by James Sallis
“Thing is, you have to admire what those kids are doing up there,” Lonnie said, “foolish as it is. They have an idea, a star to guide by, and they’re willing to put everything they are behind it. How many of us can say that?”
J. T. got back to town not long after. I saw her pickup coming down the street, met her out front of the office. She looked exhausted—exhausted and wired—as she hauled a gym bag out of the cab and held it high to show this was the whole of it. Travel always does that, she said, stomps her flat, jacks her up. I filled her in on the call from Memphis. She listened carefully, shook her head and said nothing.
“So how’d it go?”
“Okay. How are you?”
“I’ve been worse. Get things taken care of?”
“Did my best, anyway.”
“They still trying to get you back?”
“No. No, that’s over. That’s over, the flight’s over, the drive’s over—and I’m starved.”
“Come on home with me, then. I’ll cook.”
She hesitated. “I don’t think I want to be at the cabin just now, Dad.”
“Fair enough, we’ll go out. What are you up for?”
“Anything—as long as it’s not the diner. No, I take that back. Meat. Serious meat.”
And since Eldon was playing at the steakhouse an hour and spare change away, what better choice?
So we chose, and drove, only to find Eldon MIA. Said he had to be out of town a day or two, our waitress told us, her expression and inflection suggesting that she’d give damn near anything to be the same.
We’d made the drive with windows down, on deserted roads, through tide pools of moonlight and the smell of tomorrow’s rain. It was at times like this, sitting together at the kitchen table or in a car, suspended for moments from causality and process, that the natural barriers between J. T. and myself receded. Not that they went down, just that they ceased for those suspended moments to matter.
“I’ve been thinking about my brother, about Don, a lot,” she said. “Thinking how so many people I know have these lives that seem impossible to them. People who do really stupid things over and over. Stupid things, violent things—either to themselves or to others.”
“Pain as the fulcrum, loss as the lever, to keep their worlds aloft. After a while that can get to be all they feel, all that reassures them they’re alive.”
“Exactly. You worked with them, Dad. You must understand.”
“No. You always think you will. Every time you learn something new, develop a new passion, you think that’s where you’re heading. Like that song Eldon and Val used to sing. Farther along we’ll know all about it. . . . But you don’t. You wind up holding the same blank cards—just more of them.”
Despite Eldon’s absence, we made the most of it, and of three or four pounds of steak between us, then drove back. It was not hard to imagine ghosts just off the road among the trees, riders out of a hundred Sleepy Hollows, fading echoes of great notions, fond hopes, and longed-for lives.
That night I heard, or dreamt I heard, a scratching at the screen on the window by my bed. I went out on the porch, but nothing was there. Only the old chair held together by twine, the stains on the floorboards.
Nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY
MONDAY NOW. Before the call from Memphis, before my half-assed investigation. Or just before. Val and I are sitting on the porch.
“We’re leaving in the morning, first light.”
Instruments laid away in the back seat of the yellow Volvo, trailer hitched behind, road unfurling ahead. Westward ho.
Before.
“Like hunters.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll—”
“I know you will. . . . I’ve already shut the house down. Thought I’d stay here tonight, if that’s okay with you.”
“Of course it is. Still planning on Texas as first stop?”
“As much as we’re planning on anything. We’ll get in, point the car in that direction, see what happens.”
I went in and got a bottle of wine I’d chilled the way she liked, rejoined her on the porch. I remember that the bottle had a colorful old-world label, red, yellow, purple, green, with a wooden gate or door on it; afterwards, when everyone was gone, I’d sit staring at it.
“You’re okay as far as funds, right?”
“Jesus, you sound like a father sending his daughter off to school. But yeah, I’m good.”
She picked up the glass, smelled the wine and smiled, put the glass down. Chill it, then let it sit to warm before drinking. There was this perfect moment in there somewhere.
“All these years, paycheck from the state, billings on clients, the only thing I ever spent money on’s the house, and that was just for materials, since I—we—did the work. The rest I put away or, God help me, but I do drive a Volvo after all, invested. So I’ve got a raft that’ll keep me afloat through the whitewater.”
A ladybug lit on her glass, closing its wing case. Val watched as it traversed the rim.
“There’s so much I’ll miss,” she said. “About the job, I mean— the rest goes without saying.”
“Giving something back, making a difference, being a force for good . . .”
“Winning. Being right.”
Neither of us said anything for a time. I sipped at my wine. She anticipated hers.
“It scares me that so often that’s what it comes down to. Which is as much as anything else why I need to stop. For now, anyway. Everything I’ve done, I start just trying to figure out how to get by. Not make a mess of it. Then before I know it, I’ve gotten serious about it, whatever it is—marble collecting, fence-mending, it doesn’t matter—and I’m trying to connect all the dots, trying to change things, make those marbles and fence slats matter. Turn those damn stupid marbles into whole round worlds.”
She looked back at the ladybug, now on its third or fourth pass.
“The French call them bêtes à bon dieu,” she said. “What a sweet, beautiful name.”
“For so small and insignificant a thing.”
“Exactly.” She looked off to the trees. “The music will be the same. I know that.”
Then: “The mythmakers had it wrong, Turner. It’s not a clash of good and evil. It’s a recondite war between the blueprinters, all those people who know just how things need to be and how to get that done, and the visionaries, who see something else entirely, and I’ve never been able to decide—”
“ ‘Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?’” Another old song.
“Right.”
“We’re all caught in the middle, Val.”
“Which is why it’s the stuff of myth.”
Putting one leg up on the chair arm, she turned to me. The chair’s joints went seriously knock-kneed, the twine that held them together at the point of letting go.
“There’s a story I love, that I don’t think I ever told you. Once, years ago, Itzhak Perlman was giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, some huge venue like that, and of course the house is packed. He hobbles onstage, puts aside his crutches, takes his seat. The orchestra begins, fades for his entrance, and when he hits the second or third note, a string breaks. Goes off like a shot. And everyone’s figuring, Well, that’s it. But very quietly Perlman signals the conductor to begin again—and he plays the entire concerto on three strings. You can all but see him rethinking the part in his head as he plays, rearranging it, recasting it, remaking it. And he does so faultlessly. ‘You know,’ he says afterwards, ‘sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.’”
Smiling, she picked up her glass and lifted it to her mouth. I glanced away as the wings of a bird taking flight caught sunlight.
After the shot, I realized it had been quiet for some time. Night birds, frogs, none of them were calling. And I had missed it.
The sound of the glass shattering came close upon the shot. Val sat straight in the chair, her mouth o
pening twice as if to speak, then slumped. I went to her, expecting at any moment a second shot. As I held her, she pointed at the wine running slowly along the floorboards. The second shot came then—but from a shotgun, not a rifle.
Nathan stepped into the clearing, from lifelong habit extracting the shell casings and replacing them even as he moved forward. In moments he was there and had Val on the floor. We’d both seen our share of shootings, we knew what had to be done.
Later I’d learn that the kids up at the camp weren’t the only ones Nathan had been keeping an eye on. He’d arrived after the man had taken his first shot and was preparing for the second. Must of heard the click of the safety release, Nathan said, ’cause he for damn sure didn’t hear me, and looked round just in time to see both barrels coming at him.
No identification on the body, of course. Keys for a Camry that turned out not to be a rental but stolen, thick fold of hundreds and twenties in a money clip, full whiskey flask snugged in one rear pocket of his jeans. In the other they found a Congressional Medal of Honor.
J. T. came back to the cabin to tell me this.
“We might be able to trace him by it,” she said, “assuming of course that it’s his.”
But tracing him was dancing in place. We all knew that. We all knew where he came from. One dead soldier more or less, named or nameless, mattered little in the scheme of things.
“Dad?”
Only then did I realize I’d made no response.
“Are you going to be okay?”
Of course I would be, in time.
“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. Come on into town and stay with me, just for tonight.”
But I declined, insisting that being by myself was exactly what I needed right now.
Again and again people say everything’s a blur at these times, but it’s not. For all that it happens fast, each single moment takes forever to uncoil in your mind, each image is clear and separate and rimed with light. Somewhere in my memory Val will always be sitting there slumped forward in the chair with a surprised expression on her face pointing to the spilled wine.
Lonnie showed up not long after, then Don Lee with Doc Oldham in tow. At one point Lonnie threatened to slap cuffs on me and haul my ass back to town if he had to. He didn’t carry through on it, though. Most of us don’t carry through; that’s one of the things you can usually count on.
Eldon was the last to turn up, after the rest had gone, even Nathan—though for all I knew, Nathan was still out there skulking. Eldon sat on the edge of the porch.
“I’m sorry, man,” he said.
“We all are.”
“You have no idea.”
I didn’t have much of anything.
“Rain heading this way.”
“Good.”
After a moment he said, “I loved her, John.”
After a moment I said, “I know you did.”
“What the hell are we gonna do now, man?”
“You’re going to go on, to Texas and all those places you two had talked about, and you’re going to play and sing the songs you and Val always did together.”
I went in and got the banjo.
“She told me you were learning to play.”
“I don’t think you can call what the banjo and I do together play. It’s more of an adversary relationship.”
When I handed it to him, he said, “I can’t take this.”
“Sure you can. It needs to be played, it needs to be allowed to do what it was made for.”
We argued about it some more, and finally he agreed. “Okay, I’ll take it, I’ll even learn to play the thing. But it’s not mine.”
“That’s what Val always said: that instruments don’t belong to people, we just borrow them for a while.”
“What about you? What are you going to do?”
I’m going to sit here on this porch, I told him. And once he was gone that’s what I did, sat there on the porch looking out into the trees and back at the label on the wine bottle and thinking about the ragged edges of my life. About daybreak I saw Miss Emily walking at wood’s edge with young ones in a line behind her. “Val,” I said aloud, and as her name came back to me in echo from the trees it sounded very much like a prayer.
Somewhere deep inside myself I’m still sitting there, waiting.
SALT RIVER
To Odie Piker
and Ant Bee—
for putting on The Dog
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER ONE
SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE to see how much music you can make with what you have left. Val told me that, seconds before I heard the crash of her wineglass against the porch floor, looked up, and only then became aware of the shot that preceded it, two years ago now.
The town doesn’t have much left. I’ve watched it wither away until some days you’d think the first strong wind could take it. I’m not sure how much I have left either. With the town, it’s all economics. As for me, I think maybe I’ve seen a few too many people die, witnessed too much unbearable sadness that still had somehow to be borne. I remember Tracy Caulding up in Memphis telling me about a science fiction story where these immortals would every century or so swim across a pool that relieved them of their memories, then they could go on. I wanted a swim in that pool.
Doc Oldham and I were sitting on the bench outside Manny’s Dollar $tore. Doc had stopped by to show off his new dance step and, worn out from the thirty-second performance, had staggered outside to rest up a spell, so I was resting up with him.
“Used to be Democrats in these parts,” Doc said. “Strange creatures, but they bred well. ’Bout any direction you looked, that’s all you’d see.”
Doc had retired, and his place had been taken by a new doctor, Bill Wilford, who looked all of nineteen years old. Doc now spent most of his time sitting outside. He spent a lot of it, too, saying things like that.
“Where’d they all get to, Turner?” He looked at me, pulling his head back, turtlelike, to focus. I had to wonder what portion of the world outside actually made it through those cataracts, how much of it got caught up in there forever. “Town’s dried up, same as a riverbed. What the hell you stayin’ here for?”
He grabbed at a knee to stop the twitching from the exercise minutes ago. His hands looked like faded pink rubber gloves. All the pigment got burned out a long time back, he said, when he was a chemist, before medical school.
“Yeah, I know,” he went on, “what the hell are any of us staying here for? Granted, the town wasn’t much to start with. Never was meant to be. Just grew up here, like a weed. Farms all about, back then. People start thinking about going to town of a weekend, pick up flour and the like, there has to be a town. So they made one. Drew straws, for all I know. See who had to move into the damn thing.”
A thumb-size grasshopper came kiting across the street and landed on Doc’s sleeve. The two of them regarded one another.
“Youngsters used to be all around, too, like them Democrats. Nowadays the ones that don’t just get born old and stay that way, they up and leave soon’s they can.” Looking down, he told the grasshopper: “You should, too.”
Doc liked people but was never much for social amenities, one of those who came and went as he pleased and said pretty much what he thought. Now that he didn’t have anything to do, sometimes you got the feeling that the second cup o
f coffee you’d offered might stretch to meet your newborn’s graduation. He knew it, too, duly noting and relishing every sign of unease, every darting eye, every shuffled foot. “Wonder is, I’m here at all,” he’d tell you. “My own goddamn miracle of medical science. Got more wrong with me than a hospital full of leftovers. Asthma, diabetes, heart trouble. Enough metal in me to sink a good-size fishing boat.”
“What you are,” I’d tell him, “is a miracle of stubbornness.”
“Just hugging the good earth, Turner. Just hugging the good earth.”
The grasshopper stepped down to his knee, sat there a moment, then took off, with a thrill of wings, back out over the street.
“Least somebody listens,” Doc said. “Back when I was an intern . . .”
Apparently a page had been turned in the chronicle playing inside his head. I waited for his coughing fit to subside.
“Back when I was an intern—it was like high school machine shop, those days. Learn to use the hacksaw, pliers, clamps, the whatsits. More like Jeopardy now—how much obscure stuff can you remember? Anyway, I was working with all these kids, all in a ward together. A lot of cystic fibrosis—not that we knew what it was. Kids who’d got the butt end of everything.
“There was this one, ugliest little thing you ever saw, body all used up, with this barrel chest, skin like leather, fingers like baseball bats. But she had this pretty name, Leilani. Made you think of flowers and perfume and music. An attending told us one day that the truth was, Leilani didn’t exist anymore, hadn’t really been alive for years, it was just the infection, the pseudomonas in her, that went on living—moving her body around, breathing, responding.”