Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

For the first time Corvus wondered what she would do with all the days ahead. It was as though she’d been unconscious and had just now awakened to terrific pain and uncertainty. Once more she sped homeward, but when she reached John Crimmins’s she stopped and cut the engine. She could hear Tommy’s voice faintly in the air, but it seemed contained, as though in some heart’s chamber. She sat in the truck for a long time, looking at the house, and then got out. She rapped on the door, but there was no answer. She waited on the porch listening to Tommy’s thin wail, a reminder of the emptiness at the heart of everything. She waited through what would have been the Anzai Culture, through Shakespeare and lunch and philosophy. Waiting, she felt John Crimmins on the other side of the door, waiting, too. In front of the house was a water spigot on a pipe. A drop of water would slowly form and drop into a ragged, shallow, cement depression on the bony earth. Sometimes she raised her eyes and traveled the distance between the two houses. She pretended that her mother was home. Her father was away — he would be back, his absence wasn’t unusual, he was expected soon — but her mother was there, reading the book she’d begun, absorbed, a little mystified. Corvus rested the back of her head on John Crimmins’s door and forgot why she was waiting. A car raced by, and an arm flung a bottle from the window. It shattered and lay sparkling. Good as buried, she thought. Good as buried.

She got into the truck and drove home.

Again he was just inside, the sound of the truck coming over the cattle guard having stilled him with its possibility. He peered past her as before, then gazed at her sympathetically, for she was not who she should be. She put Tommy in the truck and drove to the Airstream, backing in close to the blocks on which the tongue lay propped. They’d had the trailer for years, but Corvus hadn’t been in it for a while. When she was little, she had pretended it was a space station where she could communicate in elaborate, time-consuming ways with aliens. Saintly, they did no evil things, were about a yard tall, and looked like owls. Corvus could not move the tongue of the trailer alone, not one inch. Alice was strong, she could help her tomorrow.

In the morning she decided to take Tommy with her to school. She would tie him to an olive tree next to the truck. She would take some of her mother’s sweaters for him to lie on. He watched as she made herself ready. He lay on the coat, gnawing at one paw, which was raw from his gnawing and licking. Corvus drank a little coffee from her mother’s favorite cup — a white teacup with lilacs painted within — then rinsed it and placed it carefully on the drainboard.

“C’mon, Tommy.” He stood and walked stiffly toward her. “C’mon, you’re coming along today.” She heard the growl on her skin, as if it hadn’t even come from him. He stood heavily in front of her, all obdurate weight, looking at her steadily and brightly. He didn’t growl again; that part was over. He returned wearily to the coat. Corvus took a blouse from her mother’s closet and crumpled it up by his head like a fresh dressing for a wound. He smelled hot and sour, there was a moist crust beneath one eye. She rubbed it off, then took a dog brush and ran it across his coat. She shut the windows and turned on the swamp cooler and the radio. “Liberation can come,” a voice ranted, “only through the destruction of the world of phenomena.…” She turned the dial forward and back, tears in her eyes. The devil had been spotted at the casino on the Yaqui reservation. He was good-looking, and each slot machine disgorged hundreds of coins when he passed by. She settled on a band of static and left.

In school she learned that the American Indian had discovered the zero prior to its discovery in India. She learned about the significance of landscape in medieval art. Flat country meant the most; it denoted apocalyptic end. School was unreal to her, the books, the papers she wrote crowded with slanting script, her hand upon the papers, writing. She envied Tommy his utter animal sadness. He was complete in it, he could not be made separate from it. The air felt electric though there were no clouds, no sign of freshening change. Still she felt the snap in what was like a current trembling thickly through everything that was that day. But it was all so distant from her, the moment and her presence in it. She felt it would be this way from now on.

Tommy had always been afraid of the cattle guard, of the meaty empty smell of the pipes. The truck, once more, lurched and rattled over it, toward home. The long home, Corvus thought. The door was open, a window broken. Tommy was on the porch. He was so long that his tail almost reached the floor. She could still see the brush marks on his fur.

The rope was white and new, and it was knotted tightly around the beam with the other end tied around the porch railing. Her mother’s coat had been dragged partway across the floor. It had been a comfortable house, plates and chairs, a deep sofa, lamps and books, the pretty things of home. She went to the kitchen and pulled open the drawer that held the knives. There were a number of them. She had thought she could use everything up. She would empty everything familiar to her of its purpose. She would keep the house and finish school, and slowly her life would be used up. Through diligence, she would come to the end of the past. That had been her plan, but now there was nothing. She was seeing nothing, looking at the drawer of knives.

From a distance there was the sound of coyotes calling. Her father had always quoted Huxley—“A Trio for Ghoul and Two Damned Souls”—when the coyotes called. They stopped.

She went to the stove and blew out the pilot lights. As a child she had always been fascinated with those beguiling darting lights of dancing blue. She opened the oven door and, sliding out the broiler plate, blew out that small light as well. She smelled the threads of gas. She could die, too. The obviousness of the choice gave her a peculiar swift delight. It was correct. It was enchanting, really. But she did not want to die so enchantingly, so obviously correctly. She wanted, instead, to die slowly, day by meaningless day, unenchanted, bitterly meaninglessly aware.

There was a gallon of kerosene that her parents had used for the outside lamps. She laid it down in ribbony whorls throughout the house, then went out to the truck. A jerry can of gas was strapped down in the bed because the fuel gauge was broken. The speedometer cable was broken as well. You never knew how fast you were going or how far you could go. She circled the house spilling the gas, then backed the truck across the cattle guard to the road. She had to go back into the house for the matches. She brought the bowl outside and went through seven worn books, a match per book, before one of them lit. “Reasonably Priced Banquets,” it said just above the striking zone.

At first nothing burned. The flame flared and smoldered with a certain knotted energy. Then it gathered, as though with an intake of breath, and it began, the flames lapping out and licking the jellylike pads of the cactus, the marigolds, the steps, the fur of the hanging dog. The wren’s nest in the eaves popped softly. Then the heat found the grassy core and with a boom and another three more, like the sounds of shotguns striking down owls at dusk, it was all burning, the pictures and tables and clocks, the Indian blanket with its canny exit for the mind, all of it, her mother’s things, her father’s.

Corvus saw owls falling. This was how she felt it. Her own soul witnessed it in this way, their great soft falling, the imago ignota of their alien faces.