Willnot

by James Sallis

  “You both look like the other guy.”

  He glanced at me, then his attention went back to the handcuffed man. “Say what?”

  “Hard to tell which of you’s the patient.”

  The sheriff had a gash at least two inches long on his forehead, blood coming off, I hoped not from, one ear. The way he was clenched in on himself, he had to be in considerable pain.

  Sally Bounds came out from the nurses’ station to join us. “They both are. But Roy, bullheaded as ever, won’t let us touch him.”

  “Explain to him that in here we’re the law?”

  “Repeatedly.”

  I nodded to the man on the gurney. “You splinted the arm?”

  Sally shook her head. “Roy, before he brought him in.”

  “Okay. I’m going to assume, Sheriff, that this isn’t a case of your playing Good Samaritan.”

  “Handcuffs give it away?”

  “That and the tussle. You have to be sporting one hell of a headache. Any dizziness?”

  “I’ll be fine, Lamar. It’s this man you need to see to.”

  As I set about doing so, the sheriff told me what happened. The man on the gurney never flinched, never reacted, eyes moving steadily back and forth from my hands to my face. Watching would be a poor descriptor. Observing.

  He’d got a call, the sheriff said, from Audrey at the MaxiMart. Fellow was in there to pay for gas, picked up some PowerBars and water, and as he came up the aisle, another man turned the corner, tripped, and almost ran into him. It was there just a second, Audrey said. In his eyes. In the way his body pulled into itself. Audrey knew that look, he’d seen it too often before to miss or mistake it.

  Now, Audrey’s not quite right, you know that as well as I do, the sheriff said. And you know why.

  Sun and sand, I said.

  So, Audrey never having called me like that before, I figure I’ll go have a talk with this fellow, see how he liked his PowerBars, see is there anything I can do for him. If he’s still around.

  He isn’t, not at first, but then as I’m swinging back by the hospital there’s the pearl-colored Honda Audrey told me about, pulling out of the parking lot. I follow him to the old Wayfare Motel, the Starlight or whatever they’re calling it now, he enters room eight, I go and knock on the door. When it opens I see he’s got a duffel bag laid out on the bed, about packed up to go, looks like. I don’t say anything, we just stand there. Then suddenly an arm’s coming toward me. I sidestep, then walk back into the arm with my whole weight behind, slam it into the doorframe. The arm’s broken, but it doesn’t slow him down. I got lucky. I also got the baton from the trunk that I’d stuck in the back of my belt.

  Which explains, I said, these contusions on the back of his skull.

  It was kind of like hitting on a rock, Lamar. Took some doing. While I’m waiting for Andrew and his ambulance I sniff out the car. Under the mat in the trunk, in the tire well, there’s a broken-down rifle. Small caliber. Thing’s like a shark. Designed for one thing and one thing only.

  “Did he talk?” I asked when the sheriff finished.

  “Hasn’t said a word.”

  “This arm has to be reduced and set, which means a trip to OR. And a marathon trip to radiology first. The arm, of course. Skull series. Pretty much everything, just to be safe.”

  “I’ll go along,” the sheriff said.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes, you will. Same workup for you.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Shut up, Roy. Or I’ll switch the handcuffs over to you.”

  Sally came out from the station smiling. “On their way,” she said.

  17

  I heard when his breathing changed and knew he was awake. Nothing showed on the monitors.

  “That sheriff of yours is thirty pounds of hard-ass in a five-pound sack.”

  “Things are tough out here on the frontier.”

  “Like they’re not elsewhere?”

  I remembered the way his eyes had observed me back in ER—as they swept over my face, checked for exits, fastened for a moment on activities past the room’s window. Somewhere across the way, the monotonous, soft clang of monitor alarms sounded. No code or stat called overhead, though, no scurry of movement in that direction.

  I watched him look down along his body. Move his fingers.

  “We pinned the arm,” I said. “You won’t have any loss of mobility, should be back on full charge in six weeks or less. Moderate hematomas. Mild concussion. Sheriff’s good too, already back on the street.”

  “Half an hour more, neither of us would ever have been off them.”

  “Life rarely gets the detour signs up in time.”

  “Everywhere I’ve been, all I’ve done, I come here to this sneeze of a town and get taken down by an old man.” He lifted his other arm the six inches or so the cuffs allowed, demonstrating. “Meanwhile, don’t you have lives to save? People to sew back together?”

  “Slow day.”

  We listened to phones ring, watched the tanklike progress of a portable X-ray machine nosing its way through carts, chairs, an emergency ventilator, trash cans, and scales toward a far room. The tech kept peeking out from behind. She’d lug to the right and hit something, look to see, correct to the left and hit something else.

  “When he was shot, Bobby told me it was an old friend’s way of saying hello.”

  “So Bobby’s okay.”

  “You know he is. Okay and out of sight.”

  “All the devil dogs on his trail? Behind the lines, in country, you keep moving.”

  “He had friends here.”

  “Friends are fence posts. Hold you in place, make you visible. And the ones he has elsewhere are Kong-size.”

  I’d heard Cong, like Viet Cong, but before I said anything, he added: “As in King.”

  Dogs. Giant gorillas. “And what’s Billygoat?”

  He shifted on the bed, trying for a sweet spot that wasn’t there. “Came up one of those days you’re sitting in your own sweat and stink drinking beer, BS-ing, waiting for something to happen. Kings of the hill, someone said, that’s us. Even if the hill’s like a foot high, someone else said. But we gotta get up there and keep the others off. Because that’s what billy goats do.”

  I walked out assuming I wouldn’t see him again, so I wasn’t surprised when the call came. The guard had stepped off for a moment to refill his coffee thermos, returned to an empty room. Our patient slipped the handcuffs, deactivated monitors, evaporated. You keep moving.

  “Man’s got a broken arm, damaged parts, no resources, how far’s he gonna get?” the officer said. State trooper Stanton, standing in for the sheriff, rationalizing.

  “I suspect he’s gone much farther with far worse.”

  We all have our own way of dealing with what troubles us. Sadness, frustration, despair, anger. Richard’s way of dealing with just about everything is humor. That night when I told him about the second disappearance, his comment was that someone, or some thing, was collecting snipers, more or less quoting Charles Fort, a favorite among the science fiction clan back in the day. One measures a circle beginning anywhere, rains of frogs, mysterious disappearances. Nothing in religion, science, or philosophy that was more than the proper thing to wear for a while; the Earth is a farm and we’re someone else’s property. The great-grandfather of crankdom.

  We talked more about Bobby and what the second sniper had said, and I told Richard about the epigraph to one of my father’s books: “Everyone we meet is fighting a battle about which we know nothing.” The quotation wasn’t attributed, and when years later I tried to look it up, I found near misses going back to at least 1903.

  In that novel, Good Fortune, a man has the gift of seeing the future. This began as flashes when he was a child, we’re told, before he had words, before he could know or say what the visions were, and steadily grew. The book opens with him standing at the edge of a clearing beneath a bright moon, desultorily addressing gods he doesn’t believe in, besee
ching them to take the gift from him, allow him to live without these winds blowing in constantly from the future, crowding out his days and years. His life.

  Back then my father’s habit was to count out two hundred first sheets, two hundred seconds for carbons and, when the stacks got down to the last ten, to start winding things up, so one hundred and ninety-nine pages later, for the first time, we see the gun. It glints in the moonlight as the protagonist lifts it. It’s as though he is waiting for something, and soon, behind, he hears the scuffle of his wife’s feet on loose gravel.

  “Don’t,” she says.

  They stand silently. Traffic sounds come from far away, as though from another, reasonable, purposeful world.

  “I won’t,” he says, and the book concludes. We never know if his inaction results from making the choice, or if it’s simply because he knows in advance how his life will end.

  That book was a favorite of my father’s friend Jan Wilford who used to come visit us periodically in Elaine, in Willnot, in Marvel or Walnut Corner. Jan was, my father said, the best person alive at destroying the world. He’d done it with garbage, with a rogue asteroid, with sentient clouds, black ice, tiny mutant crickets, even grass. Once, uncharacteristically, my father apologized for not having read Jan’s latest novel. “Why would you?” he said. “It’s just like all the others.” And sitting there with beers, moon a flat white disk balanced atop the trees, an owl commenting from one nearby, they laughed.

  As did Richard and I.

  “You’ve truly had an interesting life, my love,” he said. “Keep pulling out these stories. Your father going to see the editor of Galaxy in his apartment because he hadn’t left it in ten years, or pacing that writer in his car on the way somewhere together because the guy—what was his name?—couldn’t ride in a machine on a holy day.”

  “Avram Davidson.”

  “Right.”

  “They were quackingly odd ducks.”

  “You ever hear from any of them?”

  “No reason I would. Most are dead now.”

  “I feel as though I know some of them, from the stories.”

  “They were like all the rest of us, many different people jammed into a single container. You see the one looking out at you at the time.”

  “True enough.” Dickens wandered in to see what we were doing and, unimpressed, collapsed on the floor inside the door. “You ever consider why your mother’s never in those stories?”

  I realized that Richard was gazing over my shoulder, off into the distance. “It would seem you have a gentleman caller.”

  I turned to look, out across the yard to the garage.

  Bobby.

  Where he’d stood the night of the party. Where I’d seen him only because and only when he’d wanted me to.

  He saw I was watching, nodded once, and was gone.

  18

  If someone was collecting snipers as Richard by way of Charles Fort suggested, then someone else was shipping in neurotics and worriers as replacements. Streams of them poured through my office on their way to the sea, to the extent that when one with what seemed a real medical issue showed up late in the day (acute diverticulitis, to every appearance), I all but pounced. We’d passed her along for lab work, X-rays and a return engagement the next morning, and Maryanne was about to drop the CLOSED sign when a van pulled up at curbside just outside. A refugee from the previous decade, off-white with logo and lettering from prior commercial use showing ghostlike beneath.

  I shrugged when Maryanne looked at me. Why not? She unlocked the door. A scouting party dismounted from the van. A couple in their fifties, an older gentleman bent bowlike, as though by a string running from forehead to feet.

  Explaining that we were about to close up shop, we seated them and asked how we could help.

  The couple looked at one another, then at the older man, then back at me. Blink, blink, blink.

  “He stinks,” the woman said.

  The man’s father, Merritt, resided in an assisted-care center in nearby Greer. He’d been there almost a year, no complaints, for what it was the place was okay. On a visit last month they began to notice something. That he smelled different.

  “He stank,” the woman said.

  “Body chemistry changes with age. Diet can make a huge difference. Not to mention medications.”

  “We asked about that,” she said. “The meds, I mean. He’s getting what he’s been on for years. Beta-blocker, daily aspirin, insulin.”

  I looked at Merritt. His skin reminded me of old guitar tops, color altered by time, lighter some places, darkened others, lacquerlike surface cracks running every which way.

  “Don’t give half a damn what the date is or who the president is,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Just saying, before you ask. Thing’s simple, really, no big mystery to it: Old pipes stink. I should know.”

  “Merritt was a plumber.”

  The old man didn’t actually snort, but his expression strongly suggested it. “When I had a life.”

  “You think that place comes cheap—”

  “That’s enough, Mildred.” It was the first time the younger man, Merritt’s son, had spoken. Ceremoniously his wife began investigating the condition of ceilings, paint, and fixtures. “Why don’t we wait out here while you have a look at Dad, Doctor Hale?”

  Back in the exam room, Merritt turtled into the chair across from my desk, head and neck jutting forward, thin legs adangle.

  “What, no take-off-your-clothes? No cold-steel exploratory devices? Are you really a doctor?”

  “Are you a stinkbug?”

  His mouth didn’t laugh, but his eyes did.

  “How are things going at the care center?”

  “Fun place. Full of good cheer, sunny tomorrows.”

  I waited.

  “When I was a kid,” he said, “I couldn’t wait to get to school. Ten minutes after I came through the front door, I’d be packed and ready to go back. Everybody thought I must have gears missing. But school was flat-out a joy compared to what I had at home. Same with the care center. It works.”

  “So why are you here?”

  He made to sit up straighter in the chair. I saw no improvement and he registered none. But a man’s gotta keep trying.

  “Mildred’s a sweet girl, good to my son. And she means well. But change, change for her is scary. Sneaks up from behind, never what it seems, makes a fool of you.”

  “And change makes you smelly?”

  “Comes back to a woman—like so many things in life. Nellie, my wife, she died over twenty years ago, and there hasn’t been anyone since. Not till now.”

  “At the center.”

  “Yep. Like me, she gets around just fine. Lot of ’em don’t. Broke her hip, but then worked her butt off to get back. You’d see her all times of the day scooting her walker down to the PT room. Worked in a health-food store till she was fifty-six and got pushed aside to make way for Amber. Amber looked about twelve years old and had green hair.”

  Now it made sense. A health-food store. “You’re taking supplements.”

  He nodded. “Protein tablets, zinc and minerals, a whole alphabet of vitamins, pills of this and that flower or weed or grass. Handfuls of the things four, five times a day. When I started taking them, she said before long I’d smell like she did.”

  “And you haven’t shared this with your family?”

  “None of their business. Don’t see me asking what goes on in their room at night.”

  We talked a bit longer, then went out to rejoin the family, to whom I said that, save for the arthritis, Merritt was in good health. Diabetes under control, everything working as it should. I did suggest that, as he’d been on the atenolol for some time, he be sure to ask to have new blood work done.

  The daughter-in-law opened her mouth but shut it at a glance from her husband, who soundly thanked me. I walked them to the door and asked how they’d found their way to me. One of the nurses that took care
of Merritt made the recommendation, the son said. “Said you weren’t like most doctors.”

  I told Richard about that when he called minutes later.

  “Wow. Not like most doctors. You should put that on your Facebook page. If you had a Facebook page.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Athletics rally. I ditched and got home early. You want I should cook?”

  “Seized by a restless urge, are we?”

  “More like a notion. A passing fancy.”

  “Or we could go out.”

  “A peculiar whim …”

  “We do, of course, have three days of leftovers.”

  “Ah, yes, the world-famous Hale Diet. Leftovers every meal, where do they all come from? Point made. I’ll go in the kitchen, see what falls off the shelves.”

  “Is that Dickens I hear?”

  “Sounds just like him, doesn’t it? His understudy. A mockingbird who has practiced long and hard and now is ready for his time center stage. He was on the front porch when I got home. Dickens may be in love.”

  “He hears himself in the mirror?”

  “Or maybe he just wants a snack.”

  Days lumbered on, as they will. Miracles happened in the corners of lives, longings slumbered in our hearts. Wednesday night Richard announced that he’d had enough of politicians pissing one another’s doorsteps and CEOs getting retirement packages of millions while workers couldn’t feed their kids or afford health care, and it was time for an embargo on news. Critically so. He was beginning to despise humankind.

  Dinner had been a fanciful omelet of andouille, shaved Parmesan and pears, that and a cucumber-tomato salad. More concocted than cooked, he insisted. “Cooking implies some level or pretension of artistry. What you see before you was not created, it was built. Assembled. As from a kit.”

  Thursday he was suspended for insubordination when, at a staff meeting, he could not refrain from addressing the principal’s fifth or sixth vapid statement, and on Monday was reinstated, the principal that morning having been terminated for “undisclosed reasons.” The school board asked if Richard might be willing to serve as acting principal.