The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  “Corvus,” she said, “would you like the last of this body butter?”

  Corvus opened her eyes. “No, thanks,” she said.

  Annabel smiled at her. “It’s important to keep your skin moisturized.”

  Corvus closed her eyes again.

  “I don’t want to be part of a control group,” Alice was saying. “You know, when doctors give people placebos and other people medicine that might help them, I don’t think that’s ethical. I don’t want a placebo, and I don’t want the other stuff either. I want to be free.”

  A hot breeze raised the scalloped edges of the pool umbrellas. It sounded like wavelets lapping far away. Corvus was making it sound like this, against any will she could muster not to: it was the sound of water filling her ears, the memory of the water her mother’s friend had offered. An early call to chaos and calamity, to the other side. But she had survived that moment and was now surviving sorrow.

  There was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there.

  “Corvus?”

  She didn’t open her eyes, just breathed in, breathed out. She’d had her own brief career as a lobbyist in the arcade for the still-living dead. She had wished to restore them to some success. She had talked and talked to them, projecting herself without words. She had clasped their worn, warm hands. They had thought her a fool. She needed to tamp herself down now, tamp herself down, measure out her breaths until they were gone. No one had to know she was doing it.

  “Although sometimes people can get better if the placebos are administered in an enthusiastic way,” Alice said. “I don’t know, it’s a complex issue. I don’t want to be indifferent to anything, I don’t want to think of anything as inevitable.”

  “Things are inevitable,” Annabel said. “Lots of things just are.”

  “I don’t want to be”—Alice wasn’t sure about this—“credulous? But maybe I do.”

  “You’ve really got us in a state of suspense here.” Annabel looked irritably at her stomach—flat, though not so flat as she’d like. Beaded with perspiration and oil, it looked pretty good, she thought, though utterly wasted on present company. She hoped she could hold on to her good skin, not hold on to it literally of course, but an awareness of the importance of proper maintenance, which she had, must surely give her an advantage over girls who didn’t give it a second thought. A phone rang. It was never for her. No one even knew she existed up here, out in the desert in this stupid house.

  “You can still see the moon,” Alice said. “I like it when you can still see the moon in a daytime sky.”

  Corvus opened her eyes, moved her eyes without moving her head, breathed in, breathed out, tamping herself down into that leached and lightless depth. She saw the moon, almost empty, standing hollow. Her mother’s friend had always pointed such a moon out to her. It appears that way because it’s carrying the dead, she’d told Corvus in her quick, low, gay voice. The moon is killing itself from carrying so many dead; you can expect to hear something strange when the moon lies like that. How had her mother happened to have as a friend such a Lilith? How had they met? For that matter, how had her parents met? She had never been told. She would never be told now. The hair of our heads will be like clouds when we die, her mother’s friend had said, your hair and mine and that of everyone we love and hate. I don’t hate anybody, Corvus had said. Like clouds, this woman said, when we become as clouds.

  Carter hung up the phone. He and Donald had planned a most satisfactory evening for themselves, although that ambitious union Donald had in mind was still on hold. They were going to hear a string quartet downtown—opera companies never came within miles of this burg—after which they would enjoy a late supper. He felt better. Everything seemed fresher now, even though he was still uncertain about how precisely to proceed. “Should I order cyanide,” he sang, “or order champagne?” He should throw another party soon. Get that piano player back.

  32

  Alice’s granny and poppa were looking at a puzzle in the funny papers, a block of wavy, unfocused multicolored lines. They would bring the page close to their faces, then push it slowly back.

  “I see it,” her poppa said.

  “I see it, too,” her granny said. “Why don’t you try it, Alice?”

  Alice studied it, crossing her eyes even. She wanted to be the kind of person who could see things that weren’t initially or even necessarily there, wanted the surprise of seeing the other something that was in everything, its hidden nimbus, its romance. “I don’t see anything,” she said. She felt hot with disappointment, as though in this simple optic failure she had failed the challenge of life.

  “You don’t see the kayak?” her poppa asked.

  “Kayak!” Alice said. “All it is is a kayak?”

  “When I was a girl, it was Jesus opening his eyes,” her granny admitted. “These big heavy-lidded eyes, and they’d just slide slowly open and bore right into you.”

  “Didn’t have to explain, just proclaim,” her poppa said. “That’s the way it was in those days.”

  “Why bother, if it’s only a kayak!”

  “Don’t get so upset, honey. Go get Corvus. See if she can spot the kayak.”

  “She’s sleeping,” Alice said.

  “That young woman sleeps too much,” her granny said. “I wish there was something we could do for her.”

  “A locked heart is difficult to unlock,” her poppa said. “We’re giving her shelter for the moment, that’s the important thing. Shelter is what she needs right now.”

  He cleared the table of the Sunday papers, and put out the supper things. They were having tortilla soup and coffee cake tonight. They had their favorites frequently.

  “Do you know they’re raising pigs now for their organs alone?” her poppa said. “No more bacon or those barbecued ears that Fury likes. They’ll be too valuable for that.”

  “I think Fury buries them directly, to tell you the truth,” her granny said.

  “Seeing animals as food is so primitive,” Alice said.

  “That’s what they’re saying. This is more civilized. Pigs will be bred for hearts and valves adequate for transplanting into needy humankind.”

  “That is so wicked,” Alice said.

  “If you needed a kidney,” her poppa asked, “would you accept one from a guinea pig just to tide you over?”

  “Certainly not,” she said.

  “A guinea pig kidney wouldn’t do Alice any good,” her granny protested. “It would be far too small.” She was more down to earth than her poppa, who sometimes just liked to stir things up.

  “Animal donors are the future,” he said. “I can see the first pig on the cover of Time. The pig prior to the selfless donation of his heart to the president.”

  “Time, that rag,” her granny said. “Well, I think it’s unfortunate. What will happen to children’s books? What will become of the classics? Remember your favorite, Alice? It was Charlotte’s Web.”

  “ ‘No one was with her when she died,’ ” Alice said, her mouth full of coffee cake.

  “What’s that?” her granny inquired.

  Alice swallowed. “No one was with Charlotte when she died. That’s how it ends.”

  “It couldn’t have ended like that, I’m sure,” her granny said, troubled. “That must be the next-to-the-last chapter.”

  “What interests me about this xenograft craze,” her poppa persisted, “is that it shows people have found it’s enough for them to live in this world. They just want to keep on living. That’s where knowledge and the march of science has brought us. Right back to square one.” He coughed and tapped his chest with his fist, a piece of cake having gone down the wrong way.

  “What is ‘xeno’?” Alic
e asked. “Was that the name of the pig?”

  “Xeno, from the Greek. It means ‘stranger.’ Know your roots and prefixes, and you’ll find the world more accessible, Alice.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t want to know,” she argued. “There’s a superfluity of knowledge. Most of it is useless. I choose not to know.” She blushed. When she had said something similar to this to Sherwin, he’d said, “You want to turn from civilization into a starlit darkness, don’t you, darling?”

  “Don’t you worry about that C in school,” her poppa said. “There’s always next year. And I don’t want you worrying about that kayak either.”

  Alice, blushing, ate her soup. A.k.a. Xeno, fiercely ate.

  “I prefer news to knowledge,” her granny said. “I suppose because I’m getting along.”

  “Talking about the news—” her poppa began.

  “You know what this lady said to me at Green Palms?” Alice said. “She said, ‘Talking about tossing puppies back and forth,’ as though I’d been talking about tossing puppies back and forth.”

  Her granny and poppa looked at her. Fury was looking at the wand on the window blind tremble so slightly. He didn’t know why it did that.

  “What did she say next?” her granny said.

  “She didn’t say anything next.”

  “The reason people in those places seldom show resentment or complain about their situation,” her poppa said, “is because of a lack of continuity in their thinking.”

  “Talking about the news,” her granny said, “did you hear about the woman in Detroit? Wanted a baby, stole one. Nothing unusual about that. Thing was, it was her girlfriend’s baby and the girlfriend hadn’t had it yet. Two girlfriends sitting around one night drinking wine and worse, and this woman gets it in her head that she wants that girlfriend’s baby and she just carves it right out of her, just scoops it right out like you would a melon, with some implement she found in the kitchen.”

  “The Motor City,” her poppa said.

  “It’s not called that anymore,” her granny said. “Anyway, woman went back to her own place with the baby, but she got arrested shortly thereafter. It was discovered that the idea hadn’t popped into her head suddenly at all, it was premeditated. She had a complete layette she’d purchased days before. Baby in question found to be perfectly fine.”

  “I have something to contribute,” Alice’s poppa said. “Did you hear about the old gentleman who shot his wife and their aviary of cockatoos, then entertained some recovering addict who was trying to get her life back together by going door to door selling some sort of cleaner?”

  “What kind of addict?” her granny said.

  “Smack, I believe.”

  “What do you mean, entertained?” Alice asked.

  “Provided her with a cup of tea. He was just about to do himself in when the addict knocked on the door to relate her tale of self-improvement. His name is … I can’t remember his name. Eighty-six years of age.”

  “Poor soul,” her granny said.

  “Wife was ailing. Old gentleman was ailing. He was afraid that they’d deteriorate completely and their feathered companions would end up at the dump.”

  “That’s where they would’ve ended up, too, if proper arrangements hadn’t been made beforehand. Course, that’s where they’ll end up now anyway.” Her granny cut them all another sliver of cake. “I bet that addict hustled right back to the needle after that experience.”

  “Shot all his loved ones with a rifle right here, in our community. Then did you hear about the two hunters who shot a man crawling down one of our mountains? They thought he was a game animal and just blew him away at dusk, thought he was something else entirely. A case of mistaken identity. They said that dusk confused them.”

  “It makes you feel we’re all living in some darkened dream,” her granny said.

  It was sad when people tried to control the future by killing everything they cared about, Alice thought. Still, the future was a dangerous place. That’s what made it the future. But how could you shoot a cockatoo with a rifle? That wasn’t really appropriate. Her poppa must have heard that one wrong.

  After supper they turned on the television. The best thing about the set, in Alice’s opinion, was the panther lamp on top of it. The panther had a little chain around its neck that had engrossed Alice for long minutes as a child. She had fiddled and fiddled with that chain. She wondered what she’d been imagining.

  “This is a rerun,” her granny announced.

  “I haven’t seen it before,” her poppa said.

  “You most certainly have.” Her granny tapped the screen. “All these women here, they’ve eaten their mothers’ ashes. That’s what they have in common.”

  They were an earnest assemblage, heavy, for the most part, in big-collared dresses. Some had taken just a taste before the internment, others were gradually consuming the entire box. They cited their mistrust of authority, their desire to take responsibility for their own grief, their determination to wrest control from the middleman.

  “It’s coming back to me now,” her poppa said. “They talk about that pilot in California, at the end of it, the one who was supposed to be scattering ashes over the Pacific at the behest of families and was instead stockpiling them in one of those franchised Cubby-Holes.”

  “Saving on airplane fuel, I guess,” her granny said. “Found two thousand boxes of cremains in one of those storage lockers. Been getting away with it for years.”

  “That one,” her poppa recalled, “two in from the left … camera doesn’t pay much attention to her, but she’s the one who found out she’d been working her way through the wrong ashes after an investigation uncovered gross carelessness at the crematorium.”

  “It’s a rerun,” her granny said. “We’ve seen it all before.”

  33

  What are you reading now?” Ginger asked.

  He put the book on the night table and carefully placed on the open pages a heavy strip of leather with his initials embossed upon it. It was a gift from Donald. Carter couldn’t imagine how he’d ever marked his place before. It reminded him of a cestus, that leather contrivance Roman boxers used to wear around their hands.

  Ginger seemed a little twitchy, the way she used to behave when she had the Smirnoff flu. Surely she couldn’t have taken up that business again.

  “Reading is so inconsequential, Carter.”

  “I enjoy it, darling.”

  “You’ll be shocked when you realize exactly how inconsequential.”

  “I was reading about Darwin and just came across a charming anecdote. When he took his child to the zoo and they looked into the cage of a sleeping hippopotamus, the little boy said, ‘Daddy, that bird is dead.’ ” Carter chuckled.

  “And you find that funny?”

  Ginger found very few things amusing. People falling, slipping, or sprawling inadvertently used to make her laugh, but that was about it. Once Carter had pitched forward at breakfast in an attempt to avoid dribbling some honey from an English muffin onto his shirt front, an event that had put Ginger in a sparkling mood for the rest of the morning. Had she thought he was having a heart attack? In any case, she’d found it quite funny.

  She moistened the tip of her finger with her tongue and smoothed her eyebrows. At least that’s what it looked like she was doing. “There’s a woman here who saw herself before she died,” she said. “Her exact double.”

  “Really?” Carter said. This sounded rather gossipy, and Ginger had never been one for gossip. Carter did not know if this signified a promising development or not. Was she settling in there?

  “Yup,” Ginger said. “Her exact double. Rooting through the sale panty bin in an outlet store.”

  Carter picked up the bookmark, which was lobbed and weighted at both ends. Maybe he’d get Donald a belt for his birthday next month. A belt was a good idea. A belt for one thing, absolutely.

  “Don’t we look all a-bubble,” Ginger snarled. “Thinking of Donald ag
ain?”

  “Jealousy is a base emotion, Ginger, it’s not good for you.”

  “Not good for me! You haven’t once thought about what was good for me, ever since I died. You’re not even grieving, for godssakes. You didn’t even lower the flag back in Connecticut. Not even for one measly month did you lower it.”

  “Darling,” Carter said. “People feel sad, they grieve, because when someone they love dies, this person, this loved person, is no longer to be seen. But in our situation, our unusual situation, I do see you. You’re very much seen by me, which makes it impossible to give you the grieving that’s very much your due.” He offered one of his most sincere smiles.

  “Don’t you feel badly about the flag?”

  “You have to be in politics or something, don’t you? So I thought.”

  “You infuriate me.”

  “It never occurred to me that you would want the flag lowered, Ginger. What do you think about what I just said, darling?”

  Ginger said nothing.

  He should recite Lucretius to her, a tantalizing punishment. “Cease thy whinings, know no care.” You are dead, Ginger, dead! Give up! The intentions of the man’s words, exactly. “Nor can one wretched be who hath no being!” Not that she seemed wretched, exactly; she was merely, as in life, making him so. Where was On the Nature of Things, anyway? A little book whose dark blue cover was warped a bit from getting tangled up in a damp beach towel once. He was beginning to misplace everything.

  “I’m going into the other room,” Carter said.

  “The other room is crowded,” Ginger said. “I believe Annabel’s in there with those girlfriends of hers. Girls who haven’t enjoyed the advantages Annabel has, Carter. I don’t know why you allow her to associate with them.”