Resurrection Man (10 page)

They stopped at the same moment, panting, slumped aver their shovels. The pit was six feet long and almost three feet deep, with narrow, sloping sides. Jet grunted and crisply drove in his spade, shaping the walls. "We want these nice and straight."

"Don't worry," Dante drawled. "You'll get another chance to practice." He chopped down with his shovel, squaring, off the head of the grave and accidentally cutting through an earthworm. The worm's front half writhed in the fill dirt. The severed back end twitched and knotted for a long moment, hanging from the grave wall, and then fell in.

A flush of nausea spread out from Dante's stomach, where the growth was, making his limbs watery. Blood pounded in his head.

"Are you all right?"

"No." Dante stood back from his grave. "I think we're about done, don't you?"

The dawn had come, but dully, through a sky leaded with clouds. Ghosts of fog still drifted forlornly over the water, seeking shelter in the dark hollows of the south bank.

Dante watched the worm-half writhe and twine at the bottom of his grave.

Jet said, "I guess we better put him in."

They went back to the rowboat and lifted the body out. Jet took its arms and head; Dante took its feet.

"By last Christmas I knew," Jet grunted, shuffling backwards, his hands hooked under the cadaver's armpits. Its white hands dragged through crumbled bits of fern and last year's leaves. "The shape under the blanket was unmistakable, if you were looking for it."

Together they ducked under the fallen tree and lowered Dante's corpse into its miserable grave. It looked thin and white and terribly fragile, huddled there; defenseless as an unborn child. Jet scooped up a handful of earth and let it sift down onto the body. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dirt. As it was in the beginning, so it shall be in the end.
In nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
."

They stood together for a moment, looking down. "It was as if you had died," Jet said softly. "And I was thinking, They won't ask me to say the eulogy." He shook his head. "And that drove me crazy.... Why, Dante? Why won't they let me say the words? Why aren't we brothers?" Jet glanced at Dante. "I've never been family. And you know, until I saw your body under the blanket I would have said it didn't matter. I would have said I couldn't miss what I never had."

(But you did miss it, Dante thought. He remembered Jet's cold eyes, black and hard as pebbles, watching him walk out onto the cracking ice; remembered the hunger flickering there. I felt it every hour of every day, he thought. I felt you on me like a leech.)

"But I would have been wrong." Jet paused, squatting at the head of the grave, looking off into a distance measured in years. "Why, Dante? Why should I have to crawl around the corners of my own house like a cockroach at the baseboards? I've never been family and that's been everything. That's been the whole arc and trajectory of my life."

"You're such a whiner," Dante said angrily. "I didn't kick you into any corners,"

"Why am I always taking pictures of your life? Why shouldn't I have a life of my own?"

The old familiar rage was pounding in Dante: the tight, twisting anger only Jet could provoke. "Well you can't have mine!"

"Why not?" Jet said coolly. "You're almost done with it."

Dante leapt for him but Jet twisted and he missed, off balance. Quick as a snake, Jet grabbed his arms and shoved. Dante fell back with Jet on top of him. Something gouged his back and he yelled in pain. He tried to roll away but there was no room to move. Jet drove his face into a wall of black dirt.

He was trapped in his own narrow grave.

The angel ran loose inside Dante, tasting the dirt and the stink of death, the prick of splintered ribs beneath his back. He felt Jet's white fingers wrapping like roots around his wrists to suck the life out of him. Black dirt smeared Dante's hair and face and filled his nose, its moldy muddiness thick in his mouth. Gasping and choking he heaved, pinned under Jet, crushed into his own grave, feeling his own dead body, its skin split and gaping underneath him. "Daddy!" he screamed.

And then Jet rolled off Dante, like a boulder rolling from the mouth of a cave, letting in a rush of gray daylight.

Still screaming, Dante struggled out of his grave and lunged away on all fours, blind with panic, scrabbling until he ran into a tree trunk and dropped like a stone, stunned.

*   *   *

He breathed. His chest heaved, great shuddering gasps, facedown in the leaf mold. At last he rolled over onto his back and lay there, looking up into the cloudy sky through the bare branches of a young willow tree.

Beneath him the ground was cold and damp. His head ached. For a long time he lay panting, resting his eyes on the soft sky; watching its subtle, rolling formlessness. The willow-wands were no longer arteries and veins: daylight had broken their enchantment, left them stiff and woody. Ordinary.

Jet put his hand on Dante's shoulder. "Hey."

Dante grabbed it, fiercely, as if it were an oar coming to him over cracking ice. "I don't want to die," he whispered.

Jet's fingers tightened on his shoulder.

"I don't want to die."

Jet held his hand. "Lo, you have come through the valley of the shadow," he murmured. His hand was warm and thin and strong. "It's okay, D. It's okay."

In plain gray daylight the river was just the river again, muddy-brown and quick with spring run-off. On its banks were only trees and ferns; the sunrise had destroyed its ghosts and spirits. Far down the river valley, Dante could see the usual film of smog hovering over the City. He could hear the traffic on the highway a half-mile behind their house; the clank and roar of a diesel truck booming along, the beeping of an irate commuter.

Dante took a deep breath. The angel in him closed its eyes, and folded its bright wings.

"Well, it's morning," he said.

Y
ET WITH HIS POWERS OF AUGURY HE DID NOT SAVE HIMSELF FROM DARK DEATH.
  —H
OMER

CHAPTER
SIX

PORTRAIT

This is a picture of Sarah and Mother together. Mother is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee; Sarah has been drawing with crayons. Sarah is eight years old. Grandmother and Aunt Sophie have already lavished great Magyar hordes of Hungarian-ness on her: she is dressed in a beautiful little frock, coarsely embroidered in the Hungarian style with tangles of fist-sized poppies and roses. She wears the frock in utter ignorance, like a linebacker. A ponytail spills down her thin back as she leans towards Mother with her tummy on the table, obscuring her drawing. She is lecturing Mother on some Important Issue, such as the necessity of being nice to our animal friends. Mother's eyes are grave and attentive; she hides a smile behind her coffee cup.

Mother always liked Sarah best. Of course, she loved them both, but she was most comfortable with Sarah. Dante... I don't think Mother ever recovered enough from what happened to me to be completely at ease with my twin. There was always a wariness in her eyes, watching him. Waiting for him to vanish into the same darkness that had swallowed Sophie's child.

Or maybe she just always wanted a girl.

For whatever reason, Sarah and Mother are very close. You can see it in the picture: in Sarah's fearlessness, and Mother's hidden smile.

This is from a time when Mother's fiery hair had not yet turned gray; the skin on her hands, smooth and tight, had not yet begun to wrinkle and hang around her joints. In that time it was summer and she wore a flowered skirt and a short-sleeved cotton blouse. Now her blouses all have long sleeves and she always wears a silk kerchief around her neck. More comfortable than jewelry, she says.

This picture of Sarah is from long before that glowering scrap of a kid would grow into a chubby, sullen teenager, before she would run off with a creep and exchange her adolescent's insecurities for an adult shame, a secret she carried in herself like a stone.

It is important to have a sense of humor if you take a lot of photographs. If one were unable to appreciate the subtle ironies of time, the gifts it gives your subjects, and the ones it strips relentlessly away...

As the years go by, every picture steeps in the remembrance of false hopes, brief passions, desires and disappointments. If you didn't have a sense of humor, photographs would be unbearably tragic.

Almost any photograph. This one, here.

My little sister Sarah.

*   *   *

Maybe Fate singled out Aunt Sophie less than she thought. Maybe, to a parent, every child is a child lost.

In time.

*   *   *

As Dante and Jet finished burying the body, Sarah was in the kitchen, trying her new act out on her mother. Above all things, Gwen Ratkay loved a good joke. The plan was to get her involved in constructing the routine; then, at an opportune moment, Sarah would sidle around to asking about Aunt Sophie's Past.

It wasn't much of a plan, Sarah conceded, but improvisation was her life.

Her mother sat at the battle-scarred kitchen table drinking coffee from the mug Sarah had given her last Christmas, an ink-black lacquered beauty with one simple design, a branch from a cherry tree, breaking into pale pink blossom. It was barely seven on a Saturday morning, but Gwen was already neatly turned out in a sensible blue skirt and plain white blouse. A kerchief of Thai silk, dyed turquoise-blue and jade-green, livened up her sober outfit, as laughter brought the life into her steady, practical face.

What Sarah loved most about her mother was that she laughed; freely and superbly from her own steady confidence. Sarah worshipped that. Her own laughter seemed to her so angry, so fearful and insecure, like the yap of a hyena. Sarah had a favorite piece of jewelry, a cameo her grandmother had given her a month before she died. It was very simple, an elegant woman's profile on a plain black background. Sarah wore it as a charm. She knew her father would disapprove if he knew, but she needed it; she wanted so desperately to call up such a woman from inside herself: poised and superb, graceful and witty and kind.

"So, magic: what a concept, hunh? Can you imagine what the world would be like if magic hadn't started running back into it after World War Two? Ever stop to think about it?" Sarah asked, goggling out at an imaginary crowd.

Mother's lip trembled. With Sarah's round face wavering and her small mouth working, she looked uncommonly like a tuna trying to do calculus.

"I mean, take Star Wars. Without the Jungian explosion, it doesn't even get made, right? Let alone win an Oscar. I mean, think about it: without all that archetypal confronting-the-darkness-and-feeling-the-magic stuff, what we have here is basically Gidget Goes to the Death Star. Can you imagine anyone financing this in, say, a Freudian world? I mean, you'd have to throw in all kinds of stuff about Luke trying to kill his own father and marry his sister and... stuff."

Sarah paused, round face becoming thoughtful. "Okay—bad example. But, um... What if we were all Marxists, God help us? Then your blockbuster classic would have to be about a small group of comrades banding together to bring down, the Imperialist..." The same slow frown settled on her face. "...the Imperialist overlords."