Free The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams Page B

fill this place with some life.

9
    R ay 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 uplooking 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