Breaking and Entering Read Online Free PDF Page B

Umbertons? Of course not.”
    “You have no feeling for reality,” Willie said. “I’ve suspected it for some time. You have a real contempt for it.”
    “This is someone else’s reality.”
    “I’ll find the place,” Willie said. “You’ll see.”
    She reached toward him and ran her fingers through his hair. She wanted to kiss his cheekbones, hold him tightly, feel him once more. She feared that they both had a longing for discovery, capture. And the longing to turn oneself in was, she knew, a fascination with the buzz saw, the stove’s red electric coil, the divider strip, the fierce oncoming light.
    Willie pulled her hands away and held them in his. He rubbed them as though they were cold. They were not cold. In another room, a bed loomed white and vaporous in the darkness.
    “Lie down with me,” Liberty said. “Let’s comfort one another.”
    “Comfort takes twenty minutes for old hands like us,” Willie said. “I’m talking averages. Growing excitement, passion, fulfillment, despair. Twenty minutes.”
    “I didn’t mean that,” Liberty said.
    “Not that? What comfort then?”
    “I meant that actually,” Liberty said.
    “I’ve always loved you,” Willie said.
    Something in the Umbertons’ house ticked, as though expanding.

     
    At daybreak, it was still raining. Rosy-fingered dawn bloomed elsewhere, in higher, purer altitudes perhaps, where the heart beats more slowly. Liberty was dreaming the things she dreamed in stolen houses—churches and flowers and suitcases, bowls and water and caves. She stirred, and felt that Willie was standing over her, staring at her. And that was part of the dream, she thought, for Willie to be studying her so solemnly, as though he were choosing something. She was a woman in a house, sleeping. She looked at Willie, safe in her sleep-looking. She looked at him and saw herself, the form he would have her assume, a woman in a house, sleeping.
    Later, she opened her eyes and saw Clem’s muzzle aimed at her, several inches away, his tail wagging slowly. She knew Willie had gone. When he hadn’t returned in an hour, she and Clem left too.
    The Florida sky, the color of tin, squeezed out rain. It fell on stone and seed alike. Across the street from the Umbertons, a neighbor’s lawn consisted of large white stones dumped on black vinyl. The rain fell on that. It fell on a sheriff’s car that drove slowly past. The deputy was opening a Twinkie wrapper with his teeth. He grinned at Liberty as though she shared with him the criminal goodness of Twinkies. The car went around a corner and the street was empty. Heat rose like smoke from the damp pavement.
    Clem chose a hydrant painted yellow, a garbage can and a clump of ginger lilies and made them his own. Walking out of Featherbed Lane ( JUNGLE LOTS YOUR PIECE OF FANTASY WITHCENTRAL SEWER AND WATER ) they entered an area bristling with garden apartments. There were gun shops and establishments that dealt exclusively in sandwiches. There were auto body repair shops offering reasonable rates where gypsies who had roamed the streets denting cars with baseball bats the night before hammered out the dents today. There was an open air laundromat where surfers were gloomily drying their blue jeans. They sat in plastic chairs and stared at the heaving washers, all vacationers in this expensive resort that is life.
    “Oh-oh,” a surfer said, “I didn’t mean to put that shirt in there.” A screaming red pressed against the soapy glass and was pulled back.
    Liberty and Clem continued walking, over to the Trail to hitch a ride home. The Trail had once been a meandering Indian footpath over coral and limestone rock, but it was now a murderous six-lane highway that gobbled up small animals for breakfast, dreamy old geezers in walkers for lunch, and doped-up young honors students in their developer-dads’ Jeeps for dinner.
    Liberty stuck out her thumb. Cars poured toward them and past. Then, a pickup truck pulled over sharply.