Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

He left the cabin without closing it up and gathered up his pack and stick. His fleeting equanimity toward the birders had vanished. He picked up the lock and threw it quite a distance. “Go birding in Hell!” he yelled. His own shout cheered him. He struck off toward the west, where already the crescent moon was visible, and made a careless camp just before dark. He ate two candy bars, then lay flat on a blanket and stared up at the wheeling heavens. They were really tearing around tonight. Birds meant … they meant freedom, that’s what had gotten him so upset back there. But at the same time, birds were different from what they were supposed to mean. The wings of a bird were in fact its forelimbs. When you got on the road of thinking about anything for too long, you just had to turn back, had to turn back.

At dawn, Ray was up and hiking. By ten o’clock, he still hadn’t come across anybody. What, did they name these stupid trails and then never set foot on them again? He was looking through his binoculars at an abandoned mine-shaft hole. There was the ore cart. He glassed the canyon wall, then idled down through the dense brush, clinging close to a winding dry wash. Among the tans and rounded greens he saw a pile of white, which he determined after a moment was a bighorn sheep. If it had been raised and released by Fish and Wildlife personnel, it had to be dumb as a post. Then he determined that it was too immobile even for the activity of dumb rumination, that it was, indeed, dead. He hastened toward it. It was a ram and only recently dead. As an animal, it had been compact and efficient and powerful, but it didn’t have a clue what it was up to now. It was meat, nascent square cut, chops, riblets, and shank, right out of his mother’s The Joy of Cooking . But of course people didn’t eat these things, they resourced out the head and horns. Though the horns were small, a determined Zuni could still get scores of fetishes out of them.

The ram didn’t look as if it had been shot, it had just damn died. In Ray’s opinion, this was a transplant. Transplants were addled as a rule, they could never really shake the tranquilizers. The condors being made in California could drown in a puddle. Ray wanted the ram, wanted to report it to that dickhead, Darling. He took off his pack and managed to pick the animal up and heave it onto his shoulders. Clutching its legs, he staggered a few steps before he rolled it back onto the ground. Then he dug out the compass and map and absorbed himself in their arcane projections. He knew where he was. A direct route back would make his trek look like a scalene triangle. He couldn’t make it to the ranger’s station before dark, but he’d be there by the next morning. Ray rooted the nonessentials out of his pack — why the heck had he brought cologne? — and clipped a ditty bag to his belt. He glanced at the pricey gear he was leaving behind and saw it for what it was: pilferage, vain pilferage. The walking stick looked downright foppish. Ray felt he’d already gained some inner knowledge on this trip. What was important now was getting the ram out; it was giving a shape to his trek, just like the angle of return. Yeah, he’d be packing out a bighorn!

After a few hours, Ray was suspecting that the beauty of the scalene triangle was an illusion of exuberant misperception. Maybe the shortest distance between two points didn’t exist in nature. He’d tied the ram to his back at one point to steady it, but when he slipped and fell he’d just about had his ear knocked off by a hoof. He looked with disfavor at the steep arroyo; like every damn one of them, it was just something to scrabble down, then scrabble up again. He was trying to drink less water when he rested, devoting himself to tweezering out cactus spines. Some larval life-form that had commenced work on the ram’s belly had gotten under his shirt, or maybe that was his imagination. He felt as if he’d been transporting live coals. After tweezing out everything he could reach, he heaved the ram up onto his shoulders once again and it fell familiarly into place. Still, the weight immediately began to affect him. He should gut the thing out, but that would be a diminishment of his coming triumph. He took a few crablike steps over the shale, then skidded into a partial fall for twenty feet. The next time he fell twenty feet, he passed out and dreamed of lemonade, of the way they used to make it from ants back in his cubby days. He was popping big-headed ants into the water per instruction of the cub master, who was saying, “These are of the soldier caste, and their heads are huge and swollen so that they may more effectively block the nest entrance.” … Explanations weren’t what were essential now, though, Ray thought, it was the thirst that was important. He dreamed of thirst.

State investigators were prowling the halls of Green Palms trying to determine if the poor old souls were being served greyhound in their ground meat dishes. It had been discovered that the little kids at Jiminy Cricket Day Care had been eating greyhound tacos all that month and already were showing severe emotional and behavioral problems simply by being told about it, problems that were now expected to persist well into their teens and possibly beyond. But no proof was found that the old people had been gumming down racing dogs. The elderly inmates, their blood flow slowed to a trickle as it labored up to and around their brains, did not, in fact, give the possibility much credence.

“Doesn’t taste much like greyhound to me,” Elmer said. “It doesn’t taste fast .”

“For most inhabitants of modern industrialized nations,” Alice said, “the principal contact with other species does take place at the dinner table.”

“I won a hundred and fifty bucks once on a horse named Miss Whirl, which was the closest I’ve been to the animal kingdom,” Elmer said. “Not to disagree with you, kid.”

“This your granpa?” the investigator asked Alice.

“Sure he is,” Elmer said.

“I’d shoot myself before I ended up in a place like this,” the investigator confided. “My girlfriend’s interning at Mercy, and you know what they call folks like this there — the ones always clogging up the ER? They call ’em crocks and fogies. They call ’em snags, rounders, shoppers, and crud.”

Alice didn’t much care for this investigator.

“Is this the closest we’re going to get?” Elmer said. “This ground-up greyhound you have to take by spoon? For months I’ve been begging them for an injection. Smash the testicles of a young dog, I say, pass it through filter paper, inject via the leg, and bingo —the diminution of the function of one’s sexual glands will be reversed! One will feel physically improved!”

She didn’t like Elmer either.

The investigator gave a thick chortle, a sort of wet gurgle in which Alice detected the birth of his own cardiovascular problems and irreversible mental decline. She hoped.

She walked down the hall, peeking into the rooms. Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. She paused at Annie’s, for she was not sleeping but sitting upright in her chair, watching the six bird feeders — tray, oval, and tubular — that hung at her window and to which no birds came, principally because they hung within rather than without, Annie not trusting the space beyond, a patio occupied by an immense cooling and heating system that serviced the entire floor. Annie had been the subject of some discussion ever since her daughter had brought her husband’s ashes over and placed them in the bottom of her bureau. Annie had not been told that her husband of fifty-seven years had died, since Green Palms frowned on such information being imparted. What was the point when grief was not germane, when it could not be comprehended or withstood? Here only the moment existed. Annie gave no sign that she inferred that her husband rested near her in the third drawer, the one she’d never used much, even when the handsome bureau had resided in the bedroom of the yellow farmhouse in the orange grove they had tended. Annie and her husband had known those trees, the peculiarities and pedigree of each, their yield, the ones the cardinals favored.