The Quick & the Dead (20 page)

“Is this the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Alice was asking him.

“I didn’t do anything!” Ray wasn’t going to tell her about the time he’d tried to shoot an apple off a dog’s head with a pellet gun. It had been that little creep Rocky’s idea, but Rocky could be very persuasive. “Sit,” Rocky had said to the dog, some stray. Almost any dog would sit if you said sit; it was weird, as if they all were tuned to a martyr’s deliverance. He had missed the apple by a mile and was fortunate not to have hit the dog, the dog at that moment being so relative to the apple.

“I don’t feel good,” he admitted. His legs and wrists hurt from being tied in what wasn’t even a proper knot. He knew proper knots from his Cubby days. And this wasn’t one of them. The little monkey was dragging its long self around Ray’s tightening head again.

“Do you want some aspirin?” Annabel asked.

“Annabel,” Alice said, “let him not feel good if he wants.”

Ray believed that if he’d been traveling with a dog none of this would
have happened. One of those hybrid wolf pups he’d seen advertised. He’d get a major collar for it, made of heavy, rippling, silver threads, the stuff knights hung around their necks to protect them from arrows.

“I always carry aspirin,” Annabel said. “I have a silver pillbox I keep them in.”

“Annabel,” Alice said, “who taught you to be friendly to everybody you meet?”

It’s breeding, maybe, Ray thought grimly, being brought up properly, and where were you brought up, Alice, he’d like to ask, in penitentiary day care? They had no weapons, as far as he knew—God, keep weapons out of the hands of women!—and at best a pretty muzzy agenda. He hoped they weren’t into disinterested malice, but girls weren’t as a rule, were they?

Annabel popped an aspirin into his mouth.

“Could I have about a half a dozen more?” Ray asked. “And some water?” There was something vaguely quasi-religious to this, even sexual—not at this exact moment, of course, but possibly in a future moment. Three chicks and an American male, bondage and threat, great lawless fun just waiting for the unexpected spark. Three flowerpots waiting for his seed. He was at their mercy
and
their service. He could do it! He just had to coast out this headache, keep being congenial. I’m shy but I’m hung like a horse, that was the implication he wanted to project. He wanted to shine as a hostage.

But his head felt frail, almost transparent, with the ghostly little monkey now shrunk into a corner. And the monkey was transparent, too, and he could see within it an even smaller monkey. This was a first, the monkey within the monkey within.

“I don’t think he’s well,” Annabel said. “He doesn’t look well.”

He wouldn’t admit he was subject to collapse. He was a stroker, and strokers never admit. When he recovered from the first one, he said the prettiest things. The words he could pluck out of air positively shimmered! He was a poet, a walking
I Ching
. It was beautiful.

How’s that pancake taste, son? Good?

Burning driftwood indigo!

Want to go for a ride in the car with me, son? I have to get some bread and Modess.

The dilatory are unfortunate even if strong!

But the second episode made him angry and mean. The pretty words left and shitfuckfart arrived, knocking on everyone’s door, the answer to every query. He snarled and flailed in a cave with greasy walls. The world existed to be cursed. Then that passed too, and he cried at everything. When he saw a brimming trash can in the street, when he saw his mother put on lipstick, when someone shook cereal into a bowl. He cried when he slept. Anything would get him started except for another person’s tears. When his mother started to bawl, Ray dried right up. He couldn’t help it, in fact, her tears made him laugh. Clearly, he was placing her under a lot of stress with his random reactions to the varied sampler that was his stroke, or strokes, warmly referred to by his therapists as TIAs, which made the attacks, the
incidents
, sound modest and unassuming, little wavelets washing prettily over his own personal cell system rather than brain-sucking riptides.

Yet throughout all this buffeting change the little monkey stayed with him and Ray appreciated its fidelity. He also appreciated that it wasn’t a beagle or a bunny, plenty of which also ended up in labs, and he’d have to be insane if he had a bunny or a beagle in his head. The monkey was an acknowledgment and example of science’s beneficial uses. The monkey was a little scary, maybe, but it wasn’t
insane
. Ray felt it to be naturally intelligent, rather like himself, and similarly unhappy as well.

When, after a few months, the uncontrollable crying stopped, Ray hit the road. He took the money from his father’s fat, worn wallet, the very sight of which would’ve set him to sobbing only a short time before, and cleaned out the silver from the sideboard for hock. Good heavy stuff, it was a service for twelve that was seldom used, which sort of hurt Ray’s feelings since it might have provided some style to the banal and unsavory antistroke diet they all choked down night after night at the kitchen table. What was that pattern called? Winnower. No, it couldn’t have been called Winnower …

He was drooling a little, as though in sleep. He twisted his shoulder forward and rubbed it against his chin.

“Why do you have to have a silver box for aspirin?” Alice was saying. “Why?”

“It’s from Tiffany’s,” Annabel said, “and I love it. I love the inessentials. I wouldn’t want a life without them.” She looked at Ray and smiled.

He made an effort to smile back but didn’t think he’d done it. Maybe they were lezzies, he thought, trekking, mountaineering lezzies and not little flowerpots at all.

“My arms are feeling numb,” he said. “Honest to God. This is tied too tight or something.”

“It’s scarcely tied at all,” Corvus said.

“Corvus,” he mumbled. He liked saying her name. “Corvus, you’ve got a beautiful name, man, it’s as fine as Pythagoras.”

Geometry. Ray had loved geometry before his stroke. He’d had an aptitude for it. Angles, lines, everything sharp and clean. He’d really gotten it. And Pythagoras was so stellar. When Ray was a kid, even before he knew he loved geometry, he’d read one of those big-print kids’ books about heroes—he could see it clearly, its cover was golden—and there was Pythagoras in a flowing robe, and he’d read that Pythagoras thought that in a previous existence he’d been a bush, which was such a stellar thing to admit to thinking.

“Say something else to me, Corvus,” Ray said. “You’re the sensible one here.”

But it was Alice who spoke: “We have to go soon. You have an opportunity to discuss a hunting ethic before we do.” She was fiddling with a knife and fork. For an instant he was anxious that she would poke it into his thigh and begin to carve, then he saw that instead it was a stick she kept snapping ever smaller. Ray rubbed his mouth with his sleeve again. “I have no hunting ethic.”

“That’s my point,” Alice said. “That’s very clear to me.”

I know you from before, he wanted to say, but he said, “The problem is with transients. Transients,” he said emphatically. “The problem is with transients and the
chandelier
. They don’t know about the chandelier until too late. No, no. Sorry. They know about the chandelier, but they don’t know it’s going to go
out
.” These three chicks were going to murder him, he thought, but he would talk them out of it. He had built the foundation and now was raising the great structure of his thought. “Whereas in the case of the monkey, the monkey can warm itself by a
fire, but it can’t feed a fire, it would never think to feed the fire, but it can take comfort from it. But with the chandelier, everyone knows about the chandelier whether they think about it or not. Everybody—the animals—beneath the chandelier we’re all aware of it together!” Ray felt close to tears. Even the little monkey. Once … it had dazzled.

Alice looked at him. He was as mute as the poor old bighorn. “Why don’t you say something?” she demanded.

Meanwhile, Ray was giving it everything he had. Human beings have language, they are not defenseless. The little monkey slumped in the corner of his head, only its big black eyes seeming alive. It wasn’t impressed by the story of the chandelier. The little monkey was going to renounce all attachment to him, all concern and function, trust and faith. Monkey as Lord, it was just letting him go.

The air was cooling, and the sky unravelling, turning a bizarre peach color.

“Corvus,” Ray said. But he couldn’t really see her, his view blocked by the sheep, which was staring at him maliciously. And the smell was terrible, although it didn’t seem to be coming from as far away as the sheep. It was closer to home, actually, something burning through his own heart’s ventricles, boiling in the fluid-filled cavities of his brain.

“Feed the flock of slaughter,” he said. How long had the three of them been gone? They
were
gone, he suddenly realized, but they’d made havoc of him. His mind was a sloshing, brimming bowl, and the little monkey was dabbling about in it with long cold fingers, trying to rehabilitate and refresh itself maybe, trying to acquire the strength to go on. That was good, Ray thought distantly. It wasn’t letting him go. His whole head felt like a split coconut, and the little monkey was dabbling around in the spilt thin milk of it. Once Ray had seen a man open a coconut with a machete and had not empathized with it at the time, but now he could—the unliving meat with no plan for itself. His mother protested that the coconut had been opened in a dangerous fashion. The man was large, with a deep dirty tan and a shark tooth wrapped in string around his neck, and he wore a green hat of woven fronds. This was in Florida, a tourist thing, a man opening coconuts outside an open-air aquarium with a sign before each murky pen:

He remembered running, prereprimanded among the dark pools.

The monkey continued to push its little hands around Ray’s mind. Ray felt less pain than discomfort, he felt sleepy and softly mauled. Then he became aware that he was swinging his hands from side to side behind him and could touch the end of the rope with his fingers. And then he was free. His hands flopped loose. He dragged them in front of him, rubbed his arms. He was trembling. He wanted to stand up but sensed a considerable gulf between thinking about moving and moving. He rubbed his hands on his knees. I wanted to do that, he thought. He looked at them, he watched his hands cupping his knees. But this isn’t the way getting up is done, it’s done some other way. He pushed his hands down his legs to his boots. The animal grinned at him beneath its curved and broken horns. But I appear unhurt, Ray thought after a time. “Sawdust,” he said, which was horrible for him to hear, for “sawdust” wasn’t the correct word—very seldom the correct word in practically any circumstance.

Ray had always considered himself one balls-to-the-wall puppy. He had thrown himself into the life he’d been given with ardor,
ardor
, yes, and now he wasn’t even walking upright but just crawling on the ground, creeping over it with no more sense than a snake. His left arm was useless, and his left leg, although possessing more feeling, seemed ambivalent about committing itself to Ray’s purpose. Ray felt no more than a simulacrum of himself humping and rolling and scrabbling down the trail. He knew it was the trail, close to where he’d begun, because it stank and he could see the prints of many soles in the dust. He knew he was alone because he couldn’t feel the little monkey anymore. The little monkey had bailed. He hadn’t entrusted Ray with the packing of the parachute. The little animal—which when new is always holy and unceasing but which in Ray’s case, it’s true, was maimed and neglected and could not be comforted—had finally flown. Ray crept, panting, along the pointed ground. He knew his life had changed.

C
orvus drove; Alice, as the thinnest, was in the middle. “That was so unsatisfactory,” Alice said. She had yearned blindly for the ontological parry and thrust and was disheartened that this, this
victim
, she thought dismissively, had been incapable of it. What was wrong with his mouth, anyway? He looked like a crybaby.

Annabel had been afraid for a moment that she’d lost her silver pillbox after giving that boy the aspirin, but here it was again, thank heaven. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, she was thinking, and didn’t know why. They never said, Always a best man, never a groom. This one she could never visualize as a groom, as anybody’s groom. What had Alice wanted with him? She just hadn’t thought the moment through, which was so typical of Alice. Some sort of frontier savagery thing, that was the closest Annabel could come to describing her behavior sometimes, but she wasn’t really savage or even malicious; it was just that if you weren’t rebutting her preposterous sentiments every minute, you’d find yourself—well, not mesmerized, Alice was no mesmerizer, but dismantled or something. Annabel frequently found herself speechless before such blind momentum. Back home, Annabel had played little parts in theater productions, not school ones but civic ones, and she’d been valued, she’d been told she had talent. She had even been in a commercial once—all she’d had to do was look at a package of chewing gum with delight—but out here she felt like a kind of supernumerary.

“I don’t think we should go out so much,” Annabel said. “You’re never going to get me to go camping again.”

“We never
went
camping,” Alice said.

“That was no hunter, either,” Annabel said. “Please don’t delude yourself.”

“He was sort of pupal, wasn’t he?” Alice realized that he hadn’t killed the animal, but this didn’t concern her overmuch. Evil must be repaid, and not necessarily to the one who’d done the deed. You had to grab whoever was available and annoying and see what came of it, although in this case it hadn’t been much. He had been irritatingly familiar, as though they’d conducted uncompleted business sometime in the past.

“Pupal?” Annabel said. “He was far from cute, but he wasn’t that disgusting.”