The Quick & the Dead (21 page)

“I think you can only do bad things,” Corvus said, “if you forget you’re going to die.”

“Oh,” Annabel said. Corvus made her nervous. How fast were they going, anyway? The Dodge’s speedometer was broken, as well as the gas gauge. The truck was a death trap, and this hair, this Tommy’s hair, was always floating around inside. I would have this vacuumed, she thought, in the most thorough way.

“Remembering you’re going to die lets you do bad things,” Alice said. “Besides, what we did wasn’t bad. We revived him. Lying there with that poor tormented thing all wrapped around him, he could’ve suffocated.” She had seen her first bighorn, but then again, she hadn’t.

Corvus’s hands, green in the dashboard’s light, purled across the wheel. The saguaros waved them on, but at a four-way stop, they paused. Music screamed from a car to the left.
Liar fuckin liar ah’m gonna squash you like an insect
. The car sped off to the horrid gaieties of town.

“We’re about to reenter,” Corvus said, “the steak and lobster world.”

“I used to love four-way stops as a little kid,” Alice said. “They just fascinated me. I’d kneel in the backseat in awe. I thought it was proof that adults knew what they were doing.”

“We should have listened to him more,” Corvus said. “He was talking in some lost language.”

“I didn’t hear him say much of anything,” Alice said. “As an experiment, he wasn’t very complex.”

“As experiments, we’re all complex,” Corvus said.

Annabel did not consider herself an experiment. She was Annabel née Vineyard, and she was going to do her best to pretend that this year, when it was over, had never occurred.

“Because we’re made for both this life and another one,” Corvus said. “At the same time we have to regard as one this life, the next life, and the life between.”

“The life between?” Annabel exclaimed. “Is that like a so-called life?” That’s where I am, she thought. They passed a large billboard advertising vasectomy reversal services.

“That guy wasn’t up to this kind of thinking,” Alice said.

Who is? Annabel thought.

They pulled into a service station. Corvus gassed up the truck while Alice cleaned the windshield. She liked the overlapping, dissolving lines the squeegee made. Annabel went inside and looked at the magazines.
Your Prom
looked fascinating. She took it over to the checkout line and stood behind a man with an immense fistula on the back of his neck. It had a little black hole in the center of it as though he were in the habit of trying to locate it with a pin or a pen. What if eternity was like this? Standing behind a huge fistula in an unmoving checkout line with the last copy of
Your Prom
magazine. She moved over to the other line, but here the customer ahead of her was wearing what appeared to be one of her mother’s suits. She was almost absolutely sure it was her mother’s suit, the cranberry-colored one with the big buttons. The woman was much too large for the suit.

Annabel hurried outside. Dozens of people were gathered beneath the moth-crazed lights, smoking and idly staring. Everything was so busy and ugly, Annabel thought, so
inconclusive
. She saw Corvus and Alice in the truck, gazing out the windshield at the roiling backdrop. Of course Alice hadn’t cleaned the glass completely, she’d missed whole areas as she always did.

Annabel squeezed in beside them on the truck’s bench seat as some boys walked by and squinted at them appraisingly. What if the three of them ran into that boy again, Annabel wondered, the one they’d tied up? He didn’t seem the kind of boy who would hold a grudge, who’d report or identify them or anything, but it would still be awkward. What would anyone
say
? Had Alice foreseen such a contingency? No, of course not. She didn’t know about Alice—or even about Corvus, who in her opinion had been rendered practically abnormal by sorrow—but if she ever saw that boy again, she would just
die
.

H
ickey was baby-sitting his own child, Mallick, which means “king.” That had been Loretta’s idea, he’d had nothing to say about it; she’d gotten to the birth certificate form first, and after seventy-two hours any changes cost fifty bucks, so Mallick it was. The kid was almost two years old now, but Hickey still hadn’t adjusted to the name and didn’t think he ever would. King, for Chrissakes. He and the kid were driving around after supper. They’d been bacheloring it for three days now, Loretta being off in Minnesota at a wolf howl.

“It’s so beautiful, Hickey,” she’d said when she called to tell him what time to pick her up at the airport. “Hundreds of people all out there silent beneath the stars, you can hear a pin drop, and then the wolves howl and when they’re through, everyone cries, ‘Thank you, thank you!’ and we all applaud. The applause is just thunderous. It’s thrilling.”

He didn’t want to hear about it. He and King had pointedly not been invited on this expedition. Every four months Loretta would leave them for a weekend and go off and do some damn thing involving crowds. Loretta loved crowds. Hickey was more solitary by nature, as he believed was King, with whom, as yet, he had forged no bond.

King sat in his padded car seat studying the scenery as though he found it vaguely inadmissible. Even dressed in lumpish toddler clothes, he had an annoyingly aristocratic air about him. Sometimes Hickey meanly called him Miss Me, which perturbed King not at all.

Also in the car this evening, holding marijuana smoke carefully in his lungs, was Hickey’s friend Kevin, whose lady had left him a week before.

“It was a simple thing,” Kevin had told him. “You know how it started? It started she looks at me one morning, I’m having my beer, and she says, ‘You know how you spell woman, Kevin? It’s “w-o-m-y-n.” That’s how
you spell woman, you lazy ugly worthless freak.’ And she was gone. She’d always wanted to open a bakery in Belize, and I suspect she’s down there this very moment. I used to say to her, ‘What kind of ambition is that, running a bakery in Belize? I have more ambition than that.’ ”

Kevin had once published a book of saguaro photographs in which the cacti said funny things befitting their incongruent natures. It was something you’d read sitting on the can. Then he’d published a sequel in which they said additional funny things, but this hadn’t proved as successful. Hickey told him he was belaboring the concept.

“Sometimes I wish Loretta would just leave for good,” Hickey said, “instead of this once-every-four-months thing. Then I could get on with my life.” He looked at his son and nodded significantly. King ignored him.

“You’d miss her if it was permanent. I miss my lady’s sweet buns bad. Maybe I should go down there, get a job in a dive shop, fill air tanks or something. Work my way back into her affection.”

“That’s dangerous work,” Hickey said. “What if you fucked up and somebody’s down there at seventy feet sucking bad air? You’d get sued.” Hickey feared the legal process although he’d never been in a courtroom, never even been called for jury duty. But he had courtroom dreams in which he stood before a robed female who was about to disclose something to him in catastrophic detail.

“You’ve got to know the
kairos
, Hickey,” Kevin said somberly. He extinguished the roach stub with his fingers and swallowed it.

“What the hell is that?” Hickey said.

“Opportunity. You’ve got to know when opportunity presents itself. You’ve got to be able to recognize it. Like I saw opportunity in these cactus once. I saw economic possibilities, whereas most people wouldn’t necessarily. Now I hate them.”

“I hate ’em, too,” Hickey said. “What the hell time is it, do you know?”

“Time is a provisional thing,” Kevin said. “Hours are an opportunity for human action, nothing more. Do you mind if I light up another joint?”

“Just don’t blow it on King. His mother’ll smell it.”

“Let’s stop and get out,” Kevin said. “What say, King, you talkin’ yet?”

“Nah, he’s not talking. I was trying to get him to start while Loretta
was away—would’ve made her feel bad, teach her she just can’t take off like she does because things happen, little milestones that come but once.”

They passed a
descanso
, a white wooden cross wreathed with faded ribbon, the name of the unlucky decedent spelled out in nails. King, clutching a mouthed rusk in one small hand, gave it a furry look. Hickey downshifted and continued until it was out of sight before stopping. The men got out, but King sat firm.

“Has he smiled yet?” Kevin asked.

“Well, yeah. But he don’t smile much,” Hickey admitted.

“Good-looking boy, though,” Kevin said doubtfully. They passed the joint back and forth. Two shallow arroyos veered down on them in a green V. He wasn’t about to ask if he and Loretta had ever thought of having King checked out. Hickey seemed in a bad mood. And he was in a bad mood too. The saguaros were looking at him as though he cut quite the comic figure out there. It used to be he felt intimate with the giant cacti when he smoked, but now he just wanted to fuck the loony things over. And they were so goddamn big, which Kevin had never found amusing, sensitive as he was to being five feet five and three-quarters without the augmenting lifts in his cowboy boots. When his girlfriend had still been fond of him, she had reassured him by saying that Kant had been only five feet tall and nonetheless a large and successful thinker. Kevin had checked out a synopsis of the shrimp philosopher’s work from the Bookmobile, but little Immanuel seemed pretty dated to him, as well as being confused, a waffler, in fact. That is, did he believe in God, personal freedom, and immortality, or not?

The saguaros, their arms upraised in mock horror, looked as if they were about to fall over from laughing at him.

“Who said paranoia is having all the facts?”

“Hell if I know.” Hickey was brooding about the sort of relationship he and King would have when his son grew up. King might try to kill him; he could see them squaring off in the messy living room. Or King wouldn’t make the attempt himself, he’d think he was too damn smart for that, he’d
hire
someone to slip into his own father’s home in the middle of the night to dispatch him. Loretta wouldn’t be there, of
course. She’d be conveniently absent in some crowd, thousands of witnesses attesting to her presence, and King would have his flunky alibiers lined up, too; but Hickey wasn’t going to allow this to happen, no he wasn’t. He’d survive, and then he and King would have themselves a little talk.

“Somebody said it,” Kevin said.

Then again, maybe he and King would never have their little talk. It could happen. And his life would just be Endure and Evade, over and over. That would be the rhythm of his years. That would be the judgment.

In the truck King sat more or less contentedly, though missing the throaty burble of his father’s Floatmaster muffler—a pleasure that, he knew from experience, would recur once they were on the road again. The sound of the Floatmaster was to King the anthem of the gods.

“You got your shotgun?” Kevin inquired.

“ ’Course. Got both of ’em.”

“Let’s shoot up some saguaros. Look at the arms on that one.” He pointed to a configuration that was annoyingly cosmic.

“Let’s make ’er dance,” Hickey agreed glumly. He went to the truck and removed the guns from beneath a Mexican blanket behind the seats. He hadn’t shot up a sag for some time. “We got to move out a ways. King don’t like loud noise.”

“He’s a sensitive, good-looking boy but you don’t want him getting too sensitive,” Kevin advised.

“Sometimes I think King and I don’t share a common atmosphere,” Hickey said, heartfelt. “And Loretta encourages that.”

“Paranoia’s having all the facts,” Kevin said, sincere. He’d like to carve that on his goddamn hearthstone.

Shooting felt good. Joy consists in this, after all, the increase of one’s power. They walked as though reconnoitering dangerous territory, firing, the green cortex of the cacti spraying like splashed water through the air. Kevin chewed off an enormous branching arm with a half dozen shots and it crashed, wetly splintering, on the ground.

“One of these damn things can kill a man if it falls on him,” Kevin said.

Hickey expressed indignation, although in fact he was feeling better,
happy even. The air felt good out here, sort of supple and kind, and he was happy to get away from King’s watchful supereminent gaze. He popped some chain-fruit cholla.

Kevin was feeling better too. He lightly hammered a cactus that appeared to be appealing comically for pardon, but it was just fooling around, it was saying, “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” which was why Kevin had had trouble selling his second edition of
Cactus Talk
. It all sounded like exceedingly familiar shit.

A plane flew high above them in the perfect sky—Loretta’s plane, no doubt, right on time, dropping down from the north. After Hickey picked her up at the airport, she would want to be taken out to dinner for Indian food from India, a place where people shat and bathed in the same river and worshiped cows. She would have a little pimple on her nose, which always happened when she traveled. She would talk about the wonderful people she’d met. People were nothing special. Didn’t she realize there were five and a half billion people in the world, how could any one of them be special? Think about it, Loretta, for Chrissakes! He hated Indian food. Endure, evade, Hickey mused, firing. He and Kevin were walking farther and farther from the truck and tiny judgmental King. Since their targets weren’t moving at all, they were delighted to see an object fluttering and seething toward them in the twilight. Hickey really couldn’t tell what it was. All push and sprawl, it was so smudged that he couldn’t make the damned thing out. He couldn’t even tell if it was humping toward them or sidling away.

“How do you interpret that, Kevin?” he yelled. But Kevin was firing, having already interpreted it as something inanimate but in motion, inanimate but confident in its effortless ability to succeed without ever having to be alive, an ability that perturbed Kevin. He emptied his shotgun under the pretext of a duty honorably discharged. And Hickey fired too. He had the better gun—his daddy’s, with the shaggy-legged hawk in full plummet etched upon the breach.