Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Never, never will I. She’d flip out if I did.”

“What is it you want, Ginger?” Carter asked. His stomach shrieked, then fell silent.

“I want you to acknowledge your responsibilities. You’re a married man, and marriage is a sacrament. It is indissoluble. I’m mortified by this Donald business. Mortified. You’ve turned into an old queen, Carter. You look so silly when you’re infatuated. Your eyes practically cross.”

Suddenly, the bedroom door began shaking in its frame. The ties, hanging there on a hook, slumped to the floor. The door flew open, and Annabel stood yelling in full nightmare.

“Pieces — in all the corners. Small, but too big — little pieces—”

Ginger evaporated as Carter hurried toward his daughter. He wore enormous blue boxer shorts.

“Left-handed people die sooner,” Annabel hollered, flailing out at him and hitting him in the mouth.

“Not true,” he managed to say. “It isn’t, no, none of it.”

“Oh Daddy, I’m sorry.” Annabel said. She went back to bed. Carter went to the kitchen and made another drink. He pushed ice under his lip, sliding it along his gum. Nobody he knew was left-handed. He put Tristan and Isolde on and sat in the dark. He loved Tristan . All meaning lay in the things its characters didn’t do or say; everything vibrated within the stillness of the characters, poised for actions that they postponed indefinitely. Opera was wonderful, Carter thought happily. An art devoted to love and death and the cryptic alliance between them. An art devoted to the definition and interchangeability of the sexes, to madness and drink and blasphemy! The characters of opera obey neither moral nor social law, which was pretty much what he’d been telling Donald. He sat in the dark listening to everything happening darkly and invisibly. When it was over, he still sat there. He supposed he should have outgrown Wagner by now. He wanted to throw a party, fill the house with people. Use that piano. He’d been sold on the house because of the existent piano in the otherwise empty rooms. He’d never had a piano before. It had yet to be utilized for anything except to display Ginger’s photograph and, more recently, Donald’s weekly flower arrangement. Donald. He was such a talented young man. Carter was definitely going to throw a party, fill this place with some life.

Ray Webb was trying to sell shoes in Houston, Texas, universally acknowledged as this planet’s place of penance. He knew no one. He hadn’t a single friend. He hadn’t had a friend since he was eight, actually — that little bald-headed girl in rehab had liked him — and now he was nineteen, drifting across the country, working, and stealing now and then. He wanted to be a waiter but was a little wobbly with the trays, and people didn’t like watching his mouth as he reeled off the specials. He’d kept those jobs for about two minutes. If the little bald-headed girl came in for a pair of shoes, he wondered, would they recognize each other? Of course she wouldn’t still be eight. They’d had some good talks once. Or rather, she had talked at him. He couldn’t speak very well because of his stroke, which is why he was in rehab to begin with. The little bald-headed girl had been struck by lightning. She’d been out picking blueberries, skipping along from lovely high bush to lovely high bush, unaware of the darkening day, and Whup! Nine times out of ten she could guess how many pennies were in a person’s pocket. Being struck by lightning had given her special powers.

Ray didn’t drink or do drugs but various ischemic incidents had given him an eager, erratic nature and a variety of facial contortions that allowed permanent employment to elude him. He hated selling shoes. He wanted to sell boots, but the manager disliked him. Even so, Ray performed his office enthusiastically. After only a week he’d developed a patter he was proud of, even though the better it got, the more wary his customers became. He couldn’t help that.

“You’ve got to take your time in selecting shoes,” he began. “You have to choose the shoes for you. You don’t want a shoe that’s going to end up looking at you with reproach when you take it off at night, offended by all you did or didn’t do. Some shoes just don’t want to carry you through life. You can’t tell this about them in a store — in stores they adopt a neutral air that makes choosing difficult. But our shoes’ route is our life’s course. Selecting them is an important decision.”

“I’ll have to think this over,” his latest customer said.

He put a couple of pieces of gum in his mouth and went back to the storeroom.

The manager followed him. “You’re not a drinker, huh?”

Ray looked at him, chewing. “I hate alcohol. I never touch it,” he said thickly. “I have no respect for it.”

“You sure have the personality of a drinker,” the manager said. “It’s like you’re a dry drunk. It’s weird.”

Ray said nothing. He was enjoying his gum. The early stages of chewing always reminded him of the part of In the Penal Colony where they put the sugar-coated gag in the condemned man’s mouth just before the immense tattooing machine starts needling him to death. It was his favorite story. He thought the machine was so cool, but no one wanted to talk to him about it. The image was somewhat sadistic he supposed, but mostly the ordeal was about enlightenment. Or about guilt, since man’s guilt is never to be doubted. Kafka had wanted to be a waiter, too, in his own restaurant. Probably no one would have gone into the place. Ray wished he’d been an academic, but the opportunity had never come up.

“You annoy me,” the manager was saying.

The exhilarating if disgusting sweetness of the gum was gone now. Ray looked around for a place to put the wad, where it might cause some unpleasantness.

The manager told him to check the boxes on the sale table. People would come in and fiddle around with the boxes, sometimes placing their old worn-out shoes in a box and walking out with a new pair. If it happened on your watch, you were docked several hours’ pay. Several hours’ pay for each instance of switched shoes. Ray gloomily examined a dozen boxes, three of which contained footwear not in its first youth. When had this happened? He must have been dreaming today.

The manager looked pleased. “I’m going for panda,” he said. “No lunch break for you today.” The manager loved Chinese food, believing it conferred upon him a sort of individuality.

Ray sat on a stool and thought about the little bald-headed girl. Something else had been wrong with her, too; being hit by lightning wasn’t her only problem. She’d been on his mind a lot lately. She was sharing space with the monkey in his head, though the monkey still ruled. Ray started to fidget. Air potato sewer vine, he thought. This was not good. He made a circuit of his department, then peered around a partition at the boots. This was a different world, a man’s world, though every bit as empty. He slipped around and into it and picked up a pair of blue snakeskin boots. He put a big black-brimmed hat on his head and picked up a leather bag with a shoulder strap. He pushed the boots into the bag, nobody there to stop him. He kept moving, out of the store and into the fat ventricle of the mall, moving quickly and feeling superb, as though slaloming through powdered snow.

He glided past the fetid food court, where he saw the manager pointing at the picture of a plate of food. That’s how people ate these days. They pointed at pictures, then were served something indistinguishable from its portrayal. Ray’s stomach growled. The little monkey in his head stretched full out beside an empty, dented dish. Ray didn’t like it when the monkey just lay there like that, its poor hair barely covering its body. It made Ray afraid.