by Joy Williams
“We’re all the stranger,” Willie said.
“We should lighten up this hobby of yours,” Liberty said. “Why don’t you hot-wire a nice car and we’ll drive to New Orleans, the City that Care Forgot.”
“That’s not the plan. Do you think I’m a thug?”
“What is the plan?”
“Liberty prefers not to read between the lines,” Willie said. “The clearly visible is exhausting enough, Liberty feels.”
She could no longer see herself in the mirror which had steamed up. She drew a line down the center of the glass with her finger. At the top on the right she wrote yes and on the left no. She regarded her list. It certainly lacked qualification.
Willie took a soft mask from his jeans pocket and pulled it on. It was a duck mask, the duck’s expression registering surprise and concern. It was not Donald Duck. It was a duck personality entirely different from Donald’s.
Turning, Liberty said, “Oh, that’s good!”
“I’m set,” the duck said. “What are you going as?”
“Nothing. But I’m going.”
“Nothing is usually indicated by a dark forest, a wasteland tract, a desert, et cetera,” the duck said.
“Don’t,” Liberty said.
“But instead you’re going as the path you could take. You feel the path you could take, the path you could have taken inside you. You feel it as an unhappiness, an incompleteness.”
“Don’t, Willie,” Liberty said.
3
Liberty had never cared for Halloween. The night gave the false hope that when one was summoned to the door by an unfamiliar knock, one’s most horrible fears could be objectively realized by the appearance of ghosts, witches, ambulatory corpses and the headless hounds of hell.
Liberty and Clem were not in costume. Willie wore his duck mask. Teddy came to the house in a white gown carrying a stethoscope and a saw. They walked through the streets to the small shopping center where Little Dot lived. They passed a shop that sold sportswear. A sign in the shop window said YES! WE HAVE MASTECTOMY BATHING SUITS!
The kiln behind the pottery shop was dark. Roger and Rosie hadn’t been able to fire anything in the kiln for a month, ever since a pair of feral cockatoos had chosen to nest there.
Liberty knocked on the door. Through the window she could see Rosie bounding through a clutter of pots and bowls and cups and vases, toward them.
“Hi,” she said. “Little Dot’s all set. She has the greatest costume but she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t want to come out of her tepee.”
“What’s that?” Teddy asked, pointing at a pin on Rosie’s blouse. There was a man’s picture on the pin.
“Oh!” Rosie said, “that’s the Dalai Lama. A friend of mine met the Dalai Lama. He said he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a little button on his suit just like this one that shows the Dalai Lama wearing horn-rimmed glasses. They sell these little pins all over the place in Tibet, and my friend bought one and gave it to me. At first I thought it was really stupid but then I felt the Dalai Lama’s spirit piercing me like little arrows. It felt just like that, like being pierced by little arrows. Now I love this pin, I don’t think it’s stupid at all! But I can’t wear it very much because it gives me a great yearning for nonexistence. That’s a great feeling, very relaxing, but it’s not the kind of feeling you should have all the time. That’s why little kids shouldn’t wear this pin. It’s like they shouldn’t sit in hot tubs either.” Rosie ran her fingers through her rusty red hair and beamed at Teddy. “I used to take drugs but the Dalai Lama made me clean. It’s great to be clean, let me tell you. Then I met Roger-Dad and that was great too. I mean, I’m very accepting now.”
Roger came into the shop. He kissed Liberty on the forehead. His pigtail harbored string and dust, part of a potato chip. “Liberty,” he said mournfully. “Willie.”
“Thanks for taking Little Dot,” Rosie said. “Roger-Dad and I are just so busy tonight. You’re Christians, right? I bet you are!” Rosie had made this inference many times.
“We believe in guilt and longing,” Willie admitted. “Confession and continual defeat. The circle and the spiral.” The words filled up the room pleasantly, like boulders.
“Jesus could never have saved me from drugs. Jesus is dead.” Rosie reflected sadly upon this for a moment.
Willie walked to the back of the store and called out into the yard where the tepee stood. The tepee looked serene. Little Dot had a sleeping bag inside and a collection of soothing photographs. Rosie subscribed to a club that sent a soothing photograph each month. The subjects offered were supposed to be especially mysterious, evocative and comforting. They were black-and-white photographs of columns and foggy roads, of ladders and lambs. Within each photograph was a place where Little Dot was free to come and go.
Little Dot pushed back the flap door of the tepee and walked stolidly past Willie and into the shop. The little girl was dressed half as a man and half as a woman. Half a tie was sewn to half a frilly blouse, half a skirt to a single trouser leg. On one side of her face was glued a beard and a thick eyebrow. There was lipstick on one side of her mouth and a rhinestone earring dangling from her ear.
“Oh, Rosie,” Liberty said.
“A representation in human form of the principle of wholeness,” Rosie said with pride.
Rosie gave Teddy and Little Dot large shopping bags, then put a highly speckled banana in the bottom of each one. “Have a ball now!” she said. The children looked at the first thing in the bottom of their bags. Before, their bags had been perfect. Now each bag had a redolent banana in it.
They left the shopping center and entered a neighborhood Willie and Liberty knew well, for they had, in the past, entered many of the homes uninvited and entertained themselves there. There was the home of the retired Colonel, for example. The retired Colonel had a bazooka and a collection of thunder jugs. He had made a coffee table out of an old gravemarker. The marker was slim and weather-pocked with an angel etched upon it and the dates 1797–1798. The retired Colonel, in whose home the marker lies, covered with magazines and overflowing ashtrays, is a heavy, sallow man, a widower with blackheads around his eyes. This night, the house is dark, the shades drawn, and the children do not approach the door. Instead, they run between the ant mounds on the lawn to the house beside it, a house from which came the voice of Elvis Presley singing “Heartbreak Hotel.” Liberty and Willie were familiar with the house from which the voice of The King rolled. An enormous Oriental carpet filled the floor of the living room and climbed one wall. Pinned to the center of it was a photograph of Elvis with his curled lip, his thickly lashed eyes, his look of humorous sadism, Elvis in his prime, signing the hand of a dazed-looking girl in an angora sweater and poodle skirt. In the bedroom were two large teddy bears, both blue and eyeless with pieces of red felt for tongues. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet was filled with diet pills and expensive bubble bath.
The children ran across the grass.
“That woman made us each say ‘He was taken too soon,’ ” Teddy said. “Then she gave us both a little box of chocolate-covered cherries.”
Willie held Little Dot’s hand, Liberty held Teddy’s. Clem followed behind them. They were like any couple out with their children and dog on Halloween.
“How did you hurt your arm?” Willie asked Little Dot. From elbow to wrist, her arm was bruised. Little Dot stopped and set down her bag. With the index and middle fingers of her right hand she squeezed her arm, twisting it like a key.
“No,” Willie said. He pushed the duck mask off his face, kissed her fingers, then spread them flat and patted them.
“Do you know what a bruise is?” Teddy said excitedly. “It’s blood that’s leaked out of a blood vessel under your skin. It’s in a strange place and whenever blood is in a strange place, it begins to change. The spilled blood has to be cleaned up and you know what’s happening right now?”
Little Dot looked at him.
“White blood cells are cleaning u
p that blood right now. They’re like little garbage men who wander around your body looking for garbage. When they find it, they swallow it up. The spilled blood is like garbage and the white blood cells are gobbling it up and when all the blood’s been eaten, the black and blue marks will be gone!”
Little Dot hid her arm behind her back.
Cars crept along the streets, transporting small, ghastly beings. The children moved forward, grazing the landscape as thoroughly as Mexican goats. Six dwellings. Nine. The swimming pools were lit. The sprinklers cast their slow, soft arcs. Thousands of dollars of lighting and millions of kilowatts of electricity were used to make green plants red and blue. Thousands of gallons of water from the sulfurous, shrinking aquifer were pumped up to make thousands of bags of cypress shreddings dark against the pale trunks of palms.
A man wearing red trousers and no shirt opened the door of a small house. Cold air fled out into the muggy night. He feigned great horror at the sight of Teddy and Little Dot and, most particularly, the duck, and extended a bowl of candy bars.
“Can I use your toilet?” Little Dot asked.
“Sure,” the man said.
Little Dot squeezed past him and disappeared down a corridor to the right. Little Dot loved utilizing people’s bathrooms and had an unerring sense of where they were.
“Can that dog do tricks?” the man asked Liberty. “I had a dog once that was so well trained, you give him a cookie, he’d get halfway through it, you’d tell him to spit it out, he would.”
“He can’t do that,” Liberty said, looking at Clem.
“Not inclined that way, huh,” the man said.
They waited for what seemed a long time for Little Dot to reappear. “Why don’t you come in,” the man finally said, “and collect your kid.” He didn’t seem annoyed.
Inside, on a white bamboo table, were a dish of peanuts, two empty martini glasses and a ceramic dildo.
“That’s an old one,” Willie said.
“Why, yes, it is,” the man said, looking at the dildo with pride. “It’s from Martha’s Vineyard. It belonged to one of those poor whaling wives.”
“Little Dot!” Liberty called.
“The bathroom’s this way,” the man said. Liberty followed him down the corridor. The door was partially open and she saw a white towel in a ring, a mirror picturing the tiled wall of a shower, a urinal. The man she was following had a thin, young neck from behind. Liberty’s hands dangled at her sides. She felt as though she, somehow, were the threatening party. The sound of a television came from another room.
“Little Dot!” Liberty called.
“Here she is,” the man said.
Little Dot was sitting on a bed with a man in a linen suit. They were watching a documentary on the Renaissance. The large screen on the wall showed Ghiberti’s bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence.
Little Dot bounced on the bed which was covered by a dark, synthetic fur. “Eden,” she said. “The sacrifice of Isaac.”
Little Dot went to Sunday School. She knew these people. She made them out of modeling clay. She drew them with her crayons.
“You’d be disappointed in Florence, kid,” the man in the suit said. He was smoking a cigarette. “Too many cars. It’s a filthy place.”
“C’mon, honey,” Liberty said, bending to touch Little Dot’s knees to keep her from bouncing. Thank you for not hurting her, she wanted to say. She knew it was an inappropriate thing to say.
“I flushed,” Little Dot said. She patted the man’s arm. “This is Gordon.”
“They’re going to show Michelangelo’s Four Captives in a moment,” Gordon said. “I’ve seen this program many, many times.” He looked at Little Dot as though he realized she was a captive too, a part of her imprisoned in a stony, unworked region of her mind.
Little Dot looked at the screen. “A doll,” she said.
“Nah, not a doll,” Gordon said. “You like dolls?”
Smoke lay in levels in the room. “You know what I can do?” Little Dot said. “I can fix zippers. I can get them back on track like nobody.”
Gordon stubbed out his cigarette and opened the drawer of a bedside table. Blunt, blurred features in stone filled the television screen. He put something in an envelope and handed it to Little Dot. She dropped it in her bag.
At the door, the other man murmured, “That is the most generous, the most genuine human being you will ever meet.”
Outside, the street looked peculiar to Liberty, as though dipped in milk.
“One more house,” the children begged. “One more!”
A truck drove toward them, a light on in the cab. A man was driving, and there was a dog on the seat beside him. The driver noticed Clem and put one hand over his dog’s eyes as they passed by.
“All I have left is gum,” the woman said. “You shoulda come earlier.” She appeared somewhat loaded. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit and drinking a beer. The top of the suit did not resemble the bottom in its pattern. “Just gum, but even so, you got to do a trick before you get the treat.”
“I could tell your fortune if you give me your hand,” Teddy said.
“No thanks and I’ll tell you why,” the woman said, tapping Teddy’s chest with a long, painted nail. “You’re a little doctor, right? Doctors give me the shivers. They give me the heebie-jeebies. My first husband was a doctor. You know what he knew about? Livers. His whole world was livers. He was a little dark Iranian, always smiling. He was creepy beyond belief.” She looked at Willie. “What are you going to do for me, duckie?” she asked coyly.
The duck spoke without moving its beak.
All would be well
Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,
And get into their world that to the sense
Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly
Among substantial things; for it is dreams
That lift us to the flowing, changing world
That the heart longs for.
“My god,” the woman said. “That’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever heard. You wait right here.” She went into another room and came back with a bottle of Cuervo Gold. “That was truly lovely, duckie,” she said, handing the bottle to Willie. “Now I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we tell the very worst thing that ever happened to us. How about you?” she said to Little Dot. “You look as though you’ve got a tale to tell.”
Little Dot sat down beside Clem and put her thumb in her mouth.
“Okay,” the woman said, rolling the beer can across her midriff, “I will tell you the worst thing that happened to me. I was just a little kid like you and I was at the circus. I was having such a wonderful time at the circus. The thing I liked best were the aerialists. I didn’t like the clowns and I didn’t like the man who caught the lead balls on the back of his neck and I didn’t like the tigers, I liked the aerialists. I loved seeing them up so high, flying through the air, the sequins on their costumes flashing. I wanted to be an aerialist. Well I was at the circus and a man on a trapeze missed the net and fell into the audience. He fell on me and broke my collarbone. He smelled terrible. I mean, really terrible, like a big mouse or something.”
The woman chuckled. This little group depressed her. She wanted to tell them everything. The truth was, she was worried. She could still bleach her hair and meet a man in a bar, maybe even manage a little water-skiing, but before her lay increasingly untrustworthy memories, hangovers, and pain during intercourse. A tooth had cracked the last time she ate barbecue. Innuendoes were being made. Diagnoses were being written.
“That actually wasn’t the worst thing,” she said. She really was high as a kite. “That happened to a little kid. The worst thing that happened to the lady you see before you was that she was robbed. She was robbed, but they didn’t take anything. Broke into her house and didn’t take a goddamn thing.” She folded her beer can in half with a pop. “I’m going to turn the light off on you now,” she said. Turning out the light on them, standing there, shutting the door
on them, their worst things unsaid, unknown, unaccounted for, made her feel a little better.
The night was still young. They returned to Willie and Liberty’s house and got into the truck. Willie drove to the newest and most elaborate hotel in town, an establishment that had six bars and a waterfall that fell three stories. On one of the patio bars, a party was taking place around an open coffin, surrounded by calla lilies. In the coffin were tiny hamburgers, barbequed shrimp on sticks, all kinds of food. Liberty and Clem and the two children sat in a corner of the lobby on the edge of the patio. Little Dot held Clem’s head in her hand, moving her mouth at him without making any sounds. She had once told Liberty that Clem was a dog because he was not good enough yet to be a child. Chains and boots and feathers seemed popular among the adult revelers this year. They were throwing small sacks of talcum powder at one another. Willie had taken the duck mask off and was standing by the reception desk. A pear-shaped man in a brown business suit approached the desk and stood next to Willie.
“Where are the cookies in this town, pal?” the man asked. “This place sucks.” He threw his room key down on the shelf behind the counter. “I’ve got to get home tomorrow. I want to be sitting on the plane in the morning, sniffing my fingers, knowing I had a good time.”
“No cookies here,” Willie said. “Give me a piece of paper, I’ll give you some addresses.” He wrote some names and numbers down. “Thanks, pal,” the man said. As he turned, Willie scooped up the room key an instant before the desk clerk appeared.
“Who can I help here?” the clerk said.
It was a suite, high up, overlooking the bay. There was little sign of the pear-shaped man’s occupancy. His bag had not been unpacked and was still locked.
“I like hotels,” Teddy said.
“They belong to everybody,” Willie said.
“This is nice, I like it,” Teddy said, hugging Liberty. “How did you know that we could come here?”