What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (57 page)

At her suggestion we took the last of the coffee outside and sat on the bench polished by a generation or so of butts.

“Good seat for the show,” she said.

“Best in the house.”

So here we are. The air is charged, electric. I think back to Lonnie’s plane, that moment just before the ground lets go. That’s what it feels like.

Takeoffs. Landings. And the lives that happen in between.

“Thought I might stick around a while, if that’s all right,”

J. T. says.

“Probably ought to be my line.” We both laugh. “Though from the look of things . . .”

“Who knows. Could be I’ll spot my first airborne cow.”

“There you go, Miss City Dweller. Having your fun at the poor rural folks’ expense.”

Cabbages and kings don’t come into it, as I recall, but, sitting there on the bench, we touch on close to everything else: J. T.’s childhood, my old partner on the MPD and my prison time, genealogy, where the country is headed politically, a novel she’d recently read about small-town life, the day Kennedy died, beer for breakfast back in Nam, third-strike offenders, Val.

Then we sit quietly, for an hour, maybe more, as black thunderheads roll in. Initially we see the jags of lightning and hear the muffled rumbling only through the dark screen of clouds. Then it breaks through. The rain, when it comes, is sweet and stinging.

A heavy metal trash can rolls down the street, driven by wind. “City tumbleweed,” J. T. says, and when I look at her there are tears in her eyes. I reach and touch her face, gently.

“I’m not crying because I’m sad,” my daughter says. “I’m crying because we’re here, together, watching this, I’m crying because of friends like Doc Oldham, because I have had the chance to get to know you. I am crying because the world is so beautiful.”

As should we all.

“If you enjoy fine, minimalist prose and thoughtful, intelligent crime stories, you would be well advised to begin with the first in the series and read them all.”

—
Associated Press

Praise for
Cypress Grove

“
Cypress Grove
features another complex protagonist and a story brimming with Southern atmosphere . . . a mystery that demands to be savored . . . [It] should attract an even broader audience for the author’s visually tantalizing, astute observations on crime and the human condition.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“[A] masterly composed novel . . . Sallis, a poet in private eye’s clothing, has found in Turner a rich new character to hang around with. Let’s hope this isn’t the last we see of him.”

—
Boston Globe

“As Turner’s memories are unlocked, so are his feelings—and his language . . . Although he went out to find a killer, Turner earns his redemption by finding his own lost voice.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Sallis might be one of the best writers in America . . . Almost every page produces a sentence, phrase or paragraph so deliciously right that readers will want to reread it. Sallis fans will pounce on this one. If you’re not acquainted with his work, this is a fine place to start.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“As a construct,
Cypress Grove
, is virtuosic . . . very successful in many ways, least of all in making the reader ask himself some rather pointed questions.”

—
Newsday

“Intriguing . . . Sallis’s quirky sense of plot rhythms and careful prose make this an outstanding and unpredictable literary thriller.”

—
Seattle Times

“The setup sounds familiar . . . But Sallis pulls off the story with such panache that few will notice . . . fast and stylish.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

Praise for
Cripple Creek

“The burned-out Memphis cop named Turner who sought refuge from his demons as a rural sheriff’s deputy in
Cyprus Grove
is still a long way from being socialized in
Cripple Creek
. But he’s now admitting visitors to his cabin in the woods, and when a mobster blows in from the city to spring a confederate from the local jail, Turner is mad enough to take his grievance straight back to Memphis. ‘Figure they can do whatever they want out here on the edge, I’m thinking,’ he says, in the spare but eloquent idiom that pegs him—along with this superior series—as a keeper.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Sallis writes lean, sinewy prose, with a nice twang and rhythm, that grabs your attention from the start and holds it fast to the end . . . smooth as aged bourbon.”

—
Philadelphia Inquirer

“I can think of no other writer—especially a so-called crime writer—who ranges so freely in his work and makes social and racial concerns (‘this unspoken apartheid we live with still,’ as Sallis puts it) so central to his fictive worlds . . . Reading Sallis, we can’t help but be aware of the intelligence behind the work, as well as how much reading he has done in his life. He’s an erudite man, and this informs the work at the deepest level.”

—
Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Sallis is an artist who happens to write mysteries.”

—
Sacramento Bee

“Sallis’s lyricism and power trump everything else, including a shock at the end of the book. This is one you absolutely don’t want to miss.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“It’s a crime that a writer this good isn’t better known.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

“A darkly moving mystery that is unlike anything else being written today.”

—
Chicago Tribune

Praise for
Salt River

“A sweet song of the South from a crime novelist with the ear of a poet.”

—
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A highly unusual, atmospherically unique mystery novel . . . fans of noir fiction will find much here to keep them turning its pages.”

—
Boston Globe

“James Sallis might be the ‘purest’ writer of crime fiction in America today. Which means that, beyond whatever story he’s telling, his books are worth reading solely for what rises from the inspired use of language . . . He assembles sentences like a virtuoso guitarist working the fret board, gracefully choosing each word (or more accurately, each note) and making it resonate. Scenes often read like prose-poems, but they are assembled with the rigor a mystery demands. The succession of chapters exert a rhythmic, almost tidal pull, leading to a conclusion that defies genre expectation—but satisfies something far deeper.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“Haunting . . . Sallis writes poetic rings around the subject.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Sallis is a gifted polymath: poet, biographer, translator, essayist, musician and prolific (if criminally neglected) novelist. His Turner books are little gems, with their sharp descriptions and melancholy reflections.”

—
Seattle Times

“Elegiac meditations on fate, grief, and how we persevere in spite of it all.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“Holds the power of simplicity and the musical ring of truth as only Sallis can deliver it—as he has done bravely, consistently, for the last few decades.”

—
Los Angeles Times Book Review

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Novels

The Long-Legged Fly

Moth

Black Hornet

Eye of the Cricket

Bluebottle

Ghost of a Flea

Death Will Have Your Eyes

Renderings

Cypress Grove

Drive

Cripple Creek

Salt River

Stories

A Few Last Words

Limits of the Sensible World

Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories

A City Equal to My Desire

Potato Tree

Poems

Sorrow’s Kitchen

My Tongue in Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

As editor

Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany

Jazz Guitars

The Guitar in Jazz

Other

The Guitar Players

Difficult Lives

Saint Glinglin
by Raymond Queneau (translator)

Gently into the Land of the Meateaters

Chester Himes: A Life

A James Sallis Reader

Copyright © 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009 by James Sallis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.

Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available

ISBN-10: 0-8027-1687-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-8027-1687-3

Cypress Grove first published by Walker & Company in 2003
Cripple Creek first published by Walker & Company in 2006
Salt River first published by Walker & Company in 2007
This e-book edition published in 2010

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8027-1969-0

Visit Walker & Company’s Web site at
www.walkerbooks.com