Hunt was wearing a colorful Mexican serape and a ten-gallon hat decorated with silver conchos. The hat’s extravagant brim obscured his face. That was important. The serape and hat weren’t Deputy Hunt’s; he said he felt like a fool in a hat like that. Sheriff Averill didn’t care. He wanted Prescott’s men to be looking at the clothes, and not the man inside them.

All fine. Good storytelling. Then the trouble came.

“All right,” Sheriff Averill told his deputies. “It’s time we took a little night air. Be seen by whoever wants to look at us. Hank, bring that jug. I want to be sure those boys on the rooftops get a good look at the dumb sheriff getting drunk with his even dumber deputies.”

“Do I have to wear this hat?” Cal Hunt almost moaned. “I’ll never live it down!”

“What you ought to be concerned about is living through the night,” Averill said. “Now come on. Let’s just get these rocking chairs outside and

That was where Drew stopped, transfixed by the image of the tiny Bitter River sheriff’s office containing three rocking chairs. No, four rocking chairs, because you had to add one for Averill himself. That was a lot more absurd than the ten-gallon, face-obscuring Stetson Cal Hunt was wearing, and not only because four rockers would fill the whole damn room. The whole idea of rocking chairs was antithetical to law enforcement, even in a small western town like Bitter River. People would laugh. Drew deleted most of the sentence and looked at what was left.

Let’s just get these

These what? Chairs? Would the sheriff’s office even have four chairs? It seemed unlikely. “Not like there’s a fucking waiting room,” Drew said, and wiped his forehead. “Not in a—” A sneeze surprised him and he let go before he could cover his mouth, spattering the laptop’s screen with a fine spray of spittle, distorting the words.

“Fuck! Goddam fuck!”

He grabbed for tissues to wipe the screen, but the Kleenex box was empty. He got a dishtowel instead, and when he’d finished cleaning the screen, he thought of how much the soggy dishtowel looked like Roy DeWitt’s bandanna. His besnotted bandanna.

Let’s just get these

Was his fever worse? Drew didn’t want to believe that, wanted to believe the growing heat he felt (plus the increased throbbing in his head) was just the pressure of trying to solve this idiotic rocking chair problem so he could move on, but it certainly seemed like—

This time he managed to turn aside before the sneezing started. Not just one this time but half a dozen. He seemed to feel his sinuses bulging with each one. Like overinflated tires. His throat was throbbing, and so was his ear.

Let’s just get these

It came to him then. A bench! There might be a bench in the sheriff’s office where people could sit while they waited to do their little bits of business. He grinned and gave himself a thumbs up. Sick or not, the pieces were still falling into place, and was that really surprising? Creativity often seemed to run on its own clean circuit, regardless of the body’s ills. Flannery O’Connor had lupus. Stanley Elkin had multiple sclerosis. Fyodor Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, and Octavia Butler suffered from dyslexia. What was a lousy cold, maybe even the flu, compared to things like that? He could work through this. The bench proved it, the bench was genius.

“Let’s just get this bench outside and have a few drinks.”

“But we’re not really gonna drink, are we, Sheriff?” Jep Leonard asked. The plan had been explained to him carefully, but Jep was not exactly the brightest bulb in the

Brightest bulb in the chandelier? God no, that was an anachronism. Or was it? The bulb part for sure, no lightbulbs in the 1880s, but there were chandeliers back then, of course there were. There was one in the saloon! If he’d had an Internet connection he could have looked at any number of old-time examples of them, but he didn’t. Just two hundred channels of TV, most of it total junk.

Better to use a different metaphor. If it even was a metaphor; Drew wasn’t completely sure. Maybe it was just a comparative… comparative something. No, it was a metaphor. He was sure of it. Almost.

Never mind, that wasn’t the point and this wasn’t a classroom exercise, it was a book, it was his book, so stick to the writing. Eyes on the prize.

Not the ripest melon in the patch? Not the fastest horse in the race? No, those were awful, but—

Then he got it. Magic! He bent and typed rapidly.

The plan had been explained to him carefully, but Jep was not exactly the smartest kid in the classroom.

Satisfied (well, relatively satisfied), Drew got up, had a knock of Dr. King’s, then chased it with a glass of water to wash the taste out of his mouth: a slimy mixture of snot and cold medicine.

This is like before. This is like what happened with Village.

He could tell himself that wasn’t true, that this time was entirely different, that the clean circuit wasn’t so clean after all because he was running a fever, a pretty high one from the way it felt, and it was all because he’d handled that bandanna.

No you didn’t, you handled his hand. You handled the hand that handled the bandanna.

“Handled the hand that handled the bandanna, right.”

He turned on the cold tap and splashed his face. That made him feel a little better. He mixed Goody’s Headache Powder with more water, drank it off, then went to the door and threw it open. He felt quite sure that Moose Mom would be there, so sure that for a moment (thank you, fever) he actually thought he did see her over there by the equipment shed, but it was only shadows moving in a slight breeze.

He took a number of deep breaths. In goes the good air, out goes the bad, when I shook his hand I must have been mad.

Drew went back inside and sat down at the laptop. Pushing on seemed like a bad idea, but not pushing on seemed even worse. So he began to write, trying to recapture the wind that had filled his sails and brought him this far. At first it seemed to be working, but by lunchtime (not that he had any interest in eating) his interior sails had gone slack. Probably it was being sick, but it was still too much like before.

I seem to be losing my words.

That was what he’d told Lucy, what he’d told Al Stamper, but that wasn’t the truth; it was just what he could give them so they could dismiss it as writer’s block, something he would eventually find his way through. Or it might dissolve on its own. In truth, it was the opposite. It was having too many words. Was it a copse or a grove? Was it flaring or glaring? Or maybe staring? Was a character sunken eyed or hollow-eyed? Oh, and if hollow-eyed was hyphenated, what about sunken eyed?

He shut down at one o’clock. He had written two pages, and the feeling that he was reverting to the nervous and neurotic man who’d almost burned down his house three years ago was getting harder to dismiss. He could tell himself to let go of the small stuff like rocking chairs versus bench, to let the story carry him, but when he looked at the screen, every word there seemed wrong. Every word seemed to have a better one hiding behind it, just out of sight.

Was it possible that he was coming down with Alzheimer’s? Could that be it?

“Don’t be dumb,” he said, and was dismayed at how nasal he sounded. Also hoarse. Pretty soon he’d lose his voice entirely. Not that there was anyone out here to talk to except himself.