The Quick & the Dead

by Joy Williams

  “She meant the plate, I think,” Annabel said.

  The man in the tuxedo giggled richly.

  “Thank you, Annabel,” Alice said.

  Fretfully, Annabel got up and wandered off to see what her father was doing. He was speaking to a young man whose very long blond hair and pale cream-colored clothes made him look rather like a palomino.

  “Our marriage was a mutual solitude, as the French say,” Carter was saying.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Annabel sighed. She went outside feeling as ethereal and misplaced as her mother. One of her mind exercises was to choose a star, pretend it was Ginger, and confide in it. She looked up and began, “I’m unhappy, Mommy. There’s nothing to do out here except cocktail parties and nature.” Even as she spoke, she heard a scuffling in the desert just beyond the pool’s walls, followed by an inhuman cry and a preoccupied silence.

  “You wouldn’t like it out here either, Mommy,” Annabel continued. “You wouldn’t tolerate it for more than five minutes.” She didn’t know what to tell her mother. Nothing sounded right to her. She certainly wasn’t going near the Big Sister debacle. To fill up some time, Annabel had offered to become a Big Sister. Her Little Sister came over to the house, and all she wanted to talk about was Girls’ Ranch. The worst thing about staying there was that they gave you hair conditioner only once a week. Plus the shampoo wasn’t the hydrating kind with natural humectants, and every girl in there had bleached hair and needed follicle nourishment. Annabel commiserated with her about this at length. Little Sister was an exceedingly shy and clumsy child, spilling a full glass of tomato juice all over the piano. This so humiliated her that she called her taxi-driver boyfriend, who arrived and drove her away before Annabel had been a Big Sister for even forty-five minutes. Later it was discovered that she’d keyed Carter’s Corvette, stuffed bananas down all the toilets, and stolen a bottle of Patrón. “She certainly knew her tequilas,” Alice had said.

  Annabel started over with another star. “Mommy, if you were me …”

  A massive object hurtled over the wall and into the swimming pool. It was the size of a motorcycle, thrashing darkly. She screamed, and it churned through the water, extinguishing the little floating candles, cracking hard against the ladder, entangling itself in the temperature duck. It sank, then struggled heavily upward. Two black nostrils stared like empty eyes.

  Carter strode out with several young men, all with drinks in hand.

  “Mr. Vineyard,” Donald said, “it’s a deer.” He jogged to the garage, where all the tools hung within their chalked-up outlines, rakes and hammers, hoses and shears. When one was taken away to be used, it looked, as far as the garage was concerned, as though it had died.

  Everyone had straggled out by now. “I can’t watch this,” the poet said, then added, “If it breaks its leg, what you have to do is call the fire department.”

  Donald ran back with a garden hose. “We’ll make a sling, perhaps we can haul it out that way.” Carter quite unexpectedly jumped into the pool. “Oh no, Mr. Vineyard,” Donald cried, “you could be struck!” Shouting, Carter’s young friends followed him in, hesitating only to kick off their shoes and remove their jackets. “Rodeo!” one yelled. The deer was sinking once again, flattening out somewhat like a carpet. The young men in their billowing shirts seemed disturbingly sexual to Annabel as they grasped parts of the animal and pushed it toward the steps, laughing and grunting, leaving behind them a wake of plastic cups and lime wedges. The deer struggled out, slid sideways, and fell back with a scrabbling crackle of hooves against the tile. Annabel was sure she saw blood in the water. Her inviting limpid pool had been transmogrified into something rank and exclusive. The animal, tipped upright on the steps once again, heaved itself from the water and in one wobbly leap vanished over the wall into the desert whence it had come. Carter’s jacket was sliced straight through; his hands were torn. The young men, too, had suffered varying degrees of damage to their clothing, which seemed to delight them. They all climbed out in high spirits, hugging and punching one another.

  Donald brought an armful of large white towels from the poolhouse. “You’re a nice man, Mr. Vineyard,” he told Carter earnestly. “A new soul in my opinion.” He dabbed at Carter’s head with a towel.

  Alice was standing beside the piano player, with whom she had become quite smitten.

  “What a macabre environmental event,” he said.

  “Now you know what I was talking about,” Alice said to Annabel.

  “What do you mean, ‘Now I know’? I don’t know anything! This doesn’t happen every time a deer falls into a swimming pool, does it?”

  Annabel wanted someone to turn off the pool light. Where was the stupid switch! The water looked murky and was still rocking against the sides of the pool. And the deer or someone had chipped her favorite decorative tile, a little mermaid with starfish on her breasts. Half of her gentle little face was gone, and who could fix that! No one could.

  Alice followed the piano player back into the house and watched him as he smoked. “You’re too much for me, kid,” he finally said. “You’ve got the look of the pilgrim all over you.”

  “That’s my friend,” she said. “Look, my boyfriend’s on death row, so I can’t do anything with you, really. We can’t have an actual love affair because of him, okay, so I just want to hang out.”

  “I love it,” he said.

  “I just want to run with you.”

  “I don’t run, dear. Goodness.”

  “I don’t mean jogging. Not that.”

  They looked at each other in amazement.

  He ground out his cigarette and lit another. “What did he do?”

  “What?”

  “To get there.”

  “Oh! It was a crime of passion.”

  “I love prisoners,” he said, blowing smoke. “Tell me though, honey, are you jammy or minty?”

  “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Straight or queer.”

  “I’m not either one.”

  “You know what they say,” he said, tapping his fingers on his knee, “When the two shall be one and the without as the within and the male with the female, neither male nor female, that’s when the party begins.” He laughed without opening his mouth.

  A car started up in the driveway, its headlights turning the bats in their threaded flight above to silver.

  “This particular party’s almost over, thank God,” he said.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” Alice said. “Where are you going, where do you live?”

  “You’re a saucy one. I live in a room, a dirty little room. You can’t see it. I’m at that time in my life when temptations abound.”

  “Do they have shapes, your temptations?” Alice asked. More people were leaving the party.

  “They have the shape of intemperate tendencies, honey.”

  “You can call me by my name,” Alice said. “It’s Alice.”

  “But I don’t want to, honey.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sherwin.”

  “It isn’t!”

  “I’ve spoiled everything again,” he sighed. “I always do.” He ground out another cigarette in the brimming ashtray. “Does that ashtray spook you?” he asked. “Sometimes they can be very spooky. Sometimes I just smoke and look at the ashtray and think, What will have happened by the time it’s full? And just when I feel I’m about to understand what the ashtray is, at the same time, with a certain wonder and even fear, I feel I’ve never understood it and I don’t understand anything.” He widened his eyes.

  She didn’t care about ashtrays. An ashtray could never perturb her like that. She simply wanted, if he ever looked away, to take one of the cigarettes he’d smoked, crushed remnant of his pleasure and need, put it into her pocket, and keep it. She wished he’d say her name.

  “Alice?” he said.

  11

  Ray felt he was pushing his luck with Merle Orlean’s credit line. Stealing without a w
eapon was fun, but it made a man less virile and flexible after a time. So he decided to settle down for a few weeks. There were mountains all around this town, sort of pretty, and it was warmer than where he’d been. This was serious heat, and Ray liked heat. He got a job at an Indian crafts shop, Morning Star Trader, by answering an ad in the newspaper. “I have experience in sales,” he told the owner. Morning Star Trader claimed they sold old pawn but didn’t. Anyone seriously into old pawn wouldn’t be caught dead in this place. Besides, where did this old pawn keep coming from? Ray didn’t believe in old pawn. He scarcely believed in history. The shop sold inconsequential jewelry, greeting cards, kachinas, sand paintings, and fetishes. There was also a table offering Mexican calacas: Here were the skeletons at the vanity table, getting married, discovering infidelities, playing instruments, feeding the birds, at the beach. Great stocking stuffers, or put them in bunny’s basket at Easter time. But the public needed no urging in this regard, thinking the calacas hilarious. The calacas flew out of there.

  What took more skill was the field wherein Ray shone, the selling of the fetishes, those tiny animals carved from bone or stone. “It’s all bullshit,” the owner had told him, “but all bullshit is relative, you know what I’m saying?” Ray did. He admired the owner, who trusted him and was never around. Ray pushed the little objects as telepathic and life-enriching. The manner that had failed him in the selling of shoes worked brilliantly here. Through a little research he’d learned that it had once been very weird with the Zunis and their fetishes, which originally had been consulted for success in hunting or to prevent sickness and defeat. The fetishes lived in special jars, where they ate and breathed and their power was contained. They were frequently washed in blood and feathers and scrubbed with pieces of hide, and repulsive objects such as human eardrums were often attached to them. They were sticky and rank from the cornmeal they were fed. Zuni beliefs were complicated and covered every known dilemma. The men had to be careful, and the women had to be even more careful than the men, because there were more things they could do wrong, such as not washing the scalps properly or failing to keep the scalp jar in good order. They had scalp jars all over the place. If a woman’s husband died—undoubtedly because of some screwup by the wife—she was obliged to mourn for a full year. At the end of the year she was supposed to have intercourse with a stranger, to whom she must present a gift he would then destroy. That part was sort of cool, Ray thought, but the custom had probably been suppressed along with so many intriguing traditions in this secular age. After awhile, the Zunis started to make things up and connections became imprecise. Their cruddy innocent world collapsed.

  In the shop, he pushed the fetishes solely as honest messengers from the world within, quiet helpful inner voices. As the customer peered into the locked glass case, Ray would begin, “The one you’re attracted to first is usually the one for you—it has something to say to you. The right one has a subtle yet powerful draw.”

  He would leave them for a moment to ponder this, then return. They were usually older women. Morning Star Trader wasn’t that great a place to meet girls. They seldom went for badger or snake; mostly wolf or bear would get the nod. If they weren’t at all serious, they would ask to see toad, possibly gila monster. These were the knickknack sort. Seldom did eagle impress them, perhaps being too close emblematically to that out-of-fashion colonial effect once so popular in the overpopulated and spiritually malnourished Northeast, a region from which many of his customers had recently fled. Eagle’s power had been compromised.

  If they seemed hesitant, Ray would ask, “Do you wish to hold one in your hand?” He peddled the fetishes as focusing powers, as channelers with the ability to lead one away from puzzlement and distress. His odd face—suggesting, as it did, fate—only seemed to help. “If you’re responsive, they can be very useful,” he would say quietly, though sometimes he’d get wound up and suggest that mole could help in strengthening the immune system or that falcon enhanced one’s communication with a pet. But mostly he supported the big vague picture.

  He had suffered only one return in two weeks working at the store, from a woman he’d encouraged to go off with mountain lion. The lions weren’t moving. Ray felt it was because their carver insisted on making their shoulders too big and their heads too small; things looked screwed up. He’d told the woman that this particular fetish protected the traveler. He didn’t know why he had come up with that angle—little monkey messing up his wave—but it turned out this was precisely what the woman wanted to hear, and she took two to double-dip their assistance. By the end of the day she was back, the engine block on her Buick having cracked before she’d even gotten home.

  “Car travel isn’t real traveling,” Ray said. He could barely enlarge on this before he was forced to admit that the store did not provide cash refunds. He was about to suggest she consult white wolf to remind her of the transitoriness of events, but she threw the fetishes—still wrapped in tissue, not even out of the bag—at him and left. He was replacing them in the case when another customer came in, a moody-looking girl in dusty black. Ray felt composed; he’d pocketed seventy dollars on the mountain lions, and the store still had them. When he began his riff, the girl looked shocked.

  “Please,” Alice said, “you’re polluting this for me.”

  “Well, fine,” Ray said.

  “Give me a break.”

  He made an ironic bow and went over to the calacas table. There were the skeletons at the mirror, at the typewriter, taking photographs of one another, walking their little skeleton dogs, in the bath. He had a headache. The little monkey was dragging a useless limb across the inside of his head, mopping inside it with its soft floppy arm. This was how his headaches were: neither piercing nor pounding, they were just the little monkey’s nerve-dead arm swinging back and forth. He wanted to close up, go back to his room, have a beer, get the monkey comfortable and count the money he’d saved. The windfall with the lions had really kicked his savings up. He wanted to buy some gear and find some wilderness and camp out for a while. He’d already lifted a pretty decent backpack from an unlocked car. Astonishing how many cars remained unlocked in this day and age. But he had a ways to go before he’d outfitted himself properly. “Sometimes in the wilderness you have to rely more on your equipment than yourself,” as the ads said.

  “Have to close up in a few minutes,” he called to the girl.

  Alice was crouched in front of the case, her fingers pressed against the glass. Then she stood up and rested her arms on the top, still looking.

  “Don’t lean on that,” he called. “It could break, easy.” His mouth inadvertently broke into a grimace, for the little monkey had stopped with the sweeping and sort of lost its balance and stumbled, as it often did. Once, when Ray was ten, he’d gone to a psychiatrist and tried to describe this sensation. “It’s like it slips sometimes and falls through glass—thin, thin glass like ice, and levels and levels of it …” he’d ventured.

  “That’s sex, son,” the doctor said warmly. “That’s puberty. That’s your hormones talking.”

  “Sex?” Ray said.

  “I’ve heard sex described that way a thousand times,” the psychiatrist said. “Let me tell you something about girls while we’re having this conversation. Girls have hair down there. It can come as a shock to the uninformed.”

  Young Ray felt like telling him that to reduce any mysterious feeling to the sexual was to grievously mutilate its true relevance. He had told him in the only way he could at ten. He’d told him to fuck off. And he hadn’t mentioned the little monkey to anyone since, not that this had quieted it down or consoled it any.

  “You’re determined to break that, aren’t you?” Ray snapped at Alice. He picked up a bottle of Windex and a roll of towels and made a great show of cleaning the glass while she stood there.

  “I’d like to see that one,” Alice said.

  “Raven,” he said. “That’s a hundred and eight dollars.”

  “I still
want to see it.”

  Reluctantly, he removed it from the case. He wanted her to assume that she shouldn’t, at that price, expect to hold it herself. “This one is associated with transformational powers. As a confident—”

  Alice looked at him—and not at his mouth, either, where most people got stuck. “Even though they’re made by people just out to make a buck, you shouldn’t mess with their abilities like you do.” She snatched the raven carving from his hand and turned it over. “Why does it say eighteen dollars?”

  “Whoops,” he said. “Guess my eyes get tired at the end of the day.” There was an unpleasant silence. “If it’s a gift, you can get that price off with a little bit of nail polish remover. I think the great transformer is money, you know what I mean? It can turn into anything. It’s practically alive, man,” he said, excited by his insight.

  Alice studied it, ran her grimy thumb across it.

  “Why don’t you take it?” Ray said suddenly. “Just take it, I’m giving it to you.” He liked doing this, saying the exact opposite of what he really felt, being nice to people he disliked. To be unnatural and spontaneous, to create confusion and unease, was satisfying. He thought of the little monkey doing what he shouldn’t be able to do, seeing through those sewn-shut lids, nudging a peanut with that insensate limb, arguing in a persuasive language never heard before against protracted and untimely death. “Say ‘Thank you,’ ” Ray prompted.

  “I won’t accept it.” The fetish made a little click as she set it down on the glass. “It’s not for my friend. I mean, it was supposed to be for her, but it isn’t. I think you’ve defiled this whole case,” she added.

  “I was only joking,” Ray said. “Why would I give you something for nothing?”

  The moment she left, the little monkey recommenced its dragging, stricken circuit in his head.

  12

  Carter had bought some satin sheets in the hope they might help him sleep.

  Ginger sat in the chair by the empty vanity table. “So how did your day go?” she asked.