Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“It is my vehicle of choice, yes, for the present anyway.”

She really was an annoying little runt. Hers would not be a profitable or particularly satisfying life. “What’s your favorite wild animal?” he asked. “What’s the wildest animal you’ve ever seen?” He just wanted to needle her. She probably hadn’t been anywhere or seen anything.

Emily twirled the sign and after a moment said, “A crow.”

“A crow!” Stumpp laughed more loudly than he’d intended. He had shot so many crows, hundred and hundreds in his childhood alone. Ducks were no brighter than a knot of wood, but crows were sort of complex. Oh, those hecatombdays in the ragged swampy burnt-over woods of his youth! He seemed to possess a magic gun and could wander and kill at will in the dear old swamp next to his parents’ simple home. And he had discovered something for himself in that lonely skeletal swamp: that it was more fun to wound a crow than to kill it, because then you could hear it calling out to the rest of the flock in an evangelical screech. Young Stumpp had been fascinated by the production an injured crow could make of its situation. Even now the sound remembered sent a lurchy thrill through his belly, the calls from the downed one and the answers from the rest of them, the still whole ones, beating heavily back and forth in the brown sulfurous emissions from the paper companies. He could almost taste the tang of that swampy air right here in his own desert parking lot and hear the calls of the heavily beating flock, sorrowing and apologizing and making plans for some other time. Time. He realized that crows had always reminded him of time, dark time. He gazed at the backs of his hands, at the plummy dark repellent veins.

“You’re very misguided,” Stumpp said.

“If you’re kind to a crow, you’ll receive a gift,” the child said.

“I wouldn’t want a gift from a crow,” he said loudly. “God knows what you’d be getting. I’d say, ‘No thanks, you black bugger.’ ”

“That’s racist specieism,” Emily said with some difficulty.

Stumpp looked at her, alarmed. “You’ve lost your childhood, haven’t you? Smash-and-trash bastards have stolen it. Left-wing vegetarian freaks.” Once more he was attacked by the impulse to snatch her up, take her under his wing as it were.

In his remembered swamp he once saw a flock of crows attack and kill one of their own. He didn’t have his gun that day — it had been taken away as punishment for some failure on his part that he’d forgotten but that was undoubtedly hygienic or academic — and, idly wandering, he had come across the drama in some broken oaks. The attacked crow had submitted to them, hadn’t tried to flee, and after not too long a time — young Stumpp being witness from start to finish — the torn, bloody, practically decapitated crow had fallen, and the muttering flock had vanished into the haze like black stones cast into water. What a judgment that had been! A judgment to fit a great crime, made by great mad wheeling clerics, a force, an incomprehensible damning intelligence. A formal sentencing made in the ruined air over a rotting landscape. His happy acts of extermination seemed but a happy game compared to this.

He looked at his old wattled hands and stuffed them into his pockets.

The child had walked over to the bicycle and was struggling to right it. “On further consideration, you shouldn’t be permitted to just pedal off,” Stumpp said. “It’s getting dark, it’s late.”

“I’ve gone everywhere on this bicycle,” Emily said, “though it’s true I don’t like it much. I’m not sentimental about it or anything. It’s functional.” She looked at it impassively. “Seven thousand miles,” she said.

“Certainly not!” Stumpp exclaimed. “Impossible!”

“I’ve been around,” Emily said.

“But I’ve never seen you around. And I know this city well. And I’ve never seen you in the museum, either, with your colleagues .” Surely he would have remarked upon this phenomenon to himself, this phenomenon in passing.

“Do you have a mother?” Emily asked. She was on the bicycle, moving it forward a rotation or two, then backward, barely maintaining a balance. It made him nervous looking at her. She didn’t look as though she knew how to ride at all.

“Of course I did,” Stumpp said.

“Did she ever want you to pretend you were retarded so she could jump a line, say, at the bank or the grocery store?”

“What?”

“It’s fun. You get to whirl, you get to gibber, I was just wondering if we had anything in common.”

“She sounds unfit, your mother.”

“She just doesn’t like lines. Hates ’em.”

A truck tore by on the road above them, its immense length rimmed in lights, with a cargo of acids or blood or veal calves. A cargo of caskets or pirated videos and perfumes, of those dolls that were the technological sensation of the coming season, that would spit at a child if their circuitry determined that not enough attention was being paid to it. The driver was smoking, tuned in to the libertarian station, half asleep.

“You’ll be crushed out there,” Stumpp said. “I’m driving you home tonight. Hate me if you wish.” He grasped the handlebars and began towing her toward his limo. The sign almost clipped him on the head. That word “Visiting” really galled him. “Steady there,” he said.

The doors floated softly open. Emily placed the sign inside and threw her faithful bicycle in without ceremony. “Where’s the driver?”

“I like to drive it myself.”

“These things are supposed to have drivers. That’s why people have them. Does it have dual air bags?”

Poor tyke, Stumpp thought. Everything she was learning was beside the point, though everything anyone learned proved to be beside the point. How false and full of pretext is all that we accomplish. Little Pickless made him dwell on the undwellable.

“I’ve got air bags in here for twelve people.” Car would float away like a zeppelin if they started to go off.

“Do you know twelve people?”

“I do not,” Stumpp said.

“I didn’t think so. I’m going to sit in the back.”

“Lovely,” Stumpp said.

“Can a person make tea back here?”

“They can, actually.”

“This is very nice.”

Gratitude flooded Stumpp’s tired heart. Little precursor. Wee mahout. Form the mover of all things. Time mixed up, almost flew right past, the whole shebang. No need for time to be dark, could be bright, transcendent. Pickless, was it …

Alice,” Carter said, “how much would you charge to kill Ginger for me?”

This was a strenuous request, and Alice was flattered. She would waive all fees for Mr. Vineyard, who’d been awfully nice to her. But Alice was a realist; murder, in this case was out of the question. “You want me to kill your wife?”

“It would be wonderful.”

“I really think that’s beyond me, Mr. Vineyard.”

“You have the heart of an anarchist. I can’t imagine where else to turn.”

“But that would be awful, Mr. Vineyard. If you could kill a dead person, it would be like killing something really rare and special, like the first of its kind or something.”

“Ginger is no unicorn, Alice.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin, quite frankly, Mr. Vineyard.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Carter said. “It has certain connotations for me, I’m afraid.” He was so discouraged. He couldn’t discuss Ginger with Donald anymore. Donald wanted to go on to other things, and Carter couldn’t blame him. He was beginning to doze off when Carter went on about Ginger. He would just slip right off to sleep, the most innocent boy in the world. And there Carter would be, watching him, enchanted, still talking, talking interminably, uncontrollably, about the perverse, unholy demands of Ginger. Donald was becoming disenchanted with him in his sleepy, hospitable, uncomplicated way. Donald was beginning to think he was nuts.