn off human intercourse after tonight. Tonight, he drinks. Tomorrow he’s going to hitchhike into a desert.”

A skinny boy with a plate full of barbecue sat down at their table. He pressed his hands together, pointed them at the plate, muttered a grace and dug in.

“The desert,” Charlie said. “Picture it. Gulches, canyons, playas, oddities of erosion, mud palisades and Duane. Awesome stillness. Desolate grandeur. And that maniac.”

“I’ll take care of Teddy,” Liberty said.

The boy was folding the chicken into his mouth and banging his teeth noisily down upon the bones.

“The kid had no doubts,” Charlie said. “We discussed it at length. No desert for him. He wants to go to the North Pole first. He has already collected some facts on the North Pole. He says the polar bears there carry their babies around between their toes. You and me and Reverdy,” Charlie sang, “heading north. And you too, sport,” he said to Clem. “Never have I failed to include you in my master plan.”

“You want some more beer?” the waitress asked.

“No, no, no,” Charlie exclaimed. “My sweetie here and me, we’re about to start our life together.” He smiled his wild smile and put his hand lightly on Liberty’s back. “We begin,” he said. “The memories of our past existences will be but glints of light, twinges of regret, passing shadows of brief disturbances that will be gone before they can be grasped.”

“There’s Duane at the bar,” Liberty said. She stood up.

Charlie cupped his hands around his mouth. “Yo, Duane!” he called. The men at the bar remained hunched and unmoving. “Such embittered individuals,” Charlie said. “Armageddon and faithless women. Camouflage and survival. Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

They pressed through the crowd toward Duane. He sat on a stool gazing into a brown drink, his face blank as an acolyte’s.

“Where’s Teddy?” she asked.

“I just lit up my lip a minute ago,” Duane said. He pushed his lower lip out and pointed. “Thought I had a cigarette. Didn’t have a cigarette. Lit up my goddamn lip.” He looked at Liberty, then at Charlie. “There’s a woman here,” he said.

“Yeah, man,” Charlie said. “Correct.”

Duane tilted toward his drink, then tilted back. “You ain’t believing a thing this woman tells you, are you? You can’t trust a woman. They don’t stay around.”

“Life is subtraction,” Charlie said. He ordered beer.

“You know what I’m gonna miss most? My big block 428. What a monster.” He shook his head mournfully. “I thought that machine was gonna be with me for the duration.”

“Where’s Teddy?” Liberty said. She touched his arm, which was as hard as a piece of wood beneath his checked shirt.

“You gonna take care of my boy?” Duane asked. “My boy, my son?”

“Yes.”

Duane looked at her shyly. “I’m abandoning my boy.”

“Don’t be so lucid, man,” Charlie said. He drank the beer quickly.

“I’m not a scrutable man,” Duane said. “Even so, I can explain myself if I want to. I got my reasons, my theories, like with hunting. You ever hear my theory as to why hunting is so great? Well, I’ll tell you it. It’s not just that you can stop some big sucker that thinks it can go anywheres it wants to go. It’s in the gear and the preparation and the knowledge of your terrain and prey and stuff, but the great part is after you’ve shot the thing and you’re looking at it and it’s dead, but not real dead you know, and it’s watching you. That’s when you have this incredible feeling. You feel a little bad. You feel a little sad and regretful and that’s the best part.” Duane pounded the bar. “That’s the best part, that little bit of guilt! Too late to do dick about it. Then that guilt just fades away.”

“One thing you got to learn to do in the desert is to keep your mouth shut,” Charlie said. “Very important.”

“Who’s telling Duane to keep his mouth shut! Don’t get me hostile. See these eyes here …” Duane jabbed his finger at his own face. “These eyes are the enemies of all joy and hope tonight.”

“I’m just saying, man, that in the desert you’ve got to learn to reduce your water needs. Lack of water is what makes the desert desert.” Charlie panted with enthusiasm.

Duane peered at him. “You got stuff floating around you, man.”

“Merely the nimbus that hovers around the redeemed,” Charlie said. “My life begins tonight.”

“No, seriously, man, what is that stuff?”

Charlie looked over his shoulder. Duane kept staring. Then he blinked and shrugged.

“Where is Teddy now, Duane?” Liberty persisted.

“I took him over to your house. We must of just missed you. The kid’s got his own car now. He can go anywhere, just has to learn to drive. ‘Escape’ I told him. Escape was my advice. My boy,” Duane mused. “Fruit of my loins.” He tugged at his lip.

A black man pushed his way up to the bar. He was holding a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. The baby’s fingers patted the air. The man sat several stools away, just where the bar began to curve, so that he faced them. He took a cloth from his pocket and ceremoniously wiped the counter, then propped the baby up on a slant board that had been concealed in the folds of the blanket.

“Oh, God,” Charlie said, “the guy with the blind baby. That’ll empty the joint.”

The light slid around the black man’s round, merry face, giving a pinkish cast to his hair. The baby was no more than a few weeks old.

“How can they know that baby’s blind?” Liberty said. “It’s such a young baby.”

“Man’s been telling everybody it’s blind,” Duane said glumly. “Man says something’s detached in its head. I mean, who even wants to think about it. I don’t know why they even serve that guy.”

“They serve him because he mean,” Charlie said.

“The hell with that,” Duane snarled. “I’m mean. Tonight I’m the meanest.”

The black man looked at them and nodded formally.

“Shit,” Duane muttered. He slid off the stool and stumbled toward the door.

“Hello there,” the black man said.

“Hello, yes!” Charlie said joyously.

The man moved closer to them, sliding the baby down the bar. Occupants of the space between them ambled away. He stopped a few feet from Liberty and looked down at Clem, who lay with his chin on her foot.

“Good evening,” he said to Clem. “How you been?”

The bartender placed a martini beside the baby. A sliver of lemon shimmered in the oil on its surface. The man ate the lemon, swallowed half the martini and placed his little finger in what was left. Then he rubbed the finger on the baby’s gums.

Charlie gazed at the drink longingly. “You’re going to make that child alcohol dependent,” he said.

“Oh, this child has many problems. This child was born in a pool hall when its whore-momma’s head was punctured by a pool cue. This child was born premature and has some other tiny baby’s kidneys. This child is blind.” He smiled at Charlie and winked, then unwrapped the blanket and placed the baby’s toes against his lips and kissed them. “This child will know nothing but darkness forever and ever,” he said.

Liberty knew that the man’s voice was Mr. Bobby’s voice, crooning and impatient, shifting and winding. A warm voice that assured freedom from pain, trouble and anxiety. A voice you could hear in a warm bath with wrist veins agape if it came to that. A voice open to wide interpretation. Somebody else’s voice.

“Blindness isn’t considered to be a severe handicap,” Charlie said.

“Is that a fact,” Mr. Bobby said. He tilted his head coquettishly.

“Heavens no,” Charlie said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“I buy the drinks,” Mr. Bobby said. He opened a wallet that was filled with credit cards. He fanned the cards out before him. Each had a different signature. “People send these in to me. They just don’t want to be accountable no more. Somebody sent this baby in to me. Wrapped in newspaper. Ain’t people something?” He ordered a double stinger on the rocks. “You are familiar with the story in the Bible where Jesus heals the blind man? Where he causes the blind man to see?”

“A very pretty story,” Charlie said. “I love miracles. Dish up the miracles I always say. There are never enough miracles in a day for my taste.”

“Now, I don’t believe that’s a pretty story at all. Whatever became of the blind man? Do we ever hear of the blind man again? No, we do not. We don’t, no, because the blind man went into a depression from which he never recovered. We are speaking here of irreversible melancholy. Giving sight to those who have never seen is no gift because nothing is as they imagined it. To have nothing be the way you imagined it, now that’s a shame.”

“But that happens all the time,” Charlie said cheerfully. “We have a friend, this lady and I, he says, ‘The things that we see are a very crude version of what is.’ ” He looked at Liberty and winked.

He was speaking about Willie. Her mind was trying to shut Willie out, she realized. Her heart was pounding.

“We all have that friend,” the man said smoothly. “A friend like that gives no satisfaction.” He smiled and his smile was like a scissors opening. “I prefer a silent friend, like this one here.” He fixed his open smile downward on Clem, then closed it. He said to Liberty, “This dog walks in your sleep, do you know that? He goes visiting. My little baby hears him all the time.”

“Dog’s a dream, man,” Charlie said.

“Now a black dog would be something else again. Some people think a black dog’s bad luck but that ain’t so, necessarily. It’s black dogs that help the dying soul make its crossing, so in a way they’re bad luck, but they’re cherished too and are forgiven everything.”

Willie was his own black dog. She had cherished him too long.

Mr. Bobby sipped his shiny green drink. “You look brand-new tonight, darling,” he said to Liberty. “You look like you done some traveling. Now my little baby’s brand new too, but even so it’s a shade too late for me to prove a little pet idea of mine. My little idea — actually, you could call it more of a belief — is that if you took a newborn thing and you deprived it from birth of all external impressions, light and sound and touch and heat and cold and whatever, taste and such, and at the same time managed to keep it alive, such an individual would not be able to perform the most insignificant action.”

“That’s grotesque,” Charlie said.

The man pushed his face close to the infant and soundlessly opened and closed his mouth. Liberty feared that he was going to start throwing his voice into the baby as though it were a ventriloquist’s doll. It was a very pretty baby with long, dark lashes.

“Are you Mr. Bobby?” she asked.

“We got one of my constituents here,” he said.

“No,” she said. “We don’t.”

“It’s just the grief business, darling. It’s a good business. You ever hear me on Identity? I-den-titty. It’s a personal favorite of mine.” He smiled faintly. “I would like that animal. What are you accepting for him?”

“He’s not for sale,” Liberty said.

“I didn’t ask if he was for sale.”

The baby gave a squeal.

“The last time I saw that animal he was in a small clearing in the middle of a jungle. That there was a clearing in such a rank and tangled wilderness was inexplicable.”

“He has never been in a jungle,” Charlie said.

“He has his journeys to make,” Mr. Bobby said irritably, “you may not.” He paused, staring at Clem. “Time before that, he was witnessing tortures. They’ve become so commonplace these days that an unbiased observer has ceased to become a luxury and is now a necessity. Someone to keep them on the up and up. I had an animal myself once, but the most interesting thing about it was that its blood was artificial. Perfluorocarbons ran through its veins.”

“What kind of dude was this?” Charlie demanded. “He sounds like an icebox or a can of Raid.”

“It was a biological curiosity, I’m not saying it was a spiritual curiosity.”

“Perfluorocarbons,” Charlie said.

“It resembled mother’s milk. Course it wasn’t mother’s milk at all.” Mr. Bobby finished his drink. “This is some night, isn’t it? This is my night off.” He dandled the baby and whispered, “You ain’t ever, ever going to see.”

“I’m sure advances will be made,” Charlie said.

“I thought we already cleared that misconception up. No reason the blind should see. You blinder than this. No reason you should see either.” Swiftly he plucked the baby from the slant board and lowered it down to Clem. The baby’s feet scrabbled against Clem’s skull. “You want this, don’t you, honey,” Mr. Bobby sang as the baby made little fretful cries. “I can’t believe,” he said, “that you people are questioning the right this child has to this animal.”

“You’re upset,” Charlie said. “I can understand that.”

“Don’t you humor me, you redneck son of a bitch,” Mr. Bobby said.

“We’d better be moving along,” Charlie said, “much as we would love to linger here.”

“That be fine, that be fine, but you just leave that box right here.”

“You’re living in a world of unreal objects, man,” Charlie said.

“This blood right here,” Mr. Bobby said, nodding at Clem. “This baby food, he be Box.”

“His name’s Clem,” Charlie said. “He doesn’t stay here.”

“I’m the one who’s naming. I name this and I name that.”

“But as all we who wish otherwise well know,” Charlie said, “naming something doesn’t make it yours.”

“For example,” Mr. Bobby said, “I name you a Man in Deep Trouble.”

“Nah,” Charlie said.

“Oh, yes. I name your past hopeless, your present an excrescence and your future dismal. No, my boy, the future ain’t gonna lift her skirts for you.” He shook a cigarette from a pack and offered it to Charlie.

“Why, thanks,” Charlie said.

“I done passed my judgment,” Mr. Bobby said.

“Oh, come on, man,” Charlie said.

Mr. Bobby lit the cigarette from a bright little package of matches. “You’re just a little flame,” he said, “and when it’s over for you, you just add your little flame to the big flame. It’s not that you feed the big flame, oh my, no, the big flame don’t need feeding, it’s just that your little light ain’t separate no more. Isn’t that nice?” He blew the match out.

“Bye, now,” Charlie said.

“Good-bye,” Mr. Bobby said. He waved the baby’s closed fist at them.

Charlie and Liberty walked out the door with Clem. Liberty could not believe that Mr. Bobby was not following them, waving the baby like a gun. Outside, the bay was smelling poorly and wheezing against the seawall. A yard boy with large, bare feet stood in a phone booth. “Ahh, honey,” he was saying into the receiver. His eyes were fixed, rather glassily, on his remarkable feet.

“What an episode, what an episode,” Charlie said. “That guy’s been coming in regular the last few nights. He’s alarming, but he never really does anything, you know. Brings that poor little baby in.” He shook his head. “Can’t choose our fans though, right?” he said to Clem. He took a deep breath. “So this is the world as seen when sober! What’s that awful smell? Is it that unfortunate body of water? I never knew it smelled like that. Why, that’s odious. Closest smell to that is skinned nutrias in the bayou when I was a little boy.”

Liberty stroked Clem’s head. “I think that was Mr. Bobby,” she said. “The voice who gives advice over the telephone. The presence on the other side of lonely silence.”

“You know his name? You are acquainted with some strange cases.”

“I know, I know,” she said softly. “There’s something wrong with me.”

“No, doll, no. You just have to open up.”

“You never got Mr. Bobby sometime when you were trying to call me? People have.”

“I got a woman once who said ‘what number,’ and I thought I had dialed the bookie so I put ten on Beach-Nut in the eighth. Horse came in, too, a real long shot, but I never got a cent.” He hugged her. “Forget him,” he said. “He’s just someone with a new con.”

“People call him,” Liberty said. “People need him.”

“That guy! People are weak vessels all right.”

A playful breeze pushed against them from the bay. It raised their shirts and their hair.

“Feel that spanking breeze,” Charlie said. “And look at that moon. I point out the moon in all its phases a lot. Can you get used to that? It takes my mind off real estate.”

There was a big red moon, full as a blood-filled tick, hanging overhead.

“Nice moon,” he said. “Nice moon.”

It was clear to Liberty that it was a somewhat alarming-looking moon.

“That moon influences only the feckless and the confused, actually,” Charlie said. “Doesn’t have a thing to do with us.”

“Please just drive me home so I can find Teddy,” Liberty said. When she found him, she thought, she would take him out of the hated house and up into the tree, the untouched tree, nothing cut or broken there. But even as she imagined the ascent into the rustling darkness, she knew they could not stay there, be there. Mustn’t climb the tree, or be a part of the shadows, mustn’t put one’s shape into the wrong, waiting, cradling, carriage …

“We’re on our way, but what’s this ‘home’? Our home’s not built yet, but I see it as languorously asymmetrical. Lots of galleries. No greasy windows for us. And there’ll be a garden, of course. Bright and beautiful and not too big, but big enough for a touch of the gloomy, which will add to its charms. But that’s a long way off still. We travel first. Tonight we all camp out in the car, eat Jelly Nellys, tickle and sing. Travel. There’s nothing like it. This becomes that. I love travel.”

Men and women thronged out of the Gator. Two half-naked yard boys with Mohawk haircuts flung themselves into a truck from which ladders hung haphazardly. These yard boys loved plants but they loved to get drunk too. Plants liked to be danced around and talked to, but they deeply disapproved of idle drunkenness. The yard boys would have some explaining to do in the morning! They would have more to worry about than butt rot, slugs, snails, orangedogs and pickle worms. Their plants would be furious. The orchids were the real problem, they were so moody and neurotic. Real hysterics, orchids … The yard boys looked at Clem sheepishly.

Mr. Bobby stood at the door, holding the baby over his head like a waiter holding a tray.

“I don’t know why that man is so vexed at me,” Charlie said. “I’m a bitty bit black. Those Cajun kings had lots of wives.”

The parking lot was as full as the bar had been. More cars and motorcycles were arriving by the moment to replace those that screeched forth into the moon-fixed night. A cement truck lumbered up, its mixer turning, the driver leaping out, hitching up his trousers, giving a tug to his nuts, ready to go and make a few toasts to JJ and perserverance. He went around the truck to help his lady down, a fat woman with a pretty face who leaned against the huge bumper while she put on her high-heeled shoes. They both patted the truck as they left, as though it were a sweet-tempered Clydesdale horse, and high-stepped nimbly into the bar, avoiding the beer cans, lost lace hankies, the little puddles of vomit and engine oil.

“Oh, how that goopy loves to turn,” Charlie said as they passed the somberly rotating thing. “Doesn’t want to settle down yet … Look, you can see the flukes of my Caddy from here.”

Liberty could, indeed, see a conspicuous car. All licentious thrust, sweep and hunker, from a distance the Cadillac looked as though it had wings. Their headlights swinging like things in orbit, cars moved around the parking lot’s peripheries. Closer, the sight of Charlie’s car seemed to come in hard, lopsided glimpses as though she had begun to blink. The hump of trunk. Raised runnels of the roof. Wide whitewalls. A man standing. It was Duane standing. Tilted toward the Cadillac, his head bowed meditatively.

“Hey, Duane, hey man, what are you doing?” Charlie said. “Man, you are pissing on my car!”

Industrious as an ant, Duane continued to empty himself. He hummed a little, snarled, shook his head, dealing with various faithless, unreliable, cheating phantoms in his mind. Oh, he had them where he wanted them now … they weren’t going to get out of this … He had them in his mind. They weren’t going nowhere. The piss raced puddling down the fender, winked like any mirage, and then vanished into the marl. He grunted and stumbled sideways as Charlie pushed him.

“This is my car!” Charlie yelled. Duane lurched backward, zipping up, fumbling with his shirt, as Charlie swatted irritably at him.

Duane looked confused, then his face turned empty and he propelled himself forward, striking Charlie’s body flatly with his own, his arms not windmilling out but folded cocked, close to his sides. Liberty heard a soft sound.

When Duane drew back, Charlie stared at him.

“Oh, shit,” Duane said.

Charlie looked preoccupied.

“I stabbed you, man,” Duane said.

Charlie moved his hand slowly in front of his stomach, not touching it. He buttoned his jacket up. He touched his jaw, throat, chest, thoughtfully.

“Ahh, shit,” Duane said. He wiped the blade of the knife on his knee and a rusty streak appeared on his faded jeans. Charlie watched this and a smile flickered uncertainly across his face. Then he frowned.

Liberty pulled at the car door, which was locked.

“I knew I shouldn’t be carrying this shit around,” Duane said. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s a big mistake for a guy like me to carry a knife around as a matter of course. This is hardly a knife, it’s just a fish knife, you know. I ain’t never stabbed anybody before, you got to believe that. You might think I have, but I haven’t. I wouldn’t hurt you, man. I forgot this was your car. This is a new car of yours, right? I just forgot to recognize it. I thought it was some smartass’s car.”

Duane chattered away.

“Where are the keys, Charlie,” Liberty said.

“I was some drunk but now I’m sober. Wow,” Duane said, “this can really sober you up.”

“It’s not locked, doll, the door’s just jammed. Go around and slide over and you can open it from the inside.”

Liberty quickly did this.

“You can get out, but you can’t get in,” Charlie said. “A token of our times. Move over now, doll, I’ll drive. I know where to go.” He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and continued to stare at Duane as he eased himself into the seat. Duane tossed the knife underhand onto the floor mat at Charlie’s feet, then raised his hands in an odd gesture of surrender and innocence. Charlie pulled the door shut, coughed, winced, and started the motor. It caught, rattled, then died. He started it again.

“That engine’s tired,” Duane said. “What’s it got on it? One hundred fifteen? One hundred twenty-five? You got blowby, man. The state should pay you for the oil you’re going to be laying on the road.”

Charlie sat very straight, sweating, his jacket buttoned up. He eased the big car forward.

“You should have that looked at,” Duane called.

“Feculent little bastard,” Charlie said. “Get me a beer, Liberty. Ol’ Charlie needs a beer. There’s a cooler in the back.”

The backseat was full of things. Blankets and pillows and books, a lantern, cartons taped shut, a red ice chest tipped on top of everything. Everything had been prepared for a trip. A change of venue, Liberty thought. The words pressed gibbering through her mind. She later would think that nothing seemed to be missing there. Nothing unusual. Her hands moved around the bottles and picked up shards of ice. She ran them across Charlie’s lips.

“You can’t drink anything,” she said, her voice trembling. “You’ve been stabbed. You mustn’t drink.”

He sucked on a piece of ice.

“Imagine me trying to quit drinking today,” Charlie said.

“Where are you cut? Is it deep?”

“I don’t know anything about the human body. Kidneys, pancreas, liver, intestines, who knows where all that stuff is … It’s just a scratch. ‘ ’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man …’ Mercutio. Romeo and Juliet. Isn’t that something? My head’s clear as a bell.”

They moved with majestic slowness down the highway, passing a motel which had a pink neon flamingo with a curved neck rising from the roof. The flamingo’s pink stomach said NO VACANCY. Outside a lighting store where all the lamps were lit, two bums slept on flattened cardboard.

“We’re driving too slow,” Liberty said. “Let me do the gas.” The hospital was miles away.

The Cadillac slowed further. “I’m looking for something,” Charlie said. He looked at her and smiled, his eyes blurred and dark. “Now, be calm,” he said. “My daddy always said, Be calm. He said it when we were all sitting around in the trailer while a hurricane was picking up pieces of Bayou Teche and setting them down in Bayou Louise. The whole affair put our trailer in the treetops, broke my momma’s jaw and almost drowned me, but my drunk daddy didn’t get a scratch.”

“Don’t talk,” she said, putting her arm around his hunched shoulders.

“This isn’t the desert. Or maybe it is. Could be my desert, my desolate outside, my never-never … Here it is, this is what I was looking for. I knew it was here.”

It was an unmanned car wash, twinkling and flashing with beckoning lights in the pale night. Charlie turned in, eased the car around a corner, deftly locked the front wheels into a set of tracks, and turned off the engine.

“What are you doing?” Liberty cried. “There isn’t time for this …”

The tunnel was a dripping spectacle ahead.

“I’ve just got to get that guy’s piss off my car, doll. Dog’d understand that. Piss on what’s yours cannot be tolerated. You know, in King Lear, three dogs are named. Their names are Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart. This is true.” He reached slowly for his wallet, pulled out a bill and lay it on the tongue of a squat machine. The tongue tugged the bill backward between thin lips. “Five bucks, but it’s worth it,” Charlie said. “This place does a thorough job.”

The big car inched forward. Liberty sat rigidly, not looking back because she would then see what wasn’t there. Clem was not in the car.

She tried to place him behind her, tried to fix, hold, imagine him there, but she could not. She could only imagine a prom cummerbund of red widening, hidden beneath Charlie’s coat — blood welling slowly from a gash, like something living, once imprisoned, not yet aware it was no longer enslaved to running the same dark, concealed circuits.

“Out of the vague, lazy web of life into the chute, hey doll,” Charlie said.

Water pounded against the car and its windows darkened. A ball of colored rags humped up the Cadillac’s hood and floated heavily against the windshield, writhing there for an instant before it slipped upward and disappeared. There was a whooshing roar and pummel, and a spray of warm water fell upon her bare knee. She twisted the triangular vent-window shut.

Soap blew at them in rattling beads.

“I’ve got everything right here with me,” Charlie said. “I really moved out today. It’s funny, I didn’t leave a paper clip behind, I swept that room clean, I wiped it down with an old wet shirt. Everything’s whole and just behind me. Files are complete, photographs in order, every cap has got a bottle, every sock a mate, all the pencils are sharpened. Nothing is broken, everything’s full, books in their jackets. It’s all here, it all works except for me. Oh, doll, I’m sorry, I feel weak as puppy water. It was a bad sign, a cancerous impulse, trying to start over, change my life, clean everything up. I’ve always been a clean person, though. My body’s clean, almost hairless except for my head. I could have been a clean old man with a little raked yard, oil cloth on the table always wiped, a small, well-groomed pullet as a pet. What do you think? The gift is inexplicable, isn’t it … I mean, what are you supposed to do with the damned thing …” Brushes churned against the glass. Charlie coughed. “I think the little bastard killed me,” he said.

An instant passed. Water hung suspended on the glass, there was a throbbing sound, draining.

“What’s the time, gotta know the time,” Charlie said. “I’m allergic to something in a watch, can’t wear one on my wrist, never know the time …” He turned the dial on the radio. I SEEN THE ROCKS AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, someone screamed through static, I SEEN … Liberty turned it off. “There’s a clock in the dash,” she said. “It’s eleven-thirty.” She put her arms around him. She slipped one arm behind his back and pressed the other lightly around his waist. She tried to make a basket of her arms.

“The clock’s always said that,” Charlie said, “but maybe it’s close enough. What is this? It’s supposed to be an intense, intolerable effluence, but it just looks dark and wet out there … baby, I’m dead.” The clock did not move. For anyone but them, it could have been the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow. “Baby,” Charlie said, “get me my bottle.”

She slid carefully away from him, knelt on the seat and looked behind her. A yellowish light filled the tunnel and the round black bristles of the scrubbing brushes slid back on gleaming joints against the wall. What had it been, with which she had shared her silence and which was now gone from her? Her task had once been to accomplish each day, but now there was no such task. She had been let go.

“We’ve been left, haven’t we,” Charlie said.

She picked up the bottle of gin, which was wedged between the cooler and the door, then slid over, onto the backs of things there. “Move over,” she said. “I’ll drive when we get out of here.”

“Oh, doll, you know, after we get out of here …” Charlie shrugged but shifted himself across the broad seat. He grasped the bottle she handed him by the neck. “Here’s to my love,” he said and drank. “All chance for reparations lost.” She held him as she had before, feeling now the dampness of his jacket. “You think there’s any justice in it?” he asked. “I was poking his girlfriend. I did want to daddy his boy.”

“No,” she said, “no justice in it.”

“He didn’t know any of that and stabbed me anyway. People like that have instincts. When we’re all gone, people like that will be starting all over, snug in caves, toasting roaches.” He took another swallow and shuddered. “Things come and go,” he said vaguely.

Funnels of dry air pushed against the car, and a long, black roller descended from the ceiling, touching the grille, pushing softly but firmly toward them. They would be out soon, the chocks would fall away. She was behind the wheel, but tipped toward him, holding. Sweat dripped from his face onto hers. The car grew dark again as the rolling tread passed over them, as some heavy, tattered material slid past fender and door.

“It’s going to say ThankYouThankYouThankYou soon,” Charlie said, “then, ExitExitExit. I’ve been here before. That kid and I had great plans for us, Liberty. You know that egg, the egg he’s been carrying around for a week, had to for a week, and the week’s going to be up, and I told him, ‘You’ve been great with that egg, God couldn’t have been nicer to that egg, but what are you going to do with it now? That egg doesn’t have a life of its own, it was meant for something else. It’s not going to end well for that egg,’ I said, but he just laughed. He laughs at what I say now, he’s a great kid. I told him the first time God carried an egg around for seven days he ended up dropping it.”

They were almost out. Charlie closed his eyes.

“Don’t close your eyes.”

“I don’t understand what’s going to happen next. I’m going to be dead.”

“You’re not. A scratch.”

“You won’t be a widow. That’s the only blessing. You know you’re never really conscious of it until it’s your turn and then you think, what do they do with all of us? The streets, why aren’t they clogged with hearses, why don’t we see what we’re seeing? If I come back, will you be frightened of me?”

“No.”

“You don’t come back. You can only stay longer, maybe. You could have stayed here longer yourself. You could have been a middle-aged lady, intense but friendly, like middle-aged ladies are, with a collection of glass balls that you shake and there’s snow. We could sit, you and I, of an evening, turning and watching. This could have been ours.”

“We’re here, still here.” She could not see the moon, but it had lit up everything.

“You think … this is splendid, this is mine, mine alone, mine … and all it is is death.”

His eyes were open.

“But who knows,” he said, “maybe I’ll be all right, after all. I see the kid out there. Everybody’s out there. Dog’s waiting … That’s one hopeless egg, but there’s a game in it still. Look at that kid, he’s playing catch with it.”

“By himself?”

“Himself alone.”

She looked, tried to see what he was seeing, drew away from him to touch the wheel, reach for the key.