Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

After listening to it for a while, Ray determined that it was the most depressing music he’d ever heard.

“Hugo Wolf,” she said reverently.

“It’s really something,” he said. “It makes you kind of want to tear your throat out.”

“Wolf couldn’t handle it,” she said. “Mahler used to visit him in the mental hospital. Mahler could handle it and should be considered the lesser man for it. What do you think of Schumann?”

“Schumann,” Ray said cautiously.

“One listens in vain,” the driver screamed, “for anything extraordinary in Schumann’s last works. They are simply weak!”

They passed burnt acres of land. The trees stood the same way they had before, stoically, in rows the same height, yet all were black. They thought they were still doing their job, but they weren’t. Bleak, mad chords filled the Cadillac. Ray rubbed the left side of his mouth; its cold and rubbery feel always gave him comfort.

A dog was trotting across the charred land that did not go on forever. Ray could see the end ahead where it became green again.

The woman slammed on the brakes. “Look,” she said, “a pet. We need a pet.” She certainly was starting from scratch, Ray thought. The big car went into a squat body wallow as it made the turn.

“Look,” Ray said, “this could end badly. I stopped once when I had a car. I saw a lost dog on a hot day trotting along just like this one, his tongue hanging out, no exit in sight. So I turn around, pull up behind him, get a water bottle out, fish around for some kind of dish, can’t find one, was going to pour some in my hand for him. Get out, walk toward him, he tucks his tail between his legs and tears out into the highway where he’s promptly chewed to pieces by the passing parade.” He looked at her and nodded, assuring her that this was true. He recalled crouching there, his hand extended, in the same tiny blue flowers the dog had been trotting through.

“That’s because you’re a fucking loser, man,” the driver said. She sped back, heaved the car around, and pulled off the macadam onto the crispy ground. The dog’s ears went back, but he soldiered on, a little faster maybe. The woman got out. She was wearing a denim jacket covered with pins and glittering buttons over a dirty pair of peach-colored tights. She was a spooky little thing, Ray thought. He reached for the blue chips and stuffed as many as he could into his mouth. She stood there and clapped her hands the way his parents used to when they wanted a light to go on in the house … that’s the kind of lights they had. His parents succumbed to gadgetry of all kinds. Ray put some chips into his coat pocket and kept chewing. The dog hurried onward, the woman walking and then running after it. Ray closed his eyes. There was the long shriek of a semi’s air horn. He knew that he had to exit the car, that it would be unwise to remain in the funereal Fleetwood much longer.

The woman wrenched the door open. “You fuck, you loser!” she screamed. “How did you do that, you sick fuck?” Ray opened his eyes. Her own were dry but bloodshot. She possessed disturbing strength. His hat flew off as she removed him from the car and he stumbled onto the cinders and tore a hole in one knee of his jeans. More cinders rained on his bare head as the car scrambled away. He groped for his hat. The little monkey was climbing the walls in his head, making clear that it wanted out. Any avenue along the capillaries would do. There was an awful craving to get out. Ray didn’t feel well. He ate a few more chips and touched the corner of his mouth for a while. It felt like the hooded towel he’d favored when he was a little kid with little rubbery animals on it from Noah’s Ark. When he got up, he didn’t look at the roadway but kept his eyes on the ground. A wallet was lying there, formerly belonging to one Merle Orleans, the poor bastard. The picture on the license showed a fellow who didn’t have a clue that he’d bought his last Cadillac. Ray had found wallets before, sometimes in the darnedest places. With Merle’s collection of credit cards, he could buy a used truck and some socks, definitely some socks, plus a warmer coat, and gloves. He had to get his own means of transportation and stop relying on the fickle grace of lunatics. Merle Orleans might very well be moving on into the afterlife. He didn’t examine the face too closely as a matter of decorum.

In a few miles, Ray was long out of the burn and looking down into a valley. To his left was a runaway-truck ramp, where a semi lay wadded in loose gravel. He’d never seen one actually in use before. If you were a runaway-truck ramp, you probably had to wait a long time for some action. He assumed that this was the truck that had come between the gloomy chick in the Fleetwood and the pet of her desiring, and that she’d run the driver off the road. On the crumpled cab were dark silhouettes of animals — dogs, deer, birds — with lines drawn through rows of nine. What a fun-loving dude! Nothing was moving inside the cab. This was so almost morally acceptable, Ray thought. A police car was nearby, its lights pulsing.

“Oh dear,” Ray said to the policeman, who ignored him.

Ray used Merle Orlean’s plastic to buy himself a truck at a place called Gary’s Beautiful Cars. The truck was matte gray with jacklights and chrome wheels and was an exception in Gary’s lot, because most of his vehicles looked beat up and hard driven. Ray drove a hundred miles and then, at the urging of a large billboard, turned into the vast parking area of the Lariat Lounge.

The lounge itself was a rankly dim establishment illuminated only by a large TV. On the screen was a powerboat race, where some mishap had occurred and was being rebroadcast. A boat named Recondita Armonia had grazed and skimmed over The Bat/Frank’s Marine , decapitating both the throttleman and the driver.

The bartender greeted Ray by saying, “You’d think that’s just a helmet flying there, but there’s a head inside.”

“Wow,” Ray said. “Where is this?”

“Earlier on, a guy did a classic skip-and-stuff and killed himself too, but they haven’t been showing that one as much.”

“Wow,” Ray said again. “Where is this?”

The bartender looked at him.

“I mean, when?” Ray said, groping for the germane.

“Whatya wanna drink, pal?” the bartender said. “I don’t got all day.”

Ray ordered a beer. Though it wasn’t very cold, he didn’t want to mention it and further discredit himself in the bartender’s eyes. You just couldn’t walk into a bar; Ray was always forgetting that. Entering a bar took thought and preparation. The desired persona had to be determined, then assembled — in Ray’s case, practically from scratch — and projected.

He gazed up at the screen, where the little helmet was tumbling over and over through the air. It’s got to be Florida, he mused. That Easter-egg green water is definitely Floridian. He marveled for a moment about being here, thousands of miles away in Arizona, watching this balletic moment with hundreds of thousands of other people from coast to coast, all as one in the great world of human consciousness, observing and absorbing, all thinking pretty much the same thing: man’s brains are still in that thing, probably saying whoaa and trying to cogitate this problem through …

He ordered another beer, which tasted just the slightest shade warmer than the first, then retreated with determined nonchalance into the establishment’s other room. In here it was darker, and by error he seated himself directly beside the only other occupied table. Two men had been talking, and one of them pushed the curtain back from a filthy window so that more light fell upon the scene, a gaping desert light much disoriented at finding itself inside.