by Joy Williams
“Hey!” Liberty chanted back. “Where did you get this truck?”
“It’s my buddy’s truck. I’ve been helping him with some tree work for the telephone company. Let the dog sit up here too. I’ve got my saws in the back.” He pushed open the door on the passenger side. Clem squeezed in front and settled himself. He looked like rising bread there.
A card taped to the windshield said NO ASS NO GRASS NO GAS NO RIDE.
“Don’t pay no attention to that,” Duane said gallantly. He popped the clutch and the truck tore off. “Guess who I saw today?”
“Who did you see today?”
“Everyone I looked at,” Duane said, grinning. Then his face grew somber. “You know that bitch, that wailing thorn-in-my-side bitch, the lezzie bitch I once revered as a wife, well she served papers on me yesterday.”
“I never met your wife, Duane,” Liberty said.
“Yes, she surely did. Seven-odd months to the day she left. She and her bitch girlfriend found a lezzie lawyer and they served me papers. Don’t want nothing, she says, just wants to get away from me. Can you believe that? My Teddy’s momma, my sweet boy’s momma, a lezzie. There was so much deceit in that woman! Like she used to go on about my hair all the time, talking about my hair, how much she loved my hair, how wonderful my hair was. Well what was that all about? My hair for chrissakes. Then she comes up to me one morning seven-odd months to the day and says, ‘I’m leaving, Duane, I want a divorce, Duane. I’m living a lie, honey, and I’m so bored and unhappy, my face is getting bumps.’ It’s true she used to have the nicest skin. Every night she’d put her face in a bowl of ice cubes. But she was getting bumps.”
Duane stopped for a red light. He rubbed his eyes, then looked at Clem. Clem was looking forward with distaste, his ears flattened against his skull. “You know that dog smells like peaches,” Duane said. “When I was a little boy, I just loved peaches. I’d eat peaches till I’d puke.”
“Peaches,” Liberty said. Clem was always reminding people of things, possibilities, better times, imagined pleasures, suppressed woes. Clem stimulated the meridians. The highs, the lows. Peaches.
“I had a dog like that once,” Duane went on. “He hung himself. It’s the truth. I had him tied up inside a shed because he was a rambler, you know. Rambled all around. So I had to tie him up, and I tied him inside a shed because he was a rambler. Rambled all around. A roamer. So I had to tie him up and I tied him inside a shed and he jumped out a window there and the rope wasn’t long enough to reach the ground and the poor guy hung himself. Actually he didn’t resemble your dog at all, but I get reminded, when I see a dog, I see a rope. Now when I see a rope it don’t remind me of a dog. Funny.”
A headache cupped Liberty’s skull. The light still shone red.
“God damn light,” Duane yelled. He gunned the truck and danced it halfway through the intersection. He looked at Liberty and smiled. “Do you know anything about lesbians?” he asked.
“I can get out anywhere along here,” Liberty offered.
“Nah,” Duane said. “I’ll take you right to your door. You’re always doing me favors, right? You watch Teddy real good.”
Liberty felt as though she were on a long hot ride with a lunatic to a honeymoon room in Racine, Wisconsin. Clem turned and pressed his nose against her neck’s artery. Peaches. She was relieved actually that Duane had quit the peaches business.
“I have some suspicions about lesbians,” Duane said. “I mean I have some theories about the way they might be spotted. I would think that might be worth something, don’t you?”
“Why what would that be worth?” Liberty asked.
The light changed and they peeled off. “A checklist,” Duane yelled, “like the seven danger signals of cancer! So a lezzie could see it coming on and do something about it. Number one on my checklist!” Duane shouted. His left arm was dangling out the window and he slapped the car door smartly with his hand. “Dream of black triangles. All the time dreaming of black triangles. Number two on my checklist!” He smacked the door again. “Don’t like their momma, can’t stand their momma. Three on my checklist, forgets to flush the toilet. Number four on my checklist …” Southern civility finally grabbed hold. He blushed. “I can’t go on,” he said. He slowed the car meekly and they drove for a moment in silence. Then he shook his head and began darting smartly in and out of traffic once more, cutting a swath, forcing to the side less-committed individuals.
A BMW with tinted windows abruptly snaked around them. The window rolled down, and a white-shirted masculine arm, its wrist adorned with a large gold ID bracelet, was extended. The hand on the arm gave Duane the finger.
Duane’s mouth flapped open like a lid on some ill-omened box.
“Did he throw me the bird?” he demanded of Liberty. Traffic flowed around them, but Duane had slowed almost to a stop and sat behind the wheel as though in a trance.
“He’s just a jerk,” Liberty said. “Ignore him.” She looked with alarm at Duane’s disordered face.
“Well, this particular jerk’s little glass of happiness is just about to be knocked over,” Duane said.
The truck pitched forward and homed in on the BMW. Duane reared it up to within an inch of the car’s rear bumper. Then he knocked it. The driver of the BMW braked and leapt out, a fit fellow with a blond mustache, well-dressed, with shiny shoes. Duane gazed at him for an instant, smiling faintly, then hurled himself out the door, but to Liberty’s surprise, he did not go forward, but retreated backward, to the bed of the truck. She turned and saw Duane grabbing a chain saw as long as his arm. He set his legs in a crouch, choked the saw, and started yanking on the cord. The man from the BMW stopped, his face turning first red, then white. It was an amazing thing to see. It was as though he were trying to withdraw all his limbs into some secret compartment of his torso. Duane was yanking away at the cord.
“God-damn saw,” he was saying.
The man fled back to his car, stalled it twice, then strained away in second gear.
Duane put the saw down in the truck bed and climbed back into the cab. Traffic was allowing him a large berth.
“Asshole like that makes the highway a dangerous place to be.” Duane composed himself and said cheerfully, “Guy won’t be able to get it up for a week. Now what were we discussing, oh yeah, the fact that Jean-Ann is queer. I feel I can talk to you, you know. I never told no one but Teddy that Jean-Ann was queer. My lady Janiella don’t even know. It’s bad enough she knows the damn woman left me. Janiella’s a woman of culture. She’d probably faint if I told her.”
“We’re almost home, Duane,” Liberty reminded him. “We’ve got to take the next right for Suntan.” Duane was the rugged, forgetful type, Liberty decided. The type who might go into a 7-Eleven for a beer and a bag of fried pork rinds and end up robbing the place instead.
Duane swerved across three lanes of traffic.
“You know, I’ve lived in this town my whole life. Smashed up my first car in this town, had my first drunk, got my first feel of titty, everything. I don’t like it here much anymore, but once you leave a town you can’t have lived there your whole life, know what I mean? Where you going to be from then? Got no place to be from.”
Suntan was a street in an area of town where the other streets were named for fun fruits—Kumquat, Tangerine, Mango, Java Plum—in an unfinished development which had been conceived in the fifties and failed in the fifties. The developer had been so out of step with the times that he hadn’t even bulldozed the trees, pumped out the mangrove lowlands, flattened the hammocks and seawalled the river. There were a few stucco, Spanish-style houses there in faded rose or white, and some frame houses set up on blocks with tin roofs and wraparound porches, but mostly there was shade on Suntan. Immense dappled shifting dark beneath the high crown of palms and oaks.
“You think Teddy resembles Jean-Ann?” Duane mused.
“I was never acquainted with Jean-Ann,” Liberty said.
“He favors her some,” D
uane said. “He’s got her dark hair. Ugh. I love that little boy, but sometimes he gives me the creeps.”
The truck cortèged bleakly down Guava, than made a turn on Suntan. One of nature’s most sacrosanct laws is that one can slow time by motion. Liberty felt the truck speeding in place, the street yawning ahead of them like an animal’s short, dark throat.
“It seems like one day Jean-Ann was normal and the next …” Duane sucked in his cheeks, choosing his word carefully. “Abnormal,” he finally said. “Jean-Ann just took our marriage and chucked it out the window.”
Liberty envisioned marriage. A homely paper sack, aloft.
“It’s hard to know what’s normal and what isn’t sometimes,” Liberty said.
Duane looked at her with irritation, as though she were a girl who had burped while he was kissing her.
“Now that it’s all over between Jean-Ann and me, I wish she was dead,” Duane said. “It’s nothing real personal, I just wish she was dead is all.”
“Here we are!” Liberty said.
“That rubber tree you got is some big mother all right,” Duane said.
Liberty agreed that it was.
“I been cutting holes in mothers like that for the last week,” Duane said.
“Why?”
“They been smaller than that,” he admitted. “That’s got to be one of the biggest trees around here.”
“But why have you been cutting into them!”
“Why, well, for the telephone lines to go through,” Duane said. “We make a nice round circle right in the middle of the crown of the tree so the lines can go through. We got to keep them lines of communication open for people.” He chuckled as though making a joke. “But this one won’t get carved. We’re outside the city limits here.”
Liberty and Clem got out.
“I bet you don’t have a single drain that ain’t stopped up in that house,” he said. “Cut that sucker down and you’d have firewood forever.”
“It never really gets cold here, Duane,” Liberty said.
“That’s what I’m saying. Wood enough for five, six years.” Duane winked at Liberty, made two tight noisy circles in the street and sped away.
“Hello the tree,” Liberty called. She would usually say this upon returning to the house. It did no harm to keep in touch with the vegetable world.
“Hello, hello. Where have you been?”
“Teddy?” Liberty said, startled. Deep inside the banyan it still dripped rain. A curtain of rodlike aerial roots parted and Teddy scrambled down the trunk.
“Daddy brought you here,” Teddy said.
“He sure did,” Liberty said. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“Something happened yesterday. I called you and called you, but you weren’t home. Sometimes when I called, this voice would say ‘What number?’ I guess it was the operator.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here, baby, what happened yesterday?” Life must be understood backwards, Liberty thought, or was it—Life can be understood backwards.
“It happened at school,” Teddy said. “They didn’t know what to say to us so they sent us home. We don’t have to go to school all week. Janiella’s really upset that I don’t have to go to school all week. She has all kinds of projects lined up to keep me occupied.”
Teddy tucked her hand in his and they went inside the house.
“Yesterday,” he said, “Mrs. Bates was telling us about protozoa. We have an aquarium in our room and it’s full of pond water and we were going to get to look at little drops of water under a microscope, and I hadn’t gotten my turn yet because I’m a W, so I hardly ever get my turn, but Billy Adams said it was amazing, all that stuff crawling around in a drop of water. So I was waiting for my turn and this man came in and shut the door. Everyone asks me what he looked like because he just stood back there for a minute where I was, but I don’t know what he looked like. He looked like anybody. Then he ran up to the front of the room and he grabbed Mrs. Bates. Nobody outside could see because our room doesn’t have any windows, there’s just our cubbies on the wall where a window could be. Then the man knocked Mrs. Bates down and banged her head on the floor and tore her dress, but when everyone started screaming, he ran away. I took off my jacket and covered her up with it and then I got the principal. I was the only one with a jacket. Janiella always makes me wear one.”
In the silence, Liberty could hear Clem drinking from his water bowl. One has these assumptions, Liberty thought, these foolish assumptions about life. This is the day that the Lord hath made—that sort of thing. It proceeds from sunrise to sunset. Dare, don’t adapt. Rejoice. Be truthful. Get enough rest. Take it easy on the sun and salt. Love. Reflect. Praise. Learn. As a child, Liberty had learned how to write with ascending accuracy between increasingly diminishing lines. That’s a child’s life. A child starts with intense admiration for the world. It’s him and the world. But there are too many messages. Most are worthless, but they still must be received. One must select and clarify. One must dismiss and forget. One is in a lighted room, then it turns dim. Inexplicably. One’s intense attachment turns to fear, then hate, then guilt. Finally, sorrow.
“Oh baby,” Liberty said.
“Do you know what they say? They say that that man used to be Mrs. Bates’ boyfriend. Do you have any paper? I have my colored pens. I want to make her a get-well card.”
Mrs. Bates had no husband, Teddy explained. Her husband was in New Zealand making hang-gliders. Teddy sat on the couch, a telephone book upon his knees, supporting the frail paper upon which he drew. He drew a plane descending upon a beautiful green and purple island in a blue sea. The island wore palm trees and waving, smiling children. Please get well Mrs. Bates, the plane’s wings said. It was a drawing of such earnest innocence and grubby grace that Liberty knew it would pluck Mrs. Bates from the plain of depressing twilight from which she was struggling to arise and shove her right back into the valley of bleakest night.
“Tonight’s Halloween, you haven’t forgotten, have you, Liberty? You said we’d all go out. I’m going to go as a doctor. My daddy and Janiella are going to give a party so I have to be out for a long time.”
“Okay, baby,” Liberty said. “We’ll have fun. I’ll see you tonight. Come over before it gets dark.”
“I love you,” Teddy said. He watches her, he opens his arms.
“I love you too,” Liberty said and hugged him. It’s timing. He always says it first.
The phone was ringing. Someone muttered something.
“What are you saying?” Liberty asked. “Who are you calling?”
“Number seventeen,” a voice said. It was a man’s voice. He sounded old and nervous, even on the verge of tears.
“I believe you have the wrong number,” Liberty said.
There was a strangled cry, then a click. She put the phone down and sat upon the sofa. Fallen between the cushions was a folded piece of mimeographed paper from the school that Teddy had left behind. GENERAL INFORMATION FOR PARENTS the paper said.
Drugs are being sold to schoolchildren in the form of brightly colored paper tabs. They resemble postage stamps in size and have pictures of Superman, Dopey and Mickey Mouse upon them. A young child could have a dangerous reaction to these “uppers” and “downers” by licking these tabs. Absortion can also occur through the skin by simply handling the paper. Alert your children.
The principal had misspelled absorption. The school had faulty wiring, daily tornado drills, and nervous German shepherds with names like Kong and Goforit prowling the corridors seeking illegal substances. They had banned The Little Lame Prince from the library, had a nurse who spanked children in the infirmary, and had turned off the drinking fountains because there was saltwater infusion in the wells. A teacher had just been attacked in a room where children were dutifully growing radishes in egg cartons and making cameras out of Quaker Oats boxes. There wasn’t time for spelling.
Liberty went into the bathroom where she turned the water on in the shower. S
he undressed and stood in the small stall beneath the spray until the hot water ran out. She turned off the water and stared uneasily at the shower curtain, which portrayed soiled palm trees staggered in rows.
“Hi,” Willie said. He pushed the curtain back. His lean jaws moved tightly, chewing gum. Willie made chewing gum look like one of the great pleasures of being a human being. He was wearing faded blue jeans and a snug, faded polo shirt. His eyes were a faded blue. Liberty felt that they passed over her lightly. Communication had indeed broken down considerably. Signals were intermittent and could easily be misread.
“Why are you standing in there?” he asked.
“I was just getting out.”
“I was in a house,” Willie said, “and in a shower pretty much like this one there was …”
Liberty raised a finger to her lips wanting to hush him. She felt awkward being naked in front of this man. This was her husband. She had known him for long years and was indeed closer to him than to her own self. She shivered.
“Don’t you want to know what was in this shower?”
“I trust you,” Liberty said. “I trust you and want to be with you.” She spoke loudly.
“There was a bitch nursing six puppies. Their eyes were squeezed shut. It was cute.”
Liberty looked at him and stepped out of the shower. She wrapped a towel around herself, went to the sink and brushed her teeth.
“I was in a house,” Willie said, “where there were huge paintings on the walls of greatly enlarged amoebae, jellyfish and polyps.”
“The things people do for protection,” Liberty said, rinsing.
“People are so deceitful these days. You wouldn’t believe the number of houses that merely give the appearance of being secured. Fake tubular locks. Alarm system decals that look as though they came out of cereal boxes. It’s all an illusion, produced for the stranger.”
“And you’re the stranger,” Liberty said. She looked into the mirror. There were her lips, her teeth.