Not Working
Has it been said that killing a man can start up new life?
An early evening, July, 1975. The wind washes through the streets of Dobie, leaving it clean. Sometimes the wind is silent. Often it whistles and whines. In the new treeless suburb where Joe Levy and his family now live, tumbleweed can roll down the street, onto sidewalks and into the open garages. Scraps of paper and a few leaves blow about, starting nowhere, ending scattered. The wind changes Dobie only very slowly, drying the paint off houses and wearing dust off the stones. The wind comes from behind the mountains to the west.
The mountains are called the White Hills. They rise nearly four thousand feet above the Dobie Plain. Dobie lies at the middle of the Plain, in a depression which Dobie Creek, pronounced Crick, flows through. Downtown a bridge crosses Dobie Creek and unites Dobie’s two unequal halves. At both the eastern and western sides signs say,
ALTITUDE
6297 FEET
“This is not a conventional story, and the ending is not what one might think. Mr. Szanto…is a real writer and handles some literary problems he has posed himself with real virtuosity.” —New York Times
