The Quick & the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

and stuffed it into the folds of the picture, but it went out.
    Corvus smoothed the picture out and folded back the cover ofanother 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 andAlice, 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
    A lice 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.