The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  “Don’t let that cat break your heart now, Mother,” her poppa said to her granny. The three of them gazed at the softly fluttering breast feathers, all that remained of the wren, stuck in place by the ooze of trauma. “Why don’t we make an excursion to the pet store and buy Fury some of those peanut butter cookies he fancies?” He turned to Alice and whispered, “Take her mind off that Zipper.”

  Alice would like to get a wrist-lock slingshot with a magnum-thrust band and a sure grip handle, and nail that Zipper once and for all.

  “I think Fury suffers from sensory overload in that place,” her granny said. “Too many radiant collars and educational toys. Too many bins of pig ears. Plus I think he was disturbed last time at seeing the corgi he thought he knew, waiting outside on that contraption.” The contraption being a padded board with wheels on which the recently paralyzed rear legs of the elderly corgi lay. Inside, his mistress was being persuaded to purchase a puppy, a bridge companion, so that when the corgi’s end came, she would be well on her way to solace.

  “I don’t think he actually knew that poor dog,” Alice’s poppa said. “But Fury tends to worry, Mother, you know he does.”

  They decided to leave him at home in his basket, the radio playing softly. Alice’s granny got out her big sun umbrella, and they walked the few blocks to the shopping mall. In the pet store window was a sign:

  WE’RE CLOSED TODAY OUT ACQUIRING NEW CRITTERS

  ESPECIALLY FOR YOU.

  REMEMBER! WE CAN GET YOU ANY CRITTER!

  “Appalling,” Alice said.

  “They’re expanding,” her poppa marveled. “This place has changed since just last week. Look, that little pie parlor next door has turned into a Just for Feet store.”

  “They were such excellent pies,” her granny said.

  “That billiard parlor wasn’t there before either, was it?” her poppa said. “Can’t remember what was there, in fact.”

  “Care to shoot some pool?” her granny challenged.

  “I wouldn’t mind a little four-ball carom,” her poppa said. “A little four-ball never hurt anybody.” He winked at Alice. “Keeping her mind off Zipper,” he said. They vanished into the merry gloom of the pool hall.

  Alice wandered around to the back of the pet shop. She really didn’t mean to enter, she just pressed against one of the doors and it gave a little. A flimsy chain dropped between the door and the jamb, and she popped it easily.

  It was warm inside. She heard some rustling and chirping, the whistling hiss of the aquariums’ aerators. This is Alice your savior, she thought. She smacked her knee painfully against a grooming table. Most of the cages were without residents, but somehow in an unpromising way. Had the proprietors sold all their captives, or had they just fled the city, one step ahead of their creditors at the breeding farms and puppy mills? The bins of barbecue-flavored pigs’ ears remained. Alice didn’t think Fury enjoyed those things at all, but rather hid them, sensitive as he was.

  She filled up a shopping cart with some simpler life forms—lizards and toads, snakes and mice—and rolled it right back out through the door she’d popped. Society, as a rule, did not trouble anyone pushing a shopping cart. The further a cart was taken from the store where it belonged, the more deference was paid to the possibly unstable individual who had taken charge of it. Alice wanted to take the creatures back to her room and talk to them—debrief them, as it were—but when she drew near the house she saw that her granny and poppa had returned, pool playing having been less larky than they’d hoped. Alice took her refugees to a nearby wash instead and gravely liberated them, though they seemed to have little instinct for freedom. They had been considered food for too long and had undoubtedly seen too much.

  6

  I’ve been thinking a lot about that last meal I had, Carter.”

  “I never went back there,” he said firmly.

  “That was surimi I ate, wasn’t it. Why on earth did you let me eat surimi?”

  “You didn’t want to order what I ordered, darling. You never would.”

  “That’s because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake. I caught on to that trick early in our marriage, Carter.”

  “I don’t know what surimi is, Ginger.”

  “It’s a fish paste, a disgusting fish paste that’s then colored and fluffed up to make simulated seafood like simulated crab.”

  “Did you learn about it there?”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Darling, I’m not—”

  “You just pick information up here, in the course of things. I’ve been speaking to a fisherman.”

  “Not IXOUS himself!”

  “Don’t show off.”

  “IXOUS, darling. IXOUS! This is stupendous. Jesus Christ God’s Son. The Savior!”

  “I hate it when you show off that tiresome St. George’s education.”

  “But this means that things fall into place after all. Why, this is good news indeed!”

  “I don’t know what you’re so thrilled about,” Ginger said. “This individual is from Louisiana. He only fished for sport. He was a real estate broker, one of those indefatigable, extroverted risk takers who fished to relax.”

  “That really got my heart to pounding,” Carter admitted.

  “He told me a little story. Sensitive men don’t have to be violets, Carter. He had invented this little clamplike grill, but without any of those grill thingies on it, and when he caught a fish, he’d take it off the hook and put it in this device and he’d fillet it right there. Slice, flip over, slice. Two swift, economical movements and then back into the water with what was left of the fish. He never thought a thing about it, and neither did anyone else.”

  Whoa, Carter thought to his heart, which seemed determined to escape from his chest’s ribbed stall.

  “Except this one time, the fish just stayed there right by the boat, breathing through its gills and moving its tail even though it was just bones.” Ginger paused. “And it looked at him.”

  “Looked?” Carter said.

  “Yes, just stayed there and looked.”

  “What kind of fish was it?”

  “A redfish, I think he said.”

  “Did it say anything?”

  “Of course not. It just looked at him for the longest time. And then it sank from sight.”

  Carter could not hide his disappointment. Ginger was never going to get anywhere, wherever she was, if she just sat around shooting the breeze with some guy from Louisiana of all places. Sportsman’s Paradise.

  “Did he continue to fish after this incident?” Carter asked sourly.

  “Not so much after that,” Ginger said dreamily. But then she glared at Carter. “I don’t know why I try to share anything with you, since you always miss the point. It wasn’t an incident. It was a moment, a meaningful moment that changed his life.”

  “I don’t mean to be crude, Ginger, but he’s dead now, isn’t he? His existence has been superannuated, right along with his meaningful moments.”

  “Don’t think you’re beyond being dead, Carter. You’re not beyond being dead, not by a long shot.”

  “You know where I think you are, darling? I think you’re in Purgatory!”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes,” she said crossly.

  “Is there a mountain there? And a kindly curriculum?” Dante flooded thrillingly back. Dante Alighieri! And the room where Romance Languages was taught at St. George’s; the smell of floor wax and the brightness of the boys’ white shirts, light rippling against the walls and the snow falling, vanishing into the sea.

  “You’re back in that second-rate prep school, aren’t you?” Ginger said. “Let me tell you what it’s like here. I’ll give you just a hint. If we see an ant heap, we don’t think of it as an ant heap.”

  “No?”

  “It’s not an ant heap at all. That’s the way it is here. It takes some getting used to.”

  Ginger was preparing to go. Carter could feel the grot
esque gathering of resources this always entailed.

  “I’ll give you another hint too, Mr. Clueless,” she said. “There isn’t any mountain.”

  7

  Alice couldn’t decide between the wrist-lock slingshot and a BB air pistol. The latter would be more accurate at a distance, but she didn’t want to leave a lot of spent ammunition all over the place. Something might eat it, a tortoise or a quail, so she settled on the slingshot. It’s a beginning, she told Annabel. But it took her longer than she expected to master the weapon.

  Annabel said, “I think maybe you shouldn’t go after the ones wearing those little warning bells on their collars.”

  “Bells don’t make any difference,” Alice said.

  “But it shows the owner’s trying to be considerate,” Annabel said.

  Alice had a little folding shovel she carried in case her efforts were successful. Quickly the cat would disappear down a hole in the desert.

  “Those signs on the phone poles are kind of getting to me, too,” Annabel said. “Like Tina.”

  Tina is a member of the family. Please help!

  “And Poco Bueno Trouble.”

  Poco Bueno Trouble needs his medicine!

  “I don’t know you very well, Alice, but I think killing a cat would be beneath you in many ways.”

  “Progressive social theories are beginning to consider murder a matter of little concern,” Alice said. “Anyway, cats are false figures. People have them around so they don’t have to address real animals.”

  “But a dog wouldn’t be a real animal then either. What do you mean?”

  They were out at Marquise School, and Alice was showing Annabel around. On a weekend afternoon, the place resembled a chic but deserted shopping center. There were fountain sculptures by gifted students, low, tasteful adobe buildings, old cottonwood and olive trees.

  “If you love animals, you’ve got to love all animals,” Annabel said stubbornly. “I had a dream last night, and you were in love with an animal. You introduced me to him. He was … well, he looked like a person, but I knew. Plus you said … I mean, you admitted it. I wasn’t happy for you, but I pretended to be. Then I woke up.”

  “In my room I have a picture of a woman trysting with an octopus in a hotel room. Actually, it’s more like a squid. A cross between the two. It’s a great picture. The squid is sort of sitting in a chair, comforting her. Light streams through the window across the unmade bed.”

  “There’s no picture like that,” Annabel said.

  “I look at it and think, Women are capable of anything.”

  “A woman thought that up, you mean,” Annabel said. She couldn’t believe this school didn’t have boys, that she’d be going to a school without boys. Boys were nice, boys were normal. Alice was clearly not normal, even though she was, at present, all Annabel had—not counting Corvus, whom Annabel found difficult to think of as a friend, despite the fact that the three of them were frequently together, making up, in Alice’s phrase, a not quite harmless-looking group. That was typical of Alice, wanting to appear not quite harmless. Annabel felt she had some insight into Alice; she wouldn’t want much more. By the time school began, Annabel was hopeful that they would have gone their separate ways. She would meet new girls and make new friends, and she would nod pleasantly at Alice when she passed her in the hall. Her new friends would consider Alice unwaxed, uncombed, and unpleasantly intense, but Annabel would be kind. She would say, “Well, you know the situation at home is really quite strange” or “She actually is quite smart.”

  She would quietly defend Alice, but she would no longer associate with her. It would be such a relief to escape Alice’s scrutiny. You couldn’t even show her a simple catalog. Annabel had been ordering stunning stuff from this place in Idaho—cobalt-and-brown mustang twirling skirts and zigzag summer storm vests and liquid necklaces, all made possible by one or another of Carter’s credit cards—and Alice hated the little catalog, was practically apoplectic over the manatee note cubes and the fake petroglyph rocks in velveteen pouches and the enameled plastic butterfly magnets, becoming particularly enraged over a photograph of a wolf offered for, Annabel thought, the quite reasonable price of seventy-five dollars.

  “Listen to this!” Alice said. “ ‘Half-hidden yet clearly curious, the wolf gazes out from the framed, double-matted print intently, forever watching from the woods. Protected behind clear acrylic.’ Protected behind clear acrylic! That’s the only place it is protected. Everywhere else it’s trapped and poisoned and shot from planes and snowmobiles.”

  “These earrings on the next page are cute,” Annabel said. “Don’t you think they’re—”

  “This is despicable.”

  “But it’s not. Look. See, right over the eight hundred number it says they give a portion of their profits for wildlife habitat preservation and that they’d like to give to all the worthy causes. See, right here?”

  “You are not saving the earth by buying lizard earrings. And what does this mean? ‘This whimsical duo in sterling silver has a mirthful attitude that’s positively contagious.’ What does that mean!”

  “Why does it have to mean anything?” Annabel asked, pleased with the reasonableness of her retort. You just had to be sensible with Alice.

  A lizard darted past, part of another lizard dangling from its mouth. It was all so bright and violent out here. Nothing had any subtlety, not even the light. “Alice?” Annabel called. “Where are you?” For, while she had been momentarily distracted by the cannibalistic ingestion in progress, Alice had vanished somewhere with that awful slingshot. The wind fluttered dryly at Annabel’s face. She examined her toenails. They were perfect.

  Walking, she passed through one courtyard into another. The school had a courtyard for each student, practically. It was ridiculous. Then she was in a sort of amphitheater that was set apart by two dozen or so ragged cypresses. Alice had said that they put on a lot of plays at Marquise. Annabel would try out for all the plays for she liked the dramatic arts. She saw a woman threading a rather uncertain passage among the stone benches. She was wearing a red dress and appeared to be very pregnant. She was too far away to say hi to, otherwise Annabel certainly would have said hi. She’d say, Oh, you’re going to have a baby! Annabel wanted to have children, lots and lots of children. Eventually, of course. Maybe she could have quadruplets. But there had to be something wrong with you first, didn’t there? You couldn’t have quadruplets all on your own; a lot of pharmaceutical assistance and scientific intervention was required. Dishes, there were those special kinds of dishes …

  The woman hadn’t noticed Annabel. Her head was lowered, and she was just going back and forth around the benches as though she were trying to flow around them in a terribly natural way. Annabel was now very much hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary to say hi. If the woman started to have her baby and a foot or an arm started coming out, Annabel wouldn’t know what to do. The woman continued to steer her big body around the benches. What if she were a homeless person and lived here? Annabel had never gone in for the fad of caring for the homeless, although Alice said there was a great deal to learn from them in the way of resourcefulness. They would come into Green Palms, the local nursing home, at lunchtime and pretend to be visitors helping their loved ones eat lunch and instead would eat the lunch themselves. The poor old souls would think they’d had their nourishment anyway. Could one be too resourceful? Annabel wondered. But this woman wasn’t carrying cardboard. Didn’t they always have cardboard with them? There wasn’t a scrap of cardboard in sight.

  The woman abruptly stopped and turned in Annabel’s direction. Annabel quickly retreated, hurrying back to the succession of maddening courtyards. She found Alice sitting by a coyote sculpture, holding a bunch of weeds. A plaque explained that the sculpture had been made by Samantha Melby, class of 1997, from materials found in a nontoxic landfill. It was awfully good for someone their age, Annabel thought. This girl had a future.

  “Do you know Samantha Melby
?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Alice said. Samantha Melby had been voted by her classmates Most Likely to Succeed, whereas Alice had been nominated as most likely to be in charge of collecting bird carcasses on the shores of the Salton Sea.

  Upon further inspection, Annabel saw that several condoms were stuck to the coyote’s thrown-back head. The poor artist. Poor Samantha Melby. That was the problem with public art, it risked great ridicule.

  “What are those?” she asked Alice, pointing at the weeds.

  “I’m taking them back to look them up in my weed book.”

  Annabel smiled glassily at her. Sometimes Alice was like a child. She acted like a child and spoke like a child, and one could treat her as affably and falsely as a child.

  “I like herbs,” Annabel said. Her father had started an herb garden with the help of his new yard boy, Donald. Herbs weren’t messy; they were contained in sunny little pots.

  “They’re okay,” Alice granted. “There was that herb that Odysseus took to protect him from Circe’s magic. It saved him from her enchantments while everybody else got turned into swine.”

  Annabel felt her brow wrinkling. “God, Alice, that was so long ago. It didn’t even happen anyway, did it?”

  Alice mused over her weeds, which had wilted dramatically in her hand.

  “Is this school hard?” Annabel said. “I certainly hope not.”

  Alice shrugged.

  “I hate Cs,” Annabel said. “They practically make me nauseous.”

  “They don’t grade here.”

  What a sensible grading policy! Annabel now sat quite contentedly in the uncomfortable sun, no longer feeling uneasy about the cats or the disquieting pregnant woman or her intentions to ditch Alice once school began. Her heart opened to Alice and to the simple justice of things, life’s rightness, its essential fairness. Things just were. Or could be. “You’re kidding!” she said delightedly.