The Quick & the Dead (9 page)

Ray said nothing. He was enjoying his gum. The early stages of chewing always reminded him of the part of
In the Penal Colony
where they put the sugar-coated gag in the condemned man’s mouth just before the immense tattooing machine starts needling him to death. It was his favorite story. He thought the machine was so cool, but no one wanted to talk to him about it. The image was somewhat sadistic he supposed, but mostly the ordeal was about enlightenment. Or about guilt, since man’s guilt is never to be doubted. Kafka had wanted to be a waiter, too, in his own restaurant. Probably no one would have gone into the place. Ray wished he’d been an academic, but the opportunity had never come up.

“You annoy me,” the manager was saying.

The exhilarating if disgusting sweetness of the gum was gone now. Ray looked around for a place to put the wad, where it might cause some unpleasantness.

The manager told him to check the boxes on the sale table. People would come in and fiddle around with the boxes, sometimes placing their old worn-out shoes in a box and walking out with a new pair. If it happened on your watch, you were docked several hours’ pay. Several hours’ pay for each instance of switched shoes. Ray gloomily examined a dozen boxes, three of which contained footwear not in its first youth. When had this happened? He must have been dreaming today.

The manager looked pleased. “I’m going for panda,” he said. “No lunch break for you today.” The manager loved Chinese food, believing it conferred upon him a sort of individuality.

Ray sat on a stool and thought about the little bald-headed girl. Something else had been wrong with her, too; being hit by lightning wasn’t her only problem. She’d been on his mind a lot lately. She was sharing space with the monkey in his head, though the monkey still ruled. Ray started to fidget. Air potato sewer vine, he thought. This was not good. He made a circuit of his department, then peered around a partition at the boots. This was a different world, a man’s world, though every bit as empty. He slipped around and into it and picked up a pair of blue snakeskin boots. He put a big black-brimmed hat on his head and picked up a leather bag with a shoulder strap. He pushed the boots into the bag, nobody there to stop him. He kept moving, out of the store and into the fat ventricle of the mall, moving quickly and feeling superb, as though slaloming through powdered snow.

He glided past the fetid food court, where he saw the manager pointing at the picture of a plate of food. That’s how people ate these days. They pointed at pictures, then were served something indistinguishable from its portrayal. Ray’s stomach growled. The little monkey in his head stretched full out beside an empty, dented dish. Ray didn’t like it when the monkey just lay there like that, its poor hair barely covering its body. It made Ray afraid.

He slipped into a restroom right before the exit to the parking lot. The place was filthy and smelled strongly of pizza. He removed his sneakers and pulled on the magnificent snakeskin boots. They were a size too large, he’d have to get thicker socks. The hat was good, it fit better than the boots, though it called attention to his mouth, which the stroke had pulled down. Still, the hat made his mouth look potent, as if it were just about to express something important. With the hat, he looked like he and the world had some plans. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of a hat before. Good-bye Houston! He would miss only his sometime excursions to the Rothko Chapel, where he had made several shy attempts at surrendering to that artist’s dark demands. Man’s whole vision was held together with rabbit-skin glue, he’d been told.

The fat man was in Teepee Ten and Ray in Teepee Two. The sign on the highway said “Sleep in a Wigwam Tonight!” and Ray thought the man was going to go into cardiac arrest with excitement. He wanted to stand Ray to a night in a concrete teepee on old Route 66, the mother highway, and Ray said fine. He’d always taken for granted the bizarre impulses of others, particularly those who picked him up on life’s long and winding road. He’d been hitching north for two days, and mostly people had food in their cars that they shared with him. The fat man had only a bag of tangerines. Ray didn’t know they even made tangerines anymore. The fat man said he wouldn’t buy him dinner, but he’d buy him breakfast in the morning.

In his teepee, Ray took a long, hot shower. He liked taking showers until the hot water ran out, but this hot water kept coming. It would not be thwarted. It was like it was challenging him or something. Finally he gave up. He stepped out and, since he couldn’t find any towels, dried himself with a couple of washcloths. His feet had started to blister from the beautiful boots, and he tore a pillowcase into strips and wound and bound his feet. He felt as resourceful as the Cub Scout he had once been. He hoped all his cub mates were dead, the little bastards. They were always going on camping trips and catching chipmunks under pots and setting fire to them with white gas. They were always hanging around canals and shooting arrows into manatees, pretending they were whales. Once they’d even captured a Key deer by lobbing baseball bats and stunning it. This was in Florida, where a boy had to take part in a certain number of monstrous customs on his way to manhood.

Ray had never cared for Florida; he had been born in Washington State, but they’d moved, after his mother’s third miscarriage, from a town where everyone had miscarriages, where the fish in the river were soft as bread, the trees warty with fungus, and half the dogs three-legged. It was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but plucky downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave. He would never go back there, of course. It had probably been condemned by now anyway, the whole place buried underground in drums.

Ray lay naked on the bed, staring at his wrapped feet and feeling
vaguely dismembered. They probably weren’t dead at all, his cub mates. They probably had jobs in primate labs, hosing out the cages, keeping the electrodes clean, the suturing thread on hand, the trepanning saws sharp, the decerebration tools sterilized. When monkeys were taught to use sign language, they’d sign
Please. Please. Hello. Hello. Big Boy be good
. They bypassed the chitchat.
Help
, they’d sign.
Lonely. Cold. Michael good girl, good
.

Ray had been obsessed with lab animals since a creepy therapist had told him after his stroke that a little monkey had given his life so that Ray could get better. Ray hated therapists, the smiles, the loose white clothes, the cheeriness. They were all creepy. “Vivisection in controlled laboratory experiments results in better treatment for little victims like you,” the therapist had said. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you different. And now you’ve learned a new word today, haven’t you?
Vivisection
. It’s not a bad word.” Well, fuck that, Ray had thought at the time, but he was afraid. The little monkey bothered him; he felt the little monkey hadn’t wanted to be his friend. He’d given it a place in his head—by now its haunt of many years—but it still didn’t want to be his friend.

“Ray?” the fat man whispered at the door to the teepee. Ray didn’t move. He lay quietly on his bed, idly wondering what happened to that child who’d been raised by apes in Africa. Some farmers had found him near Lake Tanganyika and dragged him off, cleaned him up, dressed him in little Levi’s and a flannel shirt, and put him in an orphanage. But he was too late for language, and he couldn’t manage to open doors. Knobs and latches eluded him. The little kid was probably a grown fuddled man by now, longing to be groomed by loving hairy fingers.

“Ray?” the fat man said. “I know you’re there. I like big wide tits. Do you like big wide tits?”

Ray’s stomach was growling, and he was sure the fat man could hear it.

“You’re such a disappointment, Ray,” the fat man said.

Ray rolled over on his stomach and tried to go to sleep. He crushed the pillows against his ears. He’d heard that if you murdered someone when you were sleeping, you wouldn’t be held responsible. You’d be acquitted in a court of law.

The next morning Ray found a coil of human excrement outside his
door. He had to stop accepting rides from people who had peculiar agendas. He felt a rattling in his brain, a sound as though of something chained, knocking around an empty pan. It was midmorning. Ray had opened the door to see what time it was, as there were no windows in the teepees. The cement of the structure was curved backward from the door and painted in colored stripes to suggest blankets or skins. The day was clear and cold. The shit, actually, had begun to freeze. He saw a Chicano girl in a yellow windbreaker pushing a housekeeping cart toward him. She was accompanied by one of those strange, hairless dogs with small heads that the Indians once upon a time had raised to eat. This one was wearing a knitted sweater, its legs trembling from the cold. Still, the dog must dig being outside, Ray thought. Anyplace but the kitchen. He nudged the shit with the toe of his boot, then picked it up and lobbed it ten yards into one of the trashcans painted to look like a tom-tom. The girl looked at him with disdain.

“Are you leaving today?” she asked.

“Where would I go?” Ray said, but this failed to charm her.

“If you’re staying, you’ve got to pay another fourteen dollars by eleven o’clock.”

“Twenty-three hundred hours, huh?” Ray maintained his crooked smile, but she pushed past him, all bright coat and double-black hair, the dog vibrating at her side.

In less than an hour, Ray was out on the highway again. He was curious as to what his brain had in mind. It was very quiet. Tall, slender pines grew in ordered ranks along the road. They all had the same DNA. If one sickened, they all did. They harbored identical secrets and had limited careers. Even the ravens found them boring, the ravens particularly. Log trucks whipped by. He was in a national forest, Land of Many Uses. There was the febrile smell of laboring machines.

A pearl-colored Fleetwood Brougham swept past at terrific speed, then braked and fishtailed backward. Ray ran up to it, his boots whistling softly, and opened the huge door. The driver was small and wiry; her face looked damp and her eyes were dilated, and in Ray’s opinion she’d stolen the car for sure. An open bag of blue corn chips was propped on the dash. He looked at it and felt weak. They drove in silence, Ray imagining
pleading and weeping coming from the trunk. The driver abruptly turned on the tape deck.

After listening to it for a while, Ray determined that it was the most depressing music he’d ever heard.

“Hugo Wolf,” she said reverently.

“It’s really something,” he said. “It makes you kind of want to tear your throat out.”

“Wolf couldn’t handle it,” she said. “Mahler used to visit him in the mental hospital. Mahler could handle it and should be considered the lesser man for it. What do you think of Schumann?”

“Schumann,” Ray said cautiously.

“One listens in vain,” the driver screamed, “for anything extraordinary in Schumann’s last works. They are simply weak!”

They passed burnt acres of land. The trees stood the same way they had before, stoically, in rows the same height, yet all were black. They thought they were still doing their job, but they weren’t. Bleak, mad chords filled the Cadillac. Ray rubbed the left side of his mouth; its cold and rubbery feel always gave him comfort.

A dog was trotting across the charred land that did not go on forever. Ray could see the end ahead where it became green again.

The woman slammed on the brakes. “Look,” she said, “a pet. We need a pet.” She certainly was starting from scratch, Ray thought. The big car went into a squat body wallow as it made the turn.

“Look,” Ray said, “this could end badly. I stopped once when I had a car. I saw a lost dog on a hot day trotting along just like this one, his tongue hanging out, no exit in sight. So I turn around, pull up behind him, get a water bottle out, fish around for some kind of dish, can’t find one, was going to pour some in my hand for him. Get out, walk toward him, he tucks his tail between his legs and tears out into the highway where he’s promptly chewed to pieces by the passing parade.” He looked at her and nodded, assuring her that this was true. He recalled crouching there, his hand extended, in the same tiny blue flowers the dog had been trotting through.

“That’s because you’re a fucking loser, man,” the driver said. She sped back, heaved the car around, and pulled off the macadam onto the
crispy ground. The dog’s ears went back, but he soldiered on, a little faster maybe. The woman got out. She was wearing a denim jacket covered with pins and glittering buttons over a dirty pair of peach-colored tights. She was a spooky little thing, Ray thought. He reached for the blue chips and stuffed as many as he could into his mouth. She stood there and clapped her hands the way his parents used to when they wanted a light to go on in the house … that’s the kind of lights they had. His parents succumbed to gadgetry of all kinds. Ray put some chips into his coat pocket and kept chewing. The dog hurried onward, the woman walking and then running after it. Ray closed his eyes. There was the long shriek of a semi’s air horn. He knew that he had to exit the car, that it would be unwise to remain in the funereal Fleetwood much longer.