The Quick & the Dead (11 page)

Corvus was quiet as always quiet, though taking everything in, Annabel suspected. She would hate to be the kind of person who had to take everything in all the time. Corvus made her feel like a merry little insect or something, though she wasn’t at all snobbish or supercilious. She had perfect skin, almost translucent, and sometimes Annabel would just gape at it. There were dog hairs on that white sundress, though, she noticed pityingly.

Alice was sitting on a couch watching a man in a tuxedo play the piano. A woman in a silk jumpsuit sat beside him on the bench, and Alice looked at them sulkily. The woman began to sing. She didn’t have a bad voice, she was confident and playful. Alice bit her nails, dragging them out of her mouth on occasion for inspection. The woman was singing witty lyrics in a light, assured voice, and the man in the tuxedo grinned at her, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, his hands flying over the keys.

“Alice, what are you thinking about?” she heard Annabel ask. “You’re all scrunched up! Do you want some hummus?” She extended some on a cracker.

“I can’t eat,” Alice said.

Annabel looked at her respectfully.

“I … he … they just won’t let him out early. We keep hoping they’ll let him out early.” The reason she didn’t date, Alice had explained, was that she already had a boyfriend, who unfortunately was away in prison.

“It’s too bad you have to think about parole all the time,” Annabel said.

Alice wished she’d never invented this absentee boyfriend.

“But I don’t think prison’s anything to be ashamed about,” Annabel said. “It’s something lots of people have to just get behind them.”

What was he in jail for anyway? Alice wondered. Nothing good.

“I’m sure he doesn’t even belong in prison,” Annabel said. “I knew a boy back home, he was piloting his dad’s motorboat at night and he hit a buoy and killed two of his friends and they sent him to prison. He was there a whole year, and he didn’t belong there at all.”

Alice looked at her.

“Well, he was a nice boy, I mean. Basically. And they’d all been drinking—even the dead ones. What’s yours look like, you’ve never told me. I don’t picture him as being particularly cute … more compelling-looking.”

“It’s difficult to describe someone you love,” Alice said.

“So he’s really going to be in there forever, or what? That’s a big responsibility for you. They want them to feel remorse, is the thing. He should profess remorse.”

“Annabel,” Alice said, “I don’t want to discuss it.”

“I
understand
,” Annabel said.

Now the singer was embracing the man in the tuxedo, giving him a big kiss on the side of the head. Then she slid gracefully off the piano bench and joined the party. The man sat with his back to the girls, not doing anything for a moment. Then he lit another cigarette.

Alice heard a woman say, “Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it.”

“What kind of poems do you write?” someone asked.

This soiree was sort of out of it, Alice thought.

The man in the tuxedo turned toward her. “What would you like to hear, darling?” he asked.

I’d like to hear you moaning in ecstasy in bed, Alice thought, startling herself. Men did that, didn’t they? She gave him a smile and felt her lip snag on her tooth the way Fury’s did sometimes after he yawned and her poppa would have to reach down and unhook it.

“Without the guidance of request, I always play ‘I Get a Kick Out of You.’ ” After he finished, he came over and sat between them.

“The woman who was singing with you,” Alice croaked. “Is she your lover?”

Annabel giggled. She had never seen Alice behave like this.

“There are certain women,” the man in the tuxedo said, “who love men like myself. They’re fascinated with us, we’re a challenge to them. Do you suppose he’d fuck me? they wonder. Do you think he could do it?”

“Really?” Alice said.

“That is the case,” the man said.

“Some people are so shallow,” Alice said.

“Some people are
tremendously
shallow,” Annabel said. “I knew a boy back home who, if someone he didn’t like told him something he thought was dumb, he’d laugh in a noblesse oblige fashion and then he’d look at someone he liked and shrug and say ‘Noblesse oblige.’ ”

“Have you ever had a man, darling?” the man asked Annabel.

“A few experiments,” she said. “They were actually just boys. Sort of. Back home.” The piano player was sort of disgusting. Leave it to Alice to be enchanted.

“Do you always wear a tuxedo?” Alice asked.

“Always,” he said. “Never without it. In church you can’t see it for the robe.”

“Church?” Alice exclaimed, troubled.

“God is the net. We are the creatures within the net.”

“Oh, that’s kind of pretty, I think,” Annabel said. But then she didn’t think it sounded pretty at all.

“You need to see the net for it to work,” he said. “It’s not enough to be in it. We have to be conscious of it over and over again.”

“We make our own net,” Alice said. She couldn’t believe he was a churchgoer. She’d have to work her way around that.

“But we don’t make it out of that marvelous light stuff,” he said. “We make those ugly, hard, crude, clangoring links.”

“You really go to church?” Alice asked.

“I play the hymns. They pay me for it, though I would do it for nothing. I find church very sexy. I love Protestants.”

“Then you don’t believe it?”

“Believe what, darling?”

“It just arouses you?”

Annabel gave an alarmed, piercing laugh.

“ ‘I fled him down the nights and down the days/I fled him down the arches of the years/I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind/and in the midst of tears I hid from him,’ dah dah dah dah. ‘From those strong feet that followed, followed after …,’ ” the man in the tuxedo chanted, his eyes half shut. “The minister loves the old mystics. I think he’s going to have a nervous breakdown any Sunday now. Expectation runs high.” He seemed to notice Corvus for the first time, and he smiled at her and bowed a little.

“Well,” Alice said, “God’s not my owner.”

“You must like cats,” he said.

“Cats?” Alice said.

“The chosen allies of womankind.”

“Would anyone like a beverage?” Annabel said.

“Cats are accustomed to making their own decisions and implementing them out of their owner’s sight.”

“I don’t care for cats at all,” Alice said.

“Coffee perhaps?” Annabel persisted.

“No coffee for me, darling,” the piano player said. “I drink coffee at night, and I have bad dreams—headless, one-eyed men with their mouths in their armpits wanting you-know-what from me and such.”

Annabel never told her dreams since the time she had asked her mother if she wanted to hear about one that in Annabel’s opinion was particularly artful and mysterious. “I dreamed …,” Annabel had begun. “I dreamed I was in Hell,” her mother interrupted, pretending those were the words Annabel was about to speak. It was nine in the morning and her mother was having a screwdriver and a cookie.

“Would you like some ice water?” Alice asked.

“Ice water would be fabulous,” he said, “but hold the ice.”

She went off happily for the water. Obtaining the simple element in a glass required intensive negotiations with the bartender.

“Plastic relies on an unrenewable resource,” Alice complained. “It’s not truly recyclable, and the petroleum involved requires extensive use of toxics in manufacture. Plus it’s the largest trash contaminant of the oceans. As a caterer, you should be aware of this and set a better example.”

“Who invited you, might I ask?” the bartender said.

She eventually returned with something acceptable.

“This is a perfect glass of water,” the man in the tuxedo said.

They watched him drink it, the muscles in his neck moving.

“What were we talking about?” Annabel said. “Oh, church …”

He put down the empty glass. “I take most of my meals on a church plate,” he said. “That is, a plate with the representation of my church’s building upon it. It’s my only plate.” He looked at them piously. “I have very little.”

“I’d love to see it,” Alice said.

“Words don’t express our thoughts very well, do they, darling?” he said.

“I’ve always thought that was true!” Alice agreed. “Who came up with the idea they could? Some sort of control freak.”

“She meant the plate, I think,” Annabel said.

The man in the tuxedo giggled richly.

“Thank you, Annabel,” Alice said.

Fretfully, Annabel got up and wandered off to see what her father was doing. He was speaking to a young man whose very long blond hair and pale cream-colored clothes made him look rather like a palomino.

“Our marriage was a mutual solitude, as the French say,” Carter was saying.

“Oh, Daddy,” Annabel sighed. She went outside feeling as ethereal and misplaced as her mother. One of her mind exercises was to choose a star, pretend it was Ginger, and confide in it. She looked up and began, “I’m unhappy, Mommy. There’s nothing to do out here except cocktail parties and nature.” Even as she spoke, she heard a scuffling in the desert just beyond the pool’s walls, followed by an inhuman cry and a preoccupied silence.

“You wouldn’t like it out here either, Mommy,” Annabel continued. “You wouldn’t tolerate it for more than five minutes.” She didn’t know what to tell her mother. Nothing sounded right to her. She certainly wasn’t going near the Big Sister debacle. To fill up some time, Annabel had offered to become a Big Sister. Her Little Sister came over to the house, and all she wanted to talk about was Girls’ Ranch. The worst thing about staying there was that they gave you hair conditioner only once a week. Plus the shampoo wasn’t the hydrating kind with natural humectants, and every girl in there had bleached hair and needed follicle nourishment. Annabel commiserated with her about this at length. Little Sister was an exceedingly shy and clumsy child, spilling a full glass of tomato juice all over the piano. This so humiliated her that she called her taxi-driver boyfriend, who arrived and drove her away before Annabel had been a Big Sister for even forty-five minutes. Later it was discovered that she’d keyed Carter’s Corvette, stuffed bananas down all the toilets, and stolen a bottle of Patrón. “She certainly knew her tequilas,” Alice had said.

Annabel started over with another star. “Mommy, if you were me …”

A massive object hurtled over the wall and into the swimming pool. It was the size of a motorcycle, thrashing darkly. She screamed, and it churned through the water, extinguishing the little floating candles,
cracking hard against the ladder, entangling itself in the temperature duck. It sank, then struggled heavily upward. Two black nostrils stared like empty eyes.

Carter strode out with several young men, all with drinks in hand.

“Mr. Vineyard,” Donald said, “it’s a deer.” He jogged to the garage, where all the tools hung within their chalked-up outlines, rakes and hammers, hoses and shears. When one was taken away to be used, it looked, as far as the garage was concerned, as though it had died.

Everyone had straggled out by now. “I can’t watch this,” the poet said, then added, “If it breaks its leg, what you have to do is call the fire department.”

Donald ran back with a garden hose. “We’ll make a sling, perhaps we can haul it out that way.” Carter quite unexpectedly jumped into the pool. “Oh no, Mr. Vineyard,” Donald cried, “you could be struck!” Shouting, Carter’s young friends followed him in, hesitating only to kick off their shoes and remove their jackets. “Rodeo!” one yelled. The deer was sinking once again, flattening out somewhat like a carpet. The young men in their billowing shirts seemed disturbingly sexual to Annabel as they grasped parts of the animal and pushed it toward the steps, laughing and grunting, leaving behind them a wake of plastic cups and lime wedges. The deer struggled out, slid sideways, and fell back with a scrabbling crackle of hooves against the tile. Annabel was sure she saw blood in the water. Her inviting limpid pool had been transmogrified into something rank and exclusive. The animal, tipped upright on the steps once again, heaved itself from the water and in one wobbly leap vanished over the wall into the desert whence it had come. Carter’s jacket was sliced straight through; his hands were torn. The young men, too, had suffered varying degrees of damage to their clothing, which seemed to delight them. They all climbed out in high spirits, hugging and punching one another.

Donald brought an armful of large white towels from the poolhouse. “You’re a nice man, Mr. Vineyard,” he told Carter earnestly. “A new soul in my opinion.” He dabbed at Carter’s head with a towel.

Alice was standing beside the piano player, with whom she had become quite smitten.

“What a macabre environmental event,” he said.

“Now you know what I was talking about,” Alice said to Annabel.

“What do you mean, ‘Now I know’? I don’t know anything! This doesn’t happen every time a deer falls into a swimming pool, does it?”

Annabel wanted someone to turn off the pool light. Where was the stupid switch! The water looked murky and was still rocking against the sides of the pool. And the deer or someone had chipped her favorite decorative tile, a little mermaid with starfish on her breasts. Half of her gentle little face was gone, and who could fix that! No one could.

Alice followed the piano player back into the house and watched him as he smoked. “You’re too much for me, kid,” he finally said. “You’ve got the look of the pilgrim all over you.”

“That’s my friend,” she said. “Look, my boyfriend’s on death row, so I can’t do anything with you, really. We can’t have an actual love affair because of him, okay, so I just want to hang out.”

“I love it,” he said.

“I just want to run with you.”

“I don’t run, dear. Goodness.”

“I don’t mean jogging. Not that.”

They looked at each other in amazement.

He ground out his cigarette and lit another. “What did he do?”

“What?”