Salt River Read Free Page A

are, the way we see the world."
    "You ever think maybe people should be allowed to just pass on, that we shouldn't have to carry them around inside us forever?"
    "Of course. But we do, right alongside what we've done with our own lives."
    "Or haven't. Yeah."
    None of us, Lonnie, Don Lee, J. T., Eldon, or myself, had ever openly spoken of what happened up in Memphis the day after Val's death. Each had been out of pocket then: Don Lee under the weather, Lonnie returning from a business trip, J. T. checking in back home in Seattle, Eldon absent from his gig.
    "So I'd be sitting there, in Bumfuck, Texas, or Grasslimb, Iowa, writing on motel stationery when some was to be had, on tablets from the 7-Eleven when it wasn't, and I'd be remembering how you told me that so much of what you'd been taught about counseling—that it's imperative to talk things out, drag feelings into daylight—how so much of that was dead wrong."
    "Humankind has a purblind passion to find some single idea that will explain everything. Religion, alien visitation, Marxism, string theory. Psychology."
    "And I'd remember your saying that people don't change."
    "What I said was, we adapt. Everything that was there before is still there, always will be. The trick's in how we come to terms with it."
    "I'd think about all that, and I'd go on writing. Then one day I stopped. For no particular reason—same as I'd started."
    Dark was coming on. Out in the near border of trees a pair of eyes, a hawk's or owl's, caught light. From deep in the woods came a bobcat's scream.
    "I've changed," Eldon said.
    I waited and, when nothing else was forthcoming, went in and poured half a jelly glass of the homemade mash Nathan brought 'round on a regular basis. Designer, he'd taken to calling it, having picked up the modish epithet somewhere. God only knows where that might have been, since he never left the woods, had no radio, hadn't set eyes on a newspaper since around V-day, and met with a shotgun anyone who set foot on his land. But he loved the word and used it every chance he got, grinning through teeth like cypress stumps.
    By the time I came back out, that quickly, dark had claimed everything at ground level; only a narrow band of light above the trees remained. Eldon was sitting with his head on the back of the chair, eyes closed. He spoke without opening them.
    "When I was twelve—I remember, because I'd just started playing guitar, after giving up on school band and a cheap trumpet that kept falling apart on me. Anyway, I was twelve, sitting out on the porch practicing, it was one of those Silvertones with the amp in the case, only the amp didn't work so I'd bought it for next to nothing, and this mockingbird staggers up to me. Can't fly, and looks better than half dead already. Dehydrated, weak, wasted. It's like he's chosen me, I'm his last chance.
    "I got a dish of water for him, some dry cat food, lashed sticks together with twine to make a cage. Too many dogs and cats around to leave him out.
    "Whatever was wrong—broken wing, most likely—he never got over it. Spent the last eight months of his life on that back porch looking out at a world he was no longer part of."
    Eldon reached over and snagged the glass from me, took a long swallow. I remembered our sitting together in The Shack out on State Road 41 after someone had smashed his guitar and tried to start a fight, remembered his telling me that night why he never drank.
    "I'm sitting there trying to keep a bird alive, and all around me people are dying and there's two or three wars going on. What kind of sense does that make?"
    He handed the glass back.
    "They think I killed someone, John."
    "Did you?"
    "I don't know."
    We sat watching the moon coast through high branches.
    "Been a hell of a ride," he said after a while, "this life."
    "Always. If you just pay attention."

CHAPTER FOUR
    LONNIE WAS SETTING a coffee mug down by June's computer when I walked in. She handed me a call slip. Since when did we