The Visiting Privilege (25 page)

“You've been robbed,” she said to the face.

She went into her parlor. On the floor above, in either the rose room or the yellow room, someone shifted around. Her arm ached. She turned off the light and sat in the dark, rubbing her arm.

“The temperature of the desert can reach one hundred and seventy-five degrees,” she said aloud. “At night, it can fall below freezing. Many a time I awoke in the morning to find a sheet of ice over the water in the glass beside my bed.” It was something that had been written on one of the cards. She could see it all, the writing, the words, plain as day.

Some time later, she heard Bomber's voice. “Gramma,” he said, “why are you sitting in the dark?” The light was on again.

“Hi!” May said.

“Sometimes,” Bomber said, “she lies out in the garden and the fog rolls in, and she stays right out there.”

“The fog will be swirling around me,” May said, “and Bomber will say, ‘Gramma, the fog's rolled in and there you are!' ” She was speaking to a figure beside Bomber with a flamboyant crest of hair. The figure was dressed in silk lounging pajamas and a pair of black work boots with steel toes.

“Gramma,” Bomber said, “this is Edith.”

“Hi!” Edith said.

“What a pretty name,” May said. “There's a hybrid lily called Edith that I like very much. I'm going to plant an Edith bulb when fall comes.”

“Will it come up every year,” Edith asked.

“Yes,” May said.

“That is so cool,” Edith said.

A few days after she had been robbed, May's purse was returned to her. It was placed in the garden, just inside the gate. Everything was there, but the bills were different. May had had a ten and a five and the new ones were singles. The cards were there. May touched one and looked at the familiar writing on the back.
It never grows dark in the desert,
the writing said.
The night sky is a deep and intense blue as though the sun were shut up behind it.
Her child had been a thoughtful tourist once, sending messages home, trying to explain things she would never see. He had never written from the prison. The thirst for explanation had left him. May thought of death. It was as though someone were bending over her, trying to blow something into her mouth. She shook her head and looked at her purse. “Where have you been?” she said to the purse. The pictures of Morocco were there. She looked through them. All there. But she didn't want them anymore. Things were never the same when they came back. She closed the purse up and dropped it in one of her large green trash cans, throwing some clipped, brown flowers over it so it was concealed. It was less than a week later that everything was returned to her again, once more placed inside the gate. People went through the dump all the time, she imagined, to see what they could find. In town, the young people began calling her by name. “May,” they'd say, “good morning!” They'd say, “How's it going, Gramma?” She was the condemned man's mother, and Bomber was the condemned man's son, and it didn't seem to matter what they did or didn't do, it was he who had been accepted by these people, and he who was allowing them to get by.

Edith was spending more and more time at May and Bomber's house. She had dyed her hair a peculiar brown color and wore scarves knotted around her neck.

“I like this look,” Edith said. “It looks like I'm concealing a tracheotomy, doesn't it?”

“Your hair's good,” Bomber said.

“You know what the psychiatrist at school says?” Edith said. “He says you think you want death when all you want is change.”

“What is with this guy,” Bomber asked. “Is there really a problem at that place or what?”

“Oh there is, absolutely,” Edith said. “You look a little like your granny. Did your dad look like her?”

“A little, I guess,” Bomber said.

“You're such a sweet boy,” Edith said. “Such a sweet, bad boy. I really love you.”

The summer was over. The light had changed, and the leaves on the trees hung still. At the Lucky Kittens, the dancing went on, but not so many people danced. When May went there, they wouldn't take her money and May submitted to this. She couldn't help herself, it seemed.

Edith helped around the house. She washed the windows with vinegar and made chocolate desserts. One evening she said, “Do you still, like, pay income tax?”

May looked at the girl and decided to firmly lie. “No,” she said.

“Well, that's good,” Edith said. “It would be pretty preposterous to pay taxes after what they did.”

“Of course,” May said.

“But you're paying in other ways,” Edith said.

“Please, dear,” May said, “it was just a mistake. It doesn't mean anything in the long run,” she said, dismayed at her words.

“I'll help you pay,” Edith said.

With the cool weather, the tourists stopped coming. When school began, Edith asked if she could move into the yellow room. She didn't get along with her parents, she had been moving about, staying here and there with friends, but she had no real place to live, could she live in the yellow room?

May was fascinated by Edith. She did not want her in the house, above her, living in the yellow room. She felt that she and Bomber should move on, that they should try their new life together somewhere else, but she knew that this was their new life. This was the place where it appeared they had gone.

“Of course, dear,” May said.

She was frightened and this surprised her, for she could scarcely believe she could know fright again after what happened to them, but there it was, some thing beyond the worst thing—some disconnection, some demand. She remembered telling Edith that she was going to plant bulbs in the garden when fall came, but she wasn't going to do it, certainly not. “No,” May said to her garden, “don't even think about it.” Edith moved into the yellow room. It was silent there, but May didn't listen either.

Something happened later that got around. May was driving, it was night, and the car veered off the road. Edith and Bomber were with her. The car flipped over twice, miraculously righted itself and skidded back onto the road, the roof and fenders crushed. This was observed by a policeman who followed them for over a mile in disbelief before he pulled the car over. None of them were injured and at first they denied that anything unusual had happened at all. May said, “I thought it was just a dream, so I kept on going.”

The three seemed more visible than ever after that, for they drove the car in that damaged way until winter came.

H
e was nine.

“Nine,” his father would say, “there's an age for you. When I was nine…” and so on.

His father's name was Walter and he was a mechanic at a Chevrolet garage in Tallahassee. He had a seventeen-year-old brother named Walter, Jr., and he was Tommy. The boys had no mother, she'd been killed in a car wreck a while before.

It had not been her fault.

The mother had taken care of houses that people rented on the river. She cleaned them and managed them for the owners. Just before she died, there had been this one house where the toilet got stopped up. “I told the plumber,” Tommy's mother told them, “that I wanted to know just what was in that toilet because I didn't trust those tenants. I knew there was something deliberate there, not normal. I said, You tell me what you find there and when he called back he said, Well, you wanted to know what I found there and it was meat fat and paper towels.”

She had been very excited about what the plumber had told her. Tommy worried that his mother had still been thinking about this when she died, that she'd been driving along still marveling about it—meat fat and paper towels!—and that then she had been struck, and died.

She had slowed for an emergency vehicle that was tearing through an intersection with its lights flashing and a truck had crashed into her from behind. The emergency vehicle had a destination but there hadn't even been an emergency at the time. It was supposed to be stationed at the stock-car races and it was late. The races—the first of the season—were just about to begin at the time of the wreck. Walter, Jr., was sitting in the old bleachers with a girl, waiting for the start, and the announcer had just called for the drivers to fire up their engines. There had been an immense roar in the sunny, dusty field, and a great cloud of insects had flown up from the rotting wood of the bleachers. The girl beside Walter, Jr., had screamed and spilled her Coke all over him. There had been thousands of these insects, which were long, red flying ants of some sort with transparent wings.

Tommy had not seen the alarming eruption of insects. He had been home, putting together a little car from a kit and painting it with silver paint.

Tommy liked rope. Sometimes he ate dirt. Lightning storms thrilled him. He was small for his age, a weedy child. He wore blue jeans with deeply rolled cuffs for growth, although he grew slowly. Weeks often went by when he didn't grow at all.

The house they lived in on the river was a two-story house with a big porch, surrounded by trees. There was a panel in the ceiling that gave access to a particularly troublesome water pipe. The pipe would leak whenever it felt like it but not all the time. Apparently it had been placed by the builders at such an angle that it could be neither replaced nor repaired. Walter had placed a bucket in the crawl space between Tommy's ceiling and the floor above to catch water, and this he emptied every few weeks. Tommy believed something existed up there that needed water, as all living things do, some quiet, listening, watching thing that shared his room with him. At the same time, he knew there was nothing there. Walter would throw the water from the bucket into the yard. It was important to Tommy that he always be there to see the bucket being brought down, emptied, then replaced.

In the house, with other photographs, was one of Tommy and his mother taken when he was six. It had been taken on the bank of the same river the rest of them still lived on, but not the same place. This had been farther upstream. Tommy was holding a fish by the tail. His mother had black hair and she was smiling at him and he was looking at the fish. He was holding the fish upside down and it was not very large but still large enough to keep, apparently. Tommy was told that he had caught the fish and that his mother had fried it up just for him in a pan with butter and salt and that he had eaten it, but Tommy could remember none of this. What he remembered was that he had found the fish, which was not true.

Tommy loved his mother but he didn't miss her. He didn't like his father much, and never had. He liked Walter, Jr.

Walter, Jr., had a mustache and his own Chevy truck. He liked to ride around at night with his friends and sometimes he would take Tommy along. The big boys would drink beer and holler at people in Ford trucks and, in general, carry on as they tore along the river roads. Once they all saw a naked woman in a lighted window. The headlights swept past all kinds of things. One night, one of the boys pointed at a mailbox.

“Look, that's a three-hundred-dollar mailbox!”

“Mailbox can't be three hundred dollars,” one of the other boys yelled.

“I seen it advertised. It's totally indestructible. Door can't be pulled off. Ya hit it with a ball bat or a two-by-four, it just busts up the wood, don't hurt the box. Toss an M-80 in there, won't hurt the box.”

“What's an M-80,” Tommy asked.

The big boys looked at him.

“He don't know what an M-80 is,” one of them said.

Walter, Jr., stopped the truck and backed it up. They all got out and stared at the mailbox. “What kind of mail you think these people get anyway?” Walter, Jr., said.

The boys pushed at the box. “It's just asking for it, isn't it,” one of the boys said. They laughed and shrugged, and one of them pissed on it. Then they got back in the truck and drove away.

Walter, Jr., had girlfriends too. For a time, his girl was Audrey, only Audrey. She had thick hair and very white, smooth skin and Tommy thought she was beautiful. Together, he thought, she and his brother were like young gods who made the world after many trials and tests, accomplishing everything only through wonders and self-transformations. In reality, the two were quite an ordinary couple. If anything, Audrey was peculiar looking, even ugly.

“If you marry my brother, I'll be your brother-in-law,” Tommy told her.

“Ha,” she said.

“Why don't you like me?” He adored her, he knew she had some power over him.

“Who wants to know?”

“Me. I want to know. Tommy.”

“Who's that?” And she would laugh, twist him over, hang him upside down by the knees so he swung like a monkey, dump him on his feet again and give him a stale stick of gum.

Then Walter, Jr., began going out with other girls.

“He dropped me,” Audrey told Tommy, “just like that.”

It was the end of the summer that his mother had died at the start of. Her clothes still hung in the closet. Audrey came over every day and she and Tommy would sit on the porch of the house on the river in two springy steel chairs painted piggy pink.

Audrey told him, “You can't trust anybody.” And, “Don't agree to anything.”

When Walter, Jr., walked by, he never glanced at her. It was as though Audrey wasn't there. He would walk by whistling, his hair dark and crispy, his stomach flat as a board. He wore sunglasses, even though the summer had been far from bright. It had been cool and damp. The water in the river was yellow with the rains.

“Does your dad miss the Mom,” Audrey asked Tommy.

“Uh-huh.”

“Who misses her the most?”

“I don't know,” Tommy said. “Dad, I think.”

“That's right,” Audrey said. “That's what true love is. Wanting something that's missing.”

She brought him presents. She gave him a big book about icebergs. He knew she had stolen it. They looked at the book together and Audrey read parts of it aloud.

“Icebergs were discovered by monks,” Audrey said. “That's not exactly what it says here, but I'm trying to make it easier for you. Icebergs were discovered by monks who thought they were floating crystal castles.” She pointed toward the river. “Squeeze your eyes up and look at the river. It looks like a cloud lying on the ground instead, see?”

He squeezed up his eyes. He could not see it.

“I like clouds,” he said.

“Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be,” Audrey said. “That's a known fact.”

Tommy looked back at the book. It was a big book, with nothing but pictures of icebergs or so it seemed. How could she have stolen it? She turned the pages back and forth, not turning them in any order that he could see.

“Later explorers came and discovered the sea cow,” she read. “The sea cows munched seaweed in the shallows of the Bering Strait. They were colossal and dim-witted, their skin was like the bark of ancient oaks. Discovered in 1741, they were extinct by 1768.”

“I don't know what extinct is,” Tommy said.

“Seventeen sixty-eight was the eighteenth century. Then there was the nineteenth century and the twentieth century and we are now in the twenty-first century. This is the century of destruction. The earth's been around for four point six billion years and it may take only fifty more years to kill it.”

He thought for a while. “I'll be fifty-nine,” he said. “You'll be sixty-five.”

“We don't want to be around when the earth gets killed,” Audrey said.

She went into the kitchen and helped herself to two Popsicles from the freezer. They ate them quickly, their lips and tongues turned red.

“Do you want me to give you a kiss?” Audrey said.

He opened his mouth.

“Look,” she said. “You don't drool when you kiss. How'd you learn such a thing?”

“I didn't,” he said.

“Never mind,” she said. “We don't ever have to kiss. We're the last generation.”

Walter made his boys supper every night when he came home from work. He set the table, poured the milk.

“Well, men,” he would say, “here we are.” He would begin to cry. “I'm sorry, men,” he'd say.

The sun would be setting in a mottled sky over the wet woods and the light would linger in a smeared radiance for a while.

Tommy would scarcely be able to sleep at night, waiting for the morning to come and go so it would be the afternoon and he would be with Audrey, rocking in the metal chairs.

“The last generation has got certain responsibilities,” Audrey said, “though you might think we wouldn't. We should know nothing and want nothing and be nothing, but at the same time we should want everything and know everything and be everything.”

Upstairs, in his room, Walter, Jr., was lifting weights. They could hear him hoarsely breathing, gasping.

Audrey's strange, smooth face looked blank. It looked empty.

“Did you love my brother,” Tommy asked. “Do you still love him?”

“Certainly not,” Audrey said. “We were just passing friends.”

“My father says we are all passing guests of God.”

“He says that kind of thing because the Mom left so quick.” She snapped her fingers.

Tommy was holding tight to the curved metal arms of the chair. He put his hands up to his face and sniffed them. He had had dreams of putting his hands in Audrey's hair, hiding them there, up to his wrists. Her hair was the color of gingerbread.

“Love isn't what you think anyway,” Audrey said.

“I don't,” Tommy said.

“Love is ruthless. I'm reading a book for English class,
Wuthering Heights.
Everything's in that book, but mostly it's about the ruthlessness of love.”

“Tell me the whole book,” Tommy said.

“Emily Brontë wrote
Wuthering Heights.
I'll tell you a story about her.”

He picked at a scab on his knee.

“Emily Brontë had a bulldog named Keeper that she loved. His only bad habit was sleeping on the beds. The housekeeper complained about this and Emily said that if she ever found him sleeping on the clean white beds again, she would beat him. So Emily found him one evening sleeping on a clean white bed and she dragged him off and pushed him in a corner and beat him with her fists. She punished him until his eyes were swelled up and he was bloody and half blind, and after she punished him, then she nursed him back to health.”

Tommy rocked on his chair, watching Audrey. He stopped picking. The scab didn't want to come off.

“She had a harsh life,” Audrey said, “but she was fair.”

“Did she tell him later that she was sorry,” Tommy asked.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Did Keeper forgive her?”

“Dogs can't think that way.”

“I've never had a dog,” Tommy said.

“I had a dog when I was little. She was a golden retriever. She looked exactly like all golden retrievers. Her size was the same, the color of her fur, and her large, sad eyes. Her behavior was the same. She was devoted, expectant and yet resigned. Do you see what I mean? But I liked her a lot. She was special to me. When she died, I wanted them to bury her under my window, but you know what they said to me? They said, The best place to bury a dog is in your heart.”

She looked at him until he finally said, “That's right.”

“That's a crock,” she said. “A crock of you know what. Don't agree to so much stuff. You've got to watch out.”

“All right,” he said, and shook his head.

Sometimes, Audrey visited him at school. He told her when his recess was and she would walk over to the playground and talk with him through the playground's chain-link fence. Once she brought a girlfriend with her. Her name was Flan and she wore large clothes, a long, wide skirt and a big sweater with little animals running in rows. There were only parts of the little animals where the body of the sweater met the sleeves and collar.

“He's like a little doll, like, isn't he,” Flan said.

“Now don't go and scare him,” Audrey said.

Flan had a cold. She held little wadded tissues to her mouth and eyes. The tissues were blue and pink and green and she would dab at her face with them and push them back in her pockets but one spilled out and fluttered in the weeds beside the school-yard fence. It didn't blow away and stayed there, fluttering.

“I ain't scaring him. Where'd you get all them moles around your neck?” she said to Tommy.