Breaking and Entering (2 page)

“I guess I’ve read just about every cookbook there is to read,” Turnupseed said. “I get a big kick out of it, not being able to eat much myself. I only got one quarter of a stomach. It really don’t bother me much. It’s nice just looking at the pictures. Now Mrs. Maxwell has had a cystostomy, but she’s chipper as the dickens about it, I don’t have to tell you that.”

“She’s always been a very chipper lady,” Willie agreed.

There were indications in the expensive house that an unpleasant operation had recently been endured. The Maxwells were subscribers to the
Ostomy Quarterly
.

“She’s a scrapper, Mrs. Maxwell,” Turnupseed said. “You know, after she come home from the hospital, she called up the paper and wanted them to send out a reporter to do an interview with her, but the paper wouldn’t do it.”

“The media prefer not to handle the subject of excreta,” Willie said.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Turnupseed said. He removed his hat and his thin hair fluttered, startled. “She got herself a Windsurfer. I’ve never seen her use it, but it’s the attitude that
counts is my belief.” He looked at Liberty, his chin trembling gently. “Your wife looks sad,” Turnupseed said to Willie. “Has she had a loss recently?”

“She’s just one of those wives,” Willie said.

“What do women want, let me ask you that,” Turnupseed said. “My last two wives always maintained they were miserable even though they had every distraction and convenience known to modern times. Number Two had a four-wheel drive vehicle with a personalized license plate. Every week she’d have her hair done. She died of a stroke, at the beauty shop, under the dryer.”

“Liberty isn’t distracted easily,” Willie said.

“What would our lives be without our distractions,” Turnupseed said, “that’s the question.”

Liberty excused herself and went inside. She stared at the Gulf, which was always there, every time she looked, filling the windows. Clem was lying on his side, his legs shuddering in a dream. Perhaps he was remembering the mailbox he was stuffed into as a puppy, by unknown persons, before Liberty found him, barely breathing, years ago.

Liberty wandered through the house. Breaking into houses caused Liberty to become pensive. She would get cramps and lose her appetite. Stolen houses made her think of babies all the time. She supposed that was common enough.

The house on Crab Key had chocolate-colored wall-to-wall carpeting covered with Oriental rugs. It had five bedrooms, four baths, two kitchens, a liquor closet that contained eleven half gallons of gin, and one piece of reading material on a polished oak coffee table, a notebook containing Mrs. Maxwell’s philosophic musings.
The advantages of a cystostomy are myriad
, one of the musings stated.
Each new day brings
me increased enjoyment. Sunrises are more radiant, sunsets more glowing, flowers more brilliant. And even the grass is greener!

The handwriting was round and firm. It appeared likely that it was not Mrs. Maxwell who was the drinker.

Liberty looked down at Willie conversing with Turnupseed on the beach. From above, Turnupseed’s head looked like a vulnerable nest. Willie was wearing a sweater he had found in the Maxwells’ closet, a green and white sweater covered with daintily proceeding reindeer. Willie loved living in other people’s houses and sleeping in their beds. He wore their clothes and drank their liquor, jumped in their pools and watched himself in their mirrors. Breaking into houses and living the ordered life of someone else appealed to Willie.

In the large walk-in closet off the Maxwells’ bedroom, there were mirrors and cosmetics. There were shoe boxes and garment bags. There were hats and ties and shoes. Everything was neatly categorized.
Cruise Wear. Ethnic Shawls and Dresses. Daddy’s WWI Uniforms
. As in the other homes that Willie and Liberty tended to occupy, the absent owners were hopeful, acquisitive, and fearful of death.

Liberty selected a white terry-cloth robe from the closet and lay on the blue satin coverlet of the king-size bed. She dreamed of fishing, her feathered hooks catching squirming rabbits. She dreamed of rowing down the streets of a flooded town, rowing into a grocery store where they were selling ten unlabeled cans for a nickel. She woke with a start and took off Mrs. Maxwell’s white terry-cloth robe.

Liberty and Clem took a walk along the beach. They passed women searching for sharks’ teeth. The women had elaborate
tooth scoopers made of screening and wood. They had spotting scoops and dip boxes. They were dedicated and purposeful, and hustling in and out of the surf they knew what they were about. Liberty admired them. They knew the difference between a spinner’s tooth and a lemon’s. They were happy women, ruthless in their selections, rigorous in their distinctions. In their bags they had duskys’ and blacktips’ and nurses’ and makos’ teeth. They loved those teeth. In their homes, lamplight glowed from glass bases filled with teeth. On their walls the best teeth were mounted on velvet and framed behind glass. The more common teeth spelled out homilies or were arranged in the shape of hearts.

The women ignored Liberty. And they regarded Clem with downright unease as though fearing he would squat on their fossiliferous wash-ins. Liberty felt that the women were correct in not introducing themselves and being friendly. She, Liberty, was a thief and a depressive. She and Willie had been married by a drunken judge at Monroe Station in the Everglades. The bridal couple had eaten their wedding supper in a restaurant that had antique rifles and dried chicken feet mounted on the wall. Their meal consisted of a gigantic snook, which Willie had miraculously caught on a doughball, and a coconut cake that the cook had whipped up special.

The women on the beach, holding their bags full of teeth, probably saw Liberty’s problems just written all over her.

As for Clem, they avoided him like shoppers swerving from a swollen can of bouillabaisse.

Liberty strolled back to her stolen home. Willie was on the beach, roasting potatoes over a little fire. Turnupseed stood nearby, his hands on his hips, his back toward the water, surveying the row of expensive houses under his protection.

“Them houses are filled with artwork and jewels and all
sorts of gadgetry,” Turnupseed said, shaking his head. “It gets to be a burden just responding to it all. I’ve tried to respond to everything that’s been presented to me all my life, and I am just now thinking that I could have saved myself considerable time and effort. Response has been my bane. Number Two and I once went to Niagara Falls. You know we put on them slickers and got wet? Three days, two nights and seven meals. We slept in a heart-shaped bed. You ever try to sleep in a heart-shaped bed? Number Two said I was as exciting as a bag of cement.”

Liberty looked around her, at all that was being guarded by Turnupseed, a man obsessed with woks, dead wives and movie stars, and armed with a floating flashlight and a tire iron. He was obviously not in the best of health. His eyes looked like breakfast buns spread with guava jelly.

Willie said, “All worldly pursuits and acquisitions have but two unavoidable and inevitable ends, which are sorrow and dispersion.” He rearranged the potatoes in the pit.

“Yup, yup, yup,” Turnupseed said, shaking his head. “But each one of us has to find that out for himself.” He turned to Liberty and politely said, “That certainly is the strangest white dog I’ve ever seen. Nothing unfortunate is about to happen to you, not if that dog can help it.”

“I don’t know,” Liberty said.

“Thank God it ain’t a black dog. Black dogs are bad luck.”

“Thank god,” Liberty said. The thought of a black dog! Black as dirt and filled with blood. She would never have a black dog.

Liberty and Turnupseed gazed at one another. It seemed as though they could never build up a dialogue.

“Where’d you get that dog?” Turnupseed asked, cranking up again, his voice hoarse.

“Found him,” Liberty said.

“I’ve never found a thing myself,” Turnupseed said. “I try not to dwell on it.” He gazed at Clem, not knowing how to salute him.

Turnupseed lived on the mainland in a little cement block house on land sucked senseless by the phosphate interests. Every time he tried to plant a tree in the queer, floppy soil, the tree perished.

“I’ve had three wives, and each one of them died,” Turnupseed confided. “Isn’t that a ghastly coincidence?”

“In continuity there is a little of everything in everything else,” Willie said when Liberty just couldn’t seem to pick anything out of the air. Willie and the guard seemed to have a way of conversing that was satisfying to them both. Liberty guessed that Willie enjoyed a simple deceit more than just about anything in the world. The words he exchanged with Turnupseed rocked gently in her head, unwholesome crafts on a becalmed sea.

Liberty and Willie sat in one of the Maxwells’ several tubs. She sat behind him, her legs encircling his waist, writing words upon his back with soap.

“WIZ,” Willie said. “SKY. SEA.” Liberty erased the invisible marks with her hand and splashed water upon Willie’s shoulders. She put her lips to his warm back, then drew away and wrote a
U
, then an 5. “WITHHELD,” Willie said. “INCARCERATE.”

Purple, monogrammed towels hung from hooks. Liberty got out of the tub and patted herself dry with one of them. She was tanned and high-waisted. Pale hair curled from her armpits. At her throat was a soft scar that looked like a rosebud.
She put on a man’s black bathrobe, rolled up the long sleeves, cinched the belt tight. She imagined Mr. Maxwell standing in this robe, breathing heavily, looking around his house at his things in it.

“Poor Chip hasn’t been able to cope very well with Mrs. Maxwell’s maiming,” Turnupseed had told Willie. “For twenty-five years she was his little singing bird, you know what I’m saying, and then she had that operation and she became his cheerful mutilated wife. She doesn’t have a morbid bone in her body, but Chip proved to be more delicate. I found him once on the beach at midnight, the drunkest man I’ve ever seen, crying and trying to stab himself with a spoon.”

“Turnupseed’s heart is going to break when he finds out what we are,” Liberty said.

“Friends are what we are,” Willie said.

Liberty went downstairs and sat alone in the living room, which was arranged for conversation. Clem lay in the kitchen, the same color as the refrigerator, his legs straight up in the air. In the living room was a fireplace containing a screen that, if plugged in, would project a fire burning. Liberty did not want the illusion of a fire burning. Liberty loved Willie. She believed in love and knew that every day was judgment day. It didn’t seem to be enough anymore. If someone loved you, Willie said, you became other than what you knew yourself to be. He did not want to become that other one. Willie was becoming a little occult in his attitudes. His thoughts included Liberty less and less, his coordinates were elsewhere, his possibilities without her becoming more actualized. This was marriage.

“Why don’t you and Willie have a baby?” Liberty’s mother demanded frequently when she phoned them at home. “What are you waiting for! If you had a baby I’d come and take care
of it for you. I saw a cute little quilt for its crib the other day in town. I do wish you’d have a baby, Liberty, I’d like to have someone to eat ice cream with. Your father can’t eat ice cream, as you know. He swells up. They have some very exotic flavors these days like Hula Pie. I don’t think it would be wise to start the baby right off on Hula Pie, though. I think something simpler would be in order, like French Vanilla. How soon would it be, do you think, before the baby could have a little cup of French Vanilla ice cream?”

Liberty looked out the windows at the sunset colors rushing, funneling, toward the horizon. It was a good sunset. When it was over, she curled up on the couch and turned on the television. On the screen there was a picture of a plate with a large steak and a plump baked potato on it. The potato got up and a little slit appeared in it, which was apparently its mouth, and it apparently began talking. Liberty turned up the sound. It was a commercial for potatoes, and the potato was complaining that everyone says steak and potatoes instead of the other way around. It nestled down against the steak again after making its point. The piece of meat didn’t say anything.