Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Don’t forget my aortic valve replacement,” a frail man called after them as they left. He was exceedingly frail, even for this place. Of course, no one got replacements for anything after they’d checked into Green Palms. The opportunity for replacement was past.

Corvus headed not toward the green van but toward the little spring where they sometimes watched the animals drink at the end of the day. It was a modest font and modestly it lay upon the earth, a suggestion of water really. Along the path to it, Alice saw a baby’s filthy pacifier tipped insouciantly against a flower the name of which she did not know. Vexed, she climbed after the pacifier and kicked it farther. Corvus walked on. She often went without speaking, but this felt different to Alice. Had she disappointed Corvus, perhaps terminally? I don’t do as well in this place as you do . Anyplace. No place. She grabbed the skin between her eyes and twisted. Stupid, stupid, she whispered. She wondered what that boy was thinking now. That had been miles away, and she certainly didn’t expect to come across him anywhere around here, although she did believe their paths would cross again someday. Boys got over things, even a thing like that. By now the experience probably seemed like a total illusion to him. Alice liked to think that she and Corvus and Annabel would do it again. They would bring justice with no mercy, randomly. It had to be random, otherwise it would seem bourgeois. And it would be just boys and men at first, until they’d perfected the craft. Maybe they’d even grab that Cedric. The first time had been messy, no craft at all. If he had been a girl, she’d be claiming for years to whomever would listen that she hadn’t gotten over it, would never get over it. The girl, had she been him, would have nightmares, problems with intimacy, a failure to connect, an inability to express feelings. Boys were better about such things, Alice had to begrudgingly admit.

The day was commencing its delicate dying in the sky. It was still early and therefore skunk time at the spring. The other animals always conceded to the skunk at first, but not forever, just at the beginning; and this, as the skunk comprehended it, deliciously, uniquely once more, was the beginning of the beginning of the night. The girls sat, leaning against the exposed roots of a cottonwood tree. Two mule deer arrived with their preposterous ears. Jackrabbit. Fox. Corvus’s silence felt soothing again, and Alice rocked in it a little. The sun slipped away and still they sat in silence. When it was almost too dark to see, they went down the trail they had only recently ascended.

Mom, if J.C. moves in here, I’m moving out,” Emily said. “Don’t be silly,” her mother said. “He’s not moving in, he has his own place. He used to live in the country, but now he has a little bungalow in town.” She was changing the vacuum cleaner bag, the swollen, filled one dribbling dirt on the floor. Emily thought it would be appropriate for her mother to say, “Don’t be silly, you can’t move out, you’re eight years old. You are my little bunny, my little bear, my little moonslip. You need your mommy to take care of you. You need your mommy to put fresh sheets on the bed, pour you milk, buy you notebooks and pencils and such, buy you new white sneakers.…” But her mother said no such thing. She struggled with the vacuum bag, which continued to spill dense gray matter over the already grubby floorboards. Emily had heard that some people, when they died, turned into something like this, bones and all, but she didn’t believe it. How could you believe something like that?

“You’re supposed to change that when it’s no more than two-thirds full,” she said. “Otherwise, you’ll damage the machine. Stewart, my colleague at school, the one who’s retarded and likes to vacuum, he told me that.”

“You don’t have colleagues, you have classmates,” her mother said. “Where does all this shit come from? Take it out to the garbage can for me, Emily.”

Emily carried the item out with a measured, exaggerated step. In case anyone was watching, it was best to appear that you were involved in a matter requiring great skill. A single enormous container, much taller than Emily, served the needs of the alley. She never understood why her mother often failed to take in the whole picture — in this case, how could Emily accomplish the task with which she was presented when she was only four feet high?

People weren’t supposed to place dangerous materials in the container, but its enormity encouraged laissez-faire. People were not supposed to put batteries in it or pesticides or paints or used oil, but people did, they did. Emily knew her own mother was guilty in that regard. She’d turn her in to the authorities, except she doubted they would know what to do with her. You were supposed to wait! You were supposed to keep your unwanted lifestyle toxins until Amnesty Day, which she’d attended twice in her brief life. Responsible people drove their cars in a solemn procession to an unnaturally smooth, dome-shaped hill out by the interstate highway. Attendants in white plastic suits and red gloves accepted the toxins and placed them in long container trucks. No one smiled. No one said thank you. Somebody once tried to dispose of a newborn baby, but someone else heard it crying and piping in a bag and that had almost been the end of Amnesty Day. You had to be careful what you called things because some people would just take advantage. People were too literal. Someone brought a bald eagle, a bald eagle utterly entire, shot straight through its big yellow eyeballs with an arrow. The eagle didn’t cause that much of a fuss, however, whereas some hundred people had come out of the woodwork wanting to adopt the infant. The reason a child was so popular simply because he had been plucked out of a dump eluded Emily.

She placed the bag of vacuumed dust by the great imposing cart’s wheels, pretending she was propitiating it. Not that it had ever given her anything, but she couldn’t help but have hope in waiting. Her colleagues at school were always telling about the wonderful items they found. One girl, Lucy, had found a parakeet and brought it home, and now it sang and looked at itself in the mirror and had only colored comics on the floor of its cage and everything.

Emily returned to the house with strides as long as her short legs could provide, still highly aware of being observed. Houses only looked empty. They were never empty.

Her mother was noisily banging the vacuum cleaner into corners.

“It doesn’t seem to be doing the job, does it?” Emily noted.

Her mother turned it off. “J.C.’s coming over for supper, honey. Try to be nice.”

“What are we going to have to eat?”

“Presentation is more important to J.C. than the food itself. Isn’t that interesting? When he told me that, I thought: That’s an interesting way to deal with the food problem.” Emily’s mother’s archenemy was the recreational calorie.

“So what are we going to have?” Emily asked.

“Something … flamboyant,” her mother said.

“You’re not going to try and masquerade cow again, are you?” Emily said. “You know neither J.C. nor I eat cow. You’re always trying to slip me cow. From when I was a little baby.”

“You’d never know it was cow,” her mother said. “Oh, I’m just kidding. I’m making raspberry chocolate cake.”

“I don’t think that’s adequate for supper,” Emily said. “I think I need more nourishment than that.”

“You are such an old lady, Emily, honestly.”

“I’m not receiving adequate nourishment. I want to be tall — a little over seven feet tall.”