The Quick & the Dead (3 page)

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, smoothed 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.

“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.