Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Emily was shocked. Could he have had an awareness of her happy thought? Despite herself, she was intrigued. An entire town of tarantulas with different careers and objectives and modes of entertainment? “You would not,” she said, comforting herself with the suspicion that he lacked genuine knowledge concerning this tarantula town.

The brush descended and stalled, each time a little farther.

“I had a buddy once worked in a morgue, combing out people’s hair. He got a kick out of it, gave them all the bells and whistles, every one.”

“What’s a morgue?” Emily asked. “Is it like a jail?”

“It sure is!” He sounded so delighted that Emily knew she had erred deeply.

“He doesn’t do that anymore, though,” J.C. said. “He does something else now. He’s late, my buddy is. He doesn’t show up anymore. Do you know what it means to be late? If I say ‘My late buddy,’ you know what that means?”

Emily was silent. J.C. was having a hell of a time. “Whoops,” he said, “there goes the brush. All those snags of yours broke it.”

Emily put her hand against her head. It felt peculiar, like a piece of slick cloth. She thought it had lost some diameter. Her ears rang a little.

“You don’t necessarily look better, but you do look different,” J.C. said. “You want to bite me now? I’m giving you another crack at this. You’re still not scared of me, are you? You do this to anybody else, and you’d be medicated up to your eyeballs. You’d be wearing a collar that would give you a shock every time you had a freaky thought.” J.C. rolled up the sleeve of his shirt.

His arm looked just as unappetizing to Emily as it ever had. She guessed that wanting to be a biter wasn’t the same thing as being given the chance to bite.

“You can do anything you want in this world,” J.C. said.

“No, you can’t,” Emily said modestly.

“Why, sure you can. And if you don’t you’ll never know the consequences. You won’t be leading any kind of life at all. Of course, some consequences are better than others.”

“You can’t do anything you want,” she insisted.

“Yes, you can! You just need an authorization card. You know how to read yet?”

“No,” Emily said quickly, trying to look aggrieved. She was hoping he’d put his hand on some reading material and pretend he was trying to teach her. His mean-spiritedness in this fascinated her.

“Your mother must be starting to worry about you in that regard.” J.C. rolled the sleeve of his shirt down and took a wallet out of his pocket. The wallet was black and worn and folded over on itself, an ugly thing. He paged through some cards before extracting one. “Right here is my authorization to do anything I want.”

It was a card from a department store. Apparently if J.C. bought ten items of underwear at different times he’d get an additional item of underwear free. This included the purchase of pajamas. He was six down and had four to go. Someone had used a paper punch to tick off his purchases. “You only get ten permits?” Emily inquired.

“Then you get another card. But it’s harder to get authorization for the second card.” He looked at her expectantly, then put the card back in his wallet. “You’re kind of an inert child, aren’t you?” he said. “I’m glad I don’t have any kids.” He had felt somewhat tenderly toward her a moment ago but was getting more impatient by the instant. “I don’t like kids.”

“I thought it was dogs you didn’t like.”

“I got that out of my system,” J.C. said. “Now I don’t care about them one way or another. I’m in balance regarding dogs.”

Her mother returned with the beer, looking flushed and pretty. “Oh, I hurried ,” she said.

J.C. took a ring off his belt loop that had a few keys on it and a tiny bottle opener. He opened one of the bottles and took a long swallow. Then he opened another and handed it to Emily’s mother. She smiled at him. “Nature’s most perfect food,” J.C. said, and took another swallow.

“Have you two had a nice time together?” her mother asked. “Oh, honey, your hair looks marvelous.”

“Best I could do with the material at hand,” J.C. said.

Emily wandered off into the yard. She crouched down for a thimbleful of sand, and was about to sprinkle it on her head but stopped short, remembering she was already under suspicion for this act.

The yard had big clumps of dead-as-doornail bushes lying all over the place, acting like bushes though they weren’t even rooted into the ground anymore. There was that marble she liked to leave there. The tiny perfume bottle to which she always professed delighted surprise. The lizard’s perfectly round hole.

Emily patrolled the perimeter. Beyond the chain-link fence, Ruth the Neighbor’s yard was perfectly green with grass. Ruth was applying something to it with a machine the shape of a child’s doll carriage. There was a drum in it, and the drum rotated and threw out just the proper amount of poison, corrective, simplifier, whatever it was. Ruth wore a paper mask over the lower part of her face. She was balding, and her remaining hair was an unconvincing black. Ruth was the one who took Emily to the Amnesty Days. The next Day was on the autumnal equinox, quite a way in the future, and Ruth thought it was quite the mistake, for most people were suspicious of equinoxes — believing them to be unorthodox, even pagan — and participation might be low. Emily didn’t know what pagan was. Possibly she might like to be one. But what she really wanted was to be a triggerman, or a poet. She did not want to work in sales.

She looked at her mother and J.C. together, a discomforting sight, and trying to coax up another happy thought, selected the train one. Trains passed through town four times a day, and Emily would ofttimes bicycle down to see them. There wasn’t a station, just a Dairy Queen and a small park practically paved with long red Dairy Queen spoons. Three of the trains would stop and people would get on and off, but the fourth train just tore on past, whistles wailing, and Emily particularly admired this one.

Dick and Dinah Webb sat behind their ten-foot cement-block privacy wall having tea. Two fainting goats, an ostrich, a kangaroo, and an assortment of pigs, ducks, and turkeys dabbled and milled around them. At the moment Dinah did not realize she was in Florida. She was in Africa, still puzzling over something a guide had explained to her years ago.

“When elephants can get beneath the bark and into the wood of the baobob tree, it’s just like chocolate cake to them. That’s what he said. Now, chocolate cake — what could that mean?”

The goats were playing on a little hill that Dick had built for them. Otherwise they showed no sign of being aware of the Webbs’ existence.

“He was an idiot,” Dick said. “Too smug by half.”

“What’s the other tree the elephants liked?”

“The speck-boom,” Dick said with satisfaction. As far as he was concerned, this was the best part of the day. Their conversations varied but were always ones they’d had before. Once great tourists, they now were pretty much confined to their property because of Dinah’s arthritis.

“The branches and stems had the puffy appearance of the arms of a doll,” Dinah said.

“Beyond weird,” Dick agreed.

“I’d like to have one of those trees. Do you think we could get a seedling or something?”

“A cutting?” Dick said.

“Could we, old sweetness?”

“I’m sure.”

“But where would we get the elephants?” Dinah laughed girlishly. Her gruesomely contorted hands rose a little, then fell back into her lap. Suddenly she wasn’t in Africa anymore — the terrifying sunrises, the thick beaks of the birds, the gazelles floating through the air. She had loved the sliver of green in the fierce bone white of the thorn tree. But now she was unwell and in Florida. But where was that? Florida could be anyplace, which had always been one of Florida’s problems.