by Joy Williams
“Any suggestions?” the voice paused.
“Twenty-one up, twenty-three—”
“I know you’re there, you dirty bugger. You’d better pick up …”
Carter returned to the bedroom. His Hermès fox-and-hen tie lay on the floor. He was sure he’d put it away. Was Ginger showing up when he wasn’t even in the room? Was she distracting him with wrong numbers, the voices of unfamiliars, so she could do something unpleasant? There were impossible phenomena like Ginger, and then there were even more impossible phenomena of a higher and more disturbing order than Ginger. He examined the tie, which appeared unharmed. He hung it carefully on a rack with its more somber companions.
He turned off the lights and resumed gazing at the stars through the enormous windows. It was really quite a nice house, Carter thought. The evening was quiet. Then there was the unmistakable sound of someone mangling his mailbox at the end of the driveway with a baseball bat. Through the silken air he heard it clearly—a dozen lurid wallops followed by the screech of a car’s tires. Then silence again.
“Daddy?” whispered Annabel at the door. “Daddy, can I come in?” He opened the door to the hall, but Annabel wasn’t there.
“Honey?” he said.
She simply wasn’t there. She was in her own neat and fragrant room sleeping, dreaming she was in a department store buying gloves, long, white, elbow-length gloves with three tiny pearl buttons at the wrist. Her mother was the salesperson and was performing in that capacity with aloof professionalism. Down aisles heaped with goods Annabel drifted—all head, as is the custom in dreams, more consciousness than head, really, with the sense she was behind her head, it being a mask of sorts that fit around her like airy rubber. Then it was no longer a store but a beach. She and her parents had prepared a picnic, and her mother was putting up the beach umbrella while her father was laying out the plaid blanket and mixing up the Dark and Stormys in the brightly colored aluminum cups. It was a lovely deserted white sand beach with soft grasses and less than the usual amount of garbage discarded from ships destined for distant, unexotic lands. Her father was proceeding efficiently, having already provided Annabel with her favorite cup filled with cranberry juice and well into sampling his own rum and ginger beer, but her mother seemed to be having some difficulty arranging herself. She kept jamming the umbrella pole into the sand, but the point would not set properly. The tip proved to be covered with shell and yolk, which at first glance didn’t present itself as such but which, as her mother continued to stab and root about and raise and plunge the pole again and again, became more adamantly shell and yolk. Ginger had selected a sea turtle’s nest for their umbrella site and had scrambled its leathery contents to a briny batter.
Annabel woke up, displeased.
What made the dream particularly unpleasant was that this picnic had indeed occurred, more or less, and unfortunately had degenerated in a similar manner. Annabel had never had a dream so redundant.
22
Corvus, Corvus. They kept calling her name. He didn’t know the names of the other two. One was very pretty, and the other one, who didn’t even remember him, was just a madwoman. How could she totally not remember him? There was something not right about her.
“ ‘Corvus,’ ” he said. “Doesn’t that mean raven?”
He didn’t think she was going to speak, but then she said, “It’s a constellation too.”
“Oh yeah, where is it?”
“It’s by Virgo to the south.”
Despite himself, he looked up into the heavens. It was still a clear day.
“You found me,” he said modestly, “but why did you tie me up?”
The ram was arranged with its head on a boulder, facing Ray. The rest of it was covered with dirt and brush—or had he sawed off the head, as he’d dreamed of doing to quicken his passage? “Where’s my hat?” He might as well have been addressing the ram for all the response he got.
“You know,” he said, “night’s going to happen, and we’re going to be attacked by something attracted to that. We are.”
“You killed the only thing around here, I think,” Annabel said. “We haven’t seen anything, not even one of those little things that look like chipmunks.”
“You think I killed that? I did not kill that!” These antihunting, antilife freaks, you had to handle them with care. “I found it, I was trying to salvage it. I don’t even have a gun, so how could I have killed it? And even if I had, I would’ve had a perfect right to. People do kill these things, you know, they’ve killed oodles of them.”
“Oodles?” Annabel laughed.
“Hey, yeah.” Ray was a little encouraged.
“Bighorn hunting has been restricted for years,” Alice said. “Last year it was eliminated.” She had arranged two little hummocks of green twigs on either side of the ram’s head.
Ray went back to talking to the pretty one. She was wearing a short shiny red jacket that looked expensive. The other two were dressed like bums. “I have my suspicions concerning the Fish and Wildlife Department,” he said. “I think they’ve been meddling with natural law, you know? I just found this thing. You’re dealing with practically a nonevent here. I just happened upon it, I swear.”
“Wherever you go, there you are,” the pretty one said, and smiled.
“It’s ‘Wherever you go, be there,’ ” Alice said. “Wow, Annabel.”
Ray was sitting on a mat of prickly pear cactus and couldn’t move without getting spiked. He wouldn’t mind seeing Ranger Darling right about now. These girls would get a scolding! The best thing about his situation was that he wasn’t lost. If they would just go away and leave him alone, he’d rally. But there were worse things than being lost. When you were lost, all you had to do was relax and not panic. Being lost was an overrated problem. Ray drifted off. The pretty one, Annabel, was defending her version of the being there business to the crazy one, maintaining that what she’d said was close enough. It was just before dusk. Then there would be dusk. Then night. Day again. The little deaths—las muertes chiquitas—then the big one. It was all practice. Ray stared at the animal thing. With the girls on either side of it, the scene was a perversion of the pictures in the hunting mags where beaming guys and the now and then gal in chocolate-chip camouflage posed with the recently acquired dead. The dead looked relaxed and still handsome but as though they didn’t quite get the occasion. Present, but a world apart from the hoopla. The living looked happy, not that their joy made much sense if examined on a deeper level. He wondered if animals had a sense of las muertes chiquitas too. What had he been thinking when he’d picked that thing up!
“You’ve been talking and talking over there,” Annabel said.
“I must be nervous,” Ray said. “You-all haven’t really hurt anyone before, have you?”
“No,” Alice said. “You’re our practice object.”
“But you’re not going to hurt me,” Ray said.
“We’re just going to leave you here,” Corvus said.
“Alice wants you to know the thing you’ve hurt by turning into it—in your mind,” Annabel explained. “Then you’ll think in a different way and be a better person.”
“The time to do that was before,” Ray protested. “It’s putrefying now, everything’s falling apart in there now, it’s not going to work.”
“What’s not going to work?” Alice said.
Ray didn’t feel so good. He could feel the little monkey’s heart beating wetly beneath its gray skin. The little monkey had stretched its whole scrawny length flat out against him and was wordlessly expressing its situation. It, too, was not lost. It had undergone unnecessary surgery, had painfully recovered from it, had been killed piece by piece and disposed of part by part, and this had been its orbit of eternal occurrence, suffered over and over again. But now it was falling from orbit, it was tensing to bail. The relationship with Ray was drawing to a close, and the little monkey couldn’t care less. But Ray cared. Which he attempted urgently to express, beca
use if the little monkey went, so went Ray. The depth of his sigh surprised him.
“Is this the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Alice was asking him.
“I didn’t do anything!” Ray wasn’t going to tell her about the time he’d tried to shoot an apple off a dog’s head with a pellet gun. It had been that little creep Rocky’s idea, but Rocky could be very persuasive. “Sit,” Rocky had said to the dog, some stray. Almost any dog would sit if you said sit; it was weird, as if they all were tuned to a martyr’s deliverance. He had missed the apple by a mile and was fortunate not to have hit the dog, the dog at that moment being so relative to the apple.
“I don’t feel good,” he admitted. His legs and wrists hurt from being tied in what wasn’t even a proper knot. He knew proper knots from his Cubby days. And this wasn’t one of them. The little monkey was dragging its long self around Ray’s tightening head again.
“Do you want some aspirin?” Annabel asked.
“Annabel,” Alice said, “let him not feel good if he wants.”
Ray believed that if he’d been traveling with a dog none of this would have happened. One of those hybrid wolf pups he’d seen advertised. He’d get a major collar for it, made of heavy, rippling, silver threads, the stuff knights hung around their necks to protect them from arrows.
“I always carry aspirin,” Annabel said. “I have a silver pillbox I keep them in.”
“Annabel,” Alice said, “who taught you to be friendly to everybody you meet?”
It’s breeding, maybe, Ray thought grimly, being brought up properly, and where were you brought up, Alice, he’d like to ask, in penitentiary day care? They had no weapons, as far as he knew—God, keep weapons out of the hands of women!—and at best a pretty muzzy agenda. He hoped they weren’t into disinterested malice, but girls weren’t as a rule, were they?
Annabel popped an aspirin into his mouth.
“Could I have about a half a dozen more?” Ray asked. “And some water?” There was something vaguely quasi-religious to this, even sexual—not at this exact moment, of course, but possibly in a future moment. Three chicks and an American male, bondage and threat, great lawless fun just waiting for the unexpected spark. Three flowerpots waiting for his seed. He was at their mercy and their service. He could do it! He just had to coast out this headache, keep being congenial. I’m shy but I’m hung like a horse, that was the implication he wanted to project. He wanted to shine as a hostage.
But his head felt frail, almost transparent, with the ghostly little monkey now shrunk into a corner. And the monkey was transparent, too, and he could see within it an even smaller monkey. This was a first, the monkey within the monkey within.
“I don’t think he’s well,” Annabel said. “He doesn’t look well.”
He wouldn’t admit he was subject to collapse. He was a stroker, and strokers never admit. When he recovered from the first one, he said the prettiest things. The words he could pluck out of air positively shimmered! He was a poet, a walking I Ching. It was beautiful.
How’s that pancake taste, son? Good?
Burning driftwood indigo!
Want to go for a ride in the car with me, son? I have to get some bread and Modess.
The dilatory are unfortunate even if strong!
But the second episode made him angry and mean. The pretty words left and shitfuckfart arrived, knocking on everyone’s door, the answer to every query. He snarled and flailed in a cave with greasy walls. The world existed to be cursed. Then that passed too, and he cried at everything. When he saw a brimming trash can in the street, when he saw his mother put on lipstick, when someone shook cereal into a bowl. He cried when he slept. Anything would get him started except for another person’s tears. When his mother started to bawl, Ray dried right up. He couldn’t help it, in fact, her tears made him laugh. Clearly, he was placing her under a lot of stress with his random reactions to the varied sampler that was his stroke, or strokes, warmly referred to by his therapists as TIAs, which made the attacks, the incidents, sound modest and unassuming, little wavelets washing prettily over his own personal cell system rather than brain-sucking riptides.
Yet throughout all this buffeting change the little monkey stayed with him and Ray appreciated its fidelity. He also appreciated that it wasn’t a beagle or a bunny, plenty of which also ended up in labs, and he’d have to be insane if he had a bunny or a beagle in his head. The monkey was an acknowledgment and example of science’s beneficial uses. The monkey was a little scary, maybe, but it wasn’t insane. Ray felt it to be naturally intelligent, rather like himself, and similarly unhappy as well.
When, after a few months, the uncontrollable crying stopped, Ray hit the road. He took the money from his father’s fat, worn wallet, the very sight of which would’ve set him to sobbing only a short time before, and cleaned out the silver from the sideboard for hock. Good heavy stuff, it was a service for twelve that was seldom used, which sort of hurt Ray’s feelings since it might have provided some style to the banal and unsavory antistroke diet they all choked down night after night at the kitchen table. What was that pattern called? Winnower. No, it couldn’t have been called Winnower …
He was drooling a little, as though in sleep. He twisted his shoulder forward and rubbed it against his chin.
“Why do you have to have a silver box for aspirin?” Alice was saying. “Why?”
“It’s from Tiffany’s,” Annabel said, “and I love it. I love the inessentials. I wouldn’t want a life without them.” She looked at Ray and smiled.
He made an effort to smile back but didn’t think he’d done it. Maybe they were lezzies, he thought, trekking, mountaineering lezzies and not little flowerpots at all.
“My arms are feeling numb,” he said. “Honest to God. This is tied too tight or something.”
“It’s scarcely tied at all,” Corvus said.
“Corvus,” he mumbled. He liked saying her name. “Corvus, you’ve got a beautiful name, man, it’s as fine as Pythagoras.”
Geometry. Ray had loved geometry before his stroke. He’d had an aptitude for it. Angles, lines, everything sharp and clean. He’d really gotten it. And Pythagoras was so stellar. When Ray was a kid, even before he knew he loved geometry, he’d read one of those big-print kids’ books about heroes—he could see it clearly, its cover was golden—and there was Pythagoras in a flowing robe, and he’d read that Pythagoras thought that in a previous existence he’d been a bush, which was such a stellar thing to admit to thinking.
“Say something else to me, Corvus,” Ray said. “You’re the sensible one here.”
But it was Alice who spoke: “We have to go soon. You have an opportunity to discuss a hunting ethic before we do.” She was fiddling with a knife and fork. For an instant he was anxious that she would poke it into his thigh and begin to carve, then he saw that instead it was a stick she kept snapping ever smaller. Ray rubbed his mouth with his sleeve again. “I have no hunting ethic.”
“That’s my point,” Alice said. “That’s very clear to me.”
I know you from before, he wanted to say, but he said, “The problem is with transients. Transients,” he said emphatically. “The problem is with transients and the chandelier. They don’t know about the chandelier until too late. No, no. Sorry. They know about the chandelier, but they don’t know it’s going to go out.” These three chicks were going to murder him, he thought, but he would talk them out of it. He had built the foundation and now was raising the great structure of his thought. “Whereas in the case of the monkey, the monkey can warm itself by a fire, but it can’t feed a fire, it would never think to feed the fire, but it can take comfort from it. But with the chandelier, everyone knows about the chandelier whether they think about it or not. Everybody—the animals—beneath the chandelier we’re all aware of it together!” Ray felt close to tears. Even the little monkey. Once … it had dazzled.
Alice looked at him. He was as mute as the poor old bighorn. “Why don’t you say something?” she de
manded.
Meanwhile, Ray was giving it everything he had. Human beings have language, they are not defenseless. The little monkey slumped in the corner of his head, only its big black eyes seeming alive. It wasn’t impressed by the story of the chandelier. The little monkey was going to renounce all attachment to him, all concern and function, trust and faith. Monkey as Lord, it was just letting him go.
The air was cooling, and the sky unravelling, turning a bizarre peach color.
“Corvus,” Ray said. But he couldn’t really see her, his view blocked by the sheep, which was staring at him maliciously. And the smell was terrible, although it didn’t seem to be coming from as far away as the sheep. It was closer to home, actually, something burning through his own heart’s ventricles, boiling in the fluid-filled cavities of his brain.
“Feed the flock of slaughter,” he said. How long had the three of them been gone? They were gone, he suddenly realized, but they’d made havoc of him. His mind was a sloshing, brimming bowl, and the little monkey was dabbling about in it with long cold fingers, trying to rehabilitate and refresh itself maybe, trying to acquire the strength to go on. That was good, Ray thought distantly. It wasn’t letting him go. His whole head felt like a split coconut, and the little monkey was dabbling around in the spilt thin milk of it. Once Ray had seen a man open a coconut with a machete and had not empathized with it at the time, but now he could—the unliving meat with no plan for itself. His mother protested that the coconut had been opened in a dangerous fashion. The man was large, with a deep dirty tan and a shark tooth wrapped in string around his neck, and he wore a green hat of woven fronds. This was in Florida, a tourist thing, a man opening coconuts outside an open-air aquarium with a sign before each murky pen:
NO WHISTLING OR CLAPPING
NO BABY TALK
He remembered running, prereprimanded among the dark pools.
The monkey continued to push its little hands around Ray’s mind. Ray felt less pain than discomfort, he felt sleepy and softly mauled. Then he became aware that he was swinging his hands from side to side behind him and could touch the end of the rope with his fingers. And then he was free. His hands flopped loose. He dragged them in front of him, rubbed his arms. He was trembling. He wanted to stand up but sensed a considerable gulf between thinking about moving and moving. He rubbed his hands on his knees. I wanted to do that, he thought. He looked at them, he watched his hands cupping his knees. But this isn’t the way getting up is done, it’s done some other way. He pushed his hands down his legs to his boots. The animal grinned at him beneath its curved and broken horns. But I appear unhurt, Ray thought after a time. “Sawdust,” he said, which was horrible for him to hear, for “sawdust” wasn’t the correct word—very seldom the correct word in practically any circumstance.
