The Quick & the Dead (13 page)

“I’ve never forgiven her. She said that my Joseph figure, the figure I’d placed in the Joseph position, was clearly a shepherd and belonged back with the sheep. And she moved it!”

“Well, she’s off to the Four Corners now,” Carter said vaguely.

“Appointment with mousie,” Ginger said.

After a few moments, Carter unobtrusively switched on the television. They were culling elephants somewhere in Africa. The terrified herd shrank back from two small men with machine guns. “Ginger!” he cried, “what have you done to the channel?” He groped for the changer but couldn’t find it. On the screen, a wet human palm displayed a slippery elephant fetus; a finger jiggled the tiny trunk, arranged the tiny legs. Carter at last located the changer, and now black ghetto youths with remarkable hair were ambling around an open coffin, fluttering their hands above the corpse’s placid face in some bizarre ritual of respect.

“See how nasty it all is,” Ginger said. “Nasty, nasty. Come with me, Carter. Come to where I am.” She raised her arms.

She meant the gesture to be inviting, he was certain. “But what about Annabel?” he said. “She’s still just a child, and there’s no one to take care of her.”

“Annabel? She’ll get along. Children stay children for far too long. Annabel will be fine. You’re not raising her properly anyway, what with those soirees you’re always hostessing. It’s humiliating the way you’re all a-bubble around those young men. And that
one
man …”

“Which one is that?”

Ginger made a ghastly face. “The hireling.”

“The piano player?” Carter said. “He’s a wonderful piano player.”

“You don’t understand, do you? Never have, never will. You can be so obtuse. But I used to love you so much! I loved you so much I even tried to walk around the house the way you did. It made me feel less lonely.”

He should kiss her, he thought, but the distance between them was so great and he was so tired. Too, he’d be insane to kiss her.

A
t school, a little more than a week after her parents’ funeral, there was another call for Corvus.

“This is your neighbor, John,” the voice said. “Your dog is barking.”

“I’ll be home by two,” Corvus said.

“It’s howling. I can hear it through my closed windows. What’s going on?” He sounded reasonable.

“He’s in the house,” Corvus said. “He’s not outside.”

“I’m a mile away. It starts up the minute you leave in the morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What’s it need, water or something? Food? What’s its favorite food? Or maybe it needs its mouth wired shut.”

“What?” she whispered.

“Anything I can do,” neighbor John said.

“I’m at school now,” Corvus said. “I’ll be home by two. That’s only an hour from now.”

“What is it you’re saying, babe?”

“The dog, Tommy, he misses my mother.” She was shocked she’d said this. She was ashamed. The words were hopeless, nobody wanted them.

“Then somebody should tell your mother to get her goddamn ass back home and do whatever she does to keep that dog from howling.” He hung up.

Corvus turned to the secretary seated behind her office desk. The woman’s child was standing in a playpen regarding Corvus with disfavor. She was too old for a playpen, but it had been arranged that the secretary could bring her in once a week.

“Your mommy and daddy are dead,” the child said. “I don’t like you, you smell funny.”

“Melissa!” the secretary said. “Now, what did I tell you! That is very, very naughty, Melissa. Corvus, dear, is everything all right?”

“I have to go home.” She hurried outside. The windows in the truck were down, and though she’d wedged a cardboard liner behind the windshield, the temperature inside was still over a hundred degrees. The steering wheel and seats were scalding.

“Death is normal, Melissa,” the secretary was saying back in her office. “Death happens sometimes.”

“I don’t know what it
is
.” The child stamped her feet.

It took twenty minutes. It always took twenty minutes. She drove through the outskirts of the city and into the bladed desert and beyond, through empty ranchland. Hawks lay in sandy furrows, their beaks open, in the shadeless noon. She passed John Crimmins’s. Her own house was at a distance it might take four minutes to run to. She bounced over the cattle guard Tommy was afraid of and up to the house. Above two metal chairs on the porch, a wind chime tinkled from a beam.

Tommy was standing just inside the door. He wagged his tail once and peered past her, then turned and went to a coat lying in the corner. He curled up on it, his chin resting on the worn corduroy collar of her mother’s coat.

“Tommy,” Corvus said. He wagged his tail once more but didn’t look at her. The house was cool and quiet, the curtains were drawn. She took some ice cubes from the freezer and, holding one in each hand, ran them across her face and through her hair. Ants crawled through Tommy’s dishes on the kitchen floor. She threw his food out and scrubbed the bowls clean. She would get padlocks for all the doors. She would get Tommy a comrade dog. She would get a third dog, a fierce one, to protect them both.

She drank a glass of water and put fresh food in his bowl, but he could not be coaxed to eat it. After a while he got up and walked through all the rooms quietly, without making a sound: a ghost dog. Corvus hadn’t heard him howl since the night of the funeral, the night Alice had been here. He lay down again on the coat, his expectancy dimmed. Just before dark she took her father’s binoculars out to the porch and looked through
them at John Crimmins’s. Two lights were on, soft as the lantern lights her mother liked to use at suppertime. She put Tommy in the truck and drove to a grocery store, where she bought fried chicken. Then she drove to the Hohokam Drive-In, pulling in next to a woman whose large horned lizard sprawled next to her on the crown of the seat. Corvus smiled, but the woman just stared at her. What was the connection, after all, between taking a dog to the movies and taking a horned lizard? There wasn’t any.

She fed Tommy little pieces of greasy chicken until only bones were left in the bag. It was going to be all right. On the screen, love was having its difficulties, its reversals, but it persevered or at least metamorphosed. Tommy sat in the front seat, looking through the windshield at the big screen. Everything was going to be all right. Corvus gave him a big smacking kiss on his muzzle the way her mother used to. She tried to imagine that she was her mother and that she was Tommy, too. Though the moment was willed and racking, it came close to comfort. Then it drew back.

That night, Tommy made no sound. He slept on her mother’s coat in the hallway. In the morning she went to school, but before her first class had ended she was summoned to the office by a phone call.

“It seems to be that importunate man again,” the secretary said. The playpen had been removed. She had at her side, instead, a steaming cup of coffee and a round, glistening pastry.

“Hello!” John Crimmins said. “This is your neighbor, John. I want you to hear this. It’s what I’m being forced to hear.”

Corvus heard Tommy’s mournful howling, which sounded as though he were there with John Crimmins, right beside him.

“Where is he?” Corvus said.

“He’s not with
me
, kid. What would I want with him? I choose my friends carefully. I taped this earlier from my doorway and I’m still taping it. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?”

Tommy’s song rose and fell, ran, twisted, then rose again. She would put him in the Airstream, hitch it to the truck, and drive farther into the desert. Or she could go the other way, deeper into town, for as the town sprawled outward, it abandoned its old developments. She could pull into the parking lots of the Tortoise, the Desert Aire, the La Siesta,
resorts where the rooms had been razed and all that was left were the signs, awaiting the right collector, and empty pools the size of railway cars. She could camp on the pavement of any number of defunct shopping malls. She could live anywhere.

The connection was severed.

“Isn’t there always a third time?” the secretary said. “But next time I’ll tell him I’m calling the police. At first I thought it was an emergency, of course, but what kind of emergency could it be now?” She became flustered. “I won’t allow that person to reach you again, dear,” she said more diplomatically. After Corvus left, she frowned at the baked good from which she’d taken a nibble, baffled as to why she had once again fallen for the one with the undesirable cheese.

For the first time Corvus wondered what she would do with all the days ahead. It was as though she’d been unconscious and had just now awakened to terrific pain and uncertainty. Once more she sped homeward, but when she reached John Crimmins’s she stopped and cut the engine. She could hear Tommy’s voice faintly in the air, but it seemed contained, as though in some heart’s chamber. She sat in the truck for a long time, looking at the house, and then got out. She rapped on the door, but there was no answer. She waited on the porch listening to Tommy’s thin wail, a reminder of the emptiness at the heart of everything. She waited through what would have been the Anzai Culture, through Shakespeare and lunch and philosophy. Waiting, she felt John Crimmins on the other side of the door, waiting, too. In front of the house was a water spigot on a pipe. A drop of water would slowly form and drop into a ragged, shallow, cement depression on the bony earth. Sometimes she raised her eyes and traveled the distance between the two houses. She pretended that her mother was home. Her father was away—he would be back, his absence wasn’t unusual, he was expected soon—but her mother was there, reading the book she’d begun, absorbed, a little mystified. Corvus rested the back of her head on John Crimmins’s door and forgot why she was waiting. A car raced by, and an arm flung a bottle from the window. It shattered and lay sparkling. Good as buried, she thought. Good as buried.

She got into the truck and drove home.

Again he was just inside, the sound of the truck coming over the cattle guard having stilled him with its possibility. He peered past her as before, then gazed at her sympathetically, for she was not who she should be. She put Tommy in the truck and drove to the Airstream, backing in close to the blocks on which the tongue lay propped. They’d had the trailer for years, but Corvus hadn’t been in it for a while. When she was little, she had pretended it was a space station where she could communicate in elaborate, time-consuming ways with aliens. Saintly, they did no evil things, were about a yard tall, and looked like owls. Corvus could not move the tongue of the trailer alone, not one inch. Alice was strong, she could help her tomorrow.

In the morning she decided to take Tommy with her to school. She would tie him to an olive tree next to the truck. She would take some of her mother’s sweaters for him to lie on. He watched as she made herself ready. He lay on the coat, gnawing at one paw, which was raw from his gnawing and licking. Corvus drank a little coffee from her mother’s favorite cup—a white teacup with lilacs painted within—then rinsed it and placed it carefully on the drainboard.

“C’mon, Tommy.” He stood and walked stiffly toward her. “C’mon, you’re coming along today.” She heard the growl on her skin, as if it hadn’t even come from him. He stood heavily in front of her, all obdurate weight, looking at her steadily and brightly. He didn’t growl again; that part was over. He returned wearily to the coat. Corvus took a blouse from her mother’s closet and crumpled it up by his head like a fresh dressing for a wound. He smelled hot and sour, there was a moist crust beneath one eye. She rubbed it off, then took a dog brush and ran it across his coat. She shut the windows and turned on the swamp cooler and the radio. “Liberation can come,” a voice ranted, “only through the destruction of the world of phenomena.…” She turned the dial forward and back, tears in her eyes. The devil had been spotted at the casino on the Yaqui reservation. He was good-looking, and each slot machine disgorged hundreds of coins when he passed by. She settled on a band of static and left.

In school she learned that the American Indian had discovered the zero prior to its discovery in India. She learned about the significance of
landscape in medieval art. Flat country meant the most; it denoted apocalyptic end. School was unreal to her, the books, the papers she wrote crowded with slanting script, her hand upon the papers, writing. She envied Tommy his utter animal sadness. He was complete in it, he could not be made separate from it. The air felt electric though there were no clouds, no sign of freshening change. Still she felt the snap in what was like a current trembling thickly through everything that was that day. But it was all so distant from her, the moment and her presence in it. She felt it would be this way from now on.

Tommy had always been afraid of the cattle guard, of the meaty empty smell of the pipes. The truck, once more, lurched and rattled over it, toward home. The long home, Corvus thought. The door was open, a window broken. Tommy was on the porch. He was so long that his tail almost reached the floor. She could still see the brush marks on his fur.