by James Sallis
“So he is. Finger on the pulse of.” Richard went out to the front room to get the Scotch.
“Didn’t mean to be,” Bobby said. “Kept having reasons not to go. Finding them, I guess is the truth of the thing. But today I came to say good-byes. Already said them to Nathan.”
“I won’t ask where you’re going.”
“I know.”
Richard came in with the bottle and a glass for me, set it on the table and, going back around, behind Bobby, lost his footing. He reached out to grab at Bobby’s chair and I thought had caught himself, but then crashed down. It took a moment for me to register that I’d heard, just before he fell, a high-pitched whistle and crack.
Bobby was up and out the door almost before Richard hit the floor. Around the hole in the window glass I watched him disappear into the trees, understanding then what had happened.
Richard’s eyes were wide, already shock-y looking, and there was, for so small an entry wound, far too much blood.
Much of it’s a blur. I remember pushing against his chest and diaphragm, breathing into his slack mouth. Yellow dish towels going red with blood. Like peasants with pitchforks up against armies, I fought with what I had. I remember pulling down the cutlery drawer for a good knife, then pulling out the drawer where we stored cheesecloth and trussing twine and dumping its contents on the floor. My fingers on bleeders. Lurching for the phone and punching numbers with one hand as the other went on doing what I’ve done all these years.
So much of it was automatic.
So much of it was, or seemed at the time, in vain.
At some point Bobby is there saying It’s taken care of, I should never have come here, brought all this, good luck to you both, Dr. Hale. Then a flash, a darkness, he’s gone, and Andrew stands above me in his dark suit and cuff links with the ambulance outside in the driveway, the front door open, the sheriff and Sam walking through it.
I’m in the ambulance. Bagging Richard. Starting an IV.
Andrew and I pushing the stretcher through the ER door, people parting left and right, faces stark in the sudden light, pages sounding overhead.
I’m outside OR. Gordie’s telling me that it was touch and go at first but all is going well now, he’s stable. I notice that Gordie doesn’t take his eyes off mine. I notice that he’s wearing his lucky scrub cap—with the plaid of his clan.
I came awake sitting by Richard’s bed in intensive care. Eyes at half-mast, he was watching me. The room dark, a wash of light from outside, from the nurses’ station and unit proper, that lost force before it reached us. Steady tick of his QRS on the monitor. “They tell me you saved my life,” he said. “If I say thank you, will you go home and get some rest?” Later, I wondered if I dreamed that.
Later also, Roy and Sam came to tell me they’d found the shooter just yards into the woods behind the house. His throat had been slit, one swift, expert strike. He’d died instantly. The killer took care to arrange the body on its back, straight, as though at rest, rifle tucked alongside. Perfect right shoulder arms, Roy said.
Slowly time, or memory, congeals. Richard on his back, face locked in concentration as he wills his leg to bend, to slide his foot toward him, and it begins, very slightly, to move. At the end of the hall tottering in his walker as he turns. He reaches out to the wall to steady himself and misjudges, almost goes down. Holding hard to the bars on either side as he attempts to walk again for the first time. Leg lifts and squats and stair steps that leave him all but breathless and shiny with sweat. All too well I remember what it was like.
Richard saying they tell me I’m out of the woods and the other guy never got out of them. Gordie coming out from OR to say Richard was in Recovery and everything looked good. Hypoxia’s the monkey in the gears though, he says, and we don’t know the extent of it. Metabolic encephalopathy for sure. Permanent damage or loss, we don’t know, we’ll just have to wait. And Kate Cross at University Hospital: It’s going to be a long haul, Lamar, you know that. But he’s going to be okay. Conservatively? Eighty percent recovery.
So, refusing to tune ahead in our minds, we wrestle the hour, hour after hour, and days fall away. Then weeks. We work his butt ragged, we make arrangements to continue rehab with home visits and half days at University in the capital, then one day we’re home.
For the first two weeks Dickens scarcely left Richard’s side. He moved onto the bed, stayed beside him, and would not budge or be budged, even to eat. I took in food for him on the same tray as Richard’s meals and set up a litter box at bedside. Richard, of course, asked if the litter box was for him.
29
A year later, Richard went back to teaching. It wasn’t easy for him, but then nothing in the last year and a half had been. And it’s still not. The limp got better but it’s there and always will be, and I still listen for it, even when he’s two rooms away. There are days when his hand won’t do as bid, when he drops or crushes what he tries to hold, days when words, mostly proper nouns but sometimes shirt or schedule or sandwich, flee him. They walk the plank of my tongue and leap off the side to oblivion, Richard says. And: Each day is a gift—in tacky wrapping paper.
So each day I’m reminded of what we can do, and the limits of it. And the hours surprise me with reminders of how close Richard and I have become, for it’s as though, physically and emotionally, I was with him through every moment of pain, of fear, of disability.
Half days worked so well for Richard at University Hospital that I decided they’d suit me too, so when I went back to work, I cut my patient load and time in the office, and scheduled OR only on Mondays. One of the new arrivals had taken care of my patients while I was away. Some stayed with her, some returned, some strayed to other physicians. Maryanne was kept busy for a while forwarding medical records, after which she decided she liked the new hours too, worked when I did, and had the rest of her time free.
After one semester of audit and two of provisional classwork, Nathan was offered early admission to the university and a scholarship. His mother moved the family there, where she landed a job as hostess at one of the best restaurants in town.
During convalescence, Richard wrote a novel, Deadline—with, he said, no agenda or motive save to keep himself occupied and on focus. It began with a writer much like my father standing on his ragged porch reading a letter from, he had supposed, a fan.
Dear Paul Bleating,
Recently I have been commissioned by the New York Times to write your obituary. I have of course done my homework, as it were, and fully plan on discussing your early development as a romance writer under numerous bylines, the importance of the nonfiction you contributed to Popular Mechanics, the origin and creation of your much-neglected novel Whatsit—among much else.
I have one question for you.
Can you tell me when you plan to die? I work much better with a deadline.
Sincerely,
Simon Rapaport
P.S. Also, I need the money.
I read it one late afternoon sitting at the kitchen table where so much had happened. I had no idea this was what he had been doing with his time. Every word and page was unmistakably, indelibly Richard. It went from weird to funny to funny weird. Don Westlake would have loved it.
Scattered throughout were misread signs, and caricatures of people we knew: the anonymous driver of Big Orange the VW, Sheriff Roy (who came off a lot like Jim Thompson’s sheriffs from The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 without the cruelty and psychosis), a couple of our recent mayors, a mysterious female federal agent named Bobbie, a tap-dancing doctor who for hundreds of years had appeared from nowhere whenever need was great, saved and repaired lives, then vanished.
“Okay,” Richard said when I put the last page facedown. He’d done his best to stay out of the room as I read, but materialized every half hour to ask if I needed anything, eyes furtively weighing my progress.
“It’s good. Funny. You know that.”
“Okay.”
“I do think one writer i
n a person’s life may be enough.”
“Hey, it kept me off the streets and out of trouble. And it’s not like I plan to make a habit of it—I’m done. Considering taking up the banjo next, maybe move on to ceramics after that.”
“Then I hope you’ll come and visit once you’ve moved.”
“Hmmmm. Maybe I need to rethink this.”
One day not long after, Richard met me at the door with “Something for you on the kitchen table. Not dinner—that’ll be along in due time. Soon as I due it.” With which he clomped back to the pantry to stand looking at shelves waiting for inspiration to strike.
Leaned against the laptop that wandered about the house being used by both of us, was a postcard of some ageless small town (Montana, maybe?) consisting, it seemed, solely of a main street, dwarfed by mountains behind and clouds above.
Remember the old joke about the translation of out of sight, out of mind? Invisible and insane.
Or an old sf story about people who live forever but every hundred years have to go in and have their memories erased?
What I wish sometimes.
I used to sleep a lot. But once you wake up—
It was unsigned, and didn’t need to be. No one would ever again hear from Bobby.
One last thing.
We buried Dickens yesterday. In our backyard the sun shone, and a new brood of crickets, trying on their new lives for a fit, leapt up tentatively into the wind, into the world.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
James Sallis is the author of more than two dozen volumes of fiction, poetry, translation, essays, and criticism, including the Lew Griffin cycle and Drive, Cypress Grove, Cripple Creek, The Killer Is Dying, and Salt River. His biography of the great crime writer Chester Himes is an acknowledged classic. Sallis lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife, Karyn.
Bloomsbury USA
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First published 2016
© James Sallis 2016
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-452-9
ePub: 978-1-63286-454-3
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sallis, James, 1944–
Willnot : a novel / James Sallis.—First edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-63286-452-9 (hardcover : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-1-63286-454-3 (ebook) 1. Physicians (General practice)—Fiction. 2. City and town life—Virginia—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3569.A462W55 2016
813’.54—dc23
2015025305
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