by Joy Williams
“Do you remember the time I was playing with the lead soldiers on the porch and I had that wonderful battle plan worked out?” Ashbel asked his sister. “And mother came by and looked and tapped her belly button and said, ‘This thread came from the jacket of a Confederate boy who was killed at the battle of Petersburg where the press of men was so great that the dead having no place to fall remained in the upright position.’ Remember that?”
“I remember that,” Franny said. “Mother and those awful skirts.”
“Oh,” Pearl said, “please go away.” Children were so exhausting. And they were so close to her, breathing on her with their sweet breaths.
Then a boy said, “Yes, leave Pearl alone for a while.”
“Who are you?” Pearl asked. “Now which one are you? Who is he?” she demanded of the others.
“Why that’s Sam,” Ashbel said. “That’s your Sam!”
“Oh for godssakes,” Pearl said irritably.
“Sam says he can make plants. Can he, Pearl?” Tracker said.
“Nobody can make plants.”
“Pearl, you’re so funny,” Franny giggled.
Ashbel sniffed at Pearl’s hair.
“If you mash up the pituitary glands of a cow and use it for shampoo would all the hairs on your head be able to see?” he asked.
“No,” Pearl said brusquely. More children arrived by her chair with nothing to do. She hadn’t the strength to get up and leave them. Certainly she would never have the strength to leave this island again. She would stay here forever, drinking herself dumb, all her wishes fulfilled.
For islands were the place for that sort of thing, were they not? The Fortunate Isles and so on. The place where children originate, the land to which the dead depart?
CHAPTER EIGHT
“What was the beast in Beauty and the Beast, Pearl? What did he look like?” Jane asked.
“I think he was supposed to be a snake,” Pearl said.
“A snake! Yuk,” Jane said.
Joe laughed. He was lying on his back, wearing a pair of tight black swimming trunks. He smelled like a sack of salt. He was very tanned. On Saturday night in Morgansport, the girls had to line their panties with Kleenex just at the thought of dancing with him.
Sometimes Pearl wondered if he wasn’t a mutant or something, he was so marvelously hung. Perspiration popped out on her temples indicating the depth of her thoughts. She blushed. She had seen the rude and pragmatic way he flirted with the town girls. She could see one of them hoisted on an armrest in the movie theater’s balcony, yipping and fluttering in the dark.
“You’re pretty, Pearl,” Timmy said in his growly little voice. “What are you thinking?”
Pearl’s eyelids shook.
“There’s a bug in your drink, Pearl, look,” Jane said. “Do you want me to get it out for you?”
“I will drink around it,” Pearl said.
“Why do you drink?” Tracker shouted, teasing. “Pearl! Pearl!”
“Because it makes your bones blossom, isn’t that right, isn’t that what you say Pearl?” Peter broke in eagerly. Peter wanted to be a magician. He thought such an act with bones would be the world’s finest illusion. He pranced before Pearl in a torn up white sheet, sea signs scribbled on his skin with a felt-tip pen. She saw him twisting his fingers into talons and then back into fingers again.
“That’s right,” Pearl agreed. “I drink because it makes my bones blossom. That’s what I say.”
The children loved the image of it and could see the truth. They could see a fragrant branching tree of bones transformed into flowers. But when they kissed her they could taste only the unhappiness in which she dwelled. They could taste no sweet blossoms at all.
“Tell us a story, Sweet,” Franny said suddenly.
“Yes,” Tracker said. “Tell us the one about the island that was really a living creature.”
“No,” Franny said. “Not that one. Ashbel gets scared at that one.”
There was an unknown island in the sea and lost people would find it, but whenever they tried to live upon it, it burrowed down into the sea and all the people were drowned, for it was a living creature and its feet were rooted in death.
Sweet changed it every time she told it. She fudged the point that the creature’s feet were rooted in death.
“I can’t think of any stories,” Sweet said.
Sweet was getting too old for stories and games, thought Pearl. Her body was thinning out and her face was becoming angular and set. She was getting her own face and her own thoughts about things. She wanted to grow up and see the world as something simple and dangerous. She wanted to do something illicit.
Timmy’s attention had been diverted toward his father who was walking, whistling, toward the sauna. Tracker, too, followed him with his eyes.
“Boys . . .” Pearl said nervously. It always made her nervous when they looked at Lincoln like that. They despised him. They were always thinking up terrible fates for him.
One of the small children gave Pearl a small tin pail full of blueberries. Seeing them made Pearl know she was hungry.
It must be almost noon, Pearl thought. Lincoln always whacked off in the sauna before lunch. She knew sometimes the boys spied on him.
Tracker was waving and smiling at Lincoln. Lincoln was too far away to hear the words Tracker’s mouth was saying.
“Daddy, Daddy, you fuck, you creep, may spiders crawl up your ass . . .”
“Hush,” she said. “Please hush.” She put a blueberry in her mouth, then reached in the cooler and filled her glass again.
Joe was standing on his head. His legs were spread to their ultimate limit. Slowly, he brought them together again. He looked like some wildly exotic creature with swaddled testes between his shoulders.
“Lincoln starches himself in there, Pearl, we’ve seen him do it. There’s a little hole in the wall behind the sumac. Come see, Pearl. We’ll show you.”
“No,” Pearl said. She looked at them for a moment. “I’ll get a rash from the sumac.” She laughed. A wind blew through the trees and rustled them, making a sound like water boiling for tea.
Pearl kept the wine for a moment in her mouth without swallowing.
“He looks so goofy, Pearl. He sticks his tongue out. His eyes get wide enough to spit in.”
“Why does he do that when he’s got Mommy?” Jane asked.
“You don’t have anyone, do you, Pearl?” Timmy said sadly. He moved his hands moodily through the blueberries without taking any.
“Pearl’s got Walker,” Jane said.
The littler children firmly believed that the dead were merely at the mercy of an implacable presence, more or less prolonged.
“Pearl’s got us,” Trip said. He had a sharp, sweaty smell. Once, on Christmas, he had given Pearl a pretty little glass jar with a silver cap, an old perfume jar. It had been filled with something that looked like blue Vaseline.
“It’s a special ointment, Pearl,” he had said. “Peter and I made it up especially for you. It’s got thorn apple in it. You use it and you’ll have wonderful dreams and won’t need a man.”
Pearl pursed her lips, remembering. She looked at Trip with her sun-blasted eyes, at his thin, rapid face. His happy tongue lolled.
“Do you think he could ever give himself a heart attack in there?” Tracker said hopefully. “It’s so hot and he’s so fat and all.”
“I’d love to pull the kisser-button of my bow string back and kill him deader than Cock Robin,” Timmy said.
“That’s just a play bow you’ve got,” Ashbel said. “It’s like your pop gun. You couldn’t kill anybody with it.” He was bunched up at Pearl’s knees. His lower lip sat primly behind his teeth.
“Once when I was showing my thing to Jane, and he caught me, he hit me so hard he knocked a tooth out,” Tracker muttered.
“Who wanted to see your thing anyway?” Jane said.
“You shouldn’t show your thing to the girls,” Pearl said vaguely.
Joe was looking at her from his peculiar position, his muscular legs spread far apart again. He was looking at the level of the wine in the bottle on the grass. Joe was a bit of a prude as far as alcohol was concerned. He was a firm believer in the care and maintenance of one’s own physical vehicle. Always running on the beach and doing hatha-yoga and this ridiculous thing on his head.
“You should try to cut down on your drinking,” he said, upside down. “It’s bad for the mind as well as the body. Each day some of the brain’s neurons die and drinking simply speeds up the process. It’s like a lot of little lights going out in your brain each day.”
Everyone looked thoughtful. They looked at Pearl as though they could see her neurons going out right then, in style, light bulbs visible, snapping and cracking, exploding, fire-cracking and fizzle-shorting.
Pearl worked the bottle back into its melting nest of ice. She’d liked Joe better as a child when he’d been silent all the time.
“When men and ladies make babies do they lie down beside each other and hug and kiss each other first?” Franny asked, deftly changing the topic.
“Love is a secret thing, isn’t it, Pearl?” Jane asked. She nuzzled Pearl’s empty hand.
“Some kinds of love are hard to think about,” Pearl admitted. To love was to immerse oneself in the waters of reality. She didn’t know anything about it.
“We could slip some D-Con in his beer some night,” Timmy said. He had curled his hands into fisty paws and was staring at them. “That might do it.”
“Timmy!” Pearl yelled. “Stop that!” A thin band of chill encircled her forehead. “Lincoln is your father. He had a part in making you. Without him you wouldn’t even be here.”
Such a thought cinched the band of chill still more tightly above her eyes. The hot day rumbled with thunder although the sky was a perfect blue. The baby Angie babbled at her hip. Pearl looked. “Oh no, dear, I don’t want that. Number Twos are not a nice thing to give to people. They are not a present, Angie. Pick me a flower or something. Franny, wash her hands. Put a diaper on her. She should be in a diaper.”
Timmy was looking at Pearl darkly, as though he was going to cry.
“Daddy did not make me,” he said.
“God made us,” Tracker said.
Pearl looked at the group gathered around her. She looked at each of them in turn. She looked at Sam. Sam slept with his eyes open and watched with his eyes shut. She was sure of it.
“God made us,” Tracker said again, satisfied. “That bastard didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Pearl stared at the sauna and imagined Lincoln tossing himself off in there, balls bouncing on the bench like peas in a pail. On his quest to conquer death by becoming father to himself.
Pearl rolled the empty glass against her cheek. Some of the children ran off to look through the peephole they had made. She could imagine what they saw—Lincoln with his head propped open on a smooth stone, an arm and leg dangling from a greasy shelf. Lincoln lying with his eyes closed, his lips half parted. His penis lying curled, a sweating snail. A muscle in his stomach twitching . . .
•
Lincoln rubbed his thumb across his chest, sloughing off a thin layer of skin. Gone. With its attendant angels. His mind was no more than meat, hanging strips of meat in his sweaty hair. He inched back slightly on the shelf so that his head hung backward. His eyelids fluttered. His cock rose. He made it swing. Probe the soupy air.
A pity a man so disciplined by nature should end up in this chaotic life. He really hated the island but here he was. With the women and the brats. With the smells of piss and pies and ironing. And that soul-less cold-assed bastard Thomas who paraded around like some exiled king.
Lincoln’s cock fattened and grew sleek.
The pleasures of solitude, of unleashing the mind. Allowing it to wander off and penetrate the most preposterous hole. The dry and dusty fucks the women offered. That wasn’t really for him. He preferred the pleasures the mind allowed. He had never much liked the idea of putting a portion of his body into a complementary part of woman. Key into lock. That sort of thing. Mighty mast into simple mast hole. It was so tedious. It was the mind that fucked the best. Consciousness doesn’t mean shit.
These wretched children had an edge on him there. They were free from reason, utterly unselfconscious, utterly indecent. Civilization had rejected them. Not a one went to school. They were far too fine for school, Thomas said. Joe had gone for a while. He had played football and damned if he hadn’t killed some kid. Lincoln had seen it from the bleachers with the rest of the family. Heard it more than saw it actually. Sound like icicles falling on a cement driveway. Little runt wearing an oversized helmet with a wolverine on it, and unfortunately carrying the ball.
Not a single person punished Joe for breaking the kid in half. Not one harsh word. Not even a protest from the runt’s mother, who perhaps thought it better that her son died in young innocence than be a victim to life’s later cruel delusions.
Joe had a tongue like a towel. Watching him eat was an amazing thing to see.
Lincoln cupped his balls. They were searing, they ached. He rubbed his hand up over his stomach, ring-a-rosied his yellow nipples, slipped onward to his throat, waggled his thumb in his mouth for a moment, licked the sweat from his lips.
The other children maddened Lincoln. Common little buggers. Possessing only a protean capacity for uninteresting change. Ions in the air they were. All dropped easily as cats. And they were worse than dogs. Noisy, fawning. Their human looks only kennels for dogs. He was still astonished that he had to be considered father to some of them. He loathed children. They had stomach aches, were stubborn and didn’t flush the toilet. They shuddered at that which was not dreadful but were fearless about confronting physical realities that could wipe them out in a flash. Lincoln sometimes attempted to explain his feelings to them. They did not distress him intellectually (for after all they were just children) or physically (because they were well formed) or even ethically (for he tolerated their mild savageries). His dislike for them was metaphysical.
“Call me ‘lovey,’ Daddy,” Jane had called to him each night as a toddler. “Say, ‘Good night, lovey.’” The child then had been patient as stone and, like her mother, impervious to slight.
“Good night, lovey,” Lincoln would repeat without tenderness, pulling her nightgown over her head, over her little sex, beardless as a bun, over her thin legs. In his children’s presence, Lincoln was possessed by neither love nor guilt. In their presence, he was a balanced man.
He had been a balanced man before and he was a balanced man now. It was just in between where something terrible had happened, that something being Shelly’s courtship of him. It had changed his life. Now he was here, a misogynist married, on an island full of children.
Once he had been a mathematician, a professor at a small university. He found his art, which depended upon the concept of nothing, congenial to his life in general. Numbers pure as light. An order in the universe. Three the masculine, four the feminine, seven the eyes of God. Shelly had been in one of his classes and he considered her to be the dumbest of the lot. She returned her papers blank. Only a few smudges and loops of hair to indicate the vast deserted regions of her brain. Lincoln was an arrogant and scornful man. He wielded words as a seal skinner does a club. The classroom was an arctic waste littered with battered puppy sensibilities. But Shelly refused to be intimidated. Her desire for him was inspired, unflagging and utterly sexual. She showed neither modesty nor common sense. She would not go away. Each night there were visitations and demands. She would enter his apartment in the guise of disorder, stinking of juices and dripping with sea water, staining his sheets and fouling his mind.
Lincoln’s apartment was large and neat. He possessed only a few things but they were things that had been chosen with discrimination and taste. He did his own cooking in the small, wellappointed kitchen. He was always making perfect soufflés and flans and blintzes which he t
hen dumped into the garbage for he worried about his health and weight. He didn’t drink. He didn’t dream. He took out few women, none of whom he touched. He didn’t like their chests. He didn’t like their odor for all they tried to hide it with the musk of bears and berries. Victims of the moon they were and easily deceived. Tits like doorbells. Eyes that widened with the hope of tears. They craved insult and abandonment, every one of them.
“Ignorant bitch,” he’d say to Shelly as she moved around his rooms.
“Oh you’re mean,” she’d cheerily reply. “Your mother never laid you in the sun to give your heart its share of light.”
“You’re retarded,” he would say.
At night, in bed, he’d clench his lips. He’d seal his ears. He concentrated upon the tiny blind and balanced man within himself. And he did not succumb, he did not falter. He endured like a monk, still with cold as she worked on him, as she kissed his every part. He was proud of his unresponsiveness. He would not be duped or managed.
Shelly had long black hair, down to her waist. Her pubis was a soft and mossy bank. It all made him sick. She would slip into the room while he was sleeping. He felt that she entered like a rat. He told her this. Wasn’t the door locked? Had she no sense of herself? Weren’t the windows sealed? Had she no pride?
She followed him everywhere, singing dirty jingles in his ear. She baked his bread, she pressed his shirts, she held his cock as he relieved himself. Actually he didn’t mind the latter much. His piss made petals in the bowl. He gave a laugh. Unlike him. And turned the stream on her. It hit her belly with a smack like a snowball.
“I don’t want you,” he’d say with ragged breath as she flailed him with a cunt that fit him like a slipper. He could teach her nothing, not even the acceptance of his hatred. He had visions of murder, dismemberment, worse. He wished he had the courage and success of Claudius . . . to pour a poison in her ear, her eyes, to change her smooth body into a length of loathsome crust. He would sheer off her labia, make a broth, stuff a bird, have her help him eat it, on Thanksgiving Day. He would seize her throat with his jaws and worry it with joy until the bones broke like seeds on his teeth.