Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“One of these damn things can kill a man if it falls on him,” Kevin said.

Hickey expressed indignation, although in fact he was feeling better, happy even. The air felt good out here, sort of supple and kind, and he was happy to get away from King’s watchful supereminent gaze. He popped some chain-fruit cholla.

Kevin was feeling better too. He lightly hammered a cactus that appeared to be appealing comically for pardon, but it was just fooling around, it was saying, “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” which was why Kevin had had trouble selling his second edition of Cactus Talk . It all sounded like exceedingly familiar shit.

A plane flew high above them in the perfect sky — Loretta’s plane, no doubt, right on time, dropping down from the north. After Hickey picked her up at the airport, she would want to be taken out to dinner for Indian food from India, a place where people shat and bathed in the same river and worshiped cows. She would have a little pimple on her nose, which always happened when she traveled. She would talk about the wonderful people she’d met. People were nothing special. Didn’t she realize there were five and a half billion people in the world, how could any one of them be special? Think about it, Loretta, for Chrissakes! He hated Indian food. Endure, evade, Hickey mused, firing. He and Kevin were walking farther and farther from the truck and tiny judgmental King. Since their targets weren’t moving at all, they were delighted to see an object fluttering and seething toward them in the twilight. Hickey really couldn’t tell what it was. All push and sprawl, it was so smudged that he couldn’t make the damned thing out. He couldn’t even tell if it was humping toward them or sidling away.

“How do you interpret that, Kevin?” he yelled. But Kevin was firing, having already interpreted it as something inanimate but in motion, inanimate but confident in its effortless ability to succeed without ever having to be alive, an ability that perturbed Kevin. He emptied his shotgun under the pretext of a duty honorably discharged. And Hickey fired too. He had the better gun — his daddy’s, with the shaggy-legged hawk in full plummet etched upon the breach.

Ray didn’t even have the opportunity to see his old friend Pythagoras in the flowing white robes, holding an animal to his mouth to catch his dying breath, for Pythagoras believed that only animals perpetuate spirit. Ray didn’t have the comforting chance to see that. His self merely scattered. Into the lacuna.

The television was on again. A startled bull with a ring through its immense nostrils stood in a river. Piranha swirled about. The bull turned gray like a block of chalk, then transparent, and then it was a skeleton, floating away.

Ginger, Ginger, Carter thought, then unplugged the television, turned the screen to the wall, and draped his bathrobe over it.

“Did you buy that stock I’ve been telling you about?” she asked.

“I have not,” Carter said. He decided he was going to be matter-of-fact tonight. No more, no less. Ginger had been urging him to buy a particular stock, insisting upon it, though she’d never shown much interest in the market in the past.

“This is how people get ahead, Carter, through insider information. I’m giving you a tip.”

“Cyberstocks are very tricky, darling. The market’s still sorting itself out.”

“Aren’t you interested in how I know?” she said.

“I wish we’d done this together before,” Carter said. “It would’ve been fun, but under the circumstances I—” Could Ginger have put on a few pounds? Impossible, Carter thought. But there was no doubt about it, she had become a little hippy.

“What are you looking at?” she snapped.

“Thinking,” he said, “just thinking.”

“It’s going to be instant gratification with this stock, I assure you.”

“People who want instant gratification get clobbered by the market. This sounds very similar to the biotechnology craze just a few—”

“Don’t try to educate me, Carter. I can’t believe you still have a long-term horizon.”

Long-term horizon? She certainly had been talking to someone. “Why not?” he asked cautiously.

“Have you rearranged this room?” Ginger demanded. “You have, haven’t you? You’ve done something with the mirror.”

He looked guiltily at the mirror, which Donald had moved only a few days before. “You never should have a mirror that reflects your image in bed, Mr. Vineyard,” Donald had told him. “A mirror that reflects your body while sleeping causes unnatural dream states and a weakening of physical vitality.”

Carter got a kick out of Donald calling him Mr. Vineyard. It was getting to be a little joke between them.

“The entire room looks different,” Ginger said, annoyed. “Is it that dolt Donald’s doing? You’ll be hanging crystals in the windows next! You’ll be putting baskets filled with feathers in the corner.” Her wide hips moved her fluidly from one side of the room to the other while she ranted about Donald. She was looking astonishingly well nourished, Carter thought with dismay. She wasn’t fading away at all.

“You’ve moved the lights around as well! It’s much dimmer in here.”

Donald had told Carter that due to overbright bulbs, the bedroom was an extraordinarily unstable environment.

“Have you ever heard of bagua , darling?” Carter ventured. “Feng shui?”

“I cannot believe this!”

Empty vessels make the most noise, Carter thought. Maybe this is what that meant.

“It’s just an idea,” he said, trying to be conciliatory.

“I know what it is, for godssakes, and it’s an Oriental idea. Carter, you’re becoming a flake. You were always dull and predictable and rational and money-oriented, and to hear you now — well, it’s pathetic.”

“My journey has changed,” Carter said, “as has yours.” He felt a little giddy talking to Ginger like this. Butting heads, as it were.

“Do you intend to marry Donald?” she said.

“Why would Donald want to get married?” He hastened to add, “What a preposterous notion.”

“Has he suggested a hot-air balloon ride yet?”

“No,” Carter said. Skimming over the desert peaks and valleys in a colorfully patterned balloon with Donald … the idea had come up. Casting off at dawn. Elevating with the rising sun. Champagne, a few silly sandwiches. Maybe on his birthday.

Ginger pulled her hair around in front of her face in a vaguely familiar gesture and peered at the ends. “I’m letting my hair grow,” she said. “Don’t you love it?”

Carter put his head in his hands.

“Passion was never your forte,” Ginger went on. “Your member was adequate, but your lovemaking lacked élan. Admit it, Carter. You preferred making money.”

“Darling, it’s so late,” Carter said from behind his hands. “Isn’t it late?”

“Why don’t you look at your little clock?” she suggested.

Carter looked around the room, which Donald had quite transformed. Where was the clock? Ginger was taking exceptional satisfaction in its absence. His minor losses and setbacks clearly won her complete approval. Ginger was mean, she was so mean. She was aggressive, destructive, and bored, a pyramid of seemingly indestructible neuroses. No way was he going to buy that stock. He would stand firm on this one, appeal to her snobbishness. Did she want to use the opportunity she’d been given, in what was a stunning reversal of nature’s laws — to indulge in common necromancy? If only she’d make some friends there. Surely the dead had their fascinations. But Ginger hadn’t been at all interested in or moved by the dead even when she was alive.