Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“I think your mother’s putting on a few pounds,” J.C. said. “She doesn’t want to put on too many more.” He took the ring from his belt loop again and pulled out the blade of a knife with this thumbnail. Emily turned from him and walked toward the demands of a stuck zipper with small enthusiasm. She opened the screen door, and as it fell behind her on its coiled spring, almost clipping her heels as it always did, a concise explosion of demiurgical ambition occurred. Emily looked behind her, puzzled. Her mother ran past, her mouth freshly lipsticked, the wide-open back of her dress exposing the prominent vertebrae of her spine. Emily had always found her mother’s spine terribly attractive.

The bomb had gone off compactly. J.C. was gripping his lap upon which, it appeared, a whole fistful of bright poppies had fallen. “Oh my God, it blew off Little Wonder,” he said. “Holy frigging God.”

A peculiar calm descended upon Emily. She stood just out of J.C.’s snatching reach — had he been interested in reaching for her, which was the furthest thing from his mind — and looked at him. It already seemed monotonous, though it had scarcely begun. Would this event lend itself to poetry? She didn’t think so. She wasn’t even actually sure what had happened.

J.C. peered between his outspread fingers and howled.

“Call the ambulance, Emily!” her mother screamed. “Call the emergency, call 911!” Then she said, “No, I’ll do it.” She looked at J.C. in an exasperated way and ran into the house.

Emily got a little dirt and sprinkled it on her head, rubbing it in good.

The ambulance arrived and the one who wasn’t the driver greeted Emily’s mother warmly. “What a coincidence,” he said. “Didn’t think we’d meet again like this.” He pried J.C.’s fingers off his shredded shorts.

“My stuff, my stuff,” J.C. mumbled.

“Be calm,” the medic said. “We’ve encountered this before, I can assure you of that. If we can find the damn thing, the docs will be able to sew it back on.”

“It’s around here somewhere,” J.C. whispered.

“That’s what I’m saying,” the medic said. “I’m sure it is. We’ll just get you stabilized, then we’ll start looking.”

“Couldn’t have flown far,” J.C. said, his eyes rolling whitely.

The driver started canvassing the yard in a desultory manner, having no patience at all with victims of illegal fireworks. None. Damn thing shouldn’t be so hard to find in this yard, which was very cruddily maintained.

“This your husband, Karen?” the medic asked Emily’s mother.

“No, no. Just a friend.” She smiled at the medic, then thought to reassure J.C. “We’re going to start looking for it right now, J.C.”

“Should I get a jar, Mom?” Emily said.

Her mother didn’t answer. She and the medic were heading off to the ambulance with J.C. strapped to a gurney. The driver was standing meditatively at one of the corners where the fence met itself, then thought better of it. “You got a rest room I could use?” he asked Emily. She nodded and pointed toward the house. Alone, she struck out across the dilapidated terrain. She didn’t know what the thing looked like, exactly. She guessed it had rings and was petaled sort of and squashed on top. She’d pieced this conception together from a number of sources. She would recognize it by its being there.

She saw the marble. There was the perfume bottle. Then she saw it, curled and winking on the dust by the lizard’s hole. A pretty lizard lived in there, with a big purple fan at its throat. That had to be it, Emily surmised, though it couldn’t be the whole thing. It didn’t look like it was the whole of anything. Some ants were already investigating it in the way they investigated everything, by crawling all over it. She stuck out her foot and nudged it a little. It looked pretty unexemplary. She nudged it around, then tipped it into the hole and tapped it in. It seemed a little spongy and didn’t want to go all the way in, so she ground it in.

Later that night, Emily sat at the foot of her mother’s bed, eating from a can of pumpkin pie filling that Ruth the Neighbor, beside herself with excitement, had brought over.

“He was a good man. He was attracted to me. Sometimes we had fun together. Oh, I know it wasn’t your fault, honey, I know. Knowing that is the only thing that’s keeping me sane right now. The only thing that’s keeping everything in perspective.”

“It is?” Emily said.

“A bomb,” her mother said. “I can’t believe, a bomb.” She was rubbing cold cream into her cheeks. Emily supposed that because of the seriousness of the exceptional event just past she wasn’t using her Facial Flex, a bizarre device that she customarily placed in her mouth for five minutes just before retiring, to combat muscle sag. Emily could tell that her mother wanted more than anything to use it, but out of respect to J.C. and his first night in the hospital she wasn’t.

“Do you want me to go away for a while?”

“What a thoughtful suggestion. Maybe. Not far.”

“Mom!”

“Then don’t say things you don’t mean, Emily! I can’t even think with you tormenting me like this. I thought you meant going to bed, to sleep. If you can sleep tonight, more power to you.”

Both of them were silent, mother and daughter, neither of them thinking much about J.C. but instead of how stimulating and surprising life was. To Emily it felt a little like Christmas Eve.

“A bomb,” her mother marveled. “The world has entered our lives.” She screwed the lid back hard onto the cold cream. “I know you never thought he hung the moon, honey, but I have needs.”

Though Emily wished that she herself had needs, all she could manage was colleagues, which, being as she didn’t even want them, didn’t come close to resembling needs.

“I’m just afraid that after this, people are going to think we’re kind of unwholesome,” her mother said. “This must not be made the centerpiece of our lives. I don’t want you to think of yourself as being bad or peculiar.”

“You mean strange?”

“We mustn’t be discouraged, Emily. Did you get a chance to talk to that nice medic today? He’s terribly nice. I met him in that class I took. He came in and gave a little slide show on the dangers of not knowing what to do in an emergency. Maybe when things settle down a bit, we’ll all go to the movies together.”

“I don’t like the cinema, Mom, you know I don’t.”

“Well, then, he and I will just have to go by ourselves, won’t we?” her mother said.

Emily finished the pie filling. Her mother continued to speak about the medic, who preferred to be referenced by his last name rather than his first. She said she liked this trait in a man.

Emily assumed that John Crimmins was in the past and was glad of it. Would she be required to send him a get-well card? Her mother looked tired and unhappy and confused but then she reached for the Facial Flex, which was in what she called her jewel box on the bedside table. There were no jewels within, but Emily knew that the device with its tiny rubber bands was special, slowing time’s progress on a personal level, her mother having told her as much in a more carefree moment. Her mother slipped the thing into her mouth, arranged her jaws, and sighed.

The portion of the dresser that Annabel had made into a little memory square looked bereft now that the paper napkin had left it. That napkin had lent the scene some sincerity. Alice couldn’t imagine where that violent sneeze had come from.

She was all right now. For a while she had saved, quite inappropriately, those stupid cigarette butts of Sherwin’s. But when they started looking like everyone else’s stupid cigarette butts, she threw them away. She couldn’t have distinguished them from someone else’s if her life depended upon it. Love was funny, the way it came and went. She gnawed her knuckles and looked at the orphaned items on Annabel’s blueberry-colored bureau, which now, because of her, seemed unable to transcend their nature. The sad thing was that Annabel had really tried with this, the tackiest notion in the room. Everything else was so tasteful, so perfect, the result of serious, practically pathological consumer coding. This assemblage had perhaps been Annabel’s first tentative clumsy baby step toward appreciating something larger — in this case, reductively, death, but with some work maybe something grander, like real life — and Alice had inadvertently, spontaneously messed it up.