Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Let them be together, they want to be together,” the daughter had said, dropping off the ashes. She felt badly about allowing her father to starve himself to death in the sensible efficiency she’d found for him after selling the grove against his wishes.

His ashes were packed in a box made of orangewood. Everyone who passed Annie’s room could smell the insistent fragrance. There had been a little shop on the highway side of the grove where Annie and her husband had sold bags of oranges and orange perfume and orange wine, orange blossom honey and boxes made of orangewood with a mirror inserted within the lid. This was one of those.

The staff was quietly observing Annie’s reactions, but she hadn’t had any. The orange was definitely making all the effort. Annie was one of the dear ones, the sweetie pies, still neat and continent and mild, but a wolf or a goose would have sensed and then grieved the loss of its mate more than Annie had, a limpet would’ve detected something missing. If specific compounds could create little dead islands in the brain, could annihilate the glowing shade-wracked jungle of caring and desire and delight and flatten it all to a sunbaked crust over which not even the most primitive thought crept or left a track, of what possible use was anything that happened to a person in this life? It made the staff wonder, even at $6.50 an hour. And although what they knew about neurofibrillary tangles and neuron-secreting chemicals could be fit onto the tip of a pencil, it made them pause as they prepared to go home with a rose and a piece of sheet cake, for visitors were forever bringing sheet cakes and roses to this place. But quickly there was no time for wondering, for the meal had to be made, the bills paid, the child’s drawing appreciated, that crayoned drawing of the spiderweb that looked like the sun.

Alice lingered, chewing on her fingers, thinking about Tommy and all the stories she’d read about grieving creatures, the faithful hounds that wouldn’t depart the hospital steps, the dock, the bar, the bier where the object of their ardor had last been seen. Animals were prescient, determined psychics, insistent in their speechless warnings, their final spectral farewells. Weren’t they always showing up at their loved one’s office in the next town scratching and whining, their silky coats mussed, their ghostly eyes beseeching, when in fact they lay in the street miles away, crushed by a speeding car? Weren’t they always howling and carrying on at the very moment the daughter away at college was being introduced to the serial killer, when the son was skidding into the head-on crash, when the master was breathing his last in intensive care? Weren’t they always wagging their tail in some dead beloved’s garden at something that wasn’t there? And here was Annie, who hadn’t experienced the slightest discomfort when her husband died of starvation, the last thing to see his stomach a bit of oatmeal. They hadn’t spent a night apart in fifty-seven years before she’d dropped that teacup, the lustrous leaves of the orange trees quaking above her, the dropping of a teacup the death visitant, the beginning of the end for many of the female inhabitants of Green Palms. Here now was Annie, blue eyes widely alert, alert to nothing, watching those empty feeding stations. The world was all a mare’s nest to Annie. There was no sign, she gave no sign. There was not the thinnest spirit wire of connection in that room. There was nothing.

Orange labored in a void.

Carter appreciated the constellations. There was the summer Triangle high in the sky. There were the wings of Aquila and Cygnus. Just before midnight the ringing phone had awakened him, but he’d decided to let the machine get it. Let the machine get it, he thought. But then he had grown curious and loped into the other room and pushed the message button.

“Granpa’s coming home from the nursing home tomorrow,” a woman’s flat voice said. “It’s the business office’s doing. They’re turning him over to us, barks and whistles and all.”

She seemed to be calling from a take-out restaurant. “Triple bacon and jalapeño number fourteen’s getting cold here!” someone bawled.

“Any suggestions?” the voice paused.

“Twenty-one up, twenty-three—”

“I know you’re there, you dirty bugger. You’d better pick up …”

Carter returned to the bedroom. His Hermès fox-and-hen tie lay on the floor. He was sure he’d put it away. Was Ginger showing up when he wasn’t even in the room? Was she distracting him with wrong numbers, the voices of unfamiliars, so she could do something unpleasant? There were impossible phenomena like Ginger, and then there were even more impossible phenomena of a higher and more disturbing order than Ginger. He examined the tie, which appeared unharmed. He hung it carefully on a rack with its more somber companions.

He turned off the lights and resumed gazing at the stars through the enormous windows. It was really quite a nice house, Carter thought. The evening was quiet. Then there was the unmistakable sound of someone mangling his mailbox at the end of the driveway with a baseball bat. Through the silken air he heard it clearly — a dozen lurid wallops followed by the screech of a car’s tires. Then silence again.

“Daddy?” whispered Annabel at the door. “Daddy, can I come in?” He opened the door to the hall, but Annabel wasn’t there.

“Honey?” he said.

She simply wasn’t there. She was in her own neat and fragrant room sleeping, dreaming she was in a department store buying gloves, long, white, elbow-length gloves with three tiny pearl buttons at the wrist. Her mother was the salesperson and was performing in that capacity with aloof professionalism. Down aisles heaped with goods Annabel drifted — all head, as is the custom in dreams, more consciousness than head, really, with the sense she was behind her head, it being a mask of sorts that fit around her like airy rubber. Then it was no longer a store but a beach. She and her parents had prepared a picnic, and her mother was putting up the beach umbrella while her father was laying out the plaid blanket and mixing up the Dark and Stormys in the brightly colored aluminum cups. It was a lovely deserted white sand beach with soft grasses and less than the usual amount of garbage discarded from ships destined for distant, unexotic lands. Her father was proceeding efficiently, having already provided Annabel with her favorite cup filled with cranberry juice and well into sampling his own rum and ginger beer, but her mother seemed to be having some difficulty arranging herself. She kept jamming the umbrella pole into the sand, but the point would not set properly. The tip proved to be covered with shell and yolk, which at first glance didn’t present itself as such but which, as her mother continued to stab and root about and raise and plunge the pole again and again, became more adamantly shell and yolk. Ginger had selected a sea turtle’s nest for their umbrella site and had scrambled its leathery contents to a briny batter.

Annabel woke up, displeased.

What made the dream particularly unpleasant was that this picnic had indeed occurred, more or less, and unfortunately had degenerated in a similar manner. Annabel had never had a dream so redundant.

Corvus, Corvus. They kept calling her name. He didn’t know the names of the other two. One was very pretty, and the other one, who didn’t even remember him, was just a madwoman. How could she totally not remember him? There was something not right about her.

“ ‘Corvus,’ ” he said. “Doesn’t that mean raven?”

He didn’t think she was going to speak, but then she said, “It’s a constellation too.”