Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“They’re okay,” Alice granted. “There was that herb that Odysseus took to protect him from Circe’s magic. It saved him from her enchantments while everybody else got turned into swine.”

Annabel felt her brow wrinkling. “God, Alice, that was so long ago. It didn’t even happen anyway, did it?”

Alice mused over her weeds, which had wilted dramatically in her hand.

“Is this school hard?” Annabel said. “I certainly hope not.”

Alice shrugged.

“I hate Cs,” Annabel said. “They practically make me nauseous.”

“They don’t grade here.”

What a sensible grading policy! Annabel now sat quite contentedly in the uncomfortable sun, no longer feeling uneasy about the cats or the disquieting pregnant woman or her intentions to ditch Alice once school began. Her heart opened to Alice and to the simple justice of things, life’s rightness, its essential fairness. Things just were . Or could be . “You’re kidding!” she said delightedly.

“Yes,” Alice said.

Annabel wanted to make Alice cry, just once. That was her goal, to bring tears to her eyes on some subject. Then she’d say, “I didn’t mean it,” and console her to the extent possible.

“You should have seen your tail drop!” Alice said.

“ ‘You should have seen your tail drop.’ I hate it when you say things like that. You sound retarded. Or like somebody’s grandmother.”

“My granny met my grandpa ‘at the fair.’ Do you know what that means? It means it was love at first sight.”

The woman in the red dress entered their courtyard. She stood with her hands on her stomach and peered at the girls.

“Uh-oh,” Alice said.

“What’s the matter with you?” Annabel hissed. “Birth. There’s nothing wrong with birth.”

The woman came up to them. She was really not much older than they were. Her hair was a mazy mass of dark curls, and she had bright blank eyes. “Would you like to feel my tummy?” she asked Annabel.

“Oh no, thank you,” Annabel said. “Thanks a lot. Really, that’s very kind but not now? Not now,” she said.

The woman smiled at her slowly and contemptuously.

“Hi, Candy,” Alice said glumly.

The popping sound of rifles miles away rolled down the mountain. It wasn’t robbery or homicide, rather the continuing subjugation and subtraction of nature in full swing.

“I lost my job,” Candy said. “Teaching kindergarten. I never thought they’d fire me. I thought they’d be afraid of a lawsuit, but the kids got on my nerves the other day and I sent them all away. Just opened the door and told them to toddle homeward. A lot of those kids didn’t even know where they lived, much to my surprise. Their parents think they’re so smart, but they have zero survival skills. Social skills they have. They’re polite and they share and they show sympathy and consideration, but has anyone evaluated the importance of social skills in a situation where one is faced with a stampeding mob or a knife-wielding lunatic? It makes me want to laugh.”

But she was only smiling again at Annabel, contemptuously.

“When’s it going to be, Candy?” Alice asked.

“Two weeks. They promised two weeks.” The woman’s hands seemed determined to grasp Annabel’s own. They were small hands, the dimpled kind. They feinted about. “I am alone,” she said to Annabel.

“What about the father?” Annabel heard herself saying. “The daddy of your baby should take an active interest.”

“The daddy? You mean the perp?” Candy’s smile had become more reserved. “But he’s so busy. He’s the bouncer at the White Shark, that neon country-and-western dance hall, he’s the guy who patrols on the horse.”

“Oh, I saw his picture in the paper!” Annabel exclaimed. “I thought he was so fly. That ‘Acre of Dancin’ and Romancin’,’ I’d love to go there.”

Candy gaped at her.

“The cute ones sometimes try to take advantage,” Annabel said uncomfortably.

“Who is this — this idiot?” Candy screamed. Then she spat, just missing Annabel’s perfect toes, and moved heavily off, muttering.

“That is so disgusting,” Annabel said. “What if that had hit my foot? What’s wrong with her, anyway?”

“Candy’s tale,” Alice said.

“Yes, what is her story ?” Annabel demanded, patting her toes.

“When she was seven months’ pregnant, there wasn’t a heartbeat anymore, but the doctors didn’t want to do a cesarean or induce labor so she has to carry it around stillborn full-term and she’s trying to make a new world cataclysmic situation out of it. The cycle has been broken, the web of life torn, dead world coming, et cetera …”

“Et cetera? You can’t possibly be as cold and uncaring and unfeeling as you sound. That is the most wretched story I—”

“… everything reversed, everything its opposite and out of order. Everything dead dead dead but continuing. She keeps trying to get the media involved. She wants to urge people not to make the event vulnerable to cult group misapplication, but of course no one wants to talk to her. Not even the cults are interested. She has potent materials to work with, but she lacks charisma.”

Annabel wanted to go back to her own room, the peach-colored room that had been painted with the special brush in the special way that made simple wallboard resemble the finest linen. She wanted to lie down and put cucumber slices over her eyes.

“And that spitting, how far does she think she’s going to get with that spitting?”

Annabel wanted to turn up the air-conditioning in her room as high as possible and curl up beneath a blanket. Annabel wondered if Alice was experiencing the same blotting up of the desert’s colors, as though a giant gray sponge preceded them as they walked.

“That guy on the horse is such a jerk. He dumped her so fast. Don’t go near him,” Alice said. “He licks frogs to get high.”

“Nobody would lick a frog,” Annabel said without much conviction.

At the edge of the school grounds, a paper fluttered from a mock orange tree. It was a blurry picture of a cat with a little conical birthday hat on its head.

LOST WHITE CAT NAMED TU-TU.

TU-TU IS DEAF!

“Please, Alice.”

“I am not responsible for Tu-Tu’s disappearance.”

“Oh, please please please,” Annabel begged.

“I’ve never seen that cat before in my life.” Alice looked into the cat’s crazed photocopied gaze. Surely it had been the indignity of the hat that had caused Tu-Tu to seek a different life.

“Please,” Annabel was saying, “promise me you won’t kill cats for the time being.”

Trying to make the world just and natural only makes it more unjust and more unnatural, Alice thought. “Okay,” she said.

“I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown for a second. Everything was pale, this blinding pale and … trembling. Is there any place around here we can get some bottled water?”

“Sure,” Alice said.

“The kind that’s treated by reverse osmosis and enhanced with minerals? That’s the superior kind. You have to look on the label.” After a while, she said, “That poor Candy.”

“I think not being born is ecologically responsible,” Alice said. She wasn’t about to go all soft over Candy. “It has more sense than its mother.”

Annabel wanted to commemorate her mother’s birthday by having a nice dinner party for just the three of them, her mother and father and herself, with lamb chops and candles and some lovely dessert.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Carter said.

“I think some ritual restored to our lives would be nice, Daddy. I want to share some of my memories of Mommy with her. If you don’t share memories, they’ll disappear, and we’re responsible for what we forget, Daddy.”