Breaking and Entering (21 page)

A smaller heron, a green one, zigzagged toward them, then alarmed, veered chattering away. The blue stood like sticks a child had carelessly arranged. She should pass it by, she knew, for she possessed nothing with which to free it, yet she pulled her sweatshirt off and held it only for an instant before she rushed the bird, throwing the shirt over its head, clutching at its wings, trying to enclose its length in her arms. Its beak felt like an iron striking her with heat, its long bones felt like brittle grasses. She smelled the nutty, parched smell of dying on it as it flailed at her, making hoarse, barking sounds. The shovel of its chest glistened and was hot beneath her hands. She pushed its wings back close to its body, dragging the sweatshirt away from its head to bind them, and pressed the bird as lightly as she could against the cold sand. She leaned against its breast which rose in scatterings, like pebbles being thrown, and began picking away at the line with her fingers. She looked at the flecks of darkness in the bird’s bright eyes and felt that the moment was already over, that she was remembering it, that this was the moment that there had been just before it had become hopeless. The baggy line dug painfully into her fingers as she tried to snap it, then it suddenly broke. The heron’s head struggled back, the feathers beneath the broken line’s turnings frayed and damp. She was able to unravel several feet of the line, but there was so much of it, webbed and snarled like the matter glimpsed in some dreadful drain. Suddenly, the heron lunged, bringing its beak up and
across Liberty’s cheek, tearing out of her grasp. Her hand slipped over its slick back, and then, with a last surge of strength, it was flying, its legs dangling, nicking the water, its long neck extended, trailing still the crippling line. Liberty held her hand to her face. She expected blood but there was no blood. The heron flew to Long Key.

She remembered a poem she knew as a child about an injured hawk who was able to fly only in his dreams. The child in her remembered everything.

She felt sleepy with failure and watched the rolling waters of the Pass without enthusiasm. The mist of early morning was rising, and she could see the silver Ts of docks on the sheltered side of Long Key. A red boathouse glimmered on water that looked flat and wooden.

There were scratches on Liberty’s arms, embalmed by drying salt, and her lips tasted of salt. Clem lay in streamers of railroad vine close by. When she stood up, he rose and trotted toward her.

They stepped into the water, let the water suck them down. Liberty opened her eyes and saw the emptiness of the water moving her. She couldn’t see herself, but felt her limbs aching dully, her eyes burning. Her body held her back, she felt its stubborn weight. It’s all a misunderstanding, she thought, like almost everything. The speed of the water was terrific. Her shoulder ground against sand and then she was flung upward and floating in calm yet moving water curving toward Long Key. She wanted to fix on something, a tree, the way the land fell, something that would remind her of something else. It had not been too far a distance, but she felt somewhat ahead of her body. Her body seemed to be behind her, still holding hard to nothing in the quick water. This is remarkable, she thought, the air, the muted sun … Her body caught her with
a jolt. She coughed and shaking the water from her eyes, she saw Clem already waiting for her on the shore.

Liberty climbed from the water and sat for a moment, catching her breath. She wore only a bathing suit and a pair of shorts. She took the shorts off and wrung the water from them. Her arms and face stung from the scratches the heron had made. She felt afraid, and it was not a belated fear of the bird’s fierce beak but of the moment that had brought it to be doomed on such a fine morning, the moment that is the fatal one, which lies close and cold next to each thing’s heart.

Down the beach, she saw Willie, his trousers billowing out with the wind. He had his arms raised. She realized she hadn’t been thinking about Willie, only about reaching him. When she touched him, he kissed her.
We are lovers
, Liberty thought.
We love
. His kiss pushed against her like the wind and the sun. Then he pulled away and looked at her, saying nothing, but she saw herself as though she were fifteen years old again and listening to him, nodding her head, agreeing. She saw herself from somewhere, watching this girl in love, this sun-burnt girl, her ear close to this boy’s moving lips. One should listen. And yet … No, one should listen. It is one’s duty, one’s gift to listen.

Watching left her feeling sad and weary. She couldn’t remember. She didn’t want to. She remembered too much.

A low and rambling yellow house was behind a hump of dune over which a walkway of weathered boards was laid. They passed through a gated courtyard to the south where everything bloomed in profusion. The hibiscus were the size of dinner plates. Heavy brass wind chimes hung beneath the eaves, too heavy to stir in the wind that rustled the fronds of the Cuban Belly palms. Liberty touched one of the elaborate wind bells and it sounded dully. Behind the house, concealed
from the road, was a curving, pebbled driveway. Each pebble seemed to have its place.

“Where’s the truck?” Liberty asked.

“I left the truck somewhere,” Willie said. “We don’t need the truck.”

Willie smelled of hot weeds and soap. There was a silky look to him, as though he’d been born in a cocoon. He looked incorruptible.

“You’re all scratched up,” Willie said, running his fingers across her arm. “You look thin. Have you been eating?”

“Sure,” Liberty said. “Sure I’ve been eating. You look thin too.”

“I need you. I need you to be with me.”

“I need you too,” Liberty said.

She was enchanted by him, she couldn’t look away. This was the long vacation in a rented world. This was their life.

“I went into a lunchroom yesterday,” Willie said, “but before I could order, the woman sitting beside me at the counter started to choke. She was eating a piece of cherry pie. She had her children with her. They weren’t eating anything, they were watching her eat. She was a fat woman, perhaps the fattest woman I’ve ever seen.”

Liberty raised her fingers to her throat. “You saved her from choking.” Willie saved people. There was nothing wrong with that. He covered, for a moment, their shadow with his own. And left them to the baffling light of days that should not have been.

“It wasn’t difficult,” Willie said. “She didn’t choke. Then she wanted to talk. She told me she was crazy about space. She had only completed the tenth grade, but she had some knowledge about galaxies and moons. She was raising her children to be astronauts. One kid wanted to be an aquanaut,
which, she told me, had brought her to the brink of despair more than once. The kids sat there and didn’t say a word. She kept the kids around primarily to remain ambulatory. She didn’t believe in the soul, she told me, but she believed in immortality in an oscillating universe. She believed in bounce and re-expansion and the separation of mind from matter. Her mind, she told me, was not the mind of an obese woman. She assured me she knew how it would all end. She said if more people loved a vacuum, the world would be a happier place.”

Clem came into the garden with a turtle in his mouth. He placed it carefully in a bird bath and sat down to watch it. The turtle was shut tight as a tomb.

“Were there any other incidents?” Liberty asked.

He shook his head.

“You aren’t looking for these people, are you? You don’t try to find them?”

“Aren’t they coming to me?”

“They’ll start depending on you, Willie.”

“That would be a mistake, wouldn’t it.” He was still stroking the scratches on her arm. “Don’t you want to come inside?”

They went into a large, interior patio. Everywhere there was the faint, comforting sound of water. The water fell along a sluice cut in the marble floor and emptied into a long pool tiled in dark blue. One wall of the patio was a rocky grotto in which orchids bloomed. The water in the sluice sparkled like snakes, like barbed wire, like sunlight.

Liberty stepped up into the living room, onto thick, whitish carpeting. The walls were the same color as the carpet—a peculiar shade, like the glabrous skin of some animal.

“You always choose such decorous homes, Willie,” Liberty said.

“This isn’t decorous. This might be it, actually.”

“Might be what? It’s just another rich person’s house.”

“We could belong here. We could stay here.”

She saw the end of it, returning.

“There’s someone here already.” Liberty said. “What are you doing?” She was sure there was someone in the house.

“No, there’s no one. I was here all day yesterday and at night. There’s no one.”

The house had a cool, medicinal smell. There was a dark painting on the wall, which Liberty did not approach. She went instead into the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator. There were a dozen bottles of Taittinger, several sealed jars of bee pollen and a box of granola. She found a bowl in the cupboard and poured some granola into it. She uncorked a bottle of champagne and let it foam into the granola. In the wastebasket was a single, desiccated orchid.

“This is not real trash,” Liberty said. “The real trash is kept somewhere else.”

She put the bowl on the floor for Clem, then made another for herself. Clem lapped the champagne, then sneezed.

Willie laughed and picked up the bottle. He tipped back his head and let the champagne run down his throat. Liberty saw his strong throat working, swallowing. Champagne spilled and bubbled upon his chest.

“Champagne and granola,” Willie said. “Liberty’s porridge. You’re just like Goldilocks.”

“Goldilocks, the first housebreaker.”

“The blonde and appealing outsider. The bears come back. She jumps from a window and runs away. There’s something wrong with that story. That story doesn’t end.”

“Someone’s here,” Liberty said. “Why don’t you think someone’s here? How did you get in?”

“An aluminum jimmy. Don’t you want to see the other rooms?”

For a time, as a child, Liberty had desired a career as a chambermaid. She saw herself going from room to room, rooms silent and dim, terrible in their confusions, the causes of their disarray beyond her knowledge, their secrets both blatant and incomprehensible. And the child had cleaned them and brought order and even light. Room after room. Again and again. In an eternal, successful repetition. But she who was not a child had no order to confer, no pretense of design.

Besides, here there was order, even emptiness.

He had his hands on her hips, steering her. They went into a bedroom filled with gymnastic equipment, some free weights and a machine using stacked weights and a cam. Bolted close to the ceiling was a bar with inversion boots. Liberty felt that the person whose house this was lived a life of both hazard and comfort and never felt sorrow about anything.

In the bathroom by the sink there were hairbrushes, a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. There were no hairs in the hairbrushes. Liberty glanced into the mirror. She was the outsider, the onlooker, the eavesdropper. Even the image reflected before her was something she felt she could not occupy. Behind her, she could see the edge of a bedroom wall, which was painted a dull red like cranberries, and an open closet door. There were three coats on hangers in the closet. They looked terrible, like apparitions. But they were just three coats.

Willie lay on the bed and Liberty felt that she should move toward him, smile or burst into tears, put her tongue in his mouth, cover him with her wounded body, perform the blind rituals of women. She turned toward him, but her eye caught instead a white sculpted head on a bureau. It had zippers for
eyes, two rectangular drawers for a mouth. It was a jewel box, she supposed.

“What’s this, do you think?” Willie said. He had opened the drawer of a table and was holding what appeared to be a flashlight. It was black and cylindrical, with a checkered pattern on the handle. It had a lens, but looked oddly malignant, as though it had been manufactured not for the purposes of light at all.

“It almost looks like a weapon,” Liberty said, “but it’s so small.” She touched a button on it and wafers of light struck and fluttered across the red walls.

“Anything can be a weapon,” Willie said. “In the house I was in on that very pretty inlet, there was a water pistol filled with ammonia in every room. Fear. There’s so much fear.”

Liberty put the object on the table. She sat down beside Willie and put her head in his lap. He stroked her hair. She parted her lips and pressed them against the khaki cloth of his groin.

He desired what she was still not. The weight and warmth she touched had nothing to do with desire for her. Charlie had told her that he once got an erection from contemplating an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. He told her that the moment, which had not been fleeting, had appalled him.

“What?” Liberty said.

“You were right,” Willie said. “There is someone in this house.”

Liberty sat up quickly and turned. A tall, muscular woman stood looking at them. She wore a bikini with a wide leather belt around her narrow waist. Weights hung from the buckle of the belt. Her features were fine, even aristocratic, but her face was deeply pock-marked, and the pulse in her neck quivered and jumped. She was old. The long muscles in her
thighs bunched as she moved around the bed toward the table and picked up the cylinder lying there.

“You don’t know how this works?” she said. She seemed amused. She held it downward in the palm of her hand. “You cock your hand like this, as though you were playing with a child and making shadow images of a duck on the wall.” She tilted her head, inches from Willie.

Liberty thought of Teddy with a quick dismay, as though she had misplaced him, as though he were in her charge in this house but that she had forgotten where. Little Dot was already gone. She had allowed her to be gone, like a part of herself, twice gone.

“Then just flick your hand toward your target …”—The lower end of the cylinder flew out and hammered Willie on the arm. He grunted and turned pale—“… catch it as it reaches its fullest extension and snap it back to striking position again.” She snapped the thing several times in the air. “Little cobra-like flicks, see.”