The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  The phone rang. “Donald!” Carter said. “Listen, I can’t talk just now, let me call you back.” But after hanging up, he found himself alone. The air felt particularly worn out, depleted. He then recalled what his idea had been: he would abandon this room to Ginger! No more imaginative than throwing a bone to a beast, perhaps, but still. “Yes!” he shouted. He would leave this room, just shut the door and never enter it again. All his favored possessions were collected here, but it was also the place where Ginger and her horrors gathered and pooled. Donald’s adjustments hadn’t helped. So let Ginger have it, let her muss it up to her heart’s content, take scissors to his fox-and-hound tie, scrawl obscenities in his books, smash his favorite whiskey glass into the whirlpool bath, scribble lipstick on his favorite pillow.…

  Then he had a quick, keen vision of leaving the entire house behind, leaving the country and traveling for a year, maybe more, with Annabel and Donald. He saw the three of them on the cool verandas of mountain haciendas, chatting with other guests in the intoxicatingly dark nights, everyone attractive and world-weary, everyone quietly fascinated with the three of them and their story, which they would never disclose. They would rent villas and walk in the rain. Lease fine apartments filled with light and flowers. There was more than one way to resist, while accommodating, the temptations of a difficult time.

  36

  Emily was putting some words together. She wanted to protest a summer school excursion she’d been forced to take part in. “Would you ride your bike down and get our burritos, Emily?” her mother said. “Just tell them to charge it to my account.”

  J.C. was sprawled on a cheap plastic reclining chair that Emily’s mother had purchased especially for his comfort. He wore shorts this simmering day and spritzed himself occasionally with a water bottle her mother had also provided. On his feet he wore sandals from which his massive toes poked rudely.

  “Watch this,” he whispered to Emily’s mother. “Hey, Pickless,” he said, taking the key ring from his pocket and removing the smallest of the keys. “Stop by the post office and get my mail. It’s Box Forty-two. It’s to the left, one row up from the bottom, three over.” He pressed the key into her palm.

  Emily hadn’t opened a post office box for weeks, not since the mother of her colleague Cedric had allowed her to open theirs. Cedric had never forgiven Emily for this and said he’d hate her for the rest of his life—a nasty, snotty, crappy hate, an icy hot hate mean as a hatchet, a fat white hate that would eat slowly at her like the worms in her grandmother’s grave. But Emily was not alarmed, for she did not consider Cedric a worthy adversary.

  “I knew that would tickle her,” J.C. said to her mother. “A little kid’s mind is a simple thing to figure.”

  “It’s sad that as one grows older, one’s pleasures become more complex,” her mother said.

  Emily gave her the startled, walleyed look of one unconscionably betrayed. She wondered if it was possible that in the future she and her mother would fail to recognize each other. She ran to her bicycle and rode quickly away, stopping at the post office first. The last time she’d been here, she saw a dachshund wearing a sun hat. Someone said to it, “You’re very well turned out today, I see. You must’ve heard the weather report.” But there was no one in the building this time except for a woman and two little girls, who were squabbling over whose turn it was to open their box. The boxes were bronze and ornate with a little square of glass. Emily piously looked at the children, who were whining and carrying on. The mother, or whoever she was, finally chose one and nudged the other back, and the one not selected sat down on the floor, put her head on her knees, and wept.

  Emily found J.C.’s box, looked through the glass, and saw there was nothing in it.

  The little girl who had inserted the tiny key and opened her box and drawn out some mail, lovely long envelopes and a magazine, looked at Emily smugly as she left, but Emily ignored her. The other girl was still crying bitterly. “There are more things to life than this,” Emily would’ve told them if she spoke to children younger than herself, which she never did.

  She picked up the burritos and pedaled home, hoping her mother and J.C. were not developing a desperate passion. Emily wished her mother would just settle down, but the world was just too full of distractions for her. In the last year she had joined the volunteer ambulance corps and taken up firearms instruction. She’d taken courses in bartending and blackjack dealing, all, Emily suspected, in the hope of meeting a desperate passion. Such dilatoriness was wasteful and improvident, Emily felt. You needed to know only one person in life, and that was yourself. You had to find that person and make friends with it if you could and hope it wouldn’t turn on you before you had a chance to familiarize yourself with its habits and tear you limb from limb. She wished she could meet the person that was herself instead of all those distracting other people, but maybe that happened later and not when you were eight years old. Her mother said that she wanted to hurry things too much, that she had even hurried her own being born, appearing three weeks before she was supposed to. Emily never tired of hearing this story, which verified her belief that she’d been someone else from the get-go. She had been born on a glass-bottom boat in the Gulf of California. “I just wanted to get one last little holiday in before my obligations,” her mother recounted. Emily loved hearing the story of her appearance and didn’t take offense at some of its meaner particulars, such as the demand by certain patrons for a refund, mostly an elderly contingent who undoubtedly saw in Emily’s unexpected entry the writing on the wall. The vessel, which was named The Bliss, was scrapped shortly afterward, as underwater visibility had been declining for years. The crew was enthusiastic, perhaps even deluded, and kept the glass clean enough; but they were increasingly garrulous about an ecosystem in which the gulf no longer played a part. The paying customer saw not at all what had been promised or inferred, only a vague, grainy drift, an emptiness that with effort might suggest some previous thriving and striving, but all in all a disappointment.

  Turning into the alley, Emily saw that something new had been added to the garbage-container vista, a neatly wrapped package that leaned against the great receptacle. It seemed a different caste from ordinary refuse. In many respects it was prerefuse. Emily stopped to look at this extremely inviting parcel. She put the kickstand of her bike down, went over, and picked it up. It was unaddressed and exceptionally light. The wrapping paper was beautifully creased and folded with geometric precision, tied and secured with string. She put it in the basket with the burritos.

  J.C. was still taking his ease in the reclining chair.

  “Where’s my mom?” Emily asked.

  “She’s changing her dress for supper. You raised in a barn? You should dress nice for supper, even in your own home. Am I the only one who knows simple etiquette around here?”

  Emily had the bag of burritos in one hand and the mystery parcel in the other.

  “What the hell’s that?” J.C. demanded. “You didn’t get that out of my box.”

  “You didn’t have anything in your box,” Emily said. “I found this.”

  “You just go around picking up suspicious-looking parcels? If I’ve ever seen anything in my life that looked more suspicious, I don’t know what it would be. You better stand back while I open it.”

  “Emily,” her mother called, “come in and put this zipper back on its track for me.”

  “I think your mother’s putting on a few pounds,” J.C. said. “She doesn’t want to put on too many more.” He took the ring from his belt loop again and pulled out the blade of a knife with this thumbnail. Emily turned from him and walked toward the demands of a stuck zipper with small enthusiasm. She opened the screen door, and as it fell behind her on its coiled spring, almost clipping her heels as it always did, a concise explosion of demiurgical ambition occurred. Emily looked behind her, puzzled. Her mother ran past, her mouth freshly lipsticked, the wide-open back of her dress exposing the prominent vertebrae of her spine. Em
ily had always found her mother’s spine terribly attractive.

  The bomb had gone off compactly. J.C. was gripping his lap upon which, it appeared, a whole fistful of bright poppies had fallen. “Oh my God, it blew off Little Wonder,” he said. “Holy frigging God.”

  A peculiar calm descended upon Emily. She stood just out of J.C.’s snatching reach—had he been interested in reaching for her, which was the furthest thing from his mind—and looked at him. It already seemed monotonous, though it had scarcely begun. Would this event lend itself to poetry? She didn’t think so. She wasn’t even actually sure what had happened.

  J.C. peered between his outspread fingers and howled.

  “Call the ambulance, Emily!” her mother screamed. “Call the emergency, call 911!” Then she said, “No, I’ll do it.” She looked at J.C. in an exasperated way and ran into the house.

  Emily got a little dirt and sprinkled it on her head, rubbing it in good.

  The ambulance arrived and the one who wasn’t the driver greeted Emily’s mother warmly. “What a coincidence,” he said. “Didn’t think we’d meet again like this.” He pried J.C.’s fingers off his shredded shorts.

  “My stuff, my stuff,” J.C. mumbled.

  “Be calm,” the medic said. “We’ve encountered this before, I can assure you of that. If we can find the damn thing, the docs will be able to sew it back on.”

  “It’s around here somewhere,” J.C. whispered.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” the medic said. “I’m sure it is. We’ll just get you stabilized, then we’ll start looking.”

  “Couldn’t have flown far,” J.C. said, his eyes rolling whitely.

  The driver started canvassing the yard in a desultory manner, having no patience at all with victims of illegal fireworks. None. Damn thing shouldn’t be so hard to find in this yard, which was very cruddily maintained.

  “This your husband, Karen?” the medic asked Emily’s mother.

  “No, no. Just a friend.” She smiled at the medic, then thought to reassure J.C. “We’re going to start looking for it right now, J.C.”

  “Should I get a jar, Mom?” Emily said.

  Her mother didn’t answer. She and the medic were heading off to the ambulance with J.C. strapped to a gurney. The driver was standing meditatively at one of the corners where the fence met itself, then thought better of it. “You got a rest room I could use?” he asked Emily. She nodded and pointed toward the house. Alone, she struck out across the dilapidated terrain. She didn’t know what the thing looked like, exactly. She guessed it had rings and was petaled sort of and squashed on top. She’d pieced this conception together from a number of sources. She would recognize it by its being there.

  She saw the marble. There was the perfume bottle. Then she saw it, curled and winking on the dust by the lizard’s hole. A pretty lizard lived in there, with a big purple fan at its throat. That had to be it, Emily surmised, though it couldn’t be the whole thing. It didn’t look like it was the whole of anything. Some ants were already investigating it in the way they investigated everything, by crawling all over it. She stuck out her foot and nudged it a little. It looked pretty unexemplary. She nudged it around, then tipped it into the hole and tapped it in. It seemed a little spongy and didn’t want to go all the way in, so she ground it in.

  Later that night, Emily sat at the foot of her mother’s bed, eating from a can of pumpkin pie filling that Ruth the Neighbor, beside herself with excitement, had brought over.

  “He was a good man. He was attracted to me. Sometimes we had fun together. Oh, I know it wasn’t your fault, honey, I know. Knowing that is the only thing that’s keeping me sane right now. The only thing that’s keeping everything in perspective.”

  “It is?” Emily said.

  “A bomb,” her mother said. “I can’t believe, a bomb.” She was rubbing cold cream into her cheeks. Emily supposed that because of the seriousness of the exceptional event just past she wasn’t using her Facial Flex, a bizarre device that she customarily placed in her mouth for five minutes just before retiring, to combat muscle sag. Emily could tell that her mother wanted more than anything to use it, but out of respect to J.C. and his first night in the hospital she wasn’t.

  “Do you want me to go away for a while?”

  “What a thoughtful suggestion. Maybe. Not far.”

  “Mom!”

  “Then don’t say things you don’t mean, Emily! I can’t even think with you tormenting me like this. I thought you meant going to bed, to sleep. If you can sleep tonight, more power to you.”

  Both of them were silent, mother and daughter, neither of them thinking much about J.C. but instead of how stimulating and surprising life was. To Emily it felt a little like Christmas Eve.

  “A bomb,” her mother marveled. “The world has entered our lives.” She screwed the lid back hard onto the cold cream. “I know you never thought he hung the moon, honey, but I have needs.”

  Though Emily wished that she herself had needs, all she could manage was colleagues, which, being as she didn’t even want them, didn’t come close to resembling needs.

  “I’m just afraid that after this, people are going to think we’re kind of unwholesome,” her mother said. “This must not be made the centerpiece of our lives. I don’t want you to think of yourself as being bad or peculiar.”

  “You mean strange?”

  “We mustn’t be discouraged, Emily. Did you get a chance to talk to that nice medic today? He’s terribly nice. I met him in that class I took. He came in and gave a little slide show on the dangers of not knowing what to do in an emergency. Maybe when things settle down a bit, we’ll all go to the movies together.”

  “I don’t like the cinema, Mom, you know I don’t.”

  “Well, then, he and I will just have to go by ourselves, won’t we?” her mother said.

  Emily finished the pie filling. Her mother continued to speak about the medic, who preferred to be referenced by his last name rather than his first. She said she liked this trait in a man.

  Emily assumed that John Crimmins was in the past and was glad of it. Would she be required to send him a get-well card? Her mother looked tired and unhappy and confused but then she reached for the Facial Flex, which was in what she called her jewel box on the bedside table. There were no jewels within, but Emily knew that the device with its tiny rubber bands was special, slowing time’s progress on a personal level, her mother having told her as much in a more carefree moment. Her mother slipped the thing into her mouth, arranged her jaws, and sighed.

  37

  The portion of the dresser that Annabel had made into a little memory square looked bereft now that the paper napkin had left it. That napkin had lent the scene some sincerity. Alice couldn’t imagine where that violent sneeze had come from.

  She was all right now. For a while she had saved, quite inappropriately, those stupid cigarette butts of Sherwin’s. But when they started looking like everyone else’s stupid cigarette butts, she threw them away. She couldn’t have distinguished them from someone else’s if her life depended upon it. Love was funny, the way it came and went. She gnawed her knuckles and looked at the orphaned items on Annabel’s blueberry-colored bureau, which now, because of her, seemed unable to transcend their nature. The sad thing was that Annabel had really tried with this, the tackiest notion in the room. Everything else was so tasteful, so perfect, the result of serious, practically pathological consumer coding. This assemblage had perhaps been Annabel’s first tentative clumsy baby step toward appreciating something larger—in this case, reductively, death, but with some work maybe something grander, like real life—and Alice had inadvertently, spontaneously messed it up.

  Annabel returned and went directly to the bureau. Without a glance at its unevocative surface she pulled open a drawer and took out a beige cashmere sweater. She removed the one she was wearing, the gray one. Rather, it was shale. She didn’t have gray. She didn’t have beige either. God, beige. What were they thinking of b
ack then? Ecru. It was ecru. Changing sweaters always soothed Annabel.

  “Daddy thinks Mommy visits him in his room,” she said. “He thinks she’s in there now.”

  Alice was relieved she was still speaking to her. “Why doesn’t your mother come in here?” she said. “Did you ask her to?”

  “She won’t see me. I mean, I guess she sees me, but she won’t let me see her. I don’t think Mommy ever liked me. She was in love with Daddy.”

  “You weren’t one of those awful children who were always asking, ‘Who do you love more? Me or Daddy? Me or Mommy?’ were you?”

  “Maybe,” Annabel said. “Maybe I was.” Though she had never truly dared. It would have been too horrible to know, and alarming either way.

  “Well, you’re paying for it now.”

  “You are incapable of empathy with another human being, aren’t you, Alice? You must lack a gene. You’re just kind of abnormal. You’re like a fifth child or something.”

  Alice was not offended.

  “Your desert is so creepy,” Annabel went on. “I don’t even like the clouds out here. I think they’re creepy too.… This would never happen back home.”

  “The desert has a tradition of very fine clouds,” Alice said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why is she here and not here? It’s not right. Have you noticed how much weight Daddy’s lost? It’s like he’s being drained.”