Rudolph Wurlitzer: The Drop Edge of Yonder

"One of the most purely, deeply thrilling, inspired, and inspiring American novels I've read in many years."

DENNIS COOPER

"The Drop Edge of Yonder is a book Fellini would have stolen and turned into a major film. Wurlitzer has a sly, subversive humor that is inimitable. I enjoyed this book immensely"

ALAN ARKIN

"A wild ride into the heart of the California gold rush. Wurlitzer's women make `Deadwood' look like Bonanza."'

ROBERT DOWNEY

"A wild adventure written by a bard who knows how to keep his audience spellbound by the campfire. And it's a subversive modern novel about the bounds of love and the discontents of civilized life. And it's also an invitation, delivered with an archaic smile, to meditate with a master on letting go."

JUDITH THURMAN

"I have never read anything like it. Every page transports the reader from the cerebral to the visceral and back again, until you start to feel that in the end there is no difference between the two."

SCOTT SPENCER

Nog

"Nog is to literature what Dylan is to lyrics."

JACK NEWFIELD, VILLAGE VOICE

Flats

"Wurlitzer will convince you in this stunningly successful book that this really is the way the world ends — not with a bang, and not with a whimper but with the light slowly covering all of us."

BOOK WORLD

Luake

"Wurlitzer is exposing the worst in people, a worst that phony, plastic Los Angeles had previously concealed…. A powerful, frightening book."

CHOICE

Slow Fade

"Slow Fade comes out of the space between real life and the movies and closes it up for good. A great book: beautiful, funny, and dangerous."

MICHAEL HERR

Hard Travel to Sacred Places

"Every scene, every word is underlined and meaningful, from the point of view of grief. Like morphine withdrawal, grief sensitizes the observer, since it cannot be denied. He is held right there. And like the Ancient Mariner, Wurlitzer holds his reader right there by his account."

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

'HE WINTER THAT ZEBULON SET HIS TRAPS ALONG THE Gila River had been colder and longer than any he had experienced, leaving him with two frostbitten toes, an arrow wound in his shoulder from a Crow war party, and, to top it all off, the unexpected arrival of two frozen figures stumbling more dead than alive into his cabin in the middle of a spring blizzard.

Rather than waking him, the cold blast of wind from the open door became part of a recurrent dream: a long endless fall through an empty sky towards a storm-tossed sea…. Come closer, the towering waves howled….

He opened his eyes, not sure for a moment if the man and woman staring back at him weren't hungry ghosts. Frost clung to their eyebrows and nostrils, and their swollen faces were raw and crimson from the tree-cracking cold. The man wore a hardbrimmed top hat tied under his bearded chin with a long red scarf, along with a buffalo robe coated with slivers of ice. The woman appeared to be a Shoshoni half-breed. She was wrapped inside a huge army overcoat distinguished by sergeant stripes at the shoulders and, at the chest, two bullet holes, one over the other.

The man sank to his knees, swearing and choking from the smoke pouring out of the cabin's leaky fireplace and the overpowering stench of a nearby slop bucket. He spoke in a rasping whisper, as if his larynx had been smashed.

"I figured we be dead meat until the breed told me you was camped on the Gila. She knows things that ain't available to other mortals."

The man was Lobo Bill, an old trapper and horse thief, known for his wide range of windy tales and maniacal rages, that Zebulon had run into and away from in various saloons and hideouts from Tularosa to Cheyenne. When he removed his top hat, he exposed a face sliced on one side from cheek to jawbone, as if neatly quartered by a butcher's knife.

Lobo Bill nodded towards the breed, who was standing with her back to the wall, staring at Zebulon with huge, empty eyes. "She ain't one for words, but when she does open her flap, she packs a punch you don't want to know about. Even so, I owe her. She saved my bacon when a wolverine took after me. Axed it into quarters and sliced me up as well. I won her in Alamosa from a horse trader. A straight flush to his full house. A hand for the ages. She's half Shoshoni, half Irish. `Not Here Not There' is what I call her, and I'm favored to have her, things bein' what they is these days, or ain't, depending on which way the wind blows, and even if it don't."

Lobo Bill and Not Here Not There took off their clothes. After their bodies thawed out, they collapsed on a pile of bearskins near the fireplace.

Zebulon spent the rest of the night stoking the fire and drinking from one of his last bottles of Taos White Lightning, pondering memories of Lobo Bill and all the other mountain lunatics he had known, and what he and they used to be, or not, and what he was meant to do, or be, depending on his view from the valley or mountaintop. It wasn't so much that the old mountain ways were played out, although that day was surely coming. There was something else that Lobo Bill and his breed had brought in with them, a mysterious presence or shadow that he was unable to define. Or maybe it was just the sight of two strange and lost figures snoring on his bed.

It was dawn when the wind died, along with most of his premonitions, enough anyway, to let him pass out next to his guests.

-HEN HE WOKE, A HARD, BRITTLE LIGHT WAS SPLATTERING against the cabin walls. There was no sign of Lobo Bill. When he questioned Not Here Not There, she shook her head and rolled her eyes back and forth, which made him think that Lobo Bill had either gone off to find his mules and traps, or he had decided to skip out altogether. Around him the cabin had been swept clean. The slop bucket had been emptied, his stock of flour, tobacco, whiskey, coffee, and dried jerky were stacked neatly in one corner, and split logs were piled up on either side of the fireplace.

The extreme tidiness of the cabin, together with Not Here Not There's sullen silence, made him uneasy, as if she were harboring secret thoughts or maybe, god help him, some illintentioned plan. Never mind, he thought. Whatever was meant to come would come, ready or not.

While they both waited for Lobo Bill to appear, Zebulon hunted for small game and prepared for the annual spring rendezvous by taking down and sorting the hundreds of muskrat and beaver pelts he had stashed in the crooks of several trees.

After three days Lobo Bill still hadn't returned. Most of the time, Not Here Not There sat on the bench outside the cabin, staring at the river and the dark blue ice that had begun to splinter into large moving cracks. In the evening she avoided looking at him as she cooked one of the rabbits he had shot. After they ate dinner, instead of retreating to the corner she had chosen to sleep in, she joined him near the fire. Looking at him with a sly grin, she took his bottle of Taos White Lightning from him and drained the rest of it, then swayed back to her place across the room.