Read Online The Killer Is Dying by James Sallis - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James Sallis
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emphysema, was at last giving out, his skin by then mostly blue and parchment-like and looking like a drying mud flat, all cracks and fissures and discoloration. He had been a heavy equipment operator and “built half this state’s good roads.” He had one daughter, severely retarded. (“You think it was my drinking done that? I was a heavysome drinker those days.”) She visited once a month, first Friday, with her son, who seemed to be her caretaker. At the end, when I was there by him and Mr. Sheldon understood what was happening, he told me to call him Billy.
Even the hero, even the superhuman, exercises power at a cost. Terrible weakness, all but unbearable pain, inordinate aging. Exile. Madness. The gift he is given, and what he gives in return, sets him forever apart.
Cost.
And eventually the bill comes due.
There were, all told, sixteen letters (if indeed that’s what they were), some written straight out, others with deletions, changes, inserts scribbled between lines or sideways in the margin. Christian started at the beginning and read them all again, wondering who they might have been intended for, sensing a pattern, or hoping for one: some coherence, a line.
Not a time he’d easily forget. That month, following hard on weeks of increasing pain, blood in the stool and frequent vomiting, sitting in a brightly lit room that looked to be little used, surrounded by blond furniture, he’d learned the name of what was slowly taking him over and down.
Four years. He had beat the odds.
Beating the odds was it—all we could ever hope for.
That time, to his message Your doll has been sent he received no acknowledgment or reply.
And that night, the city around him was beginning to burn—a fire that had started in the industrial area just south of the city’s center, in a meatpacking plant, and quickly spread—though he wouldn’t know it till days later, far away in another town and another motel room, from TV news. He had been watching a show about vultures.
They’re not birds of prey, a zoologist said, but birds that clean up the messes around us. They can ride air currents for hours without once flapping wings, detect a dead animal by scent from two hundred feet in the air. Their intestines digest and destroy agents of such diseases as cholera and anthrax in the carcasses they devour. No chase or frenzied kill here. The vulture keeps watch, waits patiently for a day or two until gases start to leak from the decomposing corpse. One type, the bearded vulture, even specializes in bones.
The zoologist had mutton chops so bushy and thick as to draw one’s attention again and again from his eyes and face. Christian remembered how those eyes glistened as the man explained that, to make their meals more interesting to the birds, zoo attendants wrap freshly thawed rat carcasses in paper tightly tied with twine.
CHAPTER TWELVE
NEXT TABLE, which was about hips-width away, a man in shorts and T and a woman in a freshly ironed cotton dress, both fiftyish, were discussing their relationship over yellow mugs of high-end coffee. Against the wall behind them, two young men in dress slacks, white shirts, and ties glanced up from their computers, spoke briefly to one another, resubmerged.
He looked at the card again.
Rankin had been moved to a regular room that morning. Christian, sitting in a chair nearby, seemingly lost in a book bought at the gift shop downstairs, had listened as an X-ray transporter reined his gurney up at the nurse’s desk to check in. “Here for Rankin, room 543, right? Chest, PA, and lateral?” Minutes later the laden gurney rolled by.
Christian stood and stretched. He laid his book open facedown on the chair, walked toward the bathroom, then took the turn into the hallway, pulling out a clipboard he’d found in a supply room and kept under his belt at his back.
Room 543 was halfway down the hall on the left. Nodding to housekeepers conferring at their cart, one
Even the hero, even the superhuman, exercises power at a cost. Terrible weakness, all but unbearable pain, inordinate aging. Exile. Madness. The gift he is given, and what he gives in return, sets him forever apart.
Cost.
And eventually the bill comes due.
There were, all told, sixteen letters (if indeed that’s what they were), some written straight out, others with deletions, changes, inserts scribbled between lines or sideways in the margin. Christian started at the beginning and read them all again, wondering who they might have been intended for, sensing a pattern, or hoping for one: some coherence, a line.
Not a time he’d easily forget. That month, following hard on weeks of increasing pain, blood in the stool and frequent vomiting, sitting in a brightly lit room that looked to be little used, surrounded by blond furniture, he’d learned the name of what was slowly taking him over and down.
Four years. He had beat the odds.
Beating the odds was it—all we could ever hope for.
That time, to his message Your doll has been sent he received no acknowledgment or reply.
And that night, the city around him was beginning to burn—a fire that had started in the industrial area just south of the city’s center, in a meatpacking plant, and quickly spread—though he wouldn’t know it till days later, far away in another town and another motel room, from TV news. He had been watching a show about vultures.
They’re not birds of prey, a zoologist said, but birds that clean up the messes around us. They can ride air currents for hours without once flapping wings, detect a dead animal by scent from two hundred feet in the air. Their intestines digest and destroy agents of such diseases as cholera and anthrax in the carcasses they devour. No chase or frenzied kill here. The vulture keeps watch, waits patiently for a day or two until gases start to leak from the decomposing corpse. One type, the bearded vulture, even specializes in bones.
The zoologist had mutton chops so bushy and thick as to draw one’s attention again and again from his eyes and face. Christian remembered how those eyes glistened as the man explained that, to make their meals more interesting to the birds, zoo attendants wrap freshly thawed rat carcasses in paper tightly tied with twine.
CHAPTER TWELVE
NEXT TABLE, which was about hips-width away, a man in shorts and T and a woman in a freshly ironed cotton dress, both fiftyish, were discussing their relationship over yellow mugs of high-end coffee. Against the wall behind them, two young men in dress slacks, white shirts, and ties glanced up from their computers, spoke briefly to one another, resubmerged.
He looked at the card again.
Rankin had been moved to a regular room that morning. Christian, sitting in a chair nearby, seemingly lost in a book bought at the gift shop downstairs, had listened as an X-ray transporter reined his gurney up at the nurse’s desk to check in. “Here for Rankin, room 543, right? Chest, PA, and lateral?” Minutes later the laden gurney rolled by.
Christian stood and stretched. He laid his book open facedown on the chair, walked toward the bathroom, then took the turn into the hallway, pulling out a clipboard he’d found in a supply room and kept under his belt at his back.
Room 543 was halfway down the hall on the left. Nodding to housekeepers conferring at their cart, one
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