Ressurection Days

by Wilson Tucker

  Kehli’s surprised glance followed the finger.

  She asked, “Hoon?”

  “Hoon, goon. Did you leave a coffin over there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there you are.” He spread his hands. “You dug me up and a drunken goon put me together. Guess whose fault I am, and guess what that’s got to do with the price of pancakes in Albania. Are you going to push the buttons again? My belly’s growling like a possum in heat.” “I cannot do that, Owen Hall. It is impossible.”

  “Why is it impossible?”

  “I have used my breakfast allotment for tomorrow. There will be no more until the day after.”

  “Kelly—is this town being rationed too? There ain’t no war on here. Are you dames on ration?”

  “Each of us is permitted one breakfast a day. There cannot be two.”

  Owen looked at the monkey wrench waiting in the oven. “You spent your rations on me. Kelly, I can’t let you go hungry—I don’t want to go hungry.”

  She was distressed. “But there is nothing more to be done.”

  “Like hell there ain’t.” He tapped his chest with a thumb. “Just leave it to the old scout, Kelly.”

  He took her hand gently and led her to the table and the waiting chair, to the precise center of the table as befitted the hostess. As always she was surprised at his touch but went along willingly. The candles were positioned so that they framed her face—one to either side —and then he brought in another chair and sat down opposite. Owen thought it a romantic setting. His companion was strikingly beautiful by candle flame. The house was entirely dark but for the room they occupied, and if only he knew how to make a radio, they could have soft music as well. Maybe he could hum. Owen smiled at her between the candles and winked his left eye.

  “You look elegant, Kelly. My grandfather always said brown-eyed women were best.’*

  She did not reply. The brown eyes watched him.

  “Now then, I’ve got some serious questions and I’d like some serious answers. I’m working up a surprise for you, cupcake. Why do you order food through the pipes? Why do you rely on pushing those buttons yonder?”

  “That is how our food is obtained.” She was patient. “It is fabricated in the zone and stored until needed.”

  Owen was skeptical. “I’ve seen the food put together in the zone—uh, downtown, and it’s for the birds. Some of the bread and some of the bacon was good stuff, grade A, and I guess the eggs are all right, but the other stuff was bird food. Kelly, it was poor horse.”

  “I am not familiar with a poor horse.”

  “Don’t bet on it. I ate most of your picnic lunch this morning, remember? And sure enough, the bread was a winner but the meat was shoe leather—stringy shoe leather. There was a jar of funny yellow stuff that could pass for glue, and maybe it was, and some apples that wouldn’t fool a dimwitted worm.” He waved his hand over the table. “I can tell you what you had for supper tonight. I don’t know what you call it, but I call it meat-loaf, and it tasted like silage. Kelly, why do you put up with that junk?”

  “Not all of the workmen are skilled processors. We teach them as best we can.”

  “Why in the hell don’t you make your own grub?” He pointed toward the front. “You’ve got a perfectly good creation machine right there in the workshop.”

  “Oh, no, Owen Hall. That machine isn’t designed to produce food, it is used for reconstituting recoveries.”

  Owen peered at the woman between the candles. How did an Indiana gentleman tell a lady that she was dumb —not only wrong but dumb to boot? Grandfather had never given him advice on that subject.

  He asked, “Does it make shoes?”

  “No.”

  “Clothing?”

  “No.”

  “Candles?”

  “No.”

  “Only the walking stiffs?”

  “Ambulatory recoveries.”

  Owen shook his head with dismay, knowing that he had missed the boat earlier in the day. Too late, he knew how to bring the town to its knees and get himself elected to City Hall. If he could have organized a general strike or mounted a successful revolution, if he could have pulled the men away from their machines, the high-and-mighty pink ladies would be starving in a week’s time. The man who controlled the food supply was king of the hill.

  “Kelly, I just lost City Hall, but now I’m going to contribute to your education, and* believe you me, the pleasure is mine. What do you say to a steak? A tender, juicy steak just oozing with vitamins and goodness?”

  She looked puzzled. “What is—”

  “Stop!”. He put up a quick hand to shut off the question. “I,don’t believe it! Talk about a rum bunch of numbskulls. Kites, jugs, cigars, dates, horses, cows, steaks, steers—nobody knows nothing around here. Nobody but me, that is. Cupcake, you’re being robbed.”

  “But nothing has been taken from me.”

  “You never had it in the first place. Somebody around here is holding out on you.” /

  “I fail to understand you, Owen Hall.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I fail to understand—”

  “Sshhh.” He put a finger to his lips. “Meditation time. A top-notch surprise coming up, cupcake.”

  Owen put his elbows on the table, and propped his head in his hands to think. After a while his eyes closed of their own volition, because he could think better that way. The house was silent. The woman sat quietly across the table and waited on him, not understanding what he was doing but being willing to wait him out.

  Texas Tommy’s Steak House on Route 31, at the north edge of Indianapolis.

  Texas Tommy was no longer there, of course; he had gone over the border into Canada in the autumn of 1939 and enlisted in the Princess Pat Regiment at Windsor or Toronto or one of those places where they accepted Americans with make-believe Canadian addresses. Texas Tommy said he wanted to whip the Hun. By and by, his regiment was shipped overseas to Britain, and for all anyone knew, Texas Tommy was over there yet whooping it up with the English women or battling the Boche, but his steak house was still open and still at the same old stand on Route 31. Texas Tommy’s wife was running the place now—leastwise, she claimed to be his wife and nobody questioned it, just as nobody questioned the living arrangements enjoyed by the cook while Tommy was away. It was the kind of restaurant that brought in the swells from the northeast side on Sunday nights, and everybody knew that Texas Tommy’s wife raised the price by fifty cents on those nights because the swells had money to burn.

  Texas Tommy’s steaks were worth more than the price charged for them; they were mouth-watering.

  Owen opened his eyes. “Do you have dishes?”

  “I have a plate and a glass.”

  He closed his eyes. Texas Tommy’s plates were large ones; a pale yellow color as he remembered them, having red and brown cross stripes reaching to the four points of the compass. A pottery in Ohio made them on special order. The plates were large enough to accommodate a king-sized steak, a baked potato, and generous helpings of corn or peas or beets or green beans or whatever was on the menu that week. There were cups and saucers in a matching pattern, a tall water glass, clean silverware, a very sharp steak knife, and a cloth napkin. That last was important: a cloth napkin. The steaks were delivered to the table exactly as ordered, the vegetables were hot, a pot of coffee was left on the table, the bread plate had both white and whole wheat, and nobody asked if the cup of butter came off the black market. There was cake or pie or ice cream for dessert, and in season strawberry shortcake or watermelon was available. All in all, it was a most satisfying meal for a dollar and a half, and nobody ever heard a swell complain on Sunday night when he was nicked for two dollars.

  Owen opened his eyes to look across the table.

  “Butter or sour cream on the potato?”

  “What—”

  “Sour cream,” Owen decided. “Kelly, I’m working on the menu, I’m going to fix a supper like you never
had in your life—all thirty years of your life. You’ll thank me in the morning.”

  “I think you are making a joke, Owen Hall.”

  “I am not making a joke Owen Hall, I am making like a gourmet chef. A chef is a kind of fancy cook who gets better wages.** He got up and reached across the table for her hand. “Come along up front. I’m going to teach you something. I’m going to show you what that retread machine can really do when a genius is at the controls.”

  The woman went along with him, her hand tucked inside his. “Do you intend to prepare a meal here?”

  “I intend to prepare a meal here. I intend to show you what you’re missing and how somebody downtown is robbing you. Start asking questions tomorrow.”

  “It cannot be done. Ask what questions?”

  “Watch me do it, chop-chop. Ask why you’re being fed shoe leather and silage day in and day out, ask why you can’t fix your own meals at home on this here machine. Get snotty about it. Throw your weight around. Make them squirm until they come up with honest answers. And when you do start cooking at home, let those poor stiffs alone in the graveyard—they got rights too.” “I really don’t understand your thought processes, Owen Hall. You speak strangely.”

  “That’s a polite way of saying you think I’m crazy. All right, cupcake, just stand by and watch a crazy man operate, and don’t drop the hot plates when they come out of the oven.”

  “Why are you suddenly behaving like this?”

  Owen turned and looked up into her face. He fancied that the distant candles created a halo effect behind her head, enriching the soft brown hair.

  “Because I ate your picnic lunch, because you gave me your breakfast and now you have nothing, because you’ve never had a civilized meal in your life … and I think I’m falling in love, Kelly.”

  Eleven

  The appearance of a single great genius is more than

  equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.

  —Cesare Lombroso

  Owen Hall put a napkin to his mouth when he burped because it wasn’t polite to do otherwise with a lady at the table. The lady seemed not to notice. He poured himself a final cup of coffee and laced it with a generous slug of bourbon, but Kehli received only two teaspoons of booze in her last cup. Owen didn’t want her to follow Paoli down the primrose path to debauchery.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “It’s the right way to end a meal, the poor man’s B and B. Four out of five doctors recommend it.”

  “Will I like it?”

  “Did you like the steak? The chocolate cake?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Then finish up your green beans. Tidy up.”

  She looked at her plate with a tiny frown. “I am very full in the stomach, Owen Hall.”

  “Think of all the starving kids in Armenia.”

  “What is—”

  “This is your last meal until you learn to cook for yourself, cupcake. I won’t be around tomorrow to do it for you.” Owen used a slice of bread to dean the last of the gravy off his plate, country style. “Remember how everything looked and felt and tasted—this is the only cooking lesson you’ll get from me. I’ll wash up the dishes and the silverware and you can stash them away somewhere, but you’ll have to make your own belly timber. There’s five hundred other things that can be fixed and eaten but I haven’t got that much time left—I can’t show you the full menu.” He popped the gravied bread into his mouth, carefully wiped his lower lip with an index finger and then waggled that finger at the woman. “Don’t forget to pass the word up and down the street—show those other broads how to cook for themselves. Let them know how they’re being robbed.”

  Kehli ate the remaining green beans one at a time.

  She hadn’t liked the first taste of the beans and the sampling of a pickle had caused her mouth to pucker and her eyes to water, but eventually her plate was picked clean. Her positive appreciation of the sirloin steak had brought joy to Owen’s heart and a boost to his ego; he thought it likely that he would have been hired on the spot if Texas Tommy had been present to inspect the steaks. He could move to Indianapolis and settle down in a comfortable job.

  Kehli had revealed a familiarity with the baked potato but not with the sour cream filling; she had looked with wonder at each of the vegetables before tasting them, while the hot coffee and the slice of chocolate cake had created an expression often seen on the faces of children at circus parades. Owen admitted that he was pretty good.

  She sat back from the table and laced her fingers across her stomach, looking at him with awe.

  “I have never eaten this much.”

  “You’ve never had the chance. Satisfied?”

  “It was excellent. Were you a chef cook?”

  ’ “Nope, just a journeyman carpenter, but what the hell, Kelly, if you can make a monkey wrench you can bake a cake. If you dames were really on the ball, you’d give those zombies some brains and find out what they can do.” He waggled the admonishing finger again. “Mind you, I don’t approve of you digging up those guys at all. It’s positively indecent, and you wouldn’t need them if you’d learn to use your heads. As for those stiffs already up and walking around, put them to good use and give them a decent living—find out which of them are cooks or carpenters or zeppelin pilots. You’d be surprised, Kelly.”

  “I think I am beyond surprises.”

  Owen grinned wickedly at her. “Cupcake, you are as green as grass. Putty in my hands.”

  She made no reply but continued to watch him with a newfound interest that bordered on fascination. Her eyes were very large in the dim light.

  Owen searched his pockets for an after-dinner cigar and lit it with one of the candles. The taste and quality of the cigar was no better than those he’d smoked during the day and he had to ruefully admit that he wasn’t an expert at everything—not everything.

  Owen blew smoke at the ceiling. “I haven’t seen any matches around the town. How do you light the candles?” Kehli reached into a pocket and gave him what appeared to-be a tube of lipstick. Owen examined it with curiosity.

  “I saw one of these in somebody’s kitchen down the road. What’s—oh, hell, yes!” He twisted off the cap and found the working end of a cigarette lighter. It was of a design he’d not seen before in either of his lives, but there was no mistaking the object or its purpose. The lighter lacked a flint and a wick and had nothing more than a pinpoint hole at the business end, but it produced a blue flame nearly an inch in length when he rotated an operating disc set into the bottom of it.

  “You found this in somebody’s grave, didn’t you?”

  “It was taken from an excavation several years ago. We did not believe it to be an offering to the ancient gods, so we copied it for our own use. Everyone in the city has copies of the artifact.”

  “You found it?”

  “I am the only excavator at present.”

  “I’d like to have one. Do you have an extra for me?” “You may keep that one, Owen Hall.”

  “Well, thanks, cupcake, you’re a brick.” He played with the lighter, watching the steady flame. “I’d give a buffalo nickel to find out how it works. It doesn’t use lighter fluid—there’s no smell here at all.” He sniffed at the orifice after the flame was put out. “How long has it lasted you?”

  “It has been at least ten years since the discovery. That is the original, not a copy.”

  Owen stared at the lighter with amazement. “Ten years without a refill. Imagine that! It’s got to be from the future, from nineteen eighty-four or two thousand eighty-seven or one of those years. We never had nothing like this.”

  “I am pleased that you find it useful.”

  Owen sipped at his coffee and worked on the cigar. “How come you’re, the only gravedigger? It’s a lousy job, I’ll grant you, but how come you have to do all the work?”

  “The others are fearful of the wilderness. I am not afraid.”

  “What wilderness?” H
e stared across the table.

  “The forest and the great open lands—all of that area beyond the excavations is wilderness.”

  Owen blinked at the woman. “Kelly, that isn’t— Well, I guess we’ve just got different names for the same thing. You call it a forest—I call it a stand of timber, small woods. What you call a wilderness, I call prairie. Farmland the sodbusters haven’t discovered yet. It’s wild, all right, but not the way you think. People around here are afraid of it, eh?”

  “I am not afraid. I am the only one in the city who will supervise the excavations or go into the forest. The others are too fearful of the burial grounds and the wilderness— they mistrust the forest.”

  “I saw a couple of wardens out there this afternoon. They’d been out to the graveyard hunting me, and when I saw them they were hot-footing it back to town. That means running, coming in along the trail on the double.”

  “They were running because of their fear of the wilderness.”

  “Geez,” Owen said with mild wonder. “And they were grown women, too.” He lifted his coffee cup and prompted Kehli to do the same. “Here’s a toast.” He touched his cup to hers. “Cheers to a bold dolly.”

  “Thank you, Owen Hall. I think that is a compliment.”

  “It purely is, cupcake. I’m a keen judge of women and horses.” He watched with an expert’s eye while she sampled the laced coffee. It appeared to meet her approval. “Do you get to keep the souvenirs?”

  “I don’t understand you once more.”

  “Do you get to keep what you find out there? You found this lighter and I found that yellow ring this morning, but outside of that, do you find a lot of things in the graves? Do they let you ke£p what you find?”

  “The artifacts!” She flashed him a smile. “I will show you.”

  Kehli rose from the table and went to the workbench at the front. Owen turned his head to watch her go because he admired flowing lines. She was back in a moment with a box full of booty. Owen gasped at the box and its contents and quickly pushed aside the dishes to make room. He spilled the booty out on the table between them.