Breaking and Entering (33 page)

“The bugs of Room 303,” Charlie said. “People think the bugs are in Charlie’s mind, but they are not in Charlie’s mind.”

“What exactly happened?”

“The particulars in cases of love lost are clouded,” Charlie said, “as we all know.”

“Janiella left.”

“She sure did, and left a mean note behind too. There are suspicions about the pool repairman. Duane’s sworn off human intercourse after tonight. Tonight, he drinks. Tomorrow he’s going to hitchhike into a desert.”

A skinny boy with a plate full of barbecue sat down at their table. He pressed his hands together, pointed them at the plate, muttered a grace and dug in.

“The desert,” Charlie said. “Picture it. Gulches, canyons, playas, oddities of erosion, mud palisades and Duane. Awesome stillness. Desolate grandeur. And that maniac.”

“I’ll take care of Teddy,” Liberty said.

The boy was folding the chicken into his mouth and banging his teeth noisily down upon the bones.

“The kid had no doubts,” Charlie said. “We discussed it at length. No desert for him. He wants to go to the North Pole first. He has already collected some facts on the North Pole. He says the polar bears there carry their babies around between their toes. You and me and Reverdy,” Charlie sang, “heading north. And you too, sport,” he said to Clem. “Never have I failed to include you in my master plan.”

“You want some more beer?” the waitress asked.

“No, no, no,” Charlie exclaimed. “My sweetie here and me, we’re about to start our life together.” He smiled his wild smile and put his hand lightly on Liberty’s back. “We begin,” he said. “The memories of our past existences will be but glints of light, twinges of regret, passing shadows of brief disturbances that will be gone before they can be grasped.”

“There’s Duane at the bar,” Liberty said. She stood up.

Charlie cupped his hands around his mouth. “Yo, Duane!”
he called. The men at the bar remained hunched and unmoving. “Such embittered individuals,” Charlie said. “Armageddon and faithless women. Camouflage and survival. Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

They pressed through the crowd toward Duane. He sat on a stool gazing into a brown drink, his face blank as an acolyte’s.

“Where’s Teddy?” she asked.

“I just lit up my lip a minute ago,” Duane said. He pushed his lower lip out and pointed. “Thought I had a cigarette. Didn’t have a cigarette. Lit up my goddamn lip.” He looked at Liberty, then at Charlie. “There’s a woman here,” he said.

“Yeah, man,” Charlie said. “Correct.”

Duane tilted toward his drink, then tilted back. “You ain’t believing a thing this woman tells you, are you? You can’t trust a woman. They don’t stay around.”

“Life is subtraction,” Charlie said. He ordered beer.

“You know what I’m gonna miss most? My big block 428. What a monster.” He shook his head mournfully. “I thought that machine was gonna be with me for the duration.”

“Where’s Teddy?” Liberty said. She touched his arm, which was as hard as a piece of wood beneath his checked shirt.

“You gonna take care of my boy?” Duane asked. “My boy, my son?”

“Yes.”

Duane looked at her shyly. “I’m abandoning my boy.”

“Don’t be so lucid, man,” Charlie said. He drank the beer quickly.

“I’m not a scrutable man,” Duane said. “Even so, I can explain myself if I want to. I got my reasons, my theories, like with hunting. You ever hear my theory as to why hunting is so great? Well, I’ll tell you it. It’s not just that you can stop
some big sucker that thinks it can go anywheres it wants to go. It’s in the gear and the preparation and the knowledge of your terrain and prey and stuff, but the great part is after you’ve shot the thing and you’re looking at it and it’s dead, but not real dead you know, and it’s watching you. That’s when you have this incredible feeling. You feel a little bad. You feel a little sad and regretful and that’s the best part.” Duane pounded the bar. “That’s the best part, that little bit of guilt! Too late to do dick about it. Then that guilt just fades away.”

“One thing you got to learn to do in the desert is to keep your mouth shut,” Charlie said. “Very important.”

“Who’s telling Duane to keep his mouth shut! Don’t get me hostile. See these eyes here …” Duane jabbed his finger at his own face. “These eyes are the enemies of all joy and hope tonight.”

“I’m just saying, man, that in the desert you’ve got to learn to reduce your water needs. Lack of water is what makes the desert desert.” Charlie panted with enthusiasm.

Duane peered at him. “You got stuff floating around you, man.”

“Merely the nimbus that hovers around the redeemed,” Charlie said. “My life begins tonight.”

“No, seriously, man, what is that stuff?”

Charlie looked over his shoulder. Duane kept staring. Then he blinked and shrugged.

“Where is Teddy now, Duane?” Liberty persisted.

“I took him over to your house. We must of just missed you. The kid’s got his own car now. He can go anywhere, just has to learn to drive. ‘Escape’ I told him. Escape was my advice. My boy,” Duane mused. “Fruit of my loins.” He tugged at his lip.

A black man pushed his way up to the bar. He was holding
a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. The baby’s fingers patted the air. The man sat several stools away, just where the bar began to curve, so that he faced them. He took a cloth from his pocket and ceremoniously wiped the counter, then propped the baby up on a slant board that had been concealed in the folds of the blanket.

“Oh, God,” Charlie said, “the guy with the blind baby. That’ll empty the joint.”

The light slid around the black man’s round, merry face, giving a pinkish cast to his hair. The baby was no more than a few weeks old.

“How can they know that baby’s blind?” Liberty said. “It’s such a young baby.”

“Man’s been telling everybody it’s blind,” Duane said glumly. “Man says something’s detached in its head. I mean, who even wants to think about it. I don’t know why they even serve that guy.”

“They serve him because he mean,” Charlie said.

“The hell with that,” Duane snarled. “I’m mean. Tonight I’m the meanest.”

The black man looked at them and nodded formally.

“Shit,” Duane muttered. He slid off the stool and stumbled toward the door.

“Hello there,” the black man said.

“Hello, yes!” Charlie said joyously.

The man moved closer to them, sliding the baby down the bar. Occupants of the space between them ambled away. He stopped a few feet from Liberty and looked down at Clem, who lay with his chin on her foot.

“Good evening,” he said to Clem. “How you been?”

The bartender placed a martini beside the baby. A sliver of lemon shimmered in the oil on its surface. The man ate the
lemon, swallowed half the martini and placed his little finger in what was left. Then he rubbed the finger on the baby’s gums.

Charlie gazed at the drink longingly. “You’re going to make that child alcohol dependent,” he said.

“Oh, this child has many problems. This child was born in a pool hall when its whore-momma’s head was punctured by a pool cue. This child was born premature and has some other tiny baby’s kidneys. This child is blind.” He smiled at Charlie and winked, then unwrapped the blanket and placed the baby’s toes against his lips and kissed them. “This child will know nothing but darkness forever and ever,” he said.

Liberty knew that the man’s voice was Mr. Bobby’s voice, crooning and impatient, shifting and winding. A warm voice that assured freedom from pain, trouble and anxiety. A voice you could hear in a warm bath with wrist veins agape if it came to that. A voice open to wide interpretation. Somebody else’s voice.

“Blindness isn’t considered to be a severe handicap,” Charlie said.

“Is that a fact,” Mr. Bobby said. He tilted his head coquettishly.

“Heavens no,” Charlie said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“I buy the drinks,” Mr. Bobby said. He opened a wallet that was filled with credit cards. He fanned the cards out before him. Each had a different signature. “People send these in to me. They just don’t want to be accountable no more. Somebody sent this baby in to me. Wrapped in newspaper. Ain’t people something?” He ordered a double stinger on the rocks. “You are familiar with the story in the Bible where Jesus heals the blind man? Where he causes the blind man to see?”

“A very pretty story,” Charlie said. “I love miracles. Dish up the miracles I always say. There are never enough miracles in a day for my taste.”

“Now, I don’t believe that’s a pretty story at all. Whatever became of the blind man? Do we ever hear of the blind man again? No, we do not. We don’t, no, because the blind man went into a depression from which he never recovered. We are speaking here of irreversible melancholy. Giving sight to those who have never seen is no gift because nothing is as they imagined it. To have nothing be the way you imagined it, now that’s a shame.”

“But that happens all the time,” Charlie said cheerfully. “We have a friend, this lady and I, he says, ‘The things that we see are a very crude version of what is.’ ” He looked at Liberty and winked.

He was speaking about Willie. Her mind was trying to shut Willie out, she realized. Her heart was pounding.

“We all have that friend,” the man said smoothly. “A friend like that gives no satisfaction.” He smiled and his smile was like a scissors opening. “I prefer a silent friend, like this one here.” He fixed his open smile downward on Clem, then closed it. He said to Liberty, “This dog walks in your sleep, do you know that? He goes visiting. My little baby hears him all the time.”

“Dog’s a dream, man,” Charlie said.

“Now a black dog would be something else again. Some people think a black dog’s bad luck but that ain’t so, necessarily. It’s black dogs that help the dying soul make its crossing, so in a way they’re bad luck, but they’re cherished too and are forgiven everything.”

Willie was his own black dog. She had cherished him too long.

Mr. Bobby sipped his shiny green drink. “You look brand-new tonight, darling,” he said to Liberty. “You look like you done some traveling. Now my little baby’s brand new too, but even so it’s a shade too late for me to prove a little pet idea of mine. My little idea—actually, you could call it more of a belief—is that if you took a newborn thing and you deprived it from birth of all external impressions, light and sound and touch and heat and cold and whatever, taste and such, and at the same time managed to keep it alive, such an individual would not be able to perform the most insignificant action.”

“That’s grotesque,” Charlie said.

The man pushed his face close to the infant and soundlessly opened and closed his mouth. Liberty feared that he was going to start throwing his voice into the baby as though it were a ventriloquist’s doll. It was a very pretty baby with long, dark lashes.

“Are you Mr. Bobby?” she asked.

“We got one of my constituents here,” he said.

“No,” she said. “We don’t.”

“It’s just the grief business, darling. It’s a good business. You ever hear me on Identity? I-den-titty. It’s a personal favorite of mine.” He smiled faintly. “I would like that animal. What are you accepting for him?”

“He’s not for sale,” Liberty said.

“I didn’t ask if he was for sale.”

The baby gave a squeal.

“The last time I saw that animal he was in a small clearing in the middle of a jungle. That there was a clearing in such a rank and tangled wilderness was inexplicable.”

“He has never been in a jungle,” Charlie said.

“He has his journeys to make,” Mr. Bobby said irritably,
“you may not.” He paused, staring at Clem. “Time before that, he was witnessing tortures. They’ve become so commonplace these days that an unbiased observer has ceased to become a luxury and is now a necessity. Someone to keep them on the up and up. I had an animal myself once, but the most interesting thing about it was that its blood was artificial. Perfluorocarbons ran through its veins.”

“What kind of dude was this?” Charlie demanded. “He sounds like an icebox or a can of Raid.”

“It was a biological curiosity, I’m not saying it was a spiritual curiosity.”

“Perfluorocarbons,” Charlie said.

“It resembled mother’s milk. Course it wasn’t mother’s milk at all.” Mr. Bobby finished his drink. “This is some night, isn’t it? This is my night off.” He dandled the baby and whispered, “You ain’t ever, ever going to see.”

“I’m sure advances will be made,” Charlie said.

“I thought we already cleared that misconception up. No reason the blind should see. You blinder than this. No reason you should see either.” Swiftly he plucked the baby from the slant board and lowered it down to Clem. The baby’s feet scrabbled against Clem’s skull. “You want this, don’t you, honey,” Mr. Bobby sang as the baby made little fretful cries. “I can’t believe,” he said, “that you people are questioning the right this child has to this animal.”

“You’re upset,” Charlie said. “I can understand that.”

“Don’t you humor me, you redneck son of a bitch,” Mr. Bobby said.

“We’d better be moving along,” Charlie said, “much as we would love to linger here.”

“That be fine, that be fine, but you just leave that box right here.”

“You’re living in a world of unreal objects, man,” Charlie said.

“This blood right here,” Mr. Bobby said, nodding at Clem. “This baby food, he be Box.”

“His name’s Clem,” Charlie said. “He doesn’t stay here.”

“I’m the one who’s naming. I name this and I name that.”

“But as all we who wish otherwise well know,” Charlie said, “naming something doesn’t make it yours.”

“For example,” Mr. Bobby said, “I name you a Man in Deep Trouble.”

“Nah,” Charlie said.

“Oh, yes. I name your past hopeless, your present an excrescence and your future dismal. No, my boy, the future ain’t gonna lift her skirts for you.” He shook a cigarette from a pack and offered it to Charlie.

“Why, thanks,” Charlie said.

“I done passed my judgment,” Mr. Bobby said.

“Oh, come on, man,” Charlie said.

Mr. Bobby lit the cigarette from a bright little package of matches. “You’re just a little flame,” he said, “and when it’s over for you, you just add your little flame to the big flame. It’s not that you feed the big flame, oh my, no, the big flame don’t need feeding, it’s just that your little light ain’t separate no more. Isn’t that nice?” He blew the match out.