Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

The phone rang. “Donald!” Carter said. “Listen, I can’t talk just now, let me call you back.” But after hanging up, he found himself alone. The air felt particularly worn out, depleted. He then recalled what his idea had been: he would abandon this room to Ginger! No more imaginative than throwing a bone to a beast, perhaps, but still. “Yes!” he shouted. He would leave this room, just shut the door and never enter it again. All his favored possessions were collected here, but it was also the place where Ginger and her horrors gathered and pooled. Donald’s adjustments hadn’t helped. So let Ginger have it, let her muss it up to her heart’s content, take scissors to his fox-and-hound tie, scrawl obscenities in his books, smash his favorite whiskey glass into the whirlpool bath, scribble lipstick on his favorite pillow.…

Then he had a quick, keen vision of leaving the entire house behind, leaving the country and traveling for a year, maybe more, with Annabel and Donald. He saw the three of them on the cool verandas of mountain haciendas, chatting with other guests in the intoxicatingly dark nights, everyone attractive and world-weary, everyone quietly fascinated with the three of them and their story, which they would never disclose. They would rent villas and walk in the rain. Lease fine apartments filled with light and flowers. There was more than one way to resist, while accommodating, the temptations of a difficult time.

Emily was putting some words together. She wanted to protest a summer school excursion she’d been forced to take part in. “Would you ride your bike down and get our burritos, Emily?” her mother said. “Just tell them to charge it to my account.”

J.C. was sprawled on a cheap plastic reclining chair that Emily’s mother had purchased especially for his comfort. He wore shorts this simmering day and spritzed himself occasionally with a water bottle her mother had also provided. On his feet he wore sandals from which his massive toes poked rudely.

“Watch this,” he whispered to Emily’s mother. “Hey, Pickless,” he said, taking the key ring from his pocket and removing the smallest of the keys. “Stop by the post office and get my mail. It’s Box Forty-two. It’s to the left, one row up from the bottom, three over.” He pressed the key into her palm.

Emily hadn’t opened a post office box for weeks, not since the mother of her colleague Cedric had allowed her to open theirs. Cedric had never forgiven Emily for this and said he’d hate her for the rest of his life — a nasty, snotty, crappy hate, an icy hot hate mean as a hatchet, a fat white hate that would eat slowly at her like the worms in her grandmother’s grave. But Emily was not alarmed, for she did not consider Cedric a worthy adversary.

“I knew that would tickle her,” J.C. said to her mother. “A little kid’s mind is a simple thing to figure.”

“It’s sad that as one grows older, one’s pleasures become more complex,” her mother said.

Emily gave her the startled, walleyed look of one unconscionably betrayed. She wondered if it was possible that in the future she and her mother would fail to recognize each other. She ran to her bicycle and rode quickly away, stopping at the post office first. The last time she’d been here, she saw a dachshund wearing a sun hat. Someone said to it, “You’re very well turned out today, I see. You must’ve heard the weather report.” But there was no one in the building this time except for a woman and two little girls, who were squabbling over whose turn it was to open their box. The boxes were bronze and ornate with a little square of glass. Emily piously looked at the children, who were whining and carrying on. The mother, or whoever she was, finally chose one and nudged the other back, and the one not selected sat down on the floor, put her head on her knees, and wept.

Emily found J.C.’s box, looked through the glass, and saw there was nothing in it.

The little girl who had inserted the tiny key and opened her box and drawn out some mail, lovely long envelopes and a magazine, looked at Emily smugly as she left, but Emily ignored her. The other girl was still crying bitterly. “There are more things to life than this,” Emily would’ve told them if she spoke to children younger than herself, which she never did.

She picked up the burritos and pedaled home, hoping her mother and J.C. were not developing a desperate passion. Emily wished her mother would just settle down, but the world was just too full of distractions for her. In the last year she had joined the volunteer ambulance corps and taken up firearms instruction. She’d taken courses in bartending and blackjack dealing, all, Emily suspected, in the hope of meeting a desperate passion. Such dilatoriness was wasteful and improvident, Emily felt. You needed to know only one person in life, and that was yourself. You had to find that person and make friends with it if you could and hope it wouldn’t turn on you before you had a chance to familiarize yourself with its habits and tear you limb from limb. She wished she could meet the person that was herself instead of all those distracting other people, but maybe that happened later and not when you were eight years old. Her mother said that she wanted to hurry things too much, that she had even hurried her own being born, appearing three weeks before she was supposed to. Emily never tired of hearing this story, which verified her belief that she’d been someone else from the get-go. She had been born on a glass-bottom boat in the Gulf of California. “I just wanted to get one last little holiday in before my obligations,” her mother recounted. Emily loved hearing the story of her appearance and didn’t take offense at some of its meaner particulars, such as the demand by certain patrons for a refund, mostly an elderly contingent who undoubtedly saw in Emily’s unexpected entry the writing on the wall. The vessel, which was named The Bliss , was scrapped shortly afterward, as underwater visibility had been declining for years. The crew was enthusiastic, perhaps even deluded, and kept the glass clean enough; but they were increasingly garrulous about an ecosystem in which the gulf no longer played a part. The paying customer saw not at all what had been promised or inferred, only a vague, grainy drift, an emptiness that with effort might suggest some previous thriving and striving, but all in all a disappointment.

Turning into the alley, Emily saw that something new had been added to the garbage-container vista, a neatly wrapped package that leaned against the great receptacle. It seemed a different caste from ordinary refuse. In many respects it was prerefuse. Emily stopped to look at this extremely inviting parcel. She put the kickstand of her bike down, went over, and picked it up. It was unaddressed and exceptionally light. The wrapping paper was beautifully creased and folded with geometric precision, tied and secured with string. She put it in the basket with the burritos.

J.C. was still taking his ease in the reclining chair.

“Where’s my mom?” Emily asked.

“She’s changing her dress for supper. You raised in a barn? You should dress nice for supper, even in your own home. Am I the only one who knows simple etiquette around here?”

Emily had the bag of burritos in one hand and the mystery parcel in the other.

“What the hell’s that?” J.C. demanded. “You didn’t get that out of my box.”

“You didn’t have anything in your box,” Emily said. “I found this.”

“You just go around picking up suspicious-looking parcels? If I’ve ever seen anything in my life that looked more suspicious, I don’t know what it would be. You better stand back while I open it.”

“Emily,” her mother called, “come in and put this zipper back on its track for me.”