The Visiting Privilege (52 page)

Toby sat on the porch of the next house she was about to unload and looked at the street. There would be no trick-or-treaters. It was a bad neighborhood and many of the kids were undoubtedly in jail. No one had infants here. Half-grown rollicking figures in baggy pants and jackets were produced, some of whom drove low, bullet-shaped cars with tricked-out axles that allowed them to bow tip and curtsy like circus horses. One of these vehicles rolled by now without performing. A man laughed and a can of beer shot through the air and struck the rotting steps. It was unopened, however, thus indicating to Toby a modicum of goodwill.

She had no admirers at present. Since leaving her parents' home at eighteen she'd experienced two brief marriages—one to a Ritalin-addicted drywaller, the next to a gaunt, gabby autodidact, brilliant and quite unhinged, who drank a pound of coffee a day, fiddled with engines and read medieval history. After their parting, he flew in a small plane he had built to Arizona and found employment as a guide in a newly discovered living cave. Daily, he berated the tourists by telling them that every breath they took was robbing the cave of its life, even though each of them had gone through three air locks and was forbidden to touch anything or take photographs. People didn't mind hearing they were well-meaning bearers of destruction, apparently. According to him, he was the most popular guide there. She was amazed to learn that people liked him. She certainly hadn't.

She sat rocking slightly in an old roof-hung swing. One chain looked just about to snap but it had looked like that for some time. A big orange moon labored up the sky.

A limousine longer than the wretched porch drew up to the house and stopped. The inhabitants were probably seeking the gin palace several blocks over, Toby reasoned. There were often singers and bands performing there. But no request for directions was forthcoming. Instead, an immense woman emerged, dressed in red and drenched in strong perfume. The limousine pulled away.

“Are you the present owner of this property,” the woman asked. “I hope you are.”

Toby narrowed her eyes and did not reply. The woman was her own age but striking, tremendous.

“I was a little girl in this house!” the woman announced. “This used to be the only house this side of the street. Next door there was nothing but a pretty field with a shed on it and the family the next street over would raise veal calves in that shed, it was a calf hutch. The man wouldn't let his own kids play with those calves, he didn't want them to make pets out of them and then get sad, but he let me play with them. I loved those little calves so, each one was dearer to me than the one before. On hot nights like this I'd take my sweet pillow and lay on the little bridge out back. Oh, how many wondrous nights I spent sleepless and singing my little songs of praise beneath the great wheel of heaven as I laid on that little bridge.”

“You lived here,” Toby said, uncharmed.

“Sister, I did. And I want to come home. I want to buy this precious property.”

“I'd consider selling it,” Toby said, she hoped not too eagerly. She hadn't invited the woman up on the porch and didn't think she would.

“What's your price,” the marvelous woman asked. Her dress was remarkable—a divine, shrieking crimson.

Toby paused, then named a figure that made her blush, it was so unreasonably high.

“I'll pay you twenty thousand more. I have money. I'm a success. I say this in all modesty, believe me.”

“It needs some work,” Toby admitted reluctantly.

“We all need work, sister. We're all of us a work in progress. And no one knows in what guise the end of the familiar will arrive. We're like darling veal calves in that regard.”

“So they used to farm around here,” Toby said. “It certainly is different now, I don't have to tell you that.”

“Nobody farmed, sister. It was just that one mean cracker who ran a calf hutch for the restaurants in Sarasota.”

Toby felt corrected and did not care for it. She brushed a mosquito off her knee and said, “Is this a serious offer you're making? Because I've had some interest and I'd have to let these other parties know. Of course they don't appreciate the place as much as you do.” She would concede that much to the imaginary.

“I've already agreed to your price and more, sister. I do appreciate it. And my mother and father, they appreciate it too. They're right out back there. Probably just about given up hope that I'd ever get back to them.”

A moment passed and Toby said, “What do you mean ‘out back there'?”

“This is our story, sister,” the woman said, straightening her smooth brown shoulders and causing the red dress to strain and shine. “They were the finest people you'd ever have the luck to meet. They were Edenists, my loved ones was, they truly believed our days are spent in Eden, that Eden was here and now. They were good and they were grateful and one afternoon just this time that year they were taking a neighbor boy out for a driving lesson. They'd promised to teach this boy, Billy Crawford, how to drive in our truck so he could get his license. It was just a kindness on their part. My daddy was a builder and his tools, his boards and paints and such, were in the old truck's bed. He sat in the middle on the bench seat with Billy Crawford behind the wheel and my mother by the window appreciating the breeze. She'd go for a little ride at any opportunity. Why my daddy took Billy Crawford on as a student we'll never know. You couldn't tell that boy nothing and he never wore his glasses as he was supposed to for he was vain. He was driving, he wasn't speeding, speed was not a factor. But what he did was he ran over this fellow's dog. Knocked him down with the tires, didn't even see him, and it was a big dog. From all reports, the man who was standing beside the dog, whose dog it was, became a threatening figure right away, fearsome in his grief, for who knows how long that dog had been his only friend. He was dressed in so many rags they looked like robes and he started screaming and hammering on that truck and wouldn't be comforted or listen to reason, not that there was any reason involved, it being an accident. Billy Crawford, who might have been following my father's directive or not, put his foot back on the pedal and commenced to drive away. But the man, his name was Rockford Wiggins, clung to the truck and hauled himself into the bed, where he continued screaming and baying, and now that he had boards and cans and tools to do his hitting with he began to beat on the window that was all that separated him from them, from Billy Crawford and my dear ones. There was a can of turpentine in the back as well and it wasn't long before death triumphant placed it in Rockford Wiggins's hands. He drenched himself and all those rags were like a hundred wicks so when he set himself off with a packet of matches, the whole truck went. I was told that it looked like a parcel of hell burning, in the manner that hell is popularly pictured. Well, sister, they all of them died, burnt to the bones. And a professional reduced my dear ones further to ashes because that was getting to be the trend back then. And I took those ashes and made them into bricks, for there was no one to tell me not to and no voice was raised against it. I knew some things since my father had been a builder, as I said. It was necessary to add something—three parts sand, one part lime and clay—but now the fundaments of those bricks are my dear ones. I mortared them into the base of the little bridge we built ourselves in the days that we were Edenists. And then I had to leave, sister. I had to go out in the world and make my way and fortune.”

“You're saying there're two bricks out back there that aren't just bricks,” Toby said.

“I didn't mingle the ashes. If I was to do it today I would've mingled them all, poor Rockford Wiggins and bratty Billy Crawford and the big dog too.”

Toby smacked at her knees. The bugs were really getting to her. “What I don't understand is how you could imagine that anyone who bought this dump would have kept things as they were.” She smiled to show that she meant no offense.

The woman smiled back. It was the sort of smile the terminally ill might realize they'd been receiving as the days wore on.

“I'm just saying that you took quite a gamble,” Toby said. “This isn't a graveyard. No one's under any obligation to care for what's here.” Or what isn't, she might as well have added.

“My broker will call you tomorrow,” the woman said.

“I'll need a few days to make arrangements.”

“In three days, then,” the woman said.

“You can come back in three days, then—no, better make it four,” Toby said.

The woman nodded and turned. The limousine appeared like a liquid poured from the shadows. She addressed Toby once more before she stepped into it. “It's perfect here!”

Her eyes were certainly dishabituated to reality, Toby thought, if she believed this crummy locale to be perfect. She pushed herself off the swing and went into the house, opening and shutting the warped door with difficulty. She sat down at the kitchen table, an old pink Formica and chrome thing, and turned the pages of a phone book until she found a listing of demolition contractors. She copied down a number of names. She would call them all in the morning. She wanted everything torn up and down. The job would go to the one who could do the work most quickly. A great devotional emptiness swam up in her. She was doing the woman a favor. It had probably just been a prank anyway. There would be no call from a broker. She sneezed sharply from the mildew and held a tissue to her nose. Some people's behavior was simply inexplicable. They outlasted their lives or something.

The great moon was now obscured by clouds. Toby picked up a flashlight and went outside, stalking across the lost but unforgotten garden to the little bridge. She bent and studied the blocks that supported the foolish thing. No two bricks were different from the rest—all pitted, common, unparticular, of uniform size and texture.

On her knees, she held the light against them. “I don't believe you,” she said.

Robert had brought the great book of Egypt to dinner, and before it could be removed from his grasp had spilled milk on it. He was scolded at length. Lillian had been returned to her room and was being trussed up by Staff in preparation for her personal night. She felt compelled to speak of the cats again.

There was the trap and the pinch of food on the chipped china saucer. Never too much, not that it seemed wasteful, it just wasn't right. And the saucer—it had to be a chipped one. A perfect saucer would have conferred something else entirely. She had meant no real harm. What if everything one did mattered. Thank God, it could not.

I
am trying to think. Sometimes I catch myself saying just those words and just in my head. It seems I got to start everything in my head with something in my head saying I am trying to think. I remember how it begins but can't remember how it ends. Even though it's over now. It don't seem right that it could be over and me back where I've always been not even knowing what it was she gave me or what I should do with it.

Because the bridge is still here and the water and the shack. And though I haven't been to town since she disappeared, I imagine the town's still there too. Her fancy car is still here sitting on the beach, though it seems to be fading, sort of like a crummy photograph. It's a black car but the birds have crapped all over it and it's white now like the sand. Sometimes it hurts my eyes. The chrome catches the sun. But as I say, sometimes I can't hardly make it out at all. It ain't really a car anymore. It wouldn't take nobody anywhere.

What it is I think is that before she came I knew something was going to happen and now that she's been, I know it ain't. She didn't leave a single thing behind except that car. Not a pair of panties or a stick of gum or nothing. Once she brought over a little round tin of chicken-liver patay. Now I know I've never eaten chicken-liver patay so it must be around here somewhere, but I can't find it. My head's fuller'n a tick on a dog. Full of blood or something. And my prick lies so tame in my blue jeans, I can't hardly believe it's even gone through what it's been through.

She was like smoke the way she went away. She was like that even when she stayed. She'd cover me up, wrapping herself around me tight, tasting sweet and as cool as an ice-cream cone, smelling so good and working at loving me. Then she would just dissolve and I'd fill right up with her like a water glass. I can't recall it ending, as I say, but I know it's stopped. Black rain at four in the afternoon like it used to be. Black trees and empty sky. And the gulf running a dirty green foam where it turns into the pass.

But I can think about it beginning. So. That first morning I come back to the shack and there's a big brown dog sitting there drinking out of the toilet bowl. He'd drained it. And looked at me as though it was me and not him that had no right being there. Drained it and sat and stared at me, its jaws rolling and dripping at me. Now, I like dogs all right but I could see this one was a bum. In the Panhandle, I had two catch dogs that was something to watch. Them dogs just loved to catch. They was no-nonsense dogs. But this can licker was a bum. Somebody's pet. A poodle or something. The big kind. Before I got around to giving him a good kick, he pushed the screen door open with his paw and left.

I was so mad. And I was thinking and figuring how to get that brown dog, not even thinking then how queer it was that there should be any dog at all, because I hadn't seen a thing for six months around the bridge or on the beach except wild. And I hadn't seen another person in that time either and then as soon as I remember this, I see the girl walking along the beach with the dog.

She's in a bright bikini and long raggedy-wet hair and I remember how long it had been since I'd seen a girl in a bikini or any girl at all because my wife had left me a long while ago, even then having stopped being a girl in any way you could think of and went back to living in Lowell, Massachusetts, the place she come from and left just to plague me. Somewhere, in that town, setting on a lawn outside a factory, is or was a chair fit for a giant's ass. Forty or fifty times bigger and crazier than a proper chair. And she come from that town. And she sold off my dogs to get back to it on a one-way ticket on a bubble-topped Trailways.

I never knew her that well. She wore more clothes, jesus, you'd think she was an Eskimo. Layers and layers of them. I never knew if I got to her or not and she'd be the last to tell me. She never talked about nothing except New England. Everything was better there, she'd say. Corn, roads, Christmas decorations. The horses ain't as mean, she'd say. The bread rises better up North. Even the sun, she'd say, is nicer because it sets in a different direction. It don't fall past the house this way at home, she'd say. I was a young man then and I never cheated. I was a young man and my balls were big as oranges. And I threw it all away. She caught my stuff in her underwear.

When I think about what a honey bear I was and how polite and wonderfully whanged and how it was all wasted on a loveless woman…She had a tongue wide and slick as a fried egg. And never used it once. I guess that's what I was waiting on but I might just as much have hoped for striking oil in the collards patch. She said she was a respectable woman and claimed to have worked in an office in Boston. But she didn't have no respect for the man and woman relationship and she didn't have no brain. She couldn't bring things together in her head. I'd bring her head together all right if I ever see her again. I'd fold it up for her so she'd be able to carry it in her handbag. Selling the best catch dogs in the state of Florida for a bus ticket.

So. I see the girl in the bright bikini and all I can think of is the old lady. It'd been so long and all I could think of was that witch I once had or maybe never had. I spent all this time here over the water not imagining anything. I just see that when I see the girl. And I got scared. I felt as though I caught myself dying. Like you'd catch yourself doing something stupid.

I walked across the bridge and climbed up into the box and got the binoculars. They belong to the state but they're mine as long as I leave them here. And, I figure, the girl's mine as long as she keeps herself in range. She's walking down the beach, stopping every few yards and squatting down and setting out a stick. She's got a bathing suit on that's like two big Band-Aids. Promising but not too promising. She had a knife strapped around her waist and wore a big wristwatch. She also had a notebook.

It wore me out watching her. She'd squat down and write something and then spring up again so graceful like she knew someone was watching her and give the bottoms of her bikini a little flip with her finger. I watched her for a long time, but she didn't do nothing spectacular. I was real happy just watching a near-naked woman move. Every once in a while she'd go into the water and swim out a few hundred yards, that damn dog swimming beside her barking like hell, and each time when she come out it was like that bikini had shrunk a little bit more and she was falling out of it every which way all plump and bubbly white.

I watched her until she got out of sight, around a bend in the beach, and then I started looking at other things. Mess of birds in the mangroves. Mullet boats way offshore. And what I'd later know was the girl's car parked on the hard sand under some cedars. A weird-looking vehicle. I know right away it's from Europe or someplace foreign. A mean car shaped like a coffin. But it reminded me of sex too, you know, though I never seen a machine that reminded me of sex before. But that car set me to feeling things, like the girl, that I hadn't felt maybe never. Though I knew what they were. And it felt so good feeling them.

I finally put up the binoculars. Wiped them off. The glass was getting milky from all the wetness in the air. As a matter of fact, I think they was shot from my never using them, never caring for them at all. Lots of things are like that. Life you know, it begins to rot if you don't use it. Everything gets bound or rusted up. Tools especially. Gear. My tool. Ha ha.

It worried me a little about the binoculars since they belong to the state. They could hassle me about them. Like they could about the bridge. Because the bridge sure ain't being what it's supposed to be. If a boat ever wanted to come through and I had to wind this devil back I believe it would just fall apart, the whole apparatus, like one of them paste-and-paper bridges you see blowing up in war movies. But no boats come through anyhow. It just ain't a proper waterway. The channel needs to be redug or a good hurricane's gotta come through here and clean everything out. A pretty beach. Good fishing but no boats come and no people either. Something happened here years ago, I heard. A sickness or something. In the water. An attack or something coming in on the tide. Somebody died or got hurt. You know the way these things are. People remember bad news even though they might never have heard it in the first place.

So the state has let it slide. Though you never know when they'll show up and raise all sorts of hell because things ain't how they want them. But it was them and not me that built this crazy beach and it was me and not them that saw, on my first day on the job, the sign just above them rotting joists around the crank that says
CAUTION WHEN INSTALLED PROPER THIS SIGN WILL NOT BE VISIBLE.

Well, it ain't my concern. And I'll tell you I never really expect the state to come and hassle me. They know they got a bargain. It takes a special man to put up with living out here. I don't think anybody will come at all. Though I'd been waiting on this girl. It sure is easy to see that now.

So. After she got out of range, I went back to the shack and took a shower. Goddamn frogs come out of the wood and sat there while I did it. Like to have broke my neck slipping on them. Put on clean clothes and cut my nails. Prettied myself up like a movie idol, then I fell asleep right in the chair in the middle of the day. Which was unusual. And when I woke up it was practically black out and the girl was there looking at me.

She was feeding cornflakes to her dog. Piece by piece. My cornflakes. She was so brown from the sun, she was shining. And she was so warm-looking that I started to sweat. Then she come over to me and darn if she didn't sit on my lap and blow in my ear. God, she was warm. It was like being baked in a biscuit.

So the first night went by and the sun come out. And my baby tickled me up with a pink bird's feather. Bright pink like it come out of a cartoon. A roseate spoonbill feather, she said, for her specialty was birds. Ha ha, I said. Because I knew where her talent was.

But she was crazy about seabirds. When she wasn't tending to me and making up inventions, she was always going on about them birds. She had a canvas bag she was always toting around and damn if inside there weren't two dead birds, perfect in every way except for their being dead. She didn't know what kind they was and she was toting them around until she could find a book that would tell her. And there were little speckled eggs in that bag too, no bigger than my thumbnail, with holes in them and all the insides gone. And other crap she picked up along the beach. And the knives. Dinky little things. She said they was for predators on land or in the sea but they couldn't do no real damage, I told her that. Do in a splinter is about all.

That girl's big pretty eyes would fill up with tears when she talked about birds. She told me to respect them because they live their lives so close to dying.

So do us all, I thought, and that was no surprise to me. It was her inventions that was a surprise and she had started in on them the first day. She never made me pretend to be things I wasn't. Only things I was. But I believe we went through a hundred changes the days she stayed with me. We didn't have costumes or nothing naturally but it was like we were playing other people doing things. Though all the time it was us. I was a gangster and she was the governor's daughter, you know, or I was a bombardier and she was the inside of the plane. Or I was a preacher, maybe Methodist, and she was a babysitter. And even her dog did it because sometimes he was like a whole other object, you know. Or like he became a feeling in the shack and quit being a dog.

She messed up time and place for me. And just with her, I felt I was loving the different women of a thousand different men. We just went on for five days with them inventions and never did the same one twice. She'd go off sometimes in her fancy car, I don't know where. I'd lie there while she was gone, not even able to move hardly nor sleep neither. Lie there with my eyes open, trying to think what was happening, listening to the sound her car made traveling over the bridge and it was like the bridge went on for miles it was the only car I'd heard traveling for so long. There were four silver pipes sticking off the end of that car. I never seen anything like it. I was trying to think, but never once did I think about her not coming back. She always come back.

On the fifth day, I went down with her to the beach. First time I been out of the shack. Hotter than a poor shotgun. No wind. We was walking over the bridge to the beach when she said, This isn't a drawbridge. It's a solid piece. There isn't any grid. And so what do you tend, I'd like to know.

Well, of course it ain't a drawbridge. Did she think I'd been here for all these years paid by the country, here every day with no vacation and never no real quitting time without knowing that the goddamn thing wasn't a drawbridge?

I didn't say nothing but just gave her a look telling her that she should tend to what she knows about and I'll tend to what I know about.

The beach was full of eggs. She kept steering me around so I wouldn't step on them. All them eggs cooking in the heat and the birds going crazy over us as we walked along. Diving down and screaming, shitting on our heads. I went down to the water to get away from them. I was still put out with the girl and wasn't paying her any mind. She was trotting up and down the beach, slaving like a field hand, writing things down in her book. Finally she run right by me and fell in the water. Tried to tease me in. Took off her suit and tossed it in my face. Skin there like the cream in a chocolate éclair. But I paid her no mind. That day was so white my eyes ached. I was floating and felt sick. All that sun, it never bothered me before. She come out and sprinkled water all over me from her hair and even that wasn't cool. It was hot as the air. I was mad because I felt she was thinking my thoughts weren't real. But then I said, Come on, I been without loving too long. Because I thought her loving would pick me up. And we went back to the shack, me with my eyes closed and my arms resting on her because it hurt so bad looking out on that day. It ain't never been that bright here before or since.