by Joy Williams
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Sam says.
They get married. They drive home. Everyone has arrived, and some of the guests have brought their children, who run around with Elizabeth’s child. One little girl has long red hair and painted green nails.
“I remember you,” the child says. “You had a kitty. Why didn’t you bring your kitty with you?”
“That kitty bought the chops,” the little girl says.
Elizabeth overhears this. “Oh, my goodness,” she says. She takes her daughter into the bathroom and closes the door.
“There is more than the seeming of things,” she says to the child.
“Oh, Mummy,” the child says, “I just want my nails green like that girl’s.”
“Elizabeth,” Sam calls. “Please come out. The house is full of people. I’m getting drunk. We’ve been married for one hour and fifteen minutes.” He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the door. Miraculously, he enters. The closed door is not locked. The child escapes by the same entrance, happy to be free. Sam kisses Elizabeth by the blue tub. He kisses her beside the sink and before the full-length mirror. He kisses her as they stand pressed against the windowsill. Together, in their animistic embrace, they float out the window and circle the house, gazing down at all those who have not found true love, below.
The Yard Boy
The yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. Being enlightened wasn’t easy. It was very hard work. It was manual labor, actually.
The enlightened being is free. He feels the sorrow and sadness of those around him but does not necessarily feel his own. The yard boy felt that he had been enlightened for about two months, at the most.
The yard boy had two possessions. One was a pickup truck. The other was a stuffed and mounted plover he had found in the take-it-or-leave-it shed at the dump. The bird was now in the room he rented. The only other thing in the room was a bed. The landlady provided sheets and towels. Sometimes when he came back from work hot and sweaty with little bits of leaves and stuff caught in his hair, the landlady would give him a piece of homemade key lime pie.
The yard boy was content. He had hard muscular arms and a tanned back. He had compassion. He had a girlfriend. When he thought about it, he supposed that having a girlfriend was a cop-out to the security he had eschewed. This was a preconception, however, and a preconception was the worst of all the forms of security. The yard boy believed he was in balance on this point. He tried to see things the way they were from the midst of nowhere, and he felt that he had worked out this difficulty about the girlfriend satisfactorily. The important thing was to be able to see through the veils of preconception.
The yard boy was a handsome fellow. He seldom spoke. He was appealing. Now that he was a yard boy his hands smelled of 6-6-6. His jeans smelled of tangelos. He was honest and truthful, a straightforward person who did not distinguish between this and that. For the girlfriend he always had a terrific silky business that was always at the ready.
The yard boy worked for several very wealthy people. In the morning of every day he got into his pickup and drove over the causeways to the Keys, where he mowed and clipped and cut and hauled. He talked to the plants. He always told them what he was going to do before he did it so they would have a chance to prepare themselves. Plants have lived in the Now for a long time but they still have to have some things explained to them.
—
At the Wilsons’ house the yard boy clips a sucker from a grapefruit tree. It is February. Even so, the tree doesn’t like it much. Mrs. Wilson comes out and watches the yard boy while he works. She has her son with her. He is about three. He doesn’t talk yet. His name is Tao. Mrs. Wilson is wealthy and can afford to be wacky. What was she supposed to do, after all, she asked the yard boy once, call her kid George? Larry? For god’s sake.
Her obstetrician had told her at the time that he had never seen a more perfectly shaped head.
The Wilsons’ surroundings are splendid. Mrs. Wilson has splendid clothes, a splendid figure. She has a wonderful Cuban cook. The house is worth three-quarters of a million dollars. The plantings are worth a hundred thousand dollars. Everything has a price. It is fantastic. A precise worth has been ascribed to everything. Every worm and aphid can be counted upon. It costs a certain amount of money to eradicate them. The sod is laid down fresh every year. For weeks after the lawn is installed, the seams are visible and then the squares of grass gather together and it becomes, everywhere, in sun or shade, a smooth, witty and improbable green like the color of a parrot.
Mrs. Wilson follows the yard boy around as he tends to the hibiscus, the bougainvillea, the poinciana, the Java flower, the flame vine. They stand beneath the mango, looking up.
“Isn’t it pagan?” Mrs. Wilson says.
Close the mouth, shut the doors, untie the tangles, soften the light, the yard boy thinks.
Mrs. Wilson says, “I’ve never understood nature, all this effort. All this will…” She flaps her slender arms at the reeking of odors, the rioting colors. Still, she looks up at the mangoes, hanging. Uuuuuh, she thinks.
Tao is standing between the yard boy and Mrs. Wilson with an oleander flower in his mouth. It is pink. Tao’s hair is golden. His eyes are blue.
The yard boy removes the flower from the little boy’s mouth. “Poisonous,” the yard boy says.
“What is it!” Mrs. Wilson cries.
“Oleander,” the yard boy says.
“Cut it down, dig it out, get rid of it,” Mrs. Wilson cries. “My precious child!” She imagines Tao being kidnapped, held for an astronomical ransom by men with acne.
Mrs. Wilson goes into the house and makes herself a drink. The yard boy walks over to the oleander. The oleander trembles in the breeze. The yard boy stands in front of it for a few minutes, his clippers by his side.
Mrs. Wilson watches him from the house. She sips her drink and rubs the glass over her hot nipples. The ice clinks. The yard boy raises the clippers and spreads them wide. The bolt connecting the two shears breaks. He walks over to the house, over to where Mrs. Wilson stands behind glass doors. The house weighs a ton with the glass. The house’s architect was the South’s most important architect, Mrs. Wilson once told the yard boy. Everything he made was designed to give a sense of freedom and space. Everything was designed to give the occupants the impression of being outside. His object was to break down definitions, the consciousness of boundaries. Mrs. Wilson told the yard boy the architect was an idiot.
Behind the glass, Mrs. Wilson understands the difficulty. Behind Mrs. Wilson’s teeth is a tongue that tastes of bourbon.
“I’ll drive you downtown and we can get a new whatever,” she says. She is determined.
She and he and Tao get into Mrs. Wilson’s Mercedes SL350. Mrs. Wilson is a splendid driver. She has taken the Mercedes up to 130, she tells the yard boy. The engine stroked beautifully at 130, no sound of strain at all.
She drives past the beaches, over the causeways. She darts in and out of traffic with a fine sense of timing. Behind them, occasionally, old men in tiny cars jump the curb in fright. Mrs. Wilson glances at them in the rearview mirror, seeming neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. She puts her hand on the yard boy’s knee. She rubs his leg.
Tao scrambles from the back into the front seat. He gets on the other side of the yard boy. He bites him.
I am living in a spiritual junkyard, thinks the yard boy. I must make it into a simple room with one beautiful object.
Sweat runs down the yard boy’s spine. Tao is gobbling at his arm as though it is junket.
“What is going on!” yells Mrs. Wilson. She turns the Mercedes around in the middle of the highway. An ice-cream truck scatters a tinkle of music and a carton of Fudgsicles as it grinds to a stop. Mrs. Wilson is cuffing Tao as she speeds back home. Her shaven armpit rises and falls before the yard boy’s eyes.
“Save the oleander!” she yells at both of them. “What do I care!”
; In the driveway she runs around to Tao’s side of the car and pinches the child’s nose. He opens his mouth. She grabs him by the hair and carries him suspended into the house.
The yard boy walks to his truck, gets in and drives off. The world is neither nest nor playground, the yard boy thinks.
—
The yard boy lies in his room thinking about his girlfriend.
Open up, give in, allow some space, sprinkle and pour, he thinks.
—
The yard boy is mowing the grass around Johnny Dakota’s swimming pool. Dakota is into heroin and intangible property. As he is working, the yard boy hears a big splash behind him. He looks into the swimming pool and sees a rock on the bottom of it. He finishes mowing the grass and then he gets a net and fishes the rock out. It is as big as his hand and gray, with bubbly streaks of iron and metal running through it. The yard boy thinks it is a meteorite. It would probably still be smoldering with heat had it not landed in the swimming pool.
It is interesting but not all that interesting. The possibility of its surviving the earth’s atmosphere is one-tenth of one percent. Other things are more interesting than this. Nevertheless, the yard boy shows it to Johnny Dakota, who might want to place it in a taped-up box in his house to prevent the air from corroding it.
Johnny Dakota looks up at the sky, then at the piece of space junk and then at the yard boy. He is a sleek, fit man. Only his eyes and his hands look old. His hands have deep ridges in them and smashed nails. He once told the yard boy that his mother had died from plucking a wild hair from her nose while vacationing in Calabria. His father had been felled by an incident in Chicago. The darkness is always near, he had told the yard boy.
Johnny Dakota usually takes his swim at this time of the morning. He is wearing his swim trunks and flip-flops. If he had been in the pool he could have been brained. Once his mother had dreamed of losing a tooth and two days later her cousin dropped dead.
Johnny Dakota is angry. Anyone could tell. His face is dark. His mouth is a thin line. He gives the yard boy two twenties and tells him to bury the rock in the backyard. He tells him not to mention this to anyone.
The yard boy takes the rock and buries it beneath a fiddle-leaf fig at the north end of the house. The fig tree is distressed. It’s magnetic, that’s the only thing known about this rock. The fig tree is almost as upset as Johnny Dakota.
—
The yard boy lies in his room. His girlfriend is giving him a hard time. She used to visit him in his room several nights a week but now she doesn’t. He will take her out to dinner. He will spend the two twenties on a fantastic dinner.
The yard boy is disgusted with himself. The spider’s web is woven into the wanting, he thinks. He has desire for his girlfriend. His mind is shuttling between thoughts of the future and thoughts of the past. He is out of touch with the sharp simplicity and wonderfulness of the moment. He looks around him. He opens his eyes wide. The yard boy’s jeans are filthy. A green insect crawls in and out of the scapular feathers of the plover.
The yard boy goes downstairs. He gives the plover to his landlady. She seems delighted. She puts it on a shelf in the pantry with her milk-glass collection. The landlady has white hair, a wen and old legs that end in sneakers. She wants the yard boy to look at a plant she has just bought. It is in a big green plastic pot in the sunshine of her kitchen. Nothing is more obvious than the hidden, the yard boy thinks.
“This plant is insane,” the yard boy says.
The landlady is shocked. She backs off a little from the plant, a rabbit’s-foot fern.
“It has seen something terrible,” the yard boy says.
“I bought it at that place I always go,” the landlady says.
The yard boy shakes his head. The plant waves a wrinkly leaf and drops it.
“Insane,” the landlady asks. She would like to cry. She has no family, no one.
“Mad as a hatter,” the yard boy says.
—
The restaurant that the yard boy’s girlfriend chooses is not expensive. It is a fish restaurant. The plates are plastic. There is a bottle of hot sauce on each table. The girlfriend doesn’t like fancy.
The yard boy’s girlfriend is not talking to him. She has not been talking to him for days, actually. He knows he should be satisfied with whatever situation arises but he is having a little difficulty with his enlightenment.
—
The yard boy’s landlady has put her rabbit’s-foot fern out by the garbage cans. The yard boy picks it up and puts it in the cab of his truck. It goes wherever he goes now.
The yard boy gets a note from his girlfriend. It says:
My ego is too healthy for real involvement with you. I don’t like you. Good-bye.
Alyce
—
The yard boy works for Mr. Crown, an illustrator who lives in a fine house on the bay. Across the street, someone is building an even finer house on the gulf. Mr. Crown was once the most renowned illustrator of Western art in the country. In his studio he has George Custer’s jacket. Sometimes the yard boy poses for Mr. Crown. The year before, a gentleman in Cody, Wyoming, bought Mr. Crown’s painting of an Indian who was the yard boy for fifty thousand dollars. This year, however, Mr. Crown is not doing so well. He has been reduced to illustrating children’s books. His star is falling. Also, the construction across the street infuriates him. The new house will block off his view of the sun as it slides daily into the water.
Mr. Crown’s publishers have told him that they are not interested in cowboys. There have been too many cowboys for too long.
The yard boy is spraying against scale and sooty mold.
“I don’t need the money but I am insulted,” Mr. Crown tells the yard boy.
Mr. Crown goes back into the house. The yard boy takes a break to get a drink of water. He sits in the cab of his truck and drinks from a plastic jug. He sprinkles some water on the rabbit’s-foot fern. The fern sits there on the seat, dribbling a little vermiculite, crazier than hell.
The fern and the yard boy sit.
It is not a peaceful spot to sit. The racket of the construction on the gulf is considerable. Nonetheless, the yard boy swallows his water and attempts to dwell upon the dignity and simplicity of the moment.
Then there is the sound of gunfire. The yard boy cranes his neck out of the window of his pickup truck and sees Mr. Crown firing from his studio at the workers across the street. It takes the workers several moments to realize that they are being shot at. The bullets make big mealy holes in the concrete. The bullets whine through the windows that will exhibit the sunset. The workers all give a howl and try to find cover. The yard boy curls up behind the wheel of his truck. The little rushy brown hairs on the fern’s stalks stick straight out.
A few minutes later the firing stops. Mr. Crown goes back to the drawing board. No one is hurt. Mr. Crown is arrested and posts a large bond. Charges are later dropped. The house across the street is built. Still, Mr. Crown seems calmer now. He gives up illustrating. When he wants to look at something, he looks at the bay. He tells the yard boy he is putting sunsets behind him.
—
The yard boy and the rabbit’s-foot fern drive from lawn to lawn in the course of their days, the fern tipping forward a little in its green pot, the wind folding back its leaves. In the wind, its leaves curl back like the lips of a Doberman pinscher.
The yard boy sees things in the course of his work that he wouldn’t dream of telling the fern even though the fern is his only confidant. The fern has a lot of space around it in which anything can happen but it doesn’t have much of an emotional life because it is insane. Therefore, it makes a good confidant.
The yard boy has always been open. He has always let be and disowned. Nevertheless, he has lost the spontaneity of his awakened state. He is sad. He can feel it. The fern can feel it too, which makes it gloomier than ever. Even so, the fern has grown quite fond of the yard boy. It wants to help him any way it can.
The yard bo
y doesn’t rent a room anymore. He lives in his truck. Then he sells his truck. He and the rabbit’s-foot fern sit on the beach. The fern lives in the shade of the yard boy. The yard boy doesn’t live in the Now at all anymore. He lives in the past. He thinks of his childhood. As a child he had a comic-book-collection high of 374 with perfect covers. His parents had loved him. His parents had another son, whom they loved too. One morning this son had fallen out of a tree onto the driveway and played with nothing but a spoon and saucepan for the next twenty-five years. When the yard boy has lived in the past as much as is reliable, he lives in the future. It is while he is living in the future that his girlfriend walks by on the beach. She is wearing a long wet T-shirt that says, I’M NOT A TOURIST I LIVE HERE. The rabbit’s-foot fern alerts the yard boy and they both stare at her as she walks by.
It is a beautiful day. The water is a smooth green, broken occasionally by porpoises rising. Between the yard boy and his girlfriend is sand a little less white than the clouds. Behind the yard boy are plantings of cabbage palms and succulents and Spanish bayonets. The bayonets are harsh and green with spikes that end in black tips like stilettos.
Act but do not rely upon one’s own abilities, thinks the yard boy. He chews at his nails. The moon can shine in a hundred different bowls, he thinks. What a lot of junk the yard boy thinks. He is as lost in the darkness of his solid thoughts as a yard boy can be. He watches his girlfriend angrily as she sashays by.
The rabbit’s-foot fern brightens at the yard boy’s true annoyance. Its fuzzy long-haired rhizomes clutch its pot tightly. The space around it simmers, it bubbles. Each cell mobilizes its intent of skillful and creative action. It turns its leaves toward the Spanish bayonets. It straightens and sways. Straightens and sways. A moment passes. The message of retribution is received along the heated air. The yard boy watches as the Spanish bayonets uproot themselves and move out.
Shepherd
It had been three weeks since the girl’s German Shepherd had died. He had drowned. The girl couldn’t get over it. She sat on the porch of her boyfriend’s beach house and looked at the water.