Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead

Tommy scrambled to his feet and stood trembling in the corner. The fur between his eyes was folded in a melancholy omega shape. He had dreamed, he had dreamed … it left him.

This was no place to be tonight for any of them, but this was the place they were.

Alice was in the Chilled-Out Pepper bookstore looking through a book on medicinal plants. She wanted to find something for Corvus’s situation and her granny’s diabetes and her poppa’s gas as well as a little something for herself, something that would give her a little edge or obscure the edge she already had, she didn’t know which.

She chewed her nails and read. Flecks of a once hopefully applied red nail polish fell onto the pages. Here was a plant fatal to sheep. Here was one that was good for honeymoon cystitis. Ugh, Alice thought. Anil del Muerto was good for sore gums and herpes blisters. Sunflower of the Dead. Of course, it smelled to high heaven. She couldn’t find anything for Corvus. Whenever you went near the subject of sadness in these books, everything got a little vague, a little folkloric, a little picturesque. One book said that bathing in red-colored water could be comforting, a suggestion Alice found to be extremely irresponsible. Didn’t red-colored water imply veins , practically? She decided on tronadora and prickly pear for her granny, silk tassel for her poppa, and anemone and passionflower for herself. It was like putting together a Christmas list. Passionflower actually was growing right at home, along with some gummy, noxious vines that the boys in the neighborhood who were on probation would come by for before their monthly drug tests. This vine, and the rather absent-minded access her granny and poppa gave the boys to it, was probably the reason why their house had not once been broken into, but Alice couldn’t find it in the book. Passionflower, however, was described at length. According to early botanists, the three stigmas represented the Trinity, as well as the nails used on Christ’s cross. The stamens were the five wounds, the tendrils were the scourges, the ten petals were the ten apostles, minus Judas and Peter, those old numbnuts, those betrayers. In an aggravated, irritable way Alice loved reading stuff like this, numerology stuff, this-means-that stuff, mystical correspondency stuff. But the passionflower tried so hard with its pinks and blues and purples, as though God would show off in such a strutty, obvious way. She was building up a real annoyance for the passionflower.

A woman at the checkout counter was making quite a fuss because a book she’d ordered had not yet arrived.

“It’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets , and it was supposed to be in today. This is today! This is a gift to myself, and I — want — that — book!” She intended to read more about Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess who was supposed to be the protectress of lone women, of female outsiders who had powerful ideas and were therefore shunned. The would-be book buyer couldn’t find enough about Coatlicue. She began knocking things over.

“Do I have to call the police?” the manager asked. “I’m going to call the police.”

Alice continued to read through the medicinal plants book, trying to remember what she meant to recall about them. Sometimes she thought she really didn’t know how to read. Things just went right through her as though they thought she didn’t exist. Only recently her granny and poppa had been taking a quiz in a magazine that would tell you if you were likely to get Alzheimer’s within four years. You chose ten objects and then someone hid them and you had to remember them all. Or you had to name as many items as possible in sixty seconds from some category, such as vegetables. Or someone read a list of twelve words and, ten minutes later, you had to repeat them. They all three had taken the tests, and Alice had been the only one who had failed. She had done particularly poorly on the word list. Even now the only word she could remember from it was choice .

“That’s too bad, honey,” her granny said. “This is not reassuring. You have a good chance of developing intellect-robbing dementia.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to give it to young people,” her poppa said. “It’s not a test for young people.”

Thinking about the Alzheimer’s debacle, Alice blushed. Another word on the list had been dawn . Maybe she just had delayed delayed recall.

She found herself reading “An insignificant bush, reaching modest height with insignificant leaves and flowers, its appearance is common and uninteresting.” This was Escoba de la Vibora , or matchweed. Despite this insignificance it was respected, even revered, by those who used it. Good, Alice thought.

She was studying the book intently when a voice at her shoulder said, “Hi there.”

Alice got her sunglasses out of her pocket and put them on.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said. He was wearing a suit and had exceptionally white teeth. Alice regarded him coolly from behind her sunglasses, which she wished weren’t so smudged. Alice’s intention was to make herself and to be nothing but the self she made, but the problem had always been where to begin. One should begin with a stranger, but strangers never paid any attention to Alice. But here was one and he was.

“It’s just that you look to be about my daughter’s age,” he said.

“Is your daughter missing?” Alice asked. Although, of course, she could hardly care if she was.

“Why, no,” the man said, laughing. “I don’t believe so. My name is Carter Vineyard, and my daughter and I just moved here. She doesn’t know anyone. I thought someone her own age could give her a call.”

Alice looked at him. He was sophisticated-looking and sincere and had to be desperate, a little stupid, or intoxicated.

“You’re about sixteen, aren’t you?” Carter said. “Go to school?”

“The Marquise School,” Alice said. “But it’s almost over. A few more weeks.”

“The Marquise School is where Annabel’s going in the fall!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t that a coincidence! It’s an excellent school, isn’t it?”

“Function in disaster. Finish in style,” Alice said.

“Pardon?”

“The maxims of Marquise.”

“Oh yes, indeed. Good,” Carter said.

“The place is pretty vacuous, actually.”

“Oh well, that’s all right too, for a while, when you’re young. You’ve got the energy to handle it. It’s when you get older that vacuousness can really lay you low.” He realized he sounded somewhat disoriented, but he was still puzzling over the maxims. They sounded good, but weren’t they a bit terminal for an expensive boarding school?

“What’s she like?” Alice asked.

“Who?”

“Your daughter.”

Carter seemed unprepared for this question. “She’s nice,” he said. “Annabel is very nice. I have a picture of her.” He took a wallet from his pocket.

Alice looked. “You can’t tell much from a picture,” she said, giving this girl the benefit of the doubt. “Who’s this?” She pointed to another photograph of a woman in a tight white evening dress, laughing.

“That’s my wife,” Carter said. “That’s Annabel’s mother. She’s dead.”

“That proves my point exactly,” Alice said excitedly. “Pictures, wow, there’s no inkling in them of what’s going to happen next.”

“Hmmm,” Carter said.

Alice feared she’d hurt his feelings. “Well, she was happy then, anyway,” she said.

Carter put his wallet away. It was true that Ginger had been happy when that picture had been taken; she had been elated. Less than an hour later, still elated, she had demolished four cars in valet parking at a penalty of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (“If he thinks he has the only keys to our Mercedes, Carter, he’s a fool. I would never have given that boy the only keys to the Mercedes.”)