Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

That elephant had died too, the same evening, the one who painted watercolors. Her keepers had shipped her to Phoenix and bred her there, and her unborn had slipped out of her womb into her abdomen, rupturing the uterine wall. They hadn’t let her paint during pregnancy because they wanted her to focus on raising a calf, they’d denied her paints, brushes, the artist’s life. Ruby was the name her managers had given her. And Ruby had spent her last hours all opened up on a pile of mattresses and inner tubes. She hadn’t liked Phoenix anyway. Who would? Still, she’d had many mourners there. Cheap bouquets piled high against the zoo’s gates. Plush toy elephants. Even a couple of old pianos, “Forgive us” painted on the keys. Candy, conversely, had not been pregnant at all, except hysterically. A combination of hypnotism and pharmaceutical mixing had untethered the imaginary child from her bitter and uncharismatic grasp.

Alice loped through washes and down the cracked beds of scalped rivers; she trotted through barren swales, past yellow earthmoving machines big as stables. Somewhere there was a hidden world, she hoped, closed to observation and obliteration. Closed to memory. Safe.

Annabel had written to her on one of those virtually weightless folds of blue paper where the letter was not enclosed but was the envelope itself. Annabel wrote that she’d had a facial in Paris, and the girl had discovered an imbedded, almost colorless blackhead on her cheek and she couldn’t get it out and couldn’t get it out and Annabel was half frantic with worry and the girl was just about to give up when she got it. Then she’d shouted, “Go, team!” and both of them wept with relief. “Go, team!” the French girl had said. Annabel had found herself quite adept at learning French, but what was the point if the French were learning dumb American phrases as fervently as they could? Annabel had just finished The Stranger in the original.

“Do you know how it begins, Alice?” she wrote. “ ‘Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ I think there’s a lot more to those first two sentences than most people think. At first I thought I couldn’t go on, but then I whizzed right through it, the whole book. Daddy’s very happy here, and so is Donald, who adores him, hangs on his every word, if you can believe it. He’s forgotten all about Siddhartha. Daddy’s going to buy Donald a vineyard, just a small one. Happiness is the most important thing there is. I’ve had two liaisons already and one affaire de cœur.… ”

She had asked about Alice’s new tooth but had not inquired after Corvus. There was more, written in the margins, but Alice didn’t read it. She preferred not finishing something to having it end on its own terms.

She perched on a shelf of shale near a pack rat’s impressive mound of cholla joints and stared down at Mr. V.’s vacated house. Mr. V. had practically teleported Annabel and Donald out of there after Sherwin’s accident. “Sliced to ribbons” was the accepted phrase. By slicing himself to ribbons, Sherwin seemed to have provided a conduit of escape for the others, as though he’d been sacrificed or something. Still, it had worked out well enough. He wasn’t living anyway, not really, and he had been tiresomely, peevishly aware of this for some time. But now that he was gone, he seemed more a strange thought she’d had than anything. He’d be the first to be amused by this, the first and maybe only. She could hear him say, Why, Alice, you are empathetic .

The house was empty, the pool drained. Everything had been auctioned off to benefit Mr. V.’s bill at the Hilton. He’d given the Corvette to the bartender, the piano to the suite’s maid. Peeled of familiarity, the house looked a blind and formless thing. A realtor’s sign glinted in the sun. Swaying on two little hooks beneath it was a cylinder that was supposed to provide information sheets, but there was nothing in it. Alice had looked. Now, from a distance, she gazed down at the house. Even the Indian was gone, and the chair he’d been placed in. At that very moment, some states and days removed from and unrealized by Alice, actual Indians were playing buffalo. They were making an attempt to dance the buffalo back into being — sticks shoved through their shoulder blades, bleeding, atoning, serving, pretending to be. A dance that hadn’t been danced in a hundred years was now being rebroadcast. “Alicekins would enjoy this, wouldn’t she?” her poppa was saying.

The emergency vehicles had certainly made a mess of the landscaping out here. On further reflection, Alice concluded it was cactus thieves who had struck. A large columnar cereus was just gone, off to a new decorating role in Palm Springs. Sophisticated burglars taking advantage of an ascendant retro surge had hit the place hard. There were holes everywhere.

Nothing stirred. Life was not obvious. The pack rat’s spiny pile was festooned here and there with bottle caps and the blue plastic rings that had once ensured the purity of jugged water. The rat had to bear the burden of its incorrect name, for it was not genus Rattus at all although often slandered as such. Shy and misunderstood as it was, it must have been immensely pleased with the construction, which even included a tube of lipstick, Mrs. V.’s lipstick so recently enshrined by Annabel. Mrs. V. was stubborn — still being represented in this practically nowhere by this tube she had known, golden without, and within horribly crimson and waxily collapsed. Alice hoped Mr. V. had gone far enough away for happiness. And she hoped he wasn’t eating veal over there, though this was unlikely, given the penchant of the French. They even ate horses. She should send him a little note, something fun, not too didactic: A HEART ATTACK IS GOD’S REVENGE FOR EATING HIS LITTLE FRIENDS. She didn’t want to be informed that he’d had a heart attack, of course.

I shouldn’t come out here after today, she thought. She felt a certain misalignment regarding herself and her life. A misalignment could make a big difference.

She had gone to Green Palms on the first of the days, and Nurse Daisy had appeared at the door.

“You look like you’ve got the flu,” she said. “We can’t expose our residents to random bugs that might carry them away sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t have the flu,” Alice said.

“People deny, they conceal, they prevaricate. I’ve heard it all.”

Inside, they were tossing a beach ball around a circle. Singing silly love songs. Getting their diapers changed.

“You’ve got something,” Nurse Daisy said, “and it’s not acceptable here. Go away, now. Shoo. Shoo!”

“I’m looking for Corvus.”

“You always are. That’s not her name anymore. She received a different name. What did you call your first little pets? Tyger? Domino? Don’t you wish you were a little kid again?”

“Not really,” Alice said.

“Your mind developing. You’d be two, then four. What a difference. People who cared would be thrilled at your progress. Those false-belief tests. You’d bring up your scores, eventually.”

“What’s a false-belief test?”

“Sally puts a chocolate in a box, then leaves the room. June comes in, takes the chocolate out of the box, puts it in a basket. Sally comes back. Where will Sally look for her chocolate? A two-year-old, a three-year-old will point at the basket, because that’s where the chocolate is , but you won’t. You’ll be four. You’ll point at the box. Theory of mind. Shows you’re capable of simultaneously conceiving of and appreciating two alternative and contradictory models of reality. And it just gets better and better for a time when you’re a little kid. The capacity to change nervous pathways — that is, to learn — seems unlimited. But then the changing slows, even stops. And all that’s left is to get pig sick of things.”