Read Online The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams - Free Book Online Page A

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