Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Please,” Alice said, “you’re polluting this for me.”

“Well, fine,” Ray said.

“Give me a break.”

He made an ironic bow and went over to the calacas table. There were the skeletons at the mirror, at the typewriter, taking photographs of one another, walking their little skeleton dogs, in the bath. He had a headache. The little monkey was dragging a useless limb across the inside of his head, mopping inside it with its soft floppy arm. This was how his headaches were: neither piercing nor pounding, they were just the little monkey’s nerve-dead arm swinging back and forth. He wanted to close up, go back to his room, have a beer, get the monkey comfortable and count the money he’d saved. The windfall with the lions had really kicked his savings up. He wanted to buy some gear and find some wilderness and camp out for a while. He’d already lifted a pretty decent backpack from an unlocked car. Astonishing how many cars remained unlocked in this day and age. But he had a ways to go before he’d outfitted himself properly. “Sometimes in the wilderness you have to rely more on your equipment than yourself,” as the ads said.

“Have to close up in a few minutes,” he called to the girl.

Alice was crouched in front of the case, her fingers pressed against the glass. Then she stood up and rested her arms on the top, still looking.

“Don’t lean on that,” he called. “It could break, easy.” His mouth inadvertently broke into a grimace, for the little monkey had stopped with the sweeping and sort of lost its balance and stumbled, as it often did. Once, when Ray was ten, he’d gone to a psychiatrist and tried to describe this sensation. “It’s like it slips sometimes and falls through glass — thin, thin glass like ice, and levels and levels of it …” he’d ventured.

“That’s sex, son,” the doctor said warmly. “That’s puberty. That’s your hormones talking.”

“Sex?” Ray said.

“I’ve heard sex described that way a thousand times,” the psychiatrist said. “Let me tell you something about girls while we’re having this conversation. Girls have hair down there. It can come as a shock to the uninformed.”

Young Ray felt like telling him that to reduce any mysterious feeling to the sexual was to grievously mutilate its true relevance. He had told him in the only way he could at ten. He’d told him to fuck off. And he hadn’t mentioned the little monkey to anyone since, not that this had quieted it down or consoled it any.

“You’re determined to break that, aren’t you?” Ray snapped at Alice. He picked up a bottle of Windex and a roll of towels and made a great show of cleaning the glass while she stood there.

“I’d like to see that one,” Alice said.

“Raven,” he said. “That’s a hundred and eight dollars.”

“I still want to see it.”

Reluctantly, he removed it from the case. He wanted her to assume that she shouldn’t, at that price, expect to hold it herself. “This one is associated with transformational powers. As a confident—”

Alice looked at him — and not at his mouth, either, where most people got stuck. “Even though they’re made by people just out to make a buck, you shouldn’t mess with their abilities like you do.” She snatched the raven carving from his hand and turned it over. “Why does it say eighteen dollars?”

“Whoops,” he said. “Guess my eyes get tired at the end of the day.” There was an unpleasant silence. “If it’s a gift, you can get that price off with a little bit of nail polish remover. I think the great transformer is money, you know what I mean? It can turn into anything. It’s practically alive, man,” he said, excited by his insight.

Alice studied it, ran her grimy thumb across it.

“Why don’t you take it?” Ray said suddenly. “Just take it, I’m giving it to you.” He liked doing this, saying the exact opposite of what he really felt, being nice to people he disliked. To be unnatural and spontaneous, to create confusion and unease, was satisfying. He thought of the little monkey doing what he shouldn’t be able to do, seeing through those sewn-shut lids, nudging a peanut with that insensate limb, arguing in a persuasive language never heard before against protracted and untimely death. “Say ‘Thank you,’ ” Ray prompted.

“I won’t accept it.” The fetish made a little click as she set it down on the glass. “It’s not for my friend. I mean, it was supposed to be for her, but it isn’t. I think you’ve defiled this whole case,” she added.

“I was only joking,” Ray said. “Why would I give you something for nothing?”

The moment she left, the little monkey recommenced its dragging, stricken circuit in his head.

Carter had bought some satin sheets in the hope they might help him sleep.

Ginger sat in the chair by the empty vanity table. “So how did your day go?” she asked.

Carter looked longingly at the sheets. “Well, the Wilsons are in town, dear, and I had dinner with them. They’re on their way to the Four Corners area for their anniversary. Twenty-five years!” A quarter of a century, with considerable help from the Percodan tablets prescribed after they’d thrown out their backs when the club car in which they’d been riding had been struck by a slow-moving freight. They had never taken a train anywhere again and instead zipped about the country first-class on airplanes, whacked out of their minds. They were great fun to be around.

“I hope, for their sake, they don’t run into any mice,” Ginger said. “The mice up there make dust that’s virulent. A person breathes it in, gets a headache — then Curtain! Dead within twenty-four hours.”

“A mouse makes a—?”

“Oh, I’m giving you the short version, for godssakes. Why go on and on about things?”

Carter was silent.

“So tell those tiresome people they’d better watch out. What did you talk about at dinner?”

Didn’t she know this? “Jazz and palms, mostly,” Carter said. “Those people really know their palms. They don’t just toss around the common names, either. No sugar, jelly, or Madagascar for them.”

“So?” Ginger said, looking at him intently.

“Madagascar is somewhat of a general term.”

“I heard a very nice thing about the people of Madagascar. They used to bury dolphins who washed up on beaches in their own graveyards.”

“Really!” Carter said, charmed.

“But they don’t do it anymore.”

Carter sucked on a Tic Tac.

“Do you know that one Christmas season Pat Wilson corrected me as to who was Joseph in our crèche display?”

“I don’t recall that.” Carter did remember the crèche, though, very well. They’d bought it in Venice the winter before Annabel arrived, and again there was that phenomenon that always thrilled him: snow falling into water. The memory threw his thoughts into a cold twilight. He lay on the bed with a sense of restless paralysis.

“I’ve never forgiven her. She said that my Joseph figure, the figure I’d placed in the Joseph position, was clearly a shepherd and belonged back with the sheep. And she moved it!”

“Well, she’s off to the Four Corners now,” Carter said vaguely.

“Appointment with mousie,” Ginger said.

After a few moments, Carter unobtrusively switched on the television. They were culling elephants somewhere in Africa. The terrified herd shrank back from two small men with machine guns. “Ginger!” he cried, “what have you done to the channel?” He groped for the changer but couldn’t find it. On the screen, a wet human palm displayed a slippery elephant fetus; a finger jiggled the tiny trunk, arranged the tiny legs. Carter at last located the changer, and now black ghetto youths with remarkable hair were ambling around an open coffin, fluttering their hands above the corpse’s placid face in some bizarre ritual of respect.