Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Oh no, she’d always painted. She’d been at the old zoo for a long time and she’d been painting there too.”

“Zoos are prisons, Annabel.”

“But that’s just the point. Daddy wanted to make it more pleasant. His idea was to build invisible walls or something so nothing would know it was in prison.”

“ ‘Invisible walls’? What do you think an invisible wall is?” Alice demanded.

“Alice, stop hounding me! She’s hounding me again,” she said to Corvus. She’d heard you could marginalize people by abstracting them in their presence, referring to them to another as though they weren’t there. It was a social skill she wished she were better at. It didn’t work at all with Alice.

“What did the quetzal do? Fly into the invisible wall? Was your father upset when it died? Did he feel he had blood on his hands?”

“Of course not. It could’ve died of old age as far as anyone knew. It just died. Really, you know what you inspire people to do, Alice? Lie. You inspire them to lie. You ask a question and then you get so annoyed when you hear the answer—”

“All answers are annoying,” Alice said.

“My father never designed a zoo, all right? He never did!”

“Did he ever design one of those special rooms in airports where people are escorted to hear the news about plane crashes?”

Annabel looked at her.

“Will anyone waiting for the arrival of Flight 501 please go immediately to the Privacy Lounge,” Alice intoned. “I wonder what those rooms are like. Do they use them for anything else, or is it all set up for that one specific purpose?”

“You are so heartless,” Annabel said.

“I bet you won’t find any invisible walls in one of those places.”

“If your granny and poppa went down in a place crash, you’d be upset.”

“They haven’t flown in years. It hurts their sinuses. I’d be upset,” Alice said.

“And what about that stupid Sherwin? If flaming Sherwin went down in flames, you’d be upset.”

“I don’t know, actually,” Alice said.

“He is so disturbing. I hate the way he looks at you, it’s such a disturbing look.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t mind that so much.”

“He looks at Corvus in a disturbing way too, I think.”

“That’s because Corvus is so cool,” Alice said lightly.

Corvus shook her head and laughed.

“There’s no way you could have a loving, fulfilling relationship with him,” Annabel was saying. “Plus he’s way old.”

“He’s twenty-six. That’s not even ten years older.”

“He is lying ,” Annabel yelped. “See, you just bring that out in people. You know what I think of when I see him looking at you? I think ‘white slavery.’ ‘White slavery,’ ” she repeated a little uncertainly. “I think he’d use you to set up a situation for himself. You’d get men for him somehow. You’d be together, which would look weird of course, but that would intrigue certain men he wouldn’t be able to get otherwise with those repugnant looks of his.”

We could be two on a party , Sherwin had said to Alice, you and me .

“Those people are so jaded, you know, it’s hard to know what they really think,” Annabel continued. “Do you ever ask him what he feels? I bet he says, ‘I don’t feel anything.’ I think he’s shy and lonely and used to getting stuff even if it’s not exactly what he wanted. It’s not just the bad skin. One time I had a crush on a football player with bad skin. But he was a football player. And there was a boy who had a limp I liked. One leg was a little bit shorter than the other, but otherwise he was adorable and very, very popular. Sometimes being a little imperfect is interesting, only Sherwin isn’t just imperfect, he’s … they don’t even like women. They think we’re fish or something, they—”

“Fish?”

“Yes, they call us fish, Alice, they have no respect at all.”

Two on a party, and when the party ends you’ll still have a life ahead of you. There’d still be time for another life , he’d said.

“I wouldn’t even consider friendship with him, if I were you.”

“I don’t,” Alice said. She had lost the tiniest bit of interest in Sherwin in recent days, however reluctant she was to admit it. She’d discovered she wasn’t interested in the human mystery. It was the nonhuman mystery that held, if not exactly promise, at least the clues, though they weren’t exactly clues either, and Sherwin with his “You wanna be my girl pupil? You wanna be my Eustochium?” was getting on her nerves. Sherwin, she was beginning to realize, represented the human mystery in one of its most convoluted and self-conscious forms. He said when he left this place, he’d send for her, send her a ticket. Would she join him there?

“If you got a free ticket to somewhere, would you take it?” Alice asked.

“Oh, I would,” Annabel said. “My God. Out of here? No question.”

“I don’t think I would,” Corvus said.

Living in that Airstream had made her even odder, Annabel thought, but she wasn’t surprised that Corvus wouldn’t accept a free ticket. She’d insist on making her own ticket, out of flattened thorns or something. And it wouldn’t even get her anywhere! Not really. Not to like Rome, say, or Paris.

“I know this is just an imaginary ticket,” Annabel said, “just a ‘what if,’ but are you really going to stay around here forever, Corvus? Won’t Social Services get on your case or something?”

Alice said, “Annabel—”

“Well, I’m just being sensible.”

“Who wanted to make a soufflé on the camping trip?” Alice demanded.

“I mean, the first thing Daddy and I did when my mother died was, we just fled . All our stuff was shipped out afterwards, even Mommy’s stuff, which dismayed Daddy, he thought he’d left very specific instructions. I was a little upset at first because we fled like thieves , practically, but now I realize a person can’t just continue to adapt to certain sorrowful locales. If I had to keep driving past that restaurant on my way someplace, over and over that spot on the road, I—”

“Annabel,” Alice said, “when we go on our retreat, we’re not going to talk so much.”

“Oh, it’s fine when you’re talking,” Annabel said. “And why do you keep calling it a retreat? That sounds so moody. Why don’t we just commune with nature? Isn’t that what people are supposed to do when they go camping?”

“We’ll put a mattress in the back of Corvus’s truck and drive as far as we can on one of those fire trails. We’ll spend the first night in the truck, then we’ll hike all day and come back to the truck at night. We’ll try to find that little waterfall.” Like the bighorn, Alice had never seen the little waterfall, while others claimed they had.

“I’ll bet there’s trash around it,” Annabel said. “Those things are just magnets for people’s trash. But nature doesn’t care. We’ll be communing with uncaring nature.” Oh, Alice sometimes made her feel so foul. “I hope we’re not going tomorrow,” she said crossly. “I have things to do tomorrow.”

“Alice and I are at Green Palms tomorrow,” Corvus said.

Annabel would never enter that place again. Her mother would say, “If I had to be buried like that, I’d rather not die.” She said it after every funeral she and Carter went to. Her poor mother! She had loved getting dressed up and going to funerals and saying funny, awful things about everyone afterward.

She looked outside. Carter and Donald were in bathing trunks and lying side by side on bright blue pool mats. The two of them were not moving rocks at all.