Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Oh yeah, where is it?”

“It’s by Virgo to the south.”

Despite himself, he looked up into the heavens. It was still a clear day.

“You found me,” he said modestly, “but why did you tie me up?”

The ram was arranged with its head on a boulder, facing Ray. The rest of it was covered with dirt and brush — or had he sawed off the head, as he’d dreamed of doing to quicken his passage? “Where’s my hat?” He might as well have been addressing the ram for all the response he got.

“You know,” he said, “night’s going to happen, and we’re going to be attacked by something attracted to that. We are.”

“You killed the only thing around here, I think,” Annabel said. “We haven’t seen anything, not even one of those little things that look like chipmunks.”

“You think I killed that? I did not kill that!” These antihunting, antilife freaks, you had to handle them with care. “I found it, I was trying to salvage it. I don’t even have a gun, so how could I have killed it? And even if I had, I would’ve had a perfect right to. People do kill these things, you know, they’ve killed oodles of them.”

“Oodles?” Annabel laughed.

“Hey, yeah.” Ray was a little encouraged.

“Bighorn hunting has been restricted for years,” Alice said. “Last year it was eliminated.” She had arranged two little hummocks of green twigs on either side of the ram’s head.

Ray went back to talking to the pretty one. She was wearing a short shiny red jacket that looked expensive. The other two were dressed like bums. “I have my suspicions concerning the Fish and Wildlife Department,” he said. “I think they’ve been meddling with natural law, you know? I just found this thing. You’re dealing with practically a nonevent here. I just happened upon it, I swear.”

“Wherever you go, there you are,” the pretty one said, and smiled.

“It’s ‘Wherever you go, be there,’ ” Alice said. “Wow, Annabel.”

Ray was sitting on a mat of prickly pear cactus and couldn’t move without getting spiked. He wouldn’t mind seeing Ranger Darling right about now. These girls would get a scolding! The best thing about his situation was that he wasn’t lost. If they would just go away and leave him alone, he’d rally. But there were worse things than being lost. When you were lost, all you had to do was relax and not panic. Being lost was an overrated problem. Ray drifted off. The pretty one, Annabel, was defending her version of the being there business to the crazy one, maintaining that what she’d said was close enough. It was just before dusk. Then there would be dusk. Then night. Day again. The little deaths— las muertes chiquitas —then the big one. It was all practice. Ray stared at the animal thing. With the girls on either side of it, the scene was a perversion of the pictures in the hunting mags where beaming guys and the now and then gal in chocolate-chip camouflage posed with the recently acquired dead. The dead looked relaxed and still handsome but as though they didn’t quite get the occasion. Present, but a world apart from the hoopla. The living looked happy, not that their joy made much sense if examined on a deeper level. He wondered if animals had a sense of las muertes chiquitas too. What had he been thinking when he’d picked that thing up!

“You’ve been talking and talking over there,” Annabel said.

“I must be nervous,” Ray said. “You-all haven’t really hurt anyone before, have you?”

“No,” Alice said. “You’re our practice object.”

“But you’re not going to hurt me,” Ray said.

“We’re just going to leave you here,” Corvus said.

“Alice wants you to know the thing you’ve hurt by turning into it — in your mind,” Annabel explained. “Then you’ll think in a different way and be a better person.”

“The time to do that was before,” Ray protested. “It’s putrefying now, everything’s falling apart in there now, it’s not going to work.”

“What’s not going to work?” Alice said.

Ray didn’t feel so good. He could feel the little monkey’s heart beating wetly beneath its gray skin. The little monkey had stretched its whole scrawny length flat out against him and was wordlessly expressing its situation. It, too, was not lost. It had undergone unnecessary surgery, had painfully recovered from it, had been killed piece by piece and disposed of part by part, and this had been its orbit of eternal occurrence, suffered over and over again. But now it was falling from orbit, it was tensing to bail. The relationship with Ray was drawing to a close, and the little monkey couldn’t care less. But Ray cared. Which he attempted urgently to express, because if the little monkey went, so went Ray. The depth of his sigh surprised him.

“Is this the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Alice was asking him.

“I didn’t do anything!” Ray wasn’t going to tell her about the time he’d tried to shoot an apple off a dog’s head with a pellet gun. It had been that little creep Rocky’s idea, but Rocky could be very persuasive. “Sit,” Rocky had said to the dog, some stray. Almost any dog would sit if you said sit; it was weird, as if they all were tuned to a martyr’s deliverance. He had missed the apple by a mile and was fortunate not to have hit the dog, the dog at that moment being so relative to the apple.

“I don’t feel good,” he admitted. His legs and wrists hurt from being tied in what wasn’t even a proper knot. He knew proper knots from his Cubby days. And this wasn’t one of them. The little monkey was dragging its long self around Ray’s tightening head again.

“Do you want some aspirin?” Annabel asked.

“Annabel,” Alice said, “let him not feel good if he wants.”

Ray believed that if he’d been traveling with a dog none of this would have happened. One of those hybrid wolf pups he’d seen advertised. He’d get a major collar for it, made of heavy, rippling, silver threads, the stuff knights hung around their necks to protect them from arrows.

“I always carry aspirin,” Annabel said. “I have a silver pillbox I keep them in.”

“Annabel,” Alice said, “who taught you to be friendly to everybody you meet?”

It’s breeding, maybe, Ray thought grimly, being brought up properly, and where were you brought up, Alice, he’d like to ask, in penitentiary day care? They had no weapons, as far as he knew — God, keep weapons out of the hands of women! — and at best a pretty muzzy agenda. He hoped they weren’t into disinterested malice, but girls weren’t as a rule, were they?

Annabel popped an aspirin into his mouth.

“Could I have about a half a dozen more?” Ray asked. “And some water?” There was something vaguely quasi-religious to this, even sexual — not at this exact moment, of course, but possibly in a future moment. Three chicks and an American male, bondage and threat, great lawless fun just waiting for the unexpected spark. Three flowerpots waiting for his seed. He was at their mercy and their service. He could do it! He just had to coast out this headache, keep being congenial. I’m shy but I’m hung like a horse, that was the implication he wanted to project. He wanted to shine as a hostage.

But his head felt frail, almost transparent, with the ghostly little monkey now shrunk into a corner. And the monkey was transparent, too, and he could see within it an even smaller monkey. This was a first, the monkey within the monkey within.

“I don’t think he’s well,” Annabel said. “He doesn’t look well.”

He wouldn’t admit he was subject to collapse. He was a stroker, and strokers never admit. When he recovered from the first one, he said the prettiest things. The words he could pluck out of air positively shimmered! He was a poet, a walking I Ching . It was beautiful.