James Sallis - Cripple Creek

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.

Monday now. Before the call from Memphis, before my harassed 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 white water."

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, fencemending, 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 betes a 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 opening 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."