Willnot

by James Sallis

  “I’m a teacher, not an administrator,” he said. “They want to take me away from what I do well, put me at a desk doing something I suck at?”

  That no one else cared anywhere near as much about the school or the kids as he did, went without saying. It sounded to me as though they expected him to do both jobs. That went unsaid too.

  Periodically over the next few days I spotted Agent Ogden moving about town, stepping onto a porch, sitting fence-post-straight behind the wheel of her rented Hyundai, but we had no further contact. On Monday, about the same time that Richard was meeting with the school board, Joel Stern showed up at the office to let me know he was shipping out.

  “The American dream’s moved on again,” he said. “Back the way we came, to the great Midwest.”

  “And you’re in hot pursuit.”

  “Tepid.” He had elected not to sit, stood poking at a model on the shelf, one of the expensive show-and-tells that drug companies and manufacturers used to hand out by the boxful, a sickly pink foot and ankle with about four inches of leg bones. When you pushed at it, the ankle went out of joint, then moments later popped back in.

  “What’s going on in the heartland?”

  “Corn. The fifties good life. With an occasional school shooting or tasty mass murder.” He moved from the foot model to framed diplomas on the wall by the shelves. “And some really good people.”

  “Good people are everywhere.”

  “You’d be shocked how long it took for me to learn that.” He came up to the desk and held out his hand. “I wanted to say a proper good-bye, Doctor Hale. And to ask … Early next year a small press up in Seattle is bringing out a collection of my essays. I’d like to send you one, if that’s all right with you.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  “Then you’re number one on the list.” He smiled. “It’s a short, short list. Please tell your friend I wish him the best of luck.”

  “Bobby?”

  “I meant Richard, but yes, the sergeant too.”

  “You know about Richard’s work situation?”

  “A large part of what I do consists of hanging around, listening, looking sideways. Much of the rest, the formal interviews, checking public records, all that, it’s three-quarters misdirection. Stirring the pot. Shaking the tree.”

  As I watched him go, out of the office and along the street where he stopped to chat for a moment with Old Ezra, it came to me that, without having previously given it much thought, I liked Joel Stern. A man not easily deceived or distracted—not by growls, not by slogans or sound bites, not by white noise. Not even by the scripts running continously in his head, by his own preconceptions.

  19

  Graffiti spray-painted on the wall read JESUS SAVES. Someone had come along, slashed through the first S in SAVES and drawn in an oversize R above.

  “Never underestimate the power of an editor,” Richard said. “Is Jesus the subject, or an adjective?”

  Having blockaded news, we sought enlightenment wherever it might be found.

  I was dropping Richard off to pick up his car following carburetor work and new brake pads. Which was also revision, as he pointed out. Standing to the left of the garage, the wall with the graffiti had separated it from a drive-through of some sort. That was mostly gone now: a cement foundation, jagged bits of walls, half a roundabout of driveway.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Richard said as we pulled in, one hand on the strap of his backpack, other on the door handle.

  “Whatever happened to my Creature photograph?” I asked.

  I’d had it from childhood, a photo probably shot as a gag on the set, showing the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the female lead passionately embracing. The Creature had her in its arms, dipping her back; she was in a swoon, leg kicked up and back, as they kissed.

  “I believe I may have put it safely away. As I did with that horrid blue dress shirt of yours.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Do you hear the silence streaming from me?”

  “And of which, the Creature or her?”

  “Irrelevant, considering that I’m better looking than both. Well, her at least. Lizard guy was kind of a hunk, now that I think of it.”

  An overhead door ran almost the whole of the garage’s front. With a steady low grind it ascended. The operator secured the pulley chain and waved Richard in.

  “Where did you get it, anyway?” Richard said.

  “The photo? It was a gift from my mother.”

  “Ah, yes. Your mother.”

  “She just thought I should have it, she said.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “It didn’t occur to me till a lot later that it might be a coded message.”

  Richard wound the backpack strap in his hand and climbed out. “Isn’t everything?”

  It certainly seemed so that day. A patient I’d seen a couple of times before for wide-ranging complaints sitting across the desk from me wondering (as he looked toward the window) if it all might not be in his head, in the office today because (glancing down at the floor) he couldn’t seem to care about anything anymore. A refund check in the mail from a bill I’d neither received nor paid. Writing a script only to learn that I’d used the last page of the last prescription pad; we’d neglected to reorder. Four rings with hang-ups, Maryanne told me, in just over an hour.

  Codes?

  Indecipherable signals?

  Or happenstance—like most of life.

  And then there was the the final report from Sebastian Daiche’s team that the sheriff brought over, asking for my help in translating it. A slurry of medical terminology mixed with legal phrases that effectively swallowed their own tails, the first Latinate, the second mandarin, determining somewhere among them that:

  There were three to four bodies, all Caucasian, all young-adult males.

  All went into the ground at approximately the same time.

  Cause of death could not be ascribed.

  No identification was possible.

  The sheriff and I were standing by the window. An unfamiliar recent-model Ford pickup eased by in the street, two rifles in the rack behind the driver, one passenger. Roy tracked it until it passed out of sight with a turn onto Poplar. I handed the report back to him.

  “We’ve reached the end of our knowledge then,” I said. “It’s over. What about the kids, any of them still out there digging?”

  “Not so’s I’ve seen or heard.”

  “Moving along.”

  “The kids are, anyway. Others, not so much. There’s been talk about putting up some kind of memorial.”

  “A memorial. We don’t even know who the bodies were. Or why.”

  “That’s part of the idea, I think.”

  “Whose idea? Where did this come from?”

  “Beats me. But it’s around.”

  Richard told me later that day that the kids at school were talking about the memorial too, the rumor being that a contest was going to be held for its design.

  Just after five I was on rounds at the hospital, playing dodge-it with food carts from hallway to hallway, glimpsing on TV after TV multiple versions of essentially the same news. As I passed a waiting room, Sunil signaled me to hold on, excused himself from the family he’d been sitting with, and moments later joined me. Sunil’s the closest thing we have to a house chaplain. He wore a mahogany-colored corduroy suit the like of which I’d not seen in twenty years. I’d long suspected that Sunil was on first-name terms with a watchful thrift-shop employee.

  “Their daughter,” he said. “Last night she got out of bed and started walking into walls. They heard the thuds, found her in her room. She’d back up four or five steps and walk into the wall again. When they tried to talk to her, all they got was what sounded like strings of vowels. Not much that can be done for her here.”

  “She needs neurology.”

  “Exactly. They’re getting her ready for a transfer to University. Wanted to ask you, who should she se
e up there?”

  “Who saw her here?”

  “Dr. Bullard.”

  “Dan will refer to the same person I would, Kate Cross. No one better, anywhere. I’ll give her a call.”

  “Thanks, Lamar. But …”

  I’d started away, turned back. Made room for a lab tech and candy striper to pass.

  “That wasn’t all I wanted to see you about. A visitor turned up at the church yesterday, late afternoon, no one else around. I came upon him sitting in the rear pew. Texting, or reading. On what they call a tablet these days, I think. Asked if it was okay for him to be there. We talked, and your name came up.”

  “Did his?”

  “Bobby.”

  “Bobby never struck me as the kind to hang out in churches. Wasn’t much given to religion.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he was seeking there. Or what he was bringing.” Which was about as mystical as Sunil’s pronouncements ever got. “He said if I saw you, to be sure and tell you hello for him.”

  “Which you took literally enough to seek me out.”

  “I had the feeling it wasn’t figurative, Lamar. Nor simple sentiment.”

  So: Code again?

  And Bobby was still around. Why? I walked off wondering.

  A while later, I was leaving Radiology after checking pictures of ten-year-old Dominic’s dislocated hip when Vinny approached me. A small wonder, since he rarely left his office.

  Joint problems in a young person are particularly worrisome, prompting all manner of speculation about skeletal defects, congenital conditions, the possibility of RA, spondylitis, or one of their ugly cousins.

  “I heard you were in house,” Vinny said, “wanted you to see this.” This being a letter on Forward Foundation stationery.

  Dear Mr. Parelli:

  It has been my intention for some time now to write and thank you for the excellent, concerned care I was fortunate enough to receive at Bielecki Hospital. I cannot overstate this—the care, or my appreciation—in light of the fact that your concerted actions saved my life.

  Following recovery and intensive physical therapy, I am back near 100% now, soon to ship out again with the crew to an excavation site in Turkey, where we will be investigating tales of an entire village population killed and buried in a single grave. I’m very much looking forward to getting back on the horse.

  Once again, please accept my profound thanks, and please pass thanks along to Dr. Hale and, in turn, to your entire staff.

  Sidney M. Patmore

  P.S. Seb Daiche has asked that I convey to Dr. Hale his apologies that we were unable to be of more help with the bodies there in Willnot.

  Richard and I arrived home within minutes of one another, poured a couple of glasses of pinot noir, and headed out to the patio, where he told me the car was running smooth as glass, he was as of today acting principal, and his predecessor had threatened the school board with litigation. In turn I told him about Sunil, the report on the bodies, and Mr. Patmore’s letter. Darkness nudged at every edge. We sat watching the flash of diaphanous wings against light bleeding from the house behind us. Presently I went in to pee, Richard to refill glasses. Coming round from the kitchen, he stood in the bathroom doorway.

  “Two-fisted?” I said.

  “Always carry a spare. Buddy system. Plan ahead for possible spills.” He gestured in slow motion, so as to minimize sloshing, with the left-hand glass. “If you need help putting that away …”

  “Not at the moment.”

  I finished and we went back outside, where Dickens looked on intently, pondering whether chasing moths was worth the multiple efforts required. A bat shot into sight like a thrown grenade, scooping up insects at light’s margin, just as suddenly gone.

  20

  As though magically summoned by my mention of it, neurology moved in to supplant sniper collecting and coded signals as patients presented with:

  A painful, progressive ringing in the ears and—patently—balance problems, strongly suggesting Ménière’s disease;

  Blurred and double vision, muscle spasms and general fatigue, symptoms so nonspecific that they might be anything, or nothing, but that in the context felt to me like MS;

  Tremors and a gait that, given their nature and the patient’s age, given also the constant circular motion of index finger and thumb called pill-rolling, almost certainly indicated Parkinson’s.

  All these oddly enough in two days, before we fell back to the accustomed run of virus, rash and sniffles, angina, blood where blood shouldn’t be, UTIs, asthma, menopause, prolapses, loss of feeling, swellings, and pain. Performed an emergency appy in there somewhere, set an arm, and sent a three-year-old with wandering eye to vision therapists at University Hospital.

  Meanwhile the days proceeded much like a master pratfaller tripping over hassocks, chairs, and folds in the carpet on his way across the room only to recover, again and again, in the last moment. Groups of every sort, religious, regional, political, fraternal, went on beating at the tribal drum, rallying to themselves all those who believed, felt, and dressed like them. And all of us went on seeking some form or fashion of Camus’s invincible summer.

  Wearing his new hat as official Bossman and to the chorus of “When am I supposed to find time to teach,” Richard’s daily stories now were not of students and course work but of tempests brewed painstakingly in teacups, eggshell egos, counselings, and intercessions, so when on a Wednesday I arrived home to find him doing a fair take on Wednesday’s child filled with woe, I assumed it to be more of the same.

  But Nathan, the ant-mill kid and twelve-year-old freethinker, had gone missing.

  Nathan ran the household when their mother was at work. Fixed breakfast, saw sister Chloe off to school properly and on time. But that morning, Chloe roused when her radio alarm went off and found a note on the kitchen table saying he had to get away to think about things and her breakfast was over by the stove. Chloe ate—toast and a plain omelet swaddled in aluminum foil—and was almost done with the Cheerios she’d got for herself when she thought she might ought to call her mother at the diner. Mom called the school. Acting principal Richard caught the call.

  So everyone, Richard said, is looking for Nathan.

  At which point—we were sitting in the kitchen—I glanced up and saw a young man passing by the window as he stepped onto the porch. I went to the door and opened it before he could knock.

  “Nathan,” Richard said.

  Bobby stood beyond, in the yard. “This is where he asked to come.”

  Richard gave the boy a quick hug and, realizing who Bobby was, introduced himself, shaking hands, as they came in. Nathan sat at the table. Bobby remained standing against the wall at (I couldn’t help but notice) an angle well out of line of sight from the windows.

  I got bottles of water from the fridge for both of them. “Not every day that two missing persons show up together on our porch.”

  “You’re okay?” Richard asked.

  Nathan nodded, emptied his bottle in two gulps.

  “We need to call your mother.” Richard went into the living room for his phone, came back and motioned Nathan to follow him.

  “I got your message,” I said.

  “From the pastor.”

  I gestured toward the front room, toward Nathan. “He is okay, right?”

  “Fine. Confused.”

  “About?”

  “Come on, Doc. He’s smart. Sees what goes on around him, how it doesn’t fit what he’s told.” Bobby looked out into the yard. “Hope you don’t mind my bringing him here.”

  “We appreciate it. Richard was worried.”

  “And hope my having been here doesn’t bring anything else down on you.”

  Richard stuck his head in the door to tell me he was going to run Nathan home.

  “I’ve been staying out in the woods,” Bobby said. “Living off the land for the most part.”

  “With your tablet.”

  “Your pastor friend let me r
echarge.” Saw in his grin a flash of the Brandon I’d known as a boy. “I don’t know how much you may have figured out about what’s going on.”

  “Not much. That the FBI’s not alone in looking for you. When you got shot you said it was an old friend saying hello.”

  “I could count on my thumbs the number of times Carlos ever missed what he set his sights on. His handlers know it too, but what’s to prove? And getting taken down by local law—which is every bit as unlikely as Carlos missing the shot—then having to skip out, that takes him out of the picture.”

  Bobby finished his water, held up the bottle. “You have recycle now, right?”

  “In the pantry, green bin.”

  “Both of us,” Bobby said, coming back, “declined to do what we were told. Carlos was smarter about it. Anyhow …” He stood where he’d been before. Not a half inch difference. “I came across the kid out there, couple of miles from anything, in a clearing that looked like it was a favorite spot for someone a long time back. Remains of a picnic table gone gray and spongy from exposure, rocks that made a kind of cook pit, part of a Styrofoam cooler with onions growing out of it.

  “He looks up when he hears me, asks ‘Is it okay for me to be here?’ Okay by me, I tell him, and it’s public land, but maybe there are parents, teachers, who are worried about him?”

  “What was he doing out there?”

  “Sitting. Checking out his shoes. Listening to the wind. My old friend Dell would say he was trying to feel himself a part of the world again, instead of apart from it. I think he was just trying to get the noise out of his head.

  “We had a long talk. You don’t meet up with many kids—hell, with many people, period—that want to talk about anything real. Most of it’s dead air and white noise, he kept saying.”

  I waited. Listening to the wind myself, I guess.

  “What got said’s between the two of us, Doc, ought to stay that way. Two guys sitting together out in the woods away from it all, both carrying stuff you’d think with the gap in age, where we’ve been, couldn’t possibly be more different, but you look close and it turns out not to be very different at all.”