The Quick & the Dead (14 page)

The rope was white and new, and it was knotted tightly around the beam with the other end tied around the porch railing. Her mother’s coat had been dragged partway across the floor. It had been a comfortable house, plates and chairs, a deep sofa, lamps and books, the pretty things of home. She went to the kitchen and pulled open the drawer that held the knives. There were a number of them. She had thought she could use everything up. She would empty everything familiar to her of its purpose. She would keep the house and finish school, and slowly her life would be used up. Through diligence, she would come to the end of the past. That had been her plan, but now there was nothing. She was seeing nothing, looking at the drawer of knives.

From a distance there was the sound of coyotes calling. Her father had always quoted Huxley—“A Trio for Ghoul and Two Damned Souls”—when the coyotes called. They stopped.

She went to the stove and blew out the pilot lights. As a child she had always been fascinated with those beguiling darting lights of dancing blue. She opened the oven door and, sliding out the broiler plate, blew out that small light as well. She smelled the threads of gas. She could die, too. The obviousness of the choice gave her a peculiar swift delight. It
was correct. It was enchanting, really. But she did not want to die so enchantingly, so obviously correctly. She wanted, instead, to die slowly, day by meaningless day, unenchanted, bitterly meaninglessly aware.

There was a gallon of kerosene that her parents had used for the outside lamps. She laid it down in ribbony whorls throughout the house, then went out to the truck. A jerry can of gas was strapped down in the bed because the fuel gauge was broken. The speedometer cable was broken as well. You never knew how fast you were going or how far you could go. She circled the house spilling the gas, then backed the truck across the cattle guard to the road. She had to go back into the house for the matches. She brought the bowl outside and went through seven worn books, a match per book, before one of them lit. “Reasonably Priced Banquets,” it said just above the striking zone.

At first nothing burned. The flame flared and smoldered with a certain knotted energy. Then it gathered, as though with an intake of breath, and it began, the flames lapping out and licking the jellylike pads of the cactus, the marigolds, the steps, the fur of the hanging dog. The wren’s nest in the eaves popped softly. Then the heat found the grassy core and with a boom and another three more, like the sounds of shotguns striking down owls at dusk, it was all burning, the pictures and tables and clocks, the Indian blanket with its canny exit for the mind, all of it, her mother’s things, her father’s.

Corvus saw owls falling. This was how she felt it. Her own soul witnessed it in this way, their great soft falling, the
imago ignota
of their alien faces.

Book
Two

G
OOD MORNING MR./MS
.

You have been deemed a candidate by Physician/Family/Staff for the Terminally Ill Program, and therefore the following comforts and electives will be denied to you beginning at 3 a.m. this day and extending into any remaining future. Television, oxygen, antibiotics, cookies, batteries, cooling waters, green pastures, and heretofore merciful acts of providence whether deserved or undeserved. Any peaceful dark that comports itself as den, lair, sanctuary, or refuge. Freedom from fear. Any acts of grace except those that passeth understanding. Podiatric care. Dental care. Donuts with jelly. Eyeglasses. Excursions. Any exercises to discourage muscle atrophy. That stupid little hard ball that we encouraged and encouraged and encouraged you to squeeze and you never would will be taken away. All wishing, hoping, and desiring. Ice in a cup to crunch. Key chains. For the ladies, hats. Remaining to you is any comfort available from dreams. We do not suggest attempting to dream of starting over. Do not dream of the first kiss or the one who will have been the love of your life. Avoid specifics in terms of the beauty of lightning, meadows, eyes, the touch of certain hands. Avoid those old
constructions—the nesting box made of cedar, the bookcase mortised with pegs, the child’s swing so easily made at the time. We suggest, rather, of dreaming of smaller balls within larger ones, of blue air liquid, of small shining clouds, of rhizomes. Dream of rhizomes if you can.

A
lice wanted very much to harass, torture, and, with any luck at all, destroy John Crimmins, but she had to find him first for he had disappeared immediately after the fire. There were already new tenants in the house he’d rented, a blameless couple with a pet peahen named Attila. The blameless couple annoyed Alice, ignorant as they were of John Crimmins’s whereabouts, unknowing of Tommy or his end, blithely incurious about the charred plot of land to the south. Should not sickening cruelty leave its impressions upon the surroundings? Should not a repulsive act taint the very air?

“I understand why you burned your house down,” she said to Corvus. They were sitting in the Airstream, which they had towed into Alice’s side yard. “It’s like the Navajos used to burn their hogans down if someone died in it, isn’t that so? Then the Anglos taught them to stop doing this, so if they had a sick baby, say, who just got sicker and sicker? They’d put it outside the house so they wouldn’t have to burn it down when the baby died.” The telling of this story had held more promise in its inception; it had been meant actually to comfort and confirm. But as with so many of Alice’s utterances, it had veered from the confirm-and-comfort path.

“I think you did the right thing, Corvus, that’s all I meant,” Alice said. “I think you always do.”

Corvus said nothing, and Alice began talking again about John Crimmins, how they would go about finding him. Alice knew there were methods by which an appealing, appropriate-looking person could get any information desired on anyone else, and she vowed to transform herself into such a person, if necessary, to see that John Crimmins met his punishment.

“I’d like to shake those people up,” she said. “How can they not know anything?”

The place had been broom swept, the blameless couple said, which was all that real estate law required. They aspired to become real estate agents themselves someday. The place had actually been quite clean when they took occupancy.

“I want to find him and drive him crazy,” Alice said.

“You’re driving me crazy,” Corvus said.

“Well, that would be … you’d be the wrong person.” I will never let you be crazy, Alice thought. She felt the stronger of the two for an instant and was frightened. But the instant passed, both the feeling stronger and the fear of it.

Corvus could not assimilate his act into her life, so she placed him outside the way she thought about her life. Doing this was going to make her sick, Alice believed, though the idea that things that happened to you weren’t your life was sort of interesting. Corvus didn’t believe John Crimmins’s power was legitimate. She never talked about him, never accompanied Alice in her musings as to what he had done before and what he would do next.

“A person like him,” Alice said, “just can’t slip back into civilized society.”

“Why not?” Corvus said.

“He’ll feel remorse eventually and jump off a building,” Alice said hopefully.

“No, he won’t.”

“Tommy’ll come back to haunt him,” Alice said, though she didn’t really believe this. Tommy, hung, then burned to the bone, would, instead, be racing after Corvus’s mother, never arriving at her side forever, released too late by the cruel facilitator, John Crimmins.

G
inger’s manifestation startled Carter for it was in the sober hour, that practically canonical hour before the first cocktail of the evening.

“Darling!” he said. “Isn’t there anything to do there?”

“No,” she said, “nothing to do. Working, sexing, resting, thinking—you can’t do any of it.”

Sexing? Carter thought. That was so depressing.

“Go ahead,” she said impatiently, “make your drink.”

He took special care with this one.

“How does it taste?”

“It doesn’t taste all that good, actually. Ginger, you’re making me nervous.”

“Do you remember how you ruined our honeymoon, Carter?”

Like pushing a rope, he thought. No, no, that had been later. “So,” he said, “how are you?” He took another swallow.

“I feel as though I’ve taxied away from the gate but haven’t taken off yet. There’s this unconscionable delay.”

“Oh my,” Carter said. “We both know what that feels like. That flight to London—”

“I think it may be something you’re doing.”

“Me?” Carter said. “But I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary, darling. Everything is very everydayish here.”

She rubbed her bare arms as though chilled. The gesture gave Carter goose bumps. “You believe I’m preventing you from, ah, ‘taking off’?”

“You were always suppressing me, Carter, always holding me back.”

“You have to stop thinking about me, Ginger. You have to take the
next step.” He looked at his ice cubes. There wasn’t anything around them.

“Let’s not argue again tonight, Carter,” Ginger said. “Let’s be friends. I’d like to give you something, a little gift.”

This discomposed him utterly.

“It’s not like that, Carter. Where would I get a gift? Use your head! It’s advice, some advice. When we were together there was always this, this … haunting insufficiency.”

“That’s not advice, Ginger,” he ventured to say.

“I’m not through!” she snarled. “
Won’t
you let me finish a sentence!”

How had he summoned her here, how, how? She was right. He must be doing something. What innocent thought or haphazard reflection was bringing her back so vividly all the time? She was his personal maenad. Maybe he was listening to too much opera. A frenzied woman who coupled marriage with carnage in a twisted rite was practically a definition of opera. This was Ginger to a T.

“You can’t make me suffer anymore, Ginger.”

“Ha,” she said.

At least they weren’t trapped in a car together, hurtling down some highway. He gave the ice cubes some more whiskey.

“My advice is …” She paused. “Imagine renewing our vows, Carter, you and I. People do it all the time, all sorts of people. And what do they do before they renew their vows? They remember the happy times. The wonderful things. The bright, not the black. I am your wife and spiritual partner. I want you to come to the threshold again. Remember when we were on the threshold of marriage and all you knew was love and hope?”

He silently resisted this interpretation of his complex feelings at that time.

“I want you to see me in that light again,” she said. “You’re not seeing me in the right light. And that’s why I’m unable to ‘take off,’ as you so crassly put it.”

He protested this mutely.

“What’s the matter with you?” she snapped. “You know, I almost went into intensive care that night. I debated whether to go into intensive care on the ride in the ambulance, and then I thought about all the unpleasantness that would entail and decided against it. I never thought you
were going to carry on like this, Carter. I should’ve chosen intensive care. You would’ve had your hands full then, all right.”

“You could decide?” Carter said. “It really was up to you?”

“You make me regret everything I do.”

She was truly expert at this, Carter thought.

“That was a big choice I made, and now you’re making me question it.”

No, he couldn’t possibly assure her that she had done the right thing. He was trapped. “I wish you’d give me the chance to miss you,” he said tentatively. “I think you’d be pleased.”

“How would you do that?” she demanded. “I’ll tell you how. You’d remember happy times, or you’d anticipate happy times and wish I were there to share them with you. You’re putting the cart before the horse. No, I think I’ll keep coming back until this thing is resolved.” She was scratching her neck in that nervous way she had. It really was the cocktail hour now, well into it. “Do you have any of those little snacks I like, those spicy snacks?”

He tried to behave as though he did but just couldn’t lay his hands on them. They’d always given him heartburn, he hated them.

“Doesn’t
Donald
like them?” she said venomously. “What’s he doing tonight, out hand-pollinating something?”

The thought of Donald fluffed Carter up a bit. “Donald—” he began.

“Oh, I don’t want to talk about him,” Ginger said. “I want to talk about me, about us, Carter, about the potential we still have together.”

“There’s no need to be jealous of Donald, darling,” Carter said. “He’s a caring and serious boy, a student of Buddhism. I actually think he could help you, Ginger.”

“Slow fat white dudes studying Buddhism make me sick.”

“Donald isn’t fat,” Carter protested. Ginger had always been overly conscious of weight.

“I can just hear him. ‘It’s only death, Ginger. Everything is fine.’ I wish people like that would shut up. Does he say, ‘Thank you, Illusion,’ every time he manages to overcome some piddling obstacle in his silly life? ‘Thank you, Illusion, thank you …’ ” she minced.