Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

GOOD MORNING MR./MS.

You have been deemed a candidate by Physician/Family/Staff for the Terminally Ill Program, and therefore the following comforts and electives will be denied to you beginning at 3 a.m. this day and extending into any remaining future. Television, oxygen, antibiotics, cookies, batteries, cooling waters, green pastures, and heretofore merciful acts of providence whether deserved or undeserved. Any peaceful dark that comports itself as den, lair, sanctuary, or refuge. Freedom from fear. Any acts of grace except those that passeth understanding. Podiatric care. Dental care. Donuts with jelly. Eyeglasses. Excursions. Any exercises to discourage muscle atrophy. That stupid little hard ball that we encouraged and encouraged and encouraged you to squeeze and you never would will be taken away. All wishing, hoping, and desiring. Ice in a cup to crunch. Key chains. For the ladies, hats. Remaining to you is any comfort available from dreams. We do not suggest attempting to dream of starting over. Do not dream of the first kiss or the one who will have been the love of your life. Avoid specifics in terms of the beauty of lightning, meadows, eyes, the touch of certain hands. Avoid those old constructions — the nesting box made of cedar, the bookcase mortised with pegs, the child’s swing so easily made at the time. We suggest, rather, of dreaming of smaller balls within larger ones, of blue air liquid, of small shining clouds, of rhizomes. Dream of rhizomes if you can.

Alice wanted very much to harass, torture, and, with any luck at all, destroy John Crimmins, but she had to find him first for he had disappeared immediately after the fire. There were already new tenants in the house he’d rented, a blameless couple with a pet peahen named Attila. The blameless couple annoyed Alice, ignorant as they were of John Crimmins’s whereabouts, unknowing of Tommy or his end, blithely incurious about the charred plot of land to the south. Should not sickening cruelty leave its impressions upon the surroundings? Should not a repulsive act taint the very air?

“I understand why you burned your house down,” she said to Corvus. They were sitting in the Airstream, which they had towed into Alice’s side yard. “It’s like the Navajos used to burn their hogans down if someone died in it, isn’t that so? Then the Anglos taught them to stop doing this, so if they had a sick baby, say, who just got sicker and sicker? They’d put it outside the house so they wouldn’t have to burn it down when the baby died.” The telling of this story had held more promise in its inception; it had been meant actually to comfort and confirm. But as with so many of Alice’s utterances, it had veered from the confirm-and-comfort path.

“I think you did the right thing, Corvus, that’s all I meant,” Alice said. “I think you always do.”

Corvus said nothing, and Alice began talking again about John Crimmins, how they would go about finding him. Alice knew there were methods by which an appealing, appropriate-looking person could get any information desired on anyone else, and she vowed to transform herself into such a person, if necessary, to see that John Crimmins met his punishment.

“I’d like to shake those people up,” she said. “How can they not know anything?”

The place had been broom swept, the blameless couple said, which was all that real estate law required. They aspired to become real estate agents themselves someday. The place had actually been quite clean when they took occupancy.

“I want to find him and drive him crazy,” Alice said.

“You’re driving me crazy,” Corvus said.

“Well, that would be … you’d be the wrong person.” I will never let you be crazy, Alice thought. She felt the stronger of the two for an instant and was frightened. But the instant passed, both the feeling stronger and the fear of it.

Corvus could not assimilate his act into her life, so she placed him outside the way she thought about her life. Doing this was going to make her sick, Alice believed, though the idea that things that happened to you weren’t your life was sort of interesting. Corvus didn’t believe John Crimmins’s power was legitimate. She never talked about him, never accompanied Alice in her musings as to what he had done before and what he would do next.

“A person like him,” Alice said, “just can’t slip back into civilized society.”

“Why not?” Corvus said.

“He’ll feel remorse eventually and jump off a building,” Alice said hopefully.

“No, he won’t.”

“Tommy’ll come back to haunt him,” Alice said, though she didn’t really believe this. Tommy, hung, then burned to the bone, would, instead, be racing after Corvus’s mother, never arriving at her side forever, released too late by the cruel facilitator, John Crimmins.

Ginger’s manifestation startled Carter for it was in the sober hour, that practically canonical hour before the first cocktail of the evening.

“Darling!” he said. “Isn’t there anything to do there?”

“No,” she said, “nothing to do. Working, sexing, resting, thinking — you can’t do any of it.”

Sexing? Carter thought. That was so depressing.

“Go ahead,” she said impatiently, “make your drink.”

He took special care with this one.

“How does it taste?”

“It doesn’t taste all that good, actually. Ginger, you’re making me nervous.”

“Do you remember how you ruined our honeymoon, Carter?”

Like pushing a rope, he thought. No, no, that had been later. “So,” he said, “how are you?” He took another swallow.

“I feel as though I’ve taxied away from the gate but haven’t taken off yet. There’s this unconscionable delay.”

“Oh my,” Carter said. “We both know what that feels like. That flight to London—”

“I think it may be something you’re doing.”

“Me?” Carter said. “But I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary, darling. Everything is very everydayish here.”

She rubbed her bare arms as though chilled. The gesture gave Carter goose bumps. “You believe I’m preventing you from, ah, ‘taking off’?”

“You were always suppressing me, Carter, always holding me back.”

“You have to stop thinking about me, Ginger. You have to take the next step.” He looked at his ice cubes. There wasn’t anything around them.

“Let’s not argue again tonight, Carter,” Ginger said. “Let’s be friends. I’d like to give you something, a little gift.”

This discomposed him utterly.

“It’s not like that, Carter. Where would I get a gift? Use your head! It’s advice, some advice. When we were together there was always this, this … haunting insufficiency.”

“That’s not advice, Ginger,” he ventured to say.

“I’m not through!” she snarled. “ Won’t you let me finish a sentence!”

How had he summoned her here, how, how? She was right. He must be doing something. What innocent thought or haphazard reflection was bringing her back so vividly all the time? She was his personal maenad. Maybe he was listening to too much opera. A frenzied woman who coupled marriage with carnage in a twisted rite was practically a definition of opera. This was Ginger to a T.

“You can’t make me suffer anymore, Ginger.”

“Ha,” she said.

At least they weren’t trapped in a car together, hurtling down some highway. He gave the ice cubes some more whiskey.