Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“They were such excellent pies,” her granny said.

“That billiard parlor wasn’t there before either, was it?” her poppa said. “Can’t remember what was there, in fact.”

“Care to shoot some pool?” her granny challenged.

“I wouldn’t mind a little four-ball carom,” her poppa said. “A little four-ball never hurt anybody.” He winked at Alice. “Keeping her mind off Zipper,” he said. They vanished into the merry gloom of the pool hall.

Alice wandered around to the back of the pet shop. She really didn’t mean to enter, she just pressed against one of the doors and it gave a little. A flimsy chain dropped between the door and the jamb, and she popped it easily.

It was warm inside. She heard some rustling and chirping, the whistling hiss of the aquariums’ aerators. This is Alice your savior, she thought. She smacked her knee painfully against a grooming table. Most of the cages were without residents, but somehow in an unpromising way. Had the proprietors sold all their captives, or had they just fled the city, one step ahead of their creditors at the breeding farms and puppy mills? The bins of barbecue-flavored pigs’ ears remained. Alice didn’t think Fury enjoyed those things at all, but rather hid them, sensitive as he was.

She filled up a shopping cart with some simpler life forms — lizards and toads, snakes and mice — and rolled it right back out through the door she’d popped. Society, as a rule, did not trouble anyone pushing a shopping cart. The further a cart was taken from the store where it belonged, the more deference was paid to the possibly unstable individual who had taken charge of it. Alice wanted to take the creatures back to her room and talk to them — debrief them, as it were — but when she drew near the house she saw that her granny and poppa had returned, pool playing having been less larky than they’d hoped. Alice took her refugees to a nearby wash instead and gravely liberated them, though they seemed to have little instinct for freedom. They had been considered food for too long and had undoubtedly seen too much.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that last meal I had, Carter.”

“I never went back there,” he said firmly.

“That was surimi I ate, wasn’t it. Why on earth did you let me eat surimi?”

“You didn’t want to order what I ordered, darling. You never would.”

“That’s because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake. I caught on to that trick early in our marriage, Carter.”

“I don’t know what surimi is, Ginger.”

“It’s a fish paste, a disgusting fish paste that’s then colored and fluffed up to make simulated seafood like simulated crab.”

“Did you learn about it there?”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Darling, I’m not —”

“You just pick information up here, in the course of things. I’ve been speaking to a fisherman.”

“Not IXOUS himself!”

“Don’t show off.”

“IXOUS, darling. IXOUS! This is stupendous. Jesus Christ God’s Son. The Savior!”

“I hate it when you show off that tiresome St. George’s education.”

“But this means that things fall into place after all. Why, this is good news indeed!”

“I don’t know what you’re so thrilled about,” Ginger said. “This individual is from Louisiana. He only fished for sport. He was a real estate broker, one of those indefatigable, extroverted risk takers who fished to relax.”

“That really got my heart to pounding,” Carter admitted.

“He told me a little story. Sensitive men don’t have to be violets, Carter. He had invented this little clamplike grill, but without any of those grill thingies on it, and when he caught a fish, he’d take it off the hook and put it in this device and he’d fillet it right there. Slice, flip over, slice. Two swift, economical movements and then back into the water with what was left of the fish. He never thought a thing about it, and neither did anyone else.”

Whoa, Carter thought to his heart, which seemed determined to escape from his chest’s ribbed stall.

“Except this one time, the fish just stayed there right by the boat, breathing through its gills and moving its tail even though it was just bones.” Ginger paused. “And it looked at him.”

“Looked?” Carter said.

“Yes, just stayed there and looked.”

“What kind of fish was it?”

“A redfish, I think he said.”

“Did it say anything?”

“Of course not. It just looked at him for the longest time. And then it sank from sight.”

Carter could not hide his disappointment. Ginger was never going to get anywhere, wherever she was, if she just sat around shooting the breeze with some guy from Louisiana of all places. Sportsman’s Paradise.

“Did he continue to fish after this incident?” Carter asked sourly.

“Not so much after that,” Ginger said dreamily. But then she glared at Carter. “I don’t know why I try to share anything with you, since you always miss the point. It wasn’t an incident . It was a moment , a meaningful moment that changed his life.”

“I don’t mean to be crude, Ginger, but he’s dead now, isn’t he? His existence has been superannuated, right along with his meaningful moments.”

“Don’t think you’re beyond being dead, Carter. You’re not beyond being dead, not by a long shot.”

“You know where I think you are, darling? I think you’re in Purgatory!”

“Oh, for Chrissakes,” she said crossly.

“Is there a mountain there? And a kindly curriculum?” Dante flooded thrillingly back. Dante Alighieri! And the room where Romance Languages was taught at St. George’s; the smell of floor wax and the brightness of the boys’ white shirts, light rippling against the walls and the snow falling, vanishing into the sea.

“You’re back in that second-rate prep school, aren’t you?” Ginger said. “Let me tell you what it’s like here. I’ll give you just a hint. If we see an ant heap, we don’t think of it as an ant heap.”

“No?”

“It’s not an ant heap at all. That’s the way it is here. It takes some getting used to.”

Ginger was preparing to go. Carter could feel the grotesque gathering of resources this always entailed.

“I’ll give you another hint too, Mr. Clueless,” she said. “There isn’t any mountain.”

Alice couldn’t decide between the wrist-lock slingshot and a BB air pistol. The latter would be more accurate at a distance, but she didn’t want to leave a lot of spent ammunition all over the place. Something might eat it, a tortoise or a quail, so she settled on the slingshot. It’s a beginning, she told Annabel. But it took her longer than she expected to master the weapon.

Annabel said, “I think maybe you shouldn’t go after the ones wearing those little warning bells on their collars.”

“Bells don’t make any difference,” Alice said.

“But it shows the owner’s trying to be considerate,” Annabel said.

Alice had a little folding shovel she carried in case her efforts were successful. Quickly the cat would disappear down a hole in the desert.

“Those signs on the phone poles are kind of getting to me, too,” Annabel said. “Like Tina.”

Tina is a member of the family. Please help!

“And Poco Bueno Trouble.”

Poco Bueno Trouble needs his medicine!

“I don’t know you very well, Alice, but I think killing a cat would be beneath you in many ways.”

“Progressive social theories are beginning to consider murder a matter of little concern,” Alice said. “Anyway, cats are false figures. People have them around so they don’t have to address real animals.”