The Quick & the Dead Read online

  She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She’d remain outside the public sector. She’d be an anarchist, she’d travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She’d fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She’d really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She’d have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow—no, that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.

  She had curved back to the road and wasn’t far from the entrance. The flattened brown animal was now but a rosy kiss on the pavement. She fingered the coins in her pocket. She’d get a soda and call her granny. She wished … she’d like to be one of those birds, those warblers that fly from Maine to Venezuela without water, food, or rest. The moment came when they wanted to be twenty-five hundred miles from the place they were and didn’t know how else to do it.

  She dialed from a phone outside the visitors’ center. She wished she knew someone she could call illicitly.

  “Poppa,” she said. “Hi.”

  “Alicekins,” her grandfather said faintly, “where are you?”

  The Indians called what they heard on telephones whispering spirits. Whisper, whisper, said her poppa’s blood, making its way through his head’s arteries. Indians didn’t overexplain matters—full and complete expression not being in accordance with Indian custom. Alice admired that.

  “I’m baby-sitting, Poppa. I thought I told you.”

  There was an alarmed pause.

  “Maybe I forgot to tell you, but I’m baby-sitting late. I won’t be home for a while.”

  “We’re fine. We’re hanging in there.”

  “Of course you are, Poppa.”

  He hung up softly. He had certain phone mannerisms and this was one of them, breaking the connection gently, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed.

  Alice went into the visitors’ center and entered the men’s room just for the heck of it. She washed her hands and looked into the mirror. The assignment was to be … absolutely … expressionless. She stared at herself. She didn’t look awake, was all. She’d get arrested if she went around looking like that. She pulled her hair down over her eyes and left. She hated mirrors.

  She walked. An enormous grocery store appeared ahead, an outpost for the consumer cavalry. It was surrounded by ragged desert and sported large signs informing those who wanted to make something of themselves in this life that investment “pads” were available. Cows browsed the desert, token cows, hired to indicate a pre-pad tax category. A few miles later, the desert had vanished completely, the cows were no longer employed. She imagined what she would do to the woman’s station wagon. She would work smoothly and calmly. She would pop the hood and remove the oil cap. Using a conveniently located hose, she would pour water into the filler hole and then top up the gas tank. She would find a can of brush cleaner in the garage and pour it into the radiator. She wouldn’t do anything to the brakes for the little kids’ sakes, but she would squirt glue all over the seats.

  She was approaching House of Hubcaps, one of her favorite places. She paused and enjoyed the magnificent display of hubcaps. Great luminous wheels crowded the windows, reflecting and distorting everything in their cool, humped centers. They were like ghastly, intelligent, unmoored heads.

  If the House of Hubcaps didn’t have the hubcap you were searching for, it didn’t exist.

  She moved on, renewed, to Jimmy and Jacky’s house. The hubcaps had refreshed her. They had cleared her mind. Vandalizing the station wagon would be too easy, too predictable, and by now far too premeditated. She should do something on a grander scale. She should attempt to liberate those children, those sour-smelling, sniveling, cautious little boys. All their mother had ever provided them with was good haircuts. She should free them from that corrupting presence, from the world of toots and jelly bags and poisonous sprays, but that would be kidnapping, and punishable, she believed, by death. Plus she didn’t want Jimmy and Jacky.

  The house was deserted. Cardboard cartons stuffed with clothes and broken toys were scattered about in the front yard, the word “Free” written on every one. The garage was empty. The rabbit hutch was empty save for a withered string bean. The rabbit was probably hopping around nearby, terrified. Or it might be hunched up somewhere in a narcosis of incomprehension at being hutchless. Or maybe the mother had boiled it and served it to the twins for lunch on a bun with some potato chips. Alice wouldn’t put it past her.

  Back at her own house, Alice got into her nightie and ate two cheese sandwiches and a bowl of spaghetti. Her granny and poppa sat in the living room watching Fury sleeping in his dog bed surrounded by his toys. Fury was named after the beautiful horse in the Bette Davis movie who is shot by Gary Merrill, who is pretending to all the world that he is Bette’s husband. Bette Davis was her granny’s favorite movie star. None of the new ones could hold a candle to her.

  “Alicekins,” her poppa said. “I’m so glad you’re back. We have some questions for you.”

  “Good ones tonight,” her granny said.

  Alice made another cheese sandwich. She was not abstemious and ate like a stray, like a pound pet rescued at the eleventh hour.

  “A woman goes to her doctor,” her granny said, “and the doctor says she’s got cancer of the liver and gives her three months to live. Cancer of the liver is a painful, horrible way to go and there’s no way to beat it, the doctor says.”

  “Typical,” her poppa said.

  “What!” her granny said.

  “Typical doctor.” Her poppa took a Kleenex from a box on the table beside him and dug around in one of Fury’s ears.

  “Yes, well, she goes home and she and her son have a long talk and the son arranges it so that his handgun collection is at her disposal and she shoots herself. During the autopsy it comes out that she didn’t have cancer of the liver at all.”

  “Just had a few pus pockets was all,” her poppa said. He put the used Kleenex into his pocket without looking at it.

  “So the question is, who’s responsible for her death, the lady, the son, or the doctor?”

  These kinds of problems always cheered Alice up. They weren’t questions of ethics or logic, and the answer, under the circumstances, didn’t matter anyway. She just loved them.

  2

  Corvus lost her parents to drowning close to the end of that peculiar spring. The phone rang at school, she was summoned to the office and was told the situation. It seemed unbelievable but was the case. They had driven down to the Mexican state of Sonora for their anniversary. They had been to the beach. They’d been swimming, sailing, even diving in the Gulf of California but had drowned coming back from Nogales on an off-ramp of I-10 during the first rainstorm of the year, just beyond one of those signs that say DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, signs the engineers claim (and continued to claim with tedious righteousness after the accident) are where they are for a reason. The last picture of Corvus and her mother and father together had been taken not long before in that same gritty border town, Nogales, with the burro on the tourist street, the timeless, tireless burro with the plywood sea and sunset behind him. Beyond the painted sea, people were living in cardboard packing crates with tin roofs held down by tires and old car batteries, beyond which a wasteland ran to the real sea, from which her parents had returned but never arrived. A frequent thought of Corvus: they had never arrived back. Still, she thought they’d probably laughed when they hit that sudden water, thinking they’d be through it in no time.

  That burro picture was the worst, Alice thought.

  She spent a lot of time at Corvus’s house, a little adobe house with the practically required blue trim. Because the land had been grazed, there was nothing on the hardened earth but a few mesquite trees. An old Dodge truck sat in an otherwise empty corral, and there was a shining Airstream trailer, for it had been the policy of Corvus’s parents to move every year. And there was a black-and-tan dog with a big head, for whom there was no one or nothing
in this world but Corvus’s mother. Not far away lived a neighbor whose name was Crimmins, and then no one for miles. The dog’s name was Tommy.

  Alice has no pictures. So she likes to look through the ones Corvus has. Corvus is culling them all the time, but the burro stays, and some other odd ones too, while some of Alice’s personal favorites—ones that represent an ideal, ones that show a little baby, for instance, with a real mother and father looking at it so grave and thoughtful—just disappear. The photos are in a flat woven basket and Alice gently paws through them. Though there are fewer, there appear to be more too, as if there were another source for them somewhere in the house. She wonders if any ceremony is involved in the way Corvus handles the pictures. Corvus likes ceremony. The graveyard service was practically baroque in its ambition, even though no one else was there except a paid soloist and the minister. The stonecutter said he’d come but didn’t. Alice had never heard a man with more excuses. When she and Corvus had gone to his shop the day before the burial to choose the stone, he had said, “I won’t be able to do yours for seven months, minimum. I have a woman ahead of you who’s catching up, putting new stones on all the family’s graves, and that family goes back—golly, practically to John Wesley Powell. She’s changing them all, totally into remodeling. She’s got all these birds and wagon trains on them. That’s the style now, color. One she wants is a World War Two fighter plane in one corner and in the other corner she wants a heart with initials entwined in it, a ‘D’ and a ‘B.’ I make these sketches, and she says, ‘I keep seeing something else, I keep seeing something else …’ ”

  “Isn’t that bad luck, to change the stones?” Corvus asked.

  “No, no, I’ll tell you what bad luck is, it’s getting involved with a rich mobster Papago. They’re sentimental but ruthless. Ruthless. Their kids are cute as bugs, but they’re ruthless too. If they don’t like what you do”—he put his index finger between his eyes—“Bang. You’re coyote kibble in some dry wash.” The stonecutter was hunched and merry, the first to admit the difficulty of keeping up with death.

  The minister had a remarkable basso profundo voice, and the whole service was runic and generic at once. When it was over, he clasped the two girls’ hands and then patted Tommy. Tommy looked frightened.

  “I can’t believe none of your teachers came,” Alice said.

  “Our teachers,” Corvus said. “Well, they didn’t know my parents.”

  “What about relatives? Aren’t there any relatives?”

  “We’re onlys.”

  Alice was an only too—well, partially, she guessed. Her situation was a bit complex.

  “My granny and poppa should have come.”

  “It’s all right, Alice.”

  “There must have been an address book we could have consulted.”

  “Alice,” Corvus said, “there isn’t anybody. Worry about something else. Look at all this grass. Do you think the mighty Colorado should be further diminished so that grass can grow to be mowed in desert graveyards?”

  “I think it’s nice what you did,” Alice said. “This is nice. All the flowers. You did it nice.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Corvus was wearing a black dress of her mother’s.

  “You’re doing it right,” Alice said. “Those big caskets and the singer—you’re doing it beautifully.”

  The girls huddled there beside the grave with Tommy. There was the sound of traffic. Meek, Alice thought. It makes you meek.

  “Poor Tommy,” Corvus said. “He’s trying to think. You can see he’s trying to think. Maybe I should have him put down, send him off with my mom.”

  “But you can’t. You shouldn’t do it now.”

  “No,” Corvus said, rubbing the dog’s bony head. “You’d never catch her now, would you, no matter how fast you went.”

  Alice was trying to think dog—the racing after that is dog. But then there was the staying and the waiting that was dog, too. “It will be good to have Tommy around,” she said.

  “You’re supposed to pray when your heart is broken, to have it break completely so that you can begin anew,” Corvus said.

  Alice didn’t consider that to be much of a prayer.

  “I’ve been trying to think, too,” Corvus said, “just like Tommy. It says in the Bible that death is the long home.”

  “Long?” Alice said. “As in long? What does that … that’s kind of creepy, isn’t it?”

  “You’re not afraid of death, are you, Alice? You just don’t want to lose your personality.” Corvus hugged her.

  They stayed until it was twilight and the first star appeared. The desert dusk was lovely, even in this place, perhaps particularly in this place. The gates to the graveyard had been closed, and Alice got out of the truck to open them. As they got closer to the house, Tommy grew happier. He rode with his head out the window, his ears flying. The air was full and soft and whole, holding ever closer what he remembered in it. They passed Crimmins’s, where a single light burned. The ground around his house had the look of cement and was enclosed by wire. The sunset was bathing the Airstream in a piercing light, but the adobe was subdued, prettily shadowed, its blue trim chalky, the marigolds Corvus’s mother had planted massed like embers. Corvus slowly pulled up to the house, and Tommy leapt out to wait confidently at the door, panting, virtually grinning up at Corvus as she opened it.

  The girls were going to eat everything in the refrigerator. It was Corvus’s idea. There was mustard, jam, milk, and a melon. Oatmeal bread, salad dressing, onions and lemons, some spongy potatoes, three bottles of beer, a can of chocolate syrup, a jar of mayonnaise.

  “I want to be sick,” Corvus said, and they waited to be sick but were not. Finally Corvus was a little sick.

  “I guess I could eat anything,” Alice said apologetically.

  Tommy lay quietly in front of the door, staring at it. This was the way she would return. When the door opened, she would come through it. They would greet each other as they always had. Then he would drink something and sleep.

  The unpleasant feast had been finished and cleared away.

  Alice said, “Sometimes I’ve thought the thing to do to these fast-food joints they build out in the desert—and those fancy places that serve veal—is to stage puke-ins. We go in, sit down, order, and throw up. Isn’t that a good idea? But I just can’t throw up.”

  “I think I’ll take everything out of my mother’s bureau,” Corvus said, “and make a bed of her clothes for Tommy tonight.”

  “Don’t do it all at once,” Alice advised. “I’d put out just one piece at a time.”

  Corvus said, “In the house where my grandmother died, the night she died, her refrigerator put on a light in her living room.”

  “How did it do that?”

  “My father explained it. He said it was the vibration of the refrigerator’s motor turning on a loose switch on the lamp.”

  “What was it trying to say, I wonder.”

  “My grandmother was so proud of that refrigerator. She’d just bought it.”

  “I think that happens a lot,” Alice said. “People buy a new refrigerator and something bad happens.”

  “My parents just bought that blanket,” Corvus said, pointing to a Navajo Black Design blanket that hung on the wall. “See the way it is in the center, like the center of a spider’s web? That’s so the weaver’s thoughts can escape the weaving when it’s finished. So the mind won’t get trapped in there.”

  “Did the Anglos think that up or the Indians?” Alice asked suspiciously. “It sounds like something an entrepreneur would come up with.” But she wanted to be gracious and sympathetic, so she said, “It’s nice that it means that.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Corvus said. “It’s just a way out of the process, an escape from completion.”

  Alice was relieved that she didn’t have to embrace the design wholeheartedly. She was holding the basket of pictures in her lap and went back to examining them. She picked one up, smoot
hed back a curled edge, picked up another.

  “You like those, don’t you?” Corvus said. “I should give you the whole lot of them.”

  “Now, who’s this?”

  “That’s my mother.”

  “It looks freezing out. Where were you living then? What’s she holding?”

  “That’s Tommy as a puppy.”

  “He looks like, I don’t know, a mitten or something.”

  “My father used to say that my mother raised Tommy from an egg.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “That’s me.”

  “You’re kidding. Really? It doesn’t look at all like you.”

  “As a little kid.”

  “Really?” Alice insisted.

  Corvus looked at the picture and laughed. “I don’t know who that is,” she said.

  “And this?”

  “She was my mother’s best friend once. Darleen. When I was a baby she dropped me.”

  “I don’t think I was ever dropped,” Alice said. “It might explain a lot, though, had I been, I mean.”

  “She dropped me more than once, actually, each time in private. I knew and she knew, that was it. Then, when I was a little older, she saved my life. She saved me from drowning. But people saw us that time and it was pretty clear she’d instigated the drowning and saving me was just a way of absolving herself. My parents saw us from the shore. They were a long way off. She really had me out there.”

  “Do you think she was in love with your mother?” Alice asked. “Maybe she was in love with your mother.” What a thing to say, Alice thought. Love’s not that crooked. Though she suspected it might be.

  “I remember her being with us pretty constantly. It was like she was a boarder or an aunt or my mother’s stepsister.”

  “She didn’t try to pass herself off as your godparent, did she?” Alice asked. “There is something so sinister about those people.” They were unaccountable, shadowy figures, practically bearded in Alice’s imagination, bearing peculiar half-priced gifts like peppermint foot cream or battery-operated lights you clipped onto books or socket-wrench sets. She’d never heard of an effective or efficient godparent. As liaisons went, they seemed to be pretty much failures.