Breaking and Entering

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Willie and Liberty broke into a house on Crab Key and lived there for a week. The house had a tile near the door that said CASA VIRGINIA. It was the home of Virginia and Chip Maxwell. It was two stories overlooking the Gulf, and had been built with the trickle-down from Phillips-head screw money. Willie achieved entry by ladder and a thin, flexible strip of aluminum. Crab Key was tiny and exclusive, belonging to an association that had an armed security patrol. The houses on Crab Key were owned by people so wealthy that they were hardly ever there.

Liberty and Willie saw the guard each morning. He was an old, lonely man, rather glossy and puffed up, his jaw puckered in and his chest puffed out like a child concentrating on making a muscle. He told Willie he had a cancer, but that grapefruit was curing it. He told Willie that they had wanted to cut again, but he had chosen grapefruit instead. He talked quite openly to Willie, as though they had been correspondents for years, just now meeting. Willie and Liberty must have reminded him of people he thought he knew, people who must have looked appropriate living in a million dollar soaring cypress house on the beach. He thought they were guests of the owners.

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