Read Online The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams - Free Book Online Page B

over her hot nipples. The ice clinks. The yard boy raises the clippers and spreads them wide. The bolt connecting the two shears breaks. He walks over to the house, over to where Mrs. Wilson stands behind glass doors. The house weighs a ton with the glass. The house’s architect was the South’s most important architect, Mrs. Wilson once told the yard boy. Everything he made was designed to give a sense of freedom and space. Everything was designed to give the occupants the impression of being outside. His object was to break down definitions, the consciousness of boundaries. Mrs. Wilson told the yard boy the architect was an idiot.
    Behind the glass, Mrs. Wilson understands the difficulty. Behind Mrs. Wilson’s teeth is a tongue that tastes of bourbon.
    “I’ll drive you downtown and we can get a new whatever,” she says. She is determined.
    She and he and Tao get into Mrs. Wilson’s Mercedes SL350. Mrs. Wilson is a splendid driver. She has taken the Mercedes up to 130, she tells the yard boy. The engine stroked beautifully at 130, no sound of strain at all.
    She drives past the beaches, over the causeways. She darts in and out of traffic with a fine sense of timing. Behind them, occasionally, old men in tiny cars jump the curb in fright. Mrs. Wilson glances at them in the rearview mirror, seeming neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. She puts her hand on the yard boy’s knee. She rubs his leg.
    Tao scrambles from the back into the front seat. He gets on the other side of the yard boy. He bites him.
    I am living in a spiritual junkyard, thinks the yard boy. I must make it into a simple room with one beautiful object.
    Sweat runs down the yard boy’s spine. Tao is gobbling at his arm as though it is junket.
    “What is going on!” yells Mrs. Wilson. She turns the Mercedes around in the middle of the highway. An ice-cream truck scatters a tinkle of music and a carton of Fudgsicles as it grinds to a stop. Mrs. Wilson is cuffing Tao as she speeds back home. Her shaven armpit rises and falls before the yard boy’s eyes.
    “Save the oleander!” she yells at both of them. “What do I care!”
    In the driveway she runs around to Tao’s side of the car and pinches the child’s nose. He opens his mouth. She grabs him by the hair and carries him suspended into the house.
    The yard boy walks to his truck, gets in and drives off. The world is neither nest nor playground, the yard boy thinks.
    —
    The yard boy lies in his room thinking about his girlfriend.
    Open up, give in, allow some space, sprinkle and pour, he thinks.
    —
    The yard boy is mowing the grass around Johnny Dakota’s swimming pool. Dakota is into heroin and intangible property. As he is working, the yard boy hears a big splash behind him. He looks into the swimming pool and sees a rock on the bottom of it. He finishes mowing the grass and then he gets a net and fishes the rock out. It is as big as his hand and gray, with bubbly streaks of iron and metal running through it. The yard boy thinks it is a meteorite. It would probably still be smoldering with heat had it not landed in the swimming pool.
    It is interesting but not all that interesting. The possibility of its surviving the earth’s atmosphere is one-tenth of one percent. Other things are more interesting than this. Nevertheless, the yard boy shows it to Johnny Dakota, who might want to place it in a taped-up box in his house to prevent the air from corroding it.
    Johnny Dakota looks up at the sky, then at the piece of space junk and then at the yard boy. He is a sleek, fit man. Only his eyes and his hands look old. His hands have deep ridges in them and smashed nails. He once told the yard boy that his mother had died from plucking a wild hair from her nose while vacationing in Calabria. His father had been felled by an incident in Chicago. The darkness is always near, he had told the yard boy.
    Johnny Dakota usually takes his swim at this time of the morning. He is wearing his swim trunks and