The Quick & the Dead (41 page)

“ ‘There shall be no sea, they say/On Nature’s great coronation day/when the Bridegroom comes to the Bride’ dum dum dum dum.” But what that meant, of course, was nullity, not the old in-and-out. Maybe he should make a few preparations and come back here to deal himself his blow. Clean his apartment, tell his few remaining acquaintances their failings, get a colonic irrigation.… He picked up the nearest reading material,
The Worst Journey in the World
, by one Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It had Carter’s bookplate in it. Carter might be a bit of a goose, Sherwin thought.

The Worst Journey in the World
was polar in nature, as the worst-journey genre tended to be, and concerned the doomed Antarctic
explorer Scott, a figure for whom Sherwin had little empathy. Scott had made it clear in his diaries that although he and his little group (a fateful asymmetrical seven rather than the originally planned-for six) had the means to take their own lives in an emergency, they decided when the last fatal blizzard descended to die naturally. Sort of the let-the-body-deal-with-it-rather-than-the-mind attitude. But their decision to consciously freeze to death was sort of an ultrasuicide. They got foxed.

Sherwin put the book down. He was surprised there wasn’t some porn or some other sign of innocent human diversion. The room eluded him, its destiny seeming a little vague. He couldn’t even hear the party from here.

He switched on the VCR on top of the television set, and Africa bloomed. The veldt. People with remarkable cheekbones. A Land Rover tearing along.

“This is the part that’s always supposed to bring a tear to your eye,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s when they’ve left the lioness for a week and it’s the rainy season and she isn’t able to get anything to eat and she’s half starved. But that’s not the real Elsa there. That’s her stand-in.”

“Jesus! You startled me,” Sherwin said. “My heart went skippety.”

“I loathe that movie,” the woman said. “It’s been in there for a month.” She smiled at him thinly, a hefty broad with sunken eyes wearing some sort of partygoing apparatus with gauzy overlays, the kind hefty broads ofttimes wore. She looked familiar, as though he’d seen her in a photograph somewhere, but a specific photograph, framed.

“So you slipped away from the party, too,” Sherwin said.

“Some time ago,” Ginger said. “Tell me, how did you find your way in here?”

“Yeah, I shouldn’t be here,” Sherwin said. “It’s just one of those nights when I don’t feel at home in my own skin. Whose room is this, anyway?”

“That boob Carter’s.”

“Yeah?” Sherwin said. “He likes Elsa the lioness?”

“If he were hip,” Ginger said, “he’d have a sci fi, horror, and B-and-C flicks library, but Carter is as unhip as it gets.”

She was hefty but rather remarkably bony, too. It sort of came and went.

“The mirrors are a kick.”

“It’s just one of his latest notions. He thinks they’ll bother me, but they don’t.” She bent toward him. “Hi,” she said.

He could see her breastbone, a bony wing. He had a quick recall of his sister, whom he hadn’t thought about in years. After she was diagnosed, his mother insisted she’d caught cancer from eating dirt when she was little, making little cakes and pies out of dirt and pebbles and berries in her playhouse. She’d caught it and held it for ten years and then died when she was seventeen. His mother had kept bees. There was a saying: bees don’t thrive unless they’re told the news. She’d talked to her bees, he remembered, even more after his sister died. She was good with bees, his mother, which was another way of saying she wasn’t all there.

“Whoa,” Sherwin said. “I just thought about some people I hadn’t thought about for a long time.”

This did not engage her interest. “You know, I’m so curious about what people think—and then it’s all so boring. Most of what people think aren’t thoughts, anyway, they’re memories. People treasure a good memory, but the thing you’ve got to realize is if you think about your dead daddy, it doesn’t make him any less dead in his other life.”

Sherwin listened intently.

“You may say, ‘Well I don’t have a dead daddy,’ but many people do, and they think about that dead daddy and delude themselves into thinking they’re keeping him alive somehow by the persistence of their memories. It’s so ridiculous. That’s just one example, I have others. People think memory grants an extension. Memory does not grant extensions.”

Sherwin liked the way she talked. There was something wrong with her, he thought; maybe she’d had a stroke. What did they say the first overt sign of a stroke was? An odd look? She had that, all right. One taco short of a combination plate. “An extension?” He laughed. “An extension of what?”

“You’ve got bad teeth, you know that?” Ginger said. “You should be more discreet about laughing.”

“I’ve got bad teeth?” Sherwin said. “Really?”

“I’m very conscious of teeth,” she said. “You’ve got scoliosis too, it looks like.”

“I hate talking health,” Sherwin said. “You wanna talk about God?”

“Let me tell you something … how can I put this?”

“That’s always the challenge.”

“God sends you after something that isn’t there.”

Sherwin thought about this.

“I wouldn’t smirk if I were you,” she snapped.

“No, no, I like that. We’re all bums on a scavenger hunt.”

“I hate people who take something someone says, then say it in a different, far less interesting way and pretend it’s better. I would never have said that. We are not all bums on a scavenger hunt.”

“Cigarette?”

“Not yet,” Ginger said.

There really was an odd smell in this room. It sort of soaked into you.

“You think I farted, don’t you?” she said. “Well, I didn’t.”

“I don’t for a moment think you farted,” Sherwin said graciously.

“Carter believes I’m shooting breezers, and that’s not it at all.”

She was
big
. It was an odd sensation. He was, in this sensation, infinitesimally small.

“Why don’t you go find Carter for me and bring him in here?” Ginger suggested. “Tell him that it’s imperative that he come in here with you for a moment.”

“What reason would I give?” Sherwin asked.

“Oh, just say it’s an emergency. Say someone’s hurt or something.”

“Is someone hurt?” He grinned again, covering his mouth with his hand. He liked her, he didn’t want to annoy her. Here was someone who could understand him completely.

“In a manner of speaking,” Ginger said.

“Something could happen in here. I’m agreeing with you.”

“Carter thinks I’m crude. Of course, he never found me welcoming or desirable before, either.”

“He’s a civilian. He’s blind to greatness. You’re a freak, baby. You’re great.”

“And you’re the famous piano player, aren’t you? The one with the little limp-dick death wish.”

This summation of his situation in no way surprised him.

“You’re the plenipotentiary, baby,” Sherwin said. “You’re my girl.”

“Embrace me,” Ginger said, “and I will be beautiful.”

“Be beautiful and I will embrace you. That’s a poem, isn’t it? ‘We argued for hours’? And ‘it turns out to be life’? Is that the one? My mind’s getting shaky.”

She laughed. “No, no, that’s not the one I’m thinking of. Give me a cigarette.” She was laughing at him. Her teeth were great. Good strong teeth.

He shook a cigarette out of his pack, lit it, and held out his hand to present it to her, but she didn’t move, so he took a step forward, then stumbled over something, losing his balance and pitching against one of the leaning mirrors. He turned, twisting, trying to recover, and fell hard against another one, falling harder than he could imagine possible, into the silvering, and felt it break into him, sliding its cool tongues into his hands and throat and heart. He lay on the floor among the glittering, his blood welling and then skimming down the slim nails of glass. He had almost heard the sound of the glass slipping into him, a sound like his father’s shovels slicing into the ground. His father had called himself a tree surgeon, though in fact he had specialized in just cutting them down, taking them down to the stump. He had saws longer than his arms and called them his Bad Boys. Now look at this Bad Boy, he’d say. He kept his tools beautiful, his shovels so sharp a man could shave with them. No dead daddy, he was still alive, wearing out his fourth wife somewhere in the Texas hill country. Such a nice clean sound he’d first heard; but that was past now, replaced by a sloppier, more distracting one, a squeaking and gurgling. Death by mirrors.
Cave, Cave, Dominus videt …
and Sherwin was showing himself to be a mess.

A
lice was walking. No place had yet received her, the world proving to be no solace. She had started out just past dawn while her granny and poppa were still murmuring in bed, having already brewed the coffee and fed Fury his applesauce from his favorite bowl, which had the image of a half-naked body builder on the bottom. The house was full of such odd bits of china, but this was clearly Fury’s favorite, always shown to him empty, prior to being filled, so he could know he wasn’t being deceived.

The heat was pure and light, hollow as a bone. She had been setting out each morning for a day of wandering but returned home to her granny and poppa each night. “No bird so wild but has its quiet nest,” as Sherwin would have said, quoting another. Sherwin had been a big quoter. Alice had seen his pockmarked face and bottle-black hair materialize on certain boulders recently when the light was right or, more likely, wrong. It wasn’t as though he’d died instantly, there had been some lag time. The county coroner, who had arrived with the ambulance, was not of the school that fed the foolish hope that a person could die instantly. Neither conciliatory nor compassionate, he had been educated by Jesuits and as such might as well have been raised by wolves. If you’d invited the coroner to imagine that such lag time served a purpose, perhaps by allowing the soon-to-be-deceased an opportunity to plead for nonforgetfulness and the remembrance of past lives in wherever was coming next, he would’ve laughed in your face. He was a regular on a local talk-show channel, and Alice’s granny had described his laugh as
infectious
.

That elephant had died too, the same evening, the one who painted watercolors. Her keepers had shipped her to Phoenix and bred her
there, and her unborn had slipped out of her womb into her abdomen, rupturing the uterine wall. They hadn’t let her paint during pregnancy because they wanted her to focus on raising a calf, they’d denied her paints, brushes, the artist’s life. Ruby was the name her managers had given her. And Ruby had spent her last hours all opened up on a pile of mattresses and inner tubes. She hadn’t liked Phoenix anyway. Who would? Still, she’d had many mourners there. Cheap bouquets piled high against the zoo’s gates. Plush toy elephants. Even a couple of old pianos, “Forgive us” painted on the keys. Candy, conversely, had not been pregnant at all, except hysterically. A combination of hypnotism and pharmaceutical mixing had untethered the imaginary child from her bitter and uncharismatic grasp.

Alice loped through washes and down the cracked beds of scalped rivers; she trotted through barren swales, past yellow earthmoving machines big as stables. Somewhere there was a hidden world, she hoped, closed to observation and obliteration. Closed to memory. Safe.

Annabel had written to her on one of those virtually weightless folds of blue paper where the letter was not enclosed but was the envelope itself. Annabel wrote that she’d had a facial in Paris, and the girl had discovered an imbedded, almost colorless blackhead on her cheek and she couldn’t get it out and couldn’t get it out and Annabel was half frantic with worry and the girl was just about to give up when she got it. Then she’d shouted, “Go, team!” and both of them wept with relief. “Go, team!” the French girl had said. Annabel had found herself quite adept at learning French, but what was the point if the French were learning dumb American phrases as fervently as they could? Annabel had just finished
The Stranger
in the original.

“Do you know how it begins, Alice?” she wrote.
“ ‘Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’
I think there’s a lot more to those first two sentences than most people think. At first I thought I couldn’t go on, but then I whizzed right through it, the whole book. Daddy’s very happy here, and so is Donald, who adores him, hangs on his every word, if you can believe it. He’s forgotten all about Siddhartha. Daddy’s going to buy Donald a vineyard, just a small one. Happiness is the most important thing there is. I’ve had two liaisons already and one
affaire de cœur.…
”

She had asked about Alice’s new tooth but had not inquired after Corvus. There was more, written in the margins, but Alice didn’t read it. She preferred not finishing something to having it end on its own terms.

She perched on a shelf of shale near a pack rat’s impressive mound of cholla joints and stared down at Mr. V.’s vacated house. Mr. V. had practically teleported Annabel and Donald out of there after Sherwin’s accident. “Sliced to ribbons” was the accepted phrase. By slicing himself to ribbons, Sherwin seemed to have provided a conduit of escape for the others, as though he’d been sacrificed or something. Still, it had worked out well enough. He wasn’t living anyway, not really, and he had been tiresomely, peevishly aware of this for some time. But now that he was gone, he seemed more a strange thought she’d had than anything. He’d be the first to be amused by this, the first and maybe only. She could hear him say,
Why, Alice, you are empathetic
.

The house was empty, the pool drained. Everything had been auctioned off to benefit Mr. V.’s bill at the Hilton. He’d given the Corvette to the bartender, the piano to the suite’s maid. Peeled of familiarity, the house looked a blind and formless thing. A realtor’s sign glinted in the sun. Swaying on two little hooks beneath it was a cylinder that was supposed to provide information sheets, but there was nothing in it. Alice had looked. Now, from a distance, she gazed down at the house. Even the Indian was gone, and the chair he’d been placed in. At that very moment, some states and days removed from and unrealized by Alice, actual Indians were playing buffalo. They were making an attempt to dance the buffalo back into being—sticks shoved through their shoulder blades, bleeding, atoning, serving, pretending to be. A dance that hadn’t been danced in a hundred years was now being rebroadcast. “Alicekins would enjoy this, wouldn’t she?” her poppa was saying.