Free Willnot by James Sallis Page A

been flushed from his system hours before. Clayton was there changing a dressing and hanging a fresh IV. A Gulf War vet, Clay stands five feet six inches and weighs in at 160, the bulk of it hard flesh and muscle. A trucker in ER once made some smart-ass comment about male nurses and suddenly found one’s face looming like a thundercloud four inches above his own.
    Clay looked up as I came in. “Man’s been in country.”
    “More than a few times, from what I hear.”
    “So he comes home and gets shot here in Willnot? That’s not even irony, that’s some other kind of horse entirely.”
    I nodded.
    “We had this platoon leader back on the sand who was always telling us the cards get dealt facedown, you don’t ever know what they are till you turn them over. He said that again right before he got shot clean through the head from damn near two thousand yards by a sniper. I’m done here, Doc. You need anything?”
    “Just dropped by to check on Bobby.”
    “I heard you took care of him when he was a kid.”
    “That was a long time back. Different lives now.”
    “For all of us.”
    Clay left and I stood by Bobby. Where was he? Dreaming of rice fields, acres of sand, bright tropical birds shifting on their perches, the smell of hot metal, the burn of mescal on his tongue? I took a last look at the monitors and started out, hearing behind me:
    “It appears I’ve been sleeping again.”
    As I turned back, Bobby sat up. Heart rate and blood pressure rose when he did so. For moments then he was quiet, breathing slowly, deeply. I watched heart rate and BP fall on the monitors.
    “You’ve been awake.”
    “A while.” He blinked. “Vision’s blurry.”
    “And?”
    “Back on familiar ground. Getting shot, losing a chunk of time. Kind of where I live.”
    He swung his legs experimentally off the side of the bed.
    “Need help?”
    He shook his head. “Wanted to tell you. I read one of your old man’s books. In Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. Cities, towns,America—everything we knew—couldn’t have been farther away. Like we’d been set down on another world and would never get back there, or maybe there was gone. Your father’s book was about a planet of sand and phantoms. He was writing about someplace else exactly the way we were living it. That book got passed from hand to hand till it fell apart. And then it got taped back together.
    “A guy from Earth, Mack or Rutger, some manly name, has just arrived on this world he knows nothing about to fix everything for those who live there. Witnessing what appears to be a senseless, purposeless suicide, he says ‘We do not speak ill of the dead.’
    “His guide starts to respond, stops to thump on the fritzing translator box to get it to work, then says ‘Here, we do not speak of the dead at all, else they believe you are calling them back, and return.’”
    “Missed that one.”
    He twisted in a hard spiral right, then left. “Feels like someone took a sledgehammer to my shoulder—which pales beside the screaming headache. But most of all, I’m just fucking thirsty.”
    I poured water for him, told him to take it slow.
    “In combat, you get hit, you go down. Wait to see what’s coming next. Same thing.” He drank the full cup. “There wasn’t a second shot. Everything still works. And here I am talking to you. Fully confident that the local cop stationed outside my door is there only to protect me from further harm.”
    “State police, actually.”
    “Let me guess. Per request of our buoyant friend from the FBI.”
    “Buoyant?”
    “She keeps bouncing up.”
    “Get some rest, we’ll talk later. Pain meds are ordered.”
    “Won’t need them.”
    “You can refuse.”
    “That’s how I got here in the first place, refusing.”
    I waited but he added no more.
    “Doc?”
    I turned back at the door.
    “No worries. That shot? Just an old friend’s way of saying hello.”

    Head down, eyes up: a classic gleek from Maryanne as I came in the door.