The Quick & the Dead Read Online Free

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.