Willnot (18 page)

“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 in 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.

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

L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS 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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