James Sallis - Salt River

"You don't say a lot, do you, Sheriff? Odd, that you haven't even asked why I'm looking for Brown."

"Not really."

His eyebrows lifted.

"You may have reason for not telling me. And if you are going to tell me, you will, in your own time. Meanwhile, I can't help but notice there's been no mention of a CAPIS warrant."

Baxter made a sound, kind of the bastard offspring of harrumph and a snort. "I see… That how you live 'round here?"

"We try, some of us."

"Well, then." He stood, tugging at his maroon slacks. The lighter-shaded crease jumped like a guide wire, seemingly independent of the rest. "Thank you for your time, Sheriff."

With a nod to the others, he left. Through the window we watched him stop just outside the door and look up and down the street. Fresh from the saloon, checking out the action.

"Shark," Lonnie said.

June looked up at him.

"What we used to call lawmen who'd get a wild hair up their butt, go off on some crusade of their own."

"Has that feeling to it, doesn't it?" I said.

"I'll be checking in with the Fort Worth PD, naturally," Lonnie said.

"Naturally."

Back in prison, when I was working on my degree, an instructor by the name of Cyril Fullerton took an interest in me, no idea why. It started off slowly, an extra comment on a paper I'd written, a note scribbled at the end of a test, but over time developed into a separate, parallel correspondence that went on through those last years, threading them together. Once I was out, we met, at a downtown diner rich with the smell of pancake syrup, hot grease, and aftershave. Cy had helped me set up a practice of sorts, referring an overflow patient or two to me and coercing colleagues to do the same, but, for all the times we'd made plans on getting together, something always came up.

We talked about that as a waitress named Bea with improbably red hair refilled our coffee cups again and again, how transparent it was that we'd both been finding a multitude of reasons not to get together, and later about how we were both bound to be disappointed, since over time we'd built up these images of the other and the puzzle piece before us didn't fit the place we'd cut out for it. At the time, new convert that I was, I thought we were speaking heart to heart, two people who understood the ways of the world and how it worked, their own shifts and feints included. Now I recognize the shoptalk for what it was: a blind, safe refuge, something we could hide behind.

We never met again. He was too busy, I was too busy. Gradually our feeble efforts to remain in touch faded away. But as it turned out, everything wasn't bluster, blinds, and baffles that day; Cy said something that has stayed with me.

"The past," he said, resting three fingers across the mouth of his cup to keep Bea from pouring yet another refill, "is a gravity. It holds you to the earth, but it also keeps pulling you down, trying, like the earth itself, to reclaim you. And the future, always looking that direction, planning, anticipating-that's a kind of freefall, your feet have left the ground, you're just floating there, floating where there is no there."

I'd left Eldon plucking disconsolately at his banjo and humming tunelessly, the occasional word- shadow, shawl, willow -breaking to the surface. Breaking, too, onto disturbing memories of Val doing much the same. Pull the bike around back, I'd told him, and don't leave the place.

He'd been playing a coffeehouse in Arlington, Texas, near the university campus. After the gig, this guy came up to him to say how much he liked the way he played. They went out for a beer-Eldon was drinking by then-and, after that beer and an uncertain number of others were downed, to breakfast at a local late-night spot specializing in Swedish pancakes the waitress assembled at tableside. ("She folded them so gentle and easy, it looked like she was diapering a baby.") The guy, whose name was Steve Butler, told Eldon he was welcome to crash at his house, that there was plenty of room and no one would be getting in anyone else's way. I'd been on the road for months, Eldon said, sleeping where I could, in parks and pullovers, behind unoccupied houses and stores; that sounded good.

First morning, he woke up with a young woman, Johanna, "like in the Bob Dylan song," beside him. Pretty much had her life story by the time I got my pants on, Eldon said. Butler, he discovered, was a lawyer who liked artistic types. People came and went in the house all day and night, some sleeping there, others just passing through. Johanna had staggered in around daylight, found space in a bed, and claimed it.

Second morning, Eldon woke to find his guitar, the old Stella he'd bought up in Memphis before he left, gone. Luckily he had the banjo stashed. Butler first insisted on paying for the guitar, then decided instead to buy him a new Santa Cruz as replacement, but Eldon never got it.

That was because on the third morning, Eldon woke up to find an empty house. He'd played at a bar that evening and remembered thinking how quiet the house was when he got back, but it had been past three in the morning and he was dead. Dead tired-not dead like the body he found in the kitchen when he dragged himself out there around ten a.m. hoping for coffee.

It was over by the refrigerator, where it had clawed a trench in the shingled layers of postcards, shopping lists, clipped cartoons, photographs, playbills, and magnets on its way down. The handle of a knife, not a kitchen knife but an oversize pocketknife or a hunting knife from the look, protruded from its back. There was blood beneath, but surprisingly little.

It was no one he'd seen before.

Eldon was pretty sure.

He'd been in the bar, playing country music, and he was in the right town for it, no doubt about that, all night. People kept buying him drinks. Figured he'd sung "Milk Cow Blues" four or five times. Maybe more-he didn't remember much of the last set.

He'd called 911, patiently answered and reanswered the police's questions for hours even though he had precious little to tell them, and while there was no evidence aside from Eldon's presence there, the fit-musician, itinerant, obvious freeloader, alcohol on his breath and squeezing out his pores ("Not to mention black," I added)-was too good for the cops to pass up.

Next morning, Steve Butler, who had been out of town at a family-law conference, showed up to arrange bail and release. Still couldn't get back in his house, he said. Eldon had shaken hands with him outside the police station, walked to his bike, and skedaddled. "Not a word I've used before," he said, "but given the circumstances, Texas, lawmen on my trail, out of town by sundown, it does seem appropriate."

Once Officer Baxter had left, as well as Lonnie, saying he'd make the calls to Texas from home, I sat thinking about the previous night as I dialed Cahoma County Hospital and waited for a report on Billy, a wait lengthy enough that I replayed our conversation, Eldon's and mine, twice in my head. The nurse who eventually came on snapped "Yes?" then immediately apologized, explaining that they were, as usual, understaffed and, unusually, near capacity with critical and near-critical patients.

"I'm calling about one of those," I said, giving her Billy's name and identifying myself.

He was doing well, I was told, all things considered. He'd gone through surgery without incident, remained in ICU. Still a possibility of cervical fracture, though X-rays hadn't been conclusive and the nearest CAT scan was up in Memphis. They were keeping him down-sedated, she explained-for the time being, give the body time to rebound from trauma.

I thanked her and asked that the office be called if there were any change. She said she'd make a note of it on the front of the chart.