Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead

She walked. An enormous grocery store appeared ahead, an outpost for the consumer cavalry. It was surrounded by ragged desert and sported large signs informing those who wanted to make something of themselves in this life that investment “pads” were available. Cows browsed the desert, token cows, hired to indicate a pre-pad tax category. A few miles later, the desert had vanished completely, the cows were no longer employed. She imagined what she would do to the woman’s station wagon. She would work smoothly and calmly. She would pop the hood and remove the oil cap. Using a conveniently located hose, she would pour water into the filler hole and then top up the gas tank. She would find a can of brush cleaner in the garage and pour it into the radiator. She wouldn’t do anything to the brakes for the little kids’ sakes, but she would squirt glue all over the seats.

She was approaching House of Hubcaps, one of her favorite places. She paused and enjoyed the magnificent display of hubcaps. Great luminous wheels crowded the windows, reflecting and distorting everything in their cool, humped centers. They were like ghastly, intelligent, unmoored heads.

If the House of Hubcaps didn’t have the hubcap you were searching for, it didn’t exist.

She moved on, renewed, to Jimmy and Jacky’s house. The hubcaps had refreshed her. They had cleared her mind. Vandalizing the station wagon would be too easy, too predictable, and by now far too premeditated. She should do something on a grander scale. She should attempt to liberate those children, those sour-smelling, sniveling, cautious little boys. All their mother had ever provided them with was good haircuts. She should free them from that corrupting presence, from the world of toots and jelly bags and poisonous sprays, but that would be kidnapping, and punishable, she believed, by death. Plus she didn’t want Jimmy and Jacky.

The house was deserted. Cardboard cartons stuffed with clothes and broken toys were scattered about in the front yard, the word “Free” written on every one. The garage was empty. The rabbit hutch was empty save for a withered string bean. The rabbit was probably hopping around nearby, terrified. Or it might be hunched up somewhere in a narcosis of incomprehension at being hutchless. Or maybe the mother had boiled it and served it to the twins for lunch on a bun with some potato chips. Alice wouldn’t put it past her.

Back at her own house, Alice got into her nightie and ate two cheese sandwiches and a bowl of spaghetti. Her granny and poppa sat in the living room watching Fury sleeping in his dog bed surrounded by his toys. Fury was named after the beautiful horse in the Bette Davis movie who is shot by Gary Merrill, who is pretending to all the world that he is Bette’s husband. Bette Davis was her granny’s favorite movie star. None of the new ones could hold a candle to her.

“Alicekins,” her poppa said. “I’m so glad you’re back. We have some questions for you.”

“Good ones tonight,” her granny said.

Alice made another cheese sandwich. She was not abstemious and ate like a stray, like a pound pet rescued at the eleventh hour.

“A woman goes to her doctor,” her granny said, “and the doctor says she’s got cancer of the liver and gives her three months to live. Cancer of the liver is a painful, horrible way to go and there’s no way to beat it, the doctor says.”

“Typical,” her poppa said.

“What!” her granny said.

“Typical doctor.” Her poppa took a Kleenex from a box on the table beside him and dug around in one of Fury’s ears.

“Yes, well, she goes home and she and her son have a long talk and the son arranges it so that his handgun collection is at her disposal and she shoots herself. During the autopsy it comes out that she didn’t have cancer of the liver at all.”

“Just had a few pus pockets was all,” her poppa said. He put the used Kleenex into his pocket without looking at it.

“So the question is, who’s responsible for her death, the lady, the son, or the doctor?”

These kinds of problems always cheered Alice up. They weren’t questions of ethics or logic, and the answer, under the circumstances, didn’t matter anyway. She just loved them.

Corvus lost her parents to drowning close to the end of that peculiar spring. The phone rang at school, she was summoned to the office and was told the situation. It seemed unbelievable but was the case. They had driven down to the Mexican state of Sonora for their anniversary. They had been to the beach. They’d been swimming, sailing, even diving in the Gulf of California but had drowned coming back from Nogales on an off-ramp of I-10 during the first rainstorm of the year, just beyond one of those signs that say DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, signs the engineers claim (and continued to claim with tedious righteousness after the accident) are where they are for a reason. The last picture of Corvus and her mother and father together had been taken not long before in that same gritty border town, Nogales, with the burro on the tourist street, the timeless, tireless burro with the plywood sea and sunset behind him. Beyond the painted sea, people were living in cardboard packing crates with tin roofs held down by tires and old car batteries, beyond which a wasteland ran to the real sea, from which her parents had returned but never arrived. A frequent thought of Corvus: they had never arrived back . Still, she thought they’d probably laughed when they hit that sudden water, thinking they’d be through it in no time.

That burro picture was the worst, Alice thought.

She spent a lot of time at Corvus’s house, a little adobe house with the practically required blue trim. Because the land had been grazed, there was nothing on the hardened earth but a few mesquite trees. An old Dodge truck sat in an otherwise empty corral, and there was a shining Airstream trailer, for it had been the policy of Corvus’s parents to move every year. And there was a black-and-tan dog with a big head, for whom there was no one or nothing in this world but Corvus’s mother. Not far away lived a neighbor whose name was Crimmins, and then no one for miles. The dog’s name was Tommy.

Alice has no pictures. So she likes to look through the ones Corvus has. Corvus is culling them all the time, but the burro stays, and some other odd ones too, while some of Alice’s personal favorites — ones that represent an ideal, ones that show a little baby, for instance, with a real mother and father looking at it so grave and thoughtful — just disappear. The photos are in a flat woven basket and Alice gently paws through them. Though there are fewer, there appear to be more too, as if there were another source for them somewhere in the house. She wonders if any ceremony is involved in the way Corvus handles the pictures. Corvus likes ceremony. The graveyard service was practically baroque in its ambition, even though no one else was there except a paid soloist and the minister. The stonecutter said he’d come but didn’t. Alice had never heard a man with more excuses. When she and Corvus had gone to his shop the day before the burial to choose the stone, he had said, “I won’t be able to do yours for seven months, minimum. I have a woman ahead of you who’s catching up, putting new stones on all the family’s graves, and that family goes back — golly, practically to John Wesley Powell. She’s changing them all, totally into remodeling. She’s got all these birds and wagon trains on them. That’s the style now, color. One she wants is a World War Two fighter plane in one corner and in the other corner she wants a heart with initials entwined in it, a ‘D’ and a ‘B.’ I make these sketches, and she says, ‘I keep seeing something else, I keep seeing something else …’ ”