The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  Sometimes he’d come to the museum of an evening, entering through the gift shop with all its trinkets. Signs of the Wild, ossified turds (utterly without odor), did well here—the kids loved them, but they’d get the shock of their lives if they tried shoplifting them. The whole shop was wired, everything had to go through the scanner. Little bags of sand—Own a Piece of the Sahara, Own a Piece of the Sonoran Desert—little cheesy books on habitat, videos of animals dangerous to man, tapes of sounds, night sounds, prerain sounds, postrain sounds, everything was tacked. Absolutely nothing could be taken without paying for the damn thing.

  Stumpp disliked the gift shop. He’d never bought a gift for anyone in his life; it was one of his remarkable features. But it was necessary to pass through his gift shop, which he would do, scowling, in order to get into the Wildebeest Lounge, where he would mix himself a martini before entering the Great Hall to see his old friends, the animals.

  The bears and big cats were in one room. Cheetahs by the baker’s dozen. No biggie, that. Common as pins now that the secret of their breeding code had been cracked. Takes two males to impregnate. Interesting, but not supremely interesting. It was their nonretractable claws that were sort of spellbinding. In another room, horn phantasmagoria. He had bagged them all—spiraled, lyre-shaped, ringed, triangular, corkscrew—but wished he’d never mounted just the heads. Those medallion things, he detested them; he might as well be some woman collecting plates. He was going to close off the damn head room.

  There were eight rooms in all. Stumpp sometimes worried about the layout. Had a couple of okapi, the whole little family, weird ruminants. Moose, reindeer, should they be together? You could drive yourself crazy. The giraffes seemed to do well in corners, reaching out for twigs. Stumpp kept habitat replications to a minimum. Fake browse had no place here; he wanted to keep it dignified and simple. An atmosphere of limpid concordance. He gazed up at a giraffe. He had loved shooting them. There was nothing like the way they galloped and crashed, but as trophies they left something to be desired. They looked so mild and coquettish—those eyelashes!—and this one had been redesigned, with fourteen inches of tongue extended. To those of a moronic bent it might seem a little lewd. He didn’t want people snickering at these animals and had directed his employees to throw the bastards out if they were caught at it. As well as wanting an attitude of limpid concordance emanating from the splendid corpses, Stumpp demanded a churchly respect, no matter how hypocritical, from the paying customer. He himself had never laughed at an animal’s predicament, which had been, primarily, facing death at his hands. He’d never gotten a kick out of the deep death moans, the blood-choked sighs. On one safari he was driven almost to homicide by the habit of one of his companions, a urologist from Denver, who put his hand palm open on the side of his head, indicating “night-night, go to sleep” every time he brought an animal down. The urologist never, in an entire month, made a clean, instantaneous kill. At the end he was just potting hyenas to watch them tear out and gag down their own intestines. Stumpp later heard the stupid fart had been killed piloting an ultralight back home in the Mile High City. Night-night, thought Stumpp.

  He had lost himself for a moment in the cinnamon-colored spots of his giraffe; there was true depth in those spots, they had in fact the potential of real sinkholes. He moved on to the elephant room. Here he’d gone to dramatic extremes, trying to do his best by the old girl who was his centerpiece and whom, he would admit to no one, he somewhat regretted having taken out. Matriarchs held the memory of the family, years and years of it in that small but heavily convoluted brain. The bulls were just all flesh and bluster; it was the succession of mothers and daughters who led the herd. The oldest cows knew time’s history. They remembered Africa, the breadth of it, and were the sources of imparted knowledge. Once the guns erased them, the ones who remained could know only less, always less. There was that much less of Africa. The young ones knew—what? Boundaries, quibbling, quotas. Each one needed three hundred pounds of food a day and sixty gallons of water. Sixty gallons every day in a drought-plagued land! They had the capacity to solve problems. What did they think, how did they reason? “I’ll cut back to forty, and perhaps I won’t be culled”? “I mustn’t get moody, or I’ll be considered a rogue”? The youngsters now knew almost nothing in their shrunken Africa. Couldn’t walk thirty miles without running into some piss-poor farmland from which they’d be excised like bugs. Agriculture—worst damn thing to ever happen to the human race. Hoeing and hoarding. Man lost a dimension. Lost all sympathy and sense of magic. Virgil, supposedly a sinless magician, referred to as such. Never cared for Virgil. Too rural, a farmer at heart. Plus a copycat. If Homer hadn’t gone before, it would’ve never occurred to Virgil to be Virgil. Then farming brought all those little mouths to feed into the picture. Little mouths that weren’t there before, not so many anyway, not construed as such.

  He gazed at the great gone creature before him. Ears like sails, great trunk high. He’d had her redone three times, couldn’t get her exactly right. Felt he owed that to her. He’d taken out an encyclopedia here. Still, there had been dozens of other hunters panting at his back, snapping at his heels, who would’ve done the same, the night-night urologist for instance. There had been a lot of unpleasantness in the bush, but if you were there to kill, some unpleasantness was necessary. It had taken years to put this all together, dozens of safaris. There were some trumpeting bulls and pretty youngsters, one positioned as though walking beneath its mother’s belly as was the young ones’ preference as long as they were able. It was an exceedingly remarkable setup. He didn’t like people coming in here, actually, and often closed it off. The space was navelike, topped with a clerestory, a doxological space. There was a sound as though of the most beautiful music in here, but there wasn’t any music; Stumpp had been told it was merely the proximity of the main air-conditioning system. Music an inadequate word in this case. Susurrus of celestial murmurings. How could such a sound be artificial? Many aspects to everything. World a mad orchestra.

  Stumpp stood, half a century old, self-made. Had built himself from the ground up. Little Stumppie. Parents loving and good, tentative in all matters. Salt of the earth. Liked warmth and applesauce. Feared water in the cellar and tanks of oxygen on wheels. Dear ones, but never tutelaries. Not as many tutelaries in this world as should be. Nor tutors. The age distrusted instruction. Distrusted instinct. Instinct all atrophied. Adrift in the dark, no better off than a motherless calf. All souls lonely, but what did it matter? Couldn’t matter less that all souls were lonely. Was in a soul’s nature never to be satisfied until infusion was achieved with all. Price was obliteration, which was unacceptable. Though only on one level; on another level, perfectly okay. The stillness to which all returns, this is reality, objective reality being nothing. No wonder everything so nonsensical. In any case, all speculation and preparation was futile. But resistance was not. Push against those blocked doors, push, push, push. Had suffered share of pain. Broken back once, broken arm, leg, jaw. Scarred and stitched all over. Old war elephant who had never once been surprised by joy.

  The air-conditioning continued to murmur away like God’s own brook, unaware that it was a mere appliance, albeit a half-a-million-dollar one. Stumpp couldn’t look at his elephants anymore. He didn’t know why he came in here so much. Was coming in more and more. It hadn’t been that long ago that there was meaning for him here, and now it meant less every time. Couldn’t be good. He dimmed the lights and locked up, then followed the yellow footprints down the hall to the Wildebeest Lounge. Yellow footprints went to the lounge, blue to the exit, white to the water closet, green to the gift shop, red to the petting menagerie. Ridiculous idea though it had been his own, Stumpp being directionally challenged. No inner logic to the color code, no basis in anything. Still, of no import. Hadn’t they gotten all the colors mixed up in some early translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead? Now, there was a blunder. Someone working away on day seven after death or whatever day it
was, working at following the red light and red wasn’t the right light at all, took them straight to Hell.

  Stumpp made another martini in the lounge, then went into the cafeteria and popped a bagel in the toaster oven. Onion, his least favorite. Only onion left. Old people had taken all the sugar packets again, kiddies had lightly unscrewed the tops of all the condiments. He ate his supper hurriedly, keeping all further thoughts at bay, rinsed his glass and plate, set all alarms, and walked out through the blueblack night to his blueblack limousine.

  35

  We went sailing today. It was a lovely day, you would’ve enjoyed it.

  A good brisk sail with a following sea.”

  “Darling?” Carter said.

  “Yes?”

  “That’s impossible.” He was going to stress this from now on in his dealings with Ginger.

  She crossed one tanned leg over the other. “It was”—she paused—“a ketch. It was not a yawl. Won’t ever mix those two up again. I remember asking you and asking you in the past and you never made the distinction clear. She was all polished and bright, and she had a lovely name. Her name was Revelance.”

  “Darling?” Carter said.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you mean Relevance?”

  “No, I do not mean Relevance, I mean Revelance.”

  “But she couldn’t be named Revelance, darling. That would be a mistake. Now, it may very well be a mistake and your recollection quite accurate. The person who painted the name on the stern just got himself too close to the work. The fellow’s laboring over one big letter at a time with the utmost care, and he loses, well, not perspective, but the sense of order, and an error is born. I’m trying to put myself in the poor man’s shoes, darling.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ginger said with disgust. “You’re not making any sense. You have no grasp of the situation at all. My best friend here is Cherity, are you going to dispute her name as well? You can’t even picture this vessel, can you?”

  “You said it was a ketch,” Carter said dispiritedly. Scarcely out of the gate, and he’d faltered in his reserve.

  “Try to picture the vessel with me, Carter.”

  “No,” Carter said.

  “Try to picture us all on board.”

  “No, no,” Carter said.

  She smiled at him in a friendly fashion, which was not like Ginger at all. The cordiality emanating from her felt almost sticky. She held the smile steadily aloft.

  “Getting out on the, ah … water, certainly seems to agree with you,” Carter said.

  “You should come along next time. Always room for one more on the Revelance.”

  Carter winced. He simply could not stand the name. “I don’t think I’d be welcome.”

  “Oh, you would, Carter, you would!” She bent toward him. “Why stay here? This is no place for you. Do you know that the desert is the loneliest land ever to come from God’s hand?”

  “No, I … why, that’s very prettily put.”

  “He said that himself. Didn’t know why he even bothered making the damn thing.”

  “Actually,” Carter said, “on further reflection I’d have to disagree. I don’t think it’s any lonelier than anyplace else.”

  “You disagree?” Ginger said.

  “That is only one of the sometimes many benefits of being alive, as opposed to being dead. When you’re dead, as you are, Ginger, you don’t have the option of expressing a conflicting point of view.”

  “You are actually disagreeing with—”

  “Plus, when dead, I suppose you’re more conscious of which side your bread is buttered on.”

  “I fail to appreciate the point you’re making here, Carter.”

  She had recovered the use of phrasing, at least. They’d always been known for their educated quarrels. If overheard, people would say, “Well, at least it’s an educated quarrel.”

  With a start, he realized it was daytime. Ginger was here at the pinnacle of healthful day, when the arrows of death flew unseen. This new development perturbed him. She had reached some new level of accomplishment or confidence. Daylight was streaming into the room as though to some promised jubilee.

  Donald had suggested that Carter simply tell Ginger to go away, which just showed how little the wonderful boy knew about women, particularly a woman like Ginger. But Donald insisted that his mother had good luck with this back in Nantucket when there were silverfish in the drawers. “Go away,” she’d said firmly to the silverfish, not yelling, and they had. Another suggestion of Donald’s, which he’d carried out surreptitiously, was to scatter salt in the corners of the bedroom, but that had not been effective either. He’d had an idea himself but had forgotten it. What had it been? An apathy had overtaken him in the last few days, a numbness, a peculiar weariness. A hair had sprouted from his ear, vigorously long and ugly. His headaches were adopting a schedule of sorts. His feet itched.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “I’m not leaving,” Ginger said.

  “Daddy?” Annabel called.

  “What do you mean, you’re not leaving?”

  “I won’t leave, and there’s nothing you can do to make me, nothing at all. Your crucials are at hand,” she added, alarmingly.

  “Daddy!” Annabel cried. “A terrible thing has happened.”

  He flung open the door.

  Annabel was holding a crumpled paper napkin in her hand. “She blew her nose in it!” she wailed.

  Carter looked at it, dumbfounded. It did look used, not disgustingly so but definitely damp; a paper napkin, after all, fulfilling, perhaps, its destiny.

  “I’m sorry,” Alice called from somewhere.

  “We were in my room,” Annabel cried, “and I have this little thing for Mommy there that I’ve made.”

  “A thing for Mommy,” Carter said. “What kind of thing for Mommy?”

  “It wasn’t like a retablo because I didn’t have anything to be thankful for, but it was this little arrangement that helped me think about Mommy. It had this little napkin that was in her purse that night and a lipstick and then that little photo of us together—I cut you out of it, Daddy, because this is for Mommy—and that silver hairbrush that had been on her bureau, it even had some of her hair in it—”

  “Not my hair,” Ginger mouthed, shaking her head.

  “It was just something I could dwell on, and—”

  “You shouldn’t be dwelling on this, honey,” Carter said.

  “—they were these meaningful things I’d collected, and Alice knew that. She knew that! And we were in my room and she sneezed and then she grabbed the little napkin right off my arrangement.”

  “Honey, why don’t you sit down while we talk.” Carter gestured to the edge of the bed opposite to where Ginger had settled herself.

  “I don’t want to, Daddy. Daddy, what am I going to do?”

  “I never carried paper napkins around in my purse,” Ginger said. “What kind of person does she think I was?”

  “I don’t like it here, Daddy. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “Sit down, honey.”

  She looked directly at the place where Ginger was, he could swear she did.

  “I don’t want to sit down. What good would sitting down do?”

  “Honey, what would you say if I told you Ginger visits me sometimes, that she comes right into this room. What would you say?”

  “Poor Daddy,” Annabel said.

  Well, that’s sensible, Carter thought.

  “How do you make it happen, Daddy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you pretend?”

  “God, no.” Carter pointed. “She’s right over there.”

  Annabel looked disconsolately through the empty space.

  “She’s developing your chin, Carter,” Ginger said, “which is too bad. You could slice a roast with a chin like that.”

  “You have to be serious sometimes, Daddy.”

  He had never seen Ginger
more incarnate. She was pulsating with an almost animal energy. No longer content with just existence after death, she had to be active as well. That day of sailing—but of course there couldn’t have been a day of sailing. Even so, he could picture the good ship Revelance borne on the back of a great fish, though surely in Ginger’s case the fish part was coincidence.

  “Ginger,” he said, “your daughter wants to think about you, to make contact, and you’re being most inconsiderate, Ginger, by failing to respond. You were never as demonstrative toward Annabel as you could have been, and now’s the time.”

  “Daddy,” Annabel cried, wringing the napkin, “don’t! You’re scaring me.”

  “She’s not very plucky, is she?” Ginger noted. “Not much spunk. Charge wasn’t long on spunk either, as I learned to my disappointment.”

  “She has my chin,” Carter said loudly. “You said so yourself.”

  “Daddy, Daddy,” Annabel said.

  “Honey, what would you like to say? Maybe this should be our approach.”

  “Mommy,” Annabel said, “if you’re there, I don’t think you should be.”

  “That’s very good,” Carter said, brightening. “Very good, honey.”

  “Your opinions are laughable,” Ginger said, then laughed. Annabel was gravitating toward her. “Noli me tangere,” Ginger warned.

  “Oh, please,” Carter said. “Isn’t that overly dramatic?” Still, it probably wouldn’t be helpful to actually touch … he tugged Annabel back.

  “Must you involve everyone you know in our relationship?” Ginger complained. “This is between a man and a woman, you and me, two great antipodes of the universe. Why drag family into it? I’m asking for very little, only you.” She made a dramlike space between two fingers, which triggered in Carter the desperate desire for a strong drink.

  She was becoming so bold she was practically thrumming. She’d show up at his parties next. Surrounding himself with others would soon no longer help. She’d be leaping into his arms, and then no one need bother calling a physician, any coroner would do. And to think that chance had brought them together so many years before, sheer chance. Surely he hadn’t been destined for this as a child, small for his age but then suddenly growing, thriving, at St. George’s. The open window with its eight-over-eight lights. The huge sills dusted with crumbs for the sparrows. The coldness of his sheets. The clock tower overlooking his world of happy preparation. To persevere and grow! Their inquiries had been ontological in nature. Oh, happy happy years of preparation. But then the preparation stopped.