The Quick & the Dead (15 page)

Had she been eavesdropping on Donald? Or were Buddhists—WASP Buddhists, in any case—wandering around in the unthere there just as unfulfilled as Ginger?

“You’ve always hated women, Carter. You showed it in so many little ways. You never used the ellipsoidal or elliptical form in your work, not once. It was so obvious, the efforts you made not to employ the oval form. You don’t even like horse racing. Most men, real men, like horse racing, but not you. The shape of the track was too feminine for you, too frightening.”

“Wagering has never appealed to me, darling. I have never wagered. Gambling is a disease.” Horse racing actually did repell him—those thousands of pounds of caroming flesh, bodies all treated with Lasix to keep the blood circulating inside where it belonged. Didn’t want that blood flying around the track on its own.

“A disease! Like drinking, you mean? Like infertility? You’re such a sap.”

“Infertility?” Carter said. “I didn’t know that was a disease.”

“They’re fighting to make infertility a disease so insurance companies will have to pick up the tab.”

Pick up the tab? Ginger’s language was beginning to fall off. Why was she keeping abreast of current trends, anyway? It didn’t seem necessary.

“The things you people fight for,” she sneered.

She was sounding more and more reactionary, Carter thought. Though one couldn’t expect the dead to be big fans of progress. He wasn’t fighting for anything, certainly not disease, if that’s what she was accusing him of. If anything he was fighting to stay awake, even though he’d scarcely finished his second drink. Staying awake was Donald’s most recent recommendation—arrived at, of course, by way of the Buddha. According to Donald, when some fellow inquired as to how in the dickens men were supposed to conduct themselves with women, the Buddha had first replied, “Don’t see them.” Fine, fine, in Carter’s present predicament, that should’ve been more than sufficient; but then the fellow had persisted, good for him, and said, “But if we
do
see them, what are we to do?” and the Buddha had answered, “Stay awake.”

Carter widened his eyes, and Ginger became, if anything, bigger.

“You should know something,” she said. “Annabel is not your child. She’s Charge Peabody’s daughter.”

“Oh stop it, Ginger.” Charge Peabody was a stellar twit, a real tosspot. Ambassador to three countries. He’d drunk himself right into the grave.

“Have him exhumed. DNA testing will prove it.”

“I’m not exhuming him, Ginger.”

“Legally his child. She could make a little money off his estate. Dig him up! I should think you’d want to get this straightened out.”

Carter darkened his drink. A nice brunette drink. She would never call it a night now, he knew. For her the night was just beginning. There was morning knowledge and evening knowledge—there always had been—and he was going to get an earful.

A
lice roamed the mountain trails in the coolness of early morning. The wilderness was less than an hour’s walk away, which wasn’t right, of course, but that’s the way the world was now, available. She trotted along the trails, her eyes picking up bones. Her eyes were good at bones: lizard jaw, webby coyote skull, the winged eye sockets of the jackrabbit, tiny mice feet encased in owl droppings. She never moved them from their resting spots, she never collected. There was a hummingbird impaled on a barrel cactus, flung there by a momentary wind, a dust devil. Above the pierced and iridescent body, a bright yellow flower bloomed. That’s what Alice liked about the desert, its constant, relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once. She wished she could interest Sherwin in it, but he professed a distaste for nature, however peculiar its forms. She was running this morning to burn off some energy, so that when she saw him in his own apartment—he had actually invited her there, he had actually said cumawn over if you wanna—she’d be a little worn out and not say immature things or much at all.

Alice heard a motorbike’s whine and saw dust rising. Bikes were banned because they stressed the bighorns, though some people argued that there were no bighorns left. They had seen them once but not for a while. Alice had never seen one. The bike was tossing itself down the mountain in brief airborne flights. The bike was yellow and the biker wore black and they looked hinged together, the man and the machine. Waggling and snapping, the thing bore down. She stepped off the path into an outcropping of broken rock and picked up the first large stone she could hold in one hand, for she was not going to let him pass without protest.

Sherwin lived above a statuary shop. The neighborhood was a little odd; it looked as though it catered to particular whims, but it was quiet now and empty, all those whims apparently catching their breath.

“So here it is, now you see it,” Sherwin said. “The room of monstrous legend. You want something to eat?”

“Where shall I sit?” Alice said. “Is it all right if I sit on the bed?”

“Sure,” he said. “So how are you?”

“What are all those statues down there?” There was a dachshund one foot high and five feet long. Maybe her granny and poppa would like it. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t. It might seem a bit cemeterian.

“Did you see Neit, the one with the veil? I like her. A friend of mine’s got a deposit on her, though. Anything with a veil, he goes for.”

“Neit?”

“Greatest of the Egyptian goddesses. She has written on her ‘I am everything which has been, is, and will be and no mortal has yet lifted my veil.’ Or words to that effect.”

“I didn’t see her,” Alice admitted. She was embarrassed that she’d been drawn to such a carefree object as the dachshund.

“I gotta have something to eat,” he said, and started frying bacon in a pan. The room soon filled with smoke and smell.

“That food had a face,” Alice said.

He built two ghastly sandwiches and quickly ate them.

“My grandmother pours the grease in an empty coffee can,” Alice said. “I don’t think you’re supposed to pour it down the sink.”

“Yeah?” Sherwin said. “Would you like a piece of pie?”

“When you’re here, are you always eating?” Alice asked. “I usually eat a lot too.”

He put a white pie box beside her on the bed. The pie was half gone; it resembled lemon meringue. He sawed off a piece for himself with a spoon and ate it walking around.

“Nothing even working on a nostalgic plane out there,” he said pointing out at the street. “If you look out a window and can’t even grub a little nostalgia out of the busy view, you’ve hit bottom.”

Alice looked at him happily.

“Your friend Corvus,” he said, “I think I have her figured out. She’s living in order to disappear. Nietzsche said that. Are you going to remember that?”

“No.” Alice didn’t want to think about Corvus now.

He laughed. “I think your friend is capable of something drastic.”

“I’m capable of something drastic too.”

“You want to do something, all right. You want to be a seminal figure. But what do you want to do right now? You wanna go out and get something to eat?”

“Can’t we just stay here?”

“You want a glass of water or something?”

“Would it be a perfect glass of water?” Alice asked slyly.

“Water is so mysterious, I love it. It can’t get wet. It’s exempt because that’s what it
is
. I just love that about water. You can’t think like that for too long, though; it’s like one of those alive thoughts. You think, Agghhh, it’s
alive
.”

Alice imagined being by herself and then a man who looked like him arriving. They would lick each other’s hands, they would bury their faces in each other’s hair.

“If I was a gay boy your age, same eyes, same mouth, same old raunch, you wouldn’t be interested,” he said. “When I was sixteen, I wanted to be known for the lowness of my morals and the highness of my mind. I’ve been meaning to ask, do you have the same dreams as your mother?”

“No!”

“I’ve heard that happens. Girls and their mothers.”

Alice’s mouth began to hurt again, taking her out of his room and her happiness. She ran her tongue over the loose tooth. It seemed very loose. Throwing a rock at the man on the motorbike had not been a gesture without consequences. He had skidded around and back toward her, taken his helmet off so she could get a good look at his stupid face, and walloped her with it. She had moved back so it hadn’t connected the way he intended, but the visor had still clipped her. Sherwin probably thought she’d bruised her mouth herself, for a more interesting look. That’s what she would’ve thought. She used to do that when she was
younger. Take a piece of skin beneath her eyes, say, and give it a good twist so she’d look intriguing. But she hadn’t done that for years.

He sat down beside her on the bed. She was wearing jeans and a baby blue T-shirt that said “Thank you for not breeding.” She stopped tonguing her tooth.

“I love you,” she said cautiously.

“I love you too.”

This disappointed her.

“Words are just noise, Alice,” he assured her. “Language is just making noise.” He nibbled at the side of her face, making tiny grunts of pleasure.

The tooth had freed itself. She held her hand to her mouth as discreetly as possible and maneuvered the tooth into it. She swallowed blood, murmuring. He drew back and saw specks of frothy blood on her T-shirt.

“I lost my tooth.” She opened her hand. The large, white tooth seemed almost voodooesque. She didn’t like looking at it and wondered how dentists made it through the day.

“You’re still losing your teeth?” Sherwin asked. “You’re younger than I thought.” He was, however, nonplussed. He had a greedy body and a wayward mind, but this was slightly more than he could handle this afternoon. He watched her go into his bathroom, cupping the tooth in her hand, her jeans loose over her flat little ass. He heard water running into the sink, then it stopped and he heard her taking an admirable piss.

When she came out, he said, “You piss like a horse, Alice. It sounds great.”

“Oh, thanks,” Alice said distractedly. She had wrapped the tooth in a piece of toilet paper and put it in her pocket. She had folded another piece of paper into the oozing socket. She supposed she should go home. Maybe when she had some money she’d get a gold replacement with an emblem on it, maybe a scorpion, but that’s what nose rings did, she didn’t want to be considered a nose ring. Every time she thought of something, it seemed it had already been a trend for hundreds if not thousands of people for some time. What if there weren’t any new
thoughts? You drifted around until you bumped into something that had been there all the while, then you attached yourself to it because you had to attach yourself to something. A stupid tooth had fallen out and she felt outworn, undone, but maybe that’s how a tooth falling out was supposed to make you feel, maybe that’s just the way a tooth falling out operated.

“You’ve got an awful lot of prescription drugs in there from veterinarians,” she noted.

“I’m a werewolf,” Sherwin said. “Which explains the tuxedos. But mostly it’s that I don’t know any writing doctors. I don’t mean to appear curious, Alice, I don’t want you to think the less of me, but why are your teeth falling out?”

She considered her strategy. She wouldn’t tell him. She would be mysterious, alluring. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Were you in an accident?”

Her actions would be ravishing and unfathomable.

“Did someone hit you?”

She told him everything. It no longer seemed like an experience she’d had.

“Don’t pick a cause, Alice, they’re all so inconvenient. Differences of opinion have been known to occur.”

“The mountain is off-limits to motorized vehicles. It’s a rule.”

“He could’ve had a gun.”

“Oh, he did. He waved it around.” He’d told her that he could rape her as well but he wouldn’t, she was too ugly. “You’re not too ugly!” Annabel would protest when told and then appear perplexed.

“Don’t engage yourself,” Sherwin said. “That’s the key to everything. Don’t traffic in social responsibility.”

“I don’t want to be socially responsible at all,” Alice said. She wanted him to be dark, the things he said to be dark. She didn’t want advice or for him ever to be helpful.

“Look, honey, if you believe in the utter value of the individual, you’ve got to devalue the rest of the world.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, it’s necessary. It just follows.”

“It hurts to talk,” Alice said.

He crushed some ice and wrapped it in a rag. “That underwear is perfectly clean, I assure you,” he said.

“How do I look?” Alice asked. “Do I look okay?”

“One seeks in vain among debased superlatives.” He pressed the ice against her jaw, then shrugged. “It’s too late for this. Do you feel nostalgic yet?”

Through the cold she could smell nicotine on his stained fingertips.

“That guy had a job before you environmentalists took it away. Now he has nothing to do but ride his bike, his only treasure, then go home at night to terrorize his children and beat his wife. Spousal abuse is directly linked to environmental regulation. It can be stamped out only by stamping out nature—not human nature, the other one. That alone will provide jobs and stop the breakdown of the American family.”