The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  “I should tell you,” Annabel said. “I take these exercises, and sometimes they really work and I don’t care about anything and I accept everything, but usually I’m very conscious of my body and I want to look pretty and have pretty things and be happy and open to new experiences and I want people to be interesting and fun and that’s just the way I am.” She twisted strands of her hair with her fingers and looked at the ends.

  “What kind of exercises?” Alice asked. Near them, hummingbirds with the swollen bodies of mice hovered.

  “Oh, you know, everything’s in your mind. You just sit quietly and try to believe that. They’re these exercises you do after someone you love has died. Someone figured them out, I bet he’s a millionaire.”

  Alice must next have asked Annabel about her mother, the pale woman in the silver frame, for Annabel went on, formally and incoherently: It had not been long ago. She’d been struck by a car. Instantaneous, her flight to Heaven. There was something about a fish restaurant.

  Alice, whose unevolved sense of compassion for her own kind had been more than once remarked upon, said, “A fish restaurant, here? Where do you find a fish restaurant around here?”

  “She’d had four martinis and was mad at Daddy. She ran out of the restaurant onto the highway. It wasn’t here, it was back home.”

  “I would absolutely refuse to go into any fish restaurant,” Alice said. “Entire species of fish are being vacuumed out of the seas by the greed of commercial fishermen. People used to think fishermen were so cool, like truck drivers, but they’re indiscriminate, avaricious bastards grossly subsidized by the government to empty the oceans.”

  Annabel gathered up her hair from the back of her neck, held it a moment, framing her pretty face, and let it drop.

  “Do you know fish can talk?” Alice said. “They squeeze their swim bladders or gnash their teeth or rub some of their bones together. They produce sounds ranging from buzzes and clicks to yelps and sobs.”

  “I don’t know what this has to do with my mother,” Annabel said. “It just happened to be a fish restaurant.”

  “I’ve got this thing about fish,” Alice admitted.

  They were quiet for a moment, then Annabel asked, “Would you like to play cribbage? I could get out the cribbage board.”

  Alice had drifted off. She saw the noble swordfish rotting in the ghost net’s raptorial web. Cribbage, what was cribbage? This Annabel was in deep denial. That swordfish was not swimming away. “No,” she said, “let’s just sit here.”

  “I love leisure time,” Annabel said. “It’s my favorite kind of time.”

  “Leisure follows the consumption pattern,” Alice said, “and is managed by an industry that sells boredom-compensating commodities.”

  Annabel wished she had an emery board at that moment.

  “Do you ever feel you’re on parole?” Alice asked. “Not just locally but cosmically? And that’s why you’re not doing what you really want to do even when you think you’re doing it?”

  “Parole!” Annabel said. “Certainly not. I haven’t done anything. Let’s go for a swim. A swim is just a swim, isn’t it? It’s nothing you have to feel guilty about.”

  They swam. Annabel complimented Alice on her vigorous butterfly, even though she personally found the stroke unappealing. They bobbed and floated. Annabel talked about perfume. There was a perfume for practically every hour of the day. You had to be subtle but precise. At noon you would think you could go all out, but you couldn’t; noon was tricky. She talked about travel. Annabel believed, and she believed this strongly, that when you went to another country you should always take little jars of bubbles for the children and little bars of soap for the adults and hand them out; it made for good relations, made those foreign people glad you were there. She talked about her sentiments and fears. She missed the flowers back east and the mizzle that accompanied the fog in from the sea. She sometimes worried about losing a limb—an arm—it would be awful. She didn’t know where that worry had come from. She didn’t even know anyone who had lost a limb. She talked about boys. She had slept with two boys; she was glad it hadn’t been just one.

  They got out of the pool, and Annabel offered to make lemonade, real lemonade with fresh lemons and raw sugar.

  “You are aware, are you not,” said Alice, “that American sugar is destroying the Everglades? Big Sugar is a wealthy powerful government-sponsored ecoterrorist that pollutes thousands of acres of one of the most remarkable ecosystems on the planet. Your little bag of sugar dooms hundreds of beautiful wading birds to death by phosphorus and heavy-metal poisoning. We should import our sugar from Cuba, kick the growers off the land around Lake Okeechobee, and—what are these!” A set of glasses on the cabana wet bar were colored in different patterns, stripes, and spots. Inside each was a scene of animals grazing or walking around, exotic animals such as zebras and leopards and giraffes, and on the glass was a circle with lines on it like the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

  “I will not drink anything out of these disgusting glasses,” she said. “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “It was a house present,” Annabel said. “Another house present.”

  “Your father has the worst friends,” Alice said. “Where does he find these people?”

  “I don’t know, he just goes out and gets them!” Annabel poured Diet Pepsi into two plain glasses and hoped that not everyone she met out here would be as censorious as Alice.

  4

  Carter entered his bedroom with a terrible foreboding that Ginger would be there tonight. He undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. Almost immediately he heard a noise like someone rattling a newspaper. He turned on the lamp. Ginger was sitting in her little chintz-covered boudoir chair with an open newspaper raised to her face. She was close enough for him to read it himself, though he very much did not want to. There was a column on wine with an illustration depicting a nest in a tree. The nest contained a single egg that had broken open to reveal—well, it had hatched a wineglass, it was clear and birds with feet and wings but with the bodies of wine bottles were flying in to provide it with sustenance. That was repulsive, Carter thought. What edition was this?

  “Carter,” Ginger said, “do you remember at the club that day in the reading room, Jeannie Winters behind the paper? She said, ‘One of my husbands just died,’ and that was all. She didn’t even put it down, she just went right on to the entertainment section. Wasn’t that a scream? I thought—I would like to be able to do that.” She lowered the paper. “But I never could, Carter, because I was wedded only to you. My life with you prevented me from being stylish like that.”

  Carter looked at her. “You seem rather deshabille tonight, my darling.”

  “While I loved you and all that, I would very much have liked to have gotten off a line as good as Jeannie Winters’. What do you mean, deshabille? It took a lot out of me coming here, and to this unfamiliar house. Why did you buy such an enormous house? And in the desert, thousands of miles from our home. I know what you’re thinking, Carter.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “You’re thinking you’ll keep moving around, farther and farther away, and I won’t be able to find you.”

  Carter had always been grateful for his ability to conceal his thoughts from Ginger, but this, alarmingly, wasn’t too far off the mark. Still, if you’re not all-knowing when you’re dead, very little makes any sense at all. Very little.

  “I want to settle down for Annabel’s sake, darling.”

  “What sort of future do you have, Carter? Really, think about it. You have a diminishing future, so why bother? You snore, you know.”

  “I do not snore,” Carter said. “I have never snored.”

  “I used to think it was merely obnoxious, but it’s undoubtedly sleep apnea, which is a potentially life-threatening disorder. You probably stop breathing hundreds of times each night, Carter.”

  “I do not snore,” Carter said. “Darling, it’s silly to argue about this. Tel
l me what it’s like there, why don’t you? Are odd stones in flannel rolled out to be adored?”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always rather had that notion.”

  “It’s not like that at all, for godssakes,” Ginger said. “That’s the dumbest attempt at embodying the unspeakable I’ve ever heard.”

  “I misunderstand a great deal of what I think,” Carter said.

  “Speaking of stones, I wouldn’t have minded one of my own. You could’ve inscribed upon it ‘Here lies the victim of an unhappy marriage.’ Nothing fancy, just to the point.”

  Carter felt warm, then cold, then warm again.

  “You should be in bed by nine,” Ginger said peevishly. “That’s when the liver repairs itself, between the hours of nine and three. Your body turns to liver restoration during the hours of darkness. I see your liver at this moment, Carter—you may not believe me, but I do. It is yellow, knotty, and hard.”

  “Cut it out, Ginger,” Carter said. “If you would. Please.”

  “You are a prime candidate for cirrhosis, you know. You don’t have a hair on your chest. If you were a bit more … simian, you’d have a better chance.”

  “I didn’t think you cared all that much about my liver, darling.”

  “You’ll always be forever in my thoughts, Carter. When will you realize that? When?”

  Carter shuddered.

  “What are Annabel’s plans for the summer?” Ginger inquired.

  “She’s just going to try and get her bearings out here, make some friends.”

  “I’ve never liked Annabel’s friends. Do you know what will happen to Annabel? She’ll grow up and then she’ll die.”

  Carter was shocked for a moment. Though it wasn’t a particularly radical comment, he felt the need to temper it nonetheless. “But she’ll have had her own life, darling.”

  “Oh, you believe that,” Ginger said irritably. “You’ll believe anything.”

  “Annabel loves you, darling.”

  “Well, I certainly hope so. I hope she’s not being encouraged to think that she idealized me inappropriately.” She twisted a little pearl button on the bodice of her dress, kept twisting until it fell off. “Shit,” she said.

  Carter feared he’d find it on the floor in the morning and watched carefully as she placed the button in her pocket. She then spoke at length about the futility of existence and the vanity of all human effort and desire. Her monologues, if anything, seemed to be getting longer. Under ordinary circumstances, if people kept going on like this you’d tell them after a while to put up or shut up, but of course Ginger had put up. She had died.

  She extended a narrow hand and pointed to his books, his ties, even his travel alarm from Tiffany’s, one of his favorite things. “All this is unnecessary, Carter.”

  He didn’t like the way she was eyeing the little clock. There had been incidents of destruction in the past. “Ginger, please don’t break that.”

  “A clock, Carter? I mean, please. You’re clinging to a clock?”

  Carter covered the clock with his hand, where it ticked warmly.

  “It crouches there watching the course of your life’s disintegration. Its only function is to witness your decline.”

  “I like it,” Carter said. “I like its lines.”

  “Time is circular, you fool. That’s the whole point.”

  Carter resolutely held the little clock.

  “Don’t cling, Carter. I’ve come back to help you in these matters. You must commence the casting off of material things. Where are my things, incidentally? What have you done with my clothes?”

  If he uttered the word rummage, she would murder him, despite the fact that it was a good churchy rummage to benefit … who was it?… Haitians, he believed. The clothes that had somehow managed to infiltrate the belongings they’d shipped out here had been donated to … he hadn’t followed up on that transferal. He was silent.

  “Your thoughts should be turning toward diminishment and cessation,” Ginger mused. “Do you remember the last time I asked you to look at my vulva?”

  He frowned.

  “You wouldn’t,” Ginger said. “So Dennis Beebee finally looked.”

  Carter slowly recalled an awkward cocktail hour.

  “Dennis said it was no longer rosily pink and plumply wrinkled,” Ginger said.

  Though that certainly didn’t sound like Dennis Beebee, Carter was reluctantly remembering how Dennis had thrown his tie over his shoulder one evening for a better look at something.

  “He said it was wan and smooth. Dennis Beebee was the last man to look at my vulva,” Ginger said. “If anyone had foretold that at my birth, I would’ve laughed in his face. Nevertheless, he was a gentleman. It’s strange, the turns life takes.”

  “Darling,” Carter said sleepily.

  “Have you lost weight?” Ginger said after a while.

  “I don’t think so. I’ve always been around a hundred and sixty.”

  “You look better. You haven’t been losing weight for someone, have you?”

  “Losing weight for someone?” He felt a chill run down his body, almost as though a hand was touching him.

  “Your stomach looks much flatter. Carter, I swear, if I ever catch you in this bed with anybody, I’ll give you both heart attacks.”

  Then she was gone. There was a peculiar smell. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was definitely not the smell of the promise of rain, a delightful smell and one he sorely missed out here. He looked at his little clock.

  5

  Alice’s granny and poppa were discussing the superior hiding properties of certain paints when the cat from down the street seized a cactus wren studying a bit of broom straw on the patio. Zipper had carried off another victim.

  “I hate that cat, I hate him!” her granny cried.

  “Most black cats are noble and gentlemanly,” her poppa said. “Zipper is not.” As a young man, as a student, he’d kept cats and developed theories about them. Tortoiseshells were clever, docile, and tricky; whites were the fondest of society and tended to be delicate; black-and-whites did not trouble themselves unduly as to their duties as pets; and so on. Alice hoped he would not reiterate these opinions now. Alice made no distinctions, for she loathed all cats and had attempted to assassinate Zipper on several occasions.

  “That Zipper makes me feel so old and helpless and foolish,” her granny said.

  Alice patted her hand. Her granny did look particularly helpless and old at the moment. Alice was astonished that she’d thought for so long that her granny and poppa were her mommy and dad. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” she’d squealed thousands of times in her life, right up until the fateful afternoon she got her menses. She was practicing lassoing. She had a nice rope and was capturing a statue of Saint Francis pretty regularly at twenty feet. The statue was cement and the size of a small child, with three intact cement birds on his shoulder and one missing one. All that remained of the gone one were claw lines etched into the folds of his robe. This was Alice’s personal favorite.

  She was coiling her rope when she felt it. It was like a roll of pennies sliding into her pants. Blood then coursed down her leg in a gay little rivulet. She ran into the house to tell Mommy, and events proceeded smoothly enough at first. Adequate information was provided, and Daddy was sent to the drugstore to get the proper paraphernalia. Then her mommy told her that though it had happened rather sooner than she’d expected Alice was a woman now and it seemed the proper moment to tell her that the situation was this: they were not her mommy and daddy but her granny and poppa. He whom she thought was her brother was her dad. Alice’s mother had been a high school dropout who nonetheless had achieved some fame as Paula “The Flea” on a roller derby team called Hot Flash before her death in a small-plane crash.

  The morning after this disclosure, her granny and poppa aged. The house grew small, cobwebs appeared, the plates crazed. Even Fury grew gray. Actually, Fury should have been the tip-of
f to the situation all along. The elderly always had dachshunds. Alice chastised herself for not having been more alert. But there had been nothing in her brother’s behavior toward her that seemed unusual. He ignored her as, she believed, was the custom. He never looked at her directly but at a point somewhat beside her, and Alice had merely assumed he suffered from an unfortunate astigmatism that would embarrass him to acknowledge. Basically, she found him boring and shiftless, though she was impressed that he had his own apartment. When she learned that he was her father, his significance to her suffered even further. Then, his girlfriend, who loved sailboarding and hang gliding, who always seemed to be wearing a harness or a helmet, became his wife. Alice was repelled by her gaudiness, her powerful thighs, her straps and belts, the lurid colors of her shiny clothes. The newlyweds went off to Oregon, where the best winds in the world were said to blow on some hidden lake. They were going to buy land and develop the place. Wind would be their only commodity. Commodity? Alice hated these people.

  She bore no grudge, however, toward her granny and poppa. They had done the best to save her, to provide her with a cozy life—a miscalculation, of course, but Alice appreciated the gesture. Deceit had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into decrepitude. For two people who had led a life of deception for years, they seemed unanxious and remarkably trusting. But her brother was her father, and he didn’t even care! That was perverse. He avoided her birth date, of course, but occasionally did send her greeting cards—unsigned, for he apparently feared liability. Alice hadn’t had her period since the last time she’d practiced roping on Saint Francis, and that had been almost five years ago. She was gangly as a willet now, a misanthrope and disbeliever.