“He can’t see that,” Charlie said. “Animals live in a two-dimensional world. For example, like with roads? To a dog, each road is a separate phenomenon that has nothing in common with another road.”
“That sounds about right,” Liberty said.
“And so it is, the truth specific to each species. To each and all, one’s own dark wood,” Charlie said. He picked up Liberty’s hand and kissed her wrist bone. “I love you,” he said. “There’s only you. I have employed Janiella only for the purposes of obfuscation.”
“You’re a bottle man,” Liberty said.
“Liberty!” Teddy called. He hurried over from the bakery counter, holding a cruller and a bag in one hand, an egg in the other. It was a small brown egg. Liberty hugged him and ran her fingers through his hair. Charlie closed his eyes.
“I’m going to learn how to build furniture,” Teddy said. “I was a little late today because I saw a joke shop on the way, but the man let me hammer a piece of wood.”
Charlie’s eyes were shut.
“Is he all right?” Teddy asked Liberty. “Is he dead?”
“I am dead,” Charlie said. “I was in the Alps, hiking. I started out on a spring day. The air was sweet and warm. As I went higher it grew cold. There was a blizzard. I took refuge in a cave and built a small fire for comfort. The small fire caused an avalanche, which flattened me. Ever since then I have been dead.”
“Who is this,” Teddy demanded.
“My man,” Charlie said, opening his eyes. “Liberty and I were just discussing running away together.”
“We weren’t,” Liberty said.
“You’re dead,” Teddy said to him somberly.
“I was a swimmer,” Charlie said. “I waded in. Soon I was out of my depth. Ever since then, I have been dead.”
Teddy put a napkin in an empty cup and placed the egg in it.
“My man,” Charlie said. “Why are you carrying around an egg?”
“I have to take care of it. Wherever I go, the egg has to go.”
“Wow, man, how did you get talked into something like that? Is the egg boiled?”
“Boiled!” Teddy said in alarm. “No!”
“I just thought it would be easier to take care of, if it was boiled, but you’re right, what a deplorable suggestion. What would be the sense of that, right? Let’s not even think about boiling that egg. Do you know that an egg knows when it’s about to be boiled? Its terrified acknowledgment can be measured.”
“How can it be measured?” Teddy asked cautiously.
“With one of those terrible instruments of modern times that records impulses on a graph,” Charlie said.
Liberty shook her head and smiled.
“Look at this pretty lady smile,” Charlie said to Teddy. “I love this lady. I’ve loved her for a long time. It’s been a secret, but now you know too.”
Teddy whispered in Liberty’s ear, then slipped something out of the bag he had put on the table. “Don’t you want some ketchup?” he said to Charlie.
Charlie looked at the red plastic bottle. It looked just like restaurant ketchup.
“I believe in bringing my own condiments too, man. See how alike we are! Always bring your own condiments. I chugged a bottle of ketchup once. Won a dollar.”
“No, no, put it on your food,” squeaked Teddy.
Charlie squeezed the bottle. A long red string leaped toward his lap.
“He didn’t jump,” Teddy said.
“I’ve been wounded.”
“He knew,” Teddy said.
“It’s just that my pulse is slow, sixty-eight, maybe sixty-nine, always. I should have been a pilot. Cool in the pitch, roll and yaw. Imperturbable when controls break down. This is great. Do you have the snapping pack of gum, the blackening soap, the fly in the ice cube?”
Teddy nodded.
“You got the lady in the bathtub?”
Teddy shook his head.
“You just can’t keep her in the bathtub,” Charlie said. “She keeps popping out. Well, I guess that’s something else.”
“If you run away with Liberty, I want to come too,” Teddy said.
“A beautiful woman, a little kid, a dog, and yours truly,” Charlie said. “We can do it! We will become myths in the minds of others. They will say about us …” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “… that we all went out for breakfast and never returned.”
“Good,” Teddy said.
“So where shall we go?” Charlie said. He kissed Liberty’s face. The line of people waiting to be seated, old women in bonnets, holding one another’s hands, looked at them.
“There’s no place to go,” Liberty said.
“There are many places to go,” Charlie said. “Hundreds.”
“Let’s make a list. I love lists!” Teddy said.
“We’re the nuclear unit scrambling out, the improbable family whose salvation is at hand,” Charlie said. “We’ll go to Idaho, British Columbia, Greece. No, forget Greece. The Greeks are mean to animals. We’ll go the Costa del Sol, Venice. We’ll go to Nepal. No, forget Nepal, all those tinkly little bells would drive us crazy. What do you say, we’ll go to Paraguay. That’s where Jesse James went.”
“Jesse James didn’t go there,” Liberty said. “That’s where the Germans went.”
“You’re right,” Charlie said. “It wasn’t Paraguay. It was Patagonia where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid went.” He was fidgeting now. His dark eyes glittered.
“They were outlaws,” Teddy said.
“They were outlaws,” Charlie said. “Successful outlaws.”
“Why are you crying?” Teddy asked Liberty. “Are you crying?”
“We’ve got to move along, it’s later than we think,” Charlie said. “How about some lunch?”
5
Liberty sat on a metal chair behind the house, near the riverbank. Stenciled on the back of the chair were the words LOPEZ PRE-ARRANGEMENT AND FUNERAL PARLOR. Dice River gave off a sweetly rotten smell. Crabs darted around in the green mud. The river was still quiet, clogged with water hyacinths and plastic six-pack rings. Later in the day it would be clogged with motorboats. Willie had been gone part of a day, a full day, part of another day. Liberty sat in the chair, breathing conscientiously, gazing at the winding, sluggish water. Dice River was a river all right, but it was not the kind of river you’d want to have in your mind.
River you’d say to Teddy, and he’d think of the river in the Just So stories where Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake knotted himself in a double clove hitch around the baby elephant’s hind legs to save him from Crocodile.
River you’d say to Willie, and he’d probably think in terms of the wide path and the narrow gate, the river would be a philosophic religious construct, the great broad self-mirroring delusionary stream of the ordinary.
River you’d say to Charlie, and he’d think of the creek trickling past his Cajun home to merge eventually with the swamp that lay beneath the two-lane, pit-bull, jai alai highway down which his daddy had disappeared for good.
River. Liberty marveled at how properly people conducted themselves for the most part, greeting the world each morning in a spirit of bemused cooperation and polite assumption, agreeing on words, sharing words, acceding to the same reality of one thing or another.
As a child, Liberty had very much wanted her own words, made enthusiastic by a phrase much employed by the adults of the time—tell it in your own words. But they hadn’t meant it. Having your own words just wasn’t feasible. Having your own words isolated you from the rest of humanity. A personal vocabulary indicated a distrustful spirit, a lack of faith in the way things were.