Salt River Read online

  SALT RIVER

  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

  Cypress Grove

  Drive

  Cripple Creek

  Stories

  A Few Last Words

  Limits of the Sensible World

  Time's Hammers: Collected Stories

  A City Equal to My Desire

  Potato Tree

  Poems

  Sorrow's Kitchen

  My Tongue in Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

  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

  SALT RIVER

  A Novel

  JAMES SALLIS

  Copyright © 2007 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 Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.

  Published by Walker & Company, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Macmillan

  All papers used by Walker & Company are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

  ISBN-10: 0-8027-1617-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8027-1617-0

  Visit Walker & Company's Web site at www.walkerbooks.com

  First U.S. edition 2007

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Westchester Book Group

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  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

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  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. IVe 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 of 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."

  He looked off in the direction the grasshopper had taken.

  "That's how I feel some days."

  "Doc, I just want you to know, any time you feel like dropping by to cheer me up, don't hesitate."

&n
bsp; "Never have. Spread it around."

  "You do that, all right."

  He waited a moment before asking, "And how are you doing?"

  "I'm here."

  "That's what it comes down to, Turner. That's what it comes down to."

  "One might hope for more."

  "One does. Always. So one gets off one's beloved butt and goes looking. Then, next thing you know, the sticks you used to knock fruit out of a tree have got sharpened up to spears and the spears have turned to guns, and there you are: countries, politicians, TV, designer clothes. Descartes said all our ills come from a man being unable to sit alone, quietly, in a room."

  "I did that a lot."

  "Ain't sure a prison cell counts."

  "Before. And after. The ills found me anyway."

  "Yeah. They'll do that, won't they? Like a dog that gets the taste for blood. Can't break him of it."

  Odie Piker drove by in his truck, cylinders banging. Thing had started out life as a Dodge. Over the years so many parts had been replaced—galvanized steel welded on as fenders, rust spots filled and painted over in whatever color came to hand, four or five rebuilt clutches and a motor or two dropped in—that there was probably nothing left of the original. Nor, I think, had it at any time in all those years ever been washed or cleaned out. Dust from the fallout of bombs tested in the fifties lurked in its seams, and back under the seat you'd find wrappers for food products long since extinct.

  Doors eased shut on pneumatics as Donna and Sally Ann left City Hall for lunch at Jay's Diner. Minutes later, Mayor Sims stepped out the side door and stood brushing at his sport coat. When he saw us, his hand shifted into a sketchy wave.

  "Frangible," Doc proclaimed, his mind on yet another track.

  "Okay."

  "Frangible. What we all are—what life is. Fragile. Easily broken. Mean the same. But neither gets it near the way frangible does."

  He looked off at the mayor, who had gotten in his car and was just sitting there.

  "Two schools of thought. One has it we're best off using simple words, plain words. That fancier ones only serve to obscure meaning—wrap it in swaddling clothes. Other side says that takes everything down to the lowest common denominator, that thought is complex and if you want to get close to what's really meant you have to choose words carefully, words that catch up gradations, nuances . . . You know this shit, Turner."

  "A version of it."

  "Versions are what we have. Of truth, our histories, ourselves. Hell, you know that, too."

  I smiled.

  "Frangible Henry over there's trying to talk himself out of going to see his lady friend up by Elaine." He gave the town's name a hard accent. Elaine. "But it's Thursday. And whichever side of the argument you pick to look at it from, he'll lose."

  "You never cease to amaze me, Doc."

  "I'm common as horseflies, Turner. We all are, however much we go on making out that it's otherwise . . . Guess we should both be about our work. If we had some, that is. Anything you need to be doing?"

  "Always paperwork."

  "Accounts for eighty percent of the workforce, people just moving papers from one place to another. Though nowadays I guess there ain't much actual paper involved. Half the rest of the workforce spends its time trying to find papers that got put in the wrong place. Well," he said, "there goes Henry off to Elaine."

  We sat watching as the mayor's butt-sprung old Buick waddled down the street. A huge crow paced it, sweeping figure eights above, then darted away. Thought it was some lumbering beast about to drop in its tracks, maybe.

  Doc pushed to his feet and stood rocking. "They say when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. I think they're wrong, Turner. I think it only winks."

  With that sage remark Doc left, to be about his business and leave me to mine, as he put it, and once he was gone I sat there alone still resting up, wondering what my business might be.

  Alone was exactly what I'd thought my business was when I came here. Now I found myself at the center of this tired old town, part of a community, even of a family of sorts. Never had considered myself much of a talker either. But with Val conversation had just gone on and on, past weary late afternoons into bleary early mornings, and I was forever remembering things she'd said to me.

  Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left.

  Or the time we were talking about my prison years and the years after, as a therapist, and she told me: "You're a matchbook, Turner. You keep on setting fire to yourself. But somehow at the same time you always manage to kindle fires in others."

  Did I?

  All I knew for certain was that for too much of my life people around me wound up dying. I wanted that to stop. I wanted a lot of things to stop.

  The car Billy Bates was in, for instance. I wanted it to stop—can't begin to tell you how very much I wish it had stopped—when it came plowing headlong down the street in front of me, before it crashed through the front wall of City Hall.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A WONDER, always, to watch Doc work. You'd swear he was giving things no more attention than tying a shoelace, but he was well and surely in there, and nothing got by him. By the time I'd crossed the street he had Billy out of the car, one hand clutching the back of his shirt, the other cradling his head. Man can barely stand, and here he is hauling someone out of a car. Had Billy on the sidewalk in no time flat, feeling for pulses, prodding and poking.

  Donna and Sally Ann came out of the diner, Donna with half a BLT in her hand. Three steps past the door, a slice of pickle fell out and she looked down at it, vacantly, the way others stood staring at the hole in the wall plugged by Billy's Buick Regal. Country music, or what passes for country music these days, played on the radio. Someone reached into the car and turned it off.

  "Pupils look okay," Doc said. "Not blown, anyway. You want to go on back in the office there and bring me out some tape, Turner? Any kind should do her, long as it's heavy. Duct tape be perfect. I assume," he said at the same volume, but to the gathering crowd, "that one of you has had sense enough to call Rory?"

  "Mabel's tracking him down," Sally Ann told him. Mabel, who'd been at it long enough to have been (some said) ordained by Alexander Graham Bell himself, was our local telephone operator, unofficial historian, and town crier. "She's also trying to find Milly."

  As I came out, Doc pulled a loose-leaf binder from the backseat of the car and slid it under Billy's head and shoulders. He tore off a length of tape and turned the ends in, so that it stuck to itself, to make a cradle for Billy's head. Then he started taping, back and forth, around and down, till head and notebook were a piece. That done, he splinted the left wrist, where a bone protruded, with tape and a paperback book also from the car. He sat with his legs straight out in front of him, picking glass out of Billy's face with finger and thumb, wiping them on his pants.

  Everyone wanted to know where the mayor was, but Doc never batted an eye.

  "Damn," he said afterward, as we waited, "that felt gooood," dropping a couple extra o's in there. "I'm of half a mind to kick that boy doctor out and take back my office." After a moment he added, "He's good, though. I made sure of that."

  "You miss it, don't you?"

  "Hell, Turner, my age, I miss damn near everything."

  Heads turned as Rory's ambulance came up the middle of Main Street. Once a delivery van for the local builders' supply, the old Pontiac now doubled as hearse, and letters from the store's name still showed beneath new paint when light fell just right. Rory had taken time to pull back the curtains inside. He got out, wearing hip boots and the smell of the river, leaving the door open. Lonnie climbed out the other side, in knee boots, and stood looking down at his younger son without saying anything.

  Doc's wrappings made it look as though a mummy's head had taken over Billy's body. Of course, in Lonnie's view something had taken over Billy long ago.

  I remembered when I first met Billy, how I thought he might be th
e closest thing to an innocent human being I'd ever known. He was dressed all in black back then, with multiple piercings and no discernible sense of direction any of us could make out, parents included, just a sweet kid kind of happily adrift. He'd dropped out of school not long after, not dropped out so much as just, well, drifted out. Missed a few days, then a week, and never went back. Worked at the hardware store a while, but that didn't last either. Then he was playing drums with a band that worked a lot outside town in the bars along Old Highway, but for some reason, the way he looked, his quietness, he was a magnet for trouble. People kept stepping up to him and he wouldn't back down. Don Lee and I'd answered our share of call-outs only to find Billy at the other end. Bar brawls, traffic incidents, domestic disturbances. Then, a year ago, he'd got married, gone back to the hardware store, and things were looking good for him. Few months later, he disappeared. We found his truck out on the Hill Road Bypass where he'd pulled it over and flagged down the bus headed toward Little Rock. Milly, his wife, said she'd often go looking for him and find him sitting in the basement sawing wood up into smaller and smaller pieces.

  I helped Rory load Billy into the ambulance, then went over and stood by Lonnie.

  Two guys off fishing, looking forward to a quiet, easy day. Sandwiches, maybe a beer or two, bait bucket standing by, drowsy sun in the sky. Now this. Frangible, like Doc said. How brittle our lives are, how tentative, every day of them, every moment.

  Once I'd been up at the camp while Isaiah Stillman was, as he put it, "doing laundry"—balancing the books on the family funds he managed. That evening he was cleaning out old folders and files, had them all lined up in the recycle bin. "We're never more than a keystroke away from oblivion, you know," he said, and hit the key to delete the contents.