The Quick & the Dead (35 page)

“That’s the kind of customer we like,” Stumpp said distastefully. This little twit Cedric was uncomfortably familiar. So much in life was similar, remindful of something else. Wanted more more. Because nothing’s there. No. Next to nothing, munificently robed. Even worse.

“I presume Cedric’s not a friend of yours,” Stumpp said.

“I don’t have friends,” Emily said.

“Ahhh,” he said.

“I have to be careful concerning people I don’t like. I didn’t like someone and I wasn’t even concentrating and something bad happened to him. I have to be extremely careful.”

“Well, that’s very responsible of you,” Stumpp said. “Still, I guess I’d better watch out. In case you forget to forget your dislikes, as it were.”

“You maybe better had,” Emily said. “So do I have your assurance that you’ll shut this place down?”

“Shut it down?” Stumpp looked at her tolerantly and shifted his shoulders inside his old oiled hunting jacket. The relationship with his animals was the only true connection he had ever known. He had been the instrument in a grave transaction. The primary instrument. Yet he hated the memories. Memory in man different, not so noble. First memory, first loss. All downhill thereafter. “I love my animals,” he said. This felt to him somewhat inadequate.

Emily scowled at him.

“You’d better leave now,” Stumpp said. “You’re trespassing, you know.” He pointed to a small pink bicycle flung down in the middle of
the parking lot. It looked ridiculous and certainly seemed incongruous with the likes of Emily Bliss Pickless. “That must be yours.”

“It is my vehicle of choice, yes, for the present anyway.”

She really was an annoying little runt. Hers would not be a profitable or particularly satisfying life. “What’s your favorite wild animal?” he asked. “What’s the wildest animal you’ve ever seen?” He just wanted to needle her. She probably hadn’t been anywhere or seen anything.

Emily twirled the sign and after a moment said, “A crow.”

“A crow!” Stumpp laughed more loudly than he’d intended. He had shot so many crows, hundred and hundreds in his childhood alone. Ducks were no brighter than a knot of wood, but crows were sort of complex. Oh, those hecatombdays in the ragged swampy burnt-over woods of his youth! He seemed to possess a magic gun and could wander and kill at will in the dear old swamp next to his parents’ simple home. And he had discovered something for himself in that lonely skeletal swamp: that it was more fun to wound a crow than to kill it, because then you could hear it calling out to the rest of the flock in an evangelical screech. Young Stumpp had been fascinated by the production an injured crow could make of its situation. Even now the sound remembered sent a lurchy thrill through his belly, the calls from the downed one and the answers from the rest of them, the still whole ones, beating heavily back and forth in the brown sulfurous emissions from the paper companies. He could almost taste the tang of that swampy air right here in his own desert parking lot and hear the calls of the heavily beating flock, sorrowing and apologizing and making plans for some other time. Time. He realized that crows had always reminded him of time, dark time. He gazed at the backs of his hands, at the plummy dark repellent veins.

“You’re very misguided,” Stumpp said.

“If you’re kind to a crow, you’ll receive a gift,” the child said.

“I wouldn’t want a gift from a crow,” he said loudly. “God knows what you’d be getting. I’d say, ‘No thanks, you black bugger.’ ”

“That’s racist specieism,” Emily said with some difficulty.

Stumpp looked at her, alarmed. “You’ve lost your childhood, haven’t you? Smash-and-trash bastards have stolen it. Left-wing vegetarian freaks.” Once more he was attacked by the impulse to snatch her up, take her under his wing as it were.

In his remembered swamp he once saw a flock of crows attack and kill one of their own. He didn’t have his gun that day—it had been taken away as punishment for some failure on his part that he’d forgotten but that was undoubtedly hygienic or academic—and, idly wandering, he had come across the drama in some broken oaks. The attacked crow had submitted to them, hadn’t tried to flee, and after not too long a time—young Stumpp being witness from start to finish—the torn, bloody, practically decapitated crow had fallen, and the muttering flock had vanished into the haze like black stones cast into water. What a judgment that had been! A judgment to fit a great crime, made by great mad wheeling clerics, a force, an incomprehensible damning intelligence. A formal sentencing made in the ruined air over a rotting landscape. His happy acts of extermination seemed but a happy game compared to this.

He looked at his old wattled hands and stuffed them into his pockets.

The child had walked over to the bicycle and was struggling to right it. “On further consideration, you shouldn’t be permitted to just pedal off,” Stumpp said. “It’s getting dark, it’s late.”

“I’ve gone everywhere on this bicycle,” Emily said, “though it’s true I don’t like it much. I’m not sentimental about it or anything. It’s functional.” She looked at it impassively. “Seven thousand miles,” she said.

“Certainly not!” Stumpp exclaimed. “Impossible!”

“I’ve been around,” Emily said.

“But I’ve never seen you around. And I know this city well. And I’ve never seen you in the museum, either, with your
colleagues
.” Surely he would have remarked upon this phenomenon to himself, this phenomenon in passing.

“Do you have a mother?” Emily asked. She was on the bicycle, moving it forward a rotation or two, then backward, barely maintaining a balance. It made him nervous looking at her. She didn’t look as though she knew how to ride at all.

“Of course I did,” Stumpp said.

“Did she ever want you to pretend you were retarded so she could jump a line, say, at the bank or the grocery store?”

“What?”

“It’s fun. You get to whirl, you get to gibber, I was just wondering if we had anything in common.”

“She sounds unfit, your mother.”

“She just doesn’t like lines. Hates ’em.”

A truck tore by on the road above them, its immense length rimmed in lights, with a cargo of acids or blood or veal calves. A cargo of caskets or pirated videos and perfumes, of those dolls that were the technological sensation of the coming season, that would spit at a child if their circuitry determined that not enough attention was being paid to it. The driver was smoking, tuned in to the libertarian station, half asleep.

“You’ll be crushed out there,” Stumpp said. “I’m driving you home tonight. Hate me if you wish.” He grasped the handlebars and began towing her toward his limo. The sign almost clipped him on the head. That word “Visiting” really galled him. “Steady there,” he said.

The doors floated softly open. Emily placed the sign inside and threw her faithful bicycle in without ceremony. “Where’s the driver?”

“I like to drive it myself.”

“These things are supposed to have drivers. That’s why people have them. Does it have dual air bags?”

Poor tyke, Stumpp thought. Everything she was learning was beside the point, though everything anyone learned proved to be beside the point. How false and full of pretext is all that we accomplish. Little Pickless made him dwell on the undwellable.

“I’ve got air bags in here for twelve people.” Car would float away like a zeppelin if they started to go off.

“Do you know twelve people?”

“I do not,” Stumpp said.

“I didn’t think so. I’m going to sit in the back.”

“Lovely,” Stumpp said.

“Can a person make tea back here?”

“They can, actually.”

“This is very nice.”

Gratitude flooded Stumpp’s tired heart. Little precursor. Wee mahout. Form the mover of all things. Time mixed up, almost flew right past, the whole shebang. No need for time to be dark, could be bright, transcendent. Pickless, was it …

A
lice,” Carter said, “how much would you charge to kill Ginger for me?”

This was a strenuous request, and Alice was flattered. She would waive all fees for Mr. Vineyard, who’d been awfully nice to her. But Alice was a realist; murder, in this case was out of the question. “You want me to kill your wife?”

“It would be wonderful.”

“I really think that’s beyond me, Mr. Vineyard.”

“You have the heart of an anarchist. I can’t imagine where else to turn.”

“But that would be awful, Mr. Vineyard. If you could kill a dead person, it would be like killing something really rare and special, like the first of its kind or something.”

“Ginger is no unicorn, Alice.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin, quite frankly, Mr. Vineyard.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Carter said. “It has certain connotations for me, I’m afraid.” He was so discouraged. He couldn’t discuss Ginger with Donald anymore. Donald wanted to go on to other things, and Carter couldn’t blame him. He was beginning to doze off when Carter went on about Ginger. He would just slip right off to sleep, the most innocent boy in the world. And there Carter would be, watching him, enchanted, still talking, talking interminably, uncontrollably, about the perverse, unholy demands of Ginger. Donald was becoming disenchanted with him in his sleepy, hospitable, uncomplicated way. Donald was beginning to think he was nuts.

“Think with me, Alice!” he cried. “Think with me! What can be done?
You’re a thoughtful girl, a daring, irreverent girl. It would be a remarkable achievement.”

“I could be Girl of the Year,” Alice said gravely.

“At the very least!”

“It’s against the laws of nature, Mr. V.”

“People have done worse to nature, far worse. You of all people are aware of the perniciousness of humankind’s presence on Earth.”

Someone was listening to her! Or at least overhearing her as she wedged her warnings about ecological collapse into the most benign conversations. “The impending extinction spasm is going to produce a cataclysmic setback to life’s abundance and diversity,” she mumbled hopefully.

Carter looked at her blankly. There was a wafer of connection here. The dead are coming back. And it had to do with the diminishment of everything else. Like happiness. It was not just millennial thinking. It was Ginger. Perhaps there were other cases. The dead are coming back. Or not going away. Whatever.

“Your wife has got to be just in your mind,” Alice said.

“Not my wife anymore,” Carter protested. “Please, at the very least—”

“I mean, you don’t even go into your room now, do you? I see you sleeping in the living room.”

“Sometimes I go over to the Hilton,” Carter admitted.

“The Hilton! They poison coyotes at the Hilton! They have the ones made of bronze in the lobby and then they kill the real ones on their stupid golf course!”

“I’ll speak to them about it. Alice, dear, we’re veering off track here.” It was a lucent night, of a brilliance he was beginning to loathe. In fact, it was night
again;
the days just kept collapsing into one another. He had come back to pick up some shirts and see Annabel, but where was Annabel? He had estranged himself from Annabel with his … his instability. He had no idea where Donald was. He might be out on a
date
for all Carter knew. An immense encephalitic moon hung above them all, and it seemed an appropriate moment to plot the murder of someone dead, it just did. Weren’t those stars up there dead? And they kept twinkling away, didn’t even know it. There might be some foundation for Ginger’s claim after all.

“Does she ever show up anywhere other than your room?” Alice asked.

“Never at the Hilton. I think the Hilton confuses her. They’ve got five hundred rooms over there, you know. Two hundred suites.”

“Well, where is she now?”

“God knows,” Carter shuddered.

“She’s in your mind,” Alice persisted.

“No, no, only to the extent that we’re discussing her. You know how that works.”

Alice didn’t. Her own thoughts were like a masked, hoarsely babbling mob, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“So what does she want from you?”

“She wants me to
die
! She wants me to share death with her!” She had always wanted to share her problems with him, her weight, her menses, the fading away of her menses, her crushes on men … now this. She was relentless.

“Everybody knows you can’t share that,” Alice said. “Maybe you only think she wants that. She probably wants something else.”

“But what would that be? There isn’t anything else.”

“Some tiny thing, maybe,” Alice said. “Microscopic. Infinitesimal.” There was, of course, something horrible about the infinitesimal.

“No, no, she wants me to join her and go on as though nothing happened. She’s getting more—maybe you’re right in part. At first it was like motes, but—”

“Motes?”

“Yes, motes, they didn’t add up at first. The first few nights she appeared, it was all sort of ambiguous.” Maybe if he’d hired a band to play during the cremation; that’s what the Buddhists did, according to Donald. But the crematorium was in an industrial park! And the undertaker said it would take three hours. No exceptions. It had always taken three hours, it would forever take three hours, which sort of ruled out a normal band. The undertaker, an unhappy man as he had never realized his dream of being a Navy SEAL, having an unreliable stomach, was not sensitive but nonetheless seemed to be functioning intuitively with the
three
business, for didn’t three symbolize spiritual synthesis? Didn’t it solve the problem posed by that infernal dualism? Three was
a remarkable figure for the situation, Carter remembered thinking even at the time. He had never considered going to the industrial park as an observer for those three hours. He had passed the wretched plot on the highway many, many times; Ginger, too, for that matter. One building made velvet, another corrugated cardboard, another paint. One place had been busted for churning out fake military medals. Another, he thought he’d heard once, rendered horses. Oversized American flags flying, chained dogs everywhere, the hulk of bulldozed trees. Still, maybe if he’d had a band—a band might have been just the thing to occupy Ginger’s mind during the difficult transition.