The Quick & the Dead (6 page)

Carter slowly recalled an awkward cocktail hour.

“Dennis said it was no longer rosily pink and plumply wrinkled,” Ginger said.

Though that certainly didn’t sound like Dennis Beebee, Carter was reluctantly remembering how Dennis had thrown his tie over his shoulder one evening for a better look at something.

“He said it was wan and smooth. Dennis Beebee was the last man to look at my vulva,” Ginger said. “If anyone had foretold that at my birth, I would’ve laughed in his face. Nevertheless, he was a gentleman. It’s strange, the turns life takes.”

“Darling,” Carter said sleepily.

“Have you lost weight?” Ginger said after a while.

“I don’t think so. I’ve always been around a hundred and sixty.”

“You look better. You haven’t been losing weight for someone, have you?”

“Losing weight for someone?” He felt a chill run down his body, almost as though a hand was touching him.

“Your stomach looks much flatter. Carter, I swear, if I ever catch you in this bed with anybody, I’ll give you both heart attacks.”

Then she was gone. There was a peculiar smell. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was definitely not the smell of the promise of rain, a delightful smell and one he sorely missed out here. He looked at his little clock.

A
lice’s granny and poppa were discussing the superior hiding properties of certain paints when the cat from down the street seized a cactus wren studying a bit of broom straw on the patio. Zipper had carried off another victim.

“I hate that cat, I hate him!” her granny cried.

“Most black cats are noble and gentlemanly,” her poppa said. “Zipper is not.” As a young man, as a student, he’d kept cats and developed theories about them. Tortoiseshells were clever, docile, and tricky; whites were the fondest of society and tended to be delicate; black-and-whites did not trouble themselves unduly as to their duties as pets; and so on. Alice hoped he would not reiterate these opinions now. Alice made no distinctions, for she loathed all cats and had attempted to assassinate Zipper on several occasions.

“That Zipper makes me feel so old and helpless and foolish,” her granny said.

Alice patted her hand. Her granny did look particularly helpless and old at the moment. Alice was astonished that she’d thought for so long that her granny and poppa were her mommy and dad. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” she’d squealed thousands of times in her life, right up until the fateful afternoon she got her menses. She was practicing lassoing. She had a nice rope and was capturing a statue of Saint Francis pretty regularly at twenty feet. The statue was cement and the size of a small child, with three intact cement birds on his shoulder and one missing one. All that remained of the gone one were claw lines etched into the folds of his robe. This was Alice’s personal favorite.

She was coiling her rope when she felt it. It was like a roll of pennies sliding into her pants. Blood then coursed down her leg in a gay little
rivulet. She ran into the house to tell Mommy, and events proceeded smoothly enough at first. Adequate information was provided, and Daddy was sent to the drugstore to get the proper paraphernalia. Then her mommy told her that though it had happened rather sooner than she’d expected Alice was
a woman
now and it seemed the proper moment to tell her that the situation was this: they were not her mommy and daddy but her granny and poppa. He whom she thought was her brother was her dad. Alice’s mother had been a high school dropout who nonetheless had achieved some fame as Paula “The Flea” on a roller derby team called Hot Flash before her death in a small-plane crash.

The morning after this disclosure, her granny and poppa aged. The house grew small, cobwebs appeared, the plates crazed. Even Fury grew gray. Actually, Fury should have been the tip-off to the situation all along. The elderly always had dachshunds. Alice chastised herself for not having been more alert. But there had been nothing in her brother’s behavior toward her that seemed unusual. He ignored her as, she believed, was the custom. He never looked at her directly but at a point somewhat beside her, and Alice had merely assumed he suffered from an unfortunate astigmatism that would embarrass him to acknowledge. Basically, she found him boring and shiftless, though she was impressed that he had his own apartment. When she learned that he was her father, his significance to her suffered even further. Then, his girlfriend, who loved sailboarding and hang gliding, who always seemed to be wearing a harness or a helmet, became his wife. Alice was repelled by her gaudiness, her powerful thighs, her straps and belts, the lurid colors of her shiny clothes. The newlyweds went off to Oregon, where the best winds in the world were said to blow on some hidden lake. They were going to buy land and develop the place. Wind would be their only commodity.
Commodity?
Alice hated these people.

She bore no grudge, however, toward her granny and poppa. They had done the best to save her, to provide her with a cozy life—a miscalculation, of course, but Alice appreciated the gesture. Deceit had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into decrepitude. For two people who had led a life of deception for years, they seemed unanxious and remarkably trusting. But her brother was her father, and he didn’t even care! That was perverse. He avoided her
birth date, of course, but occasionally did send her greeting cards—unsigned, for he apparently feared liability. Alice hadn’t had her period since the last time she’d practiced roping on Saint Francis, and that had been almost five years ago. She was gangly as a willet now, a misanthrope and disbeliever.

“Don’t let that cat break your heart now, Mother,” her poppa said to her granny. The three of them gazed at the softly fluttering breast feathers, all that remained of the wren, stuck in place by the ooze of trauma. “Why don’t we make an excursion to the pet store and buy Fury some of those peanut butter cookies he fancies?” He turned to Alice and whispered, “Take her mind off that Zipper.”

Alice would like to get a wrist-lock slingshot with a magnum-thrust band and a sure grip handle, and nail that Zipper once and for all.

“I think Fury suffers from sensory overload in that place,” her granny said. “Too many radiant collars and educational toys. Too many bins of pig ears. Plus I think he was disturbed last time at seeing the corgi he thought he knew, waiting outside on that contraption.” The contraption being a padded board with wheels on which the recently paralyzed rear legs of the elderly corgi lay. Inside, his mistress was being persuaded to purchase a puppy, a
bridge companion
, so that when the corgi’s end came, she would be well on her way to solace.

“I don’t think he actually knew that poor dog,” Alice’s poppa said. “But Fury tends to worry, Mother, you know he does.”

They decided to leave him at home in his basket, the radio playing softly. Alice’s granny got out her big sun umbrella, and they walked the few blocks to the shopping mall. In the pet store window was a sign:

“Appalling,” Alice said.

“They’re expanding,” her poppa marveled. “This place has changed since just last week. Look, that little pie parlor next door has turned into a Just for Feet store.”

“They were such excellent pies,” her granny said.

“That billiard parlor wasn’t there before either, was it?” her poppa said. “Can’t remember
what
was there, in fact.”

“Care to shoot some pool?” her granny challenged.

“I wouldn’t mind a little four-ball carom,” her poppa said. “A little four-ball never hurt anybody.” He winked at Alice. “Keeping her mind off Zipper,” he said. They vanished into the merry gloom of the pool hall.

Alice wandered around to the back of the pet shop. She really didn’t mean to enter, she just pressed against one of the doors and it gave a little. A flimsy chain dropped between the door and the jamb, and she popped it easily.

It was warm inside. She heard some rustling and chirping, the whistling hiss of the aquariums’ aerators. This is Alice your savior, she thought. She smacked her knee painfully against a grooming table. Most of the cages were without residents, but somehow in an unpromising way. Had the proprietors sold all their captives, or had they just fled the city, one step ahead of their creditors at the breeding farms and puppy mills? The bins of barbecue-flavored pigs’ ears remained. Alice didn’t think Fury enjoyed those things at all, but rather hid them, sensitive as he was.

She filled up a shopping cart with some simpler life forms—lizards and toads, snakes and mice—and rolled it right back out through the door she’d popped. Society, as a rule, did not trouble anyone pushing a shopping cart. The further a cart was taken from the store where it belonged, the more deference was paid to the possibly unstable individual who had taken charge of it. Alice wanted to take the creatures back to her room and talk to them—debrief them, as it were—but when she drew near the house she saw that her granny and poppa had returned, pool playing having been less larky than they’d hoped. Alice took her refugees to a nearby wash instead and gravely liberated them, though they seemed to have little instinct for freedom. They had been considered food for too long and had undoubtedly seen too much.

I
’ve been thinking a lot about that last meal I had, Carter.”

“I never went back there,” he said firmly.

“That was surimi I ate, wasn’t it. Why on earth did you let me eat surimi?”

“You didn’t want to order what I ordered, darling. You never would.”

“That’s because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake. I caught on to that trick early in our marriage, Carter.”

“I don’t know what surimi is, Ginger.”

“It’s a fish paste, a disgusting fish paste that’s then colored and fluffed up to make simulated seafood like simulated crab.”

“Did you learn about it there?”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Darling, I’m
not
—”

“You just pick information up here, in the course of things. I’ve been speaking to a fisherman.”

“Not IXOUS himself!”

“Don’t show off.”

“IXOUS, darling. IXOUS! This is stupendous. Jesus Christ God’s Son. The Savior!”

“I hate it when you show off that tiresome St. George’s education.”

“But this means that things fall into place after all. Why, this is good news indeed!”

“I don’t know what you’re so thrilled about,” Ginger said. “This individual is from Louisiana. He only fished for sport. He was a real estate broker, one of those indefatigable, extroverted risk takers who fished to relax.”

“That really got my heart to pounding,” Carter admitted.

“He told me a little story. Sensitive men don’t have to be violets, Carter. He had invented this little clamplike grill, but without any of those grill thingies on it, and when he caught a fish, he’d take it off the hook and put it in this device and he’d fillet it right there. Slice, flip over, slice. Two swift, economical movements and then back into the water with what was left of the fish. He never thought a thing about it, and neither did anyone else.”

Whoa, Carter thought to his heart, which seemed determined to escape from his chest’s ribbed stall.

“Except this one time, the fish just stayed there right by the boat, breathing through its gills and moving its tail even though it was just bones.” Ginger paused. “And it looked at him.”

“Looked?” Carter said.

“Yes, just stayed there and looked.”

“What kind of fish was it?”

“A redfish, I think he said.”

“Did it say anything?”

“Of course not. It just looked at him for the longest time. And then it sank from sight.”

Carter could not hide his disappointment. Ginger was never going to get anywhere, wherever she was, if she just sat around shooting the breeze with some guy from Louisiana of all places. Sportsman’s Paradise.

“Did he continue to fish after this incident?” Carter asked sourly.

“Not so much after that,” Ginger said dreamily. But then she glared at Carter. “I don’t know why I try to share anything with you, since you always miss the point. It wasn’t an
incident
. It was a
moment
, a
meaningful
moment that changed his life.”

“I don’t mean to be crude, Ginger, but he’s dead now, isn’t he? His existence has been superannuated, right along with his meaningful moments.”

“Don’t think you’re beyond being dead, Carter. You’re not beyond being dead, not by a long shot.”

“You know where I think you are, darling? I think you’re in Purgatory!”

“Oh, for Chrissakes,” she said crossly.

“Is there a mountain there? And a kindly curriculum?” Dante flooded thrillingly back. Dante Alighieri! And the room where Romance Languages was taught at St. George’s; the smell of floor wax and the brightness of the boys’ white shirts, light rippling against the walls and the snow falling, vanishing into the sea.

“You’re back in that second-rate prep school, aren’t you?” Ginger said. “Let me tell you what it’s like here. I’ll give you just a hint. If we see an ant heap, we don’t think of it as an ant heap.”

“No?”

“It’s not an ant heap at all. That’s the way it is here. It takes some getting used to.”

Ginger was preparing to go. Carter could feel the grotesque gathering of resources this always entailed.

“I’ll give you another hint too, Mr. Clueless,” she said. “There isn’t any mountain.”

A
lice couldn’t decide between the wrist-lock slingshot and a BB air pistol. The latter would be more accurate at a distance, but she didn’t want to leave a lot of spent ammunition all over the place. Something might eat it, a tortoise or a quail, so she settled on the slingshot. It’s a beginning, she told Annabel. But it took her longer than she expected to master the weapon.

Annabel said, “I think maybe you shouldn’t go after the ones wearing those little warning bells on their collars.”