The Quick & the Dead (7 page)

“Bells don’t make any difference,” Alice said.

“But it shows the owner’s trying to be considerate,” Annabel said.

Alice had a little folding shovel she carried in case her efforts were successful. Quickly the cat would disappear down a hole in the desert.

“Those signs on the phone poles are kind of getting to me, too,” Annabel said. “Like Tina.”

Tina is a member of the family. Please help!

“And Poco Bueno Trouble.”

Poco Bueno Trouble needs his medicine!

“I don’t know you very well, Alice, but I think killing a cat would be beneath you in many ways.”

“Progressive social theories are beginning to consider murder a matter of little concern,” Alice said. “Anyway, cats are false figures. People have them around so they don’t have to address real animals.”

“But a dog wouldn’t be a real animal then either. What do you mean?”

They were out at Marquise School, and Alice was showing Annabel around. On a weekend afternoon, the place resembled a chic but deserted shopping center. There were fountain sculptures by gifted students, low, tasteful adobe buildings, old cottonwood and olive trees.

“If you love animals, you’ve got to love all animals,” Annabel said stubbornly. “I had a dream last night, and you were in love with an animal. You introduced me to him. He was … well, he looked like a person, but I
knew
. Plus you said … I mean, you admitted it. I wasn’t happy for you, but I pretended to be. Then I woke up.”

“In my room I have a picture of a woman trysting with an octopus in a hotel room. Actually, it’s more like a squid. A cross between the two. It’s a great picture. The squid is sort of sitting in a chair, comforting her. Light streams through the window across the unmade bed.”

“There’s no picture like that,” Annabel said.

“I look at it and think, Women are capable of anything.”

“A woman thought that up, you mean,” Annabel said. She couldn’t believe this school didn’t have boys, that she’d be going to a school without boys. Boys were nice, boys were normal. Alice was clearly not normal, even though she was, at present, all Annabel had—not counting Corvus, whom Annabel found difficult to think of as a friend, despite the fact that the three of them were frequently together, making up, in Alice’s phrase, a not quite harmless-looking group. That was typical of Alice, wanting to appear not quite harmless. Annabel felt she had some insight into Alice; she wouldn’t want much more. By the time school began, Annabel was hopeful that they would have gone their separate ways. She would meet new girls and make new friends, and she would nod pleasantly at Alice when she passed her in the hall. Her new friends would consider Alice unwaxed, uncombed, and unpleasantly intense, but Annabel would be kind. She would say, “Well, you know the situation at home is really quite strange” or “She actually is quite smart.”

She would quietly defend Alice, but she would no longer associate with her. It would be such a relief to escape Alice’s scrutiny. You couldn’t even show her a simple catalog. Annabel had been ordering stunning stuff from this place in Idaho—cobalt-and-brown mustang twirling skirts and zigzag summer storm vests and liquid necklaces, all made possible by one or another of Carter’s credit cards—and Alice hated the little catalog, was practically apoplectic over the manatee note cubes and the fake petroglyph rocks in velveteen pouches and the enameled plastic butterfly magnets, becoming particularly enraged over a photograph of a
wolf offered for, Annabel thought, the quite reasonable price of seventy-five dollars.

“Listen to this!” Alice said. “ ‘Half-hidden yet clearly curious, the wolf gazes out from the framed, double-matted print intently, forever watching from the woods. Protected behind clear acrylic.’ Protected behind clear acrylic! That’s the only place it is protected. Everywhere else it’s trapped and poisoned and shot from planes and snowmobiles.”

“These earrings on the next page are cute,” Annabel said. “Don’t you think they’re—”

“This is despicable.”

“But it’s not. Look. See, right over the eight hundred number it says they give a portion of their profits for wildlife habitat preservation and that they’d like to give to all the worthy causes. See, right here?”

“You are not saving the earth by buying lizard earrings. And what does this mean? ‘This whimsical duo in sterling silver has a mirthful attitude that’s positively contagious.’ What does that mean!”

“Why does it have to mean anything?” Annabel asked, pleased with the reasonableness of her retort. You just had to be sensible with Alice.

A lizard darted past, part of another lizard dangling from its mouth. It was all so bright and violent out here. Nothing had any subtlety, not even the light. “Alice?” Annabel called. “Where are you?” For, while she had been momentarily distracted by the cannibalistic ingestion in progress, Alice had vanished somewhere with that awful slingshot. The wind fluttered dryly at Annabel’s face. She examined her toenails. They were perfect.

Walking, she passed through one courtyard into another. The school had a courtyard for each student, practically. It was ridiculous. Then she was in a sort of amphitheater that was set apart by two dozen or so ragged cypresses. Alice had said that they put on a lot of plays at Marquise. Annabel would try out for all the plays for she liked the dramatic arts. She saw a woman threading a rather uncertain passage among the stone benches. She was wearing a red dress and appeared to be very pregnant. She was too far away to say hi to, otherwise Annabel certainly would have said hi. She’d say, Oh, you’re going to have a baby! Annabel wanted to have children, lots and lots of children. Eventually, of course.
Maybe she could have quadruplets. But there had to be something wrong with you first, didn’t there? You couldn’t have quadruplets all on your own; a lot of pharmaceutical assistance and scientific intervention was required. Dishes, there were those special kinds of dishes …

The woman hadn’t noticed Annabel. Her head was lowered, and she was just going back and forth around the benches as though she were trying to flow around them in a terribly natural way. Annabel was now very much hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary to say hi. If the woman started to have her baby and a foot or an arm started coming out, Annabel wouldn’t know what to do. The woman continued to steer her big body around the benches. What if she were a homeless person and lived here? Annabel had never gone in for the fad of caring for the homeless, although Alice said there was a great deal to learn from them in the way of resourcefulness. They would come into Green Palms, the local nursing home, at lunchtime and pretend to be visitors helping their loved ones eat lunch and instead would eat the lunch themselves. The poor old souls would think they’d had their nourishment anyway. Could one be
too
resourceful? Annabel wondered. But this woman wasn’t carrying cardboard. Didn’t they always have cardboard with them? There wasn’t a scrap of cardboard in sight.

The woman abruptly stopped and turned in Annabel’s direction. Annabel quickly retreated, hurrying back to the succession of maddening courtyards. She found Alice sitting by a coyote sculpture, holding a bunch of weeds. A plaque explained that the sculpture had been made by Samantha Melby, class of 1997, from materials found in a nontoxic landfill. It was awfully good for someone their age, Annabel thought. This girl had a future.

“Do you know Samantha Melby?” she asked.

“Are you kidding?” Alice said. Samantha Melby had been voted by her classmates Most Likely to Succeed, whereas Alice had been nominated as most likely to be in charge of collecting bird carcasses on the shores of the Salton Sea.

Upon further inspection, Annabel saw that several condoms were stuck to the coyote’s thrown-back head. The poor artist. Poor Samantha Melby. That was the problem with public art, it risked great ridicule.

“What are those?” she asked Alice, pointing at the weeds.

“I’m taking them back to look them up in my weed book.”

Annabel smiled glassily at her. Sometimes Alice was like a child. She acted like a child and spoke like a child, and one could treat her as affably and falsely as a child.

“I like herbs,” Annabel said. Her father had started an herb garden with the help of his new yard boy, Donald. Herbs weren’t messy; they were contained in sunny little pots.

“They’re okay,” Alice granted. “There was that herb that Odysseus took to protect him from Circe’s magic. It saved him from her enchantments while everybody else got turned into swine.”

Annabel felt her brow wrinkling. “God, Alice, that was so long ago. It didn’t even happen anyway, did it?”

Alice mused over her weeds, which had wilted dramatically in her hand.

“Is this school hard?” Annabel said. “I certainly hope not.”

Alice shrugged.

“I hate Cs,” Annabel said. “They practically make me nauseous.”

“They don’t grade here.”

What a sensible grading policy! Annabel now sat quite contentedly in the uncomfortable sun, no longer feeling uneasy about the cats or the disquieting pregnant woman or her intentions to ditch Alice once school began. Her heart opened to Alice and to the simple justice of things, life’s rightness, its essential fairness. Things just
were
. Or could
be
. “You’re kidding!” she said delightedly.

“Yes,” Alice said.

Annabel wanted to make Alice cry, just once. That was her goal, to bring tears to her eyes on some subject. Then she’d say, “I didn’t mean it,” and console her to the extent possible.

“You should have seen your tail drop!” Alice said.

“ ‘You should have seen your tail drop.’ I hate it when you say things like that. You sound retarded. Or like somebody’s grandmother.”

“My granny met my grandpa ‘at the fair.’ Do you know what that means? It means it was love at first sight.”

The woman in the red dress entered their courtyard. She stood with her hands on her stomach and peered at the girls.

“Uh-oh,” Alice said.

“What’s the matter with you?” Annabel hissed. “Birth. There’s nothing wrong with birth.”

The woman came up to them. She was really not much older than they were. Her hair was a mazy mass of dark curls, and she had bright blank eyes. “Would you like to feel my tummy?” she asked Annabel.

“Oh no, thank you,” Annabel said. “Thanks a lot. Really, that’s very kind but not now? Not now,” she said.

The woman smiled at her slowly and contemptuously.

“Hi, Candy,” Alice said glumly.

The popping sound of rifles miles away rolled down the mountain. It wasn’t robbery or homicide, rather the continuing subjugation and subtraction of nature in full swing.

“I lost my job,” Candy said. “Teaching kindergarten. I never thought they’d fire me. I thought they’d be afraid of a lawsuit, but the kids got on my nerves the other day and I sent them all away. Just opened the door and told them to toddle homeward. A lot of those kids didn’t even know where they lived, much to my surprise. Their parents think they’re so smart, but they have zero survival skills. Social skills they have. They’re polite and they share and they show sympathy and consideration, but has anyone evaluated the importance of social skills in a situation where one is faced with a stampeding mob or a knife-wielding lunatic? It makes me want to laugh.”

But she was only smiling again at Annabel, contemptuously.

“When’s it going to be, Candy?” Alice asked.

“Two weeks. They promised two weeks.” The woman’s hands seemed determined to grasp Annabel’s own. They were small hands, the dimpled kind. They feinted about. “I am alone,” she said to Annabel.

“What about the father?” Annabel heard herself saying. “The daddy of your baby should take an active interest.”

“The daddy? You mean the perp?” Candy’s smile had become more reserved. “But he’s so busy. He’s the bouncer at the White Shark, that neon country-and-western dance hall, he’s the guy who patrols on the horse.”

“Oh, I saw his picture in the paper!” Annabel exclaimed. “I thought he was so fly. That ‘Acre of Dancin’ and Romancin’,’ I’d love to go there.”

Candy gaped at her.

“The cute ones sometimes try to take advantage,” Annabel said uncomfortably.

“Who is this—this idiot?” Candy screamed. Then she spat, just missing Annabel’s perfect toes, and moved heavily off, muttering.

“That is so disgusting,” Annabel said. “What if that had hit my foot? What’s wrong with her, anyway?”

“Candy’s tale,” Alice said.

“Yes, what is her
story
?” Annabel demanded, patting her toes.

“When she was seven months’ pregnant, there wasn’t a heartbeat anymore, but the doctors didn’t want to do a cesarean or induce labor so she has to carry it around stillborn full-term and she’s trying to make a new world cataclysmic situation out of it. The cycle has been broken, the web of life torn, dead world coming, et cetera …”

“Et cetera? You can’t possibly be as cold and uncaring and unfeeling as you sound. That is the most wretched story I—”

“… everything reversed, everything its opposite and out of order. Everything dead dead dead but continuing. She keeps trying to get the media involved. She wants to urge people not to make the event vulnerable to cult group misapplication, but of course no one wants to talk to her. Not even the cults are interested. She has potent materials to work with, but she lacks charisma.”

Annabel wanted to go back to her own room, the peach-colored room that had been painted with the special brush in the special way that made simple wallboard resemble the finest linen. She wanted to lie down and put cucumber slices over her eyes.

“And that spitting, how far does she think she’s going to get with that spitting?”

Annabel wanted to turn up the air-conditioning in her room as high as possible and curl up beneath a blanket. Annabel wondered if Alice was experiencing the same blotting up of the desert’s colors, as though a giant gray sponge preceded them as they walked.

“That guy on the horse is such a jerk. He dumped her so fast. Don’t go near him,” Alice said. “He licks frogs to get high.”

“Nobody would lick a frog,” Annabel said without much conviction.