The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  Besides scamming some of the larger items, he’d indulged himself by purchasing a few things as well, such as a knife and compass. He bought a walking stick with the knob carved into the shape of a grizzly’s head (Grizz = hunter, nature’s pharmacist) though he liked the brown bear’s stick better (power, adaptability) because it followed more naturally the whorls and ways of the wood. But he ended up with the Grizz. Who knew the dynamic behind the purchasing impulse, anyway? If he knew that, he could be hired anywhere; he’d be paid for simply not talking to the competition. He bought a snakebite kit that looked a little Mickey Mouse to him (Mouse = servility, conformity), but at least it was a contingency that had been packaged. Seeing as how there wasn’t an antidote to everything, it behooved you to grab whatever you could.

  It was his first solo trek, though he truthfully couldn’t consider it a trek: he would never be more than twenty miles from something, some ranch or working mine or trapline shack. He had maps. Still, if it wasn’t a trek itself it might lead to one, and then another, and then the trek would become a true and endless one. There’d be secret knowledge. Fulfillment. He’d come back just to prepare to go out again to remote, empty, and beautiful places where self and sanity had no more meaning than the wind dropping at nightfall. He’d experience the no meaning and he’d feel entire, not all chopped up the way he felt now. The little monkey knew about these things, it knew about the validity of no meaning. Ray gave it credit for that, the little monkey had suffered, and it knew. It existed in no temporal future. The past, the light that shone externally upon it, even when the eyes of monitors and data crunchers had wearied of it, shone still.

  Ray was at the ranger station the moment it opened, his stomach burning from too much coffee. The ranger was taking his time displaying a grouping of pop-up books to their best advantage. He pulled the tab on the elf owl lurching out of the saguaro. He pulled the tab on the jackrabbit hightailing it away from the hawk. He pulled the tab on the bobcat swiping at a butterfly.

  “I could use a little help with this map here,” Ray said. Rangers peddling merchandise—it wasn’t right. It was supposed to be a dangerous occupation, and here he was fiddling around with kiddie books. The nameplate above his pocket read “Darling.”

  The ranger ambled over to where Ray stood. Ray spread out the map and told him his plans. The ranger blinked at him, seemingly unimpressed. “You in good health?”

  “Hey,” Ray said.

  “My mother, when she had her stroke, her face pulled down just so.” He tugged at his own lip.

  “What the hey,” Ray said.

  The ranger shrugged. “Here’s a pretty hike for the time you got. Two days in, a day there, two days out. You take the West Fork Trail four miles into Harold’s Canyon, follow that until its junction with Scorpion Flat, take a right on Bitter Biscuit Trail about six miles until it tops out at Bless Your Heart Peak. If you come across the cairn with the red paint on it, you’ve gone too far, that’s the conjunction of Pig Root and Bill Bustard Trail.… There’s a birders’ cabin there.”

  Ray snatched his map back. Man made him not want any instruction whatsoever. What kind of idleness was it, naming everything like that? He and Darling did not part on the friendliest of terms. Ray lunged up West Fork Trail at a trot and six hours later didn’t know where he was. But that was fine with him. That was fine.

  On the afternoon of his second day he came across the birders’ cabin. He consulted his map. Maybe they’d moved it. The cabin was locked and the windows were shuttered. The lock was a long cylindrical one with letters instead of numbers on the falls. Ray spun “GONE BIRDING,” and it sprang open. People were so transparent, he thought, so suspicious and simplistic and coy. He dropped his pack on the porch, then took off his hat and rubbed his sweaty hair vigorously with both hands. Inside the cabin was neat and had the civilizing touch of womankind, of avid, affluent, educated female birders. It must be nice to come up here, spot the rare birdies on their nests, listen to their songs. Ray knew nothing about birds. There was some dove that said who cooks for you-all, that was about all he knew. Of course the dove didn’t really say that, he knew that too.

  The large, open room was filled with bunks and tables, and along the back wall was a glass case filled with avian specimens. The method here was to collect the whole package: mom and dad, nest, eggs, nestlings in various stages of growth. Ray was head-to-head with some type of flycatcher here. Nest made of the midribs of mesquite leaves, quail feathers, and thatch, the tag read, and bound with insect threads. “A unique domed cradle of particular artistry.” “That’s true,” Ray said aloud. The eggs were dappled, all lavender and red. “Clutch,” Ray said. The word just came to him. There was a sudden sizzle in the back of his skull as though a seam were running down it. Of the smallest nestling, the tag’s comment read, “This newly hatched youngster looks little different from the worm it was being fed.” “Where would we be without that valuable insight?” Ray remarked loudly. He picked up one of the adult birds; it was dry and light as a piece of popcorn. This was a little weird, he thought, bordering on the indecent. How would the birders like to have their skulls made into bird feeders? Put it in their wills, show a real dedication to their lifelong hobby. Ray would suggest it to them. He found a pen in a drawer along with lined data sheets. “Fetched another set!” was scrawled on one. A sadistic activity, bird counting. Ray pressed the pen down, but his intention was dissolving like mist. He pressed harder, but the pen didn’t move. Then it made a few quick, unsatisfactory marks. Ray looked up, chastised. There were dried flowers in a vase, a big framed photograph of laughing people in khaki and floppy hats. He had wished harm upon them, had contrived to insult them, his own kind. He had the sensation that the back of his head was splitting open, little fingers curling and pressing the folds of matter back. He looked at what he’d written. His handwriting … he should exercise more caution with it. Discouraging. He found his hat and pulled it carefully onto his head. The hat and the headache got along, he’d found.

  He left the cabin without closing it up and gathered up his pack and stick. His fleeting equanimity toward the birders had vanished. He picked up the lock and threw it quite a distance. “Go birding in Hell!” he yelled. His own shout cheered him. He struck off toward the west, where already the crescent moon was visible, and made a careless camp just before dark. He ate two candy bars, then lay flat on a blanket and stared up at the wheeling heavens. They were really tearing around tonight. Birds meant … they meant freedom, that’s what had gotten him so upset back there. But at the same time, birds were different from what they were supposed to mean. The wings of a bird were in fact its forelimbs. When you got on the road of thinking about anything for too long, you just had to turn back, had to turn back.

  At dawn, Ray was up and hiking. By ten o’clock, he still hadn’t come across anybody. What, did they name these stupid trails and then never set foot on them again? He was looking through his binoculars at an abandoned mine-shaft hole. There was the ore cart. He glassed the canyon wall, then idled down through the dense brush, clinging close to a winding dry wash. Among the tans and rounded greens he saw a pile of white, which he determined after a moment was a bighorn sheep. If it had been raised and released by Fish and Wildlife personnel, it had to be dumb as a post. Then he determined that it was too immobile even for the activity of dumb rumination, that it was, indeed, dead. He hastened toward it. It was a ram and only recently dead. As an animal, it had been compact and efficient and powerful, but it didn’t have a clue what it was up to now. It was meat, nascent square cut, chops, riblets, and shank, right out of his mother’s The Joy of Cooking. But of course people didn’t eat these things, they resourced out the head and horns. Though the horns were small, a determined Zuni could still get scores of fetishes out of them.

  The ram didn’t look as if it had been shot, it had just damn died. In Ray’s opinion, this was a transplant. Transplants were addled as a rule, they could never really shake the tranquilizers.
The condors being made in California could drown in a puddle. Ray wanted the ram, wanted to report it to that dickhead, Darling. He took off his pack and managed to pick the animal up and heave it onto his shoulders. Clutching its legs, he staggered a few steps before he rolled it back onto the ground. Then he dug out the compass and map and absorbed himself in their arcane projections. He knew where he was. A direct route back would make his trek look like a scalene triangle. He couldn’t make it to the ranger’s station before dark, but he’d be there by the next morning. Ray rooted the nonessentials out of his pack—why the heck had he brought cologne?—and clipped a ditty bag to his belt. He glanced at the pricey gear he was leaving behind and saw it for what it was: pilferage, vain pilferage. The walking stick looked downright foppish. Ray felt he’d already gained some inner knowledge on this trip. What was important now was getting the ram out; it was giving a shape to his trek, just like the angle of return. Yeah, he’d be packing out a bighorn!

  After a few hours, Ray was suspecting that the beauty of the scalene triangle was an illusion of exuberant misperception. Maybe the shortest distance between two points didn’t exist in nature. He’d tied the ram to his back at one point to steady it, but when he slipped and fell he’d just about had his ear knocked off by a hoof. He looked with disfavor at the steep arroyo; like every damn one of them, it was just something to scrabble down, then scrabble up again. He was trying to drink less water when he rested, devoting himself to tweezering out cactus spines. Some larval life-form that had commenced work on the ram’s belly had gotten under his shirt, or maybe that was his imagination. He felt as if he’d been transporting live coals. After tweezing out everything he could reach, he heaved the ram up onto his shoulders once again and it fell familiarly into place. Still, the weight immediately began to affect him. He should gut the thing out, but that would be a diminishment of his coming triumph. He took a few crablike steps over the shale, then skidded into a partial fall for twenty feet. The next time he fell twenty feet, he passed out and dreamed of lemonade, of the way they used to make it from ants back in his cubby days. He was popping big-headed ants into the water per instruction of the cub master, who was saying, “These are of the soldier caste, and their heads are huge and swollen so that they may more effectively block the nest entrance.” … Explanations weren’t what were essential now, though, Ray thought, it was the thirst that was important. He dreamed of thirst.

  20

  State investigators were prowling the halls of Green Palms trying to determine if the poor old souls were being served greyhound in their ground meat dishes. It had been discovered that the little kids at Jiminy Cricket Day Care had been eating greyhound tacos all that month and already were showing severe emotional and behavioral problems simply by being told about it, problems that were now expected to persist well into their teens and possibly beyond. But no proof was found that the old people had been gumming down racing dogs. The elderly inmates, their blood flow slowed to a trickle as it labored up to and around their brains, did not, in fact, give the possibility much credence.

  “Doesn’t taste much like greyhound to me,” Elmer said. “It doesn’t taste fast.”

  “For most inhabitants of modern industrialized nations,” Alice said, “the principal contact with other species does take place at the dinner table.”

  “I won a hundred and fifty bucks once on a horse named Miss Whirl, which was the closest I’ve been to the animal kingdom,” Elmer said. “Not to disagree with you, kid.”

  “This your granpa?” the investigator asked Alice.

  “Sure he is,” Elmer said.

  “I’d shoot myself before I ended up in a place like this,” the investigator confided. “My girlfriend’s interning at Mercy, and you know what they call folks like this there—the ones always clogging up the ER? They call ’em crocks and fogies. They call ’em snags, rounders, shoppers, and crud.”

  Alice didn’t much care for this investigator.

  “Is this the closest we’re going to get?” Elmer said. “This ground-up greyhound you have to take by spoon? For months I’ve been begging them for an injection. Smash the testicles of a young dog, I say, pass it through filter paper, inject via the leg, and bingo—the diminution of the function of one’s sexual glands will be reversed! One will feel physically improved!”

  She didn’t like Elmer either.

  The investigator gave a thick chortle, a sort of wet gurgle in which Alice detected the birth of his own cardiovascular problems and irreversible mental decline. She hoped.

  She walked down the hall, peeking into the rooms. Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. She paused at Annie’s, for she was not sleeping but sitting upright in her chair, watching the six bird feeders—tray, oval, and tubular—that hung at her window and to which no birds came, principally because they hung within rather than without, Annie not trusting the space beyond, a patio occupied by an immense cooling and heating system that serviced the entire floor. Annie had been the subject of some discussion ever since her daughter had brought her husband’s ashes over and placed them in the bottom of her bureau. Annie had not been told that her husband of fifty-seven years had died, since Green Palms frowned on such information being imparted. What was the point when grief was not germane, when it could not be comprehended or withstood? Here only the moment existed. Annie gave no sign that she inferred that her husband rested near her in the third drawer, the one she’d never used much, even when the handsome bureau had resided in the bedroom of the yellow farmhouse in the orange grove they had tended. Annie and her husband had known those trees, the peculiarities and pedigree of each, their yield, the ones the cardinals favored.

  “Let them be together, they want to be together,” the daughter had said, dropping off the ashes. She felt badly about allowing her father to starve himself to death in the sensible efficiency she’d found for him after selling the grove against his wishes.

  His ashes were packed in a box made of orangewood. Everyone who passed Annie’s room could smell the insistent fragrance. There had been a little shop on the highway side of the grove where Annie and her husband had sold bags of oranges and orange perfume and orange wine, orange blossom honey and boxes made of orangewood with a mirror inserted within the lid. This was one of those.

  The staff was quietly observing Annie’s reactions, but she hadn’t had any. The orange was definitely making all the effort. Annie was one of the dear ones, the sweetie pies, still neat and continent and mild, but a wolf or a goose would have sensed and then grieved the loss of its mate more than Annie had, a limpet would’ve detected something missing. If specific compounds could create little dead islands in the brain, could annihilate the glowing shade-wracked jungle of caring and desire and delight and flatten it all to a sunbaked crust over which not even the most primitive thought crept or left a track, of what possible use was anything that happened to a person in this life? It made the staff wonder, even at $6.50 an hour. And although what they knew about neurofibrillary tangles and neuron-secreting chemicals could be fit onto the tip of a pencil, it made them pause as they prepared to go home with a rose and a piece of sheet cake, for visitors were forever bringing sheet cakes and roses to this place. But quickly there was no time for wondering, for the meal had to be made, the bills paid, the child’s drawing appreciated, that crayoned drawing of the spiderweb that looked like the sun.

  Alice lingered, chewing on her fingers, thinking about Tommy and all the stories she’d read about grieving creatures, the faithful hounds that wouldn’t depart the hospital steps, the dock, the bar, the bier where the object of their ardor had last been seen. Animals were prescient, determined psychics, insistent in their speechless warnings, their final spectral farewells. Weren’t they always showing up at their loved one’s office in the next town scratching and whining, their silky coats mussed, their ghostly eyes beseeching, when in fact they lay in the street miles away, crushed by a speeding car? Weren’t they always howling and carrying on at the very moment the dau
ghter away at college was being introduced to the serial killer, when the son was skidding into the head-on crash, when the master was breathing his last in intensive care? Weren’t they always wagging their tail in some dead beloved’s garden at something that wasn’t there? And here was Annie, who hadn’t experienced the slightest discomfort when her husband died of starvation, the last thing to see his stomach a bit of oatmeal. They hadn’t spent a night apart in fifty-seven years before she’d dropped that teacup, the lustrous leaves of the orange trees quaking above her, the dropping of a teacup the death visitant, the beginning of the end for many of the female inhabitants of Green Palms. Here now was Annie, blue eyes widely alert, alert to nothing, watching those empty feeding stations. The world was all a mare’s nest to Annie. There was no sign, she gave no sign. There was not the thinnest spirit wire of connection in that room. There was nothing.

  Orange labored in a void.

  21

  Carter appreciated the constellations. There was the summer Triangle high in the sky. There were the wings of Aquila and Cygnus. Just before midnight the ringing phone had awakened him, but he’d decided to let the machine get it. Let the machine get it, he thought. But then he had grown curious and loped into the other room and pushed the message button.

  “Granpa’s coming home from the nursing home tomorrow,” a woman’s flat voice said. “It’s the business office’s doing. They’re turning him over to us, barks and whistles and all.”

  She seemed to be calling from a take-out restaurant. “Triple bacon and jalapeño number fourteen’s getting cold here!” someone bawled.