Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

He slipped into a restroom right before the exit to the parking lot. The place was filthy and smelled strongly of pizza. He removed his sneakers and pulled on the magnificent snakeskin boots. They were a size too large, he’d have to get thicker socks. The hat was good, it fit better than the boots, though it called attention to his mouth, which the stroke had pulled down. Still, the hat made his mouth look potent, as if it were just about to express something important. With the hat, he looked like he and the world had some plans. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of a hat before. Good-bye Houston! He would miss only his sometime excursions to the Rothko Chapel, where he had made several shy attempts at surrendering to that artist’s dark demands. Man’s whole vision was held together with rabbit-skin glue, he’d been told.

The fat man was in Teepee Ten and Ray in Teepee Two. The sign on the highway said “Sleep in a Wigwam Tonight!” and Ray thought the man was going to go into cardiac arrest with excitement. He wanted to stand Ray to a night in a concrete teepee on old Route 66, the mother highway, and Ray said fine. He’d always taken for granted the bizarre impulses of others, particularly those who picked him up on life’s long and winding road. He’d been hitching north for two days, and mostly people had food in their cars that they shared with him. The fat man had only a bag of tangerines. Ray didn’t know they even made tangerines anymore. The fat man said he wouldn’t buy him dinner, but he’d buy him breakfast in the morning.

In his teepee, Ray took a long, hot shower. He liked taking showers until the hot water ran out, but this hot water kept coming. It would not be thwarted. It was like it was challenging him or something. Finally he gave up. He stepped out and, since he couldn’t find any towels, dried himself with a couple of washcloths. His feet had started to blister from the beautiful boots, and he tore a pillowcase into strips and wound and bound his feet. He felt as resourceful as the Cub Scout he had once been. He hoped all his cub mates were dead, the little bastards. They were always going on camping trips and catching chipmunks under pots and setting fire to them with white gas. They were always hanging around canals and shooting arrows into manatees, pretending they were whales. Once they’d even captured a Key deer by lobbing baseball bats and stunning it. This was in Florida, where a boy had to take part in a certain number of monstrous customs on his way to manhood.

Ray had never cared for Florida; he had been born in Washington State, but they’d moved, after his mother’s third miscarriage, from a town where everyone had miscarriages, where the fish in the river were soft as bread, the trees warty with fungus, and half the dogs three-legged. It was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but plucky downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave. He would never go back there, of course. It had probably been condemned by now anyway, the whole place buried underground in drums.

Ray lay naked on the bed, staring at his wrapped feet and feeling vaguely dismembered. They probably weren’t dead at all, his cub mates. They probably had jobs in primate labs, hosing out the cages, keeping the electrodes clean, the suturing thread on hand, the trepanning saws sharp, the decerebration tools sterilized. When monkeys were taught to use sign language, they’d sign Please. Please. Hello. Hello. Big Boy be good . They bypassed the chitchat. Help , they’d sign. Lonely. Cold. Michael good girl, good .

Ray had been obsessed with lab animals since a creepy therapist had told him after his stroke that a little monkey had given his life so that Ray could get better. Ray hated therapists, the smiles, the loose white clothes, the cheeriness. They were all creepy. “Vivisection in controlled laboratory experiments results in better treatment for little victims like you,” the therapist had said. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you different. And now you’ve learned a new word today, haven’t you? Vivisection . It’s not a bad word.” Well, fuck that, Ray had thought at the time, but he was afraid. The little monkey bothered him; he felt the little monkey hadn’t wanted to be his friend. He’d given it a place in his head — by now its haunt of many years — but it still didn’t want to be his friend.

“Ray?” the fat man whispered at the door to the teepee. Ray didn’t move. He lay quietly on his bed, idly wondering what happened to that child who’d been raised by apes in Africa. Some farmers had found him near Lake Tanganyika and dragged him off, cleaned him up, dressed him in little Levi’s and a flannel shirt, and put him in an orphanage. But he was too late for language, and he couldn’t manage to open doors. Knobs and latches eluded him. The little kid was probably a grown fuddled man by now, longing to be groomed by loving hairy fingers.

“Ray?” the fat man said. “I know you’re there. I like big wide tits. Do you like big wide tits?”

Ray’s stomach was growling, and he was sure the fat man could hear it.

“You’re such a disappointment, Ray,” the fat man said.

Ray rolled over on his stomach and tried to go to sleep. He crushed the pillows against his ears. He’d heard that if you murdered someone when you were sleeping, you wouldn’t be held responsible. You’d be acquitted in a court of law.

The next morning Ray found a coil of human excrement outside his door. He had to stop accepting rides from people who had peculiar agendas. He felt a rattling in his brain, a sound as though of something chained, knocking around an empty pan. It was midmorning. Ray had opened the door to see what time it was, as there were no windows in the teepees. The cement of the structure was curved backward from the door and painted in colored stripes to suggest blankets or skins. The day was clear and cold. The shit, actually, had begun to freeze. He saw a Chicano girl in a yellow windbreaker pushing a housekeeping cart toward him. She was accompanied by one of those strange, hairless dogs with small heads that the Indians once upon a time had raised to eat. This one was wearing a knitted sweater, its legs trembling from the cold. Still, the dog must dig being outside, Ray thought. Anyplace but the kitchen. He nudged the shit with the toe of his boot, then picked it up and lobbed it ten yards into one of the trashcans painted to look like a tom-tom. The girl looked at him with disdain.

“Are you leaving today?” she asked.

“Where would I go?” Ray said, but this failed to charm her.

“If you’re staying, you’ve got to pay another fourteen dollars by eleven o’clock.”

“Twenty-three hundred hours, huh?” Ray maintained his crooked smile, but she pushed past him, all bright coat and double-black hair, the dog vibrating at her side.

In less than an hour, Ray was out on the highway again. He was curious as to what his brain had in mind. It was very quiet. Tall, slender pines grew in ordered ranks along the road. They all had the same DNA. If one sickened, they all did. They harbored identical secrets and had limited careers. Even the ravens found them boring, the ravens particularly. Log trucks whipped by. He was in a national forest, Land of Many Uses. There was the febrile smell of laboring machines.

A pearl-colored Fleetwood Brougham swept past at terrific speed, then braked and fishtailed backward. Ray ran up to it, his boots whistling softly, and opened the huge door. The driver was small and wiry; her face looked damp and her eyes were dilated, and in Ray’s opinion she’d stolen the car for sure. An open bag of blue corn chips was propped on the dash. He looked at it and felt weak. They drove in silence, Ray imagining pleading and weeping coming from the trunk. The driver abruptly turned on the tape deck.