Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Ray had always considered himself one balls-to-the-wall puppy. He had thrown himself into the life he’d been given with ardor, ardor , yes, and now he wasn’t even walking upright but just crawling on the ground, creeping over it with no more sense than a snake. His left arm was useless, and his left leg, although possessing more feeling, seemed ambivalent about committing itself to Ray’s purpose. Ray felt no more than a simulacrum of himself humping and rolling and scrabbling down the trail. He knew it was the trail, close to where he’d begun, because it stank and he could see the prints of many soles in the dust. He knew he was alone because he couldn’t feel the little monkey anymore. The little monkey had bailed. He hadn’t entrusted Ray with the packing of the parachute. The little animal — which when new is always holy and unceasing but which in Ray’s case, it’s true, was maimed and neglected and could not be comforted — had finally flown. Ray crept, panting, along the pointed ground. He knew his life had changed.

Corvus drove; Alice, as the thinnest, was in the middle. “That was so unsatisfactory,” Alice said. She had yearned blindly for the ontological parry and thrust and was disheartened that this, this victim , she thought dismissively, had been incapable of it. What was wrong with his mouth, anyway? He looked like a crybaby.

Annabel had been afraid for a moment that she’d lost her silver pillbox after giving that boy the aspirin, but here it was again, thank heaven. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, she was thinking, and didn’t know why. They never said, Always a best man, never a groom. This one she could never visualize as a groom, as anybody’s groom. What had Alice wanted with him? She just hadn’t thought the moment through, which was so typical of Alice. Some sort of frontier savagery thing, that was the closest Annabel could come to describing her behavior sometimes, but she wasn’t really savage or even malicious; it was just that if you weren’t rebutting her preposterous sentiments every minute, you’d find yourself — well, not mesmerized, Alice was no mesmerizer, but dismantled or something. Annabel frequently found herself speechless before such blind momentum. Back home, Annabel had played little parts in theater productions, not school ones but civic ones, and she’d been valued, she’d been told she had talent. She had even been in a commercial once — all she’d had to do was look at a package of chewing gum with delight — but out here she felt like a kind of supernumerary.

“I don’t think we should go out so much,” Annabel said. “You’re never going to get me to go camping again.”

“We never went camping,” Alice said.

“That was no hunter, either,” Annabel said. “Please don’t delude yourself.”

“He was sort of pupal, wasn’t he?” Alice realized that he hadn’t killed the animal, but this didn’t concern her overmuch. Evil must be repaid, and not necessarily to the one who’d done the deed. You had to grab whoever was available and annoying and see what came of it, although in this case it hadn’t been much. He had been irritatingly familiar, as though they’d conducted uncompleted business sometime in the past.

“Pupal?” Annabel said. “He was far from cute, but he wasn’t that disgusting.”

“I think you can only do bad things,” Corvus said, “if you forget you’re going to die.”

“Oh,” Annabel said. Corvus made her nervous. How fast were they going, anyway? The Dodge’s speedometer was broken, as well as the gas gauge. The truck was a death trap, and this hair, this Tommy’s hair, was always floating around inside. I would have this vacuumed, she thought, in the most thorough way.

“Remembering you’re going to die lets you do bad things,” Alice said. “Besides, what we did wasn’t bad. We revived him. Lying there with that poor tormented thing all wrapped around him, he could’ve suffocated.” She had seen her first bighorn, but then again, she hadn’t.

Corvus’s hands, green in the dashboard’s light, purled across the wheel. The saguaros waved them on, but at a four-way stop, they paused. Music screamed from a car to the left. Liar fuckin liar ah’m gonna squash you like an insect . The car sped off to the horrid gaieties of town.

“We’re about to reenter,” Corvus said, “the steak and lobster world.”

“I used to love four-way stops as a little kid,” Alice said. “They just fascinated me. I’d kneel in the backseat in awe. I thought it was proof that adults knew what they were doing.”

“We should have listened to him more,” Corvus said. “He was talking in some lost language.”

“I didn’t hear him say much of anything,” Alice said. “As an experiment, he wasn’t very complex.”

“As experiments, we’re all complex,” Corvus said.

Annabel did not consider herself an experiment. She was Annabel née Vineyard, and she was going to do her best to pretend that this year, when it was over, had never occurred.

“Because we’re made for both this life and another one,” Corvus said. “At the same time we have to regard as one this life, the next life, and the life between.”

“The life between?” Annabel exclaimed. “Is that like a so-called life?” That’s where I am, she thought. They passed a large billboard advertising vasectomy reversal services.

“That guy wasn’t up to this kind of thinking,” Alice said.

Who is? Annabel thought.

They pulled into a service station. Corvus gassed up the truck while Alice cleaned the windshield. She liked the overlapping, dissolving lines the squeegee made. Annabel went inside and looked at the magazines. Your Prom looked fascinating. She took it over to the checkout line and stood behind a man with an immense fistula on the back of his neck. It had a little black hole in the center of it as though he were in the habit of trying to locate it with a pin or a pen. What if eternity was like this? Standing behind a huge fistula in an unmoving checkout line with the last copy of Your Prom magazine. She moved over to the other line, but here the customer ahead of her was wearing what appeared to be one of her mother’s suits. She was almost absolutely sure it was her mother’s suit, the cranberry-colored one with the big buttons. The woman was much too large for the suit.

Annabel hurried outside. Dozens of people were gathered beneath the moth-crazed lights, smoking and idly staring. Everything was so busy and ugly, Annabel thought, so inconclusive . She saw Corvus and Alice in the truck, gazing out the windshield at the roiling backdrop. Of course Alice hadn’t cleaned the glass completely, she’d missed whole areas as she always did.

Annabel squeezed in beside them on the truck’s bench seat as some boys walked by and squinted at them appraisingly. What if the three of them ran into that boy again, Annabel wondered, the one they’d tied up? He didn’t seem the kind of boy who would hold a grudge, who’d report or identify them or anything, but it would still be awkward. What would anyone say ? Had Alice foreseen such a contingency? No, of course not. She didn’t know about Alice — or even about Corvus, who in her opinion had been rendered practically abnormal by sorrow — but if she ever saw that boy again, she would just die .

Hickey was baby-sitting his own child, Mallick, which means “king.” That had been Loretta’s idea, he’d had nothing to say about it; she’d gotten to the birth certificate form first, and after seventy-two hours any changes cost fifty bucks, so Mallick it was. The kid was almost two years old now, but Hickey still hadn’t adjusted to the name and didn’t think he ever would. King, for Chrissakes. He and the kid were driving around after supper. They’d been bacheloring it for three days now, Loretta being off in Minnesota at a wolf howl.