James Sallis: Salt River

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."

"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?"