Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“I–I don’t know what you mean.”

“Straight or queer.”

“I’m not either one.”

“You know what they say,” he said, tapping his fingers on his knee, “When the two shall be one and the without as the within and the male with the female, neither male nor female, that’s when the party begins.” He laughed without opening his mouth.

A car started up in the driveway, its headlights turning the bats in their threaded flight above to silver.

“This particular party’s almost over, thank God,” he said.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Alice said. “Where are you going, where do you live?”

“You’re a saucy one. I live in a room, a dirty little room. You can’t see it. I’m at that time in my life when temptations abound.”

“Do they have shapes, your temptations?” Alice asked. More people were leaving the party.

“They have the shape of intemperate tendencies, honey.”

“You can call me by my name,” Alice said. “It’s Alice.”

“But I don’t want to, honey.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sherwin.”

“It isn’t!”

“I’ve spoiled everything again,” he sighed. “I always do.” He ground out another cigarette in the brimming ashtray. “Does that ashtray spook you?” he asked. “Sometimes they can be very spooky. Sometimes I just smoke and look at the ashtray and think, What will have happened by the time it’s full? And just when I feel I’m about to understand what the ashtray is, at the same time, with a certain wonder and even fear, I feel I’ve never understood it and I don’t understand anything.” He widened his eyes.

She didn’t care about ashtrays. An ashtray could never perturb her like that. She simply wanted, if he ever looked away, to take one of the cigarettes he’d smoked, crushed remnant of his pleasure and need, put it into her pocket, and keep it. She wished he’d say her name.

“Alice?” he said.

Ray felt he was pushing his luck with Merle Orlean’s credit line. Stealing without a weapon was fun, but it made a man less virile and flexible after a time. So he decided to settle down for a few weeks. There were mountains all around this town, sort of pretty, and it was warmer than where he’d been. This was serious heat, and Ray liked heat. He got a job at an Indian crafts shop, Morning Star Trader, by answering an ad in the newspaper. “I have experience in sales,” he told the owner. Morning Star Trader claimed they sold old pawn but didn’t. Anyone seriously into old pawn wouldn’t be caught dead in this place. Besides, where did this old pawn keep coming from? Ray didn’t believe in old pawn. He scarcely believed in history. The shop sold inconsequential jewelry, greeting cards, kachinas, sand paintings, and fetishes. There was also a table offering Mexican calacas: Here were the skeletons at the vanity table, getting married, discovering infidelities, playing instruments, feeding the birds, at the beach. Great stocking stuffers, or put them in bunny’s basket at Easter time. But the public needed no urging in this regard, thinking the calacas hilarious. The calacas flew out of there.

What took more skill was the field wherein Ray shone, the selling of the fetishes, those tiny animals carved from bone or stone. “It’s all bullshit,” the owner had told him, “but all bullshit is relative, you know what I’m saying?” Ray did. He admired the owner, who trusted him and was never around. Ray pushed the little objects as telepathic and life-enriching. The manner that had failed him in the selling of shoes worked brilliantly here. Through a little research he’d learned that it had once been very weird with the Zunis and their fetishes, which originally had been consulted for success in hunting or to prevent sickness and defeat. The fetishes lived in special jars, where they ate and breathed and their power was contained. They were frequently washed in blood and feathers and scrubbed with pieces of hide, and repulsive objects such as human eardrums were often attached to them. They were sticky and rank from the cornmeal they were fed. Zuni beliefs were complicated and covered every known dilemma. The men had to be careful, and the women had to be even more careful than the men, because there were more things they could do wrong, such as not washing the scalps properly or failing to keep the scalp jar in good order. They had scalp jars all over the place. If a woman’s husband died — undoubtedly because of some screwup by the wife — she was obliged to mourn for a full year. At the end of the year she was supposed to have intercourse with a stranger, to whom she must present a gift he would then destroy. That part was sort of cool, Ray thought, but the custom had probably been suppressed along with so many intriguing traditions in this secular age. After awhile, the Zunis started to make things up and connections became imprecise. Their cruddy innocent world collapsed.

In the shop, he pushed the fetishes solely as honest messengers from the world within, quiet helpful inner voices. As the customer peered into the locked glass case, Ray would begin, “The one you’re attracted to first is usually the one for you — it has something to say to you. The right one has a subtle yet powerful draw.”

He would leave them for a moment to ponder this, then return. They were usually older women. Morning Star Trader wasn’t that great a place to meet girls. They seldom went for badger or snake; mostly wolf or bear would get the nod. If they weren’t at all serious, they would ask to see toad, possibly gila monster. These were the knickknack sort. Seldom did eagle impress them, perhaps being too close emblematically to that out-of-fashion colonial effect once so popular in the overpopulated and spiritually malnourished Northeast, a region from which many of his customers had recently fled. Eagle’s power had been compromised.

If they seemed hesitant, Ray would ask, “Do you wish to hold one in your hand?” He peddled the fetishes as focusing powers, as channelers with the ability to lead one away from puzzlement and distress. His odd face — suggesting, as it did, fate — only seemed to help. “If you’re responsive, they can be very useful,” he would say quietly, though sometimes he’d get wound up and suggest that mole could help in strengthening the immune system or that falcon enhanced one’s communication with a pet. But mostly he supported the big vague picture.

He had suffered only one return in two weeks working at the store, from a woman he’d encouraged to go off with mountain lion. The lions weren’t moving. Ray felt it was because their carver insisted on making their shoulders too big and their heads too small; things looked screwed up. He’d told the woman that this particular fetish protected the traveler. He didn’t know why he had come up with that angle — little monkey messing up his wave — but it turned out this was precisely what the woman wanted to hear, and she took two to double-dip their assistance. By the end of the day she was back, the engine block on her Buick having cracked before she’d even gotten home.

“Car travel isn’t real traveling,” Ray said. He could barely enlarge on this before he was forced to admit that the store did not provide cash refunds. He was about to suggest she consult white wolf to remind her of the transitoriness of events, but she threw the fetishes — still wrapped in tissue, not even out of the bag — at him and left. He was replacing them in the case when another customer came in, a moody-looking girl in dusty black. Ray felt composed; he’d pocketed seventy dollars on the mountain lions, and the store still had them. When he began his riff, the girl looked shocked.