The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  Alice imagined being by herself and then a man who looked like him arriving. They would lick each other’s hands, they would bury their faces in each other’s hair.

  “If I was a gay boy your age, same eyes, same mouth, same old raunch, you wouldn’t be interested,” he said. “When I was sixteen, I wanted to be known for the lowness of my morals and the highness of my mind. I’ve been meaning to ask, do you have the same dreams as your mother?”

  “No!”

  “I’ve heard that happens. Girls and their mothers.”

  Alice’s mouth began to hurt again, taking her out of his room and her happiness. She ran her tongue over the loose tooth. It seemed very loose. Throwing a rock at the man on the motorbike had not been a gesture without consequences. He had skidded around and back toward her, taken his helmet off so she could get a good look at his stupid face, and walloped her with it. She had moved back so it hadn’t connected the way he intended, but the visor had still clipped her. Sherwin probably thought she’d bruised her mouth herself, for a more interesting look. That’s what she would’ve thought. She used to do that when she was younger. Take a piece of skin beneath her eyes, say, and give it a good twist so she’d look intriguing. But she hadn’t done that for years.

  He sat down beside her on the bed. She was wearing jeans and a baby blue T-shirt that said “Thank you for not breeding.” She stopped tonguing her tooth.

  “I love you,” she said cautiously.

  “I love you too.”

  This disappointed her.

  “Words are just noise, Alice,” he assured her. “Language is just making noise.” He nibbled at the side of her face, making tiny grunts of pleasure.

  The tooth had freed itself. She held her hand to her mouth as discreetly as possible and maneuvered the tooth into it. She swallowed blood, murmuring. He drew back and saw specks of frothy blood on her T-shirt.

  “I lost my tooth.” She opened her hand. The large, white tooth seemed almost voodooesque. She didn’t like looking at it and wondered how dentists made it through the day.

  “You’re still losing your teeth?” Sherwin asked. “You’re younger than I thought.” He was, however, nonplussed. He had a greedy body and a wayward mind, but this was slightly more than he could handle this afternoon. He watched her go into his bathroom, cupping the tooth in her hand, her jeans loose over her flat little ass. He heard water running into the sink, then it stopped and he heard her taking an admirable piss.

  When she came out, he said, “You piss like a horse, Alice. It sounds great.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Alice said distractedly. She had wrapped the tooth in a piece of toilet paper and put it in her pocket. She had folded another piece of paper into the oozing socket. She supposed she should go home. Maybe when she had some money she’d get a gold replacement with an emblem on it, maybe a scorpion, but that’s what nose rings did, she didn’t want to be considered a nose ring. Every time she thought of something, it seemed it had already been a trend for hundreds if not thousands of people for some time. What if there weren’t any new thoughts? You drifted around until you bumped into something that had been there all the while, then you attached yourself to it because you had to attach yourself to something. A stupid tooth had fallen out and she felt outworn, undone, but maybe that’s how a tooth falling out was supposed to make you feel, maybe that’s just the way a tooth falling out operated.

  “You’ve got an awful lot of prescription drugs in there from veterinarians,” she noted.

  “I’m a werewolf,” Sherwin said. “Which explains the tuxedos. But mostly it’s that I don’t know any writing doctors. I don’t mean to appear curious, Alice, I don’t want you to think the less of me, but why are your teeth falling out?”

  She considered her strategy. She wouldn’t tell him. She would be mysterious, alluring. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Were you in an accident?”

  Her actions would be ravishing and unfathomable.

  “Did someone hit you?”

  She told him everything. It no longer seemed like an experience she’d had.

  “Don’t pick a cause, Alice, they’re all so inconvenient. Differences of opinion have been known to occur.”

  “The mountain is off-limits to motorized vehicles. It’s a rule.”

  “He could’ve had a gun.”

  “Oh, he did. He waved it around.” He’d told her that he could rape her as well but he wouldn’t, she was too ugly. “You’re not too ugly!” Annabel would protest when told and then appear perplexed.

  “Don’t engage yourself,” Sherwin said. “That’s the key to everything. Don’t traffic in social responsibility.”

  “I don’t want to be socially responsible at all,” Alice said. She wanted him to be dark, the things he said to be dark. She didn’t want advice or for him ever to be helpful.

  “Look, honey, if you believe in the utter value of the individual, you’ve got to devalue the rest of the world.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, it’s necessary. It just follows.”

  “It hurts to talk,” Alice said.

  He crushed some ice and wrapped it in a rag. “That underwear is perfectly clean, I assure you,” he said.

  “How do I look?” Alice asked. “Do I look okay?”

  “One seeks in vain among debased superlatives.” He pressed the ice against her jaw, then shrugged. “It’s too late for this. Do you feel nostalgic yet?”

  Through the cold she could smell nicotine on his stained fingertips.

  “That guy had a job before you environmentalists took it away. Now he has nothing to do but ride his bike, his only treasure, then go home at night to terrorize his children and beat his wife. Spousal abuse is directly linked to environmental regulation. It can be stamped out only by stamping out nature—not human nature, the other one. That alone will provide jobs and stop the breakdown of the American family.”

  Alice reluctantly dragged her tongue from the tantalizing vacancy. “Can you see it when I smile?”

  “You should forgive him, for starters. Forgiveness is cool.”

  “Forgiveness is optional,” Alice said. “Sometimes it’s not appropriate at all.”

  “Forgiveness is complicated, you’d like it.”

  “I’m not a complicated person.” It was as though he were talking about Corvus again.

  “You ever watch that television show, Ricky and Romulus? Every Tuesday five to five-thirty? One’s a paraplegic black guy, and the other’s the white guy who crippled him in a robbery. Black guy says, ‘I have forgiven you, I am in the living process of forgiving you, I want to help you get employment, an apartment, a high school diploma, I want to help you get clean, I want to pay off your credit card debts.’ Romulus is a good guy. Can only move his lips and eyebrows. Looks like a big gray melon sitting in a chair. Ricky, on the other hand, is a skinny, jittery, hyped-up, drug-addled flamboyance cursing and bawling ‘Lemme alone, I’ve served my time, I’ve paid my debt to society, I don’t want your skanky forgiveness, get off my ass, I wish you were dead, man.’ They go at each other for fifteen minutes and then viewers call in with supporting arguments. It’s a remarkable program.”

  “How can it be on every Tuesday?”

  “They’ve been on for over a year now. The quality of mercy is an inexhaustible subject.”

  Alice thought that their first time alone together had gone well. Well, fairly well. When she got back home she asked her granny and poppa about Ricky and Romulus. Did it exist? She stood in darkness just around the corner from them, worrying about the havoc her tooth would wreak on their small savings.

  “I don’t watch that,” her granny said. “It’s like those wrestling programs. There’s something insincere about it. If we’re free Tuesday five to five-thirty,” her granny said, “we’re usually tuned into Women Betrayed by Companion Animals. Some of those stories can make your hair stand on end.”

  No lights were shining in the Airstream. Alice slipped
into her room, which she thought of as the kind of room where somebody who someday would do something cataclysmic would spend her formative years. The only decoration was the picture of the woman and the octopus. Alice loved this picture and had studied its every nuance. She undressed, and as she was pulling her T-shirt over her head, the tooth fell to the floor. She picked it up and almost put it beneath her pillow. When she had been a little kid, of course, teeth had dutifully turned into cold hard cash, in one of the perverse and jolly customs perpetrated on little kids. A classic capitalistic consumer ploy, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy. The idea that there was some spirit out there who paid for teeth—what was it constructing anyway? What was its problem?

  She got into bed and waited for sleep. She liked waiting for sleep. It wasn’t like waiting at all.

  She reflected on the octopus, as she did most nights, so intelligent and shy but extending itself, as it were, moving out of its solitary nature, unoctopuslike, impossibly in love. She had always related more to the octopus than the woman, although the woman had to be fairly interesting to find herself in this situation. An octopus could brood and plan for the future, that was known, everybody knew that, and it was undoubtedly brooding and planning at the very moment depicted, while the woman looked as though she had given up. The octopus, so bright and solitary and weird, was giving the situation its full attention, whereas the woman knew that it was suffocating and being poisoned by its bloodstream just by being in the room with her, and that brooding and planning wouldn’t help at all. The difference in attitude was what made the situation tragic.

  17

  Corvus chose to volunteer once a week at the nursing home, Green Palms, and the first Thursday Alice and Annabel went too. They were accepted and acknowledged much like the dogs, Tiffany and Helen, who made their rounds on Fridays.

  A green van transporting a few gloomy cleaning ladies and a manic, moonfaced physical therapist picked them up and took them out into the foothills, where Green Palms was concealed in a magnificent riparian area. Nothing was supposed to be built here, but the developers had won approval by making the nursing home the cornerstone of their resort package. Green Palms was state-of-the-art End of the Trail. In an act of conceptual brilliance, it was tastefully concealed from the resort’s supper clubs, ballrooms, pools, gymnasiums, and stables; a glimpse of it could be afforded from the golf course, but from the more expensive suites it was invisible, and from a distance it could not be seen at all. The van wound its way slowly up narrow roads and through a number of guardhouse gates, which opened in recognition of a decal on the windshield.

  “I wish we lived in a gated community,” Annabel said. “I mean, the strangest people come up sometimes and say they’re lost, and Daddy believes them.”

  “Gated communities should be unconstitutional,” Alice said.

  Then they were there. The palm at the end of the mind, Alice thought when they arrived, a line from a poem she’d read at school. The teacher had spoiled it for her somewhat by saying that the poet, according to his notebooks, had considered another line for that slot. The alp at the end of the street. She could hardly imagine anyone getting to the palm at the end of the mind via the alp at the end of the street, but the ability to do so, she thought, was what this place was all about. They were all solipsists in Green Palms, all heroes and heroines of their own vanishing consciousness.

  Corvus suggested that Alice and Annabel think of the people here as already being dead, which meant that visiting with them and doing little things like rubbing cream into their hands or spraying a pleasant scent on their pillows was something very special.

  Annabel protested this.

  “That seems awfully extreme,” Alice admitted.

  “When you’re with them, have a picture in your mind of yourself drinking from a glass,” Corvus said. “And picture the glass as already being broken, shattered.”

  Annabel had never seen Corvus so … animated, if you could call it that.

  Inside, Alice was given a Mr. Barlow and a Very Brucie and an Ottolie. Annabel was assigned to a Mrs. Fresnet. “Oh, that’s that inexpensive champagne,” she said. “Is she part of that champagne empire?”

  “Do Mrs. Fresnet, and then we’ll see about you,” a nurse’s aide said.

  Corvus was directed to a waiting room where a number of residents were waiting for a marimba player who’d failed to show up. It had been an hour now. “You’re going to be a terrific disappointment to them,” the aide said, “but you’d be doing staff a big favor.”

  Annabel was looking at something crumpled standing in the hallway, saying “A nice soft peach” over and over. People hobbled and eddied around her. It was a little crumpled man, and he had been saying “A nice soft peach” for about ten minutes now. She approached Mrs. Fresnet’s room with dread.

  Alice went to Mr. Barlow’s room first. Mr. Barlow had been a professional gardener—the master gardener, actually, in Washington’s Floral Library—who couldn’t care less now about his tulips, or any tulips: the Mary Poppins, the Dreaming Maid, the White Triumphator, the Queen of Night. Alice couldn’t get much out of Mr. Barlow, who just stared at her with glittering eyes. Very Brucie was better. He still had some odds and ends to relate. In his youth, he said, he had been handsome and reckless, and the wild things he had done had been referred to as “very Brucie.” He had a barely viable roommate whose presence didn’t bother him at all. The only difficulty was when the man’s son visited, which put a strain on everyone. The son, a bald, florid man in a tight gray suit, had visited intensively in recent weeks, playing the “Rosa Mystica” at his father’s bedside on a small tape recorder. The “Rosa Mystica” was supposed to be unbind-and-assist music, but the father didn’t die and the son stopped coming. Alice wondered if the tape she’d seen in the parking lot that very morning—broken and unraveled, smashed, really, it appeared to have been run over or stomped on—was the same. No way to know for a certainty.

  The air in Green Palms felt restrained. There was a sense that salvation was being deliberately, cruelly withheld. And there was a speechless concurrence that it was hardly significant that in their lives the birthday presents had been purchased, the weeding done, the letter written, the windows washed, or the preburial contract sensibly arranged. And if, with some effort, they could recall the affairs that had been consummated, the roads taken, the languages mastered, the queer meals eaten in foreign lands, of what lasting consequence was that? This had been the destination all the while. Having been a good householder, having run a tight ship, having fought the good fight, whatever, it mattered not at all. Alice pushed Very Brucie in his silent shiny chair around the hallways, her hands trembling a little. She was here because of Corvus.

  Mrs. Fresnet, who, as far as Annabel could ascertain, was not of the Fresnet empire, was worrying that her “Do not revive” form was not on file. Annabel went to the office to inquire and came back with a copy of it. Mrs. Fresnet took the form and studied it, then smiled at Annabel. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Isn’t this what you wanted?” Annabel asked, smiling back. “For your peace of mind?”

  “But this is a copy,” Mrs. Fresnet said, “not the real thing. The only real thing they give you in here is custard.” She opened her mouth wide, and Annabel was afraid she was going to let out a corker of a scream, but Mrs. Fresnet slowly closed her mouth again. “I have fifteen dollars in my account that can be withdrawn weekly for personal hygiene, and I want you to withdraw that fifteen dollars and keep it. It’s yours. Then I want you to get me out of here and drive me away, out in the desert into the sun-steeped scene of a bigger, darker world.”

  It couldn’t be sun-steeped and dark at the same time, Annabel thought, but you had to give these people some latitude. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t have a license to drive. I don’t have a car.”

  “When I was your age, I was more resourceful,” Mrs.
Fresnet said. Then she opened her mouth again and gave an ear-splitting, sustained scream. Annabel ran out of the room to the nurse’s station, where the same glum aide was presiding.

  “She feels better after she does that,” the aide said. “Then she asks for some cup custard, and you’re supposed to get the cup custard and sit there while she eats it, which will take, in your perception, forever.”

  “Please tell my friends I’ll be waiting for them in the van,” Annabel said.

  “The van’s not out there now.”

  “I’ll wait for them in the place the van’s supposed to be when it’s there,” Annabel said. She was never coming inside this place again.

  Alice had advanced to Ottolie, who resembled an iguana. She sat in her chair, wrapped in an iguana-colored shawl, and didn’t acknowledge Alice for some time.

  “I never sleep, you know,” Ottolie finally said. “Never. Someone sleeps for me. She lives in Nebraska.”

  “That’s great!” Alice said.

  “Aksarben. That’s where I get a lot of my people. You have to learn how to delegate tasks.”

  “I love your name,” Alice said. “It’s such a pretty name. Could you spell it for me?” Alice had picked up a brochure at the desk that said visitors should engage the residents in simple recall.

  “I’ve changed my name.” Ottolie slowly blinked her eyes. “When I was a little girl traveling with my parents, their name was Wright. Mr. and Mrs. Wright. We all had a horse named Tony. Tony the horse. Have you ever had to bury a horse? It’s a heck of a dilemma. You need your father to do it. They’re the ones who do it best. Mothers are no good for that situation. Do you know what might happen to you tomorrow? You could fall or be pushed. You could be the result of a random bullet.” She leaned toward Alice with the details. “Somebody celebrating his baby daughter’s birthday, firing a gun into the air. You happened to be in the vicinity. Wasn’t intended for you, was meant to fall harmlessly to earth, but it ended up on your plate anyway. Or mercury could leak through your gloves. Say you were conducting an experiment with a type of mercury that had no known relevance to anything and it splashed on your skin and there you’d be, six months down the road, rotting from the inside out. You’d say to yourself, Why was I fooling around?”