by Joy Williams
Carter looked longingly at the sheets. “Well, the Wilsons are in town, dear, and I had dinner with them. They’re on their way to the Four Corners area for their anniversary. Twenty-five years!” A quarter of a century, with considerable help from the Percodan tablets prescribed after they’d thrown out their backs when the club car in which they’d been riding had been struck by a slow-moving freight. They had never taken a train anywhere again and instead zipped about the country first-class on airplanes, whacked out of their minds. They were great fun to be around.
“I hope, for their sake, they don’t run into any mice,” Ginger said. “The mice up there make dust that’s virulent. A person breathes it in, gets a headache—then Curtain! Dead within twenty-four hours.”
“A mouse makes a—?”
“Oh, I’m giving you the short version, for godssakes. Why go on and on about things?”
Carter was silent.
“So tell those tiresome people they’d better watch out. What did you talk about at dinner?”
Didn’t she know this? “Jazz and palms, mostly,” Carter said. “Those people really know their palms. They don’t just toss around the common names, either. No sugar, jelly, or Madagascar for them.”
“So?” Ginger said, looking at him intently.
“Madagascar is somewhat of a general term.”
“I heard a very nice thing about the people of Madagascar. They used to bury dolphins who washed up on beaches in their own graveyards.”
“Really!” Carter said, charmed.
“But they don’t do it anymore.”
Carter sucked on a Tic Tac.
“Do you know that one Christmas season Pat Wilson corrected me as to who was Joseph in our crèche display?”
“I don’t recall that.” Carter did remember the crèche, though, very well. They’d bought it in Venice the winter before Annabel arrived, and again there was that phenomenon that always thrilled him: snow falling into water. The memory threw his thoughts into a cold twilight. He lay on the bed with a sense of restless paralysis.
“I’ve never forgiven her. She said that my Joseph figure, the figure I’d placed in the Joseph position, was clearly a shepherd and belonged back with the sheep. And she moved it!”
“Well, she’s off to the Four Corners now,” Carter said vaguely.
“Appointment with mousie,” Ginger said.
After a few moments, Carter unobtrusively switched on the television. They were culling elephants somewhere in Africa. The terrified herd shrank back from two small men with machine guns. “Ginger!” he cried, “what have you done to the channel?” He groped for the changer but couldn’t find it. On the screen, a wet human palm displayed a slippery elephant fetus; a finger jiggled the tiny trunk, arranged the tiny legs. Carter at last located the changer, and now black ghetto youths with remarkable hair were ambling around an open coffin, fluttering their hands above the corpse’s placid face in some bizarre ritual of respect.
“See how nasty it all is,” Ginger said. “Nasty, nasty. Come with me, Carter. Come to where I am.” She raised her arms.
She meant the gesture to be inviting, he was certain. “But what about Annabel?” he said. “She’s still just a child, and there’s no one to take care of her.”
“Annabel? She’ll get along. Children stay children for far too long. Annabel will be fine. You’re not raising her properly anyway, what with those soirees you’re always hostessing. It’s humiliating the way you’re all a-bubble around those young men. And that one man …”
“Which one is that?”
Ginger made a ghastly face. “The hireling.”
“The piano player?” Carter said. “He’s a wonderful piano player.”
“You don’t understand, do you? Never have, never will. You can be so obtuse. But I used to love you so much! I loved you so much I even tried to walk around the house the way you did. It made me feel less lonely.”
He should kiss her, he thought, but the distance between them was so great and he was so tired. Too, he’d be insane to kiss her.
13
At school, a little more than a week after her parents’ funeral, there was another call for Corvus.
“This is your neighbor, John,” the voice said. “Your dog is barking.”
“I’ll be home by two,” Corvus said.
“It’s howling. I can hear it through my closed windows. What’s going on?” He sounded reasonable.
“He’s in the house,” Corvus said. “He’s not outside.”
“I’m a mile away. It starts up the minute you leave in the morning.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What’s it need, water or something? Food? What’s its favorite food? Or maybe it needs its mouth wired shut.”
“What?” she whispered.
“Anything I can do,” neighbor John said.
“I’m at school now,” Corvus said. “I’ll be home by two. That’s only an hour from now.”
“What is it you’re saying, babe?”
“The dog, Tommy, he misses my mother.” She was shocked she’d said this. She was ashamed. The words were hopeless, nobody wanted them.
“Then somebody should tell your mother to get her goddamn ass back home and do whatever she does to keep that dog from howling.” He hung up.
Corvus turned to the secretary seated behind her office desk. The woman’s child was standing in a playpen regarding Corvus with disfavor. She was too old for a playpen, but it had been arranged that the secretary could bring her in once a week.
“Your mommy and daddy are dead,” the child said. “I don’t like you, you smell funny.”
“Melissa!” the secretary said. “Now, what did I tell you! That is very, very naughty, Melissa. Corvus, dear, is everything all right?”
“I have to go home.” She hurried outside. The windows in the truck were down, and though she’d wedged a cardboard liner behind the windshield, the temperature inside was still over a hundred degrees. The steering wheel and seats were scalding.
“Death is normal, Melissa,” the secretary was saying back in her office. “Death happens sometimes.”
“I don’t know what it is.” The child stamped her feet.
It took twenty minutes. It always took twenty minutes. She drove through the outskirts of the city and into the bladed desert and beyond, through empty ranchland. Hawks lay in sandy furrows, their beaks open, in the shadeless noon. She passed John Crimmins’s. Her own house was at a distance it might take four minutes to run to. She bounced over the cattle guard Tommy was afraid of and up to the house. Above two metal chairs on the porch, a wind chime tinkled from a beam.
Tommy was standing just inside the door. He wagged his tail once and peered past her, then turned and went to a coat lying in the corner. He curled up on it, his chin resting on the worn corduroy collar of her mother’s coat.
“Tommy,” Corvus said. He wagged his tail once more but didn’t look at her. The house was cool and quiet, the curtains were drawn. She took some ice cubes from the freezer and, holding one in each hand, ran them across her face and through her hair. Ants crawled through Tommy’s dishes on the kitchen floor. She threw his food out and scrubbed the bowls clean. She would get padlocks for all the doors. She would get Tommy a comrade dog. She would get a third dog, a fierce one, to protect them both.
She drank a glass of water and put fresh food in his bowl, but he could not be coaxed to eat it. After a while he got up and walked through all the rooms quietly, without making a sound: a ghost dog. Corvus hadn’t heard him howl since the night of the funeral, the night Alice had been here. He lay down again on the coat, his expectancy dimmed. Just before dark she took her father’s binoculars out to the porch and looked through them at John Crimmins’s. Two lights were on, soft as the lantern lights her mother liked to use at suppertime. She put Tommy in the truck and drove to a grocery store, where she bought fried chicken. Then she drove to the Hohokam Drive-In, pulling in next to a woman whose large horned lizard s
prawled next to her on the crown of the seat. Corvus smiled, but the woman just stared at her. What was the connection, after all, between taking a dog to the movies and taking a horned lizard? There wasn’t any.
She fed Tommy little pieces of greasy chicken until only bones were left in the bag. It was going to be all right. On the screen, love was having its difficulties, its reversals, but it persevered or at least metamorphosed. Tommy sat in the front seat, looking through the windshield at the big screen. Everything was going to be all right. Corvus gave him a big smacking kiss on his muzzle the way her mother used to. She tried to imagine that she was her mother and that she was Tommy, too. Though the moment was willed and racking, it came close to comfort. Then it drew back.
That night, Tommy made no sound. He slept on her mother’s coat in the hallway. In the morning she went to school, but before her first class had ended she was summoned to the office by a phone call.
“It seems to be that importunate man again,” the secretary said. The playpen had been removed. She had at her side, instead, a steaming cup of coffee and a round, glistening pastry.
“Hello!” John Crimmins said. “This is your neighbor, John. I want you to hear this. It’s what I’m being forced to hear.”
Corvus heard Tommy’s mournful howling, which sounded as though he were there with John Crimmins, right beside him.
“Where is he?” Corvus said.
“He’s not with me, kid. What would I want with him? I choose my friends carefully. I taped this earlier from my doorway and I’m still taping it. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?”
Tommy’s song rose and fell, ran, twisted, then rose again. She would put him in the Airstream, hitch it to the truck, and drive farther into the desert. Or she could go the other way, deeper into town, for as the town sprawled outward, it abandoned its old developments. She could pull into the parking lots of the Tortoise, the Desert Aire, the La Siesta, resorts where the rooms had been razed and all that was left were the signs, awaiting the right collector, and empty pools the size of railway cars. She could camp on the pavement of any number of defunct shopping malls. She could live anywhere.
The connection was severed.
“Isn’t there always a third time?” the secretary said. “But next time I’ll tell him I’m calling the police. At first I thought it was an emergency, of course, but what kind of emergency could it be now?” She became flustered. “I won’t allow that person to reach you again, dear,” she said more diplomatically. After Corvus left, she frowned at the baked good from which she’d taken a nibble, baffled as to why she had once again fallen for the one with the undesirable cheese.
For the first time Corvus wondered what she would do with all the days ahead. It was as though she’d been unconscious and had just now awakened to terrific pain and uncertainty. Once more she sped homeward, but when she reached John Crimmins’s she stopped and cut the engine. She could hear Tommy’s voice faintly in the air, but it seemed contained, as though in some heart’s chamber. She sat in the truck for a long time, looking at the house, and then got out. She rapped on the door, but there was no answer. She waited on the porch listening to Tommy’s thin wail, a reminder of the emptiness at the heart of everything. She waited through what would have been the Anzai Culture, through Shakespeare and lunch and philosophy. Waiting, she felt John Crimmins on the other side of the door, waiting, too. In front of the house was a water spigot on a pipe. A drop of water would slowly form and drop into a ragged, shallow, cement depression on the bony earth. Sometimes she raised her eyes and traveled the distance between the two houses. She pretended that her mother was home. Her father was away—he would be back, his absence wasn’t unusual, he was expected soon—but her mother was there, reading the book she’d begun, absorbed, a little mystified. Corvus rested the back of her head on John Crimmins’s door and forgot why she was waiting. A car raced by, and an arm flung a bottle from the window. It shattered and lay sparkling. Good as buried, she thought. Good as buried.
She got into the truck and drove home.
Again he was just inside, the sound of the truck coming over the cattle guard having stilled him with its possibility. He peered past her as before, then gazed at her sympathetically, for she was not who she should be. She put Tommy in the truck and drove to the Airstream, backing in close to the blocks on which the tongue lay propped. They’d had the trailer for years, but Corvus hadn’t been in it for a while. When she was little, she had pretended it was a space station where she could communicate in elaborate, time-consuming ways with aliens. Saintly, they did no evil things, were about a yard tall, and looked like owls. Corvus could not move the tongue of the trailer alone, not one inch. Alice was strong, she could help her tomorrow.
In the morning she decided to take Tommy with her to school. She would tie him to an olive tree next to the truck. She would take some of her mother’s sweaters for him to lie on. He watched as she made herself ready. He lay on the coat, gnawing at one paw, which was raw from his gnawing and licking. Corvus drank a little coffee from her mother’s favorite cup—a white teacup with lilacs painted within—then rinsed it and placed it carefully on the drainboard.
“C’mon, Tommy.” He stood and walked stiffly toward her. “C’mon, you’re coming along today.” She heard the growl on her skin, as if it hadn’t even come from him. He stood heavily in front of her, all obdurate weight, looking at her steadily and brightly. He didn’t growl again; that part was over. He returned wearily to the coat. Corvus took a blouse from her mother’s closet and crumpled it up by his head like a fresh dressing for a wound. He smelled hot and sour, there was a moist crust beneath one eye. She rubbed it off, then took a dog brush and ran it across his coat. She shut the windows and turned on the swamp cooler and the radio. “Liberation can come,” a voice ranted, “only through the destruction of the world of phenomena.…” She turned the dial forward and back, tears in her eyes. The devil had been spotted at the casino on the Yaqui reservation. He was good-looking, and each slot machine disgorged hundreds of coins when he passed by. She settled on a band of static and left.
In school she learned that the American Indian had discovered the zero prior to its discovery in India. She learned about the significance of landscape in medieval art. Flat country meant the most; it denoted apocalyptic end. School was unreal to her, the books, the papers she wrote crowded with slanting script, her hand upon the papers, writing. She envied Tommy his utter animal sadness. He was complete in it, he could not be made separate from it. The air felt electric though there were no clouds, no sign of freshening change. Still she felt the snap in what was like a current trembling thickly through everything that was that day. But it was all so distant from her, the moment and her presence in it. She felt it would be this way from now on.
Tommy had always been afraid of the cattle guard, of the meaty empty smell of the pipes. The truck, once more, lurched and rattled over it, toward home. The long home, Corvus thought. The door was open, a window broken. Tommy was on the porch. He was so long that his tail almost reached the floor. She could still see the brush marks on his fur.
The rope was white and new, and it was knotted tightly around the beam with the other end tied around the porch railing. Her mother’s coat had been dragged partway across the floor. It had been a comfortable house, plates and chairs, a deep sofa, lamps and books, the pretty things of home. She went to the kitchen and pulled open the drawer that held the knives. There were a number of them. She had thought she could use everything up. She would empty everything familiar to her of its purpose. She would keep the house and finish school, and slowly her life would be used up. Through diligence, she would come to the end of the past. That had been her plan, but now there was nothing. She was seeing nothing, looking at the drawer of knives.
From a distance there was the sound of coyotes calling. Her father had always quoted Huxley—“A Trio for Ghoul and Two Damned Souls”—when the coyotes called. They stopped.
She went to the stove an
d blew out the pilot lights. As a child she had always been fascinated with those beguiling darting lights of dancing blue. She opened the oven door and, sliding out the broiler plate, blew out that small light as well. She smelled the threads of gas. She could die, too. The obviousness of the choice gave her a peculiar swift delight. It was correct. It was enchanting, really. But she did not want to die so enchantingly, so obviously correctly. She wanted, instead, to die slowly, day by meaningless day, unenchanted, bitterly meaninglessly aware.
There was a gallon of kerosene that her parents had used for the outside lamps. She laid it down in ribbony whorls throughout the house, then went out to the truck. A jerry can of gas was strapped down in the bed because the fuel gauge was broken. The speedometer cable was broken as well. You never knew how fast you were going or how far you could go. She circled the house spilling the gas, then backed the truck across the cattle guard to the road. She had to go back into the house for the matches. She brought the bowl outside and went through seven worn books, a match per book, before one of them lit. “Reasonably Priced Banquets,” it said just above the striking zone.
At first nothing burned. The flame flared and smoldered with a certain knotted energy. Then it gathered, as though with an intake of breath, and it began, the flames lapping out and licking the jellylike pads of the cactus, the marigolds, the steps, the fur of the hanging dog. The wren’s nest in the eaves popped softly. Then the heat found the grassy core and with a boom and another three more, like the sounds of shotguns striking down owls at dusk, it was all burning, the pictures and tables and clocks, the Indian blanket with its canny exit for the mind, all of it, her mother’s things, her father’s.
Corvus saw owls falling. This was how she felt it. Her own soul witnessed it in this way, their great soft falling, the imago ignota of their alien faces.
Book
Two
GOOD MORNING MR./MS.
