Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [57]
He left very little, a few clothes, the Chevrolet filled with tools. Everything seemed lifeless and drab. The handle of his hammer was smooth. He had worked all over, built ships in Galveston during the war. There were photographs when he was twenty, the same hooked nose, the hard, country face. He looked like a pharaoh there in the funeral home. They had folded his hands. His cheeks were sunken, his eyelids like paper.
Billy Amstel went to Mexico in a car he and Alma bought for a hundred dollars. They agreed to share expenses. The sun polished the windshield in which they sat going southward. They told each other stories of their life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES SALTER is the author of the novels Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, Solo Faces, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; and the collection Last Night. He lives in Colorado and on Long Island.
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Charles Johnson
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Joyce Carol Oates
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John Richardson
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Salman Rushdie
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Carolyn See
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Gore Vidal
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2010 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 1988 by James Salter
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Philip Gourevitch
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by North Point Press, San Francisco, in 1988.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Paris Review, where “Am Strande von Tanger,” “The Cinema,” “Via Negativa,” and “The Destruction of the Goetheanum” first appeared; to Grand Street, for the publication of “Lost Sons,” “Akhilno,” and “Twenty Minutes”; to Esquire for “Foreign Shores,” “Dusk,” and “American Express”; and to The Carolina Quarterly, for the publication of “Dirt.”
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