The Quick & the Dead (19 page)

“Doesn’t taste much like greyhound to me,” Elmer said. “It doesn’t taste
fast
.”

“For most inhabitants of modern industrialized nations,” Alice said, “the principal contact with other species does take place at the dinner table.”

“I won a hundred and fifty bucks once on a horse named Miss Whirl, which was the closest I’ve been to the animal kingdom,” Elmer said. “Not to disagree with you, kid.”

“This your granpa?” the investigator asked Alice.

“Sure he is,” Elmer said.

“I’d shoot myself before I ended up in a place like this,” the investigator confided. “My girlfriend’s interning at Mercy, and you know what they call folks like this there—the ones always clogging up the ER? They call ’em crocks and fogies. They call ’em snags, rounders, shoppers, and crud.”

Alice didn’t much care for this investigator.

“Is this the closest we’re going to get?” Elmer said. “This ground-up greyhound you have to take by spoon? For months I’ve been begging them for an injection. Smash the testicles of a young dog, I say, pass it through filter paper, inject via the leg, and
bingo
—the diminution of the function of one’s sexual glands will be reversed! One will feel physically improved!”

She didn’t like Elmer either.

The investigator gave a thick chortle, a sort of wet gurgle in which Alice detected the birth of his own cardiovascular problems and irreversible mental decline. She hoped.

She walked down the hall, peeking into the rooms. Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. She paused at Annie’s, for she was not sleeping but sitting upright in her chair, watching the six bird feeders—tray, oval, and tubular—that hung at her window and to which no birds came, principally because they hung within rather than without, Annie not trusting the space beyond, a patio occupied by an immense cooling and heating system that serviced the entire floor. Annie had been the subject of some discussion ever since her daughter had brought her husband’s ashes over and placed them in the bottom of her bureau. Annie had not been told that her husband of fifty-seven years had died, since Green Palms frowned on such information being imparted. What was the point when grief was not germane, when it could not be comprehended or withstood? Here only the moment existed. Annie gave no sign that she inferred that her husband rested near her in the third drawer, the one she’d never used much, even when the handsome bureau had resided in the bedroom of the yellow farmhouse in the orange grove they had tended. Annie and her husband had known those trees, the peculiarities and pedigree of each, their yield, the ones the cardinals favored.

“Let them be together, they want to be together,” the daughter had said, dropping off the ashes. She felt badly about allowing her father to starve himself to death in the sensible efficiency she’d found for him after selling the grove against his wishes.

His ashes were packed in a box made of orangewood. Everyone who passed Annie’s room could smell the insistent fragrance. There had been a little shop on the highway side of the grove where Annie and her husband had sold bags of oranges and orange perfume and orange wine,
orange blossom honey and boxes made of orangewood with a mirror inserted within the lid. This was one of those.

The staff was quietly observing Annie’s reactions, but she hadn’t had any. The orange was definitely making all the effort. Annie was one of the dear ones, the sweetie pies, still neat and continent and mild, but a wolf or a goose would have sensed and then grieved the loss of its mate more than Annie had, a limpet would’ve detected something missing. If specific compounds could create little dead islands in the brain, could annihilate the glowing shade-wracked jungle of caring and desire and delight and flatten it all to a sunbaked crust over which not even the most primitive thought crept or left a track, of what possible use was anything that happened to a person in this life? It made the staff wonder, even at $6.50 an hour. And although what they knew about neurofibrillary tangles and neuron-secreting chemicals could be fit onto the tip of a pencil, it made them pause as they prepared to go home with a rose and a piece of sheet cake, for visitors were forever bringing sheet cakes and roses to this place. But quickly there was no time for wondering, for the meal had to be made, the bills paid, the child’s drawing appreciated, that crayoned drawing of the spiderweb that looked like the sun.

Alice lingered, chewing on her fingers, thinking about Tommy and all the stories she’d read about grieving creatures, the faithful hounds that wouldn’t depart the hospital steps, the dock, the bar, the bier where the object of their ardor had last been seen. Animals were prescient, determined psychics, insistent in their speechless warnings, their final spectral farewells. Weren’t they always showing up at their loved one’s office in the next town scratching and whining, their silky coats mussed, their ghostly eyes beseeching, when in fact they lay in the street miles away, crushed by a speeding car? Weren’t they always howling and carrying on at the very moment the daughter away at college was being introduced to the serial killer, when the son was skidding into the head-on crash, when the master was breathing his last in intensive care? Weren’t they always wagging their tail in some dead beloved’s garden at something that wasn’t there? And here was Annie, who hadn’t experienced the slightest discomfort when her husband died of starvation, the last thing to see his stomach a bit of oatmeal. They hadn’t spent a night apart in fifty-seven years before she’d dropped that teacup, the lustrous leaves of
the orange trees quaking above her, the dropping of a teacup the death visitant, the beginning of the end for many of the female inhabitants of Green Palms. Here now was Annie, blue eyes widely alert, alert to nothing, watching those empty feeding stations. The world was all a mare’s nest to Annie. There was no sign, she gave no sign. There was not the thinnest spirit wire of connection in that room. There was nothing.

Orange labored in a void.

C
arter appreciated the constellations. There was the summer Triangle high in the sky. There were the wings of Aquila and Cygnus. Just before midnight the ringing phone had awakened him, but he’d decided to let the machine get it. Let the machine get it, he thought. But then he had grown curious and loped into the other room and pushed the message button.

“Granpa’s coming home from the nursing home tomorrow,” a woman’s flat voice said. “It’s the business office’s doing. They’re turning him over to us, barks and whistles and all.”

She seemed to be calling from a take-out restaurant. “Triple bacon and jalapeño number fourteen’s getting cold here!” someone bawled.

“Any suggestions?” the voice paused.

“Twenty-one up, twenty-three—”

“I know you’re there, you dirty bugger. You’d better pick up …”

Carter returned to the bedroom. His Hermès fox-and-hen tie lay on the floor. He was sure he’d put it away. Was Ginger showing up when he wasn’t even in the room? Was she distracting him with wrong numbers, the voices of unfamiliars, so she could do something unpleasant? There were impossible phenomena like Ginger, and then there were even more impossible phenomena of a higher and more disturbing order than Ginger. He examined the tie, which appeared unharmed. He hung it carefully on a rack with its more somber companions.

He turned off the lights and resumed gazing at the stars through the enormous windows. It was really quite a nice house, Carter thought. The evening was quiet. Then there was the unmistakable sound of someone mangling his mailbox at the end of the driveway with a baseball bat.
Through the silken air he heard it clearly—a dozen lurid wallops followed by the screech of a car’s tires. Then silence again.

“Daddy?” whispered Annabel at the door. “Daddy, can I come in?” He opened the door to the hall, but Annabel wasn’t there.

“Honey?” he said.

She simply wasn’t there. She was in her own neat and fragrant room sleeping, dreaming she was in a department store buying gloves, long, white, elbow-length gloves with three tiny pearl buttons at the wrist. Her mother was the salesperson and was performing in that capacity with aloof professionalism. Down aisles heaped with goods Annabel drifted—all head, as is the custom in dreams, more consciousness than head, really, with the sense she was
behind
her head, it being a mask of sorts that fit around her like airy rubber. Then it was no longer a store but a beach. She and her parents had prepared a picnic, and her mother was putting up the beach umbrella while her father was laying out the plaid blanket and mixing up the Dark and Stormys in the brightly colored aluminum cups. It was a lovely deserted white sand beach with soft grasses and less than the usual amount of garbage discarded from ships destined for distant, unexotic lands. Her father was proceeding efficiently, having already provided Annabel with her favorite cup filled with cranberry juice and well into sampling his own rum and ginger beer, but her mother seemed to be having some difficulty arranging herself. She kept jamming the umbrella pole into the sand, but the point would not set properly. The tip proved to be covered with shell and yolk, which at first glance didn’t present itself as such but which, as her mother continued to stab and root about and raise and plunge the pole again and again, became more adamantly shell and yolk. Ginger had selected a sea turtle’s nest for their umbrella site and had scrambled its leathery contents to a briny batter.

Annabel woke up, displeased.

What made the dream particularly unpleasant was that this picnic had indeed occurred, more or less, and unfortunately had degenerated in a similar manner. Annabel had never had a dream so redundant.

C
orvus, Corvus. They kept calling her name. He didn’t know the names of the other two. One was very pretty, and the other one, who didn’t even remember him, was just a madwoman. How could she totally not remember him? There was something not right about her.

“ ‘Corvus,’ ” he said. “Doesn’t that mean raven?”

He didn’t think she was going to speak, but then she said, “It’s a constellation too.”

“Oh yeah, where is it?”

“It’s by Virgo to the south.”

Despite himself, he looked up into the heavens. It was still a clear day.

“You found me,” he said modestly, “but why did you tie me up?”

The ram was arranged with its head on a boulder, facing Ray. The rest of it was covered with dirt and brush—or had he sawed off the head, as he’d dreamed of doing to quicken his passage? “Where’s my hat?” He might as well have been addressing the ram for all the response he got.

“You know,” he said, “night’s going to happen, and we’re going to be attacked by something attracted to that. We are.”

“You killed the only thing around here, I think,” Annabel said. “We haven’t seen anything, not even one of those little things that look like chipmunks.”

“You think I killed that? I did not kill that!” These antihunting, antilife freaks, you had to handle them with care. “I found it, I was trying to salvage it. I don’t even have a gun, so how could I have killed it? And even if I had, I would’ve had a perfect right to. People do kill these things, you know, they’ve killed oodles of them.”

“Oodles?” Annabel laughed.

“Hey, yeah.” Ray was a little encouraged.

“Bighorn hunting has been restricted for years,” Alice said. “Last year it was eliminated.” She had arranged two little hummocks of green twigs on either side of the ram’s head.

Ray went back to talking to the pretty one. She was wearing a short shiny red jacket that looked expensive. The other two were dressed like bums. “I have my suspicions concerning the Fish and Wildlife Department,” he said. “I think they’ve been meddling with natural law, you know? I just found this thing. You’re dealing with practically a nonevent here. I just happened upon it, I swear.”

“Wherever you go, there you are,” the pretty one said, and smiled.

“It’s ‘Wherever you go, be there,’ ” Alice said. “Wow, Annabel.”

Ray was sitting on a mat of prickly pear cactus and couldn’t move without getting spiked. He wouldn’t mind seeing Ranger Darling right about now. These girls would get a scolding! The best thing about his situation was that he wasn’t lost. If they would just go away and leave him alone, he’d rally. But there were worse things than being lost. When you were lost, all you had to do was relax and not panic. Being lost was an overrated problem. Ray drifted off. The pretty one, Annabel, was defending her version of the being there business to the crazy one, maintaining that what she’d said was close enough. It was just before dusk. Then there would be dusk. Then night. Day again. The little deaths—
las muertes chiquitas
—then the big one. It was all practice. Ray stared at the animal thing. With the girls on either side of it, the scene was a perversion of the pictures in the hunting mags where beaming guys and the now and then gal in chocolate-chip camouflage posed with the recently acquired dead. The dead looked relaxed and still handsome but as though they didn’t quite get the occasion. Present, but a world apart from the hoopla. The living looked happy, not that their joy made much sense if examined on a deeper level. He wondered if animals had a sense of
las muertes chiquitas
too. What had he been thinking when he’d picked that thing up!

“You’ve been talking and talking over there,” Annabel said.

“I must be nervous,” Ray said. “You-all haven’t really hurt anyone before, have you?”

“No,” Alice said. “You’re our practice object.”

“But you’re not going to hurt me,” Ray said.

“We’re just going to leave you here,” Corvus said.

“Alice wants you to know the thing you’ve hurt by turning into it—in your mind,” Annabel explained. “Then you’ll think in a different way and be a better person.”

“The time to do that was before,” Ray protested. “It’s putrefying now, everything’s falling apart in there now, it’s not going to work.”

“What’s not going to work?” Alice said.

Ray didn’t feel so good. He could feel the little monkey’s heart beating wetly beneath its gray skin. The little monkey had stretched its whole scrawny length flat out against him and was wordlessly expressing its situation. It, too, was not lost. It had undergone unnecessary surgery, had painfully recovered from it, had been killed piece by piece and disposed of part by part, and this had been its orbit of eternal occurrence, suffered over and over again. But now it was falling from orbit, it was tensing to bail. The relationship with Ray was drawing to a close, and the little monkey couldn’t care less. But Ray cared. Which he attempted urgently to express, because if the little monkey went, so went Ray. The depth of his sigh surprised him.