Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“It couldn’t have ended like that, I’m sure,” her granny said, troubled. “That must be the next-to-the-last chapter.”

“What interests me about this xenograft craze,” her poppa persisted, “is that it shows people have found it’s enough for them to live in this world. They just want to keep on living. That’s where knowledge and the march of science has brought us. Right back to square one.” He coughed and tapped his chest with his fist, a piece of cake having gone down the wrong way.

“What is ‘xeno’?” Alice asked. “Was that the name of the pig?”

“Xeno, from the Greek. It means ‘stranger.’ Know your roots and prefixes, and you’ll find the world more accessible, Alice.”

“There’s a lot I don’t want to know,” she argued. “There’s a superfluity of knowledge. Most of it is useless. I choose not to know.” She blushed. When she had said something similar to this to Sherwin, he’d said, “You want to turn from civilization into a starlit darkness, don’t you, darling?”

“Don’t you worry about that C in school,” her poppa said. “There’s always next year. And I don’t want you worrying about that kayak either.”

Alice, blushing, ate her soup. A.k.a. Xeno, fiercely ate.

“I prefer news to knowledge,” her granny said. “I suppose because I’m getting along.”

“Talking about the news—” her poppa began.

“You know what this lady said to me at Green Palms?” Alice said. “She said, ‘Talking about tossing puppies back and forth,’ as though I’d been talking about tossing puppies back and forth.”

Her granny and poppa looked at her. Fury was looking at the wand on the window blind tremble so slightly. He didn’t know why it did that.

“What did she say next?” her granny said.

“She didn’t say anything next.”

“The reason people in those places seldom show resentment or complain about their situation,” her poppa said, “is because of a lack of continuity in their thinking.”

“Talking about the news,” her granny said, “did you hear about the woman in Detroit? Wanted a baby, stole one. Nothing unusual about that. Thing was, it was her girlfriend’s baby and the girlfriend hadn’t had it yet. Two girlfriends sitting around one night drinking wine and worse, and this woman gets it in her head that she wants that girlfriend’s baby and she just carves it right out of her, just scoops it right out like you would a melon, with some implement she found in the kitchen.”

“The Motor City,” her poppa said.

“It’s not called that anymore,” her granny said. “Anyway, woman went back to her own place with the baby, but she got arrested shortly thereafter. It was discovered that the idea hadn’t popped into her head suddenly at all, it was premeditated. She had a complete layette she’d purchased days before. Baby in question found to be perfectly fine.”

“I have something to contribute,” Alice’s poppa said. “Did you hear about the old gentleman who shot his wife and their aviary of cockatoos, then entertained some recovering addict who was trying to get her life back together by going door to door selling some sort of cleaner?”

“What kind of addict?” her granny said.

“Smack, I believe.”

“What do you mean, entertained ?” Alice asked.

“Provided her with a cup of tea. He was just about to do himself in when the addict knocked on the door to relate her tale of self-improvement. His name is … I can’t remember his name. Eighty-six years of age.”

“Poor soul,” her granny said.

“Wife was ailing. Old gentleman was ailing. He was afraid that they’d deteriorate completely and their feathered companions would end up at the dump.”

“That’s where they would’ve ended up, too, if proper arrangements hadn’t been made beforehand. Course, that’s where they’ll end up now anyway.” Her granny cut them all another sliver of cake. “I bet that addict hustled right back to the needle after that experience.”

“Shot all his loved ones with a rifle right here, in our community. Then did you hear about the two hunters who shot a man crawling down one of our mountains? They thought he was a game animal and just blew him away at dusk, thought he was something else entirely. A case of mistaken identity. They said that dusk confused them.”

“It makes you feel we’re all living in some darkened dream,” her granny said.

It was sad when people tried to control the future by killing everything they cared about, Alice thought. Still, the future was a dangerous place. That’s what made it the future. But how could you shoot a cockatoo with a rifle? That wasn’t really appropriate. Her poppa must have heard that one wrong.

After supper they turned on the television. The best thing about the set, in Alice’s opinion, was the panther lamp on top of it. The panther had a little chain around its neck that had engrossed Alice for long minutes as a child. She had fiddled and fiddled with that chain. She wondered what she’d been imagining.

“This is a rerun,” her granny announced.

“I haven’t seen it before,” her poppa said.

“You most certainly have.” Her granny tapped the screen. “All these women here, they’ve eaten their mothers’ ashes. That’s what they have in common.”

They were an earnest assemblage, heavy, for the most part, in big-collared dresses. Some had taken just a taste before the internment, others were gradually consuming the entire box. They cited their mistrust of authority, their desire to take responsibility for their own grief, their determination to wrest control from the middleman.

“It’s coming back to me now,” her poppa said. “They talk about that pilot in California, at the end of it, the one who was supposed to be scattering ashes over the Pacific at the behest of families and was instead stockpiling them in one of those franchised Cubby-Holes.”

“Saving on airplane fuel, I guess,” her granny said. “Found two thousand boxes of cremains in one of those storage lockers. Been getting away with it for years.”

“That one,” her poppa recalled, “two in from the left … camera doesn’t pay much attention to her, but she’s the one who found out she’d been working her way through the wrong ashes after an investigation uncovered gross carelessness at the crematorium.”

“It’s a rerun,” her granny said. “We’ve seen it all before.”

What are you reading now?” Ginger asked.

He put the book on the night table and carefully placed on the open pages a heavy strip of leather with his initials embossed upon it. It was a gift from Donald. Carter couldn’t imagine how he’d ever marked his place before. It reminded him of a cestus, that leather contrivance Roman boxers used to wear around their hands.

Ginger seemed a little twitchy, the way she used to behave when she had the Smirnoff flu. Surely she couldn’t have taken up that business again.

“Reading is so inconsequential, Carter.”

“I enjoy it, darling.”

“You’ll be shocked when you realize exactly how inconsequential.”

“I was reading about Darwin and just came across a charming anecdote. When he took his child to the zoo and they looked into the cage of a sleeping hippopotamus, the little boy said, ‘Daddy, that bird is dead.’ ” Carter chuckled.

“And you find that funny?”

Ginger found very few things amusing. People falling, slipping, or sprawling inadvertently used to make her laugh, but that was about it. Once Carter had pitched forward at breakfast in an attempt to avoid dribbling some honey from an English muffin onto his shirt front, an event that had put Ginger in a sparkling mood for the rest of the morning. Had she thought he was having a heart attack? In any case, she’d found it quite funny.