Resurrection Man (12 page)

Slowly Jet nodded. "Earn your wings, Clarence. Earn your wings."

Of course this is madness, Dante told himself as Jet putted out into the channel. To deliberately take the lure, of all things, and drop it down under the big tree as his dreams had directed: this was sheerest angeling.

He could feel the white wings of magic opening around him.

But angeling was what the times seemed to demand. And besides, Dante thought mordantly, even if he went crazy, it would only be for a few more days.

His leather jacket was damp, its gorgeous stencils smeared with mud and crumbles of dead leaves. His fingers were getting stiff with the cold, and he wished he'd brought a pair of gloves.

He took his rod and reel and found himself a spot under the old willow, sitting on a great black root, thick as his waist, that boiled out of the ground at its base. The river had eaten the ground below it; sitting on the root, Dante swung his feet, watching his loafers just skim the water.

It was a dark morning. The sun toiled behind sullen masses of dark gray cloud. A thin mist still hung upon the river; here and there it thickened into cloudy ghosts that drifted sadly by him, like mourners in a funeral procession. Autumn's fire had swept down the valley, leaving the trees on the north shore bare. On the south side, shadowed from the sun, the maple trees still burned in time, each leaf a week-long twist of flame. Occasionally a crack would open in the clouds overhead, and a shaft of sunlight, glancing down, would kindle the maple leaves, or reveal a strange and sudden beauty in a length of whiskey-colored river.

It had been a long time since Dante had tasted sleep; his whole body ached for it. How voracious the stupid body is, he thought. Less than a week to live (please, please, at least six more days!), horror and wonder on every side, and all the body can think about is sleep. And breakfast. Less than five hours had passed since he had opened a slit in his own dead belly and already his mind was starting to daydream about bacon and toast and hot coffee. Coffee! Loaded with milk and sugar, warm between his fingers...

Dante brought himself back with a jerk. What a bastard underhand trick, he thought savagely, looking down at his body. I'm still as smart as I ever was. Smarter! Sharp as a tack. Well-read. Funny. Good conversation. But everything I am sits here condemned, fastened to a dying animal.

A magpie flapped by, squawking,
eat! eat! eat!
Biscuits, Dante thought. Hot white biscuits, gilded with margarine.

Casting his line into the river with a thin hissing whine, he saw his life writ large: the lowering sky full of dark portents, and shot through with gleams of dreamlike beauty. Slowly he reeled in the lure, filled up and overflowing with the mystery of the river, his hunger and the sullen clouds, memories and the mist; unexpected floods of light.

The lure jerked; snagged; pulled free. The line was heavy. As the lure came up to the surface, Dante saw its barbs swaddled in a rag of rotten cloth. He pulled it dripping from the water, and saw the cloth was tangled around something like a flat stick or splinter. Dante picked it up, turning it over in his fingers. It was small, perhaps an inch long, an? white.

It looked like a human bone.

"And lo," he murmured. "I am become a fisher of Men."

I
WOULD FAR RATHER BE IGNORANT THAN WISE IN THE FOREBODING OF EVIL.
  —A
ESCHYLUS

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Dante's first chore when he got in was to track down Sarah and find out what she had learned from Mother about Aunt Sophie's long-vanished husband, Pendleton.

Then it was time to deal with the bone.

Starting with the guess that it was part of either a foot or hand, Dante snuck into his father's study and tracked it down with the aid of Gray's
Anatomy
. It turned out to be the first metacarpal of the upper extremity—the bottom of the thumb. Following Gray's advice to hold the bone with "the carpal extremity upward and the dorsal surface backward," Dante located "the tubercle for the extensor ossis metacarpi pollicis"—which faced right. Thus: the right thumb.

"Aha!" he murmured triumphantly, slowly closing the book. Then he froze, locked in memory as if in ice.

*   *   *

It was a long, still afternoon and he had wandered into his father's study. Light slanted through a narrow window, making lustrous the dark cherrywood desk and the white skull. Light glinted on the glass cabinet in which Father kept his medicine: rows of dark green bottles, shiny steel implements, the arthritis charms his patients had begun to ask for ("Well, placebos are good medicine too," he had sighed, swiftly knotting bits of willow-bark and colored ribbon as if tying a fly). His funny-looking pre-War baseball glove from high school and an untouched bottle of Courvoisier Five-Star he'd bought on graduation to drink the day he retired. The study was rich with Father's smells: shaving lotion and hair cream, perhaps a faint hint of the finger of whiskey he drank here after dinner each night. Everywhere the dense smoldering aroma of pipe smoke.

Dante liked pipe smoke better than the acrid stink of Aunt Sophie's cigarettes, but it was the scent of fresh tobacco that made him drunk. He loved to sneak into the study and open the second drawer of Father's desk, rooting through thickets of pipe reamers to uncover a glorious treasure: Amphora tobacco, packed in brown plastic pouches that felt and smelled like softest leather. When he found one he would open it like a Christmas present and hold it to his face, breathing its scent into himself until the room went dizzy.

But to get to his father's desk, Dante had to pass the medicine cabinet, its second-lowest shelf a rack of picks and saws and scalpels. And across the room, turned face out on the oak bookshelf, the dreadful Gray's
Anatomy
. This fat volume of bodies was the chief and lord of Grown-Up Books, full of his father's terrible secrets.

A hundred times he stood hovering in the doorway while Grandfather Clock ticked slowly behind him. Would the lure of the tobacco draw him into his father's terrible world? Or would wiser instincts prevail, and send him away from the dreadful book with the Skinned Man on the cover? His father had caught him once, and made him look into the Book; showed him a picture of the human heart and told him what it did.

That afternoon, sent upstairs for his afternoon nap, Dante had been lying with one arm sprawled over the edge of his bed. It was a hot stuffy summer day. The mattress was shaking with his heartbeat, shaking, thudding against his chest until he jerked his dangling arm back into the bed, terrified his heart would wear out from having to drive the blood up from his hanging hand. Every time he made his heart work he was wearing it out. The ugly lump of muscle his father made him look at in the dreadful Book: the traitor heart that one day would make him die.

*   *   *

Portrait

From the time we were seven years old, Father took us out once each fall to hunt. He didn't want us to forget where the meat we ate came from; didn't want us to think it grew in bloodless shrink-wrapped packages for our consumption.

This is a picture I took on Thanksgiving morning the year we were both twenty. In the foreground, framed by Father's standing figure on one side and a thin silver birch on the other, you can see Dante's kill, a three-year-old buck. Blood drenches its throat where Dante's bullet hit, and spatters the innocent snow.

Dante is crouching just behind the buck. He is holding his rifle with the walnut stock planted between his knees, and his hands wrapped around the barrel.

It's one of the best black and whites I ever took, so sharp you can see the coils of Dante's breath, and the blood smoking at the buck's throat. You can almost hear the crackle of dead leaves underfoot.

No picture I have of them shows the resemblance between Dante and Father more strikingly. In life, Dante's energy fools you; you get distracted by his restless pacing, his flaring eyebrows, his darting hands. But in the picture he is still. He has taken Father's stillness into himself and you see his hands are Father's careful hands, thicker and more steady than mine. He has Father's gently rolling shoulders, and most of all he has Father's eyes. Without Dante's mobile face and flying brows to distract you, you see the same narrow blue eyes, deadly serious; the same quiet intensity.

Dante refuses to see any similarity between his father and himself. Father must wonder about this. I do. It seemed so obvious to everyone that Dante was destined to be Anton Ratkay's special child, the same way Sarah was her mother's. And yet somehow Dante drifted away: first arguments, then silence, then amiable banter; charming and meaningless and utterly impenetrable.

If you catch Father looking at Dante when he thinks himself unobserved, you can see the bafflement in him. In the depths of those eyes, long since steeled to bitter things, you can see him hurting, wondering when destiny failed and he lost his son. Wondering what he should have done... what he could have done differently.

In the picture Dante looks intently at the dead buck in front of him. There is no shock, no lip-trembling remorse; just the slightest narrowing of his narrow blue eyes and a still intensity in his body as he ponders the thing he has made.

Off to the side, Father is looking at Dante with exactly the same expression.

*   *   *

"Dante?"

Startled, Dante looked up to see his father standing in the doorway of the study. He scrambled to his feet and tucked Pendleton's thumb bone quickly in his shirt pocket, next to the lure he had meant to return. "Sorry!"

Dr. Ratkay allowed himself a faint smile. "No problem at all." He ambled over and tapped with one finger on Gray's massive Anatomy. "Heavy, isn't it? More than twelve hundred pages, and all the writing extremely small."

They stood side by side. His father hadn't had the grace to go bald yet, Dante noted with a twinge of envy, though since last Christmas his salt-and-pepper hair had become mostly salt. Looking down at the top of his father's head, Dante was struck by how Anton Ratkay had begun to shrink: his shoulders were curling and his chest was thinner. In the bulky brown sweater Aunt Sophie had knit for him he selemed oddly old and frail, as if bundled against a cold only he could feel.

Stooping over his desk, Dr. Ratkay coughed repeatedly—but into his hand, like a gentleman.

"You shouldn't smoke so much."

Father laughed, digging out his trusty briar and a pouch of Amphora. "Your mother says my face is turning into a tobacco leaf: all wrinkled and leathery. I try to tell her it's been pickled in aftershave, but she won't listen."

He tapped the Anatomy with the stem of his pipe. "'Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.' Hippocrates said that. It's still true, every word."

He dropped into the Radetzky swivel chair before his desk. As a rule he preferred to live with the furniture he had inherited from his parents, but he was a pragmatist. A few years after the new contouring synthetics came out, his back had begun to give him problems. Mother convinced him to give the Radetzky a try. "Think of it as research into the effectiveness of a new therapy for back pain," she said crisply. "If it works, you can suggest it to your patients."