Resurrection Man (9 page)

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It was the dark gray before dawn, clammy and cold, as Dante and Jet lowered the boat into the river with the corpse propped awkwardly across the thwarts. Jet sat in the stern, his pale hand resting on the tiller of the little Evinrude engine, just above the cadaver's head. Dante sat in the prow. When the boat rocked, his own dead feet bumped against his thigh. Rigor mortis had started, stiffening the corpse's face and neck. According to Dr. Ratkay's autopsy book, rigor would proceed down the length of the body from head to toe, passing off in the same order twenty-four to forty-eight hours later.

A chilly fog hung over the river. Billows moved heavily through it, following and overspreading one another. The damp cold ate into Dante like rigor mortis, bringing slow paralysis into his face and fingers, and his breath steamed up into the blinding fog that hemmed them in, making of their boat a little rocking world with only three inhabitants, two living and one dead. The only sounds were the chugging of the old Evinrude and the slap of the river against the bow. Once Dante peered back through the gloom, his eyes drawn to his corpse, only to see its chest and head thickly wreathed in mist, as if it were a candle guttering into clouds of cold gray smoke. With one hand on the tiller, Jet sat beside it, implacable as Charon.

Dante hunched down against the cold and blew into his hands to warm them. He did not look back again.

Some time later Jet said, "I see the willow." He flipped the engine into reverse to slow them down.

A cloud of fog passed, and Dante, caught off guard, saw the great willow on Three Hawk Island with angel's eyes. Suddenly it loomed over him, showing itself with the force of a secret revealed: its trunk a great heart, splitting into ventricles, each bough an artery, each branch a vein, twigs tangled and dwindling into hair-thin capillaries; vessels and veins plucked whole from a giant's body and revealed to him, like the maps of the human circulatory system his father had tried to make him look at in the fearful pages of Gray's
Anatomy
.

If one were a fish—a pike, say—what might one find in the hollow pool at the willow's base?

What grief or guilt had lain there all these years, trapped, decaying, bleeding into the water the willow drank, the soil it consumed?

Jet nosed the boat around the point of Three Hawk Island and into a shallow bay on the southern side. It was a good spot to bury a body. Here they had moorage for the boat and would be shielded from the eyes of anyone on the north shore, inciuding their parents. The river's south bank, steep and shadowy and cold, was almost uninhabited.

Dante jumped onto the island and pulled the boat up on shore. Slowly he walked to the base of the big willow, squinting up into the branches. "Is the fort still there?"

"Yes."

A little puff of wind roiled through a cloud of fog; from the shadows overhead came a low, ghostly groan, and a hollow clacking, like the bones of a hanged man stirring in the breeze. Wind chimes, Dante realized with a start. Jet must have replaced the original glass chimes with bamboo ones that held a deeper, more haunting and melancholy music.

"I fixed it up myself a few weeks ago," Jet continued. "A new coat of lacquer on the roof, another can of Thompson's on the rest." Jet grinned at Dante's look of surprise. "I still come here, you know. I sweep it out every autumn, after the willow drops its leaves. If you'd been paying attention, you would have seen the blinds rolled up and stashed in the boathouse."

"I guess I had other things on my mind."

"Not to mention your liver." Jet joined him at the willow's foot, leaning his back against the hoary bole. "We used to have a hell of a time keeping Sarah out of here."

Dante grinned, remembering. "We beat back the Powells and Hewletts and the Baggy boys, but Sarah was a whole other situation."

"We were handicapped," Jet pointed out. "We couldn't use slingshots."

"Ah. Right you are."

Overhead the sky was paling. A soft plop carried from the south bank, as of something slipping into the river. A mink, Dante thought. Or possibly a marten.

They stood together in the gray morning, looking south. From time to time an eddy in the fog would reveal the far bank. Jet's eyes, for once empty of calculation or cold amusement, were unreadable, fixed on the darkness of the far shore. "The fort was ours," he said finally. "Yours and mine. Everyone else was a stranger." Naked willow-fronds hung around them, dripping cold tears of dew.

Dante reached up to the willow's trunk and touched a welt, chest-high, where someone had stripped off a ribbon of bark. Aunt Sophie, he realized. Aunt Sophie complaining of her rheumatism, sipping her cup of bitter willow-bark tea. Jet would have known that, of course; would have watched, hidden in the fort, as she took her slices of bark. He was still the little spy she had found in her bassinet, a baby no longer wholly her child, with a mark of Cain newly etched on his face.

Dante sighed. He had a lot to do in seven days. He squinted up at the brightening sky and corrected himself: six and a half.

Dante shuddered as a fragment of dream came back to him: the magic lure glimmering and winking, leading him down into strange depths of sleep. The night before last, he thought wearily. The last time he had slept, before he had crept out into another gray dawn and tried his luck fishing with a wasp-bodied lure.

They decided to bury the body in the shallow depression under a fallen tree, now rotten and cancered with moss. They dug quickly. Made from silt and leaf mold and years of mud, the dirt here was startlingly black, moist and rich as chocolate cake.

"How long had you known?" Dante asked. Before setting off in the boat he had returned to the house to swap his silk jacket for a leather one decorated with Braque stencils. Now he stripped it off as sweat began to bead like dew on his high forehead.

"Known?"

Dante glanced back at the boat, where his patient body waited.

"Ah," Jet said. He bent back to his task. "Not long."

"But you checked under the blanket. In my room." Reluctantly, Jet nodded. "Other people always called you sneaky," Dante said. He drove his shovel down. "I told them they were wrong. I told them you wouldn't pry where you didn't belong."

"I don't
belong
anywhere—had you forgotten? I live at the edge of the known world, gnawing the bones you throw me from the table."

"Spare me your self-pity."

Jet stopped, his fingers tight around the haft of his shovel. "You were too scared to look, Dante. Somebody had to." Jet bent back to work. "I didn't think to check under the blanket for a long time," he said softly. "I may be cursed, but I ain't no angel.... I didn't feel anything growing under the blanket. It was years before I realized you were afraid of it."

Jet squinted, as if trying to see into the past. "You had been visiting, but you were about to go back to the City for a date. Amalia Jensen, I believe it was." (Here Dante, remembering, would have blushed had his face not already been red with exertion. He grunted and flung another shovelful of dirt into the bushes.) "You were preening and ignoring me while I warned you about her and that loathsome Todd fellow. You ran the comb through your hair and without thinking reached for the blanket—so you could look at yourself in the mirror, I suppose. When you touched it, I could see the shock go through you, as if you'd stuck your finger in a socket. You turned pale as a ghost, babbled some excuse, and bolted into the bathroom."

Dante shook his head. "I don't remember any of this."

"I'm not surprised," Jet said dryly. "I'm sure you did your usual sterling job of forgetting any unpleasantness. You do remember what happened with Amalia, don't you?"

"Shut up:"

Jet snickered. "After that, I would make faces in the mirror every now and then, and check under the blanket, to see what sprouted there. For a long time nothing did, and I was worried."

Dante snorted. "Bored, you mean."

"Well, seriously, Dante: you are my only real entertainment, you know. So finally on one of your visits home—Christmas two years ago—I decided to tiptoe into your room while you were sleeping. Things were different with you there. Instead of feeling the usual jumble when I ran my hand over the blanket, there was something long and smooth and solid. But that was the last time you slept in your room until this visit. You always came up with some excuse to drive back to the City, or crash on the parlor sofa."

"I only felt safe if I could hear Grandfather Clock," Dante admitted.

They worked in silence for a long time. The heavy chopping of the spades, his and Jet's, beat unevenly like the blades of a windshield wiper, like their two hammers pounding nails into the fort in the old willow. Memories rushed over Dante like clouds: the thin fierce darkness of Jet's body, stooping next to his, digging in the dirt of some sandbox, his lank hair falling over his eyes, scowling with concentration. Jet wrapped around a tree limb, hammering up from underneath at an awkward nail while the scent of willow-sap bled into the summer air around them. Shadows rushed over Dante; all those times he had felt Jet's loneliness, Jet hammering it at him like a nail, like the steel blade of a shovel chopping into soft earth.

And Dante had always fled that steel touch because he couldn't bear the enormity of Jet's loneliness. He was powerless to fix it. Even to acknowledge it was to feel the chained angel stirring in himself, brooding beneath bright wings on its terrible thoughts of guilt and dread. Stuttering Ann-Marie Bissell, with her bruised cheeks and her mustard sandwiches for lunch. The touch of a huge hand on Duane's leg. The glassy clink at the bottom of Mrs. Farrell's desk; her cloudy eyes when the children filed back into class after lunch.

He dug, and watched himself digging in Jet, as if seeing his reflection in a dark mirror. The chop of the shovel, biting down, the twist of the haft in his hands, the sudden weight on his trembling biceps, his back aching as he turned and dumped the dirt beside the grave.

I'm dying, Dante thought. I'm dying, and my life is passing before my angel eyes. And with each chop of the shovel, a wind blew through him, as if from the beating of great wings, and he was dizzy with the nearness of death....