Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

In fact, Stumpp was a little bored with his museum. The Hwyl! was gone. It was stuffing the project down everyone’s throat that had been fun. And he was tired of dealing with taxidermists, a vain and surly lot insulted when it was suggested that they were little more than upholsterers. Not one of them had any balls, in his opinion — real balls. They all thought they were artists, yet you couldn’t really tell one’s work from another’s. There was a limit to what was possible in making an animal look alive that wasn’t. He was down to one in-house taxidermist now, a mop-up man.

Stumpp was a West Virginia boy, who as far as he was concerned had been born at the age of fourteen, when he got interested in buying and selling gold coins. As he liked to say, and did say to guides and gofers from Mozambique to the Brooks Range, you could spend your life like a damn goat staring out a crooked door through the rain at the mud, or you could spend it some other way. Life was what you made of it or, rather, what you made of your perception of it. Stumpp had dumped gold early and been equally prescient in the timing of his other interests and acquisitions. Most recently, with minor effort, he was doing extremely well in the arenas of gene research and embryo cryopreservation. Shooting megafauna had always been just for relaxation.

But he hadn’t been able to relax lately, and it was beginning to trouble him, as was the smell of shit he was detecting everywhere — not strong, but faintly pervasive. Ignoring it took effort, exhaustive effort of an intense mental sort. Did he have to become a goddamn yogi to escape the smell of shit? Nobody else smelled it, and he’d stopped asking. Not that it was a conversation stopper. Stumpp found that in good bars, hotel bars, say, where a martini cost ten dollars and arrived in a glass with the surface diameter of a goldfish bowl, people would accept this observation convivially, women in particular. Stumpp had a lot of respect for women and judged them to be more perspicacious than men.

“I can’t believe a man like you is having this … ahh, problem,” his last redhead said. “You seem radioactive with belief in yourself, which I find very attractive.”

But it had been a while since his last redhead, since he’d been flattered by any beautiful woman. These days were different days. There was something technical about them, undistinctive. You couldn’t tell the scientists from the vandals. You could order viruses through the mail — pathogens, toxins, what have you. A clever schoolchild could wipe out all the bees in a meadow during recess. They were breeding rhinos with no horns to make them less desirable. Couldn’t even get your goddamn rhino anymore. One of the companies he’d invested in was churning out genetically identical sheep. He stood to make millions, but what sort of real pleasure could be wrested from making money off genetically identical sheep? Where were bravery and singularity and radioactive charisma? Ever since the completion of the museum, Stumpp had felt himself in decline. It was as though he were descending some kind of goddamned terraced path with the smell of shit on a rising wind at his back. For it was at his back, giving lie to the sentimental saw that a wind at one’s back was to one’s advantage. The way Stumpp felt it, the wind was serving the interests of those yet unborn. Sometimes he even imagined it speaking, in the manner of an obnoxious junior high school coach: “Let’s give everyone a chance here, let’s allow everyone a crack at it.” … He should probably pull his money out of all that human egg research. But his money was making so much money. A tough call, money or mental health. Investing in the future had its psychological drawbacks. His money had even spread into oocyte banking. Eggs were being harvested from aborted fetuses. It was getting a little out of hand, those crazy scientists horsing around and having more fun than they had at Alamogordo, supercooling this and flash-freezing that. The lights go out these days, some power grid fails, and it’s not just your digital clock that gets scrambled and your freezer food that needs to be tossed, you could lose whole families, potential waiting families, nonexistent, sure, in theory, but with every right to exist. Everything that didn’t exist had the right to, was the new thinking — made an end run around the ethicists with that one — and although such notions would make money, particularly if you got in on the ground floor, Stumpp was ego sophisticated enough to see trouble ahead. Stumpp’s own parents (gone now) had been unexceptional in the extreme, but at least they’d had the grace to get him in the proper way. “It was in a rowboat, Stumppie,” his mother said. “I knew it at the time. It was like BINGO … my body knew.” At least they’d had the happiness of the old thrust and heave, the unexpected yaw. But these days it was all assisted fertilization, micromanipulation, people in different rooms. The joys of sex were irrelevant in the present climate, or so it seemed to Stumpp. His own old bean hadn’t seen much action lately.

The egg business was driving him crazy. He was thinking too much about it. He’d pull out of eggs. See if that tempered the wind at his back.

Sometimes he’d come to the museum of an evening, entering through the gift shop with all its trinkets. Signs of the Wild, ossified turds (utterly without odor), did well here — the kids loved them, but they’d get the shock of their lives if they tried shoplifting them. The whole shop was wired, everything had to go through the scanner. Little bags of sand — Own a Piece of the Sahara, Own a Piece of the Sonoran Desert — little cheesy books on habitat, videos of animals dangerous to man, tapes of sounds, night sounds, prerain sounds, postrain sounds, everything was tacked. Absolutely nothing could be taken without paying for the damn thing.

Stumpp disliked the gift shop. He’d never bought a gift for anyone in his life; it was one of his remarkable features. But it was necessary to pass through his gift shop, which he would do, scowling, in order to get into the Wildebeest Lounge, where he would mix himself a martini before entering the Great Hall to see his old friends, the animals.

The bears and big cats were in one room. Cheetahs by the baker’s dozen. No biggie, that. Common as pins now that the secret of their breeding code had been cracked. Takes two males to impregnate. Interesting, but not supremely interesting. It was their nonretractable claws that were sort of spellbinding. In another room, horn phantasmagoria. He had bagged them all — spiraled, lyre-shaped, ringed, triangular, corkscrew — but wished he’d never mounted just the heads. Those medallion things, he detested them; he might as well be some woman collecting plates. He was going to close off the damn head room.

There were eight rooms in all. Stumpp sometimes worried about the layout. Had a couple of okapi, the whole little family, weird ruminants. Moose, reindeer, should they be together? You could drive yourself crazy. The giraffes seemed to do well in corners, reaching out for twigs. Stumpp kept habitat replications to a minimum. Fake browse had no place here; he wanted to keep it dignified and simple. An atmosphere of limpid concordance. He gazed up at a giraffe. He had loved shooting them. There was nothing like the way they galloped and crashed, but as trophies they left something to be desired. They looked so mild and coquettish — those eyelashes! — and this one had been redesigned, with fourteen inches of tongue extended. To those of a moronic bent it might seem a little lewd. He didn’t want people snickering at these animals and had directed his employees to throw the bastards out if they were caught at it. As well as wanting an attitude of limpid concordance emanating from the splendid corpses, Stumpp demanded a churchly respect, no matter how hypocritical, from the paying customer. He himself had never laughed at an animal’s predicament, which had been, primarily, facing death at his hands. He’d never gotten a kick out of the deep death moans, the blood-choked sighs. On one safari he was driven almost to homicide by the habit of one of his companions, a urologist from Denver, who put his hand palm open on the side of his head, indicating “night-night, go to sleep” every time he brought an animal down. The urologist never, in an entire month, made a clean, instantaneous kill. At the end he was just potting hyenas to watch them tear out and gag down their own intestines. Stumpp later heard the stupid fart had been killed piloting an ultralight back home in the Mile High City. Night-night, thought Stumpp.