Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“If we don’t take our time about it,” Nurse Daisy said, “we can still bathe Hattie.” Hattie used to be a beauty from Philadelphia with a lovely voice, but now, wrinkled, mute, and weighing scarcely more than a boom box, she was here. The body was but a foolish thing, Nurse Daisy liked to assure her, nothing but a counterpart, a substitute, a saboteur, a fraud, and a thief. Unremarkably, her words never soothed. If Nurse Cormac was known for assuring everyone she touched with her cool hands that the Lord Jesus would appear to them in the manner that would enable them to see Him most clearly, in the form they would most recognize, a personalized, monogrammed, shaped-to-order savior for the end of each distinctive life, Nurse Daisy tirelessly projected an unambitious unimaginative Death, who showed up wearily and never on time.

A toilet flushed. Someone howled, “I want to go hoooome .”

“Do you know what position Freddie used to hold? He was an important man, a good man. It’s no secret. Let me tell you. He influenced thousands of lives in this state.”

“What difference does it make?” Alice said.

“So you think that reality is the present, is that what you think?”

This was the most remarkable query Alice had ever heard. She wasn’t going near this one. But she said, “Reality’s no present,” something her poppa might say but hadn’t to her knowledge. She wondered where Nurse Daisy went after work. She imagined her home to be a thorny, unwelcoming wattle.

“Ho ho,” she said. “Very good. Present as in ‘gift.’ Up for assisting me with Hattie?” She believed that Alice was not among her anonymous accusers, the names of which were legion.

In fact, Alice wasn’t one of them, but still the woman wore her out. She blushed and lied. “My friends and I are going to a movie.”

“In my day,” Nurse Daisy said, “when you went to a movie, just as you were settling in and the lights had gone out, a film personality would appear on the screen appealing for funds for some worthy cause promoting human health or longevity. A disease that required eradication — some part of the Devil’s work that needed to be stamped out. Do you believe that disease and death are the Devil’s work?”

“I do not.”

“The Devil is Jesus’ brother. Throw that up to Nurse Cormac sometime, she’ll go through the roof. Do you know anything about electricity?”

Charged particles manifesting themselves as attraction and repulsion, Alice thought mechanically, though she knew that for the nurse this explanation would hardly suffice.

“Negative electricity is as good as positive electricity,” Nurse Daisy instructed. “It’s all electricity.”

Alice thought with discomfort about her oftentimes casual use of electrical products.

“Let’s return to the movie I was speaking about — or rather, as it was in my day, the pitch before the movie. A film star would appear, and the star would appeal to you directly, look right into your eyes. He would acknowledge your presence before him. And he would talk about this or that disease or viral calamity or genetic injustice and his words would be interspersed with the images of all manner of humankind struggling to be well, and he would thank you in advance for opening up your heart. Then the lights would go on, and individuals would pass through the aisles soliciting donations. People would dig into their pockets and purses and give to fight the evil afflicting others. There was something about the lights and the rows upon rows of strangers and the waiting for the movie that would make every person give, not a single one abstaining.”

“I would’ve abstained,” Alice said.

“Your quarter would have paid for a monkey, your dime for a rabbit, your nickel for a mouse to help researchers find cures.”

“What!” Alice yelped. “You didn’t give, did you? You left the movie in protest, didn’t you?”

“You were able to do so much good for a quarter in those days. They made it easier for you than they do today. Today it’s harder to make a person feel guilty. You know the man who blew up the building and killed one hundred sixty people? His sister said he’s not guilty even if he did do it. His sister said, ‘He’s not a monster.’ She remembered happy times together. They played Clue. On their parents’ birthday they would make them breakfast and serve it to them in bed. How did that All-American ritual get started, do you think? It’s always seemed quite unwholesome to me. To serve your parents breakfast in bed on their birthdays? I’d bet anything you never did it.”

They had reached the nurse’s station, where the nurses were chatting about the previous evening, when two residents on the same floor had died within ten minutes.

“That happens so often,” one said. “Months go by, then out of the blue, one gets taken. Then another one.”

“You think It thinks, Well, as long as I’m here ,” the other nurse said a little giddily. She was regarding a plate of cookies as though it were all a matter of selection when clearly it was not, the cookies being identical as far as Alice could tell, round and brown with colored sprinkles. They looked desperate, as if baked by someone in despair. Most of the gifts or goods in Green Palms exhibited that aura. When the nurse finally selected one, she had to move others to get at it. She took her first bite just as wizened Wilson Greer II rolled up in his wheelchair.

“Is that the balut , ladies? Share the balut , for Christ’s sweet sakes! No hoarding!” He extended bony fingers toward the plate. Wilson had it in his head that any treat people gathered around was unhatched duck embryos still in the shell, something he’d discovered in the Philippines prior to becoming a guest of the emperor and participating in the Bataan Death March. There wasn’t anyone on the floor who didn’t associate water being sucked down a drain with Wilson’s aural memory of the sound of his best friend and fellow officer Colonel Rodney Wren being bayoneted on the road. There wasn’t anyone who had been around Wilson more than five minutes who didn’t have the catchy ditty

Here’s to the Battling Bastards of Bataan

No poppa, no momma, no Uncle Sam

No aunts, no sisters, no cousins, no nieces

No rifles, no guns or artillery pieces

And nobody gives a damn …

rollicking around their brains, insistent as any show tune.

“You’re not eating that correctly,” the hoary warrior told the nurse. “You have to make a little hole in it, suck out the broth, then peel the shell slowww-ly and eat the yolk and the chick. It’s best before the beak and feathers appear, but sometimes you can’t be choosy, you know?”

People began to drift away. “You call yourselves balut ?” Wilson said to the cookies. “You’re no good!”

Alice palmed three cookies off the plate and attempted to swallow them quietly.

“You know they’ve committed psychosurgery on me,” Wilson said. “They buried sensitive electrodes deep within my brain, which allows my brain waves to be sent via a two-way radio to a central computer. Whenever I have an urge they consider inappropriate, the computer sends back a message of its own, inhibiting me. The computer blocks my attitude to just about everything. I don’t know which way is up. I don’t know my ass from my elbow. My inner compass lies dead. My Indian guide has left me.”

Alice looked at him helplessly. A nurse pushed against the back of the wheelchair and said, “C’mon, Wilson, din-din time.”

“Bitch, cunt, whore,” he said. “Filthy phantom animal.”

“Goodness,” the nurse said cheerfully, running the wheelchair casually into the wall. The jarring silenced him.