The Quick & the Dead (30 page)

He returned to the girls. “I can’t reach something in my room. I was hoping you could help me.”

“You’re taller than any of us, though, Daddy,” Annabel noted. “Are you sure you’re not sleepwalking?”

Her comment seemed strange to him; maybe he didn’t need this drink. He swallowed it anyway.

“What were you-all talking about?” he said. “I could hear your voices.”

“We were talking about Mommy, Daddy, and how none of us has a mother. I was saying how Mommy used to clean up after my throw-up—I was always throwing up, remember?—and there was a little bronze bell by my bed and Mommy would always come when I rang it and she always let me put out the candles after dinner with one of those little candle snuffers. One was a silver cone and one was a little beehive and I was trying to remember other things because it was my turn. Alice didn’t want her turn.”

“Well, those are very pleasant things to remember, honey,” Carter said. Ginger had never allowed Annabel to put out the candles and in fact hadn’t spoken to the child for an entire week when somehow the beehive candle snuffer had found its way into the play yard and Annabel had flattened it with her tricycle. As far as the throw-ups, Carter did recall stuffing a number of towels into the washing machine one winter season, but mostly a psychiatrist had dealt with the situation.

“Would you girls come into my room for a moment?” he said. “Just a moment.”

But of course Ginger wasn’t there. What had she done to his mind! She’d taken part of it and was gnawing on it like a sandwich. He saw what the girls saw as they looked around the room, his rumpled bed, the scattered books, the empty glass beneath the lamp, the rings the glass had made. The room was decidedly giving the wrong impression.

Beyond the large window a coyote sauntered by with the neighbor’s Siamese cat in its jaws. Only Alice saw it.

“What’s out there!” Carter exclaimed.

But Alice wouldn’t say, for Annabel’s sake, although she couldn’t conceal her interested approval.

Oh, the stubborn girl, Carter thought.

The coyote paused to rearrange the cat in its jaws, and Alice discreetly pulled the blinds.

“I was thinking of clearing out of this room, cleaning it out,” Carter said. “What do you think?”

“Daddy, it’s after midnight,” Annabel noted. “And you just changed this room around last week.”

“I was thinking of doing a little more to it, like tearing it down completely. Just whacking it off from the rest of the house.”

“You could put in a wildlife pool,” Alice suggested.

“Yes!” Carter said. “Then maybe they’d stop using our pool. Do you think they’d honor the distinction?” Carter was all for making distinctions. If Ginger would just make a distinction or two, principally between the requirements of the dead and the needs of the living … but Ginger’s mind, or whatever it was, made no distinctions, although a certain sloppiness was occurring in her style, a worrisome blurring of boundaries. She had used the phrase “Your ass is grass” the other evening, for one thing. How could one’s ass be grass? One’s days, of course, that was another matter entirely. However bibulous Ginger had been before, when she was alive, she had always been viciously articulate. She had always been witty and destructively unique. But he half expected her to scream, “I’m gonna smack your butt!” any evening now, or “Get your butt over here!” like an overextended toddler-laden woman in some shopping mall. It would be sad, really, if Ginger were reduced to screaming “Oh, my God!” over everything.

“A wildlife pool would be a great idea,” Alice said. “Just knock this whole room down.”

“Daddy, you can’t be serious!” Annabel said.

The girls stood around him, a puzzled triad. The Three Fates plying their ghastly shears, although only one did that. Atropos … Atropos … What were the others named? Klotho! He was cheered to remember. Klotho. But on the last one he still drew a blank.

“So many books in here,” Corvus mused.

“Yes, I like to read,” Carter said. “Sometimes I read all night. Please, take any you’d like.”

But of course she wouldn’t. The girl wanted nothing, he could see it in her eyes. It must be fearful to want nothing; it wasn’t as fulfilling as it sounded. She must feel sickeningly hobbled all the time. Yet she didn’t look anxious, any more than she looked indifferent.

“What can’t you reach, Daddy?” Annabel said.

The liquor had been spreading nicely through Carter, but it had now—and he couldn’t pretend otherwise—stopped. He continued to watch Corvus as though she were about to do something startling or inspirational. He realized he was holding his breath, then began thinking of Ginger again. They say that with people who die suddenly, you should
tell them right away they’re dead or there’ll be trouble and misunderstandings on both sides. But he had apprised Ginger of the fact immediately, he was sure of it. Oh, that dreadful night, they’d both been tanked, and after the accident there had been all this discussion about the restaurant having dumped grease on the highway in the past, getting rid of it in the middle of the night, and causing accidents, but none, before this, fatal. Grease, grease, grease—that’s all anyone was talking about with the ambulance still wailing in the distance. And that stupid sign pulsating over everything:
THEY’RE TOO BIG TO BE SHRIMP
. The evening was preposterous. Really, Carter couldn’t blame Ginger for not taking it seriously.

He was in a sort of trance, during which the girls had discreetly left. Carter felt shaken. It was as though he had invited them all in to watch him be sick. He feared he would no longer enjoy quite the same stature in the house, that of the carefree but intelligent and reliable adult, someone who could be expected to be reading sensibly and artfully in his room at night yet could nevertheless be counted on should an emergency arise, someone who knew how to spend money and still had a future. Of course there had been the deer-in-the-swimming-pool incident, but that had been an exceptional evening. His liver hurt.

He went into the bathroom and shaved carefully. By now it was after two o’clock. The hours between two and dawn were like a gift that only a few unwrapped, a puzzling, luminous gift. He pushed the pillows up against the headboard, lay down, and stared straight ahead. What did those girls do all night? He should know, he should be more responsible, offer more guidance, but he was just a drunk widower in love with a yard boy. He got up and pulled the blinds back. The dark shuddered, as though he’d interrupted it.

He got back into bed. He wished he could write or paint, that he possessed some small talent. To race through the night with a pen! But writing makes everything clearer and worse at once, that is, when it wasn’t making everything appear worse without clarifying it. That was the problem with writing.

All was quiet. There was no Ginger, not even a pneumatic one. Isn’t that the way Paul suggests the dead are resurrected? Pneumatically? The thought of Ginger being pumped up by the whispering breath of a
caring supreme being discouraged him. What a carnival everything was, one big lurid carnival. He sighed and turned on the television. “I’m going to kill you,” one half-naked person was saying to another, “but I’ll refrain from eating you because of your rank.” They seemed to be Druids, meeting in some sacred grove. But did Druids talk like that? He was certain Ginger was doing something to his television. The magnetism of inharmony. He turned everything off and gazed fretfully into the dark.

T
he Wildlife Museum had been built around the same time as Green Palms by a man named Stumpp, who had shot more than a thousand big game animals and now wanted to share some of the more magnificent specimens with the general public in exchange for an enormous tax write-off. They were all Stumpp’s animals, brought down by his own plump hand in Africa and Alaska back when those places were truly their selves. Africa at this point in time particularly broke Stumpp’s heart, crawling with people as it was. All those scrawny humans crouching in the dust. He wouldn’t go to Africa anymore. Let them have what was left; he’d partaken of it when it had been glorious. Stumpp wasn’t one of those trophy hunters who went on and on anecdotally about the beasts he’d shot. He couldn’t recall each and every incident, not even most of them, but he felt warmly toward all his animals. None of them had given him any problems, not like some of the humans in the cities over there, who would just as soon cut your throat if you didn’t give them coins for whatever nonsense they were offering you—nails or screws or Chiclets or the like.

The Wildlife Museum was built to resemble Harlech Castle in Wales. Its original design had included a moat in which Stumpp had planned to place several sharks, but this idea had been scuttled by a candy-assed county commission. But Stumpp was glad he hadn’t sued on the sharks’ behalf. They would have been alive, for one thing, which would have compromised the integrity of his establishment, and they undoubtedly would’ve been harassed by the schoolchildren on whom the museum depended for much of its revenue. The kids would have been chucking everything down at those sharks: last year’s laptops, trumpets, baseballs. The sharks would’ve been sitting ducks for those kids. So there was no
moat. Instead, in front of the castle, were the typical parking designations, the stenciled collection of circles and lines that in developed countries announced that the place was sacred to the halt and the lame, that while they might be wobbly on their pins and had to cart themselves around in rolling chairs like packages, they still had rights of access and could be interested in things, in this case the dead of other species looking beautiful. The rear of the museum butted up against thirty thousand acres of National Monument land and was all glass and splashily lit, so it was quite conceivable that animals wandering down their trails at night could look in and witness perfection, not that they’d know it, of course.

In fact, Stumpp was a little bored with his museum. The
Hwyl!
was gone. It was stuffing the project down everyone’s throat that had been fun. And he was tired of dealing with taxidermists, a vain and surly lot insulted when it was suggested that they were little more than upholsterers. Not one of them had any balls, in his opinion—real balls. They all thought they were artists, yet you couldn’t really tell one’s work from another’s. There was a limit to what was possible in making an animal look alive that wasn’t. He was down to one in-house taxidermist now, a mop-up man.

Stumpp was a West Virginia boy, who as far as he was concerned had been born at the age of fourteen, when he got interested in buying and selling gold coins. As he liked to say, and did say to guides and gofers from Mozambique to the Brooks Range, you could spend your life like a damn goat staring out a crooked door through the rain at the mud, or you could spend it some other way. Life was what you made of it or, rather, what you made of your perception of it. Stumpp had dumped gold early and been equally prescient in the timing of his other interests and acquisitions. Most recently, with minor effort, he was doing extremely well in the arenas of gene research and embryo cryopreservation. Shooting megafauna had always been just for relaxation.

But he hadn’t been able to relax lately, and it was beginning to trouble him, as was the smell of shit he was detecting everywhere—not strong, but faintly pervasive. Ignoring it took effort, exhaustive effort of an intense mental sort. Did he have to become a goddamn yogi to escape the smell of shit? Nobody else smelled it, and he’d stopped asking. Not that it was a conversation stopper. Stumpp found that in good bars, hotel
bars, say, where a martini cost ten dollars and arrived in a glass with the surface diameter of a goldfish bowl, people would accept this observation convivially, women in particular. Stumpp had a lot of respect for women and judged them to be more perspicacious than men.

“I can’t believe a man like you is having this … ahh, problem,” his last redhead said. “You seem
radioactive
with belief in yourself, which I find very attractive.”

But it had been a while since his last redhead, since he’d been flattered by any beautiful woman. These days were different days. There was something technical about them, undistinctive. You couldn’t tell the scientists from the vandals. You could order viruses through the mail—pathogens, toxins, what have you. A clever schoolchild could wipe out all the bees in a meadow during recess. They were breeding rhinos with no horns to make them less desirable. Couldn’t even get your goddamn rhino anymore. One of the companies he’d invested in was churning out genetically identical sheep. He stood to make millions, but what sort of real pleasure could be wrested from making money off genetically identical sheep? Where were bravery and singularity and radioactive charisma? Ever since the completion of the museum, Stumpp had felt himself in decline. It was as though he were descending some kind of goddamned terraced path with the smell of shit on a rising wind at his back. For it was at his back, giving lie to the sentimental saw that a wind at one’s back was to one’s advantage. The way Stumpp felt it, the wind was serving the interests of those yet unborn. Sometimes he even imagined it speaking, in the manner of an obnoxious junior high school coach: “Let’s give everyone a chance here, let’s allow everyone a crack at it.” … He should probably pull his money out of all that human egg research. But his money was making so much money. A tough call, money or mental health. Investing in the future had its psychological drawbacks. His money had even spread into oocyte banking. Eggs were being harvested from aborted fetuses. It was getting a little out of hand, those crazy scientists horsing around and having more fun than they had at Alamogordo, supercooling this and flash-freezing that. The lights go out these days, some power grid fails, and it’s not just your digital clock that gets scrambled and your freezer food that needs to be tossed, you could lose whole families, potential waiting families, nonexistent, sure, in theory,
but with every right to exist. Everything that didn’t exist had the right to, was the new thinking—made an end run around the ethicists with that one—and although such notions would make money, particularly if you got in on the ground floor, Stumpp was ego sophisticated enough to see trouble ahead. Stumpp’s own parents (gone now) had been unexceptional in the extreme, but at least they’d had the grace to get him in the proper way. “It was in a rowboat, Stumppie,” his mother said. “I knew it at the time. It was like BINGO … my body knew.” At least they’d had the happiness of the old thrust and heave, the unexpected yaw. But these days it was all assisted fertilization, micromanipulation, people in different rooms. The joys of sex were irrelevant in the present climate, or so it seemed to Stumpp. His own old bean hadn’t seen much action lately.