Taking Care by Joy Williams

lawn, a mangled garden within a square of sticks and string, and then the deep bruised woods, thick as a velvet curtain. The ground all around the trailer was red. Lola felt that it looked idiotic, as though someone had tried to pretty the place up.
    There were deer, bear, coon, possum, boar and turkey. Up the river, in the spring, men brought skiffs full of bees to the tupelo trees in the swamp.
    “That would be something to watch for, love,” Jim said. “Once I saw a man covered with bees. They hung off his clothes and all over his face. He walked by my house, going home. He had lost the queen but had found her again and he was covered with black bees, hardly able to see his way.”
    Lola looked vacantly at him for a long time and then began to drum her knees with her fists. “I don’t want to see anything like that! I want to be out of here before Christmas!”
    Down the river, eight or so miles, was the Gulf of Mexico. He assured her it was there, but she went to sleep and dreamed that she followed the river and it ended only in a fourteenth-century European town of freaks and circuses. Everything was violent or deformed. Tattooed children were being sold, and tiny dead songbirds, clustered like grapes. The river was green and full of animals, stopping abruptly at the town and never appearing again, as though it were painted on, an apron of a stage. Ballistas were mounted on the walls and hides were drying in the sun and everyone was calling to her.
    Whimpering, she woke him up. In the night, something screamed. She could not tell if it was an animal or a bird or whether the process was of slaughter or slaughtering. She kept plucking at her husband’s arm, long after he had awakened and turned on the light. He was a very handsome young man withclear untroubled eyes. People depended upon him to dispense events. Lola saw it simply. Without his telling, it did not exist, and after he had related it, it became harmless verbiage. Everything could be reduced by the mentioning of it. She had married him because he made her feel secure. Sometimes, when he was narrating a television special and the show had been pre-taped, he was both on the screen and by her side, and she was dizzy with relief. Those were the times when she understood best her love for him.
    “I hate this place,” she said shrilly, releasing his arm now and squeezing the bedclothes around her fingers. “I hate it! I hate the river and this awful trailer. I hate these woods!” She watched him with large indignant eyes, the dream already relaxing its grip on her mind, the reason for waking up and needing him going further and further away, almost lost. She was sleepy again. The bed was so warm where he lay. “Hate,” she said. “I’m full of hate.” He laughed and kissed her on the mouth. Both knew she could not concentrate on anything for very long.
    The next morning, she scrubbed at a pot she had left soaking in the sink. Two mice had fallen into the grey water and drowned. She groped at them, thinking they were loosened noodles, screamed and returned to bed. Jim coaxed her up and took her into town with him, the car lurching toward the paved road in the ruts of the logging trucks. They swam through soft hollows, butterflies caroming softly across the windshield.
    “If we had a little rain,” Jim said, “it would fix up this road.”
    In the brown grass were wooden barrels of turpentine gum. They came upon a group of Negroes prying the tin pans off the trees and emptying them into the barrels. They wore wide green trousers and denim jackets and shoveled the gum out of the pans with thick sticks. They all stopped working as the car approached and stared at it expressionlessly as it lumbered past. Lola pressed her foot against the floorboards of the car, beating on an imaginary throttle. The car hung in the space before the men and then left them slowly behind, dusting their boots. Inthe bullet-shaped mirror on the fender, two wide hands rose in an