Breaking and Entering (3 page)

Willie and Liberty went to a party given by the Edgecups of the Crab Key Association. Turnupseed had reminded them to go. He was surprised that the Maxwells hadn’t told them about it. The house was pink, and shuttered in the Bermuda fashion. Everything was pink. The phones were pink, the statuary and chaise longues. The balloons bobbing in the swimming pool were pink. The punch was pink.

The hostess greeted them with ardor. She was standing beside a gentleman wearing bathing trunks which were imprinted with flying beach umbrellas.

“You two are just cute as buttons,” she said. “Are you related?”

“We’re brother and sister,” Willie said.

“That’s adorable,” she said. “I had a brother once but he was …” she fluttered her fingers “… one of those. Very into the Greek tradition. He stole away all my boyfriends.” She looked down at Clem, who stood beside them chewing on an ice cube. “What,” she asked, “is that supposed to represent?”

“It’s a dog,” the gentleman suggested. “A pet would be my guess.”

“It certainly has peculiar eyes,” the hostess said. “My, I wouldn’t want to look at them every day. They sure remind me of something, though.” A memory knocked, then tramped muddily through her otherwise fastidious memory rooms. “Goodness,” she said excitedly. “I haven’t been this broody in years!… Have you tried the pears stuffed with Gorgonzola? I want everyone to promise me they’ll try them.” She wandered off.

“What’s your line of work, son?” the gentleman asked Willie. He was drinking a martini from a jar. He would unscrew the cap of the jar, take a sip and screw the lid back on again. After each sip, his jaws would go slack, giving him a meaty look.

Willie shrugged.

The man nodded. “I don’t believe in work either,” he said, and laughed. “It’s my money that believes in it.” His laugh had bubbles and clots in it. He probed delicately at one of the beach umbrellas tipped at the crotch of his bathing trunks.

“I’ve saved a few people recently,” Willie said. “If you call that work. It’s what’s been coming up recently.”

“What are you, one of those Witnesses? Sneak up to a
place with those little booklets, trying to make a man change his ways? A stranger comes up to my door, I greet him bare-ass, dick out, pistol ready.” He narrowed his eyes.

“I’m not doing what you think,” Willie said. “This wasn’t your redemption stuff. This was minor. Material stuff. Isolated events. Drowning. Shock.”

It was true. Willie had been saving people, though he knew it didn’t have the feel of a calling.

The first person Willie had saved was a young man struck by lightning on the beach. It was late in the afternoon of a stormy day, and they were watching the surfers enjoy the high, troubled Gulf. The sky was the color of plums and the water pale, and the surfers were dark on their bright boards. The boy had been hurled out of the water and thrown twenty feet through the air onto the beach by the force of the charge. His chest had been badly burned. The burns were delicate and intricate like the web of a spider. Willie had administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The young man’s name was Carl. He was small and blond and looked ferocious even when he was unconscious. A few days later his parents had come over to the house with a box of chocolate-covered cherries. The parents were old and grateful. They had had Carl very late in life. They said he was a wild boy whom they had never understood. They thought he had a death wish. They were old and Carl was young. They couldn’t understand his hurry.

While they were at the house, Carl’s father, Big Carl, who was an automobile mechanic, gave their truck a tune-up. Carl’s mother found a tick the size of an acorn under Clem’s chin and disposed of it without fuss in the toilet. She confided to Liberty that Carl had once called her a bugger and made
her cry. She never cried about anything, she said, except her little Carl.

Willie had saved two people next, an elderly couple in a Mercedes who had taken a wrong turn and driven briskly down a boat ramp into eight feet of water. Willie had been there to pull open the door. His hand had first rested on a man’s bearded face, and for an instant, Willie said, he thought he was going to get bitten. The old woman wore a low-cut evening gown which showed off her Pacemaker to good advantage. The three of them stood dripping on the ramp, staring at the fuchsia pom-pom on the Mercedes antenna, all that was visible on the surface of the bay. They had been going to the opera.

“You’ve always been a fool, Herbert,” the old woman said to her husband.

“A wrong turn in a strange city is not impossible, my dear,” Herbert said.

To Willie, he said, “Once I was a young man like you. I was an innocent, a rain-washed star, then I married this bag.”

“Herbert’s lived in this town for years,” the man with the beach umbrellas flying over his bathing trunks said when Willie recounted the incident. “They love accidents, those two. Gets their blood going. Puts the sap in old Herb’s stick.”

The old couple had given Willie a thousand dollars, all in twenties, delivered by messenger.

“It’s good work, but it doesn’t sound steady,” the man said, clapping Willie on the shoulder. “Ruthie!” he hollered, gesturing wildly to a woman on the other side of the pool. “Come over here and meet this grand guy!” Ruthie made her way
toward them, plunging her fingers in the soil of each potted plant along her route.

“She never waters anything,” Ruthie complained.

“Meet these two here,” the man said. “Ask them if they’ve got a Mississippi credit card.”

“Oh, I know that one,” Ruthie exclaimed cheerfully. “That’s four feet of garden hose to siphon gas, am I right?” She looked at Willie slyly, then turned to Liberty and showed her teeth.

Ruthie wore a great deal of jewelry. She glittered, resembling a chandelier. Willie declared admiration.

“I always wear my jewelry,” Ruthie said. “All the time, everywhere. Life is short.”

“Do you know why people are interested in jewels?” Willie asked. He touched a large red stone at the woman’s wrist. “It’s the way the visionaries experience things. Their world is a dazzling one of light. Everyone wants to see things that way. Materially, jewels and gems are the closest thing to a preternatural experience.”

“Come over here a sec,” Ruthie said and led him away from the party.

“What kind of drugs you got?” she asked, smiling. “I’m your lady. I’ll buy anything. I want to bong myself to the gills.” She clutched a little purse.

“I don’t have any drugs.”

“What’s all this lapis lazuli stuff?”

“I was just giving you some background.”

“You’re the youngest person here by at least twenty years. You don’t deal?”

“Nothing.”

“No? I can’t believe it. You think I don’t know? That I’m too old or ordinary to know?” She was still smiling. “They
gave my husband heroin when he was dying. He kept telling me how profoundly uninteresting life was.”

“Good,” Willie said. “That’s good.”

“You’re a creepy kid,” Ruthie said.

Liberty watched, from a distance, Willie speaking. He looked back at her, scanning the space between them like a machine. How long would it be before they were caught, Liberty wondered. Caught, they would be separated. Separated, the contradictions between them would disappear, would vanish. No one would catch them then.

They had not fallen in love as though it were a trap, not at all. Love was not a thing that merely happened. Love was created, an act of the will, something made strong in the world, surviving the world’s strangeness and unaccountability. But Willie was inching out, his eye on something, the angling of some light coming from beneath some closed door.

All one day at
CASA VIRGINIA
, Willie took pictures of Liberty. He had found a camera in the house and a few rolls of film. Willie took shots of Liberty eating from a can of peaches. He took shots of her in her mildewy bikini. He took shots of her with a sea oat between her teeth. He took her hip bone, her nipples, her widow’s peak. Liberty saw that her life was being recorded in some way. Nevertheless, she was aware that her moments lacked incident.

Willie put the rolls of film in an antique brass bowl on the floor in the middle of the living room. Liberty took them outside at noon and broke the film from the cartridges. She would give the film to Little Dot, a child she knew. Little Dot found uses for useless things. She might attach the coils to her headband and pretend she was a princess from the planet
Utynor. The sheets of film would be her face. Things had purposes for which they were not intended certainly. That’s what enabled a person to keep getting up in the morning.

At last Willie decided to move along. They saw Turnupseed staggering along the beach with an enormous Glad bag filled with empty beer cans.

“There’s enough aluminum on the beaches of Florida to build an airplane,” Turnupseed said.

Turnupseed looked tired. He was tired of the responsibility. “Looking back on it,” he said, “if I had to do it all over again, I just don’t know if I could.”

Willie said, “We can’t disown the light into which we’re born.”