Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

The men had been telling stories, and they waved Ray right in on the hearing of one, as though he’d been with them all the while, had departed only for a moment, and had now come back.

“So he spends Christmas Day in a motel room with my sixteen-year-old daughter.”

“Jesus. Christmas Day.”

“Disappeared right after the stockings. She came home that night, but it took me and my buddy until New Year’s Eve to find him.”

“You was always good friends, I recall.”

“ Good friends. No problem up to then between me and Modesto. My little girl can be a troublemaker sometimes, I’d be the first to admit it. So Modesto has this girlfriend he’s crazy about, and she’s got a little kid. It’s Modesto’s little kid. He’s crazy about the both of them, but she’s out of town for Christmas visiting her mother. She’s in Bisbee. Her mother runs one of those cute-as-hell motels over there.”

The man smiled at Ray, who couldn’t help but wonder why they had befriended him.

“So I say to Modesto, when we found him, ‘You’ve got a choice here, my friend.’ We had him in his own truck. We was sitting on either side of him in his own truck. ‘You got a choice,’ I say. ‘You can either watch your girlfriend and your little kid go down — and I mean watch , I mean go down —or you can eat these varmint pellets.’ ”

“Nahhhh!”

“Yes.”

“Strychnine!”

“We had him outside his girlfriend’s apartment. I mean, right outside. You could see the fucking mobile over the kid’s crib. And I say, ‘Take this, eat this, or else they die.’ ”

Ray gulped his beer. “Scared the shit out of him, huh?” he interjected.

“So the punk took it. He thought it was a movie or something. He thought he was exhibiting an ethical dimension.”

“He might’ve thought it was an initiation or something,” Ray said. Initiations were always a dark-before-dawn arrangement. Things usually got better afterward.

“So he swallows the damn stuff, and my buddy and I vacate the truck. Modesto sits there for a minute and then starts shooting all around the cab on his own accord in these convulsions. Banged himself all the hell up. Must’ve gone on for ten minutes.”

“It wasn’t really strychnine was it?” Ray said.

“Cops come eventually, and you know what they conclude? They conclude Modesto OD’d. They say he suicided.”

“Cops are dumb around here, huh?” Ray said.

“That word ‘initiation’ is some word,” the storyteller’s companion said. “Don’t hear a word like that every day.”

“Man’s trying to put himself in Modesto’s shoes.”

“Gotta be an asshole to want to be in them.”

“Considering that Modesto convulsed himself right out of them, I’d have to agree with you. Those ten minutes were, well, they were beyond my wildest dreams of satisfaction,” the man said contentedly.

Ray thought he’d better be on his way. He didn’t even feel the need to finish his beer. At the same time, he thought he should buy a round for all concerned, though possibly that wasn’t a great idea either.

“Like maybe you’re imagining that Modesto’s imagining he’s being initiated into the No Fear club or something? Those assholes that have them banners across their windshields, those shade screens that say ‘No Fear,’ they belong to a club, right?”

“That is not my truck,” Ray said.

“We saw you get out of it.”

“It’s not mine.”

“Salaried pussies, they lease those vehicles.”

“I stole it,” Ray said.

“Ooh-hoo.”

“I sure did.” Ray wanted to appear a hardened criminal, but hip and friendly too. He pondered his exit line.

“You happen to know the Jesus prayer, wee-wee face?” the storyteller inquired.

Ray said nothing. His mouth seemed more insensate than usual.

“You just keep mumbling the ol’ Jesus prayer, and it will wreak a little miracle on you.”

“Wreak?” Ray dared. “I don’t … what is it?”

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You just keep mumbling it”—the storyteller rolled his eyes and waggled his tongue in a rude portrayal of an idiot—“and mumbling and mumbling and you’ll come to know that whatever happens to you is just something that happens. And what’s even better is, you’ll come to know that whatever you do to someone else is just something that happens too.”

The other man stared at Ray’s truck, absorbed in the flagrant breach of etiquette it represented.

“Adios, gentlemen,” Ray said.

They gaped at him. “Adios?” they cried in unison.

“Don’t die around here,” the storyteller suggested warmly. “It will be utterly misconstrued.”

Ray was already up and moving steadily through the bar, past the big-screen TV, now focused on Recondita Armonia in the dry pits. There wasn’t a mark on her.

Even with a considerable number of partying people, the house was in no way crowded. Carter supposed it was a bit large for his and Annabel’s needs, but they’d always lived in large houses. Anything under twelve thousand square feet Ginger had considered a hut. In their marriage’s prime, they had needed various rooms into which to retreat after quarrels had reached their towering crest. As a matter of fact, whenever they had bought a house (and they had moved frequently during Ginger’s spate on earth) one of their requirements had been rooms that served no other purpose. But though Carter had paid top dollar for this place, it lacked what could be considered a post-altercation crawl space. This pleased him, for any place that intimated a way of life other than the one he had shared with Ginger was a pearl beyond price.

He had toyed with various themes for this evening’s party but finally decided just to let the champagne flow and see what happened. He did suggest dressy. Carter loved dressy. He himself was never more relaxed than in a dinner jacket. There was something about a dinner jacket that was so relaxing, it just took you a million miles away.

Annabel was wearing her alpaca swing coat and her beaded chiffon skirt, two of her most fabulous things. Alice was wearing houndstooth slacks from Goodwill and a clean T-shirt with no railing message on it. Though Annabel had forced a little makeup on her, she’d rubbed most of it off. “You looked so sultry,” Annabel complained. “Well, maybe not sultry, but that cherry chocolate lipstick looked good on you. Effects can be achieved, Alice, you just have to experiment.” Corvus wore an unexceptional white sundress, but what she wore hardly elicited notice; it was the intrigue of her face, the sleekness of her dark hair. All three of them were motherless. Annabel thought they should have more in common than they did.

There was the civilized, slapping sound of martinis being made.

Carter found himself enjoying the company of several young men. “Now, for Wagner,” he was saying, “opera was a political creed and spiritual gospel; its aims were revolution and salvation. He wanted to transfigure the lives of those who heard his work.” The fine young men were attentive to these sentiments.

About a hundred guests were present. Carter had found them here and there. Ginger had never liked his friends, so he’d gotten into the habit of making new ones readily. Back east, Ginger had actually been instrumental in getting one of his nicest friends deported to the horribly infelicitous country of his birth, a place where everyone spoke a different dialect and murderous fights broke out over the slightest misunderstanding. His friend had previously managed to inadvertently insult a number of his countrymen, and Carter feared that the homecoming had not been a pleasant one.