Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Jesus! You startled me,” Sherwin said. “My heart went skippety.”

“I loathe that movie,” the woman said. “It’s been in there for a month.” She smiled at him thinly, a hefty broad with sunken eyes wearing some sort of partygoing apparatus with gauzy overlays, the kind hefty broads ofttimes wore. She looked familiar, as though he’d seen her in a photograph somewhere, but a specific photograph, framed.

“So you slipped away from the party, too,” Sherwin said.

“Some time ago,” Ginger said. “Tell me, how did you find your way in here?”

“Yeah, I shouldn’t be here,” Sherwin said. “It’s just one of those nights when I don’t feel at home in my own skin. Whose room is this, anyway?”

“That boob Carter’s.”

“Yeah?” Sherwin said. “He likes Elsa the lioness?”

“If he were hip,” Ginger said, “he’d have a sci fi, horror, and B-and-C flicks library, but Carter is as unhip as it gets.”

She was hefty but rather remarkably bony, too. It sort of came and went.

“The mirrors are a kick.”

“It’s just one of his latest notions. He thinks they’ll bother me, but they don’t.” She bent toward him. “Hi,” she said.

He could see her breastbone, a bony wing. He had a quick recall of his sister, whom he hadn’t thought about in years. After she was diagnosed, his mother insisted she’d caught cancer from eating dirt when she was little, making little cakes and pies out of dirt and pebbles and berries in her playhouse. She’d caught it and held it for ten years and then died when she was seventeen. His mother had kept bees. There was a saying: bees don’t thrive unless they’re told the news. She’d talked to her bees, he remembered, even more after his sister died. She was good with bees, his mother, which was another way of saying she wasn’t all there.

“Whoa,” Sherwin said. “I just thought about some people I hadn’t thought about for a long time.”

This did not engage her interest. “You know, I’m so curious about what people think — and then it’s all so boring. Most of what people think aren’t thoughts, anyway, they’re memories. People treasure a good memory, but the thing you’ve got to realize is if you think about your dead daddy, it doesn’t make him any less dead in his other life.”

Sherwin listened intently.

“You may say, ‘Well I don’t have a dead daddy,’ but many people do, and they think about that dead daddy and delude themselves into thinking they’re keeping him alive somehow by the persistence of their memories. It’s so ridiculous. That’s just one example, I have others. People think memory grants an extension. Memory does not grant extensions.”

Sherwin liked the way she talked. There was something wrong with her, he thought; maybe she’d had a stroke. What did they say the first overt sign of a stroke was? An odd look? She had that, all right. One taco short of a combination plate. “An extension?” He laughed. “An extension of what?”

“You’ve got bad teeth, you know that?” Ginger said. “You should be more discreet about laughing.”

“I’ve got bad teeth?” Sherwin said. “Really?”

“I’m very conscious of teeth,” she said. “You’ve got scoliosis too, it looks like.”

“I hate talking health,” Sherwin said. “You wanna talk about God?”

“Let me tell you something … how can I put this?”

“That’s always the challenge.”

“God sends you after something that isn’t there.”

Sherwin thought about this.

“I wouldn’t smirk if I were you,” she snapped.

“No, no, I like that. We’re all bums on a scavenger hunt.”

“I hate people who take something someone says, then say it in a different, far less interesting way and pretend it’s better. I would never have said that. We are not all bums on a scavenger hunt.”

“Cigarette?”

“Not yet,” Ginger said.

There really was an odd smell in this room. It sort of soaked into you.

“You think I farted, don’t you?” she said. “Well, I didn’t.”

“I don’t for a moment think you farted,” Sherwin said graciously.

“Carter believes I’m shooting breezers, and that’s not it at all.”

She was big . It was an odd sensation. He was, in this sensation, infinitesimally small.

“Why don’t you go find Carter for me and bring him in here?” Ginger suggested. “Tell him that it’s imperative that he come in here with you for a moment.”

“What reason would I give?” Sherwin asked.

“Oh, just say it’s an emergency. Say someone’s hurt or something.”

“Is someone hurt?” He grinned again, covering his mouth with his hand. He liked her, he didn’t want to annoy her. Here was someone who could understand him completely.

“In a manner of speaking,” Ginger said.

“Something could happen in here. I’m agreeing with you.”

“Carter thinks I’m crude. Of course, he never found me welcoming or desirable before, either.”

“He’s a civilian. He’s blind to greatness. You’re a freak, baby. You’re great.”

“And you’re the famous piano player, aren’t you? The one with the little limp-dick death wish.”

This summation of his situation in no way surprised him.

“You’re the plenipotentiary, baby,” Sherwin said. “You’re my girl.”

“Embrace me,” Ginger said, “and I will be beautiful.”

“Be beautiful and I will embrace you. That’s a poem, isn’t it? ‘We argued for hours’? And ‘it turns out to be life’? Is that the one? My mind’s getting shaky.”

She laughed. “No, no, that’s not the one I’m thinking of. Give me a cigarette.” She was laughing at him. Her teeth were great. Good strong teeth.

He shook a cigarette out of his pack, lit it, and held out his hand to present it to her, but she didn’t move, so he took a step forward, then stumbled over something, losing his balance and pitching against one of the leaning mirrors. He turned, twisting, trying to recover, and fell hard against another one, falling harder than he could imagine possible, into the silvering, and felt it break into him, sliding its cool tongues into his hands and throat and heart. He lay on the floor among the glittering, his blood welling and then skimming down the slim nails of glass. He had almost heard the sound of the glass slipping into him, a sound like his father’s shovels slicing into the ground. His father had called himself a tree surgeon, though in fact he had specialized in just cutting them down, taking them down to the stump. He had saws longer than his arms and called them his Bad Boys. Now look at this Bad Boy, he’d say. He kept his tools beautiful, his shovels so sharp a man could shave with them. No dead daddy, he was still alive, wearing out his fourth wife somewhere in the Texas hill country. Such a nice clean sound he’d first heard; but that was past now, replaced by a sloppier, more distracting one, a squeaking and gurgling. Death by mirrors. Cave, Cave, Dominus videt … and Sherwin was showing himself to be a mess.

Alice was walking. No place had yet received her, the world proving to be no solace. She had started out just past dawn while her granny and poppa were still murmuring in bed, having already brewed the coffee and fed Fury his applesauce from his favorite bowl, which had the image of a half-naked body builder on the bottom. The house was full of such odd bits of china, but this was clearly Fury’s favorite, always shown to him empty, prior to being filled, so he could know he wasn’t being deceived.

The heat was pure and light, hollow as a bone. She had been setting out each morning for a day of wandering but returned home to her granny and poppa each night. “No bird so wild but has its quiet nest,” as Sherwin would have said, quoting another. Sherwin had been a big quoter. Alice had seen his pockmarked face and bottle-black hair materialize on certain boulders recently when the light was right or, more likely, wrong. It wasn’t as though he’d died instantly, there had been some lag time. The county coroner, who had arrived with the ambulance, was not of the school that fed the foolish hope that a person could die instantly. Neither conciliatory nor compassionate, he had been educated by Jesuits and as such might as well have been raised by wolves. If you’d invited the coroner to imagine that such lag time served a purpose, perhaps by allowing the soon-to-be-deceased an opportunity to plead for nonforgetfulness and the remembrance of past lives in wherever was coming next, he would’ve laughed in your face. He was a regular on a local talk-show channel, and Alice’s granny had described his laugh as infectious .