Willnot by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page B

site looking like an extra in a safari movie: khaki pants, brown shirt with sleeves rolled above the elbows, brown vest-jacket with multiple pockets. All of it well-worn and well kept. “There was something else under them. Roots, or an ancient cellar, we thought when we first hit. Old wood.”
    Marcie dealt the plate with my bagel onto the counter and stepped back. Waiting for me to check my cards.
    “Anything else?” she said.
    Seb asked if tea was possible. Hot? She glanced at him, shook her head, and went to get it.
    “Wooden trunks. Two of them, set side by side. Pretty much rotted away, naturally.”
    “Put there at the same time as the bodies?”
    “From all evidence, yes. Almost like a platform. A floor.”
    “Or Egyptians burying possessions the dead would need in the afterlife,” Richard said, and went back to his oatmeal.
    “What was in the trunks?”
    “Chances are good we’ll never know.” Seb stopped as Marcie brought a mug of steaming water and a caddy with a dozen or so tea packets. He shuffled through them, pulled out one that smelled faintly of oranges. When he dropped it in to steep, the smell grew strong. Clove in there too.
    “The trunks were filled with papers,” Seb said.
    Richard didn’t look up this time, only said, “Not Confederate money as in old movies.”
    “Just paper. All of it far gone. Whatever the groundwater, worms and insects didn’t bleach out or eat away, the chemicals took care of. Our forensics people back in Arizona may find something to latch onto. But if they do, it won’t be much.”
    Having told us what he came for, Seb Daiche knocked back his tea in a single draw and strode out against the incoming wave of breakfast diners.
    “Things to do, people to see.”
    Richard smiled. “Evidently. And I need to be seen at school. But what he said—”
    “Which was very little.”
    “—takes me back. Years and years ago, once when things got really, really bad, on the advice of a friend I went to see a Zen master. I tried to talk, to tell him what was going on, out in the world, up in my head, and he stopped me. Sit perfectly still in a room, he said. Do nothing. Think nothing. Sit still in that room for a long time and all possible versions of your self will arise. Realizing they have no reason to stay around, they will depart, leaving behind peace. Peace and your one true self.”
    “You stood up and walked out.”
    “Hey … that was going to be a good story.”
    “I may know you too well for stories.”
    “Stories are all we have, Lamar.”
    Briefly he touched my hand there on the counter. Our eyes met. My heart paced in its cage.

    And one of my possible selves got up off its butt and went to work. Fearlessly into the quotidian.
    Specifically a midmorning exploratory laparotomy that turned into a bowel resection, a messy procedure more akin to plumbing or sausage-making than to heroic surgery. Mr. Mayson would be, as Gordie Blythe so eloquently put it, “bagging his goodies for a while,” but he’d also be making a full recovery, back to work at his mom-and-pop in three to four weeks.
    As I stood there for three-plus hours cutting, stitching, and shooting the bull with fellow sailors, baroque music pumping away in the background, a part of my mind wandered off to Richard’s Zen story, and from there to all the years I had wondered why it was that I lived among the broken. My father, mother, their friends, other families of which I caught glimpses—most everyone, it seemed. Till with age it occurred to me that we’re all broken, just in different ways. And that the brokenness makes us interesting, makes us who we are.
    Ollie Rice was my first patient when I came to Willnot. Huge man who looked as though he could tuck a cow under each arm then go for a leisurely stroll. Along in years but with a full head of hair, albeit it of such a shade of red as to be almost pink, and eyes dark as river stone. He came in, took the chair across my desk. I said