The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  “Why can’t your mother just stay around if she wants? What’s so awful about that?”

  “This is not Latin America,” Annabel said coolly.

  “What does Latin America have to do with it?”

  “In Latin America these things happen, but not here. Didn’t you ever have to read any of their novels in school? It’s because their culture is oppressed or suppressed or something.”

  This sweater was coral. And this one was dusk. She had never thought dusk especially flattering, at least with her coloring.

  “This is an interesting thing that’s happening to you,” Alice suggested.

  “It’s not happening to me at all. It’s happening to my mother.”

  “How does she look?” Alice asked.

  “You are so morbid.”

  “What does your father say? What does she do? Does she say anything? Can you remember what your mother’s voice sounds like?”

  “Her voice?”

  “The last thing you forget is a person’s voice. The next-to-last thing is the sound of their footsteps. Their tread.”

  “Tread? Nobody treads.”

  “The next-to-the-next last thing is …”

  “You are not an expert on this, Alice. No one ever died for you. I don’t mean died for you, of course, that would be preposterous. I mean died in your personal experience. You didn’t even know your mother. You’re not even entitled to discuss these matters with me, if you want to know the truth. The thing is, if my mother insists on staying here I’ll never have my own destiny. What happens to me will still be part of my mother’s destiny. That’s not natural.” Annabel stopped fluffing and stacking her sweaters and paused dramatically in thought, Alice assumed that’s what it was, then began determinedly to pick apart the memory square. “Do you want this lipstick?” she asked.

  Alice shook her head.

  “I don’t even think it’s Mommy’s hair in this brush. I’m remembering she used it to clean the backseat of the car. She hated the backseat and was always worrying about it, like who Daddy had given a ride to. He was always giving rides to all sorts of people, particularly in the rain. She used to spray the backseat with poison, practically. And photographs where somebody’s cut out, that looks so dumb, you know? I never realized before how stupid that looks.” Annabel dumped everything into a wicker wastebasket and placed a piece of stationery over it.

  The room had its equilibrium back, its sterile calm.

  “I have to find another way to grieve,” Annabel said.

  “I think you’ve passed through the grieving process,” Alice said. “I think you’re in the clear.”

  “Both of them are crazy, they always were.”

  “Who?” Alice said cautiously. “Mommy and Daddy?”

  “Mommy and Daddy, right. I have to take a nap now. Come back later, okay, much later? You can come back later.”

  Alice walked a mile down to the intersection where the bus stop was. Annabel was one of those people who would say “We’ll get in touch soonest” when they never wanted to see you again. Alice expected to hear those words any day now. She didn’t know why she spent so much time at Annabel’s house. The house meant something to her, she couldn’t get enough of it. It was already like some stupid memory of a happier time, a time that she could look back on as belonging to someone who was not quite Alice yet. She had felt a beat off all summer—just an hour off her real life, a year or two, maybe a few hundred miles. She wished she could be outside, in the world, but not of it. Still, being outside was very much like being at the bus-stop intersection where the desert and its flitting birds had been transformed into four identical Jiffy Lubes, one on each corner, none seeming more popular or desirable in terms of patrons than another.

  The bus bench was empty, but someone had left a portion of newspaper behind. VOLCANO BURIES 450 IN GUATEMALA, a smallish headline announced discreetly. Alongside the article was a large advertisement for a toenail fungus cure. Didn’t people at the newspaper ever think of propriety and balance? Alice irritably stuffed the newspaper into a bulging trash receptacle.

  She waited. After a moment or two she realized, realized fully, that she was waiting for the bus. This seemed to her the ugliest folly. She could always use Corvus’s truck to visit Annabel, or indeed to go anywhere, but she wanted it available for Corvus. She fervently wished that her friend would want to use the truck, but she was in one of her sleep marathons, rising only to go to Green Palms. She slept lightly with her eyes open, causing Alice to suspect she wasn’t sleeping at all but traveling somewhere terrible, following narrow, colored paths to multicolored lakes, all to the sound of jungles burning, waves crashing, mountains collapsing, horrible phenomena leaping out, frightful figures, masses of light—all Bardo bluff and all awful, with the added disadvantage that Corvus was alive while she was experiencing this, not only alive but just sixteen and a half years old. To experience Bardo normally, a person was supposed to be dead. Being dead would give a person some protection from this scary stuff, even though the whole point of the Bardo state, as Alice had struggled to understand it, was that it was just as illusory as life’s little activities and memories were. Maybe Corvus was just trying to speed things up so that when she did die at a respectable age—thirty, say—she would’ve done all her Bardo time and could just slip into that thing that had no beginning and no end, which Alice couldn’t grasp at all and didn’t sound all that fabulous, either. She just wished she could keep Corvus from sleeping so much. When she got home she’d make her eat a Popsicle or something. A Popsicle at the very least.

  A bus drew up to the curb, the door opened, and the driver called down, “You going to the Wildlife Museum?”

  Alice shrank back. “I certainly am not!”

  “It’s Appreciate the Variety of World Wildlife Day. They’re running special buses. The museum’s the only place this baby goes. If you want to go someplace else, you’ll have to wait another five minutes.”

  “I’d like to blow that place up!”

  The driver grinned, then took a small camera from his pocket and snapped her picture. “I’ve received over one thousand dollars by providing the police with tips just on what I overhear on my route.” He shut the door, waved, and passed through the light just as it changed from yellow to red.

  To make matters worse, Alice had recognized the camera to be a disposable one.

  By the time she got home, it was the news hour. Her granny and poppa had their snacks and seltzer arranged on their collapsible TV dinner tables, which had their own little rack to contain them slimly when not in use.

  A large airliner had gone down in the Atlantic weeks ago, and they still hadn’t found all the bodies. The entire glee club of a small southern college had perished, among others. It just went on and on, the search for bodies. The president was addressing the anxious relatives, and someone was screaming at him, “We want our bodies!”

  “They’re doing the best they can,” Alice’s poppa told the TV.

  “I went to France with my glee club when I was your age, Alice,” her granny said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

  “It could’ve been you on that plane,” her poppa said to her granny. “That airplane’s destination was France.”

  Fury looked anxiously at the screen, his muzzle white, his eyes large. He was beginning to develop a distaste for the news. His stomach burbled, his paws hurt, he wanted to scratch and couldn’t.

  Alice went into the kitchen, removed two Popsicles from the freezer, and peeled back the papers on one, then the other. Both were a thin and watery yellow, a slim bullet shape. She gave one a quick lap and couldn’t determine the flavor. Maybe the treats had been in the freezer too long along with the bagged remains of the birds Zipper had assassinated. Poppa was going to bury them when he was up to it, but he was becoming more and more preoccupied with the news, at all hours of the day. His handyman abilities were slowly atrophying. Overwhelming input and feeble output, he’d say, that’s my problem now.
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br />   He called out, “They executed another of them at the state penitentiary. Strangled an old lady with her Christmas-tree lights. Shot a young mother square in the heart and left her triplets toddling around in her blood.”

  “Last words?” Alice called. Their last words were sometimes of interest.

  “I think they drug them ahead of time to get some of those last words,” her granny said. “Dope up that last piece of pie.”

  “There’s that fellow again,” her poppa said. “He’s getting a lot of coverage.”

  We want our bodies!

  Fury whined. It just came out. He was not one to whine as a rule.

  “Don’t eat alone in your room, Alice, come out here and eat with us,” her granny said.

  Corvus really had to return to the normal life of the household, Alice thought. Her granny and poppa had forgotten she was in the house with them.

  Corvus is dreaming she’s on the island where they’d lived one year. This island could be Heaven, with its wooden walls smelling of lemons, the rugusa roses and blueberry bushes pressing against the windows. There’s a stone well outside with a pump handle and a raccoon who knows how to work the handle with his hands. There’s a claw-footed tub in the yard filled with pansies. There are old blue bottles on the sills that fill themselves with light. The ponds are full of quahogs and the sea with fish and the sky with crying white birds. The house is on a hill, and old wooden steps morticed into the earth lead down to the beach, where begins a trail of silvered boards that wind through the witchgrass to a strip of hard sand. Then there is the cold, shadow-dappled sea.

  Her parents are not there, but that’s all right. Though she is still a child, there’s no alarming explanation for their absence. If they were there, they might not permit Corvus to go off with the mail lady, and Corvus must, because this is the dream she is dreaming. This is the day she goes off with the mail lady on her rounds, a woman who looks every inch the man, with her khaki uniform, her black glasses, her black watch strap, her jeep. To accompany her is an honor, that’s the thinking; she goes everywhere, knows everyone. Her big freckled hand slaps back the raised red flags of the mailboxes and reaches inside. She never looks at what she retrieves, just throws it in her sack, a slumped leather mouth beside her. She’s neither happy nor unhappy, the mail lady. They are through picking up all the mail in just a few hours.

  “Would you like to see my house?” the mail lady asks. “I have two red squirrels playing cards.” Corvus pauses at such length that the woman is then forced to say, “I could give you something cold to drink. I could even make you a sandwich, I suppose, though normally I don’t eat lunch.”

  “I’ll look at the squirrels,” Corvus says.

  They arrive at the house. Seagulls stand one-legged on the roof, each with a drop of red on its bill by which each is known to its young.

  There is one small room. A closed door leads elsewhere. Corvus looks at the squirrels, the cards wired clumsily to their long claws. She looks at a sanderling under a bell jar, at something suspended in a bottle. She declines the cold drink.

  “I like animals,” the mail lady says. “I like having them around me. I like to collect Victorian fantasy, but I don’t snap up the truly freaky stuff like some collectors do, two-headed sheep and whatnot.”

  The mail lady doesn’t have many people to talk to, Corvus decides. “Don’t you have any real pets?” she asks.

  “I don’t have the personality for pets,” the mail lady says. “I know a lot about myself, and I accept it.”

  Corvus doesn’t believe she knows a thing about herself for she is in a dream and in costume and could go berserk at any instant, as people in dreams and costumes do. Or she could merely blur and fade away. Corvus scratches at a mosquito bite on her shoulder.

  “What would you like to do?” the mail lady asks. She has taken off her shoes and belt; her brown shirt hangs over her brown trousers.

  “I’d like to see the rest of your house.” Corvus thinks the rooms are full of mail, hundreds of undelivered messages.

  “There’s just one other room,” the mail lady says. “My mother’s in there on her sickbed. She’s very ill. This isn’t an intermission, unfortunately. It’s her final condition.”

  “How long has she been in there?”

  “Three years.”

  The door is shut, there is no sound. There is some sort of object back there, Corvus thinks, an object with no meaning left. “Why do you keep her back there?”

  “She’s my mother. Never think your body’s your friend. It’s your enemy.”

  Corvus wets her finger and mops the bleeding bite with it.

  “I’ll see her if you want,” Corvus says. “Do you want me to see her?”

  “I didn’t invite you here to see her. I invited you to see the squirrels, who I thought you’d enjoy.” She appears to find the squirrels terribly congenial, prepared to provide hours of fun. “Look at this one! It can take our picture. I can put my camera between its paws and set the timer, and if we stand right here behind this line we’ll be at just the right distance, there won’t be parts of us missing.”

  Corvus can’t see the line, which must be faint.

  The mail lady is speaking faster and faster, as though she knows her time will soon be up. “There seem to be more girls around than ever,” she says. “In my day, an abundance of boys being born meant a war coming. But an outbreak of girls, who knows what that means, something even worse perhaps.…”

  There are a whirring sound and a blossom of light, but Corvus never sees the picture. It is Alice coming into the room, the sudden light the door’s opening brings, and Corvus wakes up.

  38

  The summer nights were long. Stumpp left the museum shortly after eight one evening and to his astonishment saw a small child walking across the parking lot holding a sign. She had a narrow little face and wild hair and wore overalls, and she paced with the sign held rigidly in front of her.

  POEM

  Frightened

  Unsafe

  Grieving

  In pursuit

  Tracked down

  Crying

  Visiting

  Hiding

  They feel sad and unwanted

  Emily Bliss Pickless Grade 4

  Stumpp smiled. “Are you Emily Bliss Pickles, Grade Four?”

  “It’s pronounced Pickless, not Pickles,” the child snarled.

  “What are you doing out here all by yourself? Where are your”—he hesitated—“guardians?”

  She chuckled bitterly.

  “Grade Four?” Stumpp went on. “Isn’t that nice. And how old does that make you? Eight or nine?”

  “A mature eight.”

  He came a little closer to her.

  “Nine-one-one!” the creature screamed. She had the lung power of a diva.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, I’m not going to harm you.”

  “You harmed them,” she said, dipping the sign toward the building.

  “You need a telephone to communicate with 911. You need an emergency, as well.”

  “This is an emergency, this place,” the child said.

  “The operator will wear you out with questions. She’ll want to know your location and the situation. You not only have to know precisely what’s occurring, you have to describe it as well. It’s far more difficult than you’d think. Help isn’t out there just for the asking, you know.”

  This was the exact moment of sundown and as scheduled, the lights went on in Stumpp’s parking lot. “Let me drive you home,” he said. “Where do you live?”

  The child bared her tiny teeth, drew from the bib pocket of her overalls a pair of scissors, and pointed them at him.

  “They’re cutting-out scissors,” Stumpp said. “They’re for paper. They wouldn’t do anything except to paper.”

  She stood no higher than a tabletop, and her hair was remarkably snaggy. Stumpp had never seen anything like it. He was surprised that geese or some damn thing didn’t att
empt to nest in it. Her eyes were too big for her face and her hands too large for her arms. He wondered if the future would show fast-forward visualizations of embryos, indicate how they’d turn out, their pluses and minuses as human beings, what they’d look like in eight years and so forth. Why not? They’d know everything they dared to know about embryos very shortly. Emily Bliss Pickless probably wouldn’t have been given her chance at bat in more modern circumstances, not on the face of it anyway.

  “You have a good hand,” he said. “That’s fine printing.”

  “I’m picketing this evil place,” she said.

  “Well, you should be out here during the day. The museum’s closed, so your being here couldn’t possibly have any effect.” Stumpp had an impulse to give her a lifetime pass, she was such a funny little thing. Barnum in his heyday would’ve plucked her off the street and made her into an attraction.

  She shook the sign and scissors at him.

  “Do you have other poems?”

  “This is what I have to say right here.”

  “But it’s really not relevant to my museum,” Stumpp said. “Whatever you’re talking about sounds still alive to me. Maybe you were thinking of a zoo. Initially, your poem seems impressive, but upon further study it doesn’t stand up. And this word ‘visiting’ is certainly not the word called for in this poem.”

  The child seemed unswayed by Stumpp’s critical discourse. “I wish you were dead,” she said. “How would you like to be stuffed?”

  “No one would pay to look at me stuffed,” Stump replied. “But my animals are beautiful. And you can get up very close to them, much closer than you could otherwise.”

  In fact, many of Stumpp’s trophy animals had been shot at close range. They had seemed … disbelieving. That polar bear. Stumpp refused to muse overlong upon the polar bear. Whenever it shambled into his consciousness, it still had the power to mortify him. When you wanted to do a thing properly, that was just the moment when you wanted the process to be over with. You’ll do the next one right, something in your mind whispered. There’s always a next time, something in your mind said. What was desired, of course, was to hold on to the instant just before. But there was no holding on. Then you were just left with a carcass and a goddamn ringing in the ears.