The Quick & the Dead (10 page)

The woman wrenched the door open. “You fuck, you loser!” she screamed. “How did you do that, you sick fuck?” Ray opened his eyes. Her own were dry but bloodshot. She possessed disturbing strength. His hat flew off as she removed him from the car and he stumbled onto the cinders and tore a hole in one knee of his jeans. More cinders rained on his bare head as the car scrambled away. He groped for his hat. The little monkey was climbing the walls in his head, making clear that it wanted out. Any avenue along the capillaries would do. There was an awful craving to get out. Ray didn’t feel well. He ate a few more chips and touched the corner of his mouth for a while. It felt like the hooded towel he’d favored when he was a little kid with little rubbery animals on it from Noah’s Ark. When he got up, he didn’t look at the roadway but kept his eyes on the ground. A wallet was lying there, formerly belonging to one Merle Orleans, the poor bastard. The picture on the license showed a fellow who didn’t have a clue that he’d bought his last Cadillac. Ray had found wallets before, sometimes in the darnedest places. With Merle’s collection of credit cards, he could buy a used truck and some socks, definitely some socks, plus a warmer coat, and gloves. He had to get his own means of transportation and stop relying on the fickle grace of lunatics. Merle Orleans might very well be moving on into the afterlife. He didn’t examine the face too closely as a matter of decorum.

In a few miles, Ray was long out of the burn and looking down into a valley. To his left was a runaway-truck ramp, where a semi lay wadded in
loose gravel. He’d never seen one actually in use before. If you were a runaway-truck ramp, you probably had to wait a long time for some action. He assumed that this was the truck that had come between the gloomy chick in the Fleetwood and the pet of her desiring, and that she’d run the driver off the road. On the crumpled cab were dark silhouettes of animals—dogs, deer, birds—with lines drawn through rows of nine. What a fun-loving dude! Nothing was moving inside the cab. This was so almost morally acceptable, Ray thought. A police car was nearby, its lights pulsing.

“Oh dear,” Ray said to the policeman, who ignored him.

Ray used Merle Orlean’s plastic to buy himself a truck at a place called Gary’s Beautiful Cars. The truck was matte gray with jacklights and chrome wheels and was an exception in Gary’s lot, because most of his vehicles looked beat up and hard driven. Ray drove a hundred miles and then, at the urging of a large billboard, turned into the vast parking area of the Lariat Lounge.

The lounge itself was a rankly dim establishment illuminated only by a large TV. On the screen was a powerboat race, where some mishap had occurred and was being rebroadcast. A boat named
Recondita Armonia
had grazed and skimmed over
The Bat/Frank’s Marine
, decapitating both the throttleman and the driver.

The bartender greeted Ray by saying, “You’d think that’s just a helmet flying there, but there’s a head inside.”

“Wow,” Ray said. “Where is this?”

“Earlier on, a guy did a classic skip-and-stuff and killed himself too, but they haven’t been showing that one as much.”

“Wow,” Ray said again. “Where is this?”

The bartender looked at him.

“I mean, when?” Ray said, groping for the germane.

“Whatya wanna drink, pal?” the bartender said. “I don’t got all day.”

Ray ordered a beer. Though it wasn’t very cold, he didn’t want to mention it and further discredit himself in the bartender’s eyes. You just couldn’t walk into a bar; Ray was always forgetting that. Entering a bar
took thought and preparation. The desired persona had to be determined, then assembled—in Ray’s case, practically from scratch—and projected.

He gazed up at the screen, where the little helmet was tumbling over and over through the air. It’s got to be Florida, he mused. That Easter-egg green water is definitely Floridian. He marveled for a moment about being here, thousands of miles away in Arizona, watching this balletic moment with hundreds of thousands of other people from coast to coast, all as one in the great world of human consciousness, observing and absorbing, all thinking pretty much the same thing: man’s
brains
are still in that thing, probably saying
whoaa
and trying to cogitate this problem through …

He ordered another beer, which tasted just the slightest shade warmer than the first, then retreated with determined nonchalance into the establishment’s other room. In here it was darker, and by error he seated himself directly beside the only other occupied table. Two men had been talking, and one of them pushed the curtain back from a filthy window so that more light fell upon the scene, a gaping desert light much disoriented at finding itself inside.

The men had been telling stories, and they waved Ray right in on the hearing of one, as though he’d been with them all the while, had departed only for a moment, and had now come back.

“So he spends Christmas Day in a motel room with my sixteen-year-old daughter.”

“Jesus. Christmas Day.”

“Disappeared right after the stockings. She came home that night, but it took me and my buddy until New Year’s Eve to find him.”

“You was always good friends, I recall.”

“
Good
friends. No problem up to then between me and Modesto. My little girl can be a troublemaker sometimes, I’d be the first to admit it. So Modesto has this girlfriend he’s crazy about, and she’s got a little kid. It’s Modesto’s little kid. He’s crazy about the both of them, but she’s out of town for Christmas visiting her mother. She’s in Bisbee. Her mother runs one of those cute-as-hell motels over there.”

The man smiled at Ray, who couldn’t help but wonder why they had befriended him.

“So I say to Modesto, when we found him, ‘You’ve got a choice here, my friend.’ We had him in his own truck. We was sitting on either side of him in his own truck. ‘You got a choice,’ I say. ‘You can either watch your girlfriend and your little kid go down—and I mean
watch
, I mean
go down
—or you can eat these varmint pellets.’ ”

“Nahhhh!”

“Yes.”

“Strychnine!”

“We had him outside his girlfriend’s apartment. I mean, right outside. You could see the fucking mobile over the kid’s crib. And I say, ‘Take this, eat this, or else they die.’ ”

Ray gulped his beer. “Scared the shit out of him, huh?” he interjected.

“So the punk took it. He thought it was a movie or something. He thought he was exhibiting an ethical dimension.”

“He might’ve thought it was an initiation or something,” Ray said. Initiations were always a dark-before-dawn arrangement. Things usually got better afterward.

“So he swallows the damn stuff, and my buddy and I vacate the truck. Modesto sits there for a minute and then starts shooting all around the cab on his own accord in these convulsions. Banged himself all the hell up. Must’ve gone on for ten minutes.”

“It wasn’t really strychnine was it?” Ray said.

“Cops come eventually, and you know what they conclude? They conclude Modesto OD’d. They say he suicided.”

“Cops are dumb around here, huh?” Ray said.

“That word ‘initiation’ is some word,” the storyteller’s companion said. “Don’t hear a word like that every day.”

“Man’s trying to put himself in Modesto’s shoes.”

“Gotta be an asshole to want to be in them.”

“Considering that Modesto convulsed himself right out of them, I’d have to agree with you. Those ten minutes were, well, they were beyond my wildest dreams of satisfaction,” the man said contentedly.

Ray thought he’d better be on his way. He didn’t even feel the need to finish his beer. At the same time, he thought he should buy a round for all concerned, though possibly that wasn’t a great idea either.

“Like maybe you’re imagining that Modesto’s imagining he’s being
initiated into the No Fear club or something? Those assholes that have them banners across their windshields, those shade screens that say ‘No Fear,’ they belong to a club, right?”

“That is not my truck,” Ray said.

“We saw you get out of it.”

“It’s not mine.”

“Salaried pussies, they
lease
those vehicles.”

“I stole it,” Ray said.

“Ooh-hoo.”

“I sure did.” Ray wanted to appear a hardened criminal, but hip and friendly too. He pondered his exit line.

“You happen to know the Jesus prayer, wee-wee face?” the storyteller inquired.

Ray said nothing. His mouth seemed more insensate than usual.

“You just keep mumbling the ol’ Jesus prayer, and it will wreak a little miracle on you.”

“Wreak?” Ray dared. “I don’t … what is it?”

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You just keep mumbling it”—the storyteller rolled his eyes and waggled his tongue in a rude portrayal of an idiot—“and mumbling and mumbling and you’ll come to know that whatever happens to you is just something that happens. And what’s even better is, you’ll come to know that whatever you do to someone else is just something that happens too.”

The other man stared at Ray’s truck, absorbed in the flagrant breach of etiquette it represented.

“Adios, gentlemen,” Ray said.

They gaped at him. “Adios?” they cried in unison.

“Don’t die around here,” the storyteller suggested warmly. “It will be utterly misconstrued.”

Ray was already up and moving steadily through the bar, past the big-screen TV, now focused on
Recondita Armonia
in the dry pits. There wasn’t a mark on her.

E
ven with a considerable number of partying people, the house was in no way crowded. Carter supposed it was a bit large for his and Annabel’s needs, but they’d always lived in large houses. Anything under twelve thousand square feet Ginger had considered a hut. In their marriage’s prime, they had needed various rooms into which to retreat after quarrels had reached their towering crest. As a matter of fact, whenever they had bought a house (and they had moved frequently during Ginger’s spate on earth) one of their requirements had been rooms that served no other purpose. But though Carter had paid top dollar for this place, it lacked what could be considered a post-altercation crawl space. This pleased him, for any place that intimated a way of life other than the one he had shared with Ginger was a pearl beyond price.

He had toyed with various themes for this evening’s party but finally decided just to let the champagne flow and see what happened. He did suggest dressy. Carter loved dressy. He himself was never more relaxed than in a dinner jacket. There was something about a dinner jacket that was so relaxing, it just took you a million miles away.

Annabel was wearing her alpaca swing coat and her beaded chiffon skirt, two of her most fabulous things. Alice was wearing houndstooth slacks from Goodwill and a clean T-shirt with no railing message on it. Though Annabel had forced a little makeup on her, she’d rubbed most of it off. “You looked so sultry,” Annabel complained. “Well, maybe not sultry, but that cherry chocolate lipstick looked good on you. Effects can be achieved, Alice, you just have to experiment.” Corvus wore an unexceptional white sundress, but what she wore hardly elicited notice; it was the intrigue of her face, the sleekness of her dark hair. All three of them
were motherless. Annabel thought they should have more in common than they did.

There was the civilized, slapping sound of martinis being made.

Carter found himself enjoying the company of several young men. “Now, for Wagner,” he was saying, “opera was a political creed and spiritual gospel; its aims were revolution and salvation. He wanted to
transfigure
the lives of those who heard his work.” The fine young men were attentive to these sentiments.

About a hundred guests were present. Carter had found them here and there. Ginger had never liked his friends, so he’d gotten into the habit of making new ones readily. Back east, Ginger had actually been instrumental in getting one of his nicest friends deported to the horribly infelicitous country of his birth, a place where everyone spoke a different dialect and murderous fights broke out over the slightest misunderstanding. His friend had previously managed to inadvertently insult a number of his countrymen, and Carter feared that the homecoming had not been a pleasant one.

“You know,” one of the young men was saying to Carter, “Wolf House is only a few days’ drive from here, in Sonoma. If you’re a London fan, you have to see it. It was his dream house, in the works for years, and it burnt to the ground the night before he was to move in.”

“I
do
want to see Wolf House,” Carter said. He had an empathy for structural decay on a grand and brooding scale, generally a bad tendency in an architect. Hadn’t the disaster in this case been the architect’s fault—a great writer’s dream thwarted on the telluric level by a faulty venting design? It made him glad he had never truly practiced his profession.

Donald discreetly turned Carter’s attention to the rising moon, which had rolled past the mountain’s corner like an immense cruise ship.