Risen (9 page)

Was that what his dreams were about?

The swinging door to the kitchen banged open and Tom jumped a mile, expecting to see Deputy Haws' rotting face and moldy-green body come shambling through. He was only slightly relieved to see his mother, especially since Peg wore the tight-lipped, scowly look that said she was about to jump on his case about something.

"You look like crap," she said.

"Thanks."

"Late night."

"That's what Fridays are for," he said.

"Fridays are for going on dates with girls, going to football games, going out for dinner and a movie. For renting a tape and making out on the sofa after your mother goes to bed. Whatever happened between you and Cindy, anyway?"

Tom shrugged.

"Didn't work out," he said. He glared at her through his eyebrows to show her that any good humor she tried to spend on him would go unappreciated. He'd rather she just ragged him out. She got the message.

"I don't want you going out with that gang tonight," she said.

"It's not a gang."

"Then what is it, Tom? Please, characterize it for me. Is it a charitable organization...you're out doing good deeds for the underprivileged?"

He glared at her in silence.

Peg propped her arms on the table and leaned toward him.

"Look," she said. "You're old enough to be out after midnight. I don't care about any sort of curfew. You could stay out until six in the morning and I wouldn't care, not if I knew you were all right and weren't getting into trouble. But I don't like the boys you're hanging out with, and I especially don't like that Ganger boy."

"Why is he always 'that Ganger boy' to everybody? Why doesn't anybody just call him 'Galen?'"

"Because that's what he's made himself. And I don't want people calling my son 'that Culler boy.' You used to be a good student, once upon a time. Until you started hanging out with those...with Galen and Kent and the others."

"They have nothing to do with it."

"They have everything to do with it. They're ignorant. They don't value education. They don't value anything but those souped up cars of theirs and getting drunk and—"

"You don't know that! You don't anything about them!"

"I know enough." She was thinking that they were just like Tom's father, but a comment to that effect would spin them off to a place she didn't want to go.

Peg sat there looking at Tom stonily. Tom stared at his eggs and they stared back. Big yellow eyes. The yolks looked like pus.

"Your eggs are getting cold."

"I'm not hungry."

Peg sighed. "They're a bad influence on you."

"Who? The eggs?"

"Don't be a wiseass. You know who I mean. They won't be happy until they drag you down to their level. You were a good student before. Now I never see you crack a book."

"You'd have to be home for that, wouldn't you?"

Peg's jaw set and Tom could tell from the way she started breathing heavily through her nose that he'd hit a nerve.

"What do you think waitressing pays in this town?" she asked after an ominous pause. "You think I'm rolling in twenty dollar tips out here? You think I want to work double shifts? I do what I have to to put food on the table...food you don't even care enough eat!"

The guilt was starting to roll in like a fog that settled over Tom's mind, obscuring everything. Where did it come from, this fog? He didn't have anything to feel guilty about...well, except the dead cop he'd helped bury in the woods. But what he was feeling now was old guilt. Old, familiar guilt.

He knew how hard his mom worked. He knew how hard it'd been on her since the divorce, and since she and Tom's dad weren't married when he died, there wasn't even any insurance money. He should've been working, but at what? Busboy in Ma's Diner? God, but Anderson sucked.

"I'll eat the eggs," he said.

Peg pounded the table. The dishes jumped and so did Tom.

"I don't care about the goddamn eggs!" she screamed. "I just want you to straighten the hell up! For Chris'sakes, Tom, I don't want you to end up a stupid, boneheaded loser like—!"

She held the words back but it was too late.

"Like my dad," Tom said.

"Yes! Okay? Your dad was stupid, Tom! Look what he did to Annie!"

"So maybe I got the stupid gene! Maybe you've got two brain-dead kids in the family!"

Peg's hand, moving with the speed of reflex, whipped out and slapped him hard across the face.

Tom sat back, stunned. He shoved his chair away from the table. It made a groaning noise and toppled onto its back, and he left it that way as he strode out of the room.

"Be here when I get home!" Peg yelled after him. She heard him tromp upstairs, heard his bedroom door slam shut.

Tom flopped down on his bed and somehow the motion made him think about Deputy Haws' body flopping into the hole they'd dug. He wished he could trade places with the dead deputy right now. He wished he was dead and buried and didn't have to hassle with all this bullshit.

"Shit," he said as the tears welled in his eyes.

In the kitchen, Peg considered allowing herself a good, hard cry. But she was already late and Ma was waiting for her at the diner, so she put it off, as she always seemed to do.

***

Doc Milford clicked through the Duffy photos one after the other for Brant, a stomach wrenching sequence detailing Madge Duffy's carving skills.

Brant merely glanced at the photos. He had no reason to doubt their authenticity or Doc's analysis of John Duffy's condition. Still, it seemed important to Doc to lay out all the evidence in favor of considering Duffy dead on Friday night. Maybe he was thinking of a malpractice suit. Or maybe he was doubting his sanity.

"The coroner showed up this morning and verified my diagnosis," Doc said. "He could tell from looking that these were pictures of a dead man, and he's seen his share. When I told him that this very same man had walked out of the hospital under his own power not eight hours later, he wouldn't believe me. And I don't blame him. It's the fruitiest goddamn story I've ever heard in my life. But it happened, I saw it, and all I have to prove it are these pictures."

"You aren't suggesting that I run these photos in the
Times
!"

"No, no, nothing like that. But you see why I had to show them to you. This wasn't some borderline case. Duffy showed all the normal symptoms of death—lack of respiration, no pulse—but for gosh sakes, look at the man!

"Normally I'd feel for a carotid pulse. In Duffy's case, with his neck laid open like that, I could see the carotid—plainly severed! The blood is not circulating in his body. Look how it's settled in the lower body area—they call it "postmortem stain." Livor mortis.

"And...there were the flies."

"Flies?" Brant asked.

"They smell death. Long before you or I would notice the smell of a dead body, the insects pick it up. We still don't know what produces the odor, but flies can smell a fresh corpse from a mile away. Madge Duffy left a window open. When the Sheriff got there, he said the body was swarming with flies."

Brant was silent. He didn't want to seem skeptical, but he hadn't seen the body himself. Could this all be a prank? Big city cynicism dies hard.

Doc Milford began to pace. He had a bad hip that wanted surgery but he kept putting it off, his own worst patient.

"I could've run an EEG," he said, "looked for brain death, but really, who would've thought it necessary?

"And even if I was wrong about the death...even if Duffy was just seriously wounded, where's the wound now? Where's the scar? It'd take hours of surgery to reattach those veins and arteries, and the stitches...he'd look like a damned Frankenstein."

His limping stride took him over to the goldfish bowl he kept in his office for its tranquilizing effect. He tapped some food into the bowl and the lone fish gobbled it up eagerly.

"People talk," Doc said as he fed the fish. "The news of the murder was all over town like a plague wind. Duffy's rise is already making the rounds. And you can bet that most people are saying what an incompetent old coot Doc Milford is and how he should have retired years ago before the liquor robbed him of his senses. Well I don't want to retire, especially not over something like this."

Brant's sympathy went out to the man. Doc Milford had devoted most of his adult life to the births and traumas of his small community and now he stood a good chance of being hooted out in disgrace. They wouldn't run him out of town, of course, but one great wave of gossip would wash out his sterling past and reduce him to another town character, like Clyde Dunwiddey the drunk. It was a fate worse than death for a proud man like Doc.

"I'll do what I can, Doc," Brant offered. "I'll point out that the coroner agreed with you, based on the photos. If Sheriff Clark and Jed Grimm will back you up...."

"You see," Doc interrupted. "If. You don't believe me. You think I'm off my rocker."

"I didn't say...."

"Oh, I don't blame you. Yes, please, talk to the Sheriff. Talk to Jed Grimm. The night nurse, Claudia White, saw the body. Talk to her, too. But wait 'til she's off the sedatives. She got quite a shock last night."

"I imagine so."

Both men were silent for a time. Brant glanced at the photo on Doc's computer. John Duffy sure looked dead to him. He'd be interested to hear what the Duffys had to say about all this.

As much as he wanted to believe Doc and to believe that something incredible had occurred in this tiny town in the middle of nowhere, as much as he wanted to think that he'd somehow, magically been at exactly the right place at the right time to stumble onto the story of the decade, Brant knew better than to get his hopes up. There was probably a simple explanation. It was a hoax or a misunderstanding of some sort. He couldn't figure it out now but it would come to him or the right piece of the puzzle would fall into place and solve everything in a mundane, logical and very ho-hum manner.

If nothing happened to explain it, it would remain an anomaly. A tabloid item, MURDERED MAN RETURNS TO LIFE, photos on page twelve. Something to read in line at the supermarket, being sure to snort derisively in case anyone was watching, commenting as you put the newspaper back in the rack, "Can you believe the trash they print? Does anybody really believe this stuff?"

"Can you send me those pictures?" Brant asked.

"Sure, sure," Doc replied.

"I'll do what I can," Brant said again.

"I know you will," said Doc, but he wondered to himself if anybody could do anything at this point, or if events weren't already spinning wildly out of control.

***

Deputy Haws had been pissed as a bluejay that night to find himself more than six miles from his consarned vehicle. He'd walked along the highway without encountering a single car. These days anybody who was anxious to get anywhere took the interstate, leaving the old county highway to service the dying little towns that had sprung up along its path so many years ago. It saw some traffic in the morning and evening as the hardhats building the nuke plant drove to work or home, and you'd see combines working its length at harvest time, the migrant harvesters following the season from south to north. But much of the time, especially late at night, the road was just a black snake of asphalt running between Not Much and Used To Be.

Being dead didn't appear to have impaired Haws in any way. The bullet wound had healed completely, though he did wonder what became of the slug inside his gut. Had it been spit out like a cherry pit, or was it still rattling around his innards somewhere? Either way, it wasn't bothering him now.

He seemed to have more energy, which he appreciated as he hoofed it along the highway. He still carried about a hundred extra pounds of bulk, but that old feeling of weariness at the slightest exertion was absent. He breathed easier and had more get up and go. Maybe there'd been something wrong with his lungs or his arteries had been getting clogged or something, and now he was experiencing that unfamiliar phenomenon called "health."

He did cough up some dirt now and again and his mouth tasted like he'd been sucking on a toad turd, but that and a sort of roughness in his eyes, like the dirt had scratched his corneas, maybe, were about it for physical side effects.

His mind, however, had changed profoundly.

He preferred to view the world as black or white. Good was good and bad was bad and that was that. He liked it when a new subject of thought bounced down through his brain like a ball bearing in a pachinko machine until it settled into one slot or the other. Then he didn't have to think about it anymore.

But people liked to confuse him with subtleties, and that made him mad. Why, when a person had everything figured out, did they have to pull the rug out from under him? Just because they couldn't make up their own minds about a thing, that didn't give them the right to confuse everybody else.

Certain people always seemed to be laughing at him, like they knew something he didn't. And occasionally, that got to him. Late at night, lying in bed, trying to make shapes out of the shadows of the leaves crawling on the wall, sometimes he'd get to wondering if the world wasn't such a big, complicated work that it was foolish for an average sort of guy like himself to think he could make sense of it.