Liberty’s mind turned and turned, hearing herself again, her own voice saying Don’t give yourself away, don’t give yourself away. The night sounds of insects were beginning, gently pulling in the dark.
Willie walked from the house toward her. He was not wearing swimming trunks but black trousers and a T-shirt that was very white. She pulled the towel more tightly around her shoulders. He was her first and last and only lover, she thought, and felt a thrill of sadness.
“I’ve got a job starting tomorrow,” Willie said. “Roofing. Tar and gravel. It’s going to be miserable.” He seemed pleased with himself. “In this heat it’s going to be murder. I’ll be working with four boys from Blossum.”
Blossum was the black part of town. Mercury lived there, all the blacks did. Blossum had a sewer winding through it that once had been a creek. The blacks didn’t want to make a fuss about it. The town was proud of the fine way they got along with their blacks, they were good blacks. On occasion, someone would get upset over there and kill some people, but they were usually his own people. They were his to kill was more or less the opinion when something like this happened. The boys who made good in Blossum played professional basketball. Some of the investments they made went right back onto the streets there. Anything you wanted you could find in Blossum. If you knew what you wanted, you could find it there. You could buy a machine gun or a child. And it had some of the finest gospel singing in the state. “Bread of Heaven,” sung almost every Wednesday night at The Church of the God of Prophecy on Marigold Street, had long been known to cause even the merciless to weep.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” Liberty said.
Don’t give yourself away the voice still said to her. Don’t give yourself away, which meant everything and nothing in a comforting and hopeless way. Liberty said the other words, the words that were not the real words, without even thinking she was about to.
“I saw a pelican in the garden today, one of the maimed ones, one that’s had part of its bill sawed off. It was so close … it was … I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“Birds are thoughts,” Willie said.
“Oh,” Liberty exclaimed, hurt. “Don’t be so indifferent. ‘Birds are thoughts.’ They’re not thoughts.”
“Why, sure they are,” Willie said. “You didn’t think that birds were all they were.”
His words, his presence, so familiar and yet so distant, had a peculiar effect on her. She thought that perhaps she had been the one stolen, after all.
“It was a real thing,” she said sadly.
“That’s a very old notion, you can’t blame it on me,” Willie said. “There’s a second part too which follows logically enough. If birds are thoughts, the mind is a birdcage.” He shook his head and made twittering sounds. Then he said, “You shouldn’t see such birds, Liberty. Poor Liberty.”
“Why would people do anything like that, why would they … I know you don’t know, it’s just I can’t imagine how they could do something like that, and do it over and over again.”
“They hate,” Willie said. “They’re good haters. They want to finish up things before they’re finished up.”
“Do you ever think about the future?” Liberty asked.
“How can you think about it?”
“Imagine it then.”
“Did you ever kiss a picture?” Willie asked. “Like a photograph or something in a magazine?”
“I guess,” Liberty said.
“The future’s like that. You’d be crazy to think it was real.”
“That’s not all craziness,” Liberty said. “I mean, it’s more deliberate. You let yourself go a little.” She was embarrassed about the photograph. She couldn’t even remember doing it exactly. But it was the sort of thing she might do.
“I’m ready for something though,” Willie said. “I’m ready.”
The summer night pulled and whined around them with its sounds and Liberty looked at him, thinking, why he knows this, he knows what there is next for us.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said.
He said nothing. She fixed her eyes on his shirt, white as an egg in the darkness. Nothing. She pushed the towel from her shoulders and slipped into the water. It was cooler now, and dark. Her own voice said you’ve given yourself away … She let her head slide back and let the water hold her. Her body, floating, felt draped as though over a stone, and she felt peaceful, as those, she imagined, about to be sacrificed, felt peaceful. She floated, looking upward, a little breathless as though she had climbed many, many steps, and the terrible but peaceful image came to her of her beating heart being seized from her breast, being plucked like a carp from a pond, wriggling and rising into the night, becoming a star.
In the house, Doris and Calvin were listening to hymns on the record player. Calvin was dozing. Somewhere, in his dream, a toilet was overflowing. Money, he thought. Half awake, he rattled his newspaper.
And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am his own …
“I’ve always worried about this hymn,” Doris said. “It sounds so flirtatious.”
“Good night,” Liberty called to them from the hall.
“Good night,” Calvin said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “Good night.”
Doris blew her a kiss on her fingertips.
Willie was waiting for her in her bedroom. She opened the door and he said in the dark, “We’re so happy. We’ll never be this happy again.” She turned the light on because she didn’t want to hear the words he was saying in the dark. The light fell between them. “We’ll never be this happy again,” Willie said, “that’s what you don’t understand.”
“I don’t.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t want to.”
Liberty took off her bathing suit and got into bed, raising the sheets to her throat. Willie went to her bureau, pulled a red scarf from the drawer and draped it over the little lampshade by her bed.
“Just the light,” she said. “I don’t like that rosy light.”
“It’s pretty,” Willie said.
“It’s lurid,” Liberty said fretfully. “Oh, I don’t care about the light,” she said. She pushed the pillow up behind her back and studied the hem of the white sheet. A hole in it had been mended with a circle of bright cloth.
“Are you frightened?” Willie asked.
“No.”
“Remember the planetarium, how frightened you were?”
“You said it was all done with machines.”
“You can’t remember the way you were, always frightened.”
“I’m not frightened now.”
“You’re not making this up?” Willie said. “You’re not just trying to make yourself up in another way?”
Liberty shook her head. “It’s a baby.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Like me, but a moving away from me too. It’s nice.”
“It’s got gills still, and a tail.”
“Not anymore.”
“I’ve heard you can feel their fingernails scratching inside you.”
“No, no, not yet.”
“Like this,” Willie said. He slowly moved his hand toward her face and drew a long nail lightly down her cheek.
“Don’t,” Liberty said.
He put his hands to his own face and drew the nails heavily down. She saw red lines obediently follow the gesture across his skin.
“Your nails are too long,” she said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”