The Quick & the Dead Read Online Free Page A

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. Sheshould 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