Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

There are a whirring sound and a blossom of light, but Corvus never sees the picture. It is Alice coming into the room, the sudden light the door’s opening brings, and Corvus wakes up.

The summer nights were long. Stumpp left the museum shortly after eight one evening and to his astonishment saw a small child walking across the parking lot holding a sign. She had a narrow little face and wild hair and wore overalls, and she paced with the sign held rigidly in front of her.

POEM

Frightened

Unsafe

Grieving

In pursuit

Tracked down

Crying

Visiting

Hiding

They feel sad and unwanted

Emily Bliss Pickless Grade 4

Stumpp smiled. “Are you Emily Bliss Pickles, Grade Four?”

“It’s pronounced Pickless, not Pickles,” the child snarled.

“What are you doing out here all by yourself? Where are your”—he hesitated—“guardians?”

She chuckled bitterly.

“Grade Four?” Stumpp went on. “Isn’t that nice. And how old does that make you? Eight or nine?”

“A mature eight.”

He came a little closer to her.

“Nine-one-one!” the creature screamed. She had the lung power of a diva.

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, I’m not going to harm you.”

“You harmed them ,” she said, dipping the sign toward the building.

“You need a telephone to communicate with 911. You need an emergency, as well.”

“This is an emergency, this place,” the child said.

“The operator will wear you out with questions. She’ll want to know your location and the situation. You not only have to know precisely what’s occurring, you have to describe it as well. It’s far more difficult than you’d think. Help isn’t out there just for the asking, you know.”

This was the exact moment of sundown and as scheduled, the lights went on in Stumpp’s parking lot. “Let me drive you home,” he said. “Where do you live?”

The child bared her tiny teeth, drew from the bib pocket of her overalls a pair of scissors, and pointed them at him.

“They’re cutting-out scissors,” Stumpp said. “They’re for paper. They wouldn’t do anything except to paper.”

She stood no higher than a tabletop, and her hair was remarkably snaggy. Stumpp had never seen anything like it. He was surprised that geese or some damn thing didn’t attempt to nest in it. Her eyes were too big for her face and her hands too large for her arms. He wondered if the future would show fast-forward visualizations of embryos, indicate how they’d turn out, their pluses and minuses as human beings, what they’d look like in eight years and so forth. Why not? They’d know everything they dared to know about embryos very shortly. Emily Bliss Pickless probably wouldn’t have been given her chance at bat in more modern circumstances, not on the face of it anyway.

“You have a good hand,” he said. “That’s fine printing.”

“I’m picketing this evil place,” she said.

“Well, you should be out here during the day. The museum’s closed, so your being here couldn’t possibly have any effect.” Stumpp had an impulse to give her a lifetime pass, she was such a funny little thing. Barnum in his heyday would’ve plucked her off the street and made her into an attraction.

She shook the sign and scissors at him.

“Do you have other poems?”

“This is what I have to say right here.”

“But it’s really not relevant to my museum,” Stumpp said. “Whatever you’re talking about sounds still alive to me. Maybe you were thinking of a zoo. Initially, your poem seems impressive, but upon further study it doesn’t stand up. And this word ‘visiting’ is certainly not the word called for in this poem.”

The child seemed unswayed by Stumpp’s critical discourse. “I wish you were dead,” she said. “How would you like to be stuffed?”

“No one would pay to look at me stuffed,” Stump replied. “But my animals are beautiful. And you can get up very close to them, much closer than you could otherwise.”

In fact, many of Stumpp’s trophy animals had been shot at close range. They had seemed … disbelieving. That polar bear. Stumpp refused to muse overlong upon the polar bear. Whenever it shambled into his consciousness, it still had the power to mortify him. When you wanted to do a thing properly, that was just the moment when you wanted the process to be over with. You’ll do the next one right, something in your mind whispered. There’s always a next time, something in your mind said. What was desired, of course, was to hold on to the instant just before. But there was no holding on. Then you were just left with a carcass and a goddamn ringing in the ears.

“Why would I want to get up close to them? They’re fake.”

“They’re not fake,” Stumpp said indignantly. “What do you think fake is, anyway?”

“I like to get up close to things I know are there.”

Like all of her gender she was semihysterical and somewhat illiterate. Still, there was something deeply irregular about her, and that hair. Did she live in a wind tunnel?

“Do you know Cedric?” Emily asked.

He’d known Cedrics. Mumblers. Sycophants. Vain about their ankles. Large wives. “Do you?” he demanded.

“Cedric’s my colleague. He loves this place. He wants to be a sportsman and make conservation possible on a grand scale, just like you.”

He certainly had swallowed the line about the museum hook, line, and sinker. It was disappointing when self-justification was so successful.

“Your arms must be getting tired,” Stumpp said wearily.

“No, they’re not,” Emily said, “but I’m putting my scissors back into my pocket.” She did so. “You should be ashamed of yourself, appealing to people like Cedric. He’s not strong. He’s just weak and clingy.”

“How old is Cedric? Is he eight as well?”

“An immature eight.”

“But little boys catch up,” Stumpp said. “And then they leave little girls in the dust.”

She seemed unperturbed by this judgment as well. “Cedric’s always saying, ‘The next time we go, I hope he has more of them.’ ‘We’ as in our class, ‘he’ as in you, ‘them’ as in there.”

“That’s the kind of customer we like,” Stumpp said distastefully. This little twit Cedric was uncomfortably familiar. So much in life was similar, remindful of something else. Wanted more more. Because nothing’s there. No. Next to nothing, munificently robed. Even worse.

“I presume Cedric’s not a friend of yours,” Stumpp said.

“I don’t have friends,” Emily said.

“Ahhh,” he said.

“I have to be careful concerning people I don’t like. I didn’t like someone and I wasn’t even concentrating and something bad happened to him. I have to be extremely careful.”

“Well, that’s very responsible of you,” Stumpp said. “Still, I guess I’d better watch out. In case you forget to forget your dislikes, as it were.”

“You maybe better had,” Emily said. “So do I have your assurance that you’ll shut this place down?”

“Shut it down?” Stumpp looked at her tolerantly and shifted his shoulders inside his old oiled hunting jacket. The relationship with his animals was the only true connection he had ever known. He had been the instrument in a grave transaction. The primary instrument. Yet he hated the memories. Memory in man different, not so noble. First memory, first loss. All downhill thereafter. “I love my animals,” he said. This felt to him somewhat inadequate.

Emily scowled at him.

“You’d better leave now,” Stumpp said. “You’re trespassing, you know.” He pointed to a small pink bicycle flung down in the middle of the parking lot. It looked ridiculous and certainly seemed incongruous with the likes of Emily Bliss Pickless. “That must be yours.”