Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“I know you don’t care for it when I’m frank, Emily, but you’re not going to be tall. Your father wasn’t tall. He wasn’t stupid, but there was one thing about him and that was that he was short, quite exceedingly short. I’m not saying he was malformed, honey, just short.”

Her father, over the years, had gotten progressively smaller. He was shrinking fast, though he’d been holding at jockey size for the last month or so.

“We’ve got to have more than cake for supper,” Emily said.

“Stained-glass faux veal loaf,” her mother said. “How does that sound for tonight? Fresh colorful seasonal vegetables providing the stained-glass effect.”

Emily knew her gullibility was being tested again and wished her mother would respect her intelligence. Most likely it would just be another bean-and-burrito night from Food for Here and There. Emily would be required to ride down for the burritos, risking her life on a bicycle path dominated by Rollerblading women pushing tricycled hooded strollers containing the next generation, women who would hesitate or veer for no one. Her mother would serve the burritos on plastic plates. Lately she’d been pouring J.C.’s beer into a glass for him and she didn’t put the milk carton on the table anymore. That was about it for presentation.

“Mom, do you know bats eat bats sometimes?”

Her mother scratched her on top of the head as though she were a pet. Indeed, though hardly freakish, Emily was about pet size.

“You’ve got so much sand in your hair! What do you do, just pour it on your head?”

Sometimes she did. Personally, she liked the feel of it.

J.C. arrived in new jeans, baby blue ropers, and a tight snap-button shirt. Emily thought he looked ridiculous.

“Hiya, Pickless,” he said, rubbing her head. “Jesus, what you got on your head?”

“Oh, I know …” her mother began.

“You want me to wash your head?” J.C. asked.

“No,” Emily replied.

“Why, I think that’s very nice of J.C.,” her mother said. “Why don’t you let him wash your hair? You don’t have anything else to do.”

J.C. washed her hair in the kitchen sink while her mother watched. He was very good at it. The water was the proper temperature, and he didn’t use too much soap.

“You got an interesting head,” J.C. said. “You should get it read sometime. I couldn’t do it, I’ll admit. I’m not about to tell you I could when I won’t, but there are those who can. You could even shave your head, and you’d still look okay.”

Emily kept her own counsel.

Her mother was looking at J.C. admiringly. “This is so nice of you, J.C.,” she said.

“I like washing hair,” he said. “It was a hard discovery to make, but I made it.” He dried her hair roughly and then began to brush it out.

“Don’t yank my scalp off,” Emily said.

“Not in the kitchen, maybe,” her mother said.

“You got any beer?” J.C. asked.

“Oh, I don’t!” her mother cried. “I meant to get beer. I’ll go get some.”

“I guess I should’ve brought my own,” J.C. said sourly.

After Emily’s mother drove off, he brushed out Emily’s hair as she sat in a lawn chair in the backyard. The brush made its way to the snaggled ends, meeting considerable resistance. A tangled bundle of Emily’s hair flew westward. “That just snapped right off,” J.C. noted. “You got the hair of an unhealthy person. If you decide not to opt for the shaved skull look, I predict you’ll be looking at a wig shortly down the line.”

“I don’t care,” Emily said. “You become what you are.”

An hour before sunset, already the mountains were adopting their hooded, secretive glaze. The sky beyond them had the hyacinthine hue of deep Heaven. Emily had never liked this time of day and made considerable effort to find some inane but absorbing pursuit to see her way through it. Something about a sunset demanded an assessment of one’s hours. What had she done today? She hadn’t even learned how to blow her nose. Her mother had a wish list concerning Emily, and the mechanics of nose blowing had been featured on it for some time. It would be on that disheartening list again tomorrow.

“It sure is going to be a pretty evening,” J.C. said.

She grunted.

“You don’t take to the end of the day kindly?” J.C. said. “I had a wife once, hated the end of the day. Picked an argument every sunset. The prettier the sunset, the worse she’d get. She’d be spitting spiders. She was okay otherwise, but a pretty sunset would just set her off. I think it was a fear of the passing of time. She resented it.”

“Sunsets do kind of bother me,” Emily admitted. “You can watch them, but they don’t need you. Even when you’re not watching them, you know they don’t need you.”

“If there’s one thing that don’t require you, it’s a sunset,” J.C. agreed.

“But you think they do,” Emily said, warming to the discussion. “You think you’ve got to watch them and say, ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful.’ ” She’d rather propitiate a Dumpster.

“I was married to that woman for six days,” J.C. said. “The worst six days of my life. We were taking our honeymoon in this old seaside house, and each night the sun would go down and bathe us in refulgent glory and she’d start her quarrel. We’d quarrel all night, and in the day we wouldn’t speak to one another. We’d read. The house had only one book, and we were both reading it. She’d gotten to it first and so she’d read a chapter, then she’d tear it out and give it to me and then I’d read it. It was about this Japanese doctor who invented the first anesthetic back in 1805 and his wife and his mother were always arguing and their daughter who was around your age dies of a cold and the wife goes blind after she insists that he try out his anesthetic on her instead of all the dogs he’d been experimenting on so she could share in his fame. Dogs were tottering around half dead through the whole goddamn book. They all had names like Mafutsu and Ostugi and Miru, because they were Japanese dogs. Couldn’t keep ’em straight.”

“Don’t tell me any more dog stories,” Emily said.

“I vowed never to marry again.”

“That’s good,” Emily said.

He pulled her head sideways with the brush and kept it there. “You don’t care for me much, do you? But you’d better get used to me because I’m going to be around. What do you think about that?”

Emily felt that a truthful reply would not be in her best interests.

“I do not know the dog stories to which you refer when you say ‘any more.’ I never told you any dog stories.”

This was more than Emily could bear. “You have,” she said.

He yanked her head down farther and she wondered if there was a possibility of it just snapping off. She didn’t know how it was attached to her neck in the first place.

“It’s not for you to make the judgment,” J.C. said, “as to whether you’ve heard a dog story from me.”

Emily tried to think a happy thought. She was driving with her mother toward the mountains. Tarantulas were crossing the road, waving their furry arms, and vultures were roosting in the cardon cactus. All was right with the world. She was drinking sweet syrup from those tiny waxy bottles, then chewing on the wax just this side of being sick.

J.C. hung his face down close to hers. She could smell toothpaste. Then he straightened, pushed her head up again, and resumed brushing. “We all got our dark side,” he said. “Sometimes we like to take it out for a walk, sometimes we don’t.”

Emily would have liked further elucidation on this point, though not from him.

“I could make you like me,” J.C. simpered. “It would be easy. Like, all I’d have to suggest to you is that we build a tarantula town together, and I’d have you eating out of the palm of my hand.”