The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  Mom, if J.C. moves in here, I’m moving out,” Emily said. “Don’t be silly,” her mother said. “He’s not moving in, he has his own place. He used to live in the country, but now he has a little bungalow in town.” She was changing the vacuum cleaner bag, the swollen, filled one dribbling dirt on the floor. Emily thought it would be appropriate for her mother to say, “Don’t be silly, you can’t move out, you’re eight years old. You are my little bunny, my little bear, my little moonslip. You need your mommy to take care of you. You need your mommy to put fresh sheets on the bed, pour you milk, buy you notebooks and pencils and such, buy you new white sneakers.…” But her mother said no such thing. She struggled with the vacuum bag, which continued to spill dense gray matter over the already grubby floorboards. Emily had heard that some people, when they died, turned into something like this, bones and all, but she didn’t believe it. How could you believe something like that?

  “You’re supposed to change that when it’s no more than two-thirds full,” she said. “Otherwise, you’ll damage the machine. Stewart, my colleague at school, the one who’s retarded and likes to vacuum, he told me that.”

  “You don’t have colleagues, you have classmates,” her mother said. “Where does all this shit come from? Take it out to the garbage can for me, Emily.”

  Emily carried the item out with a measured, exaggerated step. In case anyone was watching, it was best to appear that you were involved in a matter requiring great skill. A single enormous container, much taller than Emily, served the needs of the alley. She never understood why her mother often failed to take in the whole picture—in this case, how could Emily accomplish the task with which she was presented when she was only four feet high?

  People weren’t supposed to place dangerous materials in the container, but its enormity encouraged laissez-faire. People were not supposed to put batteries in it or pesticides or paints or used oil, but people did, they did. Emily knew her own mother was guilty in that regard. She’d turn her in to the authorities, except she doubted they would know what to do with her. You were supposed to wait! You were supposed to keep your unwanted lifestyle toxins until Amnesty Day, which she’d attended twice in her brief life. Responsible people drove their cars in a solemn procession to an unnaturally smooth, dome-shaped hill out by the interstate highway. Attendants in white plastic suits and red gloves accepted the toxins and placed them in long container trucks. No one smiled. No one said thank you. Somebody once tried to dispose of a newborn baby, but someone else heard it crying and piping in a bag and that had almost been the end of Amnesty Day. You had to be careful what you called things because some people would just take advantage. People were too literal. Someone brought a bald eagle, a bald eagle utterly entire, shot straight through its big yellow eyeballs with an arrow. The eagle didn’t cause that much of a fuss, however, whereas some hundred people had come out of the woodwork wanting to adopt the infant. The reason a child was so popular simply because he had been plucked out of a dump eluded Emily.

  She placed the bag of vacuumed dust by the great imposing cart’s wheels, pretending she was propitiating it. Not that it had ever given her anything, but she couldn’t help but have hope in waiting. Her colleagues at school were always telling about the wonderful items they found. One girl, Lucy, had found a parakeet and brought it home, and now it sang and looked at itself in the mirror and had only colored comics on the floor of its cage and everything.

  Emily returned to the house with strides as long as her short legs could provide, still highly aware of being observed. Houses only looked empty. They were never empty.

  Her mother was noisily banging the vacuum cleaner into corners.

  “It doesn’t seem to be doing the job, does it?” Emily noted.

  Her mother turned it off. “J.C.’s coming over for supper, honey. Try to be nice.”

  “What are we going to have to eat?”

  “Presentation is more important to J.C. than the food itself. Isn’t that interesting? When he told me that, I thought: That’s an interesting way to deal with the food problem.” Emily’s mother’s archenemy was the recreational calorie.

  “So what are we going to have?” Emily asked.

  “Something … flamboyant,” her mother said.

  “You’re not going to try and masquerade cow again, are you?” Emily said. “You know neither J.C. nor I eat cow. You’re always trying to slip me cow. From when I was a little baby.”

  “You’d never know it was cow,” her mother said. “Oh, I’m just kidding. I’m making raspberry chocolate cake.”

  “I don’t think that’s adequate for supper,” Emily said. “I think I need more nourishment than that.”

  “You are such an old lady, Emily, honestly.”

  “I’m not receiving adequate nourishment. I want to be tall—a little over seven feet tall.”

  “I know you don’t care for it when I’m frank, Emily, but you’re not going to be tall. Your father wasn’t tall. He wasn’t stupid, but there was one thing about him and that was that he was short, quite exceedingly short. I’m not saying he was malformed, honey, just short.”

  Her father, over the years, had gotten progressively smaller. He was shrinking fast, though he’d been holding at jockey size for the last month or so.

  “We’ve got to have more than cake for supper,” Emily said.

  “Stained-glass faux veal loaf,” her mother said. “How does that sound for tonight? Fresh colorful seasonal vegetables providing the stained-glass effect.”

  Emily knew her gullibility was being tested again and wished her mother would respect her intelligence. Most likely it would just be another bean-and-burrito night from Food for Here and There. Emily would be required to ride down for the burritos, risking her life on a bicycle path dominated by Rollerblading women pushing tricycled hooded strollers containing the next generation, women who would hesitate or veer for no one. Her mother would serve the burritos on plastic plates. Lately she’d been pouring J.C.’s beer into a glass for him and she didn’t put the milk carton on the table anymore. That was about it for presentation.

  “Mom, do you know bats eat bats sometimes?”

  Her mother scratched her on top of the head as though she were a pet. Indeed, though hardly freakish, Emily was about pet size.

  “You’ve got so much sand in your hair! What do you do, just pour it on your head?”

  Sometimes she did. Personally, she liked the feel of it.

  J.C. arrived in new jeans, baby blue ropers, and a tight snap-button shirt. Emily thought he looked ridiculous.

  “Hiya, Pickless,” he said, rubbing her head. “Jesus, what you got on your head?”

  “Oh, I know …” her mother began.

  “You want me to wash your head?” J.C. asked.

  “No,” Emily replied.

  “Why, I think that’s very nice of J.C.,” her mother said. “Why don’t you let him wash your hair? You don’t have anything else to do.”

  J.C. washed her hair in the kitchen sink while her mother watched. He was very good at it. The water was the proper temperature, and he didn’t use too much soap.

  “You got an interesting head,” J.C. said. “You should get it read sometime. I couldn’t do it, I’ll admit. I’m not about to tell you I could when I won’t, but there are those who can. You could even shave your head, and you’d still look okay.”

  Emily kept her own counsel.

  Her mother was looking at J.C. admiringly. “This is so nice of you, J.C.,” she said.

  “I like washing hair,” he said. “It was a hard discovery to make, but I made it.” He dried her hair roughly and then began to brush it out.

  “Don’t yank my scalp off,” Emily said.

  “Not in the kitchen, maybe,” her mother said.

  “You got any beer?” J.C. asked.

  “Oh, I don’t!” her mother cried. “I meant to get beer. I’ll go get some.”

  “I guess I should’ve brought my own,” J.C. said sour
ly.

  After Emily’s mother drove off, he brushed out Emily’s hair as she sat in a lawn chair in the backyard. The brush made its way to the snaggled ends, meeting considerable resistance. A tangled bundle of Emily’s hair flew westward. “That just snapped right off,” J.C. noted. “You got the hair of an unhealthy person. If you decide not to opt for the shaved skull look, I predict you’ll be looking at a wig shortly down the line.”

  “I don’t care,” Emily said. “You become what you are.”

  An hour before sunset, already the mountains were adopting their hooded, secretive glaze. The sky beyond them had the hyacinthine hue of deep Heaven. Emily had never liked this time of day and made considerable effort to find some inane but absorbing pursuit to see her way through it. Something about a sunset demanded an assessment of one’s hours. What had she done today? She hadn’t even learned how to blow her nose. Her mother had a wish list concerning Emily, and the mechanics of nose blowing had been featured on it for some time. It would be on that disheartening list again tomorrow.

  “It sure is going to be a pretty evening,” J.C. said.

  She grunted.

  “You don’t take to the end of the day kindly?” J.C. said. “I had a wife once, hated the end of the day. Picked an argument every sunset. The prettier the sunset, the worse she’d get. She’d be spitting spiders. She was okay otherwise, but a pretty sunset would just set her off. I think it was a fear of the passing of time. She resented it.”

  “Sunsets do kind of bother me,” Emily admitted. “You can watch them, but they don’t need you. Even when you’re not watching them, you know they don’t need you.”

  “If there’s one thing that don’t require you, it’s a sunset,” J.C. agreed.

  “But you think they do,” Emily said, warming to the discussion. “You think you’ve got to watch them and say, ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful.’ ” She’d rather propitiate a Dumpster.

  “I was married to that woman for six days,” J.C. said. “The worst six days of my life. We were taking our honeymoon in this old seaside house, and each night the sun would go down and bathe us in refulgent glory and she’d start her quarrel. We’d quarrel all night, and in the day we wouldn’t speak to one another. We’d read. The house had only one book, and we were both reading it. She’d gotten to it first and so she’d read a chapter, then she’d tear it out and give it to me and then I’d read it. It was about this Japanese doctor who invented the first anesthetic back in 1805 and his wife and his mother were always arguing and their daughter who was around your age dies of a cold and the wife goes blind after she insists that he try out his anesthetic on her instead of all the dogs he’d been experimenting on so she could share in his fame. Dogs were tottering around half dead through the whole goddamn book. They all had names like Mafutsu and Ostugi and Miru, because they were Japanese dogs. Couldn’t keep ’em straight.”

  “Don’t tell me any more dog stories,” Emily said.

  “I vowed never to marry again.”

  “That’s good,” Emily said.

  He pulled her head sideways with the brush and kept it there. “You don’t care for me much, do you? But you’d better get used to me because I’m going to be around. What do you think about that?”

  Emily felt that a truthful reply would not be in her best interests.

  “I do not know the dog stories to which you refer when you say ‘any more.’ I never told you any dog stories.”

  This was more than Emily could bear. “You have,” she said.

  He yanked her head down farther and she wondered if there was a possibility of it just snapping off. She didn’t know how it was attached to her neck in the first place.

  “It’s not for you to make the judgment,” J.C. said, “as to whether you’ve heard a dog story from me.”

  Emily tried to think a happy thought. She was driving with her mother toward the mountains. Tarantulas were crossing the road, waving their furry arms, and vultures were roosting in the cardon cactus. All was right with the world. She was drinking sweet syrup from those tiny waxy bottles, then chewing on the wax just this side of being sick.

  J.C. hung his face down close to hers. She could smell toothpaste. Then he straightened, pushed her head up again, and resumed brushing. “We all got our dark side,” he said. “Sometimes we like to take it out for a walk, sometimes we don’t.”

  Emily would have liked further elucidation on this point, though not from him.

  “I could make you like me,” J.C. simpered. “It would be easy. Like, all I’d have to suggest to you is that we build a tarantula town together, and I’d have you eating out of the palm of my hand.”

  Emily was shocked. Could he have had an awareness of her happy thought? Despite herself, she was intrigued. An entire town of tarantulas with different careers and objectives and modes of entertainment? “You would not,” she said, comforting herself with the suspicion that he lacked genuine knowledge concerning this tarantula town.

  The brush descended and stalled, each time a little farther.

  “I had a buddy once worked in a morgue, combing out people’s hair. He got a kick out of it, gave them all the bells and whistles, every one.”

  “What’s a morgue?” Emily asked. “Is it like a jail?”

  “It sure is!” He sounded so delighted that Emily knew she had erred deeply.

  “He doesn’t do that anymore, though,” J.C. said. “He does something else now. He’s late, my buddy is. He doesn’t show up anymore. Do you know what it means to be late? If I say ‘My late buddy,’ you know what that means?”

  Emily was silent. J.C. was having a hell of a time. “Whoops,” he said, “there goes the brush. All those snags of yours broke it.”

  Emily put her hand against her head. It felt peculiar, like a piece of slick cloth. She thought it had lost some diameter. Her ears rang a little.

  “You don’t necessarily look better, but you do look different,” J.C. said. “You want to bite me now? I’m giving you another crack at this. You’re still not scared of me, are you? You do this to anybody else, and you’d be medicated up to your eyeballs. You’d be wearing a collar that would give you a shock every time you had a freaky thought.” J.C. rolled up the sleeve of his shirt.

  His arm looked just as unappetizing to Emily as it ever had. She guessed that wanting to be a biter wasn’t the same thing as being given the chance to bite.

  “You can do anything you want in this world,” J.C. said.

  “No, you can’t,” Emily said modestly.

  “Why, sure you can. And if you don’t you’ll never know the consequences. You won’t be leading any kind of life at all. Of course, some consequences are better than others.”

  “You can’t do anything you want,” she insisted.

  “Yes, you can! You just need an authorization card. You know how to read yet?”

  “No,” Emily said quickly, trying to look aggrieved. She was hoping he’d put his hand on some reading material and pretend he was trying to teach her. His mean-spiritedness in this fascinated her.

  “Your mother must be starting to worry about you in that regard.” J.C. rolled the sleeve of his shirt down and took a wallet out of his pocket. The wallet was black and worn and folded over on itself, an ugly thing. He paged through some cards before extracting one. “Right here is my authorization to do anything I want.”

  It was a card from a department store. Apparently if J.C. bought ten items of underwear at different times he’d get an additional item of underwear free. This included the purchase of pajamas. He was six down and had four to go. Someone had used a paper punch to tick off his purchases. “You only get ten permits?” Emily inquired.

  “Then you get another card. But it’s harder to get authorization for the second card.” He looked at her expectantly, then put the card back in his wallet. “You’re kind of an inert child, aren’t you?” he said. “I’m glad I don’t have any kids.” He had felt somewhat tenderly toward her a moment ago but was getting
more impatient by the instant. “I don’t like kids.”

  “I thought it was dogs you didn’t like.”

  “I got that out of my system,” J.C. said. “Now I don’t care about them one way or another. I’m in balance regarding dogs.”

  Her mother returned with the beer, looking flushed and pretty. “Oh, I hurried,” she said.

  J.C. took a ring off his belt loop that had a few keys on it and a tiny bottle opener. He opened one of the bottles and took a long swallow. Then he opened another and handed it to Emily’s mother. She smiled at him. “Nature’s most perfect food,” J.C. said, and took another swallow.

  “Have you two had a nice time together?” her mother asked. “Oh, honey, your hair looks marvelous.”

  “Best I could do with the material at hand,” J.C. said.

  Emily wandered off into the yard. She crouched down for a thimbleful of sand, and was about to sprinkle it on her head but stopped short, remembering she was already under suspicion for this act.

  The yard had big clumps of dead-as-doornail bushes lying all over the place, acting like bushes though they weren’t even rooted into the ground anymore. There was that marble she liked to leave there. The tiny perfume bottle to which she always professed delighted surprise. The lizard’s perfectly round hole.

  Emily patrolled the perimeter. Beyond the chain-link fence, Ruth the Neighbor’s yard was perfectly green with grass. Ruth was applying something to it with a machine the shape of a child’s doll carriage. There was a drum in it, and the drum rotated and threw out just the proper amount of poison, corrective, simplifier, whatever it was. Ruth wore a paper mask over the lower part of her face. She was balding, and her remaining hair was an unconvincing black. Ruth was the one who took Emily to the Amnesty Days. The next Day was on the autumnal equinox, quite a way in the future, and Ruth thought it was quite the mistake, for most people were suspicious of equinoxes—believing them to be unorthodox, even pagan—and participation might be low. Emily didn’t know what pagan was. Possibly she might like to be one. But what she really wanted was to be a triggerman, or a poet. She did not want to work in sales.