Breaking and Entering (25 page)

“I don’t think so,” Liberty said.

“It’s not gonna all come back later to him? He’s not going to be visited by the total recall?”

“He was really unconscious?”

“My Chester was hardly breathing like,” Mercury said. “Dead drunk out.” She mopped her throat and forehead with a man’s big white handkerchief.

“No, then.”

“I said some things, oh! I had me a time. I worked myself up so I about could have killed him. He was lying there all defenseless and kind of cunning really, but I could have liked to drop an iron on him.”

“Oh, why!” Liberty said.

“I shouldn’t say why to a nice little white girl like yourself.”

“That’s all right,” Liberty said. She felt queasy and took tiny sips of the hot, heavy air, swallowing, trying to calm herself.

“Lipstick on his underwears,” Mercury said promptly. “My Chester’s an infidel.”

The girls stood there, mulling.

“An infidel is an unbeliever,” Liberty said, still distraught.

“Chester don’t believe in much, it’s true,” Mercury said, “and maybe that’s his biggest problem, he don’t have any standards, although he do have nice clothes. He gotten suits,
all different colors. But you know the only reason I didn’t drop the iron on him and murder him on the spot? After I took his clothes off and seen the lipstick on his underwears? I seen the electric chair. Right in the corner of my eye. It was a little tiny thing about the size of a postage stamp and it was
red
but otherwise it looked just the way you know it looks, and the sight of that electric chair deterred me from my actions on the spot, just the way they say.” She nodded somberly and daubed at herself once more with the handkerchief. “This is some cruel weather, isn’t it,” she said.

Pressed in the corner of Liberty’s eye was the bird she had seen, the dreadful poor and feathered thing.

“There was a pelican over there just before you came,” Liberty said, pointing at the little pool. The pump whirred secretively, behind the fleshy, drooping lilies. “Somebody had hurt it.” She tossed her head in dismay.

“Uhh,” Mercury said. “You seen one of them. I heard about them. Some fisherman doing it, correct? This heat makes people mean. Days like this, they’re false days. It’s best to let them go right on by.”

“I went over to it thinking I could help it, but it flew off. I had some idea about fixing it somehow.”

“Naw,” Mercury said. “You try to fix a wild, hurt thing like that and what happens is, the same thing happens. You take them home and keep them warm and feed them things and you look at them and they look at you and in three days they die. You wouldn’t happen to have some ice for the ice tea I bought, would you?”

They went inside the house, to the kitchen. Liberty cracked apart the ice from the trays and dropped them into Mercury’s jar.

“Do you like that soft, mushy ice they give you sometimes
in a cup that gets all colored up with what you’re drinking?” Mercury asked.

“No,” Liberty said. The coldness of the house made the bones around her eyes ache.

“Neither do I,” Mercury said. “So,” she said, “I’d best get started. I don’t want the lady to see too many of them dead leaves.” Mercury had put too much fertilizer around the trees near the swimming pool and the leaves were dropping. They floated, green and gold, on the surface of the pool and cluttered the trap. “I should have rinsed down into the roots more,” Mercury said.

“They’ll come back.”

“Sure they will!” Mercury agreed. She unfolded her long self from the chair she’d been sitting on and went outside. Heat clawed its way into the kitchen before the door swung shut. The heat had a force and a sound to it that summer, a smell and even a language to it—a dry and erratic click like a foreign tribe speaking, the sound of parched leaves and hot air stirring and clicking, the sound an animal’s untrimmed nails would make tapping and clicking on some polished floor.

Liberty went down the hall to Willie’s room. The bed was neatly made, the sheets pulled tight without a crease. Above it was the only decoration in the room, a poster of the planet Saturn and its mysterious rings. Willie had bought it the year before when their class had visited a planetarium. Liberty remembered how trapped she had felt there, in the darkness, beneath the expanding dome. The days had hurried by in the planetarium. Celestial bodies rose, moved toward the west, set. The heavens turned round and round. Sunrises followed one another more and more rapidly. Liberty had clenched the armrests, feeling she was going to be spun away. Then the
sky had become dense black. In the place of stars, question marks appeared. “This,” a voice had said, “is the Universe as we know it.”

Liberty lay on the bed and looked at the poster. Saturn was cold and gloomy and peaceful. For a moment or two she lay composed, her mind blank. Then she thought, this is the way Willie feels alone here, everything quiet and still and far away, and then she wasn’t peaceful anymore for her mind had started to run, trying to capture what it was that Willie felt when he was feeling nothing. It wasn’t her own voice she heard but just the mind’s running in a rapid cold and clotted circle like Saturn’s rings.

She was fifteen and she was going to have a baby, she was going to have a baby, she was going to have a baby.

They hadn’t done it all the time. There was the first time, but then they grew cautious and there were other times but not always. There were good days and bad days, safe and dangerous ones, even as Mercury had attested, false days and true. But now there were just days that multiplied.

Liberty got up and smoothed the sheets tight again. She sniffed the pillowcase, which smelled of Willie, a soft palmy smell like a lake, then went back to her own room where she took off her clothes and put on her bathing suit. The suit was a faded one from the summer before that had lost its shape and begun to nubble. She felt childish and obscure in it and for a while picked abstractly at the beaded material, rolling the balls in her fingers and dropping them into the wastebasket on top of the calendar that she—sick of seeing the numbered days—had discarded there that morning. The calendar was one from church—there were several scattered throughout the house—and above the days that month was the Red Sea being parted, a picture that Liberty had come to dislike intensely.
It was a quite ordinary interpretation. The blessed marched between towering but submissive walls of water behind which the creatures of the sea gazed forth, in wonder, with troubled, babylike faces, innocent and isolated.

She walked around her room. It was a pretty room, cheerful. The one window was filled with the view of the garden and it caught her eye once more, like a nail catching the sleeve of a blouse, but the garden was empty except for the massed colors of its flowers trembling in the heat. She was the only one at home. Calvin and Doris and Willie, too, were down at the church with other volunteers, painting the nave. She had been with them, but the fumes from the paint had made her sick. Honey, get away from that can and put your head way back, a lady had said. She was one of Doris’s friends. Her hair was in a bun and she had a dagger of dried paint on her cheek. Liberty had put her head way back and had seen the single fan in the vertex of the church, its paddles beating in a blur, whirling silently far above her, like a bat. And that had comforted her a little, for it was a familiar thing and something she had thought long ago for a time to be a bat before she knew it was a fan.

She had felt sick and she had come home. She would be all right. Everyone would be all right, she thought. Her life would be different. Very different, that was all. And that was fine. That’s what life was, the whole purpose of it was not to be left behind. And she and Willie and the baby would all three just go ahead and not be left behind, and it would be different, which was fine. She would be happy and stoical about it. Could one be happy and stoical at once?

Sweat crawled through her hair. She went out to the swimming pool.

“Ah,” Mercury said, “I been waiting on you for some company
here.” She had tied herself up top and bottom in two big handkerchiefs, the knots riding like rabbit ears on her bony hips. The two girls went to the edge of the pool and fell flat out in.

“This water warm as buns,” Mercury screamed. They paddled around, Mercury kicking the water like a can before she stepped back out. “This is not the refeshment I imagined at all,” she fretted. “How’s it doing you?”

“It’s doing me all right,” Liberty said.

Mercury drew on her clothes, shook the corn rows of her hair. Liberty lay floating on her back, watching her through her spread out feet. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Mercury said, “hold on, day
after
tomorrow.”

“Bye then,” Liberty said.

“Bye.”

Liberty swam back and forth the length of the pool, first rapidly, then doggedly. Then she swam leisurely, as though she had all the time in the world, back and forth.

They had all come home by early suppertime, spattered with paint in an earthly camouflage of divine works. Liberty begged off supper by saying she still felt too hot to eat. She wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the canvas of the diving board, watching Willie and his parents moving about in the kitchen and settling around the table, bowing their heads momentarily in prayer over the fruit cup. The table was covered with layers of old clean cloths, for Doris and Calvin did not believe in throwing things away. When a person dropped his arm on that table, it would just about bounce off the padding.

Their motions seemed slow and insubstantial to her, as though they had been interchanged with wavering holographs and as she watched, a shiver moved slowly like a hand with
outstretched fingers up her skull. Everything would not be all right, not all right at all. She had lived in this house like a child, like a daughter, for years. And now, wrapped in her towel, watching, she felt like a thief, but what was it she had stolen? She felt like a thief in a large coat, a coat with many pockets. But what was it that was missing from others, exactly, that she had so artlessly taken? Oh, but of course it was their love, and their trust, misplaced. In her. She strained forward a little, watching them eat. They seemed a circle, but there was her place, not set, but her place, empty. They were her family. Doris and Calvin were like Lucile and Lamon, but of course they were not, and Willie was like a twin to her, but he was not. He was not her brother, he was her lover, her first and only lover …

She didn’t belong to any of them anymore. She belonged to something else. She watched them, her mind turning slowly, falling. Willie was thin, as thin as she, they were both tall and skinny, as though the life they led that others did not see or know was wearing them away, the real life feeding on the merely visible one, the real life being secretive and inward and hidden. Their real life was exhilarating and artful and treacherous. It was invisible, but it was growing, growing away from them, and they could not be left behind, they would not be. They would have to follow it, leave with it. They would be driven out, they would not be fine, they would be led now by this life that others could see, and what kind of life was that?

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.”