Risen (10 page)

Maybe he was blind to something that only smart people could see, the way they say dogs can't see color. How could you explain color to a dog? Maybe he was just too thickheaded to understand what smarter people tried to tell him.

Well, if that was the case then there was nothing he could do about it, so it was stupid to even think about it. He got along okay, better than some of the so-called geniuses he'd known who ended up working in bookstores, selling books to other smart people for minimum wage. Or killing themselves because the world didn't fit their idea of how the world ought to be. They'd doubted themselves to death, some of those smart people had.

Deputy Haws wasn't going to lose any sleep thinking about how maybe everything he knew was wrong.

But still....

Still....

The uncertainty was always there, lurking in his nerves like a cold sore, ready to pop out under stress. It made him lash out over ridiculous things and get into fights when the conversation drifted to particular topics, like whether somebody who repeated third grade should be allowed to carry a handgun.

That night, though, trudging along the blacktop, he had no more doubts. Everything was crystal clear. Everything. And he was absolutely dead sure certain about it all. No crack weakened the armor of his certitude.

Seth had made everything clear.

Seth had spoken to him while he was dead. Seth had peered into Haws' brain on those lie-awake nights when the shadows crept along the wall, and Seth had examined the questions that haunted Haws' dreams, and Seth had provided the answer that Haws sought.

Seth was the answer.

No matter the question. All questions were one, really. All answers, one.

Seth.

All Haws had to do was believe in Seth and everything would be all right. All would be right. All...right.

There was an example right there of Haws' new clarity of thought.

It was Haws' mission to bring this enlightenment to the rest of the world, starting with those who needed Seth's wisdom the most.

Starting with Galen Ganger.

***

Haws retrieved his vehicle and drove home well before dawn. He laundered his clothes and sewed a patch over the bullet hole, doing both jobs much better than anyone in town would've expected him to.

He'd treated the bloodstains with pre-wash and liquid detergent and let them soak and then ran everything through the washer three times. Then he'd cut a circle of material from his shirt tail where it wouldn't be missed and used it to patch the bullet hole.

In truth, Haws was not half bad with a needle and thread. He'd all but raised his little sister, Lucille, his alcoholic mother not being of much use in that regard and his father being a "guest of the federal government" in Leavenworth, Kansas. With no money to waste on luxuries, Haws had grown up learning how to make do.

He hadn't anticipated needing more than one official police shirt and one pair of official police pants, so tonight he had to salvage his sole uniform so he could be seen around town later that morning. He wanted to mess with the heads of the punk kids who surely figured him for dead. Nothing heavy. He wouldn't run them in. He just wanted to be seen and let their own guilty consciences and fear of payback do the rest. For now.

Haws still lived with Lucy, who cleaned houses to bring in her share of the rent. Like her mother, she was a heavy sleeper, but for a different reason. Lucy slept because she was depressed. She was not an attractive woman by most standards and had given up on herself early in life. She rose from the bed only long enough to make her meager living, to watch a little TV, or to open a can and heat contents to boiling. Unlike her brother, Lucy was cadaverously thin. Her depression had been with her so long that she couldn't imagine life without it. She was not like other people, certainly not like the happy, buoyant souls she saw on the television screen, and she did not expect anything to change. She tried not to inconvenience her brother, whom she loved and relied upon, and that meant staying out of the way, in her bedroom, in her bed, the covers pulled up tight over her bony shoulders. It was as good a place as any to be, for her, and if that's how she wanted to live, it was okay by her brother.

Haws finished his washing and mending and pressing and draped his uniform on a wire hanger that he hung in a doorway. No point putting it in the closet when he was just going to put it back on in a few hours anyway.

He showered and put on clean underwear and went to bed, not really tired but figuring that he should try to get some rest. He fell asleep in moments and slept like a baby until late Saturday morning. He woke feeling like a million bucks. With a bit of luck, this could turn out to be the best day of his life.

Ma's Diner was already in pandemonium when Deputy Haws walked in.

Claudia White, the night nurse at Cooves County Hospital, was in a screaming match with the Ganger boy who gripped a teaspoon in his hand as if it was a switchblade and looked ready to spoon her to death. Jedediah Grimm, the undertaker, had hold of Ganger by both arms but that didn't stop Ganger's elbow from shooting back where it caught Peg Culler and made her drop two armloads of breakfast specials. Nurse White's mother seemed on the verge of a heart attack and Reverend Small was urging everybody to calm down and Merle Tippert, owner of the Rialto Theatre, pounded the table and screamed for boysenberry syrup. Ma screamed at Tippert from the service window but Haws had no idea what he was saying because he'd lapsed into Mandarin or something...it might have been Tongues for all Haws knew. Tom Culler sat at the counter looking sick and Brant Kettering sat next to him scribbling furiously in his notebook. Everybody else either observed nervously or wolfed their food like they planned to sneak out on their check during the hullabaloo.

Haws' arrival calmed the place down, but it wasn't because of the sudden appearance of the law. It was because, when he saw him, Galen Ganger's jaw dropped to the floor and he forgot all about Nurse White and the room spun and he fainted dead away. As a bonus, Tom Culler turned as green as a cartoon character and heaved his breakfast onto the countertop. It was everything Haws could have wished for, and more.

***

Brant knew that the article ran long and was too raw for publication, but he wanted to write it out like it happened first and save it for his book. He could water it down and objectify it later for the
Cooves County Times
. He wrote:

John Duffy's alleged rise from the dead would be old news by the time the story made it to the
Times
. What I couldn't provide in terms of timeliness I determined to make up for with depth, or, failing that, width. I wanted to see what the town was thinking, and for that there was no better observation post on a Saturday morning than Ma's Diner.

For many of the citizens of Anderson, Saturday morning breakfast at Ma's was the social event of the week. Ma's had its regulars, like Merle Tippert who lived alone and ate most of his meals out and who reserved Saturday morning for his weekly treat of waffles and boysenberry syrup, the hell with what Doc Milford said about his cholesterol. But anyone was likely to show up, if not for breakfast then for a donut and a cup of coffee, just to hear the current buzz. Any news worth telling would have made the rounds by telephone, but for a quick overview of public opinion about the co-op manager's new hairpiece or Carl Tompkins' decision to carry a line of Japanese power tools down at the hardware store, Ma's was the place to be.

So I hied myself thither to get the lowdown on Duffy.

An angel got its wings as I entered. I presume an angel got its wings because a bell tinkled overhead.

I've often wondered exactly how that works—not the bell because I know how a bell works, but the angel business. How does it all stay in balance? What happens if there are more bells ringing than angels needing wings—do all the bells on Earth fall silent until the wingless angel population recovers? Or do the bells keep ringing and a lot of undeserving angels suddenly sprout wings and quickly and guiltily flutter off for a round of golf on the nearest par-seventy cloud bank? Did Frank Capra know what he was talking about or is it possible that he just made the whole thing up?

I was clearly in the proper frame of mind to debate life after death as I took my favorite stool at the counter, the one near the cash register where I'd receive maximum exposure to
la femme
Culler. I don't know why I can't get this woman out of my mind. For some reason I find her delectable. The fact that she's encased in her own world of troubles as rigidly as if sealed in lucite and is therefore unattainable only makes the attraction stronger.

Anyhow, I sat down and it was several minutes before Peg was able to take my order. The joint was jumpin', and the topic on everybody's lips was John Duffy. I tried to tune my hearing to a single conversation at a time, aurally table hopping the way I do with the television and the remote control. Eventually, though, the debate took on a more diner-wide scope with people shouting from one table to the next as the issue got deeper and murkier and closer to deeply held, heartfelt beliefs.

The brouhaha seemed to start with Claudia White. Claudia is the night nurse at the hospital and was on duty that night when Duffy appeared from the stairwell in pursuit of Curtis Waxler, the janitor. Doc Milford had prescribed sedatives for the shock Claudia had received to her psyche and ibuprofen for the pain from the bump on her head she took when she fainted at the sight of a man she knew for a fact to be dead throwing open the stairwell door and calling out, "You there!" Maybe she'd stopped taking the sedatives or never took them or they weren't strong enough or she was one of those people on whom drugs have the opposite effect, but for whatever reason Claudia was clearly not sedate. Her voice was up an octave and her hands were waving in the air as she told the story to her mother, sitting across the table from her ignoring a bowl of oatmeal.

"He weren't dead," opined Merle Tippert sitting at the next table by himself. "And this here syrup's maple, not boysenberry. Peg!"

Peg looked his direction even though she was busy filling a coffee cup. He held up the syrup dispenser and hollered out, "Maple!" as if he were saying "Hemlock!" or "Radioactive toxic waste!"

"Sorry, Merle, I'll be right there," Peg answered.

"He was so dead!" Claudia called over to Tippert. "You think I don't know a dead man when I see one? I've been a nurse for fourteen years and I think I know a little more about death than you do who wasn't even there!"

"He weren't dead," Tippert maintained. "Doctors!" He practically spat the word. Merle Tippert practically spat most of his words, which is probably why business was down at the video rental store he ran right next to his movie house. "Videos!" he'd spit at customers. "Television!" He didn't like to rent out movies on videotape. If twenty people would just decide to watch
His Girl Friday
on the same night he'd show the darned thing at the Rialto and they'd see it the way it was meant to be seen, on a big screen with an audience. But society was splitting off into one's and two's who sat in their separate houses and watched movies on little screens all by themselves because they had to watch what they wanted to watch when they wanted to watch it and just stop it right in the middle if they felt like taking a bath or something, which you might as well do since nothing made after 1945 was worth seeing anyway. And don't even mention that direct-to-cable crap.

"Doctors!" Tippert spat. "Don't know nothing! And Doc Milford hasn't had a sober day in twenty years!"

"Don't you go bad-mouthing Doctor Milford!" Claudia warned. If Doc Milford had been running for Pope he would not find a more ardent supporter than Nurse Claudia White. She overlooked his occasional afternoon nip from the flask in his bottom left hand desk drawer because she knew that he'd devoted his life to their little town and she, for one, was grateful for it. Maybe the rest of the people in Anderson didn't appreciate how rare a dedicated physician was these days or how many towns bigger than theirs went begging for a good doctor, but Claudia knew. She knew. And she wasn't going to let a comment like Tippert's go by without calling him on it. "He's given a lot more to this town than that ratty little movie house of yours ever did," she said.

"Yes, and he's done it half-drunk most of the time, too," Tippert countered.

"He was stone cold sober when they brought John Duffy in," said Claudia, "and Duffy was dead as a door nail."

Claudia turned to Jed Grimm, the local undertaker, for confirmation. "You saw him, Mr. Grimm. Of everybody in town, I expect you've seen more dead people than anybody. Was Duffy dead or wasn't he?"

Jed Grimm was working on a short stack with fried eggs and a side of bacon but he didn't waste a second before announcing loudly, aware that eager ears were waiting for his verdict, "That he was, my dear. He was as dead as they come."