Free The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

flip-flops. If he had been in the pool he could have been brained. Once his mother had dreamed of losing a tooth and two days later her cousin dropped dead.
    Johnny Dakota is angry. Anyone could tell. His face is dark. His mouth is a thin line. He gives the yard boy two twenties and tells him to bury the rock in the backyard. He tells him not to mention this to anyone.
    The yard boy takes the rock and buries it beneath a fiddle-leaf fig at the north end of the house. The fig tree is distressed. It’s magnetic, that’s the only thing known about this rock. The fig tree is almost as upset as Johnny Dakota.
    —
    The yard boy lies in his room. His girlfriend is giving him a hard time. She used to visit him in his room several nights a week but now she doesn’t. He will take her out to dinner. He will spend the two twenties on a fantastic dinner.
    The yard boy is disgusted with himself. The spider’s web is woven into the wanting, he thinks. He has desire for his girlfriend. His mind is shuttling between thoughts of the future and thoughts of the past. He is out of touch with the sharp simplicity and wonderfulness of the moment. He looks around him. He opens his eyes wide. The yard boy’s jeans are filthy. A green insect crawls in and out of the scapular feathers of the plover.
    The yard boy goes downstairs. He gives the plover to his landlady. She seems delighted. She puts it on a shelf in the pantry with her milk-glass collection. The landlady has white hair, a wen and old legs that end in sneakers. She wants the yard boy to look at a plant she has just bought. It is in a big green plastic pot in the sunshine of her kitchen. Nothing is more obvious than the hidden, the yard boy thinks.
    “This plant is insane,” the yard boy says.
    The landlady is shocked. She backs off a little from the plant, a rabbit’s-foot fern.
    “It has seen something terrible,” the yard boy says.
    “I bought it at that place I always go,” the landlady says.
    The yard boy shakes his head. The plant waves a wrinkly leaf and drops it.
    “Insane,” the landlady asks. She would like to cry. She has no family, no one.
    “Mad as a hatter,” the yard boy says.
    —
    The restaurant that the yard boy’s girlfriend chooses is not expensive. It is a fish restaurant. The plates are plastic. There is a bottle of hot sauce on each table. The girlfriend doesn’t like fancy.
    The yard boy’s girlfriend is not talking to him. She has not been talking to him for days, actually. He knows he should be satisfied with whatever situation arises but he is having a little difficulty with his enlightenment.
    —
    The yard boy’s landlady has put her rabbit’s-foot fern out by the garbage cans. The yard boy picks it up and puts it in the cab of his truck. It goes wherever he goes now.
    The yard boy gets a note from his girlfriend. It says:
My ego is too healthy for real involvement with you. I don’t like you. Good-bye.
    Alyce
    —
    The yard boy works for Mr. Crown, an illustrator who lives in a fine house on the bay. Across the street, someone is building an even finer house on the gulf. Mr. Crown was once the most renowned illustrator of Western art in the country. In his studio he has George Custer’s jacket. Sometimes the yard boy poses for Mr. Crown. The year before, a gentleman in Cody, Wyoming, bought Mr. Crown’s painting of an Indian who was the yard boy for fifty thousand dollars. This year, however, Mr. Crown is not doing so well. He has been reduced to illustrating children’s books. His star is falling. Also, the construction across the street infuriates him. The new house will block off his view of the sun as it slides daily into the water.
    Mr. Crown’s publishers have told him that they are not interested in cowboys. There have been too many cowboys for too long.
    The yard boy is spraying against scale and sooty mold.
    “I don’t need the money but I am insulted,” Mr. Crown tells the yard boy.
    Mr. Crown goes back into the house. The