Breaking and Entering (4 page)

In the uncaring light, Turnupseed gave a smile rather like a baby’s.

“You’ve got a lot of my first wife in you, son. What a sweetie she was. Number One was the one I really boogied with, if you know what I mean. She said that being sad separates a person from God.”

“She said that?” Willie wondered.

“I believe she used those very words,” Turnupseed said.

“We’ve got to be off now,” Willie said. “We’re leaving.”

“Leaving this radiant place?” Turnupseed said. “Well, I don’t blame you. Last night, you know, in town, I just could swear I saw my last wife in the laundromat. She didn’t speak to me.”

“Well, the dead can’t disappear,” Willie said. “After all, where would they go?”

“I like your manner son, I’m going to miss you,” Turnupseed said. “Take care of that wife of yours. She seems to be
living in a world where this don’t follow that, if you know what I mean.”

Later, when the Crab Key Association discovered that Turnupseed had been on such excellent terms with the besmirchers, an aneurysm would smack into the old guard’s heart with the grace of a speeding bus touching a toad. Liberty could still see him waving good-bye.

2

W
illie and Liberty and a locksmith stood outside the Umbertons’ house on Featherbed Lane. Willie and Liberty were not acquainted with the Umbertons, who had been away now for several weeks. Newspaper delivery had been canceled, the houseplants placed outside in filtered shade, the phone disconnected, and several lamps of low wattage had been lit, burning dimly at night and invisibly by day. The Umbertons were away, in another state, in a more vigorous clime, in a recommended restaurant where they were choosing with considerable excitement items from the dessert cart. They were absorbed and concerned by the choices offered—the napoleons, the lemon tarts, the chocolate-dipped strawberries—much as they would be weeks later, after their return home, in cylinder rim vertical deadbolt locks, hardened shackles and electric eyes.

Willie had noted that the house had no alarm system, so he had called a locksmith from a phone booth.

“Locked yourself out, huh?” the locksmith said.

“You know what happened to us?” Willie said. “Our keys were stolen. Keys to everything, stolen.”

“That’s awful,” the locksmith said. His name was Drawdy. “The stealing these days is just awful. People will steal anything. My sister come home one night and somebody had dug up every dwarf pygmy palm in her yard. She’d just had some landscaping done, and there were these four dwarf pygmy palms, except when she came home that night, there was just four holes there. Those holes were so neat she didn’t notice at first that the palms were gone. Never seen neater holes in my life. It was like little men from outer space came down and just plucked up those dwarf pygmy palms.” He looked at the lock on the front door of the Umbertons’ house. “You know what I’d give you for this,” he said to Willie. “I wouldn’t give you fifteen cents for this.” He went back to his truck and got his tool box. “I’ll tell you,” Drawdy said, returning. “You’ve got to think like a burglar these days to protect yourself. You’ve got to look at everything just like a burglar would.” He set to work on the door. Clem walked around the corner of the house and sniffed the locksmith’s leg. “God in heaven,” Drawdy said. He grew rigid, then slowly smiled. His smile was fixed and gray, lying on his mouth like a cobweb he had stumbled into.

“That’s just Baby Dog,” Willie said. “He’s one of us.”

Drawdy turned his smile on the door’s lock and picked away at it.

“Before I got into locks and such, I sold light bulbs,” Drawdy said. “I worked for a store in Mobile that sold nothing but white light bulbs. Now I bet you think that a white light bulb is nothing but a white light bulb, that white is white, but that is not the case. In Mobile I personally dealt with and
sold
Soft White, Warm White, Deluxe Warm White, Cool White, Deluxe Cool White, Daylight, Design White, Regal White, Natural White, Chroma White 50, Chroma White 75, Optima
White, Vita-Lite, Natur-Escent, Verilux and …” he pushed open the Umbertons’ door with a flourish “… White.”

“Thanks,” Willie said.

“I would say that animal was close to a Chroma White 50,” Drawdy said, staring at Clem.

“How much do we owe you?” asked Willie.

“Twenty-five dollars,” Drawdy said.

“Could you bill us?” Willie asked. “I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure,” Drawdy said, squinting at Clem. The Umbertons’ name was given and their address. Drawdy wrote it down.

“I bet y’all don’t know how light bulbs are made,” Drawdy said.

“We don’t,” Willie agreed.

“Light bulbs are made by feeding glass in a continuous stream to the bulb-making machine,” Drawdy said somberly. “Don’t y’all want some keys made?”

“We’ll be in touch,” Willie said.

“Right,” Drawdy said. He watched Clem. “If I had that animal I’d teach him something maybe.”

“Like what?” Willie asked.

Drawdy looked puzzled. He rubbed his jaw and looked. “Like how to play an instrument,” he said. He picked up his toolbox, walked back to his truck and drove away.

The Umbertons had many possessions. The house was heavily furnished. They had glass torchères, leather couches, massive sideboards, thick carpets. And then the house was cluttered with small objects. The objects were of a different quality, as though the Umbertons had bought them for somebody else and then took them back after a quarrel. The kind of objects intended for a recipient who died before the occasion of giving.

On the leather-topped desk in the living room was a framed photograph of the Umbertons on their wedding day. They
were standing on marble steps, he one step above her. He had a crew cut, her dress a long train. Their round faces were set resolutely toward one another. On the desk too was a picture of a large orange cat in front of a Christmas tree. It was obvious that a superior choice had been made that year in the selection of the tree, for in an album photos of many previous Christmas trees were mounted. The kitchen cupboards were filled with an assortment of nourishing and sensible canned goods. Large clothes hung in the closets in predominant colors of blue and beige. There was a cabinet off the bath that was filled with nothing but toilet paper.

“This is how some people prepare for nuclear attack,” Willie said, staring in at the treasury of white two-ply.

The Umbertons could be imagined as tall. The sinks and counters were set several inches higher than usual. Perhaps they had even become giants since their wedding day. The beds were oversized, the coffee mugs. Everything was heavy duty.

The Umbertons could be imagined as loving games. In one of the rooms was a pool table and a pinball machine. On the walls of this room hung a series of coconut shell heads, loonily embellished. An entire community of coconuts, masculine and feminine, mean and happy, hanging on the wall, contemplating the Umbertons’ life of leisure. In the kitchen it was clear that the Umbertons loved their Cuisinart, for which they had many attachments, and their orange cat, who had a box full of toys. Clem looked the box over. He selected a rubber pig, which squealed, and went off with it.

The sofas had pads under the legs to protect the rugs. The toilets had deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls. There was plastic on the lamp shades to protect them from dust and on the mattresses to shield them from nocturnal emissions. The Umbertons were waging a sprightly war against
decline. They protected their possessions as though they had given birth to them.

“How about cutting my hair?” Willie asked Liberty. “Just a trim.”

She knew his intention and shook her head. He would gather the hair up and put it in the middle of the rug when they left, or on the table, in the center of something. Nothing would be missing, nothing out of place, but addressing the Umbertons when they returned, would be a mass of hair.

“You can’t read my mind,” Willie said. “I just wanted my hair cut.”

“It doesn’t need it,” Liberty said. “It’s fine the way it is, it looks good, I like it.”

“I could write your diary,” Willie said.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Liberty said. Then she said, “That’s not true.” Finally she said, “I wouldn’t keep a diary.”

Beyond the windows the bay winked greenly. It was sick, filling up with silt. Each day there was less oxygen in the water than the day before. It labored against the cement wall the Umbertons had erected between them and it.

Liberty went into a sewing room off the kitchen. There were patterns and folds of fabric, a sewing machine and a dressmaker’s dummy. The room was snug and painted a placid peach. A calendar on the wall showed tittering bunnies and kittens playing musical chairs in a wholesome meadow. The room was obviously Mrs. Umberton’s tender retreat from the large life she shared with Mr. Umberton. Liberty sat on a hassock covered with a cheerful chintz and felt the top slip slightly. Removing the lid, she found inside a well-thumbed paperback with a torn cover.
He plunged his head between her spread thighs
, Liberty read.
Lunging and licking, he thrust his tongue in her sea-smelling channels and velvet whorls
tasting the wine which is fermented by desire. He drew back and she whined in pleasure as she saw his glistening shaft …

Liberty threw the book back into the hassock and went into the living room. Willie was holding his hands above a spray of plastic flowers in a bud vase as though he were warming them there.

“What are we looking for here,” Liberty asked, “just in general?”

“You know, when anesthesia was first invented, many doctors didn’t want to use it,” Willie said. “They felt it would rob God of the earnest cries for help that arose from those in time of trouble.”

“Anesthesia,” Liberty said. “You can’t rob God.”

“I keep having this dream,” Willie said. “It’s a typical prison dream. I’m wandering around, doing what I please, choosing this, ignoring that. And then I realize I’m locked up.”

Liberty looked at Willie, who was turning and folding his hands. Her own hands were trembling, and her mind darted, this way and that. Once, on a sunny day, much like this day, she had been driving down the road in their truck and she had seen a male cardinal that had just been struck by a car. It lay rumpled, on the road’s shoulder, and the female rose and dipped in confusion and fright about it, urging it to continue, to go on with her. Liberty’s mind moved like that, like that wretched, bewildered bird.

During the night, it rained. The rain came down in warm, rattling sheets. It pounded the beach sand smooth, it dimpled the bay, it clattered the brown fronds of palms where rats lived. It entered the lagoons and aquifers and passed through the Umbertons’ screens. Willie was playing pinball. Liberty
could hear the flap of the paddles and the merry bells. She lay on her stomach on a rug in another room, glancing through the only other reading material in the house, a newspaper, several weeks old.

The local paper was highly emotional and untrustworthy. Truth was not a guarantee made to the paper’s readers, but certain things could be counted upon. One could expect, on any given day, a picture of a lone, soaring gull, a naked child holding a garden hose, or a recipe for a casserole containing okra. The editors took paragraphs from the wires for international affairs and concentrated on local color and horror—the migrant worker who killed his five children by sprinkling malathion on their grits; the seven-car pile-ups; the starving pet ponies with untrimmed hooves the size of watermelons. In this particular edition, there was one article of considerable interest, Liberty thought. It was an article about babies, babies in some large, northern city.

A nurse had made the first mistake. She had mixed up two newborn babies and given them to the wrong mothers for nursing. A second nurse on a different shift switched them back again. The first nurse, realizing her initial error, switched them a third time, switched the little bracelets on their wrists, switched the coded, scribbled inserts on their rolling baskets. At this point, the situation had become hopelessly scrambled. Three days passed. The mothers went home with the wrong babies. This was not a Prince and Pauper-type story. Both mothers had nice homes and fathers and siblings for the baby. Four months later the hospital called and told the mothers they had the wrong babies. They had proof. Toe prints and blood types. Chemical proof. They had done the things professionals do to prove that a person was the person he was supposed to be. The mothers were hysterical. They had fallen
in love with the wrong babies and now they didn’t want to give their wrong babies up. But apparently it had to be done. It seemed to be the law.