After Clarion, I didn’t see Avram for several years, though we carried on a correspondence; but when I moved to Seattle, I took the ferry across the Sound to visit him with some regularity. During those visits, I would help him with errands. He was by then limited to a walker, incapable of leaving the apartment without assistance, and he would often call me and ask me to come visit, and when I did, I would find myself pushing him about Bremerton in a wheelchair, obedient as a horse to his demands, helping him with the groceries, bill-paying, library returns, and that sort of thing. I was being used, of course, and there were times when I became impatient with him for taking advantage of the relationship. But it gradually dawned on me that this is what friends did — they used one another — and that I was using Avram every bit as much as he used me, though my usage of him was less labor intensive: as mentor, touchstone, resource. On occasion, he, too, would become impatient. Once, when I was beginning to write my own Central American stories, I wrote him a letter expressing some insecurity as to whether people would think that I was encroaching on his literary turf. A few days later, I got back a post card that read: “That’s right, Shepard. I’ve staked claim to the entire Caribbean littoral. It’s mine, all mine. Keep your grubby hands off.” I was so confounded by this burst of acerbity, it took me a goodly while to understand that he was telling me I was an idiot for assuming that any writer could dispossess another of the opportunity to examine a certain region or historical moment. At any rate, our friendship passed, as most friendships do, through phases of intimacy and neglect, waxed minimal, became exuberant, grew intensely divisive and reached grudging accord, and then, one morning shortly after I learned he was failing, I picked up the phone and was informed that he had died… a death, I believe, that warranted much more of a salute than it received.
It’s customary at this pass, in most introductions, to list through the included stories and give a brief preview of each, saying that “Bloody Man,” for instance, is a ghost story concerning, among other subjects, pirates. But that would be misleading and more than a little shallow as an approach to Avram’s work in general or the specific. For one thing, given the ghostly status of the country where they take place, all the Limekiller tales are, by virtue of that alone, ghost stories, regardless whether a literal supernatural-type ghost can be perceived flitting about in them. For another thing, these are not like other stories in the least, and you cannot so easily sum them up. If you haven’t read Avram Davidson before, you are about to enter uncharted territory as regards the art of the narrative. Certainly you will be able to find, should you care to look closely, traditional narrative mechanisms buried among Avram’s sentences — foreshadowings, structural elements, and so on. Yet you don’t feel them moving you along as you do in more traditionally narrated stories. No grinding noises such as are made by primitive machines. No great grandiose tidal sweep of, yee-haw! Writing. No stampede of eloquence. No institutional overlay of Bauhaus Existential. No Stylemaster style. Reading Avram, and in particular, reading the Limekiller stories, you are simply dropped into the exceptionally active mind of the narrator and twitched along from thought to thought, something like the way a sun-dazzle will appear to be shifted from point to point on the surface of water slopping against the pitch-coated pilings of a pier in Avram’s (and Limekiller’s) own Point Pleasaunce. The mechanics of the story become obscured and you are made dizzy, dazed, much like Limekiller himself might feel, walking, (shall we imagine?), in the strong sun, slightly trashed by a hangover, trying to figure out some minor money hassle, distracted by this slash of color, that burst of song, or. Well, perhaps a sample would be instructive:
“Night. and not the plenilune, either. You can bet your boots, Limekiller has no boots, he has, though, a shovel! Limekiller feels that if he eats another pannikin of rice and beans or of the thin chowder called fish-tea that he. that he… What he is after, he is after turtle eggs, so significant a source of insult in the rich, rich Chinese culture, largely represented in British Hidalgo by the canny and philoprogenitive merchant Aurelio Aung and about 327 of his descendants. Better be exceedingly careful in talking about turtles to the Aung. More better say as little as possible about eggs at all to any of them. To ask, even to ask, ‘Don Aurelio, do you think it's going to rain?’ would bring conversation to a sudden and deathly still halt. As for that sole man ever to have placed his hand on the ancient and naked head of old Aurelio Aung (for what reason, knows only God!), death did not exactly come on swift wings, but it is certain that Aurelio Aung III felled him with a kick he had learned before kung fu became well-known in the regions of the dark west and that Aurelio Aung Jr. had assisted III to propel the man down a flight of stairs at the bottom of which a throng or tong of unnumbered Aung were waiting to and did kick him with many sharp kicks of their sharp- pointed shoes (they being fashionable, and Old Aung had imported them and sold them in considerable numbers), before P.C. Oscar Spencer C. Featherstonehaugh Smith, then on duty, had finished strolling over quite leisurely…
This, the opening of “Limekiller at Large,” inundates you with atmospheric fact, with a tumbling-downstairs rhythm to accompany the single tumbling-downstairs event detailed, and submerges you in the mind of the narrator, ne Limekiller, without saying a thing about him, other than he is hunting turtle eggs with a shovel. But as you are twitched and shifted, like a sun dazzle, across the light chop of Avram’s prose, you come to know so many things about Jack Limekiller and about the many things he knows, it feels that you are not reading a story, but listening in on his selfconversation, that little talk we’re always having with ourselves, that flippy voiceover that captions all our experiences, this being an especially clever and artful specimen, yet every note authentic. And so when you reach the end of the story, though you have endured, witnessed, felt what Limekiller himself endured, witnessed, felt, though you have sensed the incidence of character development, conflict, denouement, etc., it seems less a story than a passage of time that had a story in it, along with innumerable other flashes and dazzles that related to the story in obliquely enchanting and curiously illuminating ways. That last, I suppose, is as good a definition as any of an Avram Davidson story.
So.
Having experienced one such enthralling passage of time with embedded story, the obvious next step would be to proceed on to another, just like Jack Limekiller would and did. Here, in this little book, you’ll be able to do that five more times and will likely expect to continue passaging thereafter.
Unfortunately, only six Limekiller passages exist.
Or, as Avram might have said, six are all there is and six is all there are.
These are they, and they are, in my view, whatever anyone else may tell you, regardless of whether a book entitled The Best Of Avram Davidson rests on a thousand and one shelves, the best of Avram Davidson, his most evocative, most generously spirited, and most Avramesque work. Despite his previously mentioned response to mv letter, I think Avram did stake claim to a place and time that no other writer should touch. That place and time resides here in this little book, complete with dialects, recipes, shanties, magic, duppies, pirates, drunkards, tapirs, manatees, pretty girls, a hero or two, and, of course, ghosts. Open its covers and a mist will boil forth, swirling, many-colored, to surround you — a mist rife with a myriad distinct voices, bursts of idiosyncratic speech, fragments of all-but-forgotten lore, a strange druggy perfume compounded of the smells of shandygaff, jacaranda, brine, palm oil, gasoline fumes, creosote, orange groves, and ought else. These stories are far more than the relics of a great fantasist, a great writer, a man whom I knew and venerated and — when he wasn’t pissing me off — loved.