The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  “Just like she did when?” Alice asked, for there couldn’t be just one moment that was you, could there? When you looked like yourself, the way you’d be remembered?

  But Carter did not address this question. “She used to be rather languid, viperish certainly, but sort of indolent, the way vipers are when they’re not trying to sink their fangs into you. But now she wants to sink in her fangs and she’s coiled with intent. Coiled.”

  Alice wanted to help Mr. V. out, he looked on the brink. “Let’s take a look in your room again and see if she’s there.”

  “I haven’t been in there in a week,” Carter said.

  Alice had an alarmed instant of feeling they had to water Mrs. V. or something, a blurred glimpse of the soul as an animal, ignored if not forgotten, thirsting, its woeful paws curled beneath its famishing.

  “Well, let’s take a look,” Alice urged.

  He strode purposefully toward his bedroom door. He disliked the door; it was not a fine door and was even hollow. For an expensive house, much had been scamped. He turned the knob and pushed the door back.

  Alice peered into the dark. “It’s really quiet in there,” she said.

  He heard Ginger’s laughter, which brought to mind the weekend they’d been Christmas shopping in New York, the evening they’d been drunk and run up the down escalator at Sak’s—far more difficult and enjoyable than you’d think. He wrenched the light on so vigorously that the plastic dimmer switch came off in his hand.

  Everything looked in terrible disarray.

  “You’ve been robbed,” Alice said. “Have you been robbed?”

  Carter peered at the room. Initially, it didn’t seem as if anything was missing except his little clock—no, it had been safely relocated, he kept it by the bar now. But he could hear it ticking, or something was ticking, a tocking rondo in his head.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “But it looks as though the police have been here. What’s that yellow ‘Do not cross’ tape?” The tape beribboned the room with festive authority.

  “That’s a joke,” Carter said. “I put it up. Just a joke.” There was The Nature of Things. It looked a little the worse for wear. Poor old Lucretius. A love philter had turned him mad. He reeled in the tape, winding it around his hand. “Do you feel a presence in here, Alice? Sort of a permeation?”

  “No,” Alice said.

  He was afraid Ginger had gotten herself into everything: the broken pool pump; the shot exhaust manifold on the Corvette; the tax audit; the thickening muscle around his heart detected by the yearly exam (he had seen a little something on the X ray, a clinging succubus he knew was Ginger); the weevils in his favorite brand of instant scone mix; Donald’s pulled groin muscle. Definitely Donald’s groin muscle …

  “Sherwin says that God permeates the whole world,” Alice said, “and lives in everything as the purest spark.”

  “God!”

  “Sherwin’s saying that just popped into my head. I realize your wife—it’s not the same thing at all—I realize that.”

  “Sherwin who? You can’t possibly mean the piano player.”

  “Have you given any further consideration to the wildlife pool in this location?”

  “Alice, I want to confide something to you. I don’t think she’s completely here anymore. I mean, we could bring in a wrecking ball but I don’t think we’d get all of her now, if you see what I’m saying.”

  “There’s nothing here, Mr. V.”

  “Exactly! Nothing can live anywhere! That’s exactly what Ginger is doing.”

  “Do you two talk?”

  “I shudder to say,” Carter said. “We do.”

  “This is really sort of impressive, Mr. V. You two must’ve been exceptionally close.”

  Carter had been twisting the “Do not cross” tape around in his hands. He raised it to his mouth and bit down on it, looking at Alice dully.

  “Mr. V.!” Alice said.

  He lowered his hands.

  “I don’t feel any kind of presence at all in here.” Alice hoped for his sake that she wasn’t just having another no-kayak moment. Of course, she’d never even met this dame. She’d only heard Annabel’s somewhat inconclusive stories about her, which she suspected were somewhat gilded.

  “The problem is that she’s not here now,” Carter said.

  Alice nodded. “I don’t have anything to work with.”

  “But I could call on you again if necessary.”

  “Absolutely, Mr. V.” She looked around the room a final time. A big no kayak.

  Back in the living room, Carter seemed a little steadier. “Spending the night, are you, Alice? Keeping Annabel company?”

  “Annabel’s painting her nails, Mr. V. She has this new color called Needles in a Haystack. She’s really happy with it.”

  “Why? It sounds gray.”

  “It’s a complex gray. It has a whole world of sophisticated meaning for her. She wants to make herself over, but she’s not considering reconstructive surgery.”

  “I would hope not,” Carter interjected. Sometimes communiqués absolutely essential to being an informed parent were just thrown at a fellow. “I wouldn’t acquiesce to anything like that.” He had responsibilities toward his daughter, but they just made his mind fog over.

  “She wants to perfect parts of herself by choosing patinas and little adornments and effects that are apparently recognized by people she wants to be recognized by, or so she says.” Alice frowned.

  “But that’s so … so common, Alice. Annabel can’t be obtaining her ethos through nail polish.”

  “It’s so-called nail polish only to us. To Annabel it’s something more. She’s unhappy here. She needs a different set of acquaintances, I think. She’s kind of mad at me.”

  “She’s annoyed with me, too. I fear she finds my behavior erratic.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. V., we understand. You’ve just lost your wife.”

  “If only I had,” Carter said fervently. “Alice, I need to confess something to you. I wanted Corvus to speak with Ginger, and I wanted that because I find Corvus not quite there or even here, if you know what I—let me say it another way. A healthy, happy person wouldn’t be able to talk sincerely with a dead person, particularly to someone as annoyed and annoying as Ginger. Now, God knows I’m not healthy or happy, but I’m not nearly as disillusioned or fatigued in spirit as Corvus, poor girl, fine girl, and I thought she could have a relationship with Ginger that would nullify her, blot Ginger right up, as it were, absorb Ginger’s nada into her own. What was the harm, I thought.…”

  He saw himself for an instant as a monster of the Russian persuasion, on a galloping sledge throwing an infant to the slavering wolves almost upon him. Then he saw himself as some idiot in a feathered loincloth throwing a virgin down a well—what were they called? Cenotes, of course. No, his might be a different mask in a new setting, but he shared the same withered atoms with the long-gone louts of a certain ilk. He’d do anything to get the job done.

  “I’m actually quite appalled at myself for considering employing this troubled girl in such a way, but I thought afterwards she will be less troubled, because after Ginger’s gone I will get the finest treatment for Corvus, the finest treatment for a fatigued and disillusioned spirit, available.”

  “You haven’t looked into availability yet?” Alice said.

  “I deserve your disgust and mistrust. I don’t feel any better for having confessed this to you.”

  “I could have told you beforehand that you wouldn’t.”

  “I can only say on my behalf that I did not approach her. She would have accepted, and I think it would have proved a terrifying experience for her.”

  “She shouldn’t be occupied like that. It’s beneath her brilliance. In many ways she can’t be harmed. You couldn’t have harmed her, so you shouldn’t worry.” Still, Alice was disappointed in him.

  Carter was surprised that Alice saw her friend as such a model of stability, or perh
aps she was just trying in her somewhat inefficient way to defend someone who was precious to her.

  “When you go back to the Hilton,” she added, “be sure to question them about their predator-control policy.”

  “Uhmm.” He might forgo the Hilton and check into a Hyatt instead. He’d had the worst dream the night before. There were too many drapes on the windows, layers and layers of them; it was like coming to in a shroud. He couldn’t remember the details, but like all dreams it seemed to partake of both death and life, something added to the first and subtracted from the latter in a foul union, most unpleasant.

  “The coyotes,” Alice reminded him. “Predators. Life needs predators to be in balance.”

  Carter asked Alice to return to the bedroom and retrieve his book. She reappeared to announce she hadn’t seen it, which made Carter break into a pronounced sweat. Gone again? He was coming to the conclusion that nothing was easier than going insane.

  In the Corvette, he misplaced the keys, finally locating them in his tightly clenched fist. He danced the car down the driveway, blowing a headlight just before he reached the road. Alice watched with concern. It sounded as though something metal was banging around under the hood. And that black smoke. Rings, she thought. She didn’t know what rings were, though she’d heard the word spoken with assurance by those observing smoke pouring from a vehicle’s pipes. It augured nothing good.

  40

  His first and last canine had been a Border collie. Technically it was a triumph, but his client was upset because it didn’t look as though “Jim” were herding anything. What’s he got to herd now? the taxidermist said. He’d always been direct back then, believing only charlatans showed charm. He’s got to be herding something or else he won’t be happy, the client said. Then you need a surround to show him, the taxidermist said, “I ain’t an interior decorator.” But he knew he’d have to forfeit the bill, maybe even return the unrefundable deposit. The client was an old man, and a tear had run down to drop from the tip of his old man’s nose. He felt in his bones that he’d arranged something terrible to be done to his Jim. I can’t even bury him outside my window like I once could have, the old man said.

  It had been an unfortunate moment even then.

  The taxidermist scowled at the infant gorilla he’d been working on all morning. He was dissatisfied with its expression, it lacked hunger. He nudged it into his trash can and moved over to his broad wooden desk. He’d never heard of this wood before. Some new wood. Like the fish they were coming up with these days. Monkfish. What the hell was monkfish? Turbot. The same. He’d go home, and the wife would say, “I’ve got this lovely piece of monkfish from the new market,” and he and the family would gather at the table beneath the cathedral ceiling in the house she’d insisted they purchase and eat it. The cathedral ceiling was ridiculous, the whole house was ridiculous, a Taj in the foothills for which they’d unwisely overextended themselves. Still, he was glad she was content. She’d been about to unravel back in Alaska. He’d enjoyed some prestige, having done all the bears in the Kodiak airport, but doing all the bears in the Kodiak airport didn’t provide the kind of income one would expect and she’d had to take a job as a housekeeper in a hot springs resort where the Japanese honeymooners just about drove her crazy. The Japanese had invented the concept of the Alaskan honeymoon and came there in droves to do it. They didn’t tip, they shed pubic hair like crazy, and they beamed, they were always beaming.

  They’d gotten out of Alaska just before the short bitter days had come round again, the moose in the cesspit jokes, the grafitti on the snowbanks of the pissed-on frontier. The wife selected to bring nothing along but her old blue Samsonite filled with the tiny dresses of her babyhood. Just in case, she’d say, just in case, not that she was campaigning for another one, but if it happened and it was a girl, or if the boys had little girls when they started their own families—maybe the clothes could be used then. The thought that these rotting, stained, shrunken, incredibly delicate clothes worn by his wife when she was newly born would be imposed on the future, where naturally they would be entirely unwelcome, depressed him. Sometimes he didn’t think his wife was well, that those goddamned cavorting Japanese had broken her spirit, that she’d lost the little something she had when he first met her that made it all seem worthwhile. Of course, she had her baby clothes back then, but they hadn’t seemed so peculiar, so out of proportion to their lives; they hadn’t reminded him, yellowing things, dark where they’d been folded, of the Momias de Guanajuato in Mexico, the Museum of the Mummies, where he’d gone when he was still single, when it was still weird and distasteful, before they’d cleaned it up and made it into a clean, well-lighted museum where you were funneled past the things through a narrow corridor so you couldn’t linger to study them more closely, people pushing up behind you so you had to keep moving and before you knew it you were back outside where some pear-shaped amputee scooting around on a dolly was selling postcards of the momias, the baby momias dressed in their Sunday best, the embroidered smocks and bright blankets remarkably similar to the stuff his wife kept in that sinister blue Samsonite.

  The taxidermist shook his head vigorously to free it of unwanted thoughts. He picked up the newspaper, leaned back in his chair, and propped his feet on the desk. He read that those goddamned Japanese had developed a prototype of a robotic cat. Those people needed to be given their own army again, get some realism back into their lives. A robotic cat, aimed at the elderly-widow market. This was what the future was: robots, artificial intelligences. There would be no sincerity, no art of the kind he’d devoted his life to. The future was a place where the dead looking alive would no longer be enough.

  Abruptly, his door swung open and Emily Bliss Pickless entered carrying a cardboard box.

  “Hey,” the taxidermist said. “You knock first. You knock.” He removed his feet from the desk.

  “I need something,” she said.

  “Yeah, a brain.” He loathed this kid.

  Emily shrugged. People either wanted to worship her or snap her in half. So do the exceptional ones walk through this world. Though she was not vain.

  The taxidermist peered into the box. A puddle of fur and blood and bone, impossibly breathing.

  “You’re not normal,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

  “I am distinguishing between life and death,” she said, “which is more than anyone else in this place does.”

  “Don’t quit your day job for that talent, missy.” She was gazing around his workplace with maddening impunity. He’d smack her little fanny and push her out the door—this was his office, his workplace, his sanctum sanctorum—but he was uneasily aware that she enjoyed some special relationship with his employer. Maybe she was a niece, a grandniece. Unmarried oddballs like Stumpp always had nieces and nephews galore, and it was the taxidermist’s opinion that these terms were code for abnormal or immoral relationships. The taxidermist had always felt this to be so. Say the word niece to him, and the red flag would go up right away.

  “Pest,” the taxidermist said.

  “Why’d you throw this little gorilla away?”

  “Get out of my trash, you!” He felt that he’d been hounded by this kid forever, though she’d showed up only a few weeks ago. Stumpp had given her one of the rooms at the museum for her animal “hospital.” He’d had a carpenter build her some cages, and there was a tabletop full of dog and cat cages customarily used for airline travel. He’d bought her a refrigerator and a few heating pads and some pans and dishes and towels. Even told the chef in his café to provide the little freak with anything she required—salads, ground meats, fruit medleys—though the taxidermist took pleasure in the fact that none of her “patients” had taken any nourishment before they croaked.

  “You don’t know how to do this anymore, do you?” she said. “You’re just pretending.”

  The taxidermist stalked out of his office in search of Stumpp. He found him in the oasis room, where he seemed to be liste
ning to the air conditioner.

  “Hey boss,” the taxidermist said, “that Pickless child? She’s adorable but she’s forever bothering me, wasting my time. You hired me as an artist, and she’s always intruding on me, taking my needles, rummaging through my tooth and eye drawers—those things are organized, I tell her.” He shivered, quite involuntarily, in the chilled air.

  Stumpp looked at him irritably. Waves of an elusive melody had been bearing him outward, beyond the confines of this place wherein he had interred himself. This was one hell of an air conditioner. Airy-fairy flaky types, which the desert and these new millennial times seemed to produce in abundance, would likely lose their wits after a session with this baby. You had to be a strong man to fiddle around with the kind of consciousness this unit inspired. This was ethereal business, and he resented being interrupted by this oaf. If he mentioned even once again in passing that he’d done all the bears in the Kodiak airport, Stumpp would punch him in his pink wet mouth—with a mouth that repulsive, hadn’t he ever considered a beard?

  “Pickless?” he finally said. “You came in here to complain about Pickless?”

  “People are going to be bringing her roadkill next. It’s going to get out of hand. Your reputation will be wrecked. Besides, has she ever saved one of those things?”

  “What do you mean, ‘saved’?”

  “Repaired it so she could let the damn thing go. No, the answer is no, she has not. Because everything she’s got is missing something which it needs. If she wasn’t eight years old, she’d realize this. Half those birds she’s got in there go around in circles or tip over backwards because their backs are broken. You can’t release a one-eyed hawk. Those poisoned things she gets, she’s just torturing them. Their guts are moldering. Does she know the slightest thing about biology? About science? She should be playing with dolls. Or just getting over playing with dolls, though I’ll admit I don’t know how that works, I have two boys myself. Sons,” he said for added emphasis.