Wade Salem is a drifty, drug-dealing, storytelling, sometime musician. He’s fascinating, if you can experience him from a distance. He’s not the man you’d want as your father-figure, which is the case for the unnamed narrator in Dylan Hicks’ novel Boarded Windows.

Our poor unnamed narrator is slogging through life. He’s got a job as an assistant manager at a near-by corporate music chain. He’s got a live-in girlfriend, Wanda, he seems to dig. Things ain’t too shabby. They ain’t so good either. Then Wade Salem lands back in his life on a few months before Narrator’s twenty-first birthday. Narrator hasn’t seen Wade since his childhood in North Dakota where Wade up and left on Bolling Greene’s tour bus one night and never returned.

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