The Quick & the Dead Page 3

  “My mother never trusted anyone after that. Not even me. I felt that she didn’t have much confidence in me. It’s funny that this picture has survived all these years, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “I mean, no, not funny.” What was sort of remarkable was that Corvus’s parents had ended up the drowned ones. She chewed on the inside of her mouth to check thoughtless utterances. She should invent another habit since it was already sore. But you didn’t invent habits, did you? Didn’t they invent you?

  “They got Tommy then—didn’t they, Tommy?” The dog raised his head in polite acknowledgment, then lowered it with a sigh.

  Alice looked at the photograph. She’d been holding it firmly, her thumbs at the woman’s throat. She was blond and quite heavy, a real butter pat. “Are there other pictures of her around, or is this the only one?” She really thought this memento should be ditched.

  “Whenever we were alone together, Darleen and I, she spoke to me in sort of a singing whisper. But in front of my parents she wouldn’t whisper, she talked like anyone else. She didn’t say anything out of the ordinary in front of my parents, she would look at me in the most normal way and then would look away again in an utterly natural manner, but when we were alone she’d say the most maliciously nonsensical things. She thought everything was grotesque. I was mesmerized by her.”

  “She sounds pornographic,” Alice said. “She was, like, molesting your mind.”

  “She had me share her private world, all right,” Corvus said. “And I soaked it all up, whatever it was that was in that whisper. People think innocence can soak up anything. That’s what innocence is for. She never bored me, but when the time, in her opinion, came for me to vanish, I struggled. I struggled hard. Nothing in the whisper had prepared me for this. She had me scissored between her legs and she was turning, so it looked above the water like she was searching for me. The sea was calm, and where had I gone? And then she let me go. I popped up like a cork, too shocked to scream, and saw my father swimming toward me. He was a good swimmer, an excellent swimmer, and he’d almost reached me. My mother was floundering behind. She was trying to run through the water, to shovel it aside with her body. I noticed the marks the straps of her bathing suit had made on her flesh. The straps weren’t aligned with the marks they’d made over the summer. I hadn’t noticed that before, and I fell into detail then, the sweet, passing detail of the world. The next instant I was raised up, grasped beneath my arms, and Darleen said, ‘Until again, Corvus. In this world or the next,’ and she threw me toward my mother and my father.”

  “It’s like you were being born,” Alice said. “She was trying to take charge of you being born.” She had quite crumpled the photograph by this time. She had wadded this woman—long overdue.

  “That’s when I had my first thought. I was five years old, probably a little late for first thoughts.”

  “I don’t think that’s late at all.” Alice didn’t want to ask her granny and poppa what her own had been and risk disappointment. They undoubtedly had it written down someplace.

  “It was—There is a next world, but no one we know will be in it.”

  “That’s good for five,” Alice said. She wanted to ask her if she’d seen a kelpie when she was underwater. They were supposed to look like a horse, a little horse, and to warn you if you were about to be drowned or to assist in your drowning. She didn’t know how it could do both, but that’s what she’d read in some book that for a time had fallen into her possession.

  But it wasn’t appropriate to ask. Not shades nor ghosts nor apparitions should have a place at the table tonight.

  “So what happened to her? Did she just walk out of the water and disappear?”

  “She walked out of the water and across the beach and into the changing room, which was a large walled space without a roof. I’d always hated it. There were no private stalls inside, just an open area where women and girls changed into their bathing suits. The floor was dirt and the sky seemed always to be moving quickly overhead, and it frightened me. There were all ages and sizes in there, everyone quickly getting in and out of clothes, everyone awkward and hurried and pretty much silent, though not completely silent. The bodies seemed to be all one body, the differences only momentary, and this was horrible to me.”

  Alice put the crushed photograph into a bowl. She picked up a matchbook from Corvus’s parents’ considerable collection. There were hundreds of matchbooks, no two the same. “Never Settle, Always Select,” her matchbook said. It advertised an indoor flea market in Gallup. She struck the match and stuffed it into the folds of the picture, but it went out.

  Corvus smoothed the picture out and folded back the cover of another matchbook. She propped it open beneath the woman’s face and when she lit one match, all the others flared.

  “That’s better,” Alice said.

  “My father carried me back to the beach and wrapped me in towels and then took me to the car. The car had been parked in the sun with its windows rolled up, and it felt delicious. My father held me in that warm car, and I’d never felt anything so delicious in my life up until then. My mother had gone to look for Darleen. She kept saying, ‘I’m going to scratch her eyes out.’ ”

  “I bet she would have, too.” The phrase had always impressed Alice favorably, but she doubted that Corvus’s mother was capable of such a thing. She had always considered Corvus’s mother a genial person and had admired her bosom, which was nicely freckled. Corvus’s father had been more difficult to gauge. He had studied to be a doctor but had had some sort of breakdown. He seemed strong, if unpredictable. He could have gone after this Darleen to her great detriment, though apparently he had not.

  “My mother couldn’t find her. We didn’t even return to the house that night because my mother thought she’d come in and steal me, so we went to a motel. I’d never been in a motel before, and it seemed like a playhouse to me. My mother threw away my bathing suit and my flip-flops with the plastic starfish on the straps. She threw away all of the clothes of that day and bought me new ones. And we never saw Darleen again. We never talked about her.”

  “What a peculiar episode,” Alice said.

  “I have to go to school tomorrow,” Corvus said.

  “Oh, you do not!” Alice exclaimed. If ever there was an excuse, she thought. “Has the counselor gotten to you yet?”

  “No, not yet. Oh, you mean in terms of career placement? She said physics.”

  “Physics?”

  “I think her notes concerned someone else.”

  The counselor was supposed to assist the students with their college choices but also doubled in grief management, which made her sound to Alice like a dog handler, as though grief were something that could be taught the down-stay. There was no love lost between this counselor and Alice, who thought she should stick to her smarmy recommendations and not be allowed to dabble in Corvus’s life. She should be prevented from attempting to manage Corvus’s grief. Maybe Alice could get a restraining order on her.

  Tommy scrambled to his feet and stood trembling in the corner. The fur between his eyes was folded in a melancholy omega shape. He had dreamed, he had dreamed … it left him.

  This was no place to be tonight for any of them, but this was the place they were.

  3

  Alice was in the Chilled-Out Pepper bookstore looking through a book on medicinal plants. She wanted to find something for Corvus’s situation and her granny’s diabetes and her poppa’s gas as well as a little something for herself, something that would give her a little edge or obscure the edge she already had, she didn’t know which.

  She chewed her nails and read. Flecks of a once hopefully applied red nail polish fell onto the pages. Here was a plant fatal to sheep. Here was one that was good for honeymoon cystitis. Ugh, Alice thought. Anil del Muerto was good for sore gums and herpes blisters. Sunflower of the Dead. Of course, it smelled to high heaven. She couldn’t find anything for Corvus. Whenever you went near the subject of sadnes
s in these books, everything got a little vague, a little folkloric, a little picturesque. One book said that bathing in red-colored water could be comforting, a suggestion Alice found to be extremely irresponsible. Didn’t red-colored water imply veins, practically? She decided on tronadora and prickly pear for her granny, silk tassel for her poppa, and anemone and passionflower for herself. It was like putting together a Christmas list. Passionflower actually was growing right at home, along with some gummy, noxious vines that the boys in the neighborhood who were on probation would come by for before their monthly drug tests. This vine, and the rather absent-minded access her granny and poppa gave the boys to it, was probably the reason why their house had not once been broken into, but Alice couldn’t find it in the book. Passionflower, however, was described at length. According to early botanists, the three stigmas represented the Trinity, as well as the nails used on Christ’s cross. The stamens were the five wounds, the tendrils were the scourges, the ten petals were the ten apostles, minus Judas and Peter, those old numbnuts, those betrayers. In an aggravated, irritable way Alice loved reading stuff like this, numerology stuff, this-means-that stuff, mystical correspondency stuff. But the passionflower tried so hard with its pinks and blues and purples, as though God would show off in such a strutty, obvious way. She was building up a real annoyance for the passionflower.

  A woman at the checkout counter was making quite a fuss because a book she’d ordered had not yet arrived.

  “It’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, and it was supposed to be in today. This is today! This is a gift to myself, and I—want—that—book!” She intended to read more about Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess who was supposed to be the protectress of lone women, of female outsiders who had powerful ideas and were therefore shunned. The would-be book buyer couldn’t find enough about Coatlicue. She began knocking things over.

  “Do I have to call the police?” the manager asked. “I’m going to call the police.”

  Alice continued to read through the medicinal plants book, trying to remember what she meant to recall about them. Sometimes she thought she really didn’t know how to read. Things just went right through her as though they thought she didn’t exist. Only recently her granny and poppa had been taking a quiz in a magazine that would tell you if you were likely to get Alzheimer’s within four years. You chose ten objects and then someone hid them and you had to remember them all. Or you had to name as many items as possible in sixty seconds from some category, such as vegetables. Or someone read a list of twelve words and, ten minutes later, you had to repeat them. They all three had taken the tests, and Alice had been the only one who had failed. She had done particularly poorly on the word list. Even now the only word she could remember from it was choice.

  “That’s too bad, honey,” her granny said. “This is not reassuring. You have a good chance of developing intellect-robbing dementia.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to give it to young people,” her poppa said. “It’s not a test for young people.”

  Thinking about the Alzheimer’s debacle, Alice blushed. Another word on the list had been dawn. Maybe she just had delayed delayed recall.

  She found herself reading “An insignificant bush, reaching modest height with insignificant leaves and flowers, its appearance is common and uninteresting.” This was Escoba de la Vibora, or matchweed. Despite this insignificance it was respected, even revered, by those who used it. Good, Alice thought.

  She was studying the book intently when a voice at her shoulder said, “Hi there.”

  Alice got her sunglasses out of her pocket and put them on.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said. He was wearing a suit and had exceptionally white teeth. Alice regarded him coolly from behind her sunglasses, which she wished weren’t so smudged. Alice’s intention was to make herself and to be nothing but the self she made, but the problem had always been where to begin. One should begin with a stranger, but strangers never paid any attention to Alice. But here was one and he was.

  “It’s just that you look to be about my daughter’s age,” he said.

  “Is your daughter missing?” Alice asked. Although, of course, she could hardly care if she was.

  “Why, no,” the man said, laughing. “I don’t believe so. My name is Carter Vineyard, and my daughter and I just moved here. She doesn’t know anyone. I thought someone her own age could give her a call.”

  Alice looked at him. He was sophisticated-looking and sincere and had to be desperate, a little stupid, or intoxicated.

  “You’re about sixteen, aren’t you?” Carter said. “Go to school?”

  “The Marquise School,” Alice said. “But it’s almost over. A few more weeks.”

  “The Marquise School is where Annabel’s going in the fall!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t that a coincidence! It’s an excellent school, isn’t it?”

  “Function in disaster. Finish in style,” Alice said.

  “Pardon?”

  “The maxims of Marquise.”

  “Oh yes, indeed. Good,” Carter said.

  “The place is pretty vacuous, actually.”

  “Oh well, that’s all right too, for a while, when you’re young. You’ve got the energy to handle it. It’s when you get older that vacuousness can really lay you low.” He realized he sounded somewhat disoriented, but he was still puzzling over the maxims. They sounded good, but weren’t they a bit terminal for an expensive boarding school?

  “What’s she like?” Alice asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your daughter.”

  Carter seemed unprepared for this question. “She’s nice,” he said. “Annabel is very nice. I have a picture of her.” He took a wallet from his pocket.

  Alice looked. “You can’t tell much from a picture,” she said, giving this girl the benefit of the doubt. “Who’s this?” She pointed to another photograph of a woman in a tight white evening dress, laughing.

  “That’s my wife,” Carter said. “That’s Annabel’s mother. She’s dead.”

  “That proves my point exactly,” Alice said excitedly. “Pictures, wow, there’s no inkling in them of what’s going to happen next.”

  “Hmmm,” Carter said.

  Alice feared she’d hurt his feelings. “Well, she was happy then, anyway,” she said.

  Carter put his wallet away. It was true that Ginger had been happy when that picture had been taken; she had been elated. Less than an hour later, still elated, she had demolished four cars in valet parking at a penalty of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (“If he thinks he has the only keys to our Mercedes, Carter, he’s a fool. I would never have given that boy the only keys to the Mercedes.”)

  “Give me Annabel’s number and I’ll call her,” Alice said, for the man seemed to have misplaced the reason he’d approached her in the first place.

  Carter’s face twitched. “Yes. Terrific.” He extracted a pen and paper from his jacket in the elegant way some men have of producing these humble instruments.

  “Do you have another girlfriend you could bring along?”

  “I wouldn’t right away,” Alice said cautiously. Maybe a rapprochement with life could be made possible for Corvus by employing this Annabel person, or maybe not.

  “I’m just wondering if I should find someone else as well. I was determined to do something about this today, get Annabel started.” He gave a happy sigh. “I like it out here. People seem accessible.”

  He was a little nuts, Alice thought. She kind of liked him.

  Outside, the Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets person was crouched sobbing, in handcuffs, while a policeman watched her warily. “A work of reference ain’t worth this, lady,” he said.

  Alice called Annabel and was immediately invited over to her house. It was in the foothills with a big pool and the city below and nothing behind but the hard, folded mountains still trying to conceal what they knew. The first impression Alice had of Annabel was that she was excep
tionally tan. Annabel said her mother used to be able to tan like that, she loved tanning practically more than anything, but when she was forty-two, her skin stopped providing that service. It just wouldn’t tan up for her anymore. She said that a friend of her mother’s had told her that it was age and hormones and nothing could be done about it, and her mother had wept.

  “Some people didn’t know how to be friends,” Alice said.

  On the piano in the living room was a picture of Annabel’s mother in a silver frame. She wasn’t laughing in this picture.

  Annabel made a spinach and fig and jicama salad for lunch, then she and Alice sat by the pool eating the salad and drinking seltzer water and chatting, tranquiling out on the trivial as some people do when they first meet and sometimes forever after. The area around the pool was intensely groomed desert vegetation. There was one of everything, but nothing was too tall except for three saguaros that clearly had just been purchased and were propped up with planks. Annabel confided that she thought saguaros were cute, the cutest things in the desert so far.

  “This is a nice house,” Alice mumbled.

  “I like the airily articulated spaces,” Annabel said.

  Alice looked at her.

  “That’s one of Daddy’s lines.”

  “But that Indian’s a little tacky, isn’t it?” The Indian sat in a bent willow chair, moodily gazing at the pool and the valley plain below. Alice had almost greeted him deferentially when she arrived. He was plastic, life-sized, dressed in a shirt and jeans and moccasins. His limbs were jointed, and his hair was braided. “I mean, when you think of the way we exterminated the Indian, the way we took his land and extinguished his spirit.”

  “Daddy says it’s inferior taxidermy,” Annabel said, nibbling on a fig. “It’s just a dumb house present.”

  Alice followed the Indian’s glum gaze. She told Annabel that deer often came down from the mountains and drowned in people’s swimming pools and asked if that had happened here yet, and Annabel said, of course not, of course it hadn’t happened. Alice said there were lots of robberies in the foothills and had they been broken into yet and Annabel said no, a million alarms would go off, the house was programmed to attack and behead the intruder practically. Alice told her about the Little Caesar Murderer, where the guy would get into the house, murder its inhabitants, then take a shower and send out for a pizza. Annabel seemed preoccupied.