you are in for a Real Treat
if you read this delightful book!
David Wroblewski (author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle) writes on the jacket of the book:
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is a gorgeous, wise, riveting work of, among other things, cowboy noir. Comic, too, but of a species that arrives bearing a scorpion’s stinger. You smile, then you wince, then you turn the page to find out what happens next, happily disarmed all the while by the voice of Eli Sisters as he puzzles his way back to humanity. Honestly, I can’t recall ever being this fond of a pair of psychopaths.
I was sitting outside the Commodore’s mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job. It was threatening to snow and I was cold and for want of something to do, I studied Charlie’s new horse, Nimble. My new horse was called Tub. We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that. Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated, so it was not as though we did not need these new ones but I felt we should have been given money to purchase horses of our own choosing, horses without histories and habits and names they expected to be addressed by. I was very fond of my previous horse and lately had been experiencing visions while I slept of his death, his kicking, burning legs, his hot-popping eyeballs. He could cover sixty miles in a day like a gust of wind and I never laid a hand on him except to stroke him or clean him, and I tried not to think of him burning up in that barn but if the vision arrived uninvited how was I to guard against it? Tub was a healthy enough animal but would have been better suited to some other, less ambitious owner. He was portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles in a day. I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward, he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.
The first paragraph of Patrick deWitt’s novel, The Sisters Brothers.
aimless - 2011 - with purpose 