by Joy Williams
“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 o
f 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.