Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Mr. Armitage,” people often ask me. “You spent more time hunting this outlaw than any other lawman. Why did they call him ‘Veils’ McGaff?”

Surely you’ve heard all the regular theories. The most popular is that he killed so many men that the market for mourning veils for their wives exploded in every town he visited. That’s not true, since Veils McGaff tended to kill men like him–hardened desperadoes without wives and for whom no tears would ever be shed–or men like me–whose hollow marriages, maintained for the sake of propriety only, would result in nothing resembling mourning should either partner take the long dirt-nap.

Another is that McGaff came from the small town of Veil Falls. That much is true, as he was born in an apartment above a whorehouse and below another whorehouse in that very town. But in those days Veil Falls was known as Whore’s Crossing, and it did not assume its less salacious monicker until Veils McGaff had already begun his reign of rampaging terror.

Some have even claimed that Veils was McGaff’s actual given name. I’ve heard that it was short for the name Veilorious in honor of Veilorious the Reprobate, a Roman senator written about by Cato and Cicero. The fanciful combination of given and middle names Vernon and Illinois into Veils has even been proposed by men who are no doubt staggering home from a long saloon night. But I know for a fact that McGaff’s actual given name was Aloysius, after his grandfather, and his middle name Mergatroyd, after the man his mother imagined had the best odds of being his father.

In fact, Veils McGaff was called that because of an incident in which he improvised a kerchief out of a piece of mourning veil during a bold daylight robbery of a haberdashery in Prosperity Falls. To his dying day at the end of two nooses from two equidistant gallows, he hated the appellation and for a time shot anyone who used it. He eventually settled on savage beatings instead, after realizing that it would be hard to recruit confederates if they were bulleted every time they used his most famous nickname.

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You know that rock that was right here? Little old hunk of granite, looks like it was smoothed in a river?

One day a few years back, I was in a bad place. Lost my job because my company had invested in someone who’d invested in the real estate bubble. Family left me for someone who was employed, and the bank who’d started it all was kind enough to foreclose on my house before it failed.

So I found myself alone, without prospects, with nothing but the clothes on my back and a few things in storage, faced with the prospect of walking or hitching across the county to my sister’s to beg for a couch to sleep on. Well, you might say that I was a little angry about that, so when I found that stone in the lot of a Huddle House I couldn’t afford to eat in, I gave it a mighty kick.

It felt so good that I resolved to try and kick it along with me as I started my walk, if for no other reason than to give me something to do. As I went along, I noticed that that little stone traveled an arrow-straight line when I kicked at it, unlike most. And I got to thinking about the journey it must have taken to be in that parking lot. I’d been a bit of a rock hound in my youth, so I imagined the whole thing, from cooled magma to grinding under a glacier to polishing in a river.

In fact, that little old rock was a lot like me. It had been beaten up in every which way you’d care to imagine, but it had taken everything the universe could throw at it.

When I got to my sister’s, I just kept on going, kicking the rock as I went. You might say it was zen, or a ritual, or even one of those obsessive compulsions. But for me it was like having a brother along for the journey, one that could understand my pain and, unlike my real brother, let you get a word in edgewise. Before long people heard about what I was doing, and they started to offer me food and shelter along the way.

I walked 1000 miles, kicking that little stone every step of the way, until I reached the sea here not three days ago. They say it’s a record, and for all I know they may be right. It didn’t much matter to me; what mattered was that I had a purpose. I had carved out a little niche for myself, and that rock had formed a new me much as nature had given it new form over however many thousands of years.

So naturally you can imagine, given all that, how perturbed I am that you just tossed my 1000-mile stone into the Atlantic Ocean.

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There once was a young man called Maycos. Maycos’ father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather had all borne that name, and in it he found great comfort. For to be named Maycos was to be connected with all the members of his family that had passed on, and those that had yet to be born.

Maycos worked as a humble bricklayer in a great city. He mixed the mortar and carefully set each stone in place, always taking pride in his work even though it brought him little happiness. The other bricklayers were often envious, since Maycos’ bricks were always laid straight and level, layer after layer. But since they worked faster than he did, the other bricklayers often found more work, and work was hard to come by. For the city was in the grip of hard times—there was little money, and many went hungry.

To pass the time, Maycos collected chips of broken bricks from the kiln where he sometimes worked. The money was very poor—even worse than bricklaying—but the broken bricks were much more important to Maycos than the whole ones. He would take them home to the tiny apartment that he shared with his mother and grandfather, and lay them in a pile on the roof. Once enough pieces of bricks were there, Maycos would mix up some mortar and carefully put the chips together to form pictures.

His grandfather, who had been a bricklayer himself until he was too old, once suggested that Maycos sell the small brick and mortar pictures that he made. But Maycos thought that no one would want to buy pictures made of broken bricks—they would prefer paintings or statues of fine marble. He also knew that times were bad for everyone in the city, and even the richest man in town, who lived on top of the tallest building, had to carefully save his money.

Maycos carefully saved what little money he made from bricklaying and making bricks and gave it to his mother and grandfather, for since his father’s death he was the little family’s sole support. He always carefully took the smallest portions of food at dinnertime, and only took time for himself when there was no work to be done. In addition to his brick pictures, Maycos read many books from the library, though he was always careful to return them early, because he could not afford to pay the fines.

Through reading, Maycos came to know many things—the history of his city, the names of birds and beasts, great men and women of the past, even how to make things and sail ships on the ocean, which he had never seen. Sometimes, Maycos thought that he would like to be a sailor, or to study animals. But, his father and his grandfather had been bricklayers, and that was all the family knew. Maycos was willing to be a bricklayer since it was all he had ever known and he needed to provide for his mother and grandfather. But sometimes, late at night when the others were asleep, he would look out the window at the lights of the sleeping city and wish that his was a different life.

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