The Quick & the Dead (2 page)

Why not? Alice thought.

Alice sauntered down to the station wagon, which was packed with luggage. “You taking a trip?” she asked.

“Didn’t Jimmy and Jacky tell you? Oh, that’s right, I swore them to secrecy. Let’s go out and have some breakfast. I’ll buy you a donut.”

The mother gave Alice the creeps. She wore large, shapeless dresses she called her “jelly bags.”

“I’ve had my breakfast,” Alice said.

“I’d like to talk to you,” the woman said. “Breakfast really isn’t necessary. Why don’t we go out to the state park—that’s a nice ride.”

Alice looked back at the patio, but her granny and poppa had gone inside. She shrugged and got into the car. Cars had never charmed her, and this one seemed particularly vile. They sped off to the park about fifteen miles away. The lovely, lovely mountains tumbled across the horizon.

The kids’ mother moved one big arm and groped around in the backseat. The car veered down the road, Alice staring stoically ahead, until she retrieved what she was after, a cocktail in a can. “Want a pop?” she said. Alice shook her head. “Sure?” the woman said. “It’s mostly fruit juices.”

I want … a scar, Alice thought. A scar that would send shivers up peoples’ spines but would not elicit pity. She didn’t want that kind of scar.

“Where are Jimmy and Jacky?” Alice finally said.

“With a babysitter.”

Alice looked at her.

“I’m trying out somebody new just for the morning, then we’re leaving. Back to the husband. We’re going to be a family again.”

“You owe me three hundred dollars,” Alice said.

“I do? Those hours added up, didn’t they?”

“Do you want a receipt for tax purposes?”

“I’d love a receipt,” the mother said.

They entered the park. A small deceased animal was lying in the road, and the car ahead of them ran over it. They ran over it. A herd of men in fluorescent shorts jogged by.

“God, I hate this place,” the woman said. She rummaged in the backseat for another pop.

“Why did we come here, then?”

“I mean the whole place, the state.”

She turned abruptly into a parking lot. There were some benches and a few little structures for shade. She turned off the ignition and got out of the car. “Gotta tinkle,” she said. Alice sat and gazed at the mountains. When you climbed, you’d move from cholla to juniper and pinyon, then to firs and aspens. Zero to eight thousand feet in forty miles. To live in a place where you could do something like that was sensational, like living exceptionally fast or living in two different bodies. The little animals of the desert didn’t know that the little animals of the mountains, only moments away, even existed. Or the big animals the big animals for that matter.

Alice looked around the littered seat for paper and pencil to compose her bill, her legs sticking to the stinking vinyl of the car seat. She got out and stood in the shade. A tinkle, she thought. The awful woman was probably taking a dump. At last she and her jelly bag appeared. She had red hair today, though sometimes it was chestnut. She was a genius with hair color, there was no denying that.

“You know what keeps going through my head?” the woman said, “
DAK’s incredible blowout price.…
We’re getting a new stereo. Can’t get it out of my head.”

Alice handed her the bill she’d tallied. “It’s in crayon, unfortunately, but I’m sure it will be acceptable. You could give me a check, though I’d prefer cash.”

“That’s what’s going through your head, huh, like DAK’s incredible
blowout price?” The woman laughed and dropped the piece of paper to the ground. “If you think I’m paying you, you’re crazy. Pervert. Bitch. You’d better watch out.”

Alice looked at the piece of paper. What was wrong with it? It just lay there.

“My boys say you say the world would be better off without them. They say you killed a pony and a farmer and that you make them eat lettuce-and-rabbit-pellet sandwiches. They say you hate nuns and say not to flush the toilet every time when it’s only yellow water. But it was the wasp nest that did it. I’m excessively susceptible to the stings of bees and wasps and could go into anaphylactic reaction and die. And they shrieked at me when I sprayed the damn thing. It was as big as a beer keg. They cursed me for destroying a thing that could have killed their own mother.”

“Fatal anaphylactic reaction is actually rare,” Alice said.

“Half the stuff they told me is even on the list.”

“What list?” Alice said. Her voice sounded peculiar.
You could give me a check, though I’d prefer cash
kept sliding through her mind.

“The checklist of symptoms of satanic ritual abuse compiled by an after-midnight radio psychologist who’s a nationally recognized authority on the subject. The list includes but is not limited to preoccupation with feces and death, questionable acting out, talk of mutilation and dismemberment, and fear of being normal and cooperative.” She ticked them off on her fingers.

“Why, that’s just stupid,” Alice said.

“You’re the one who’s stupid, dumbass,” the woman said, “thinking I’d pay for your time. I’ve got better things to do with my money.”

“Jimmy and Jacky misinterpreted my remarks a little,” Alice said. It was probably the hair and submarine emphasis in their background that made them somewhat wobbly in the comprehension department.

“You’d better watch it,” the woman said. “Get away from me.” Alice hadn’t moved. “You’d better watch it,” she said again, laughing, as she got into the station wagon. Then she drove away.

A black bird, a phainopepla, rocketed past and alighted on a trembling mesquite bush. Alice felt that the desert was looking at her, that it kept coming closer, incuriously. She stared into the distance, seeing
it as something ticking, something about to arrive. A brief, ferocious wind came up and a Styrofoam cup sailed by and impaled itself upon an ocotillo. She started back toward the park’s entrance, walking not along the road but through the desert itself. Cars and vans occasionally passed by. Tiny heads were what she saw, behind closed windows. She walked quickly, sometimes breaking into a run, through the gulleys and over the rocks, past the strange growths, all living their starved, difficult lives. Everything had hooks or thorns. Everything was saw-edged and spiny-pointed. Everything was defensive and fierce and determined to live. She liked this stuff. It all had a great deal of character. At the same time, it was here only because it had adapted to the circumstances, the external and extreme circumstances of its surroundings.

Plants were lucky because when they adapted it wasn’t considered a compromise. It was more difficult for a human being, a girl.

She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She’d remain outside the public sector. She’d be an anarchist, she’d travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She’d fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She’d really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She’d have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow—no, that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.

She had curved back to the road and wasn’t far from the entrance. The flattened brown animal was now but a rosy kiss on the pavement. She fingered the coins in her pocket. She’d get a soda and call her granny. She wished … she’d like to be one of those birds, those warblers that fly from Maine to Venezuela without water, food, or rest. The moment came when they wanted to be twenty-five hundred miles from the place they were and didn’t know how else to do it.

She dialed from a phone outside the visitors’ center. She wished she knew someone she could call illicitly.

“Poppa,” she said. “Hi.”

“Alicekins,” her grandfather said faintly, “where are you?”

The Indians called what they heard on telephones whispering spirits. Whisper, whisper, said her poppa’s blood, making its way through his head’s arteries. Indians didn’t overexplain matters—full and complete
expression not being in accordance with Indian custom. Alice admired that.

“I’m baby-sitting, Poppa. I thought I told you.”

There was an alarmed pause.

“Maybe I forgot to tell you, but I’m baby-sitting late. I won’t be home for a while.”

“We’re fine. We’re hanging in there.”

“Of course you are, Poppa.”

He hung up softly. He had certain phone mannerisms and this was one of them, breaking the connection gently, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed.

Alice went into the visitors’ center and entered the men’s room just for the heck of it. She washed her hands and looked into the mirror. The assignment was to be … absolutely … expressionless. She stared at herself. She didn’t look awake, was all. She’d get arrested if she went around looking like that. She pulled her hair down over her eyes and left. She hated mirrors.

She walked. An enormous grocery store appeared ahead, an outpost for the consumer cavalry. It was surrounded by ragged desert and sported large signs informing those who wanted to make something of themselves in this life that investment “pads” were available. Cows browsed the desert, token cows, hired to indicate a pre-pad tax category. A few miles later, the desert had vanished completely, the cows were no longer employed. She imagined what she would do to the woman’s station wagon. She would work smoothly and calmly. She would pop the hood and remove the oil cap. Using a conveniently located hose, she would pour water into the filler hole and then top up the gas tank. She would find a can of brush cleaner in the garage and pour it into the radiator. She wouldn’t do anything to the brakes for the little kids’ sakes, but she would squirt glue all over the seats.

She was approaching House of Hubcaps, one of her favorite places. She paused and enjoyed the magnificent display of hubcaps. Great luminous wheels crowded the windows, reflecting and distorting everything in their cool, humped centers. They were like ghastly, intelligent, unmoored heads.

If the House of Hubcaps didn’t have the hubcap you were searching for, it didn’t exist.

She moved on, renewed, to Jimmy and Jacky’s house. The hubcaps had refreshed her. They had cleared her mind. Vandalizing the station wagon would be too easy, too predictable, and by now far too premeditated. She should do something on a grander scale. She should attempt to liberate those children, those sour-smelling, sniveling, cautious little boys. All their mother had ever provided them with was good haircuts. She should free them from that corrupting presence, from the world of toots and jelly bags and poisonous sprays, but that would be kidnapping, and punishable, she believed, by death. Plus she didn’t want Jimmy and Jacky.

The house was deserted. Cardboard cartons stuffed with clothes and broken toys were scattered about in the front yard, the word “Free” written on every one. The garage was empty. The rabbit hutch was empty save for a withered string bean. The rabbit was probably hopping around nearby, terrified. Or it might be hunched up somewhere in a narcosis of incomprehension at being hutchless. Or maybe the mother had boiled it and served it to the twins for lunch on a bun with some potato chips. Alice wouldn’t put it past her.

Back at her own house, Alice got into her nightie and ate two cheese sandwiches and a bowl of spaghetti. Her granny and poppa sat in the living room watching Fury sleeping in his dog bed surrounded by his toys. Fury was named after the beautiful horse in the Bette Davis movie who is shot by Gary Merrill, who is pretending to all the world that he is Bette’s husband. Bette Davis was her granny’s favorite movie star. None of the new ones could hold a candle to her.

“Alicekins,” her poppa said. “I’m so glad you’re back. We have some questions for you.”

“Good ones tonight,” her granny said.

Alice made another cheese sandwich. She was not abstemious and ate like a stray, like a pound pet rescued at the eleventh hour.

“A woman goes to her doctor,” her granny said, “and the doctor says she’s got cancer of the liver and gives her three months to live. Cancer of the liver is a painful, horrible way to go and there’s no way to beat it, the doctor says.”

“Typical,” her poppa said.

“What!” her granny said.

“Typical doctor.” Her poppa took a Kleenex from a box on the table beside him and dug around in one of Fury’s ears.

“Yes, well, she goes home and she and her son have a long talk and the son arranges it so that his handgun collection is at her disposal and she shoots herself. During the autopsy it comes out that she didn’t have cancer of the liver at all.”

“Just had a few pus pockets was all,” her poppa said. He put the used Kleenex into his pocket without looking at it.

“So the question is, who’s responsible for her death, the lady, the son, or the doctor?”

These kinds of problems always cheered Alice up. They weren’t questions of ethics or logic, and the answer, under the circumstances, didn’t matter anyway. She just loved them.

C
orvus lost her parents to drowning close to the end of that peculiar spring. The phone rang at school, she was summoned to the office and was told the situation. It seemed unbelievable but was the case. They had driven down to the Mexican state of Sonora for their anniversary. They had been to the beach. They’d been swimming, sailing, even diving in the Gulf of California but had drowned coming back from Nogales on an off-ramp of I-10 during the first rainstorm of the year, just beyond one of those signs that say
DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED
, signs the engineers claim (and continued to claim with tedious righteousness after the accident) are where they are for a reason. The last picture of Corvus and her mother and father together had been taken not long before in that same gritty border town, Nogales, with the burro on the tourist street, the timeless, tireless burro with the plywood sea and sunset behind him. Beyond the painted sea, people were living in cardboard packing crates with tin roofs held down by tires and old car batteries, beyond which a wasteland ran to the real sea, from which her parents had returned but never arrived. A frequent thought of Corvus: they had never arrived
back
. Still, she thought they’d probably laughed when they hit that sudden water, thinking they’d be through it in no time.