Willnot

by James Sallis

  We spent the morning out there, getting the tour, meeting members of the team, witness to the scratch and scrabble. Before we left we made a final visit to the hole. It had by now become a crater, strung with marker ribbons and depth flags.

  “Four to six bodies, we’re thinking,” Seb said, “but no way we can know till we’ve tallied and matched parts. It was a stew down there.”

  Years in the far past, on Bastille Day, I stood in a Confederate cemetery with my father, magnolia detritus showering down on our shoulders, him saying “Be very quiet, very still, and you can almost feel the earth pulling at your body. Lines of force forming around you.” He had taken to reading poetry, a practice that thankfully proved short lived, though the fallout persisted.

  Six hours in the future I sat at home listening to Richard say “The man’s an idiot. An absolute, irredeemable, inexorable idiot. It’s not just that he’s incompetent, he doesn’t give a shit. Not about the teachers, not about the kids.”

  “You can always quit.”

  “And what, spend my day tidying up the house, buying figurines on eBay?” He had the laptop on the coffee table and was working away at it even as he railed. Pages came and went. “I love my job, Lamar.” Scrolling down. Then a flurry of keystrokes.

  “No you don’t. You love teaching. The rest of it, the endless meetings, the drudge of record keeping, mandated testing, breakroom politics, you despise.”

  “It all comes in the gift box.”

  “As, for the time being, does your principal.”

  “Listen to this.” Without taking his eye off the screen he reached for his wineglass, realized it was empty, and held it up for a refill.

  How can you know what you believe? From the day you’re born, everyone is busy filling your eyes, ears and mind with what they believe, with information about how you’re supposed to act, what you are, what you should be. The blanket’s blue: you’re a boy. Act like a man. Let us pray. It’s all around you, streaming from parents, relatives, school, movies, music, church, TV, ads, the Internet. You breathe it in, it wicks up through your feet. Filling you up, pulling you in so many directions you can’t walk straight, keeping you so distracted that you never have time to think.

  “The kid’s twelve, Lamar. Twelve years old and he thinks like that, writes like that. Father was killed in Iraq. His mother sees after Nathan and his sister on what she makes as a waitress.”

  “The diner out by the highway?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I know his mother, then. I’ve heard her talk about her husband and kids.”

  “Last thing he wrote was on ant mills, about army ants that get separated from the main party, lose the pheromone track, and simply go on following one another, round and round in the same circle till they die of exhaustion. The circumference of one ant mill was measured at twelve hundred feet. It took each ant two and a half hours to make a single trip around.”

  “Cheery stuff.”

  “Actually he’s a happy, easygoing kid. But he’s thinking. Feeling. Reaching. And everything around him seems to be doing its best to squash that.”

  “And isn’t that why you’re there?”

  Richard took a breath. “Of course it is. So easy to forget.”

  “Just as the boy said, distractions. And while you’re sitting here remembering, I’m off to do a load of clothes. Brought most of a hillside back with me from the site. And my shoes are twice the size they were Tuesday when I put them on.”

  Dickens followed me to the utility room. He’d once caught a mouse out there, in the space between dryer and wall. I’d taken it away from him and put it outside, but Dickens figured time was ripe for another.

  4

  I was a great disappointment to my father. A writer, he never voiced it yet seems to have held hard to the clandestine notion that somehow I’d follow him into the breach. This dynasty of two sitting upright at our keyboards pecking away at the world’s disorder one sentence at a time. There was silence on the evening I told my parents, over dinner, that I’d been accepted to premed. Finally, finished and about to rise, my father pushed his plate away and said simply, Good luck, Son.

  He wrote paperback novels, science fiction mostly, though earlier he’d had his hand into mysteries, suspense novels, ro-mances, historicals, even soft porn. As far as I know, he never counted, and copies had long since flown the shelves; from the Internet there look to have been ten, maybe twelve, of these. But with science fiction he found his niche. Three books in, he was being invited to conventions with names like FenCon or SlanDom. Two more and, at least at smaller venues, he became guest of honor.

  These books were on the shelves. With one in particular, Prophets of Duum, I spent many a childhood hour staring at the buxom woman turned sideways as, from the border, emerged a monster with vast eyes, behind these two a herd of plants with tiny gnarled feet who or which appeared to be cheering—either the monster’s attack or the woman’s flight. By the time I was in med school, Joseph M. Hale books had overgrown the shelves and tumbled, nevermore to be seen, into boxes in various garages, mudrooms, basements, and sheds. From time to time he or Mom would think to send me one.

  The earliest that I remember sold for 35¢, later ones for $4.95. The covers themselves never changed much. Blurb sources migrated from Anthony Boucher, to Ted Sturgeon, Judy Merrill and Fritz Leiber, folks I knew from conventions I was dragged along to at age four, ten or fifteen, to writers I’d never heard of, growing loftier and more breathless with each passing year.

  Then the decline. Joseph M. Hale, “author of sixty-six novels and untold short stories, a classic in his field, a giant,” staggering off, with a stray book published on the cheap here, another there, to the sunset of OP, out of print. Writers—artists—are commodities. And commodities get used up.

  But that was years later. At the time I was in med school, then in internship and residency, my father was cranking them out to an audience ever hungry for more, publishing as many as eight or nine books a year under his own and other names, making, even at $750 or a couple grand per, good money.

  And moving around. Always moving around.

  Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward—Kierkegaard, right? Right up there with “Those who don’t know history” and “fifteen minutes of fame” on the top-cliché list of journalists and bloggers, though generally unattributed. The truth is that life can’t be understood at all. Looking back now, though, it does seem that with every few books Joseph M. Hale became something of a different person. There was, in Boston, the uncomplicated craftsman, a carpenter who worked with paragraphs and pages rather than lumber, planes and nails. In Bend, Oregon, the heroic novelist swimming heartily upstream of literary fashion. J. M. Hale from Fort Worth, Texas, with a newfound bent for regional writing, laboring away at a rickety card table, expending as much time moving table and chair about in an effort to avoid direct sunlight as he did writing. And here outside Willnot, Joe M. the populist, a man of the people who within the year, taking it to the limit, had uprooted us yet again, to the undiscovered country of hills and hollers to live among squirrel eaters.

  Someone said of Hemingway that each new novel required a new wife. Joseph M. Hale may have needed new screen doors. Longed for, hankered for, hungered for, had lust in his heart for new screen doors, and for new flies outside them.

  Plenty of flies in those hills and hollers. Hunters nailed squirrels to trees, gutted them and stripped the flesh out, left innards and skins behind. The buzz and drone of flies filled my sleep for years after.

  We lived in a house that a local modeled after a photo he’d seen in a magazine (Life, one imagines) and built “with his own two hands, tree to lumber to roof and floor and walls.” It was a California bungalow gone wildly wrong: flush to the ground with earth showing between planks, proportions all out of whack, none of the corners met true, stand in the front room drooling and drool would soon enough fetch up against the kitchen baseboard.

&
nbsp; Mother set about making, on a Singer that swiveled up magically from what moments before had been a table, our clothes. One morning weeks after we took up homesteading there, my father and I stood on the porch peering through windows the glass of which removed all angles from the world, bending them into gentle curves. Guided by the tissue-thin paper pattern pinned to it, Mother snipped away at a panel of pale blue cloth on its way to becoming my sister’s new dress. I had voiced some typically snide adolescent remark about her enterprise.

  “You think what I do is any different, Lamar? I string things together to make patterns. Things for people to wear. Maybe that helps keep them warm or feel better about themselves, maybe helps them believe there’s some kind of meaning to it all. All I’m doing is picking stuff up and putting it somewhere else.”

  Mother looked up then, smiled and waved. Through the imperfect glass her hand seemed to have an extra finger.

  “But Clara actually makes things, things that haven’t been in the world before.”

  “Like clothes.”

  “Like this family.”

  Man of the people. Simple patternmaker. Literary outrider and trickster. A magpie sniping from other birds’ nests. Yet he had quietly longed for me to follow in his footsteps.

  Historians cobble up counterfeit accounts of the past, reducing thousands of streams to a dozen currents, overwriting actual lives, the stories of all those people simply wanting to get on in the world they know, with narratives of grand ideas and motives. Our stabs at understanding character are built of the same doubtful materials. We worry out a few select strands from an individual’s life, a baker’s dozen of dominant traits, and use these to form a portrait. When we are all seething masses of contradictions. And of surprise.

  5

  I was awake with no idea why. 6:28 on the nightstand clock. First thought: Dickens throwing up again. Or Richard was having one of his sleepless nights. Then I heard the banging.

  The front door opened. Voices.

  Richard leaning into the room.

  “It’s the sheriff, Lamar.” Then, with a mock-horror face, “My God, what have you done?”

  I swung out and stood.

  “Nice,” Richard said, “but you might want to put a robe on. You know, go formal.”

  I grabbed his off the back of the door and went out.

  “Sorry, Doc. You’re needed. I could have called but figured it’s faster this way. There’s been an accident at the site.”

  Raising his voice, he continued as I went back into the bedroom to find clothes.

  “Looks like a generator blew. Things were stacked up tight, so it took some containers and shelving with it. Only two workers on the scene that early. One of them’s got what looks like a piece of rebar in his chest, the other’s leg got hacked up pretty bad, lost a lot of blood. Wellman came in early and found them.”

  I shouted through the door. “They’re at the hospital?”

  “Andrew and his new driver transported, guy supposed to have been a paramedic up in Detroit? Kid said it was some of the best first aid he’d ever seen.”

  “Battlefield medicine.”

  “Probablee.”

  Hours later, undressed and dressed yet again, feet hurting in my $400 cross-trainers that I still called tennis shoes, I asked for more suction. Janis Banks was running the table. Melinda Arnold was circulating.

  Gordie Blythe looked up from his nice stool at the head of the table. “BP’s holding fine, Lamar.”

  “Always good to hear. And while we’re on the subject of hearing, who picked today’s music?”

  Dolly, our surgical orderly, raised her gloved hand. “Flutes from the Andes. Or maybe American Indian, I’m not sure. Beautiful, huh?”

  Commentary circled the table—

  “Very interesting,” complete with trilled r’s.

  “Unworldly.”

  “Ethereal.”

  —and came back to me. “Sounds like an asthmatic cat, one maybe the size of a cow, trying to breathe.”

  Dolly’s eyes went wide. “You can’t see it, but under this mask I’m making my little-girl face. A moue, or whatever it’s called.”

  “It’s okay, I like cats fine. And Richard’s asthmatic.” I bent closer. “What is that?” I pushed flesh aside with the edge of the scalpel. “Can you get a retractor in there?”

  Gordie leaned in on his stool. “What?”

  The man’s leg had been struck by two, perhaps three pieces of jagged metal. One had slammed against the knee, ripped away skin but done, as far as I could see, no joint damage. From a gash farther down, tibia peeked out. Another metal piece hit high, close to the hip. That was my field. I was checking for bleeders. And I was seeing the border of something pale and amorphous.

  “Do we have this man’s history?”

  “Only basics, from his personnel file.”

  As Janis scissored the retractor, I saw what I was half expecting. Gordie had come around from his stool and stood by me looking down. “That’s a proud one,” he said. A tumor on the order of four kilograms, snuggled up low in the abdominal cavity, tucked away there like an old sock at the back of a drawer.

  I probed at the mass.

  “I wouldn’t be leaning in too hard on it, Lamar,” Gordie said. “That femoral looks right thin.”

  And about to erode. Gordie had called it. Ten days from now, or a month, or two, it would have given way and the man would have bled out in minutes.

  “How providential that we all happen to be standing here,” I said, “with time on our hands. Shall we have this little bugger out?”

  Within the hour Mr. Patmore lay in recovery, trussed, ticked like a mattress with stitches, pillow-propped, pale and befuddled. I explained it all to him once he was awake, then again a couple of hours later in his room. The tumor, I was able to tell him subsequently, was benign.

  Wellman and Seb Daiche sat in the waiting room outside Recovery, Wellman watching TV with no affect, as though it were broadcasting in some language he didn’t know, Seb punching away at the keys of a laptop. I ran it down again for them after telling Wellman he’d done good work out there. He looked at me much the same as he had at the TV and nodded.

  “Good,” Seb said. “Not to worry. The foundation will cover all expenses.”

  “You have a foundation?”

  “Work for one. That’s the only way we’re able to do what we do. Nonprofit, straightforward agenda, no doctrinal or direct government ties.”

  I didn’t miss Wellman’s reaction to that: an all but imperceptible turn of his head.

  Sammy Cohen, who had been taking care of the other casualty in the adjoining OR, was in the surgery lounge self-medicating with a tumbler of orange juice. We compared notes. Improbably, a hollow aluminum shaft from shelving had skirted heart, lungs and major vessels, the boy’d be good to go in a week. I told Sammy what Seb had said about the foundation.

  “Damn. If only I’d known …”

  “What, you’d have used the expensive thread?”

  “Instead of fishing line, yeah.”

  Not a lot was left of the day, or of me either (how did I ever make it through internship and residency?), but after checking post-op X-rays and lab work, I swung by the office. Had a couple of feverish kids, a possible bowel obstruction, a case of carpal tunnel waiting for me. And an FBI agent named Ogden.

  “We don’t often see federal agents,” I said as she followed me into my office. “Or ever.”

  “Considering what you have outside town, you may have to get used to it.”

  “That’s why you’re here?”

  She didn’t respond.

  I sat, smiled, and waited. She remained standing.

  “I believe you know Brandon Lowndes?”

  “Of course I do. I took care of him when he was a child, and very ill. He goes by Bobby now, I understand. What do you go by?”

  “Why would you want to know that?”

  “Not many have two names hereabouts. Just our way. First o
r last, that’s it. The occasional epithet. Crazy Jane, Dago Frank. All meant respectfully, of course.”

  She swept my face for a clue that wasn’t there.

  “Theodora, but most everyone calls me Teddy.”

  “Most everyone. And a bit of hill-country lag buried deep. West Virginia?”

  “North Carolina. That was a long time ago.”

  “So was my association with Brandon.”

  “Have you recently seen or been contacted by Sergeant Lowndes, Doctor?”

  “A direct question. Things are looking up here. Why don’t you have a seat, Theodora Ogden? Surely federal agents aren’t prohibited from sitting during an interrogation.”

  “This is not an interrogation.”

  But she sat, not demurely, sinking easily into the chair and pulling her feet close. None of the usual fidgets with clothing, posture, where to put hands.

  “He was here three days ago,” I said.

  “For what reason?”

  “Just to say hello, he told me.”

  “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “None at all, after fourteen years.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Our conversation might fill three balloons in a comic strip. He’d been a marine, call him Bobby, I was looking old, he was passing through.”

  “He didn’t ask you for anything, then.”

  “No.”

  “Or mention where he was staying.”

  “He didn’t even mention that the FBI would be in later to check on him.”

  She stood and held out a card. “Please call me if he contacts you again. Where I’m staying is on the back.”

  I turned it over. The Best Western out by the interstate. Choices being limited hereabouts.

  “A warning?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t want to eat there.”

  “Where do I want to eat?”

  “The café here in town. Only says CAFÉ on the sign, but everybody calls it Happy Bun.”