The Quick & the Dead

~ ~ ~

SO. YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN A FUTURE LIFE.

Then do we have the place for you!

You’d be home now if you lived here, as the old signs promised.

But first, a few questions. To determine if you qualify.

What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?

Don’t use reason without imagination here.

A hare is the determinative sign defining the concept of being. Say you catch an actual hare of the desert and place a mirror to his nose; you will observe that a moist breath mark will appear on the glass. The moisture comes from the hare, though there is not a drop of moisture going into him. Does this disprove the axiom “Out of nothing, nothing comes”?

Do you consider the gulf between the material and spiritual worlds only apparent?

Don’t worry about catching the hare.

Do you believe that what has been is also now and that what is to be has already been?

The dead have certain obligations. Is one of them to remember us?

Do you find that offensive?

Do you find the dead ridiculous? How about the dead finding the living ridiculous?

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible. How do you propose to remember that in time?

Which would you prefer to have your life compared to, wind or dust?

Why?

Sorry.

1

The winter had not brought rain and there were no flowers, there would be no flowers. Still, the land in the spring of the year when Alice would turn sixteen could not be said to be suffering from drought. The desert knew no drought, really. Anything so habitual and prolonged was simply life — a life invisible and anticipatory. What was germinative would only remain so that spring. What was possible was neither dead nor alive. Relief had been promised, of course.

For more than a month now, after school, Alice had been caring for six-year-old fraternal twins, Jimmy and Jacky. They lived with their mother, who was away all day, cutting hair. Their father was off in another state, building submarines. Hair, submarines, it was disgusting, Alice thought. She did not find the children at all interesting. They cried frequently, indulged themselves in boring, interminable narratives, were sentimental and cruel, and when frustrated would bite. They had a pet rabbit that Alice feared for. She made them stop giving it baths all the time and tried to interest them in giving themselves baths, although in this she was not successful. She assisted them with special projects for school. It was never too early for investigative reporting. They should not be dissuaded by their teacher’s discomfort; to discomfort teachers was one’s duty. They were not too young to be informed about the evils of farm subsidies, monoculture, and overproduction. They should know, if only vaguely at first, about slaughterhouses. They shouldn’t try to learn everything at once — they’d probably get discouraged — but they should know how things come into being, like ponies, say, and how they’re taken out of being and made into handbags and coats. They should get a petition going to stop the lighting of athletic fields, since too much light obliterated the night sky. Excessive light was bad. On the other hand, some things perceived as bad were good. Wasps, for instance. They should not destroy the wasp nest they discovered in their garage with poisons because wasp-nest building was fun to watch in a time-lapse photography sort of way. They should marvel at the wasps’ architectural abilities, their insect awareness of a supreme future structure they alone were capable of creating. Wasps were cool. The queens knew how to subsist in a state of cryogenic preservation in the wintertime. Jimmy and Jacky could get special credit for their understanding of wasps, agribusiness, slaughterhouses — just to name a few possibilities. She was willing to make learning interesting for them.

But she didn’t help much with homework. Mostly the three of them just hung out. Little kids didn’t instinctively know how to hang out, Alice was surprised to learn. Sometimes they’d walk down to the Goodwill store and see the kind of stuff people had wanted once but didn’t want anymore. She usually didn’t buy anything because she didn’t believe in consumption, but once she bought a nun in a snow dome. The nun was only fifty cents because the snow had turned brown and clotted and fell in revolting clumps when you turned the thing upside down. What was a nun doing in one of those snow domes anyway? Alice had never seen anything like it. The twins had never seen anything like it either. But Goodwill was only good for once or twice a week. The rest of the time they’d sit around in these tiny plastic chairs the boys had in their junk-filled room and Alice would discuss things with them, chiefly environmental concerns. Alice liked talking about animals and excess packaging. She opened their small eyes to the world of drift nets, wetland mitigation, predator control, and overpopulation. She urged them to discuss the overpopulation problem with their mother. Sometimes their attention wandered. They had a bunk bed in their room, and they both slept on the bottom bunk. When they were seven, they’d be permitted to sleep on the top bunk. They could hardly wait.

Their mother hadn’t paid Alice yet, and near the end of the second month Alice asked for her money.

“Yes, yes, sure,” the mother said. “I have to go to the bank tomorrow. How about Saturday?”

She appeared Saturday morning at Alice’s house in her big sloppy station wagon. Alice and her granny and poppa were sitting on the patio drinking coffee and watching the birds at the feeder. Actually, only Alice was watching the birds, since her granny and poppa were talking avidly about compost. Alice couldn’t talk about compost so early in the morning, but they could. Compost was as munificent as God to them, just as interesting as God certainly. They said that the reason healthy plants repel pests is that they have such intense vibrations in the molecules of their cells. The higher the state of health, the higher the vibrations. Because pests’ vibrations are on a much lower level, they receive a distinct shock when they come into contact with a healthy plant.

Why not? Alice thought.

Alice sauntered down to the station wagon, which was packed with luggage. “You taking a trip?” she asked.

“Didn’t Jimmy and Jacky tell you? Oh, that’s right, I swore them to secrecy. Let’s go out and have some breakfast. I’ll buy you a donut.”

The mother gave Alice the creeps. She wore large, shapeless dresses she called her “jelly bags.”

“I’ve had my breakfast,” Alice said.

“I’d like to talk to you,” the woman said. “Breakfast really isn’t necessary. Why don’t we go out to the state park — that’s a nice ride.”

Alice looked back at the patio, but her granny and poppa had gone inside. She shrugged and got into the car. Cars had never charmed her, and this one seemed particularly vile. They sped off to the park about fifteen miles away. The lovely, lovely mountains tumbled across the horizon.

The kids’ mother moved one big arm and groped around in the backseat. The car veered down the road, Alice staring stoically ahead, until she retrieved what she was after, a cocktail in a can. “Want a pop?” she said. Alice shook her head. “Sure?” the woman said. “It’s mostly fruit juices.”

I want … a scar, Alice thought. A scar that would send shivers up peoples’ spines but would not elicit pity. She didn’t want that kind of scar.

“Where are Jimmy and Jacky?” Alice finally said.

“With a babysitter.”

Alice looked at her.

“I’m trying out somebody new just for the morning, then we’re leaving. Back to the husband. We’re going to be a family again.”

“You owe me three hundred dollars,” Alice said.

“I do? Those hours added up, didn’t they?”

“Do you want a receipt for tax purposes?”

“I’d love a receipt,” the mother said.

They entered the park. A small deceased animal was lying in the road, and the car ahead of them ran over it. They ran over it. A herd of men in fluorescent shorts jogged by.

“God, I hate this place,” the woman said. She rummaged in the backseat for another pop.

“Why did we come here, then?”

“I mean the whole place, the state.”

She turned abruptly into a parking lot. There were some benches and a few little structures for shade. She turned off the ignition and got out of the car. “Gotta tinkle,” she said. Alice sat and gazed at the mountains. When you climbed, you’d move from cholla to juniper and pinyon, then to firs and aspens. Zero to eight thousand feet in forty miles. To live in a place where you could do something like that was sensational, like living exceptionally fast or living in two different bodies. The little animals of the desert didn’t know that the little animals of the mountains, only moments away, even existed. Or the big animals the big animals for that matter.

Alice looked around the littered seat for paper and pencil to compose her bill, her legs sticking to the stinking vinyl of the car seat. She got out and stood in the shade. A tinkle, she thought. The awful woman was probably taking a dump. At last she and her jelly bag appeared. She had red hair today, though sometimes it was chestnut. She was a genius with hair color, there was no denying that.

“You know what keeps going through my head?” the woman said, “DAK’s incredible blowout price.… We’re getting a new stereo. Can’t get it out of my head.”

Alice handed her the bill she’d tallied. “It’s in crayon, unfortunately, but I’m sure it will be acceptable. You could give me a check, though I’d prefer cash.”

“That’s what’s going through your head, huh, like DAK’s incredible blowout price?” The woman laughed and dropped the piece of paper to the ground. “If you think I’m paying you, you’re crazy. Pervert. Bitch. You’d better watch out.”

Alice looked at the piece of paper. What was wrong with it? It just lay there.

“My boys say you say the world would be better off without them. They say you killed a pony and a farmer and that you make them eat lettuce-and-rabbit-pellet sandwiches. They say you hate nuns and say not to flush the toilet every time when it’s only yellow water. But it was the wasp nest that did it. I’m excessively susceptible to the stings of bees and wasps and could go into anaphylactic reaction and die. And they shrieked at me when I sprayed the damn thing. It was as big as a beer keg. They cursed me for destroying a thing that could have killed their own mother.”

“Fatal anaphylactic reaction is actually rare,” Alice said.

“Half the stuff they told me is even on the list.”

“What list?” Alice said. Her voice sounded peculiar. You could give me a check, though I’d prefer cash kept sliding through her mind.

“The checklist of symptoms of satanic ritual abuse compiled by an after-midnight radio psychologist who’s a nationally recognized authority on the subject. The list includes but is not limited to preoccupation with feces and death, questionable acting out, talk of mutilation and dismemberment, and fear of being normal and cooperative.” She ticked them off on her fingers.

“Why, that’s just stupid,” Alice said.

“You’re the one who’s stupid, dumbass,” the woman said, “thinking I’d pay for your time. I’ve got better things to do with my money.”

“Jimmy and Jacky misinterpreted my remarks a little,” Alice said. It was probably the hair and submarine emphasis in their background that made them somewhat wobbly in the comprehension department.

“You’d better watch it,” the woman said. “Get away from me.” Alice hadn’t moved. “You’d better watch it,” she said again, laughing, as she got into the station wagon. Then she drove away.

A black bird, a phainopepla, rocketed past and alighted on a trembling mesquite bush. Alice felt that the desert was looking at her, that it kept coming closer, incuriously. She stared into the distance, seeing it as something ticking, something about to arrive. A brief, ferocious wind came up and a Styrofoam cup sailed by and impaled itself upon an ocotillo. She started back toward the park’s entrance, walking not along the road but through the desert itself. Cars and vans occasionally passed by. Tiny heads were what she saw, behind closed windows. She walked quickly, sometimes breaking into a run, through the gulleys and over the rocks, past the strange growths, all living their starved, difficult lives. Everything had hooks or thorns. Everything was saw-edged and spiny-pointed. Everything was defensive and fierce and determined to live. She liked this stuff. It all had a great deal of character. At the same time, it was here only because it had adapted to the circumstances, the external and extreme circumstances of its surroundings.

Plants were lucky because when they adapted it wasn’t considered a compromise. It was more difficult for a human being, a girl.

She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She’d remain outside the public sector. She’d be an anarchist, she’d travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She’d fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She’d really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She’d have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow — no, that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.

She had curved back to the road and wasn’t far from the entrance. The flattened brown animal was now but a rosy kiss on the pavement. She fingered the coins in her pocket. She’d get a soda and call her granny. She wished … she’d like to be one of those birds, those warblers that fly from Maine to Venezuela without water, food, or rest. The moment came when they wanted to be twenty-five hundred miles from the place they were and didn’t know how else to do it.

She dialed from a phone outside the visitors’ center. She wished she knew someone she could call illicitly.

“Poppa,” she said. “Hi.”

“Alicekins,” her grandfather said faintly, “where are you?”

The Indians called what they heard on telephones whispering spirits. Whisper, whisper, said her poppa’s blood, making its way through his head’s arteries. Indians didn’t overexplain matters — full and complete expression not being in accordance with Indian custom. Alice admired that.

“I’m baby-sitting, Poppa. I thought I told you.”

There was an alarmed pause.

“Maybe I forgot to tell you, but I’m baby-sitting late. I won’t be home for a while.”

“We’re fine. We’re hanging in there.”

“Of course you are, Poppa.”

He hung up softly. He had certain phone mannerisms and this was one of them, breaking the connection gently, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed.

Alice went into the visitors’ center and entered the men’s room just for the heck of it. She washed her hands and looked into the mirror. The assignment was to be … absolutely … expressionless. She stared at herself. She didn’t look awake, was all. She’d get arrested if she went around looking like that. She pulled her hair down over her eyes and left. She hated mirrors.

She walked. An enormous grocery store appeared ahead, an outpost for the consumer cavalry. It was surrounded by ragged desert and sported large signs informing those who wanted to make something of themselves in this life that investment “pads” were available. Cows browsed the desert, token cows, hired to indicate a pre-pad tax category. A few miles later, the desert had vanished completely, the cows were no longer employed. She imagined what she would do to the woman’s station wagon. She would work smoothly and calmly. She would pop the hood and remove the oil cap. Using a conveniently located hose, she would pour water into the filler hole and then top up the gas tank. She would find a can of brush cleaner in the garage and pour it into the radiator. She wouldn’t do anything to the brakes for the little kids’ sakes, but she would squirt glue all over the seats.

She was approaching House of Hubcaps, one of her favorite places. She paused and enjoyed the magnificent display of hubcaps. Great luminous wheels crowded the windows, reflecting and distorting everything in their cool, humped centers. They were like ghastly, intelligent, unmoored heads.

If the House of Hubcaps didn’t have the hubcap you were searching for, it didn’t exist.

She moved on, renewed, to Jimmy and Jacky’s house. The hubcaps had refreshed her. They had cleared her mind. Vandalizing the station wagon would be too easy, too predictable, and by now far too premeditated. She should do something on a grander scale. She should attempt to liberate those children, those sour-smelling, sniveling, cautious little boys. All their mother had ever provided them with was good haircuts. She should free them from that corrupting presence, from the world of toots and jelly bags and poisonous sprays, but that would be kidnapping, and punishable, she believed, by death. Plus she didn’t want Jimmy and Jacky.

The house was deserted. Cardboard cartons stuffed with clothes and broken toys were scattered about in the front yard, the word “Free” written on every one. The garage was empty. The rabbit hutch was empty save for a withered string bean. The rabbit was probably hopping around nearby, terrified. Or it might be hunched up somewhere in a narcosis of incomprehension at being hutchless. Or maybe the mother had boiled it and served it to the twins for lunch on a bun with some potato chips. Alice wouldn’t put it past her.

Back at her own house, Alice got into her nightie and ate two cheese sandwiches and a bowl of spaghetti. Her granny and poppa sat in the living room watching Fury sleeping in his dog bed surrounded by his toys. Fury was named after the beautiful horse in the Bette Davis movie who is shot by Gary Merrill, who is pretending to all the world that he is Bette’s husband. Bette Davis was her granny’s favorite movie star. None of the new ones could hold a candle to her.

“Alicekins,” her poppa said. “I’m so glad you’re back. We have some questions for you.”

“Good ones tonight,” her granny said.

Alice made another cheese sandwich. She was not abstemious and ate like a stray, like a pound pet rescued at the eleventh hour.

“A woman goes to her doctor,” her granny said, “and the doctor says she’s got cancer of the liver and gives her three months to live. Cancer of the liver is a painful, horrible way to go and there’s no way to beat it, the doctor says.”

“Typical,” her poppa said.

“What!” her granny said.

“Typical doctor.” Her poppa took a Kleenex from a box on the table beside him and dug around in one of Fury’s ears.

“Yes, well, she goes home and she and her son have a long talk and the son arranges it so that his handgun collection is at her disposal and she shoots herself. During the autopsy it comes out that she didn’t have cancer of the liver at all.”

“Just had a few pus pockets was all,” her poppa said. He put the used Kleenex into his pocket without looking at it.

“So the question is, who’s responsible for her death, the lady, the son, or the doctor?”

These kinds of problems always cheered Alice up. They weren’t questions of ethics or logic, and the answer, under the circumstances, didn’t matter anyway. She just loved them.

2

Corvus lost her parents to drowning close to the end of that peculiar spring. The phone rang at school, she was summoned to the office and was told the situation. It seemed unbelievable but was the case. They had driven down to the Mexican state of Sonora for their anniversary. They had been to the beach. They’d been swimming, sailing, even diving in the Gulf of California but had drowned coming back from Nogales on an off-ramp of I-10 during the first rainstorm of the year, just beyond one of those signs that say DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, signs the engineers claim (and continued to claim with tedious righteousness after the accident) are where they are for a reason. The last picture of Corvus and her mother and father together had been taken not long before in that same gritty border town, Nogales, with the burro on the tourist street, the timeless, tireless burro with the plywood sea and sunset behind him. Beyond the painted sea, people were living in cardboard packing crates with tin roofs held down by tires and old car batteries, beyond which a wasteland ran to the real sea, from which her parents had returned but never arrived. A frequent thought of Corvus: they had never arrived back. Still, she thought they’d probably laughed when they hit that sudden water, thinking they’d be through it in no time.

That burro picture was the worst, Alice thought.

She spent a lot of time at Corvus’s house, a little adobe house with the practically required blue trim. Because the land had been grazed, there was nothing on the hardened earth but a few mesquite trees. An old Dodge truck sat in an otherwise empty corral, and there was a shining Airstream trailer, for it had been the policy of Corvus’s parents to move every year. And there was a black-and-tan dog with a big head, for whom there was no one or nothing in this world but Corvus’s mother. Not far away lived a neighbor whose name was Crimmins, and then no one for miles. The dog’s name was Tommy.

Alice has no pictures. So she likes to look through the ones Corvus has. Corvus is culling them all the time, but the burro stays, and some other odd ones too, while some of Alice’s personal favorites — ones that represent an ideal, ones that show a little baby, for instance, with a real mother and father looking at it so grave and thoughtful — just disappear. The photos are in a flat woven basket and Alice gently paws through them. Though there are fewer, there appear to be more too, as if there were another source for them somewhere in the house. She wonders if any ceremony is involved in the way Corvus handles the pictures. Corvus likes ceremony. The graveyard service was practically baroque in its ambition, even though no one else was there except a paid soloist and the minister. The stonecutter said he’d come but didn’t. Alice had never heard a man with more excuses. When she and Corvus had gone to his shop the day before the burial to choose the stone, he had said, “I won’t be able to do yours for seven months, minimum. I have a woman ahead of you who’s catching up, putting new stones on all the family’s graves, and that family goes back — golly, practically to John Wesley Powell. She’s changing them all, totally into remodeling. She’s got all these birds and wagon trains on them. That’s the style now, color. One she wants is a World War Two fighter plane in one corner and in the other corner she wants a heart with initials entwined in it, a ‘D’ and a ‘B.’ I make these sketches, and she says, ‘I keep seeing something else, I keep seeing something else …’ ”

“Isn’t that bad luck, to change the stones?” Corvus asked.

“No, no, I’ll tell you what bad luck is, it’s getting involved with a rich mobster Papago. They’re sentimental but ruthless. Ruthless. Their kids are cute as bugs, but they’re ruthless too. If they don’t like what you do”—he put his index finger between his eyes—“Bang. You’re coyote kibble in some dry wash.” The stonecutter was hunched and merry, the first to admit the difficulty of keeping up with death.

The minister had a remarkable basso profundo voice, and the whole service was runic and generic at once. When it was over, he clasped the two girls’ hands and then patted Tommy. Tommy looked frightened.

“I can’t believe none of your teachers came,” Alice said.

“Our teachers,” Corvus said. “Well, they didn’t know my parents.”

“What about relatives? Aren’t there any relatives?”

“We’re onlys.”

Alice was an only too — well, partially, she guessed. Her situation was a bit complex.

“My granny and poppa should have come.”

“It’s all right, Alice.”

“There must have been an address book we could have consulted.”

“Alice,” Corvus said, “there isn’t anybody. Worry about something else. Look at all this grass. Do you think the mighty Colorado should be further diminished so that grass can grow to be mowed in desert graveyards?”

“I think it’s nice what you did,” Alice said. “This is nice. All the flowers. You did it nice.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.” Corvus was wearing a black dress of her mother’s.

“You’re doing it right,” Alice said. “Those big caskets and the singer — you’re doing it beautifully.”

The girls huddled there beside the grave with Tommy. There was the sound of traffic. Meek, Alice thought. It makes you meek.

“Poor Tommy,” Corvus said. “He’s trying to think. You can see he’s trying to think. Maybe I should have him put down, send him off with my mom.”

“But you can’t. You shouldn’t do it now.”

“No,” Corvus said, rubbing the dog’s bony head. “You’d never catch her now, would you, no matter how fast you went.”

Alice was trying to think dog—the racing after that is dog. But then there was the staying and the waiting that was dog, too. “It will be good to have Tommy around,” she said.

“You’re supposed to pray when your heart is broken, to have it break completely so that you can begin anew,” Corvus said.

Alice didn’t consider that to be much of a prayer.

“I’ve been trying to think, too,” Corvus said, “just like Tommy. It says in the Bible that death is the long home.”

“Long?” Alice said. “As in long? What does that … that’s kind of creepy, isn’t it?”

“You’re not afraid of death, are you, Alice? You just don’t want to lose your personality.” Corvus hugged her.

They stayed until it was twilight and the first star appeared. The desert dusk was lovely, even in this place, perhaps particularly in this place. The gates to the graveyard had been closed, and Alice got out of the truck to open them. As they got closer to the house, Tommy grew happier. He rode with his head out the window, his ears flying. The air was full and soft and whole, holding ever closer what he remembered in it. They passed Crimmins’s, where a single light burned. The ground around his house had the look of cement and was enclosed by wire. The sunset was bathing the Airstream in a piercing light, but the adobe was subdued, prettily shadowed, its blue trim chalky, the marigolds Corvus’s mother had planted massed like embers. Corvus slowly pulled up to the house, and Tommy leapt out to wait confidently at the door, panting, virtually grinning up at Corvus as she opened it.

The girls were going to eat everything in the refrigerator. It was Corvus’s idea. There was mustard, jam, milk, and a melon. Oatmeal bread, salad dressing, onions and lemons, some spongy potatoes, three bottles of beer, a can of chocolate syrup, a jar of mayonnaise.

“I want to be sick,” Corvus said, and they waited to be sick but were not. Finally Corvus was a little sick.

“I guess I could eat anything,” Alice said apologetically.

Tommy lay quietly in front of the door, staring at it. This was the way she would return. When the door opened, she would come through it. They would greet each other as they always had. Then he would drink something and sleep.

The unpleasant feast had been finished and cleared away.

Alice said, “Sometimes I’ve thought the thing to do to these fast-food joints they build out in the desert — and those fancy places that serve veal — is to stage puke-ins. We go in, sit down, order, and throw up. Isn’t that a good idea? But I just can’t throw up.”

“I think I’ll take everything out of my mother’s bureau,” Corvus said, “and make a bed of her clothes for Tommy tonight.”

“Don’t do it all at once,” Alice advised. “I’d put out just one piece at a time.”

Corvus said, “In the house where my grandmother died, the night she died, her refrigerator put on a light in her living room.”

“How did it do that?”

“My father explained it. He said it was the vibration of the refrigerator’s motor turning on a loose switch on the lamp.”

“What was it trying to say, I wonder.”

“My grandmother was so proud of that refrigerator. She’d just bought it.”

“I think that happens a lot,” Alice said. “People buy a new refrigerator and something bad happens.”

“My parents just bought that blanket,” Corvus said, pointing to a Navajo Black Design blanket that hung on the wall. “See the way it is in the center, like the center of a spider’s web? That’s so the weaver’s thoughts can escape the weaving when it’s finished. So the mind won’t get trapped in there.”

“Did the Anglos think that up or the Indians?” Alice asked suspiciously. “It sounds like something an entrepreneur would come up with.” But she wanted to be gracious and sympathetic, so she said, “It’s nice that it means that.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Corvus said. “It’s just a way out of the process, an escape from completion.”

Alice was relieved that she didn’t have to embrace the design wholeheartedly. She was holding the basket of pictures in her lap and went back to examining them. She picked one up, smoothed back a curled edge, picked up another.

“You like those, don’t you?” Corvus said. “I should give you the whole lot of them.”

“Now, who’s this?”

“That’s my mother.”

“It looks freezing out. Where were you living then? What’s she holding?”

“That’s Tommy as a puppy.”

“He looks like, I don’t know, a mitten or something.”

“My father used to say that my mother raised Tommy from an egg.”

“Who’s this?”

“That’s me.”

“You’re kidding. Really? It doesn’t look at all like you.”

“As a little kid.”

“Really?” Alice insisted.

Corvus looked at the picture and laughed. “I don’t know who that is,” she said.

“And this?”

“She was my mother’s best friend once. Darleen. When I was a baby she dropped me.”

“I don’t think I was ever dropped,” Alice said. “It might explain a lot, though, had I been, I mean.”

“She dropped me more than once, actually, each time in private. I knew and she knew, that was it. Then, when I was a little older, she saved my life. She saved me from drowning. But people saw us that time and it was pretty clear she’d instigated the drowning and saving me was just a way of absolving herself. My parents saw us from the shore. They were a long way off. She really had me out there.”

“Do you think she was in love with your mother?” Alice asked. “Maybe she was in love with your mother.” What a thing to say, Alice thought. Love’s not that crooked. Though she suspected it might be.

“I remember her being with us pretty constantly. It was like she was a boarder or an aunt or my mother’s stepsister.”

“She didn’t try to pass herself off as your godparent, did she?” Alice asked. “There is something so sinister about those people.” They were unaccountable, shadowy figures, practically bearded in Alice’s imagination, bearing peculiar half-priced gifts like peppermint foot cream or battery-operated lights you clipped onto books or socket-wrench sets. She’d never heard of an effective or efficient godparent. As liaisons went, they seemed to be pretty much failures.

“My mother never trusted anyone after that. Not even me. I felt that she didn’t have much confidence in me. It’s funny that this picture has survived all these years, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Alice said. “I mean, no, not funny.” What was sort of remarkable was that Corvus’s parents had ended up the drowned ones. She chewed on the inside of her mouth to check thoughtless utterances. She should invent another habit since it was already sore. But you didn’t invent habits, did you? Didn’t they invent you?

“They got Tommy then — didn’t they, Tommy?” The dog raised his head in polite acknowledgment, then lowered it with a sigh.

Alice looked at the photograph. She’d been holding it firmly, her thumbs at the woman’s throat. She was blond and quite heavy, a real butter pat. “Are there other pictures of her around, or is this the only one?” She really thought this memento should be ditched.

“Whenever we were alone together, Darleen and I, she spoke to me in sort of a singing whisper. But in front of my parents she wouldn’t whisper, she talked like anyone else. She didn’t say anything out of the ordinary in front of my parents, she would look at me in the most normal way and then would look away again in an utterly natural manner, but when we were alone she’d say the most maliciously nonsensical things. She thought everything was grotesque. I was mesmerized by her.”

“She sounds pornographic,” Alice said. “She was, like, molesting your mind.”

“She had me share her private world, all right,” Corvus said. “And I soaked it all up, whatever it was that was in that whisper. People think innocence can soak up anything. That’s what innocence is for. She never bored me, but when the time, in her opinion, came for me to vanish, I struggled. I struggled hard. Nothing in the whisper had prepared me for this. She had me scissored between her legs and she was turning, so it looked above the water like she was searching for me. The sea was calm, and where had I gone? And then she let me go. I popped up like a cork, too shocked to scream, and saw my father swimming toward me. He was a good swimmer, an excellent swimmer, and he’d almost reached me. My mother was floundering behind. She was trying to run through the water, to shovel it aside with her body. I noticed the marks the straps of her bathing suit had made on her flesh. The straps weren’t aligned with the marks they’d made over the summer. I hadn’t noticed that before, and I fell into detail then, the sweet, passing detail of the world. The next instant I was raised up, grasped beneath my arms, and Darleen said, ‘Until again, Corvus. In this world or the next,’ and she threw me toward my mother and my father.”

“It’s like you were being born,” Alice said. “She was trying to take charge of you being born.” She had quite crumpled the photograph by this time. She had wadded this woman — long overdue.

“That’s when I had my first thought. I was five years old, probably a little late for first thoughts.”

“I don’t think that’s late at all.” Alice didn’t want to ask her granny and poppa what her own had been and risk disappointment. They undoubtedly had it written down someplace.

“It was — There is a next world, but no one we know will be in it.”

“That’s good for five,” Alice said. She wanted to ask her if she’d seen a kelpie when she was underwater. They were supposed to look like a horse, a little horse, and to warn you if you were about to be drowned or to assist in your drowning. She didn’t know how it could do both, but that’s what she’d read in some book that for a time had fallen into her possession.

But it wasn’t appropriate to ask. Not shades nor ghosts nor apparitions should have a place at the table tonight.

“So what happened to her? Did she just walk out of the water and disappear?”

“She walked out of the water and across the beach and into the changing room, which was a large walled space without a roof. I’d always hated it. There were no private stalls inside, just an open area where women and girls changed into their bathing suits. The floor was dirt and the sky seemed always to be moving quickly overhead, and it frightened me. There were all ages and sizes in there, everyone quickly getting in and out of clothes, everyone awkward and hurried and pretty much silent, though not completely silent. The bodies seemed to be all one body, the differences only momentary, and this was horrible to me.”

Alice put the crushed photograph into a bowl. She picked up a matchbook from Corvus’s parents’ considerable collection. There were hundreds of matchbooks, no two the same. “Never Settle, Always Select,” her matchbook said. It advertised an indoor flea market in Gallup. She struck the match and stuffed it into the folds of the picture, but it went out.

Corvus smoothed the picture out and folded back the cover of another matchbook. She propped it open beneath the woman’s face and when she lit one match, all the others flared.

“That’s better,” Alice said.

“My father carried me back to the beach and wrapped me in towels and then took me to the car. The car had been parked in the sun with its windows rolled up, and it felt delicious. My father held me in that warm car, and I’d never felt anything so delicious in my life up until then. My mother had gone to look for Darleen. She kept saying, ‘I’m going to scratch her eyes out.’ ”

“I bet she would have, too.” The phrase had always impressed Alice favorably, but she doubted that Corvus’s mother was capable of such a thing. She had always considered Corvus’s mother a genial person and had admired her bosom, which was nicely freckled. Corvus’s father had been more difficult to gauge. He had studied to be a doctor but had had some sort of breakdown. He seemed strong, if unpredictable. He could have gone after this Darleen to her great detriment, though apparently he had not.

“My mother couldn’t find her. We didn’t even return to the house that night because my mother thought she’d come in and steal me, so we went to a motel. I’d never been in a motel before, and it seemed like a playhouse to me. My mother threw away my bathing suit and my flip-flops with the plastic starfish on the straps. She threw away all of the clothes of that day and bought me new ones. And we never saw Darleen again. We never talked about her.”

“What a peculiar episode,” Alice said.

“I have to go to school tomorrow,” Corvus said.

“Oh, you do not!” Alice exclaimed. If ever there was an excuse, she thought. “Has the counselor gotten to you yet?”

“No, not yet. Oh, you mean in terms of career placement? She said physics.”

“Physics?”

“I think her notes concerned someone else.”

The counselor was supposed to assist the students with their college choices but also doubled in grief management, which made her sound to Alice like a dog handler, as though grief were something that could be taught the down-stay. There was no love lost between this counselor and Alice, who thought she should stick to her smarmy recommendations and not be allowed to dabble in Corvus’s life. She should be prevented from attempting to manage Corvus’s grief. Maybe Alice could get a restraining order on her.

Tommy scrambled to his feet and stood trembling in the corner. The fur between his eyes was folded in a melancholy omega shape. He had dreamed, he had dreamed … it left him.

This was no place to be tonight for any of them, but this was the place they were.

3

Alice was in the Chilled-Out Pepper bookstore looking through a book on medicinal plants. She wanted to find something for Corvus’s situation and her granny’s diabetes and her poppa’s gas as well as a little something for herself, something that would give her a little edge or obscure the edge she already had, she didn’t know which.

She chewed her nails and read. Flecks of a once hopefully applied red nail polish fell onto the pages. Here was a plant fatal to sheep. Here was one that was good for honeymoon cystitis. Ugh, Alice thought. Anil del Muerto was good for sore gums and herpes blisters. Sunflower of the Dead. Of course, it smelled to high heaven. She couldn’t find anything for Corvus. Whenever you went near the subject of sadness in these books, everything got a little vague, a little folkloric, a little picturesque. One book said that bathing in red-colored water could be comforting, a suggestion Alice found to be extremely irresponsible. Didn’t red-colored water imply veins, practically? She decided on tronadora and prickly pear for her granny, silk tassel for her poppa, and anemone and passionflower for herself. It was like putting together a Christmas list. Passionflower actually was growing right at home, along with some gummy, noxious vines that the boys in the neighborhood who were on probation would come by for before their monthly drug tests. This vine, and the rather absent-minded access her granny and poppa gave the boys to it, was probably the reason why their house had not once been broken into, but Alice couldn’t find it in the book. Passionflower, however, was described at length. According to early botanists, the three stigmas represented the Trinity, as well as the nails used on Christ’s cross. The stamens were the five wounds, the tendrils were the scourges, the ten petals were the ten apostles, minus Judas and Peter, those old numbnuts, those betrayers. In an aggravated, irritable way Alice loved reading stuff like this, numerology stuff, this-means-that stuff, mystical correspondency stuff. But the passionflower tried so hard with its pinks and blues and purples, as though God would show off in such a strutty, obvious way. She was building up a real annoyance for the passionflower.

A woman at the checkout counter was making quite a fuss because a book she’d ordered had not yet arrived.

“It’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, and it was supposed to be in today. This is today! This is a gift to myself, and I — want — that — book!” She intended to read more about Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess who was supposed to be the protectress of lone women, of female outsiders who had powerful ideas and were therefore shunned. The would-be book buyer couldn’t find enough about Coatlicue. She began knocking things over.

“Do I have to call the police?” the manager asked. “I’m going to call the police.”

Alice continued to read through the medicinal plants book, trying to remember what she meant to recall about them. Sometimes she thought she really didn’t know how to read. Things just went right through her as though they thought she didn’t exist. Only recently her granny and poppa had been taking a quiz in a magazine that would tell you if you were likely to get Alzheimer’s within four years. You chose ten objects and then someone hid them and you had to remember them all. Or you had to name as many items as possible in sixty seconds from some category, such as vegetables. Or someone read a list of twelve words and, ten minutes later, you had to repeat them. They all three had taken the tests, and Alice had been the only one who had failed. She had done particularly poorly on the word list. Even now the only word she could remember from it was choice.

“That’s too bad, honey,” her granny said. “This is not reassuring. You have a good chance of developing intellect-robbing dementia.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to give it to young people,” her poppa said. “It’s not a test for young people.”

Thinking about the Alzheimer’s debacle, Alice blushed. Another word on the list had been dawn. Maybe she just had delayed delayed recall.

She found herself reading “An insignificant bush, reaching modest height with insignificant leaves and flowers, its appearance is common and uninteresting.” This was Escoba de la Vibora, or matchweed. Despite this insignificance it was respected, even revered, by those who used it. Good, Alice thought.

She was studying the book intently when a voice at her shoulder said, “Hi there.”

Alice got her sunglasses out of her pocket and put them on.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said. He was wearing a suit and had exceptionally white teeth. Alice regarded him coolly from behind her sunglasses, which she wished weren’t so smudged. Alice’s intention was to make herself and to be nothing but the self she made, but the problem had always been where to begin. One should begin with a stranger, but strangers never paid any attention to Alice. But here was one and he was.

“It’s just that you look to be about my daughter’s age,” he said.

“Is your daughter missing?” Alice asked. Although, of course, she could hardly care if she was.

“Why, no,” the man said, laughing. “I don’t believe so. My name is Carter Vineyard, and my daughter and I just moved here. She doesn’t know anyone. I thought someone her own age could give her a call.”

Alice looked at him. He was sophisticated-looking and sincere and had to be desperate, a little stupid, or intoxicated.

“You’re about sixteen, aren’t you?” Carter said. “Go to school?”

“The Marquise School,” Alice said. “But it’s almost over. A few more weeks.”

“The Marquise School is where Annabel’s going in the fall!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t that a coincidence! It’s an excellent school, isn’t it?”

“Function in disaster. Finish in style,” Alice said.

“Pardon?”

“The maxims of Marquise.”

“Oh yes, indeed. Good,” Carter said.

“The place is pretty vacuous, actually.”

“Oh well, that’s all right too, for a while, when you’re young. You’ve got the energy to handle it. It’s when you get older that vacuousness can really lay you low.” He realized he sounded somewhat disoriented, but he was still puzzling over the maxims. They sounded good, but weren’t they a bit terminal for an expensive boarding school?

“What’s she like?” Alice asked.

“Who?”

“Your daughter.”

Carter seemed unprepared for this question. “She’s nice,” he said. “Annabel is very nice. I have a picture of her.” He took a wallet from his pocket.

Alice looked. “You can’t tell much from a picture,” she said, giving this girl the benefit of the doubt. “Who’s this?” She pointed to another photograph of a woman in a tight white evening dress, laughing.

“That’s my wife,” Carter said. “That’s Annabel’s mother. She’s dead.”

“That proves my point exactly,” Alice said excitedly. “Pictures, wow, there’s no inkling in them of what’s going to happen next.”

“Hmmm,” Carter said.

Alice feared she’d hurt his feelings. “Well, she was happy then, anyway,” she said.

Carter put his wallet away. It was true that Ginger had been happy when that picture had been taken; she had been elated. Less than an hour later, still elated, she had demolished four cars in valet parking at a penalty of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (“If he thinks he has the only keys to our Mercedes, Carter, he’s a fool. I would never have given that boy the only keys to the Mercedes.”)

“Give me Annabel’s number and I’ll call her,” Alice said, for the man seemed to have misplaced the reason he’d approached her in the first place.

Carter’s face twitched. “Yes. Terrific.” He extracted a pen and paper from his jacket in the elegant way some men have of producing these humble instruments.

“Do you have another girlfriend you could bring along?”

“I wouldn’t right away,” Alice said cautiously. Maybe a rapprochement with life could be made possible for Corvus by employing this Annabel person, or maybe not.

“I’m just wondering if I should find someone else as well. I was determined to do something about this today, get Annabel started.” He gave a happy sigh. “I like it out here. People seem accessible.”

He was a little nuts, Alice thought. She kind of liked him.

Outside, the Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets person was crouched sobbing, in handcuffs, while a policeman watched her warily. “A work of reference ain’t worth this, lady,” he said.

Alice called Annabel and was immediately invited over to her house. It was in the foothills with a big pool and the city below and nothing behind but the hard, folded mountains still trying to conceal what they knew. The first impression Alice had of Annabel was that she was exceptionally tan. Annabel said her mother used to be able to tan like that, she loved tanning practically more than anything, but when she was forty-two, her skin stopped providing that service. It just wouldn’t tan up for her anymore. She said that a friend of her mother’s had told her that it was age and hormones and nothing could be done about it, and her mother had wept.

“Some people didn’t know how to be friends,” Alice said.

On the piano in the living room was a picture of Annabel’s mother in a silver frame. She wasn’t laughing in this picture.

Annabel made a spinach and fig and jicama salad for lunch, then she and Alice sat by the pool eating the salad and drinking seltzer water and chatting, tranquiling out on the trivial as some people do when they first meet and sometimes forever after. The area around the pool was intensely groomed desert vegetation. There was one of everything, but nothing was too tall except for three saguaros that clearly had just been purchased and were propped up with planks. Annabel confided that she thought saguaros were cute, the cutest things in the desert so far.

“This is a nice house,” Alice mumbled.

“I like the airily articulated spaces,” Annabel said.

Alice looked at her.

“That’s one of Daddy’s lines.”

“But that Indian’s a little tacky, isn’t it?” The Indian sat in a bent willow chair, moodily gazing at the pool and the valley plain below. Alice had almost greeted him deferentially when she arrived. He was plastic, life-sized, dressed in a shirt and jeans and moccasins. His limbs were jointed, and his hair was braided. “I mean, when you think of the way we exterminated the Indian, the way we took his land and extinguished his spirit.”

“Daddy says it’s inferior taxidermy,” Annabel said, nibbling on a fig. “It’s just a dumb house present.”

Alice followed the Indian’s glum gaze. She told Annabel that deer often came down from the mountains and drowned in people’s swimming pools and asked if that had happened here yet, and Annabel said, of course not, of course it hadn’t happened. Alice said there were lots of robberies in the foothills and had they been broken into yet and Annabel said no, a million alarms would go off, the house was programmed to attack and behead the intruder practically. Alice told her about the Little Caesar Murderer, where the guy would get into the house, murder its inhabitants, then take a shower and send out for a pizza. Annabel seemed preoccupied.

“I should tell you,” Annabel said. “I take these exercises, and sometimes they really work and I don’t care about anything and I accept everything, but usually I’m very conscious of my body and I want to look pretty and have pretty things and be happy and open to new experiences and I want people to be interesting and fun and that’s just the way I am.” She twisted strands of her hair with her fingers and looked at the ends.

“What kind of exercises?” Alice asked. Near them, hummingbirds with the swollen bodies of mice hovered.

“Oh, you know, everything’s in your mind. You just sit quietly and try to believe that. They’re these exercises you do after someone you love has died. Someone figured them out, I bet he’s a millionaire.”

Alice must next have asked Annabel about her mother, the pale woman in the silver frame, for Annabel went on, formally and incoherently: It had not been long ago. She’d been struck by a car. Instantaneous, her flight to Heaven. There was something about a fish restaurant.

Alice, whose unevolved sense of compassion for her own kind had been more than once remarked upon, said, “A fish restaurant, here? Where do you find a fish restaurant around here?”

“She’d had four martinis and was mad at Daddy. She ran out of the restaurant onto the highway. It wasn’t here, it was back home.”

“I would absolutely refuse to go into any fish restaurant,” Alice said. “Entire species of fish are being vacuumed out of the seas by the greed of commercial fishermen. People used to think fishermen were so cool, like truck drivers, but they’re indiscriminate, avaricious bastards grossly subsidized by the government to empty the oceans.”

Annabel gathered up her hair from the back of her neck, held it a moment, framing her pretty face, and let it drop.

“Do you know fish can talk?” Alice said. “They squeeze their swim bladders or gnash their teeth or rub some of their bones together. They produce sounds ranging from buzzes and clicks to yelps and sobs.”

“I don’t know what this has to do with my mother,” Annabel said. “It just happened to be a fish restaurant.”

“I’ve got this thing about fish,” Alice admitted.

They were quiet for a moment, then Annabel asked, “Would you like to play cribbage? I could get out the cribbage board.”

Alice had drifted off. She saw the noble swordfish rotting in the ghost net’s raptorial web. Cribbage, what was cribbage? This Annabel was in deep denial. That swordfish was not swimming away. “No,” she said, “let’s just sit here.”

“I love leisure time,” Annabel said. “It’s my favorite kind of time.”

“Leisure follows the consumption pattern,” Alice said, “and is managed by an industry that sells boredom-compensating commodities.”

Annabel wished she had an emery board at that moment.

“Do you ever feel you’re on parole?” Alice asked. “Not just locally but cosmically? And that’s why you’re not doing what you really want to do even when you think you’re doing it?”

“Parole!” Annabel said. “Certainly not. I haven’t done anything. Let’s go for a swim. A swim is just a swim, isn’t it? It’s nothing you have to feel guilty about.”

They swam. Annabel complimented Alice on her vigorous butterfly, even though she personally found the stroke unappealing. They bobbed and floated. Annabel talked about perfume. There was a perfume for practically every hour of the day. You had to be subtle but precise. At noon you would think you could go all out, but you couldn’t; noon was tricky. She talked about travel. Annabel believed, and she believed this strongly, that when you went to another country you should always take little jars of bubbles for the children and little bars of soap for the adults and hand them out; it made for good relations, made those foreign people glad you were there. She talked about her sentiments and fears. She missed the flowers back east and the mizzle that accompanied the fog in from the sea. She sometimes worried about losing a limb — an arm — it would be awful. She didn’t know where that worry had come from. She didn’t even know anyone who had lost a limb. She talked about boys. She had slept with two boys; she was glad it hadn’t been just one.

They got out of the pool, and Annabel offered to make lemonade, real lemonade with fresh lemons and raw sugar.

“You are aware, are you not,” said Alice, “that American sugar is destroying the Everglades? Big Sugar is a wealthy powerful government-sponsored ecoterrorist that pollutes thousands of acres of one of the most remarkable ecosystems on the planet. Your little bag of sugar dooms hundreds of beautiful wading birds to death by phosphorus and heavy-metal poisoning. We should import our sugar from Cuba, kick the growers off the land around Lake Okeechobee, and — what are these!” A set of glasses on the cabana wet bar were colored in different patterns, stripes, and spots. Inside each was a scene of animals grazing or walking around, exotic animals such as zebras and leopards and giraffes, and on the glass was a circle with lines on it like the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

“I will not drink anything out of these disgusting glasses,” she said. “Where do you get this stuff?”

“It was a house present,” Annabel said. “Another house present.”

“Your father has the worst friends,” Alice said. “Where does he find these people?”

“I don’t know, he just goes out and gets them!” Annabel poured Diet Pepsi into two plain glasses and hoped that not everyone she met out here would be as censorious as Alice.

4

Carter entered his bedroom with a terrible foreboding that Ginger would be there tonight. He undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. Almost immediately he heard a noise like someone rattling a newspaper. He turned on the lamp. Ginger was sitting in her little chintz-covered boudoir chair with an open newspaper raised to her face. She was close enough for him to read it himself, though he very much did not want to. There was a column on wine with an illustration depicting a nest in a tree. The nest contained a single egg that had broken open to reveal — well, it had hatched a wineglass, it was clear and birds with feet and wings but with the bodies of wine bottles were flying in to provide it with sustenance. That was repulsive, Carter thought. What edition was this?

“Carter,” Ginger said, “do you remember at the club that day in the reading room, Jeannie Winters behind the paper? She said, ‘One of my husbands just died,’ and that was all. She didn’t even put it down, she just went right on to the entertainment section. Wasn’t that a scream? I thought — I would like to be able to do that.” She lowered the paper. “But I never could, Carter, because I was wedded only to you. My life with you prevented me from being stylish like that.”

Carter looked at her. “You seem rather deshabille tonight, my darling.”

“While I loved you and all that, I would very much have liked to have gotten off a line as good as Jeannie Winters’. What do you mean, deshabille? It took a lot out of me coming here, and to this unfamiliar house. Why did you buy such an enormous house? And in the desert, thousands of miles from our home. I know what you’re thinking, Carter.”

“What?” he asked.

“You’re thinking you’ll keep moving around, farther and farther away, and I won’t be able to find you.”

Carter had always been grateful for his ability to conceal his thoughts from Ginger, but this, alarmingly, wasn’t too far off the mark. Still, if you’re not all-knowing when you’re dead, very little makes any sense at all. Very little.

“I want to settle down for Annabel’s sake, darling.”

“What sort of future do you have, Carter? Really, think about it. You have a diminishing future, so why bother? You snore, you know.”

“I do not snore,” Carter said. “I have never snored.”

“I used to think it was merely obnoxious, but it’s undoubtedly sleep apnea, which is a potentially life-threatening disorder. You probably stop breathing hundreds of times each night, Carter.”

“I do not snore,” Carter said. “Darling, it’s silly to argue about this. Tell me what it’s like there, why don’t you? Are odd stones in flannel rolled out to be adored?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always rather had that notion.”

“It’s not like that at all, for godssakes,” Ginger said. “That’s the dumbest attempt at embodying the unspeakable I’ve ever heard.”

“I misunderstand a great deal of what I think,” Carter said.

“Speaking of stones, I wouldn’t have minded one of my own. You could’ve inscribed upon it ‘Here lies the victim of an unhappy marriage.’ Nothing fancy, just to the point.”

Carter felt warm, then cold, then warm again.

“You should be in bed by nine,” Ginger said peevishly. “That’s when the liver repairs itself, between the hours of nine and three. Your body turns to liver restoration during the hours of darkness. I see your liver at this moment, Carter — you may not believe me, but I do. It is yellow, knotty, and hard.”

“Cut it out, Ginger,” Carter said. “If you would. Please.”

“You are a prime candidate for cirrhosis, you know. You don’t have a hair on your chest. If you were a bit more … simian, you’d have a better chance.”

“I didn’t think you cared all that much about my liver, darling.”

“You’ll always be forever in my thoughts, Carter. When will you realize that? When?”

Carter shuddered.

“What are Annabel’s plans for the summer?” Ginger inquired.

“She’s just going to try and get her bearings out here, make some friends.”

“I’ve never liked Annabel’s friends. Do you know what will happen to Annabel? She’ll grow up and then she’ll die.”

Carter was shocked for a moment. Though it wasn’t a particularly radical comment, he felt the need to temper it nonetheless. “But she’ll have had her own life, darling.”

“Oh, you believe that,” Ginger said irritably. “You’ll believe anything.”

“Annabel loves you, darling.”

“Well, I certainly hope so. I hope she’s not being encouraged to think that she idealized me inappropriately.” She twisted a little pearl button on the bodice of her dress, kept twisting until it fell off. “Shit,” she said.

Carter feared he’d find it on the floor in the morning and watched carefully as she placed the button in her pocket. She then spoke at length about the futility of existence and the vanity of all human effort and desire. Her monologues, if anything, seemed to be getting longer. Under ordinary circumstances, if people kept going on like this you’d tell them after a while to put up or shut up, but of course Ginger had put up. She had died.

She extended a narrow hand and pointed to his books, his ties, even his travel alarm from Tiffany’s, one of his favorite things. “All this is unnecessary, Carter.”

He didn’t like the way she was eyeing the little clock. There had been incidents of destruction in the past. “Ginger, please don’t break that.”

“A clock, Carter? I mean, please. You’re clinging to a clock?”

Carter covered the clock with his hand, where it ticked warmly.

“It crouches there watching the course of your life’s disintegration. Its only function is to witness your decline.”

“I like it,” Carter said. “I like its lines.”

“Time is circular, you fool. That’s the whole point.”

Carter resolutely held the little clock.

“Don’t cling, Carter. I’ve come back to help you in these matters. You must commence the casting off of material things. Where are my things, incidentally? What have you done with my clothes?”

If he uttered the word rummage, she would murder him, despite the fact that it was a good churchy rummage to benefit … who was it?… Haitians, he believed. The clothes that had somehow managed to infiltrate the belongings they’d shipped out here had been donated to … he hadn’t followed up on that transferal. He was silent.

“Your thoughts should be turning toward diminishment and cessation,” Ginger mused. “Do you remember the last time I asked you to look at my vulva?”

He frowned.

“You wouldn’t,” Ginger said. “So Dennis Beebee finally looked.”

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.

5

Alice’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:

WE’RE CLOSED TODAY OUT ACQUIRING NEW CRITTERS

ESPECIALLY FOR YOU.

REMEMBER! WE CAN GET YOU ANY CRITTER!

“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.

6

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.”

7

Alice 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.”

“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.

At the edge of the school grounds, a paper fluttered from a mock orange tree. It was a blurry picture of a cat with a little conical birthday hat on its head.

LOST WHITE CAT NAMED TU-TU.

TU-TU IS DEAF!

“Please, Alice.”

“I am not responsible for Tu-Tu’s disappearance.”

“Oh, please please please,” Annabel begged.

“I’ve never seen that cat before in my life.” Alice looked into the cat’s crazed photocopied gaze. Surely it had been the indignity of the hat that had caused Tu-Tu to seek a different life.

“Please,” Annabel was saying, “promise me you won’t kill cats for the time being.”

Trying to make the world just and natural only makes it more unjust and more unnatural, Alice thought. “Okay,” she said.

“I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown for a second. Everything was pale, this blinding pale and … trembling. Is there any place around here we can get some bottled water?”

“Sure,” Alice said.

“The kind that’s treated by reverse osmosis and enhanced with minerals? That’s the superior kind. You have to look on the label.” After a while, she said, “That poor Candy.”

“I think not being born is ecologically responsible,” Alice said. She wasn’t about to go all soft over Candy. “It has more sense than its mother.”

8

Annabel wanted to commemorate her mother’s birthday by having a nice dinner party for just the three of them, her mother and father and herself, with lamb chops and candles and some lovely dessert.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Carter said.

“I think some ritual restored to our lives would be nice, Daddy. I want to share some of my memories of Mommy with her. If you don’t share memories, they’ll disappear, and we’re responsible for what we forget, Daddy.”

Carter loved his daughter deeply, but the thought that she might be a little simple occurred to him frequently. Hadn’t Ginger insisted on painting the entire second floor in the first trimester? Hadn’t she persisted in those Bloody Marys at lunch?

“We’ll remember her on her birthday,” Annabel said determinedly. “We’ll devote the whole dinner to her. If it works out, we’ll extend it to other holidays. We’ll set a place for Mommy and pour wine into her glass and put food on her plate.”

Carter thought she was getting Ginger mixed up with Santa Claus. Each Christmas Eve they left some apples on the hearth for the reindeer. Plus a good strong belt of whiskey for Santa. Carter rubbed his face. “Are we really going to have lamb chops?” he asked.

Annabel nodded; it was her mother’s favorite. Alice would kill her, of course, if she found out, but Alice didn’t have to be informed of everything. She’d tell her they’d had pasta. Personally Annabel didn’t see anything wrong with a lamb chop now and then.

“I’ll take care of everything, Daddy.”

Or perhaps, Carter mused, she had in mind that thing the Mexicans did. One day a year they gave the dead food and flowers and in general made a big fuss, so they’d stay put and wouldn’t bother them all the other days of the year. Suddenly he became more interested. “What can I do to help, honey?” he asked.

“No gifts,” Annabel said.

They dressed up and set the table nicely. At first it was a little strange, but the food was good. Annabel chattered away to Ginger about her new friends, looking fixedly at the empty chair. She told her about the pimple she’d found — she couldn’t imagine where it had come from. She told her about the new Corvette Carter had bought.

“No, no,” he said, “she won’t approve of that.” Annabel looked at him oddly, and he laughed.

Midway through the meal, Annabel began to cry.

“Oh, honey,” Carter said.

“She’s not here!” Annabel cried.

“She’s probably not used to the house yet.”

“I don’t expect her to really be here, Daddy. That’s not what I’m saying. That would be silly. I just don’t feel she’s listening to us. I don’t feel her presence.”

Where was she, for godssakes? Carter wondered.

“I miss her,” Annabel said. “I wish we hadn’t scattered the ashes. I thought the empty chair was going to be the best part, but it isn’t.” She quickly cleared the dishes from the table and disappeared into the kitchen.

Carter sat there. Really, Ginger, he thought, this is mean of you. To be a termagant is one thing, but where is your compassion?

“I miss her,” Annabel called from the kitchen. “I miss her.”

Carter believed this and was horrified. He had another glass of wine and wandered outside into a beautiful night, black and still. Couldn’t make out a thing, actually, but he knew that all around him were Donald’s admirable touches. Donald, the young gardener, had presented himself at the door just last week, offering his services, his landscaping services. Donald could move a rock and effect an improvement. Restless, Carter returned to the house, poured himself a nightcap, and got ready for bed. He turned down the covers, put both pillows behind his shoulders, and cracked open the Jack London.

“Daddy,” Annabel called out, “I’m going to deep condition my hair and maybe wax my legs.”

“Okay, honey.”

“Good night, Daddy.”

London had gotten Carter through many a long night. “There were no mourners save a huge wolf-dog, to whom the taste of his master’s lash was still sweet,” he read. This was the real stuff. Blood on the snow. Sneering white silence. More blood. And no one cared. Nobody cared, and there was no law. Blazing eyes, slavered fangs, and wretchedness. Oh, it was a maggot’s life, a cosmos of death. But this was the way things were.… Carter lowered the book, and shut his eyes. His thoughts swung pleasantly to Donald. He was so tall. He had a face smooth and guileless as a baby’s and a thick mat of hair on his chest. Carter would’ve loved to press his mouth against that salty, soft amazing pelt, but of course he wouldn’t, absolutely not. He was an amusing man, a lighthearted man, he wanted to be happy, not to make a fool of himself.

He opened his eyes and flipped through the pages. “At the sound of this, the cry of Life plunging down from Life’s apex in the grip of death, the full pack at Buck’s heels raised a hell’s chorus of delight.” Carter frowned and studied the book’s cover. This shouldn’t be included in a collection of stories, it was part of The Call of the Wild. He was about to turn off the light and think about Donald for just a tiny bit more when he noticed Ginger perched at the foot of the bed. She was wearing a dress he’d always disliked — a shapeless green rayon thing that you could see right through.

“I always knew you were a faggot, Carter.”

“Why, darling!” Carter said. “I don’t understand. Why weren’t you here earlier?”

“What was that all about, anyway?”

“Annabel would have been thrilled.”

“We never celebrated my birthdays, Carter, as you are well aware. But it’s your full-blown faggotry we’re discussing here, not my age. And that Donald character. Honestly, Carter, you are so common, so ordinary. That little scar on his cheek! And the way you speak to him.… ‘This is all you have to remember,’ Ginger said mincingly. ‘Mozart’s subject is pleasure, Beethoven’s is joy, Wagner’s an insatiable yearning, dissatisfied with all consummation.’ ”

Carter blushed; it was true they’d been discussing music.

“That scar’s fake as a three-day tattoo.”

“Someone dropped a pruning saw on him. He could have lost an eye.”

“Well, I’ve lost everything, you idiot, and I’m not going to let you forget it. Why was I cremated? If I’d ever thought about it, I would have expressly instructed that there would be no cremation. And to scatter me where you did, in that sound. Some of the worst toxic polluters in New England dump everything they’ve got into that sound! I expected to be placed in a handsome vault. You know how I really pictured it? I pictured you going first, of course. And then when my turn came and I was lowered into our tomb, your skeleton arms would open to receive me.”

She got that right out of Héloïse and Abélard, Carter thought, history’s most tedious couple. He hoped Ginger wasn’t going to start writing to him. “Darling, please,” he said, “give it a rest.” Dead for months and still complaining about his driving, the way he had to clear his throat sometimes, his tipping practices (twenty percent), which she considered excessive. He studied her. She looked the same, and she was glaring at him.

“You never liked my breasts. You never paid any attention to them.”

“I disagree with you there, darling. I’m sorry to say I disagree with you categorically over that one. I love — I loved — your breasts, your silver breasts. Your pearlescent breasts.”

“No, no, no,” Ginger moaned. “You were a false alarm, and I answered it.”

Carter’s stomach hurt. Those lambchops were down there thinking, What’s happened to us now? Where … why, this is incomprehensible.… He closed his eyes, hoping Ginger might vanish, though this had not been effective in the past. She stayed and stayed, sometimes for hours, her masterly and intricate condemnation of him going on and on. Ginger was clearly, merely, a thought of his and could be replaced with another. Why couldn’t he do that? Maybe he needed a little instruction along these lines, a little training. He opened his eyes. Ginger was still there.

“I don’t understand,” he said, “why you didn’t show up when Annabel wanted you.”

“Never, never will I. She’d flip out if I did.”

“What is it you want, Ginger?” Carter asked. His stomach shrieked, then fell silent.

“I want you to acknowledge your responsibilities. You’re a married man, and marriage is a sacrament. It is indissoluble. I’m mortified by this Donald business. Mortified. You’ve turned into an old queen, Carter. You look so silly when you’re infatuated. Your eyes practically cross.”

Suddenly, the bedroom door began shaking in its frame. The ties, hanging there on a hook, slumped to the floor. The door flew open, and Annabel stood yelling in full nightmare.

“Pieces — in all the corners. Small, but too big — little pieces—”

Ginger evaporated as Carter hurried toward his daughter. He wore enormous blue boxer shorts.

“Left-handed people die sooner,” Annabel hollered, flailing out at him and hitting him in the mouth.

“Not true,” he managed to say. “It isn’t, no, none of it.”

“Oh Daddy, I’m sorry.” Annabel said. She went back to bed. Carter went to the kitchen and made another drink. He pushed ice under his lip, sliding it along his gum. Nobody he knew was left-handed. He put Tristan and Isolde on and sat in the dark. He loved Tristan. All meaning lay in the things its characters didn’t do or say; everything vibrated within the stillness of the characters, poised for actions that they postponed indefinitely. Opera was wonderful, Carter thought happily. An art devoted to love and death and the cryptic alliance between them. An art devoted to the definition and interchangeability of the sexes, to madness and drink and blasphemy! The characters of opera obey neither moral nor social law, which was pretty much what he’d been telling Donald. He sat in the dark listening to everything happening darkly and invisibly. When it was over, he still sat there. He supposed he should have outgrown Wagner by now. He wanted to throw a party, fill the house with people. Use that piano. He’d been sold on the house because of the existent piano in the otherwise empty rooms. He’d never had a piano before. It had yet to be utilized for anything except to display Ginger’s photograph and, more recently, Donald’s weekly flower arrangement. Donald. He was such a talented young man. Carter was definitely going to throw a party, fill this place with some life.

9

Ray Webb was trying to sell shoes in Houston, Texas, universally acknowledged as this planet’s place of penance. He knew no one. He hadn’t a single friend. He hadn’t had a friend since he was eight, actually — that little bald-headed girl in rehab had liked him — and now he was nineteen, drifting across the country, working, and stealing now and then. He wanted to be a waiter but was a little wobbly with the trays, and people didn’t like watching his mouth as he reeled off the specials. He’d kept those jobs for about two minutes. If the little bald-headed girl came in for a pair of shoes, he wondered, would they recognize each other? Of course she wouldn’t still be eight. They’d had some good talks once. Or rather, she had talked at him. He couldn’t speak very well because of his stroke, which is why he was in rehab to begin with. The little bald-headed girl had been struck by lightning. She’d been out picking blueberries, skipping along from lovely high bush to lovely high bush, unaware of the darkening day, and Whup! Nine times out of ten she could guess how many pennies were in a person’s pocket. Being struck by lightning had given her special powers.

Ray didn’t drink or do drugs but various ischemic incidents had given him an eager, erratic nature and a variety of facial contortions that allowed permanent employment to elude him. He hated selling shoes. He wanted to sell boots, but the manager disliked him. Even so, Ray performed his office enthusiastically. After only a week he’d developed a patter he was proud of, even though the better it got, the more wary his customers became. He couldn’t help that.

“You’ve got to take your time in selecting shoes,” he began. “You have to choose the shoes for you. You don’t want a shoe that’s going to end up looking at you with reproach when you take it off at night, offended by all you did or didn’t do. Some shoes just don’t want to carry you through life. You can’t tell this about them in a store — in stores they adopt a neutral air that makes choosing difficult. But our shoes’ route is our life’s course. Selecting them is an important decision.”

“I’ll have to think this over,” his latest customer said.

He put a couple of pieces of gum in his mouth and went back to the storeroom.

The manager followed him. “You’re not a drinker, huh?”

Ray looked at him, chewing. “I hate alcohol. I never touch it,” he said thickly. “I have no respect for it.”

“You sure have the personality of a drinker,” the manager said. “It’s like you’re a dry drunk. It’s weird.”

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.

The woman wrenched the door open. “You fuck, you loser!” she screamed. “How did you do that, you sick fuck?” Ray opened his eyes. Her own were dry but bloodshot. She possessed disturbing strength. His hat flew off as she removed him from the car and he stumbled onto the cinders and tore a hole in one knee of his jeans. More cinders rained on his bare head as the car scrambled away. He groped for his hat. The little monkey was climbing the walls in his head, making clear that it wanted out. Any avenue along the capillaries would do. There was an awful craving to get out. Ray didn’t feel well. He ate a few more chips and touched the corner of his mouth for a while. It felt like the hooded towel he’d favored when he was a little kid with little rubbery animals on it from Noah’s Ark. When he got up, he didn’t look at the roadway but kept his eyes on the ground. A wallet was lying there, formerly belonging to one Merle Orleans, the poor bastard. The picture on the license showed a fellow who didn’t have a clue that he’d bought his last Cadillac. Ray had found wallets before, sometimes in the darnedest places. With Merle’s collection of credit cards, he could buy a used truck and some socks, definitely some socks, plus a warmer coat, and gloves. He had to get his own means of transportation and stop relying on the fickle grace of lunatics. Merle Orleans might very well be moving on into the afterlife. He didn’t examine the face too closely as a matter of decorum.

In a few miles, Ray was long out of the burn and looking down into a valley. To his left was a runaway-truck ramp, where a semi lay wadded in loose gravel. He’d never seen one actually in use before. If you were a runaway-truck ramp, you probably had to wait a long time for some action. He assumed that this was the truck that had come between the gloomy chick in the Fleetwood and the pet of her desiring, and that she’d run the driver off the road. On the crumpled cab were dark silhouettes of animals — dogs, deer, birds — with lines drawn through rows of nine. What a fun-loving dude! Nothing was moving inside the cab. This was so almost morally acceptable, Ray thought. A police car was nearby, its lights pulsing.

“Oh dear,” Ray said to the policeman, who ignored him.

Ray used Merle Orlean’s plastic to buy himself a truck at a place called Gary’s Beautiful Cars. The truck was matte gray with jacklights and chrome wheels and was an exception in Gary’s lot, because most of his vehicles looked beat up and hard driven. Ray drove a hundred miles and then, at the urging of a large billboard, turned into the vast parking area of the Lariat Lounge.

The lounge itself was a rankly dim establishment illuminated only by a large TV. On the screen was a powerboat race, where some mishap had occurred and was being rebroadcast. A boat named Recondita Armonia had grazed and skimmed over The Bat/Frank’s Marine, decapitating both the throttleman and the driver.

The bartender greeted Ray by saying, “You’d think that’s just a helmet flying there, but there’s a head inside.”

“Wow,” Ray said. “Where is this?”

“Earlier on, a guy did a classic skip-and-stuff and killed himself too, but they haven’t been showing that one as much.”

“Wow,” Ray said again. “Where is this?”

The bartender looked at him.

“I mean, when?” Ray said, groping for the germane.

“Whatya wanna drink, pal?” the bartender said. “I don’t got all day.”

Ray ordered a beer. Though it wasn’t very cold, he didn’t want to mention it and further discredit himself in the bartender’s eyes. You just couldn’t walk into a bar; Ray was always forgetting that. Entering a bar took thought and preparation. The desired persona had to be determined, then assembled — in Ray’s case, practically from scratch — and projected.

He gazed up at the screen, where the little helmet was tumbling over and over through the air. It’s got to be Florida, he mused. That Easter-egg green water is definitely Floridian. He marveled for a moment about being here, thousands of miles away in Arizona, watching this balletic moment with hundreds of thousands of other people from coast to coast, all as one in the great world of human consciousness, observing and absorbing, all thinking pretty much the same thing: man’s brains are still in that thing, probably saying whoaa and trying to cogitate this problem through …

He ordered another beer, which tasted just the slightest shade warmer than the first, then retreated with determined nonchalance into the establishment’s other room. In here it was darker, and by error he seated himself directly beside the only other occupied table. Two men had been talking, and one of them pushed the curtain back from a filthy window so that more light fell upon the scene, a gaping desert light much disoriented at finding itself inside.

The men had been telling stories, and they waved Ray right in on the hearing of one, as though he’d been with them all the while, had departed only for a moment, and had now come back.

“So he spends Christmas Day in a motel room with my sixteen-year-old daughter.”

“Jesus. Christmas Day.”

“Disappeared right after the stockings. She came home that night, but it took me and my buddy until New Year’s Eve to find him.”

“You was always good friends, I recall.”

“Good friends. No problem up to then between me and Modesto. My little girl can be a troublemaker sometimes, I’d be the first to admit it. So Modesto has this girlfriend he’s crazy about, and she’s got a little kid. It’s Modesto’s little kid. He’s crazy about the both of them, but she’s out of town for Christmas visiting her mother. She’s in Bisbee. Her mother runs one of those cute-as-hell motels over there.”

The man smiled at Ray, who couldn’t help but wonder why they had befriended him.

“So I say to Modesto, when we found him, ‘You’ve got a choice here, my friend.’ We had him in his own truck. We was sitting on either side of him in his own truck. ‘You got a choice,’ I say. ‘You can either watch your girlfriend and your little kid go down — and I mean watch, I mean go down—or you can eat these varmint pellets.’ ”

“Nahhhh!”

“Yes.”

“Strychnine!”

“We had him outside his girlfriend’s apartment. I mean, right outside. You could see the fucking mobile over the kid’s crib. And I say, ‘Take this, eat this, or else they die.’ ”

Ray gulped his beer. “Scared the shit out of him, huh?” he interjected.

“So the punk took it. He thought it was a movie or something. He thought he was exhibiting an ethical dimension.”

“He might’ve thought it was an initiation or something,” Ray said. Initiations were always a dark-before-dawn arrangement. Things usually got better afterward.

“So he swallows the damn stuff, and my buddy and I vacate the truck. Modesto sits there for a minute and then starts shooting all around the cab on his own accord in these convulsions. Banged himself all the hell up. Must’ve gone on for ten minutes.”

“It wasn’t really strychnine was it?” Ray said.

“Cops come eventually, and you know what they conclude? They conclude Modesto OD’d. They say he suicided.”

“Cops are dumb around here, huh?” Ray said.

“That word ‘initiation’ is some word,” the storyteller’s companion said. “Don’t hear a word like that every day.”

“Man’s trying to put himself in Modesto’s shoes.”

“Gotta be an asshole to want to be in them.”

“Considering that Modesto convulsed himself right out of them, I’d have to agree with you. Those ten minutes were, well, they were beyond my wildest dreams of satisfaction,” the man said contentedly.

Ray thought he’d better be on his way. He didn’t even feel the need to finish his beer. At the same time, he thought he should buy a round for all concerned, though possibly that wasn’t a great idea either.

“Like maybe you’re imagining that Modesto’s imagining he’s being initiated into the No Fear club or something? Those assholes that have them banners across their windshields, those shade screens that say ‘No Fear,’ they belong to a club, right?”

“That is not my truck,” Ray said.

“We saw you get out of it.”

“It’s not mine.”

“Salaried pussies, they lease those vehicles.”

“I stole it,” Ray said.

“Ooh-hoo.”

“I sure did.” Ray wanted to appear a hardened criminal, but hip and friendly too. He pondered his exit line.

“You happen to know the Jesus prayer, wee-wee face?” the storyteller inquired.

Ray said nothing. His mouth seemed more insensate than usual.

“You just keep mumbling the ol’ Jesus prayer, and it will wreak a little miracle on you.”

“Wreak?” Ray dared. “I don’t … what is it?”

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You just keep mumbling it”—the storyteller rolled his eyes and waggled his tongue in a rude portrayal of an idiot—“and mumbling and mumbling and you’ll come to know that whatever happens to you is just something that happens. And what’s even better is, you’ll come to know that whatever you do to someone else is just something that happens too.”

The other man stared at Ray’s truck, absorbed in the flagrant breach of etiquette it represented.

“Adios, gentlemen,” Ray said.

They gaped at him. “Adios?” they cried in unison.

“Don’t die around here,” the storyteller suggested warmly. “It will be utterly misconstrued.”

Ray was already up and moving steadily through the bar, past the big-screen TV, now focused on Recondita Armonia in the dry pits. There wasn’t a mark on her.

10

Even with a considerable number of partying people, the house was in no way crowded. Carter supposed it was a bit large for his and Annabel’s needs, but they’d always lived in large houses. Anything under twelve thousand square feet Ginger had considered a hut. In their marriage’s prime, they had needed various rooms into which to retreat after quarrels had reached their towering crest. As a matter of fact, whenever they had bought a house (and they had moved frequently during Ginger’s spate on earth) one of their requirements had been rooms that served no other purpose. But though Carter had paid top dollar for this place, it lacked what could be considered a post-altercation crawl space. This pleased him, for any place that intimated a way of life other than the one he had shared with Ginger was a pearl beyond price.

He had toyed with various themes for this evening’s party but finally decided just to let the champagne flow and see what happened. He did suggest dressy. Carter loved dressy. He himself was never more relaxed than in a dinner jacket. There was something about a dinner jacket that was so relaxing, it just took you a million miles away.

Annabel was wearing her alpaca swing coat and her beaded chiffon skirt, two of her most fabulous things. Alice was wearing houndstooth slacks from Goodwill and a clean T-shirt with no railing message on it. Though Annabel had forced a little makeup on her, she’d rubbed most of it off. “You looked so sultry,” Annabel complained. “Well, maybe not sultry, but that cherry chocolate lipstick looked good on you. Effects can be achieved, Alice, you just have to experiment.” Corvus wore an unexceptional white sundress, but what she wore hardly elicited notice; it was the intrigue of her face, the sleekness of her dark hair. All three of them were motherless. Annabel thought they should have more in common than they did.

There was the civilized, slapping sound of martinis being made.

Carter found himself enjoying the company of several young men. “Now, for Wagner,” he was saying, “opera was a political creed and spiritual gospel; its aims were revolution and salvation. He wanted to transfigure the lives of those who heard his work.” The fine young men were attentive to these sentiments.

About a hundred guests were present. Carter had found them here and there. Ginger had never liked his friends, so he’d gotten into the habit of making new ones readily. Back east, Ginger had actually been instrumental in getting one of his nicest friends deported to the horribly infelicitous country of his birth, a place where everyone spoke a different dialect and murderous fights broke out over the slightest misunderstanding. His friend had previously managed to inadvertently insult a number of his countrymen, and Carter feared that the homecoming had not been a pleasant one.

“You know,” one of the young men was saying to Carter, “Wolf House is only a few days’ drive from here, in Sonoma. If you’re a London fan, you have to see it. It was his dream house, in the works for years, and it burnt to the ground the night before he was to move in.”

“I do want to see Wolf House,” Carter said. He had an empathy for structural decay on a grand and brooding scale, generally a bad tendency in an architect. Hadn’t the disaster in this case been the architect’s fault — a great writer’s dream thwarted on the telluric level by a faulty venting design? It made him glad he had never truly practiced his profession.

Donald discreetly turned Carter’s attention to the rising moon, which had rolled past the mountain’s corner like an immense cruise ship.

Corvus was quiet as always quiet, though taking everything in, Annabel suspected. She would hate to be the kind of person who had to take everything in all the time. Corvus made her feel like a merry little insect or something, though she wasn’t at all snobbish or supercilious. She had perfect skin, almost translucent, and sometimes Annabel would just gape at it. There were dog hairs on that white sundress, though, she noticed pityingly.

Alice was sitting on a couch watching a man in a tuxedo play the piano. A woman in a silk jumpsuit sat beside him on the bench, and Alice looked at them sulkily. The woman began to sing. She didn’t have a bad voice, she was confident and playful. Alice bit her nails, dragging them out of her mouth on occasion for inspection. The woman was singing witty lyrics in a light, assured voice, and the man in the tuxedo grinned at her, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, his hands flying over the keys.

“Alice, what are you thinking about?” she heard Annabel ask. “You’re all scrunched up! Do you want some hummus?” She extended some on a cracker.

“I can’t eat,” Alice said.

Annabel looked at her respectfully.

“I … he … they just won’t let him out early. We keep hoping they’ll let him out early.” The reason she didn’t date, Alice had explained, was that she already had a boyfriend, who unfortunately was away in prison.

“It’s too bad you have to think about parole all the time,” Annabel said.

Alice wished she’d never invented this absentee boyfriend.

“But I don’t think prison’s anything to be ashamed about,” Annabel said. “It’s something lots of people have to just get behind them.”

What was he in jail for anyway? Alice wondered. Nothing good.

“I’m sure he doesn’t even belong in prison,” Annabel said. “I knew a boy back home, he was piloting his dad’s motorboat at night and he hit a buoy and killed two of his friends and they sent him to prison. He was there a whole year, and he didn’t belong there at all.”

Alice looked at her.

“Well, he was a nice boy, I mean. Basically. And they’d all been drinking — even the dead ones. What’s yours look like, you’ve never told me. I don’t picture him as being particularly cute … more compelling-looking.”

“It’s difficult to describe someone you love,” Alice said.

“So he’s really going to be in there forever, or what? That’s a big responsibility for you. They want them to feel remorse, is the thing. He should profess remorse.”

“Annabel,” Alice said, “I don’t want to discuss it.”

“I understand,” Annabel said.

Now the singer was embracing the man in the tuxedo, giving him a big kiss on the side of the head. Then she slid gracefully off the piano bench and joined the party. The man sat with his back to the girls, not doing anything for a moment. Then he lit another cigarette.

Alice heard a woman say, “Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it.”

“What kind of poems do you write?” someone asked.

This soiree was sort of out of it, Alice thought.

The man in the tuxedo turned toward her. “What would you like to hear, darling?” he asked.

I’d like to hear you moaning in ecstasy in bed, Alice thought, startling herself. Men did that, didn’t they? She gave him a smile and felt her lip snag on her tooth the way Fury’s did sometimes after he yawned and her poppa would have to reach down and unhook it.

“Without the guidance of request, I always play ‘I Get a Kick Out of You.’ ” After he finished, he came over and sat between them.

“The woman who was singing with you,” Alice croaked. “Is she your lover?”

Annabel giggled. She had never seen Alice behave like this.

“There are certain women,” the man in the tuxedo said, “who love men like myself. They’re fascinated with us, we’re a challenge to them. Do you suppose he’d fuck me? they wonder. Do you think he could do it?”

“Really?” Alice said.

“That is the case,” the man said.

“Some people are so shallow,” Alice said.

“Some people are tremendously shallow,” Annabel said. “I knew a boy back home who, if someone he didn’t like told him something he thought was dumb, he’d laugh in a noblesse oblige fashion and then he’d look at someone he liked and shrug and say ‘Noblesse oblige.’ ”

“Have you ever had a man, darling?” the man asked Annabel.

“A few experiments,” she said. “They were actually just boys. Sort of. Back home.” The piano player was sort of disgusting. Leave it to Alice to be enchanted.

“Do you always wear a tuxedo?” Alice asked.

“Always,” he said. “Never without it. In church you can’t see it for the robe.”

“Church?” Alice exclaimed, troubled.

“God is the net. We are the creatures within the net.”

“Oh, that’s kind of pretty, I think,” Annabel said. But then she didn’t think it sounded pretty at all.

“You need to see the net for it to work,” he said. “It’s not enough to be in it. We have to be conscious of it over and over again.”

“We make our own net,” Alice said. She couldn’t believe he was a churchgoer. She’d have to work her way around that.

“But we don’t make it out of that marvelous light stuff,” he said. “We make those ugly, hard, crude, clangoring links.”

“You really go to church?” Alice asked.

“I play the hymns. They pay me for it, though I would do it for nothing. I find church very sexy. I love Protestants.”

“Then you don’t believe it?”

“Believe what, darling?”

“It just arouses you?”

Annabel gave an alarmed, piercing laugh.

“ ‘I fled him down the nights and down the days/I fled him down the arches of the years/I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind/and in the midst of tears I hid from him,’ dah dah dah dah. ‘From those strong feet that followed, followed after …,’ ” the man in the tuxedo chanted, his eyes half shut. “The minister loves the old mystics. I think he’s going to have a nervous breakdown any Sunday now. Expectation runs high.” He seemed to notice Corvus for the first time, and he smiled at her and bowed a little.

“Well,” Alice said, “God’s not my owner.”

“You must like cats,” he said.

“Cats?” Alice said.

“The chosen allies of womankind.”

“Would anyone like a beverage?” Annabel said.

“Cats are accustomed to making their own decisions and implementing them out of their owner’s sight.”

“I don’t care for cats at all,” Alice said.

“Coffee perhaps?” Annabel persisted.

“No coffee for me, darling,” the piano player said. “I drink coffee at night, and I have bad dreams — headless, one-eyed men with their mouths in their armpits wanting you-know-what from me and such.”

Annabel never told her dreams since the time she had asked her mother if she wanted to hear about one that in Annabel’s opinion was particularly artful and mysterious. “I dreamed …,” Annabel had begun. “I dreamed I was in Hell,” her mother interrupted, pretending those were the words Annabel was about to speak. It was nine in the morning and her mother was having a screwdriver and a cookie.

“Would you like some ice water?” Alice asked.

“Ice water would be fabulous,” he said, “but hold the ice.”

She went off happily for the water. Obtaining the simple element in a glass required intensive negotiations with the bartender.

“Plastic relies on an unrenewable resource,” Alice complained. “It’s not truly recyclable, and the petroleum involved requires extensive use of toxics in manufacture. Plus it’s the largest trash contaminant of the oceans. As a caterer, you should be aware of this and set a better example.”

“Who invited you, might I ask?” the bartender said.

She eventually returned with something acceptable.

“This is a perfect glass of water,” the man in the tuxedo said.

They watched him drink it, the muscles in his neck moving.

“What were we talking about?” Annabel said. “Oh, church …”

He put down the empty glass. “I take most of my meals on a church plate,” he said. “That is, a plate with the representation of my church’s building upon it. It’s my only plate.” He looked at them piously. “I have very little.”

“I’d love to see it,” Alice said.

“Words don’t express our thoughts very well, do they, darling?” he said.

“I’ve always thought that was true!” Alice agreed. “Who came up with the idea they could? Some sort of control freak.”

“She meant the plate, I think,” Annabel said.

The man in the tuxedo giggled richly.

“Thank you, Annabel,” Alice said.

Fretfully, Annabel got up and wandered off to see what her father was doing. He was speaking to a young man whose very long blond hair and pale cream-colored clothes made him look rather like a palomino.

“Our marriage was a mutual solitude, as the French say,” Carter was saying.

“Oh, Daddy,” Annabel sighed. She went outside feeling as ethereal and misplaced as her mother. One of her mind exercises was to choose a star, pretend it was Ginger, and confide in it. She looked up and began, “I’m unhappy, Mommy. There’s nothing to do out here except cocktail parties and nature.” Even as she spoke, she heard a scuffling in the desert just beyond the pool’s walls, followed by an inhuman cry and a preoccupied silence.

“You wouldn’t like it out here either, Mommy,” Annabel continued. “You wouldn’t tolerate it for more than five minutes.” She didn’t know what to tell her mother. Nothing sounded right to her. She certainly wasn’t going near the Big Sister debacle. To fill up some time, Annabel had offered to become a Big Sister. Her Little Sister came over to the house, and all she wanted to talk about was Girls’ Ranch. The worst thing about staying there was that they gave you hair conditioner only once a week. Plus the shampoo wasn’t the hydrating kind with natural humectants, and every girl in there had bleached hair and needed follicle nourishment. Annabel commiserated with her about this at length. Little Sister was an exceedingly shy and clumsy child, spilling a full glass of tomato juice all over the piano. This so humiliated her that she called her taxi-driver boyfriend, who arrived and drove her away before Annabel had been a Big Sister for even forty-five minutes. Later it was discovered that she’d keyed Carter’s Corvette, stuffed bananas down all the toilets, and stolen a bottle of Patrón. “She certainly knew her tequilas,” Alice had said.

Annabel started over with another star. “Mommy, if you were me …”

A massive object hurtled over the wall and into the swimming pool. It was the size of a motorcycle, thrashing darkly. She screamed, and it churned through the water, extinguishing the little floating candles, cracking hard against the ladder, entangling itself in the temperature duck. It sank, then struggled heavily upward. Two black nostrils stared like empty eyes.

Carter strode out with several young men, all with drinks in hand.

“Mr. Vineyard,” Donald said, “it’s a deer.” He jogged to the garage, where all the tools hung within their chalked-up outlines, rakes and hammers, hoses and shears. When one was taken away to be used, it looked, as far as the garage was concerned, as though it had died.

Everyone had straggled out by now. “I can’t watch this,” the poet said, then added, “If it breaks its leg, what you have to do is call the fire department.”

Donald ran back with a garden hose. “We’ll make a sling, perhaps we can haul it out that way.” Carter quite unexpectedly jumped into the pool. “Oh no, Mr. Vineyard,” Donald cried, “you could be struck!” Shouting, Carter’s young friends followed him in, hesitating only to kick off their shoes and remove their jackets. “Rodeo!” one yelled. The deer was sinking once again, flattening out somewhat like a carpet. The young men in their billowing shirts seemed disturbingly sexual to Annabel as they grasped parts of the animal and pushed it toward the steps, laughing and grunting, leaving behind them a wake of plastic cups and lime wedges. The deer struggled out, slid sideways, and fell back with a scrabbling crackle of hooves against the tile. Annabel was sure she saw blood in the water. Her inviting limpid pool had been transmogrified into something rank and exclusive. The animal, tipped upright on the steps once again, heaved itself from the water and in one wobbly leap vanished over the wall into the desert whence it had come. Carter’s jacket was sliced straight through; his hands were torn. The young men, too, had suffered varying degrees of damage to their clothing, which seemed to delight them. They all climbed out in high spirits, hugging and punching one another.

Donald brought an armful of large white towels from the poolhouse. “You’re a nice man, Mr. Vineyard,” he told Carter earnestly. “A new soul in my opinion.” He dabbed at Carter’s head with a towel.

Alice was standing beside the piano player, with whom she had become quite smitten.

“What a macabre environmental event,” he said.

“Now you know what I was talking about,” Alice said to Annabel.

“What do you mean, ‘Now I know’? I don’t know anything! This doesn’t happen every time a deer falls into a swimming pool, does it?”

Annabel wanted someone to turn off the pool light. Where was the stupid switch! The water looked murky and was still rocking against the sides of the pool. And the deer or someone had chipped her favorite decorative tile, a little mermaid with starfish on her breasts. Half of her gentle little face was gone, and who could fix that! No one could.

Alice followed the piano player back into the house and watched him as he smoked. “You’re too much for me, kid,” he finally said. “You’ve got the look of the pilgrim all over you.”

“That’s my friend,” she said. “Look, my boyfriend’s on death row, so I can’t do anything with you, really. We can’t have an actual love affair because of him, okay, so I just want to hang out.”

“I love it,” he said.

“I just want to run with you.”

“I don’t run, dear. Goodness.”

“I don’t mean jogging. Not that.”

They looked at each other in amazement.

He ground out his cigarette and lit another. “What did he do?”

“What?”

“To get there.”

“Oh! It was a crime of passion.”

“I love prisoners,” he said, blowing smoke. “Tell me though, honey, are you jammy or minty?”

“I–I don’t know what you mean.”

“Straight or queer.”

“I’m not either one.”

“You know what they say,” he said, tapping his fingers on his knee, “When the two shall be one and the without as the within and the male with the female, neither male nor female, that’s when the party begins.” He laughed without opening his mouth.

A car started up in the driveway, its headlights turning the bats in their threaded flight above to silver.

“This particular party’s almost over, thank God,” he said.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Alice said. “Where are you going, where do you live?”

“You’re a saucy one. I live in a room, a dirty little room. You can’t see it. I’m at that time in my life when temptations abound.”

“Do they have shapes, your temptations?” Alice asked. More people were leaving the party.

“They have the shape of intemperate tendencies, honey.”

“You can call me by my name,” Alice said. “It’s Alice.”

“But I don’t want to, honey.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sherwin.”

“It isn’t!”

“I’ve spoiled everything again,” he sighed. “I always do.” He ground out another cigarette in the brimming ashtray. “Does that ashtray spook you?” he asked. “Sometimes they can be very spooky. Sometimes I just smoke and look at the ashtray and think, What will have happened by the time it’s full? And just when I feel I’m about to understand what the ashtray is, at the same time, with a certain wonder and even fear, I feel I’ve never understood it and I don’t understand anything.” He widened his eyes.

She didn’t care about ashtrays. An ashtray could never perturb her like that. She simply wanted, if he ever looked away, to take one of the cigarettes he’d smoked, crushed remnant of his pleasure and need, put it into her pocket, and keep it. She wished he’d say her name.

“Alice?” he said.

11

Ray felt he was pushing his luck with Merle Orlean’s credit line. Stealing without a weapon was fun, but it made a man less virile and flexible after a time. So he decided to settle down for a few weeks. There were mountains all around this town, sort of pretty, and it was warmer than where he’d been. This was serious heat, and Ray liked heat. He got a job at an Indian crafts shop, Morning Star Trader, by answering an ad in the newspaper. “I have experience in sales,” he told the owner. Morning Star Trader claimed they sold old pawn but didn’t. Anyone seriously into old pawn wouldn’t be caught dead in this place. Besides, where did this old pawn keep coming from? Ray didn’t believe in old pawn. He scarcely believed in history. The shop sold inconsequential jewelry, greeting cards, kachinas, sand paintings, and fetishes. There was also a table offering Mexican calacas: Here were the skeletons at the vanity table, getting married, discovering infidelities, playing instruments, feeding the birds, at the beach. Great stocking stuffers, or put them in bunny’s basket at Easter time. But the public needed no urging in this regard, thinking the calacas hilarious. The calacas flew out of there.

What took more skill was the field wherein Ray shone, the selling of the fetishes, those tiny animals carved from bone or stone. “It’s all bullshit,” the owner had told him, “but all bullshit is relative, you know what I’m saying?” Ray did. He admired the owner, who trusted him and was never around. Ray pushed the little objects as telepathic and life-enriching. The manner that had failed him in the selling of shoes worked brilliantly here. Through a little research he’d learned that it had once been very weird with the Zunis and their fetishes, which originally had been consulted for success in hunting or to prevent sickness and defeat. The fetishes lived in special jars, where they ate and breathed and their power was contained. They were frequently washed in blood and feathers and scrubbed with pieces of hide, and repulsive objects such as human eardrums were often attached to them. They were sticky and rank from the cornmeal they were fed. Zuni beliefs were complicated and covered every known dilemma. The men had to be careful, and the women had to be even more careful than the men, because there were more things they could do wrong, such as not washing the scalps properly or failing to keep the scalp jar in good order. They had scalp jars all over the place. If a woman’s husband died — undoubtedly because of some screwup by the wife — she was obliged to mourn for a full year. At the end of the year she was supposed to have intercourse with a stranger, to whom she must present a gift he would then destroy. That part was sort of cool, Ray thought, but the custom had probably been suppressed along with so many intriguing traditions in this secular age. After awhile, the Zunis started to make things up and connections became imprecise. Their cruddy innocent world collapsed.

In the shop, he pushed the fetishes solely as honest messengers from the world within, quiet helpful inner voices. As the customer peered into the locked glass case, Ray would begin, “The one you’re attracted to first is usually the one for you — it has something to say to you. The right one has a subtle yet powerful draw.”

He would leave them for a moment to ponder this, then return. They were usually older women. Morning Star Trader wasn’t that great a place to meet girls. They seldom went for badger or snake; mostly wolf or bear would get the nod. If they weren’t at all serious, they would ask to see toad, possibly gila monster. These were the knickknack sort. Seldom did eagle impress them, perhaps being too close emblematically to that out-of-fashion colonial effect once so popular in the overpopulated and spiritually malnourished Northeast, a region from which many of his customers had recently fled. Eagle’s power had been compromised.

If they seemed hesitant, Ray would ask, “Do you wish to hold one in your hand?” He peddled the fetishes as focusing powers, as channelers with the ability to lead one away from puzzlement and distress. His odd face — suggesting, as it did, fate — only seemed to help. “If you’re responsive, they can be very useful,” he would say quietly, though sometimes he’d get wound up and suggest that mole could help in strengthening the immune system or that falcon enhanced one’s communication with a pet. But mostly he supported the big vague picture.

He had suffered only one return in two weeks working at the store, from a woman he’d encouraged to go off with mountain lion. The lions weren’t moving. Ray felt it was because their carver insisted on making their shoulders too big and their heads too small; things looked screwed up. He’d told the woman that this particular fetish protected the traveler. He didn’t know why he had come up with that angle — little monkey messing up his wave — but it turned out this was precisely what the woman wanted to hear, and she took two to double-dip their assistance. By the end of the day she was back, the engine block on her Buick having cracked before she’d even gotten home.

“Car travel isn’t real traveling,” Ray said. He could barely enlarge on this before he was forced to admit that the store did not provide cash refunds. He was about to suggest she consult white wolf to remind her of the transitoriness of events, but she threw the fetishes — still wrapped in tissue, not even out of the bag — at him and left. He was replacing them in the case when another customer came in, a moody-looking girl in dusty black. Ray felt composed; he’d pocketed seventy dollars on the mountain lions, and the store still had them. When he began his riff, the girl looked shocked.

“Please,” Alice said, “you’re polluting this for me.”

“Well, fine,” Ray said.

“Give me a break.”

He made an ironic bow and went over to the calacas table. There were the skeletons at the mirror, at the typewriter, taking photographs of one another, walking their little skeleton dogs, in the bath. He had a headache. The little monkey was dragging a useless limb across the inside of his head, mopping inside it with its soft floppy arm. This was how his headaches were: neither piercing nor pounding, they were just the little monkey’s nerve-dead arm swinging back and forth. He wanted to close up, go back to his room, have a beer, get the monkey comfortable and count the money he’d saved. The windfall with the lions had really kicked his savings up. He wanted to buy some gear and find some wilderness and camp out for a while. He’d already lifted a pretty decent backpack from an unlocked car. Astonishing how many cars remained unlocked in this day and age. But he had a ways to go before he’d outfitted himself properly. “Sometimes in the wilderness you have to rely more on your equipment than yourself,” as the ads said.

“Have to close up in a few minutes,” he called to the girl.

Alice was crouched in front of the case, her fingers pressed against the glass. Then she stood up and rested her arms on the top, still looking.

“Don’t lean on that,” he called. “It could break, easy.” His mouth inadvertently broke into a grimace, for the little monkey had stopped with the sweeping and sort of lost its balance and stumbled, as it often did. Once, when Ray was ten, he’d gone to a psychiatrist and tried to describe this sensation. “It’s like it slips sometimes and falls through glass — thin, thin glass like ice, and levels and levels of it …” he’d ventured.

“That’s sex, son,” the doctor said warmly. “That’s puberty. That’s your hormones talking.”

“Sex?” Ray said.

“I’ve heard sex described that way a thousand times,” the psychiatrist said. “Let me tell you something about girls while we’re having this conversation. Girls have hair down there. It can come as a shock to the uninformed.”

Young Ray felt like telling him that to reduce any mysterious feeling to the sexual was to grievously mutilate its true relevance. He had told him in the only way he could at ten. He’d told him to fuck off. And he hadn’t mentioned the little monkey to anyone since, not that this had quieted it down or consoled it any.

“You’re determined to break that, aren’t you?” Ray snapped at Alice. He picked up a bottle of Windex and a roll of towels and made a great show of cleaning the glass while she stood there.

“I’d like to see that one,” Alice said.

“Raven,” he said. “That’s a hundred and eight dollars.”

“I still want to see it.”

Reluctantly, he removed it from the case. He wanted her to assume that she shouldn’t, at that price, expect to hold it herself. “This one is associated with transformational powers. As a confident—”

Alice looked at him — and not at his mouth, either, where most people got stuck. “Even though they’re made by people just out to make a buck, you shouldn’t mess with their abilities like you do.” She snatched the raven carving from his hand and turned it over. “Why does it say eighteen dollars?”

“Whoops,” he said. “Guess my eyes get tired at the end of the day.” There was an unpleasant silence. “If it’s a gift, you can get that price off with a little bit of nail polish remover. I think the great transformer is money, you know what I mean? It can turn into anything. It’s practically alive, man,” he said, excited by his insight.

Alice studied it, ran her grimy thumb across it.

“Why don’t you take it?” Ray said suddenly. “Just take it, I’m giving it to you.” He liked doing this, saying the exact opposite of what he really felt, being nice to people he disliked. To be unnatural and spontaneous, to create confusion and unease, was satisfying. He thought of the little monkey doing what he shouldn’t be able to do, seeing through those sewn-shut lids, nudging a peanut with that insensate limb, arguing in a persuasive language never heard before against protracted and untimely death. “Say ‘Thank you,’ ” Ray prompted.

“I won’t accept it.” The fetish made a little click as she set it down on the glass. “It’s not for my friend. I mean, it was supposed to be for her, but it isn’t. I think you’ve defiled this whole case,” she added.

“I was only joking,” Ray said. “Why would I give you something for nothing?”

The moment she left, the little monkey recommenced its dragging, stricken circuit in his head.

12

Carter had bought some satin sheets in the hope they might help him sleep.

Ginger sat in the chair by the empty vanity table. “So how did your day go?” she asked.

Carter looked longingly at the sheets. “Well, the Wilsons are in town, dear, and I had dinner with them. They’re on their way to the Four Corners area for their anniversary. Twenty-five years!” A quarter of a century, with considerable help from the Percodan tablets prescribed after they’d thrown out their backs when the club car in which they’d been riding had been struck by a slow-moving freight. They had never taken a train anywhere again and instead zipped about the country first-class on airplanes, whacked out of their minds. They were great fun to be around.

“I hope, for their sake, they don’t run into any mice,” Ginger said. “The mice up there make dust that’s virulent. A person breathes it in, gets a headache — then Curtain! Dead within twenty-four hours.”

“A mouse makes a—?”

“Oh, I’m giving you the short version, for godssakes. Why go on and on about things?”

Carter was silent.

“So tell those tiresome people they’d better watch out. What did you talk about at dinner?”

Didn’t she know this? “Jazz and palms, mostly,” Carter said. “Those people really know their palms. They don’t just toss around the common names, either. No sugar, jelly, or Madagascar for them.”

“So?” Ginger said, looking at him intently.

“Madagascar is somewhat of a general term.”

“I heard a very nice thing about the people of Madagascar. They used to bury dolphins who washed up on beaches in their own graveyards.”

“Really!” Carter said, charmed.

“But they don’t do it anymore.”

Carter sucked on a Tic Tac.

“Do you know that one Christmas season Pat Wilson corrected me as to who was Joseph in our crèche display?”

“I don’t recall that.” Carter did remember the crèche, though, very well. They’d bought it in Venice the winter before Annabel arrived, and again there was that phenomenon that always thrilled him: snow falling into water. The memory threw his thoughts into a cold twilight. He lay on the bed with a sense of restless paralysis.

“I’ve never forgiven her. She said that my Joseph figure, the figure I’d placed in the Joseph position, was clearly a shepherd and belonged back with the sheep. And she moved it!”

“Well, she’s off to the Four Corners now,” Carter said vaguely.

“Appointment with mousie,” Ginger said.

After a few moments, Carter unobtrusively switched on the television. They were culling elephants somewhere in Africa. The terrified herd shrank back from two small men with machine guns. “Ginger!” he cried, “what have you done to the channel?” He groped for the changer but couldn’t find it. On the screen, a wet human palm displayed a slippery elephant fetus; a finger jiggled the tiny trunk, arranged the tiny legs. Carter at last located the changer, and now black ghetto youths with remarkable hair were ambling around an open coffin, fluttering their hands above the corpse’s placid face in some bizarre ritual of respect.

“See how nasty it all is,” Ginger said. “Nasty, nasty. Come with me, Carter. Come to where I am.” She raised her arms.

She meant the gesture to be inviting, he was certain. “But what about Annabel?” he said. “She’s still just a child, and there’s no one to take care of her.”

“Annabel? She’ll get along. Children stay children for far too long. Annabel will be fine. You’re not raising her properly anyway, what with those soirees you’re always hostessing. It’s humiliating the way you’re all a-bubble around those young men. And that one man …”

“Which one is that?”

Ginger made a ghastly face. “The hireling.”

“The piano player?” Carter said. “He’s a wonderful piano player.”

“You don’t understand, do you? Never have, never will. You can be so obtuse. But I used to love you so much! I loved you so much I even tried to walk around the house the way you did. It made me feel less lonely.”

He should kiss her, he thought, but the distance between them was so great and he was so tired. Too, he’d be insane to kiss her.

13

At school, a little more than a week after her parents’ funeral, there was another call for Corvus.

“This is your neighbor, John,” the voice said. “Your dog is barking.”

“I’ll be home by two,” Corvus said.

“It’s howling. I can hear it through my closed windows. What’s going on?” He sounded reasonable.

“He’s in the house,” Corvus said. “He’s not outside.”

“I’m a mile away. It starts up the minute you leave in the morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What’s it need, water or something? Food? What’s its favorite food? Or maybe it needs its mouth wired shut.”

“What?” she whispered.

“Anything I can do,” neighbor John said.

“I’m at school now,” Corvus said. “I’ll be home by two. That’s only an hour from now.”

“What is it you’re saying, babe?”

“The dog, Tommy, he misses my mother.” She was shocked she’d said this. She was ashamed. The words were hopeless, nobody wanted them.

“Then somebody should tell your mother to get her goddamn ass back home and do whatever she does to keep that dog from howling.” He hung up.

Corvus turned to the secretary seated behind her office desk. The woman’s child was standing in a playpen regarding Corvus with disfavor. She was too old for a playpen, but it had been arranged that the secretary could bring her in once a week.

“Your mommy and daddy are dead,” the child said. “I don’t like you, you smell funny.”

“Melissa!” the secretary said. “Now, what did I tell you! That is very, very naughty, Melissa. Corvus, dear, is everything all right?”

“I have to go home.” She hurried outside. The windows in the truck were down, and though she’d wedged a cardboard liner behind the windshield, the temperature inside was still over a hundred degrees. The steering wheel and seats were scalding.

“Death is normal, Melissa,” the secretary was saying back in her office. “Death happens sometimes.”

“I don’t know what it is.” The child stamped her feet.

It took twenty minutes. It always took twenty minutes. She drove through the outskirts of the city and into the bladed desert and beyond, through empty ranchland. Hawks lay in sandy furrows, their beaks open, in the shadeless noon. She passed John Crimmins’s. Her own house was at a distance it might take four minutes to run to. She bounced over the cattle guard Tommy was afraid of and up to the house. Above two metal chairs on the porch, a wind chime tinkled from a beam.

Tommy was standing just inside the door. He wagged his tail once and peered past her, then turned and went to a coat lying in the corner. He curled up on it, his chin resting on the worn corduroy collar of her mother’s coat.

“Tommy,” Corvus said. He wagged his tail once more but didn’t look at her. The house was cool and quiet, the curtains were drawn. She took some ice cubes from the freezer and, holding one in each hand, ran them across her face and through her hair. Ants crawled through Tommy’s dishes on the kitchen floor. She threw his food out and scrubbed the bowls clean. She would get padlocks for all the doors. She would get Tommy a comrade dog. She would get a third dog, a fierce one, to protect them both.

She drank a glass of water and put fresh food in his bowl, but he could not be coaxed to eat it. After a while he got up and walked through all the rooms quietly, without making a sound: a ghost dog. Corvus hadn’t heard him howl since the night of the funeral, the night Alice had been here. He lay down again on the coat, his expectancy dimmed. Just before dark she took her father’s binoculars out to the porch and looked through them at John Crimmins’s. Two lights were on, soft as the lantern lights her mother liked to use at suppertime. She put Tommy in the truck and drove to a grocery store, where she bought fried chicken. Then she drove to the Hohokam Drive-In, pulling in next to a woman whose large horned lizard sprawled next to her on the crown of the seat. Corvus smiled, but the woman just stared at her. What was the connection, after all, between taking a dog to the movies and taking a horned lizard? There wasn’t any.

She fed Tommy little pieces of greasy chicken until only bones were left in the bag. It was going to be all right. On the screen, love was having its difficulties, its reversals, but it persevered or at least metamorphosed. Tommy sat in the front seat, looking through the windshield at the big screen. Everything was going to be all right. Corvus gave him a big smacking kiss on his muzzle the way her mother used to. She tried to imagine that she was her mother and that she was Tommy, too. Though the moment was willed and racking, it came close to comfort. Then it drew back.

That night, Tommy made no sound. He slept on her mother’s coat in the hallway. In the morning she went to school, but before her first class had ended she was summoned to the office by a phone call.

“It seems to be that importunate man again,” the secretary said. The playpen had been removed. She had at her side, instead, a steaming cup of coffee and a round, glistening pastry.

“Hello!” John Crimmins said. “This is your neighbor, John. I want you to hear this. It’s what I’m being forced to hear.”

Corvus heard Tommy’s mournful howling, which sounded as though he were there with John Crimmins, right beside him.

“Where is he?” Corvus said.

“He’s not with me, kid. What would I want with him? I choose my friends carefully. I taped this earlier from my doorway and I’m still taping it. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?”

Tommy’s song rose and fell, ran, twisted, then rose again. She would put him in the Airstream, hitch it to the truck, and drive farther into the desert. Or she could go the other way, deeper into town, for as the town sprawled outward, it abandoned its old developments. She could pull into the parking lots of the Tortoise, the Desert Aire, the La Siesta, resorts where the rooms had been razed and all that was left were the signs, awaiting the right collector, and empty pools the size of railway cars. She could camp on the pavement of any number of defunct shopping malls. She could live anywhere.

The connection was severed.

“Isn’t there always a third time?” the secretary said. “But next time I’ll tell him I’m calling the police. At first I thought it was an emergency, of course, but what kind of emergency could it be now?” She became flustered. “I won’t allow that person to reach you again, dear,” she said more diplomatically. After Corvus left, she frowned at the baked good from which she’d taken a nibble, baffled as to why she had once again fallen for the one with the undesirable cheese.

For the first time Corvus wondered what she would do with all the days ahead. It was as though she’d been unconscious and had just now awakened to terrific pain and uncertainty. Once more she sped homeward, but when she reached John Crimmins’s she stopped and cut the engine. She could hear Tommy’s voice faintly in the air, but it seemed contained, as though in some heart’s chamber. She sat in the truck for a long time, looking at the house, and then got out. She rapped on the door, but there was no answer. She waited on the porch listening to Tommy’s thin wail, a reminder of the emptiness at the heart of everything. She waited through what would have been the Anzai Culture, through Shakespeare and lunch and philosophy. Waiting, she felt John Crimmins on the other side of the door, waiting, too. In front of the house was a water spigot on a pipe. A drop of water would slowly form and drop into a ragged, shallow, cement depression on the bony earth. Sometimes she raised her eyes and traveled the distance between the two houses. She pretended that her mother was home. Her father was away — he would be back, his absence wasn’t unusual, he was expected soon — but her mother was there, reading the book she’d begun, absorbed, a little mystified. Corvus rested the back of her head on John Crimmins’s door and forgot why she was waiting. A car raced by, and an arm flung a bottle from the window. It shattered and lay sparkling. Good as buried, she thought. Good as buried.

She got into the truck and drove home.

Again he was just inside, the sound of the truck coming over the cattle guard having stilled him with its possibility. He peered past her as before, then gazed at her sympathetically, for she was not who she should be. She put Tommy in the truck and drove to the Airstream, backing in close to the blocks on which the tongue lay propped. They’d had the trailer for years, but Corvus hadn’t been in it for a while. When she was little, she had pretended it was a space station where she could communicate in elaborate, time-consuming ways with aliens. Saintly, they did no evil things, were about a yard tall, and looked like owls. Corvus could not move the tongue of the trailer alone, not one inch. Alice was strong, she could help her tomorrow.

In the morning she decided to take Tommy with her to school. She would tie him to an olive tree next to the truck. She would take some of her mother’s sweaters for him to lie on. He watched as she made herself ready. He lay on the coat, gnawing at one paw, which was raw from his gnawing and licking. Corvus drank a little coffee from her mother’s favorite cup — a white teacup with lilacs painted within — then rinsed it and placed it carefully on the drainboard.

“C’mon, Tommy.” He stood and walked stiffly toward her. “C’mon, you’re coming along today.” She heard the growl on her skin, as if it hadn’t even come from him. He stood heavily in front of her, all obdurate weight, looking at her steadily and brightly. He didn’t growl again; that part was over. He returned wearily to the coat. Corvus took a blouse from her mother’s closet and crumpled it up by his head like a fresh dressing for a wound. He smelled hot and sour, there was a moist crust beneath one eye. She rubbed it off, then took a dog brush and ran it across his coat. She shut the windows and turned on the swamp cooler and the radio. “Liberation can come,” a voice ranted, “only through the destruction of the world of phenomena.…” She turned the dial forward and back, tears in her eyes. The devil had been spotted at the casino on the Yaqui reservation. He was good-looking, and each slot machine disgorged hundreds of coins when he passed by. She settled on a band of static and left.

In school she learned that the American Indian had discovered the zero prior to its discovery in India. She learned about the significance of landscape in medieval art. Flat country meant the most; it denoted apocalyptic end. School was unreal to her, the books, the papers she wrote crowded with slanting script, her hand upon the papers, writing. She envied Tommy his utter animal sadness. He was complete in it, he could not be made separate from it. The air felt electric though there were no clouds, no sign of freshening change. Still she felt the snap in what was like a current trembling thickly through everything that was that day. But it was all so distant from her, the moment and her presence in it. She felt it would be this way from now on.

Tommy had always been afraid of the cattle guard, of the meaty empty smell of the pipes. The truck, once more, lurched and rattled over it, toward home. The long home, Corvus thought. The door was open, a window broken. Tommy was on the porch. He was so long that his tail almost reached the floor. She could still see the brush marks on his fur.

The rope was white and new, and it was knotted tightly around the beam with the other end tied around the porch railing. Her mother’s coat had been dragged partway across the floor. It had been a comfortable house, plates and chairs, a deep sofa, lamps and books, the pretty things of home. She went to the kitchen and pulled open the drawer that held the knives. There were a number of them. She had thought she could use everything up. She would empty everything familiar to her of its purpose. She would keep the house and finish school, and slowly her life would be used up. Through diligence, she would come to the end of the past. That had been her plan, but now there was nothing. She was seeing nothing, looking at the drawer of knives.

From a distance there was the sound of coyotes calling. Her father had always quoted Huxley—“A Trio for Ghoul and Two Damned Souls”—when the coyotes called. They stopped.

She went to the stove and blew out the pilot lights. As a child she had always been fascinated with those beguiling darting lights of dancing blue. She opened the oven door and, sliding out the broiler plate, blew out that small light as well. She smelled the threads of gas. She could die, too. The obviousness of the choice gave her a peculiar swift delight. It was correct. It was enchanting, really. But she did not want to die so enchantingly, so obviously correctly. She wanted, instead, to die slowly, day by meaningless day, unenchanted, bitterly meaninglessly aware.

There was a gallon of kerosene that her parents had used for the outside lamps. She laid it down in ribbony whorls throughout the house, then went out to the truck. A jerry can of gas was strapped down in the bed because the fuel gauge was broken. The speedometer cable was broken as well. You never knew how fast you were going or how far you could go. She circled the house spilling the gas, then backed the truck across the cattle guard to the road. She had to go back into the house for the matches. She brought the bowl outside and went through seven worn books, a match per book, before one of them lit. “Reasonably Priced Banquets,” it said just above the striking zone.

At first nothing burned. The flame flared and smoldered with a certain knotted energy. Then it gathered, as though with an intake of breath, and it began, the flames lapping out and licking the jellylike pads of the cactus, the marigolds, the steps, the fur of the hanging dog. The wren’s nest in the eaves popped softly. Then the heat found the grassy core and with a boom and another three more, like the sounds of shotguns striking down owls at dusk, it was all burning, the pictures and tables and clocks, the Indian blanket with its canny exit for the mind, all of it, her mother’s things, her father’s.

Corvus saw owls falling. This was how she felt it. Her own soul witnessed it in this way, their great soft falling, the imago ignota of their alien faces.