Breaking and Entering (35 page)
Read Breaking and Entering Online
Authors: Joy Williams
“The clock’s always said that,” Charlie said, “but maybe it’s close enough. What is this? It’s supposed to be an intense, intolerable effluence, but it just looks dark and wet out there … baby, I’m dead.” The clock did not move. For anyone but them, it could have been the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow. “Baby,” Charlie said, “get me my bottle.”
She slid carefully away from him, knelt on the seat and looked behind her. A yellowish light filled the tunnel and the round black bristles of the scrubbing brushes slid back on gleaming joints against the wall. What had it been, with which she had shared her silence and which was now gone from her? Her task had once been to accomplish each day, but now there was no such task. She had been let go.
“We’ve been left, haven’t we,” Charlie said.
She picked up the bottle of gin, which was wedged between the cooler and the door, then slid over, onto the backs of things there. “Move over,” she said. “I’ll drive when we get out of here.”
“Oh, doll, you know, after we get out of here …” Charlie shrugged but shifted himself across the broad seat. He grasped the bottle she handed him by the neck. “Here’s to my love,” he said and drank. “All chance for reparations lost.” She held
him as she had before, feeling now the dampness of his jacket. “You think there’s any justice in it?” he asked. “I was poking his girlfriend. I did want to daddy his boy.”
“No,” she said, “no justice in it.”
“He didn’t know any of that and stabbed me anyway. People like that have instincts. When we’re all gone, people like that will be starting all over, snug in caves, toasting roaches.” He took another swallow and shuddered. “Things come and go,” he said vaguely.
Funnels of dry air pushed against the car, and a long, black roller descended from the ceiling, touching the grille, pushing softly but firmly toward them. They would be out soon, the chocks would fall away. She was behind the wheel, but tipped toward him, holding. Sweat dripped from his face onto hers. The car grew dark again as the rolling tread passed over them, as some heavy, tattered material slid past fender and door.
“It’s going to say ThankYouThankYouThankYou soon,” Charlie said, “then, ExitExitExit. I’ve been here before. That kid and I had great plans for us, Liberty. You know that egg, the egg he’s been carrying around for a week, had to for a week, and the week’s going to be up, and I told him, ‘You’ve been great with that egg, God couldn’t have been nicer to that egg, but what are you going to do with it now? That egg doesn’t have a life of its own, it was meant for something else. It’s not going to end well for that egg,’ I said, but he just laughed. He laughs at what I say now, he’s a great kid. I told him the first time God carried an egg around for seven days he ended up dropping it.”
They were almost out. Charlie closed his eyes.
“Don’t close your eyes.”
“I don’t understand what’s going to happen next. I’m going to be dead.”
“You’re not. A scratch.”
“You won’t be a widow. That’s the only blessing. You know you’re never really conscious of it until it’s your turn and then you think, what do they do with all of us? The streets, why aren’t they clogged with hearses, why don’t we see what we’re seeing? If I come back, will you be frightened of me?”
“No.”
“You don’t come back. You can only stay longer, maybe. You could have stayed here longer yourself. You could have been a middle-aged lady, intense but friendly, like middle-aged ladies are, with a collection of glass balls that you shake and there’s snow. We could sit, you and I, of an evening, turning and watching. This could have been ours.”
“We’re here, still here.” She could not see the moon, but it had lit up everything.
“You think … this is splendid, this is mine, mine alone, mine … and all it is is death.”
His eyes were open.
“But who knows,” he said, “maybe I’ll be all right, after all. I see the kid out there. Everybody’s out there. Dog’s waiting … That’s one hopeless egg, but there’s a game in it still. Look at that kid, he’s playing catch with it.”
“By himself?”
“Himself alone.”
She looked, tried to see what he was seeing, drew away from him to touch the wheel, reach for the key.
Joy Williams is the author of four novels, three short story collections, and a history of the Florida Keys. She has received the Rea Award for the short story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most recent novel,
The Quick and the Dead
, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Books by Joy Williams
Novels
State of Grace
The Changeling
Breaking and Entering
The Quick and the Dead
Short Stories
Taking Care
Escapes
Honored Guest
Nonfiction
The Florida Keys: A History and Guide
Ill Nature
OOKS BY
J
OY
W
ILLIAMS
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist; Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning; Annabel is desperate to pursue an ordinary American life of indulgences. Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles—and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity
Fiction/978-0-375-72764-1
STATE OF GRACE
Nominated for the National Book Award in 1974, this haunting, profoundly disquieting novel manages to be at once sparse and lush, to combine Biblical simplicity with Gothic intensity and strangeness. It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapes—in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, and searingly acute,
State of Grace
bears the inimitable stamp of one of our finest and most provocative writers.
Fiction/978-0-679-72619-7
ILL NATURE
Most of us watch with mild concern the fast-disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution-related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched forests, and violence both home and abroad. Joy Williams does more than watch. In this collection of condemnations and love letters, revelations and cries for help, she brings to light the price of complacency with scathing wit and unexpected humor. Sounding the alarm over the disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created, she takes on subjects as varied as the culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, vanishing wetlands, and the determination of American women to reproduce at any cost. Controversial, opinionated, at times exceptionally moving,
Ill Nature
is a clarion call for us to step out of our cars and cubicles, and do something to save our natural legacy.
Nature/Essays/978-0-375-71363-7
HONORED GUEST
With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways—comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client’s wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers,
Honored Guest
is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-1-4000-9552-0
ALSO AVAILABLE
Taking Care
, 978-0-394-72912-1
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com