Deadman

by Jon A. Jackson

  Still, he longed to set her right on a few things, and he had tried a couple of times, but it was difficult for him to organize his thoughts properly. For one thing there was an abiding concern with memory. Everyone wanted to talk about his memory. The doctors were positively pests about it, particularly the brain surgeon. What did he remember? What was the last thing he remembered before the curtain (as he'd come to think of it)? What was the first thing he remembered after the curtain? They were all after him about it, including the detective, Mulheisen, who had been to see him a couple of times. This guy made Joe nervous. He sat there looking at him with those slightly hooded eyes, not saying anything for long periods of time. Joe thought he might be looking into his brain. Anyway, he had decided that memory wasn't so important. He had a feeling that if he just left it alone, it would come back. In fact, it was always there. He sensed it, not as a body of knowledge but as a kind of field, a network or web that was pervasive and always present but not presently . . . well, not presently retrievable. Or, at least, not readily retrievable. But he believed it would be, eventually. Of course, nobody's memory is 100 percent retrievable, not at will, but Joe didn't know that.

  Some things, actually a lot of things, he did remember with no difficulty whatsoever. In fact, it wasn't so much that he remembered them but that he knew them without having to remember. Thus, he knew who he was: He was Joe Service, and he was twenty-nine years old; he lived in Montana, but often traveled to other places; he had a house and there was a woman named Helen who lived there with him and was very important, but he wasn't sure in what way. He knew how to shave, how to walk—he was amazed that he couldn't walk better, but it seemed that parts of his right leg, right foot, right arm, and right hand were missing. They were not, in fact, missing. He could see the “missing” parts but he couldn't figure out what they were doing there, as he was sure that they weren't there. He had learned that he had been injured and he gradually began to understand that the use of his body would return to him—how to talk, how to learn. Important things.

  One day he remembered, without trying (See? he told himself, just be patient), meeting a man who was some kind of biologist. He couldn't remember the man's name, but he suspected that it wasn't important or that he had never learned it in the first place. He had met the man on a train. This was about three or four years ago, he thought. (He still wasn't secure with the notion of time: A day he knew, and thus a week of days and a month of weeks and days, but a year was still a little nebulous—it was a long time, but not a terribly long time, he thought. He'd learned that a year was twelve months and that it had been almost three months since the curtain.) He was on a train, sitting in the lounge, talking to the biologist. The biologist explained to him a theory that life requires adversity, struggle, difficulty. According to this theory, without adversity the organism falls into complacency and then stasis, or death. The whole principle of life is at odds with the basic status of the inconsiderate universe; every cell quivers with the need to pit itself against an indifferent force. Thus, the most dangerous moment in life is the moment of triumph, of accomplishment, satisfaction, and happiness.

  This was all very fascinating and amusing when one is sitting in a club car sipping whiskey, with no greater goal in mind than the end of the journey, hours or days ahead, aboard a train that is going there whether you want it to or not. But he'd thought about it a good deal, later, when he was living with Helen in his little cabin in the mountains. (He thought of that now, recovering it more or less completely in the process.)

  They had driven from Detroit. They were deliriously happy. They had stopped to see all the sights en route: the Mississippi River, the Badlands, the presidents on the mountain, the Missouri River, the mountains. They had made love frequently and furiously. At the cabin they had devoted themselves to little more than playing. They shopped for things for the house. They went fishing. They went down to the hot springs. Helen was wildly happy and so was he. And then the problems had started.

  He couldn't recall (and suspected that he would never be able to recall) the moment when it all started. The moment when it wasn't enough to play and be happy. He had to be doing something. Something worth doing. Something that would mean more than just being happy. Sex was an excellent antidote, for a while, to these moments of unease. And these moments of unease were railed against: Why should one's pleasure be spoiled by this vague and nagging unease? And then he had begun to understand what the biologist was talking about. Why a person would put himself in danger, would flirt with danger, to make life more bearable. Presumably, there were people who had learned to get over this unease, but these people were truly in danger, if one believed the theory of adversity. As for Joe, he was uneasy, but he was happy. He was alive.

  He had to leave the hospital soon, he knew. He had to recover his old life, so he could get on with Joe Service, Part Two. There was a lot at stake, although he wasn't sure what it was. He was bothered by the woman Heather. She had become a close friend of Cateyo's, but he was afraid of Heather, and he couldn't explain it to Cateyo. He had to get back to the cabin and find out about Helen, whom he had also been unable to discuss with Cateyo. Anyway, the hospital wanted him to leave. He didn't need to stay in the room. Apparently, he had enough money to hire Cateyo to stay with him. In fact, he knew that he had plenty of money at the cabin, although he wasn't sure how much. But the money was important, he knew that.

  For some reason, Cateyo had not told Joe that Heather had moved into her house. She never talked about the house, anyway. But as the time came closer for Joe to leave the hospital she began more and more to regret having offered Heather the spare room. She enjoyed Heather's presence, despite the fact that she often barged into the bathroom at embarrassing moments. The woman took a lot of the day-to-day tasks off Cateyo's hands, shopping and keeping house. And it was a comfort to sit and talk to her in the evenings. Sometimes, in fact, when she came home, dead-tired, it was a treat to allow Heather to bring her tea and bakery goods, tucking her up on the couch while she recounted the day's events. Mostly she talked about Paul—she still called him Paul, although they had learned his name was really Joseph Humann. It was very comforting to explain to Heather what a remarkable man Paul was and how she felt called to serve him. “It's God's purpose,” she said. “God doesn't do anything without a purpose, so there must be a reason he sent Paul to me.”

  Cateyo had two additional reasons not to feel bad about Heather's presence: One, Heather would be leaving soon. Her job, which didn't seem to take too much of her time, would soon be ending, and she had another lined up in Seattle. And two, Cateyo had agreed to take a leave of absence from her nursing job when Paul was discharged. They would go to his cabin to live. This was an indication of how much Joe's condition had improved: his ability to make these kinds of plans and decisions with Cateyo and the doctors and counselors. They all agreed it was a terrific sign.

  For Joe, however, as his memory improved and plans were being formulated, the cabin became not just a hopeful destination but also a focus for anxiety. Helen was there, or should be there. But he hadn't heard from her. She hadn't come to visit him. He had bought her a new truck, he remembered that. He'd gotten it in Missoula. And on the way back . . . it was a beautiful day . . . hawks, deer, mountains, the shadows of clouds drifting across a valley floor . . . the irritation of the Superfund project site . . . and then the curtain. Oh yeah, the dead man. Then the curtain.

  He could walk now, a little. He could be alone and take care of himself for short periods of time. They would leave soon. First they would take a day trip to the cabin, to see if everything was all right. Cateyo was arranging it with Big Face, the guy who came by nearly every day and just looked at him, standing at the foot of the bed in his boots and khaki shirt with the badge. Some kind of cop. Why Big Face controlled the cabin, Joe didn't know, and it annoyed him, but he didn't think it was too important. Not as important as Helen or Heather. She was going too, to help out, Cateyo said. Joe didn't
think that was right, but he couldn't get it across to Cateyo.

  Cateyo was talking about the World. It was a very bad place. There was a better place, Heaven. In the beginning, Joe didn't get this, but soon it all came back to him. She was talking about some imaginary place where everything was all right, where it was okay to be happy and do nothing—a concept that the biologist's theory had blown once and for all. Joe never objected. He just listened. In the World you had taxes, schools that ignored Jesus, pornography everywhere, unutterable obscenities, people who walked around pretending that Jesus and Heaven didn't exist. The fact was, it was the World that was just a shadow. This seemed a little uncertain to Joe. The World existed, sure, but its existence was somehow unreal, only a momentary existence, at least in comparison to Heaven, which was eternal. This was why the new man was required: to reawaken the people to the existence of God's Heaven, where real life would commence, outside of Time, once this shadow world was destroyed. It couldn't be long, the signs were everywhere: the Soviet Union destroyed—self-destructed!—a clear sign of God's wrath. There were plenty of other signs, but one had to be careful how one interpreted them.

  Cateyo laughed about her father's folly: He had almost gotten it right, but he'd been too fascinated by ridiculous details that were mere distractions. He'd believed that Jimmy Carter was the anti-Christ, for instance: The initials J.C. had confused him. True, the anti-Christ would seem to be a kind of savior, a religious man, but he was really a devil, and Jimmy Carter had been, deep down, a liberal. Liberalism was a genuine evil. Anyway, Jimmy Carter had tried to make the Jews and the Muslims lie down together, which would have been an act of the anti-Christ, all right, but it hadn't worked. Now, Saddam Hussein, there was a potential anti-Christ! Her father would have reveled in the rise of Saddam, and no doubt he would have seen in Desert Storm the makings of Armageddon, but Cateyo hadn't been fooled for a minute. What was needed was a truly new man, a man resurrected from the dead, like Christ. This new man would not be an anti-Christ. She was understandably leery of anti-Christ theories. No, the new man wasn't something out of prophecy, but out of the Gospels themselves. Why, St. Paul himself might be considered a type of new man, which was why she had taken to calling Joe Paul, although that was really just a joke . . . and on and on.

  Over a period of time, literally weeks of hearing this notion explained and elaborated, sometimes self-mockingly ("I know folks think I'm crazy, but . . .”) but generally quite seriously, Joe had gradually recovered his own memories about all this, about Heaven and Jesus. He couldn't take it seriously. He looked at Cateyo and saw a lovely young woman, healthy and happy, bright and bubbling. The world was a fine place if it had such people in it. He was happy to be alive, and he'd literally had his brains blown out. He wanted to say, “Babe, wake up. It's a great world. You're young, you're on top of it. I'm lying on my back, trying to recover my scrambled wits, and you're dreaming about playing a harp.”

  In the meantime he was thrilled by her almost daily baths that ended with her stroking him until he ejaculated. On two occasions she had even applied her mouth. Talk about heavenly! He wondered how she squared these seemingly lewd activities with her disgust for pornography and immorality. Obviously, he thought, she just didn't think about it. Clearly, she was happy, her ramblings about the evils of the World notwithstanding. She told him so. In fact, she came very close to telling him that she loved him. He knew she loved him. He was glad.

  Love is such a wonderful thing. It not only makes happy those in love, or loved, but even the ones around them are affected. For that reason, Cateyo's supervisor, Head Nurse Work, could not bring herself to do any more than warn Cateyo about “unprofessional” attitudes and restrict her access to Joe to normal shift hours. Anyone could see that the patient was responding very well. So, okay, she tolerated a few “extra” hours of attendance. Who can stand in the way of happiness?

  The day of the outing arrived at last.

  18

  Rocky Mountain Rendezvous

  There are certain kinds of winter days in the Ruby Valley that are just awful. Ordinarily winter isn't so bad in the Mountain West, particularly in the sheltered valleys. In fact, it can be beautiful. Low temperatures can be a problem, but except when a cold spell goes on for more than a few days, it's not necessarily awful. Snow can be a nuisance or a threat, but generally is quite pleasant and brings with it recreational opportunities and, most important, is like a deposit in the bank, for summer withdrawal—westerners, particularly those outside the towns, appreciate snow.

  The hunters like snow because it brings the elk down from the high country and you can track a wounded critter. The skiers love snow, of course; the cross-country skiers because it opens up a vast back country. Field mice love snow because it hides them from the hawks and the owls, and they can tunnel to their hearts’ content in the dry grass. For the trout, it closes the streams to the osprey and the great blue herons and it promises summer flows. Trappers and snow-mobilers simply love it. The wind . . . well, the wind is never really welcome. The wind is a killer. Cold is tolerable when it is calm. Every knot of wind makes it less tolerable. Fortunately, the valleys don't get much wind.

  But an overcast day in November, –10 degrees Fahrenheit, twenty-plus knots of wind, stinging snow . . . nobody loves a day like this. The mobile-home dweller for sure doesn't love it. No mobile home seems quite secure against a day like this. The wind has a way of penetrating through the bales of hay and the plywood skirting to freeze the pipes; the structure rocks in the wind like a sleeping car on the Trans-Siberian Express; it's never quite warm enough, or if you have a woodstove, either it's too hot or—all too frequently—you've got to go out and get more firewood.

  That was certainly the way Sally McIntyre looked at it. She got her two preteen kids (Jason and Jennifer) off on the school bus at 7:15, when it was still dark. Then she got ready for work. She was feeding cattle on the Garland Ranch; her ditch-rider job was through for the season. She put on her long johns, an insulated coverall over a wool shirt with hooded sweatshirt and jeans, pulled on her felt-lined Sorel boots and donned a brown duck tin coat. She hauled in more firewood for the airtight stove and set the fire so it would hold for several hours. Her old pickup started readily: She kept it tuned and the battery well-charged (she hauled it inside when the temperature dropped below –15 degrees Fahrenheit); it had an electric engine heater, which she kept plugged into an extension cord. She left it to warm up while she filled a thermos with hot coffee and packed a heavy lunch: two meat loaf sandwiches, an apple, a couple of Snickers candy bars. You burn a lot of calories pitching bales of hay in sub-zero weather.

  All morning she hauled hay and spread it in the fields near the ranch house for several hundred cattle to feed on. They looked pretty miserable. It was just damned unpleasant, although the sun periodically broke through, for ten minutes at a time, between snow squalls blowing off the mountains—what she called a dirty sun, its face never really bright. The thermometer never got close to zero, the wind gusted to thirty knots at times and drove the snow like BB shot. But by midday she was finished and she found herself up on the service road below Garland Butte, not far from where she had found the body in the balmy days of goose summer. She was warm enough, in a general way, but still cold in parts. She had eaten her sandwiches and candy bars while driving between haystacks and feed lots. She had lain in the snow and ice to tighten the chains on the rear wheels of the truck, she had nearly frozen her fingers repairing a gate, and she had gotten a sleeve wet breaking ice in a drinking trough. She was tired and dirty.

  There wasn't a lot of snow in the fields, most of it swept into ditches and drifts. She decided to walk up to the hot springs. She found a half-pint of Jim Beam bourbon in the truck and slipped it into the pocket of the tin coat. It was easy walking, even exhilarating to hike into the spitting wind up the long north slope to the copse of pines behind the Humann cabin on Garland Butte. There were ravens scudding before the wind, but little other evide
nce of life in this bitter season.

  The springs, however, were wonderful. They were well sheltered from the wind by the huge trees, but the snow howled above, the wind tossing the tops of the ponderosas. The steam billowed, one moment as impenetrable as valley fog, the next swept nearly away. Chickadees and a small gang of juncos yammered and peeped around the springs. A small, oblivious downy woodpecker worked stolidly about the lower limbs, tapping, listening, tapping.

  Sally quickly stripped off her clothes and jumped into the hot water. She immersed herself until her body temperature was sufficiently high, then rose out, steaming, while she carefully folded the clothes and found a place in a cleft that wasn't too damp but still warm from the steam, so that the clothes (particularly the boots) wouldn't freeze while she bathed. Then she sank back into the hot water, lying submerged with her head resting against a convenient mossy rock. Her red hair was frozen where it had gotten wet and she lay back, watching through slit eyes the steam rising up among the frosted green boughs and the snow sifting down as it fell out from the wind roaring over the tops. Every once in a while she reached out a parboiled arm and took hold of the whiskey bottle. A sip was about a half-shot and it felt warm all the way down. Then she set the bottle back and sank down, occasionally shifting about, sort of walking and dragging on her back, with her hands on the sandy, stony bottom, pushing herself along, to find a still hotter spring. Once she stood up and walked out of the pool entirely, her naked body glowing in the snow as she walked about, cooling off. Then she plunged back in and swam submerged to the hottest part of the pool, to lie awhile and let her hair freeze.

  This was bliss, but not perfect bliss. She did not, on this occasion, think about the cowboy, Gary, who had been an object of fantasy on her first visit to the springs. She hadn't seen Gary since before the visit and she didn't miss him. Nor did she think for more than a second about her ex-husband. He had been rather like Gary, all cock and no brains, to say nothing of his being too fond of booze coupled with a tendency to punch women. She thought instead of her children, scrappy and independent, but still childishly loving and an almost continuous delight. She thought about her own mother, now sitting around a trailer park in New Mexico with her fourth husband, a retired mailman. A pretty nice old broad, actually, quite funny if a little boozy. The doctors had removed a breast a year ago, but she still smoked a pack and a half a day. Sally worried about her, but not much.