Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“It’s so beautiful, Hickey,” she’d said when she called to tell him what time to pick her up at the airport. “Hundreds of people all out there silent beneath the stars, you can hear a pin drop, and then the wolves howl and when they’re through, everyone cries, ‘Thank you, thank you!’ and we all applaud. The applause is just thunderous. It’s thrilling.”

He didn’t want to hear about it. He and King had pointedly not been invited on this expedition. Every four months Loretta would leave them for a weekend and go off and do some damn thing involving crowds. Loretta loved crowds. Hickey was more solitary by nature, as he believed was King, with whom, as yet, he had forged no bond.

King sat in his padded car seat studying the scenery as though he found it vaguely inadmissible. Even dressed in lumpish toddler clothes, he had an annoyingly aristocratic air about him. Sometimes Hickey meanly called him Miss Me, which perturbed King not at all.

Also in the car this evening, holding marijuana smoke carefully in his lungs, was Hickey’s friend Kevin, whose lady had left him a week before.

“It was a simple thing,” Kevin had told him. “You know how it started? It started she looks at me one morning, I’m having my beer, and she says, ‘You know how you spell woman, Kevin? It’s “w-o-m-y-n.” That’s how you spell woman, you lazy ugly worthless freak.’ And she was gone. She’d always wanted to open a bakery in Belize, and I suspect she’s down there this very moment. I used to say to her, ‘What kind of ambition is that, running a bakery in Belize? I have more ambition than that.’ ”

Kevin had once published a book of saguaro photographs in which the cacti said funny things befitting their incongruent natures. It was something you’d read sitting on the can. Then he’d published a sequel in which they said additional funny things, but this hadn’t proved as successful. Hickey told him he was belaboring the concept.

“Sometimes I wish Loretta would just leave for good,” Hickey said, “instead of this once-every-four-months thing. Then I could get on with my life.” He looked at his son and nodded significantly. King ignored him.

“You’d miss her if it was permanent. I miss my lady’s sweet buns bad. Maybe I should go down there, get a job in a dive shop, fill air tanks or something. Work my way back into her affection.”

“That’s dangerous work,” Hickey said. “What if you fucked up and somebody’s down there at seventy feet sucking bad air? You’d get sued.” Hickey feared the legal process although he’d never been in a courtroom, never even been called for jury duty. But he had courtroom dreams in which he stood before a robed female who was about to disclose something to him in catastrophic detail.

“You’ve got to know the kairos , Hickey,” Kevin said somberly. He extinguished the roach stub with his fingers and swallowed it.

“What the hell is that?” Hickey said.

“Opportunity. You’ve got to know when opportunity presents itself. You’ve got to be able to recognize it. Like I saw opportunity in these cactus once. I saw economic possibilities, whereas most people wouldn’t necessarily. Now I hate them.”

“I hate ’em, too,” Hickey said. “What the hell time is it, do you know?”

“Time is a provisional thing,” Kevin said. “Hours are an opportunity for human action, nothing more. Do you mind if I light up another joint?”

“Just don’t blow it on King. His mother’ll smell it.”

“Let’s stop and get out,” Kevin said. “What say, King, you talkin’ yet?”

“Nah, he’s not talking. I was trying to get him to start while Loretta was away — would’ve made her feel bad, teach her she just can’t take off like she does because things happen, little milestones that come but once.”

They passed a descanso , a white wooden cross wreathed with faded ribbon, the name of the unlucky decedent spelled out in nails. King, clutching a mouthed rusk in one small hand, gave it a furry look. Hickey downshifted and continued until it was out of sight before stopping. The men got out, but King sat firm.

“Has he smiled yet?” Kevin asked.

“Well, yeah. But he don’t smile much,” Hickey admitted.

“Good-looking boy, though,” Kevin said doubtfully. They passed the joint back and forth. Two shallow arroyos veered down on them in a green V. He wasn’t about to ask if he and Loretta had ever thought of having King checked out. Hickey seemed in a bad mood. And he was in a bad mood too. The saguaros were looking at him as though he cut quite the comic figure out there. It used to be he felt intimate with the giant cacti when he smoked, but now he just wanted to fuck the loony things over. And they were so goddamn big, which Kevin had never found amusing, sensitive as he was to being five feet five and three-quarters without the augmenting lifts in his cowboy boots. When his girlfriend had still been fond of him, she had reassured him by saying that Kant had been only five feet tall and nonetheless a large and successful thinker. Kevin had checked out a synopsis of the shrimp philosopher’s work from the Bookmobile, but little Immanuel seemed pretty dated to him, as well as being confused, a waffler, in fact. That is, did he believe in God, personal freedom, and immortality, or not?

The saguaros, their arms upraised in mock horror, looked as if they were about to fall over from laughing at him.

“Who said paranoia is having all the facts?”

“Hell if I know.” Hickey was brooding about the sort of relationship he and King would have when his son grew up. King might try to kill him; he could see them squaring off in the messy living room. Or King wouldn’t make the attempt himself, he’d think he was too damn smart for that, he’d hire someone to slip into his own father’s home in the middle of the night to dispatch him. Loretta wouldn’t be there, of course. She’d be conveniently absent in some crowd, thousands of witnesses attesting to her presence, and King would have his flunky alibiers lined up, too; but Hickey wasn’t going to allow this to happen, no he wasn’t. He’d survive, and then he and King would have themselves a little talk.

“Somebody said it,” Kevin said.

Then again, maybe he and King would never have their little talk. It could happen. And his life would just be Endure and Evade, over and over. That would be the rhythm of his years. That would be the judgment.

In the truck King sat more or less contentedly, though missing the throaty burble of his father’s Floatmaster muffler — a pleasure that, he knew from experience, would recur once they were on the road again. The sound of the Floatmaster was to King the anthem of the gods.

“You got your shotgun?” Kevin inquired.

“ ’Course. Got both of ’em.”

“Let’s shoot up some saguaros. Look at the arms on that one.” He pointed to a configuration that was annoyingly cosmic.

“Let’s make ’er dance,” Hickey agreed glumly. He went to the truck and removed the guns from beneath a Mexican blanket behind the seats. He hadn’t shot up a sag for some time. “We got to move out a ways. King don’t like loud noise.”

“He’s a sensitive, good-looking boy but you don’t want him getting too sensitive,” Kevin advised.

“Sometimes I think King and I don’t share a common atmosphere,” Hickey said, heartfelt. “And Loretta encourages that.”

“Paranoia’s having all the facts,” Kevin said, sincere. He’d like to carve that on his goddamn hearthstone.

Shooting felt good. Joy consists in this, after all, the increase of one’s power. They walked as though reconnoitering dangerous territory, firing, the green cortex of the cacti spraying like splashed water through the air. Kevin chewed off an enormous branching arm with a half dozen shots and it crashed, wetly splintering, on the ground.