Others of My Kind

by Sallis, James

  “Oh,” Grace said, handing me a slip, “this woman’s been calling.”

  Edith Smith. Mrs. Horace Smith.

  Back in the studio, where I rarely used the phone, I dialed.

  “Thank you for calling back,” she said.

  “I just now got your messages.”

  “When you came to see us …” She grew silent. I waited. “I knew why you were here. Who you were.”

  “Yes. I thought you might.”

  “I’m so sorry. It was more than I could take on. I had my hands full just taking care of Horace. Those last months, he faded in and out, he’d be there one moment, be missing the next. I mean, he was there, but….”

  “I understand.”

  “Many’s the time I’d walk in and find him weeping over a TV commercial. One day a bird started building its nest on a ledge outside one of the windows and he stood there for hours watching, tears streaming down his face. He’d become so emotional, and after every outbreak he was ill for days. How could he possibly handle the appearance in his life of a lost daughter?”

  “Why did you call, Mrs. Smith?”

  “He’s gone. My Horace is gone. A stroke, they say. We never know, they tell me, with time he may come back, we’ll just have to wait and see, we don’t know. But I look into his eyes and I know.”

  “I’m sorry for you, Mrs. Smith. And for your husband. I’m still not fixed on why you’re calling.”

  “I’m all alone, Miss Rowan. You don’t have to be my daughter, I’ve no right to ask that. But I need a friend just now.”

  Friend seemed to be the role I was meant to take. Cheryl. Mickie. The president, for God’s sake. Now my own mother—a total stranger.

  “Are you at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  I was with my father when the bomb, missile, whatever—for a long time we didn’t know, but it was an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade—struck the White House. Edith stood behind me as I held his hand. She and I had turned to watch it happen again on the TV mounted high on the wall, and when we turned back, his eyes were open.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name, young lady,” he said.

  “Jenny. It’s Jenny.”

  “Of course. All you nurses are very kind here.” His eyes went to the TV. Another clip of the breached west wing, smoke and fire everywhere. “You seen that?”

  “Yes, sir, I have.”

  “What’s this country come to?” He watched a while. “Terrible, just terrible. None of us are safe. You be careful out there, you hear me, Jenny?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then he smiled, patted my hand, and died.

  I stayed with Edith well into the afternoon. From time to time, those first hours, I clicked on the TV or radio hoping to learn more, but no one had got it sorted and all we had was your essential tape loop, the same niggardly bits of information going round and round in a stutter.

  Sarah was all right, though. When the rocket struck, she’d been on the hill conferring with congressional leaders.

  “Isn’t it protocol,” CBS anchor Bill Whiting said, hair and necktie perfect, ever-present sparkle in his eyes, “that congressmen come to the president, not the other way round?”

  “Ordinarily, yes,” his expert guest said. I remembered Mickie’s jest that Whiting’s sparkle had been surgically implanted. “Tradition more than protocol, perhaps. But”—he paused meaningfully and tugged at his own tie, perhaps hoping it might come to look as good as Bill’s—“this is not a president who does things in the usual manner.”

  “Definitely not.” And here was Bill squinting to read the scroll on the prompter. Scuttlebutt had it that the network had offered to buy him contacts but he was afraid they’d dim the sparkle. “Employment has taken a dramatic upward swing. The economy as a whole, in fact. And as the song says, she’s only just begun.”

  Meanwhile, I thought, the whole country had gone amnesiac, forgetting that Sarah’s son had been abducted and remained missing. Amazing what a loud bang in the sky overhead and prospects of an improved GNP can obscure. In a sense, of course, she’d stopped being Sarah. She’d become an icon, an image, a symbol. Agendas and propagandas, the loss and longing of a whole population, were busily attaching themselves to her like barnacles.

  I was preparing to take leave of Edith, one more pot of tea and I’d be gone, when the buzzer sounded.

  I answered the door, and one of the suit people stood there.

  “Miss Rowan,” he said.

  “Good God.”

  “Not quite.” Behind him, at curbside, car doors opened and Sarah emerged. She came up the four stairs of the porch and held out her hand.

  “I heard about your father. I’m so sorry.”

  Not a sign of media anywhere.

  I showed her in and introduced her to Edith. Sarah said she was sorry to hear about her husband and offered condolences.

  “Condolences don’t mean much, I know, given the magnitude of your loss. If there’s anything …”

  Edith, stoic until that moment, burst into tears.

  Our president settled beside her on the sofa, saying that she couldn’t stay long.

  Chapter 16

  A feature piece in the Washington Post got picked up by the wire services and the Internet. Mickie phoned at five A.M. to warn me. Pure American Dream stuff, spun cotton candy. Much-abused woman pulls herself by her bootstraps right smack out of the horrors of her past to become a productive citizen, a creative force really, and—where else but in America?—befriends the president in her hour of need.

  Wow. And hand me a tissue.

  The amnesia seemed to be passing, at least, and that was a good thing: the country had been reminded what befell Sarah and son.

  I’d always understood that America is as much idea as actuality, a focused amnesia instrumental to that idea’s power. Women forget the pain of childbirth, body and mind file away trauma where it can’t be accessed, the state with its grand ideals must look away from whatever belies those ideals. Henry James claimed that in America each new generation is a new people. Each day here is also a new day, unburdened by history, rife with promise.

  “Don’t suppose I should come in, then,” I had said when Mickie called.

  “What, with us just starting to get reports and footage on the White House strike? And we’re supposed to handle all this without our top editor? You damn well better come in.”

  “You’ve got other editors.”

  “What I’ve got is people who, if they hadn’t gone to goddamn trade school, would be stocking supermarket shelves, working part-time at Walmart for no benefits.”

  “You drive a hard bargain.”

  “That’s why I’m still around, sweetie. You have any idea how many I’ve seen just fade away?”

  “I’ll be in by eight, latest.”

  I soaked in a bath as I drank half a pot of coffee, read half an Ed McBain novel, and knocked back two pieces of grilled flatbread. Before I left, I looked in on Cheryl, still dead asleep. I was fairly sure she had an early class today, but hey, it was her life.

  Close to nine, I parked in the alley behind the studio and ducked into the service entrance. By noon I had a rough cut of the White House attack. Remembering Dr. Strangelove, I’d assembled it as a kind of ballet: explosion like the bloom of a huge white flower, draw back to the faces of standersby, then clouds above and an untroubled sky, comments of interviewees folded in as leitmotifs, citizens of DC going about their business, Sarah looking through papers aboard Air Force One, firemen’s faces streaming with sweat, children at play in the park, the explosion again. Somehow I’d managed to build a three-four beat into the whole thing. Ravel, whose La Valse well could serve as the sound track of our time, would have been proud.

  “This’ll do just fine,” Mickie said, “as it is.”

  “But it’s only a rough cut.”

  “Which is why it works so well. The ragged edges show. The rawness. It’s
exactly what’s going on in all our minds—images, confusion, a jumble of words we can’t absorb and feelings we can’t voice, this sense of a world gone suddenly sideways.”

  She picked up her phone.

  “Marc? Where are we on the clock? What, five or six minutes in? Kill it. Cut in, announce an exclusive special feature. I’m shooting it up to you now. Run it whole, no interruptions—and no, I don’t give a damn what the schedule says.”

  She hung up.

  “The call’s yours, Jenny. I can keep the credits off this. You know as well as I do, once your name scrolls up, they’ll be on it like jackals.”

  “I don’t need credit.”

  “They may get onto it anyway.”

  “Then at least we’ll know we made them work for it.”

  Mickie smiled. “Attitude’s everything.” Snaring my letter of resignation, which I’d brought her along with the tape, she held it up. “This what you really want?”

  “Do you see an alternative?”

  For a moment, as our eyes held, there was nothing else in the world.

  “From your perspective, no,” she said finally. “But I’d as soon hack off both arms as lose you. Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mickie nodded. “I hope you’ll be in touch, once you settle. Let me know you’re okay, if nothing else.”

  “I’ll always be okay.”

  Standing, Mickie held out her hand, and we shook. “It’s all just one box after another, Jenny.”

  • • •

  I’d promised to meet Edith for lunch. As I went out past her desk, Grace said, “You may not want your call slips.”

  “No way.” The sheaf she held out had the thickness of a desktop calendar.

  I was almost through the door before I turned back. “You have plans for lunch, Grace?”

  “Usually I just bring in a salad, can of tuna and crackers, something like that, eat here at the desk.”

  “Any interest in taking a walk on the wild side? I’m meeting my mother for lunch. You could join us.”

  She did, and the two of them hit it off instantly. Three months later, they’d move in together. They lived together for six years till Edith died, leaving the house to Grace, who’s still there.

  I heard all this from Cheryl, who’d taken over my apartment, now rapidly filling with children whose photos hang on my refrigerator. Joanie, an adorable curly-headed blond of five. Katie, almost exactly a year younger, dark hair, serious demeanor. Baby Kyle looking faintly demonic in his crib. Cheryl’s husband Carl sounds a marvel. By profession a small-animal veterinarian, he’s a lay preacher in his church. Many an evening, sitting at the kitchen table here in my apartment in Miami at the edge of the known world, just as I used to sit at my red-and-white table in the old place, Cheryl’s place now, I think how much I’d like to meet Carl. But I live in a different world these days, and largely in Spanish.

  Ten thirty. My shift begins in half an hour. How many shootings and knifings, how many incontrovertible accidents, will grace our ER tonight? How many IVs will I start, how many endotracheal tubes hand to the doctor on duty? How many hands old and young will I hold even as I feel them go lax and empty in my own?

  Chapter 17

  A week after I left, just past dawn, they found Reagan’s body. A rookie patrol officer on a slow crawl through an alley noticed a concentration of rats around a fifty-gallon drum theretofore used by street people for fires and pulled up, car door open, motor left running, stopped to look in.

  I watched the news from my new apartment at world’s edge. Jack Collins stood looking tired and gorgeous behind a podium honeycombed with microphones. There’s no way adequately to express how much I longed in my heart to reach out to Sarah then. She in turn had resources that could have found me easily enough. But like Mickie she respected my choice. Cheryl is the only one I keep in touch with.

  Heath bars and Magic 8-Balls, squatter Josie’s limp-doll baby, Jack’s warmth beside me in bed—memory will cut you off at the knees if you let it.

  Speaking of the Magic 8-Ball, I just now gave it two turns.

  Outlook good.

  Don’t count on it.

  I should tell you that everything above was written months ago in a burst, most of it in two days and the night between, fueled by infusions of coffee and dark beer, before I stalled out with no idea how to end.

  In the interim Sarah Courtney-Phillips nears the end of her elected full term with an unprecedented 72 percent approval rate. Like Jack, she looks good on TV these days. Well appointed, well groomed, eyebrows shaved and redrawn, a new haircut. Her daughter is often beside her.

  I still have no idea how to finish. I’m supposed to tie it all up, I know, supposed to bring to light structures not easily evident, set the whole to a low boil as it were, reduce by half, add salt of irony, pepper of erudition, herbs and spices to taste.

  But there’s really no structure here—only my life.

  So here’s the only ending I have.

  I remember how it felt when the box was pulled out. I’d hear the footsteps first. Then the jolt along my spine as we, the box and I, slid. And the miraculous opening. More than anything, I think, I would hope to have you feel that moment in all its wonder and surprise. I know you can’t understand. What an amazing gift it was when the box was opened.

  I wish you all good openings, and wonder, and surprise.

  A Note on the Author

  James Sallis is the acclaimed author of more than two dozen volumes of fiction, poetry, translation, essays, and criticism, including the Lew Griffin cycle, Drive, Cypress Grove, Cripple Creek, The Killer Is Dying, and Salt River. His biography of the great crime writer Chester Himes is an acknowledged classic. Sallis lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife, Karyn.

  By the Same Author

  Novels

  The Long-Legged Fly

  Moth

  Black Hornet

  Eye of the Cricket

  Bluebottle

  Ghost of a Flea

  Death Will Have Your Eyes

  Renderings

  Drive

  Driven

  Cypress Grove

  Cripple Creek

  Salt River

  What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

  The Killer Is Dying

  Stories

  A Few Last Words

  Limits of the Sensible World

  Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories

  A City Equal to My Desire

  Potato Tree and Other Stories

  Poems

  Sorrow’s Kitchen

  My Tongue in Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

  Rain’s Eagerness

  As editor

  Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany

  Jazz Guitars

  The Guitar in Jazz

  Other

  The Guitar Players

  Difficult Lives

  Saint Glinglin, by Raymond Queneau (translator)

  Gently into the Land of the Meateaters

  Chester Himes: A Life

  A James Sallis Reader

  Copyright © 2013 by James Sallis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Sallis, James, 1944–

  Others of my kind : a novel / by James Sallis.— First U.S. edition.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-1-6204-0210-8

  1. Kidnapping—Fiction. 2. Girls—Crimes against—Fiction.

  3. Post-traumatic stress disorder in adolescence—Fiction.

  4. Rehabilitation counseling—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.A462O84 2013

  81
3′.54—dc23

  2013012215

  First U.S. edition 2013

  Electronic edition published in September 2013

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