Janiella came up behind him and blew on his neck. She was wearing high-heeled sandals, short shorts and two handkerchiefs tied around her breasts.
“I was thinking,” Duane mused, “maybe we could dye Teddy’s hair.”
“What?” Liberty said.
“That’s some idea,” Janiella said.
Duane turned around and nodded. “Dye his hair. Bleach it from one of those little packages women use.”
Janiella giggled.
“That stuff could turn his black hair white,” Duane said.
“It will come out orangey, believe me,” Janiella said.
“I don’t mean white like that dog of yours,” Duane said to Liberty. “I mean a light blond like. He wouldn’t be so partial to Jean-Ann in his looks that way.”
Teddy and the two women stared at him. Duane’s cars, sleek as rats, crouched around them.
Duane raised the thumb and index fingers of his hands and boxed Teddy’s head in the square they made. He squinted, shrinking the square.
“Getting rid of the hair would help,” Duane said. He dropped his hands and regarded Teddy thoughtfully. “If his jaws were a little fuller that would help too.”
“You’re crazy, Duane,” Janiella said appreciatively.
“How tall you believe my boy’s going to get? Jean-Ann was one tall drink of water.” Duane looked at Teddy reproachfully.
“Jean-Ann,” Janiella said. She nibbled on Duane’s neck.
“Jean-Ann, Jean-Ann. You’ve seen better heads on mule dicks, right!” Duane laughed and pinched her buttocks.
Teddy was blushing. His narrow chest was mottled with red. “That’s the way they are,” he said to Liberty. “I’m going to go inside now.”
In a slash pine, a crow perched on a branch. Smaller, frantic, brighter birds darted and swooped at it, calling. There was a nest somewhere. Everywhere, in the day’s last, lingering light, liaisons and arrangements were being made. It’s the dry season and somewhere, in the middle of the state, a pine tree blows up. Farther north, an elderly man with Alzheimer’s lives contentedly with his dead wife for three days while to the south a couple wearing scuba gear get married underwater. A teenage boy kills himself so he can donate his heart to his sick girlfriend while a homosexual whose lover has just left him goes into Woolworth’s and buys two gerbils. Love comes and goes, pitching its mansion. And on the circular track of days, it appears that Dread is gaining on Devotion every second.
6
When Liberty returned to her own house, she found it locked. She jiggled the doorknob. They never locked the house, but there it was, locked. Perhaps Landlord had come back. Landlord was, in fact, the landlord’s name, a person whom Liberty had never met, but who by his uncaring absence seemed generous enough. Willie dealt with him. Apparently the understanding was that Landlord might return, and when he did they’d have to find another place.
Webby matter fouled the jalousies. Large moths clung to the darkness beneath the eaves. Looking in the window, she saw that the room was unchanged from the way she and Clem had left it when they had gone to the beach at noon. She pushed at the door once more, then returned to the street to study the house, surprised at how neglected it looked. A rusting hot-water heater, resembling a bomb, stood on the sagging side porch. Firecracker plant spilled out of the cracks in the foundation. The mailbox, which was stationed on a black chain coiling rigidly upward, dangled open, empty.
It had been in just such a mailbox years ago where she had found Clem, a puppy barely alive, his soiled shape filling up dark space. The sun had beat down upon the box then as she looked in, and black insects had shifted in the hinges where it was damp. When she pulled him out, she saw that someone had burnt the pads of his feet, there were burns on his coat, on his soft muzzle. One eye was shut and oozed a clear liquid. She had taken him to a regular doctor because the veterinarian’s offices were farther away. The doctor, who knew her, said she hadn’t found him a moment too soon.
All the doctors knew her there, for she hadn’t been well and doctors knew her. It had been this time of year but in another place, and seven years ago, before she and Willie were actually married. They were living near an abandoned orange grove, and the rotting fruit, on the ground and still hanging in the trees, made the air smell like a sad bar. It was the fall of what was their last year of school, but neither of them was going to school. By the end of that summer, Liberty knew she wasn’t going back. That was over, school, the excitement of making connections, the doors opening in her mind, the babble of voices becoming isolated, subdued, orderly. In science she had been the only one in the class who had seen the connection between the Thermos bottle and rocketry. She had seen the line leading from picnics to atom bombs.
She had a gift, the teachers said. It was as if she’d been given a gift, the teachers said, and she was throwing it away.
She had thrown it away. She took no comfort in connections. She had learned the strange paths love followed and believed only in clamorous uproar, cruel seasons, random acts.
Where do you go when there’s nowhere to go, and the death you might have died belongs to you no longer?
She heard a phone ringing, then it stopped. She went back across the dirt yard to the banyan tree, climbed up the trunk and walked out on a limb wide as a train track. The limb, rather than penetrate the house, had accommodated it nicely by veering up only inches from the bathroom window. Liberty lay on the limb and wiggled the screen out of the rotting wood, then squirmed through the window headfirst. Two lizards darted down the wall.
“Willie,” Liberty called.
At the front door, Clem was standing on two legs like any human being. He dropped softly inside when she pulled the door back. The lock was old and had gummed itself shut. She turned it back and forth. In the kitchen she covered a plate with dog food and set it on the floor for Clem. The plate was a large plastic one that depicted the First Presbyterian Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi, with its peculiar steeple atop which a large bronze finger pointed skyward. Clem worked away at the food, exposing the shrubbery, the steps, and the door to the nave. He always saved the revelation of the finger for last.
The phone rang.
“Why did you answer so quickly? What’s wrong?” Liberty’s mother demanded.
“Nothing, nothing,” Liberty said.
“Something’s wrong,” her mother gasped.
“No.”
“I hate it when you pick up the phone on the first ring. When I called your number before, the most peculiar thing happened. I got a tape. Are you hooked up to some answering machine, Liberty?”
Liberty thought of life-support systems. Tubes and pumps. Machines that cleansed.
“No.”
“Where do you get the money for these things, Liberty. Having an answering service … the life you must lead!”
“I have no answering service, Mother. You must have dialed wrong.”
“Now how could I have dialed wrong. Really, the things you infer sometimes. I thought it was a trendy little joke you were making, something you felt was bohemian. The man was talking about friendship, how to make friends with the opposite sex or something. It was so sappy, but the man had a lovely voice. I have often wished your father’s voice was more mellifluous. Sometimes I dial Time and Temperature just to hear the mellifluous voice of a male stranger.” She sighed. “I wanted to ask you a question, dear. Do you remember Peter Marsh?”
“I don’t, no.”
“Oh, Liberty, are you on drugs or something? I sometimes wonder what has happened to your mind. You used to have such a good mind, Liberty. You were always so good with those hard questions like if there are four houses on a street and the Blakes live next to the Browns and the Burtons live next to the—”