Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“See how nasty it all is,” Ginger said. “Nasty, nasty. Come with me, Carter. Come to where I am.” She raised her arms.

She meant the gesture to be inviting, he was certain. “But what about Annabel?” he said. “She’s still just a child, and there’s no one to take care of her.”

“Annabel? She’ll get along. Children stay children for far too long. Annabel will be fine. You’re not raising her properly anyway, what with those soirees you’re always hostessing. It’s humiliating the way you’re all a-bubble around those young men. And that one man …”

“Which one is that?”

Ginger made a ghastly face. “The hireling.”

“The piano player?” Carter said. “He’s a wonderful piano player.”

“You don’t understand, do you? Never have, never will. You can be so obtuse. But I used to love you so much! I loved you so much I even tried to walk around the house the way you did. It made me feel less lonely.”

He should kiss her, he thought, but the distance between them was so great and he was so tired. Too, he’d be insane to kiss her.

At school, a little more than a week after her parents’ funeral, there was another call for Corvus.

“This is your neighbor, John,” the voice said. “Your dog is barking.”

“I’ll be home by two,” Corvus said.

“It’s howling. I can hear it through my closed windows. What’s going on?” He sounded reasonable.

“He’s in the house,” Corvus said. “He’s not outside.”

“I’m a mile away. It starts up the minute you leave in the morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What’s it need, water or something? Food? What’s its favorite food? Or maybe it needs its mouth wired shut.”

“What?” she whispered.

“Anything I can do,” neighbor John said.

“I’m at school now,” Corvus said. “I’ll be home by two. That’s only an hour from now.”

“What is it you’re saying, babe?”

“The dog, Tommy, he misses my mother.” She was shocked she’d said this. She was ashamed. The words were hopeless, nobody wanted them.

“Then somebody should tell your mother to get her goddamn ass back home and do whatever she does to keep that dog from howling.” He hung up.

Corvus turned to the secretary seated behind her office desk. The woman’s child was standing in a playpen regarding Corvus with disfavor. She was too old for a playpen, but it had been arranged that the secretary could bring her in once a week.

“Your mommy and daddy are dead,” the child said. “I don’t like you, you smell funny.”

“Melissa!” the secretary said. “Now, what did I tell you! That is very, very naughty, Melissa. Corvus, dear, is everything all right?”

“I have to go home.” She hurried outside. The windows in the truck were down, and though she’d wedged a cardboard liner behind the windshield, the temperature inside was still over a hundred degrees. The steering wheel and seats were scalding.

“Death is normal, Melissa,” the secretary was saying back in her office. “Death happens sometimes.”

“I don’t know what it is .” The child stamped her feet.

It took twenty minutes. It always took twenty minutes. She drove through the outskirts of the city and into the bladed desert and beyond, through empty ranchland. Hawks lay in sandy furrows, their beaks open, in the shadeless noon. She passed John Crimmins’s. Her own house was at a distance it might take four minutes to run to. She bounced over the cattle guard Tommy was afraid of and up to the house. Above two metal chairs on the porch, a wind chime tinkled from a beam.

Tommy was standing just inside the door. He wagged his tail once and peered past her, then turned and went to a coat lying in the corner. He curled up on it, his chin resting on the worn corduroy collar of her mother’s coat.

“Tommy,” Corvus said. He wagged his tail once more but didn’t look at her. The house was cool and quiet, the curtains were drawn. She took some ice cubes from the freezer and, holding one in each hand, ran them across her face and through her hair. Ants crawled through Tommy’s dishes on the kitchen floor. She threw his food out and scrubbed the bowls clean. She would get padlocks for all the doors. She would get Tommy a comrade dog. She would get a third dog, a fierce one, to protect them both.

She drank a glass of water and put fresh food in his bowl, but he could not be coaxed to eat it. After a while he got up and walked through all the rooms quietly, without making a sound: a ghost dog. Corvus hadn’t heard him howl since the night of the funeral, the night Alice had been here. He lay down again on the coat, his expectancy dimmed. Just before dark she took her father’s binoculars out to the porch and looked through them at John Crimmins’s. Two lights were on, soft as the lantern lights her mother liked to use at suppertime. She put Tommy in the truck and drove to a grocery store, where she bought fried chicken. Then she drove to the Hohokam Drive-In, pulling in next to a woman whose large horned lizard sprawled next to her on the crown of the seat. Corvus smiled, but the woman just stared at her. What was the connection, after all, between taking a dog to the movies and taking a horned lizard? There wasn’t any.

She fed Tommy little pieces of greasy chicken until only bones were left in the bag. It was going to be all right. On the screen, love was having its difficulties, its reversals, but it persevered or at least metamorphosed. Tommy sat in the front seat, looking through the windshield at the big screen. Everything was going to be all right. Corvus gave him a big smacking kiss on his muzzle the way her mother used to. She tried to imagine that she was her mother and that she was Tommy, too. Though the moment was willed and racking, it came close to comfort. Then it drew back.

That night, Tommy made no sound. He slept on her mother’s coat in the hallway. In the morning she went to school, but before her first class had ended she was summoned to the office by a phone call.

“It seems to be that importunate man again,” the secretary said. The playpen had been removed. She had at her side, instead, a steaming cup of coffee and a round, glistening pastry.

“Hello!” John Crimmins said. “This is your neighbor, John. I want you to hear this. It’s what I’m being forced to hear.”

Corvus heard Tommy’s mournful howling, which sounded as though he were there with John Crimmins, right beside him.

“Where is he?” Corvus said.

“He’s not with me , kid. What would I want with him? I choose my friends carefully. I taped this earlier from my doorway and I’m still taping it. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?”

Tommy’s song rose and fell, ran, twisted, then rose again. She would put him in the Airstream, hitch it to the truck, and drive farther into the desert. Or she could go the other way, deeper into town, for as the town sprawled outward, it abandoned its old developments. She could pull into the parking lots of the Tortoise, the Desert Aire, the La Siesta, resorts where the rooms had been razed and all that was left were the signs, awaiting the right collector, and empty pools the size of railway cars. She could camp on the pavement of any number of defunct shopping malls. She could live anywhere.

The connection was severed.

“Isn’t there always a third time?” the secretary said. “But next time I’ll tell him I’m calling the police. At first I thought it was an emergency, of course, but what kind of emergency could it be now?” She became flustered. “I won’t allow that person to reach you again, dear,” she said more diplomatically. After Corvus left, she frowned at the baked good from which she’d taken a nibble, baffled as to why she had once again fallen for the one with the undesirable cheese.