Resurrection Man

by Sean Stewart

  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: th
e 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....

  They stopped at the same moment, panting, slumped aver their shovels. The pit was six feet long and almost three feet deep, with narrow, sloping sides. Jet grunted and crisply drove in his spade, shaping the walls. "We want these nice and straight."

  "Don't worry," Dante drawled. "You'll get another chance to practice." He chopped down with his shovel, squaring, off the head of the grave and accidentally cutting through an earthworm. The worm's front half writhed in the fill dirt. The severed back end twitched and knotted for a long moment, hanging from the grave wall, and then fell in.

  A flush of nausea spread out from Dante's stomach, where the growth was, making his limbs watery. Blood pounded in his head.

  "Are you all right?"

  "No." Dante stood back from his grave. "I think we're about done, don't you?"

  The dawn had come, but dully, through a sky leaded with clouds. Ghosts of fog still drifted forlornly over the water, seeking shelter in the dark hollows of the south bank.

  Dante watched the worm-half writhe and twine at the bottom of his grave.

  Jet said, "I guess we better put him in."

  They went back to the rowboat and lifted the body out. Jet took its arms and head; Dante took its feet.

  "By last Christmas I knew," Jet grunted, shuffling backwards, his hands hooked under the cadaver's armpits. Its white hands dragged through crumbled bits of fern and last year's leaves. "The shape under the blanket was unmistakable, if you were looking for it."

  Together they ducked under the fallen tree and lowered Dante's corpse into its miserable grave. It looked thin and white and terribly fragile, huddled there; defenseless as an unborn child. Jet scooped up a handful of earth and let it sift down onto the body. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dirt. As it was in the beginning, so it shall be in the end. In nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti."

  They stood together for a moment, looking down. "It was as if you had died," Jet said softly. "And I was thinking, They won't ask me to say the eulogy." He shook his head. "And that drove me crazy.... Why, Dante? Why won't they let me say the words? Why aren't we brothers?" Jet glanced at Dante. "I've never been family. And you know, until I saw your body under the blanket I would have said it didn't matter. I would have said I couldn't miss what I never had."

  (But you did miss it, Dante thought. He remembered Jet's cold eyes, black and hard as pebbles, watching him walk out onto the cracking ice; remembered the hunger flickering there. I felt it every hour of every day, he thought. I felt you on me like a leech.)

  "But I would have been wrong." Jet paused, squatting at the head of the grave, looking off into a distance measured in years. "Why, Dante? Why should I have to crawl around the corners of my own house like a cockroach at the baseboards? I've never been family and that's been everything. That's been the whole arc and trajectory of my life."

  "You're such a whiner," Dante said angrily. "I didn't kick you into any corners,"

  "Why am I always taking pictures of your life? Why shouldn't I have a life of my own?"

  The old familiar rage was pounding in Dante: the tight, twisting anger only Jet could provoke. "Well you can't have mine!"

  "Why not?" Jet said coolly. "You're almost done with it."

  Dante leapt for him but Jet twisted and he missed, off balance. Quick as a snake, Jet grabbed his arms and shoved. Dante fell back with Jet on top of him. Something gouged his back and he yelled in pain. He tried to roll away but there was no room to move. Jet drove his face into a wall of black dirt.

  He was trapped in his own narrow grave.

  The angel ran loose inside Dante, tasting the dirt and the stink of death, the prick of splintered ribs beneath his back. He felt Jet's white fingers wrapping like roots around his wrists to suck the life out of him. Black dirt smeared Dante's hair and face and filled his nose, its moldy muddiness thick in his mouth. Gasping and choking he heaved, pinned under Jet, crushed into his own grave, feeling his own dead body, its skin split and gaping underneath him. "Daddy!" he screamed.

  And then Jet rolled off Dante, like a boulder rolling from the mouth of a cave, letting in a rush of gray daylight.

  Still screaming, Dante struggled out of his grave and lunged away on all fours, blind with panic, scrabbling until he ran into a tree trunk and dropped like a stone, stunned.

  * * *

  He breathed. His chest heaved, great shuddering gasps, facedown in the leaf mold. At last he rolled over onto his back and lay there, looking up into the cloudy sky through the bare branches of a young willow tree.

  Beneath him the ground was cold and damp. His head ached. For a long time he lay panting, resting his eyes on the soft sky; watching its subtle, rolling formlessness. The willow-wands were no longer arteries and veins: daylight had broken their enchantment, left them stiff and woody. Ordinary.

  Jet put his hand on Dante's shoulder. "Hey."

  Dante grabbed it, fiercely, as if it were an oar coming to him over cracking ice. "I don't want to die," he whispered.

  Jet's fingers tightened on his shoulder.

  "I don't want to die."

  Jet held his hand. "Lo, you have come through the valley of the shadow," he murmured. His hand was warm and thin and strong. "It's okay, D. It's okay."

  In plain gray daylight the river was just the river again, muddy-brown and quick with spring run-off. On its banks were only trees and ferns; the sunrise had destroyed its ghosts and spirits. Far down the river valley, Dante could see the usual film of smog hovering over the City. He could hear the traffic on the highway a half-mile behind their house; the clank and roar of a diesel truck booming along, the beeping of an irate commuter.

  Dante took a deep breath. The angel in him closed its eyes, and folded its bright wings.

  "Well, it's morning," he said.

  YET WITH HIS POWERS OF AUGURY HE DID NOT SAVE HIMSELF FROM DARK DEATH. —HOMER

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  PORTRAIT

  This is a picture of Sarah and Mother together. Mother is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee; Sarah has been drawing with crayons. Sarah is eight years old. Grandmother and Aunt Sophie have already lavished great Magyar hordes of Hungarian-ness on her: she is dressed in a beautiful little frock, coarsely embroidered in the Hungarian style with tangles of fist-sized poppies and roses. She wears the frock in utter ignorance, like a linebacker. A ponytail spills down her thin back as she leans towards Mother with her tummy on the table, obscuring her drawing. She is lecturing Mother on some Important Issue, such as the necessity of being nice to our animal friends. Mother's eyes are grave and attentive; sh
e hides a smile behind her coffee cup.

  Mother always liked Sarah best. Of course, she loved them both, but she was most comfortable with Sarah. Dante... I don't think Mother ever recovered enough from what happened to me to be completely at ease with my twin. There was always a wariness in her eyes, watching him. Waiting for him to vanish into the same darkness that had swallowed Sophie's child.

  Or maybe she just always wanted a girl.

  For whatever reason, Sarah and Mother are very close. You can see it in the picture: in Sarah's fearlessness, and Mother's hidden smile.

  This is from a time when Mother's fiery hair had not yet turned gray; the skin on her hands, smooth and tight, had not yet begun to wrinkle and hang around her joints. In that time it was summer and she wore a flowered skirt and a short-sleeved cotton blouse. Now her blouses all have long sleeves and she always wears a silk kerchief around her neck. More comfortable than jewelry, she says.

  This picture of Sarah is from long before that glowering scrap of a kid would grow into a chubby, sullen teenager, before she would run off with a creep and exchange her adolescent's insecurities for an adult shame, a secret she carried in herself like a stone.

  It is important to have a sense of humor if you take a lot of photographs. If one were unable to appreciate the subtle ironies of time, the gifts it gives your subjects, and the ones it strips relentlessly away...

  As the years go by, every picture steeps in the remembrance of false hopes, brief passions, desires and disappointments. If you didn't have a sense of humor, photographs would be unbearably tragic.