Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Beyond the large window a coyote sauntered by with the neighbor’s Siamese cat in its jaws. Only Alice saw it.

“What’s out there!” Carter exclaimed.

But Alice wouldn’t say, for Annabel’s sake, although she couldn’t conceal her interested approval.

Oh, the stubborn girl, Carter thought.

The coyote paused to rearrange the cat in its jaws, and Alice discreetly pulled the blinds.

“I was thinking of clearing out of this room, cleaning it out,” Carter said. “What do you think?”

“Daddy, it’s after midnight,” Annabel noted. “And you just changed this room around last week.”

“I was thinking of doing a little more to it, like tearing it down completely. Just whacking it off from the rest of the house.”

“You could put in a wildlife pool,” Alice suggested.

“Yes!” Carter said. “Then maybe they’d stop using our pool. Do you think they’d honor the distinction?” Carter was all for making distinctions. If Ginger would just make a distinction or two, principally between the requirements of the dead and the needs of the living … but Ginger’s mind, or whatever it was, made no distinctions, although a certain sloppiness was occurring in her style, a worrisome blurring of boundaries. She had used the phrase “Your ass is grass” the other evening, for one thing. How could one’s ass be grass? One’s days, of course, that was another matter entirely. However bibulous Ginger had been before, when she was alive, she had always been viciously articulate. She had always been witty and destructively unique. But he half expected her to scream, “I’m gonna smack your butt!” any evening now, or “Get your butt over here!” like an overextended toddler-laden woman in some shopping mall. It would be sad, really, if Ginger were reduced to screaming “Oh, my God!” over everything.

“A wildlife pool would be a great idea,” Alice said. “Just knock this whole room down.”

“Daddy, you can’t be serious!” Annabel said.

The girls stood around him, a puzzled triad. The Three Fates plying their ghastly shears, although only one did that. Atropos … Atropos … What were the others named? Klotho! He was cheered to remember. Klotho. But on the last one he still drew a blank.

“So many books in here,” Corvus mused.

“Yes, I like to read,” Carter said. “Sometimes I read all night. Please, take any you’d like.”

But of course she wouldn’t. The girl wanted nothing, he could see it in her eyes. It must be fearful to want nothing; it wasn’t as fulfilling as it sounded. She must feel sickeningly hobbled all the time. Yet she didn’t look anxious, any more than she looked indifferent.

“What can’t you reach, Daddy?” Annabel said.

The liquor had been spreading nicely through Carter, but it had now — and he couldn’t pretend otherwise — stopped. He continued to watch Corvus as though she were about to do something startling or inspirational. He realized he was holding his breath, then began thinking of Ginger again. They say that with people who die suddenly, you should tell them right away they’re dead or there’ll be trouble and misunderstandings on both sides. But he had apprised Ginger of the fact immediately, he was sure of it. Oh, that dreadful night, they’d both been tanked, and after the accident there had been all this discussion about the restaurant having dumped grease on the highway in the past, getting rid of it in the middle of the night, and causing accidents, but none, before this, fatal. Grease, grease, grease — that’s all anyone was talking about with the ambulance still wailing in the distance. And that stupid sign pulsating over everything: THEY’RE TOO BIG TO BE SHRIMP. The evening was preposterous. Really, Carter couldn’t blame Ginger for not taking it seriously.

He was in a sort of trance, during which the girls had discreetly left. Carter felt shaken. It was as though he had invited them all in to watch him be sick. He feared he would no longer enjoy quite the same stature in the house, that of the carefree but intelligent and reliable adult, someone who could be expected to be reading sensibly and artfully in his room at night yet could nevertheless be counted on should an emergency arise, someone who knew how to spend money and still had a future. Of course there had been the deer-in-the-swimming-pool incident, but that had been an exceptional evening. His liver hurt.

He went into the bathroom and shaved carefully. By now it was after two o’clock. The hours between two and dawn were like a gift that only a few unwrapped, a puzzling, luminous gift. He pushed the pillows up against the headboard, lay down, and stared straight ahead. What did those girls do all night? He should know, he should be more responsible, offer more guidance, but he was just a drunk widower in love with a yard boy. He got up and pulled the blinds back. The dark shuddered, as though he’d interrupted it.

He got back into bed. He wished he could write or paint, that he possessed some small talent. To race through the night with a pen! But writing makes everything clearer and worse at once, that is, when it wasn’t making everything appear worse without clarifying it. That was the problem with writing.

All was quiet. There was no Ginger, not even a pneumatic one. Isn’t that the way Paul suggests the dead are resurrected? Pneumatically? The thought of Ginger being pumped up by the whispering breath of a caring supreme being discouraged him. What a carnival everything was, one big lurid carnival. He sighed and turned on the television. “I’m going to kill you,” one half-naked person was saying to another, “but I’ll refrain from eating you because of your rank.” They seemed to be Druids, meeting in some sacred grove. But did Druids talk like that? He was certain Ginger was doing something to his television. The magnetism of inharmony. He turned everything off and gazed fretfully into the dark.

The Wildlife Museum had been built around the same time as Green Palms by a man named Stumpp, who had shot more than a thousand big game animals and now wanted to share some of the more magnificent specimens with the general public in exchange for an enormous tax write-off. They were all Stumpp’s animals, brought down by his own plump hand in Africa and Alaska back when those places were truly their selves. Africa at this point in time particularly broke Stumpp’s heart, crawling with people as it was. All those scrawny humans crouching in the dust. He wouldn’t go to Africa anymore. Let them have what was left; he’d partaken of it when it had been glorious. Stumpp wasn’t one of those trophy hunters who went on and on anecdotally about the beasts he’d shot. He couldn’t recall each and every incident, not even most of them, but he felt warmly toward all his animals. None of them had given him any problems, not like some of the humans in the cities over there, who would just as soon cut your throat if you didn’t give them coins for whatever nonsense they were offering you — nails or screws or Chiclets or the like.

The Wildlife Museum was built to resemble Harlech Castle in Wales. Its original design had included a moat in which Stumpp had planned to place several sharks, but this idea had been scuttled by a candy-assed county commission. But Stumpp was glad he hadn’t sued on the sharks’ behalf. They would have been alive, for one thing, which would have compromised the integrity of his establishment, and they undoubtedly would’ve been harassed by the schoolchildren on whom the museum depended for much of its revenue. The kids would have been chucking everything down at those sharks: last year’s laptops, trumpets, baseballs. The sharks would’ve been sitting ducks for those kids. So there was no moat. Instead, in front of the castle, were the typical parking designations, the stenciled collection of circles and lines that in developed countries announced that the place was sacred to the halt and the lame, that while they might be wobbly on their pins and had to cart themselves around in rolling chairs like packages, they still had rights of access and could be interested in things, in this case the dead of other species looking beautiful. The rear of the museum butted up against thirty thousand acres of National Monument land and was all glass and splashily lit, so it was quite conceivable that animals wandering down their trails at night could look in and witness perfection, not that they’d know it, of course.