Dance for the Dead

by Thomas Perry

  If he managed to plant himself so that he was impossible to ignore while she was out front mowing her lawn and ask her a question like, “What are you doing these days?” she would say in her friendliest way, “Mowing my lawn.” Then she would flick the conversation out of his hands, fold it into a joke, and toss it back to him. “When I get done with this one I’m heading over to your house to do yours. You’re turning that place into an eyesore and lowering property values from here to Buffalo.”

  It was around this time that Jake had begun to notice the visitors. Maybe they had been coming for a long time, and he hadn’t noticed because he was still going to work every day. But there they were. The strangers would come to her front door. Some were women, but most of them were men. The door would open and they would disappear inside. Sometimes late at night he would hear a car engine and then they would be gone. A lot of the time Jane would be gone too, and not return for a month or more.

  After a couple of years of this he pretended he didn’t know where the boundary was between small talk and prying. He asked her where she was getting the money to live. She said she had a “consulting business.” That pushed Jake four or five steps past the boundary and made him determined to find out what was going on. Various theories suggested themselves. She obviously had plenty of money that she wasn’t prepared to account for in a way that might set anyone’s mind at ease.

  He had worried himself five years closer to the grave before he heard her burglar alarm go off one night. He rushed to his corner window and flipped the switch to turn on the porch light that he used so seldom he wasn’t even sure the 250-watt bulb was good anymore. There, caught in the sudden glare, were not one or two but four men. The one nearest him reached into his coat and produced a pistol. It wasn’t the standard revolver the Deganawida police carried. It was big and square like the .45 Colts they used to issue in the army. Jake still considered it a great piece of fortune that the man’s second reaction to the light had been to turn his face and then his tail rather than to open fire.

  After that night he had sat Jane down and demanded answers to the questions he had been asking less and less politely for years. The ones he got weren’t the sort that would induce a reasonable person to sleep much better. A man who had the sort of enemies other people only dream about had managed to get himself tracked to her door, and the four of them had tried to break in to see if there was anything in there to help them learn where he was.

  Now Jake took his bushel basket and dumped the leaves into the big barrel by the garage. This part of the country was different from other places because the Indians had never left. There were so many differences between groups—the English from Massachusetts who had fought here in the Revolution and seen how much better this land was; the Irish recruited from their bogs to dig the Erie Canal, supposedly because somebody figured they could survive the swamps but maybe because nobody cared if they didn’t; the German farmers who arrived as soon as there was enough water in the ditch to float their belongings here on canal boats—that the Indians weren’t much stranger to them than they were to each other. After that the rest of the world arrived.

  The names of most places stayed pretty much whatever the Seneca had called them, and the roads were just improvements of the paths between them. The cities were built on the sites of Seneca villages beside rivers and lakes, plenty of them with Senecas still living in them, at first just a trading post and then a few more cabins, and then a mill.

  Even now things that people thought of as regional attitudes and expressions came straight from the Senecas. When anybody from around here wanted to say they were still present at the end of a big party, they would say they had “stayed until the last dog was hung.” Most of them probably had no idea anymore that they were talking about the Seneca New Year’s celebration in the winter, where on the fifth day they used to strangle a white dog and hang it on a pole. Nobody had done that for at least a hundred years.

  It was easy to forget about Indians as Indians or Poles as Poles most of the time, so people did, but whenever Jake got to the point where he was pretty sure everybody was just about the same, one of them did something that was absolutely incomprehensible unless you compared it with what her great-grandpa used to do.

  Jane awoke suddenly in the darkness. Her hands could feel the stitched outlines of the flowers on the quilted bedspread her mother had made. She was puzzled. It took her a moment to remember why she was in Deganawida, sleeping fully dressed. She could tell that her mind had been struggling with something in the darkness, but whatever it was, she had not been able to bring it back with her this time. There was a sound still in the air, maybe left over from the dream, and then she heard it again: the ring of the doorbell.

  She stepped to the window and looked down at the front steps. She could see the faint glow of the porch light on Carey McKinnon’s high forehead. He was carrying a big brown shopping bag. She hurried to the mirror, turned on the light, brushed her hair quickly, then rushed into the bathroom and reached for the handle of her makeup drawer, but the ring came again. She had no time.

  She came down the stairs, crossed the living room, and swung the door open. She stayed back out of the reach of the bright light on the porch and said, “Oh, too bad. I was hoping it was Special Delivery.”

  “No, you weren’t,” said Carey. “They don’t come at eleven o’clock at night. I happened to be passing by on the way home from work, and I saw your car was back.”

  “No, you weren’t,” she said. “Deganawida is north of the hospital. Amherst is due east.”

  “I had to stop near here to buy myself these flowers.” He opened the bag and held up a dozen white roses. “Since you’re up anyway, could you do me a favor and put them someplace?”

  “Oh, all right.” She reached out and took them. “I suppose you’d better come in while I do it. I don’t want you scaring Mrs. Oshinski’s Dobermans.”

  He stepped in and closed the door behind him. She knew she had imagined he had ducked to come through the doorway; he had just looked down to plant his feet on the mat. But he had always given the impression that he was a big boy and still growing, and it had never gone away, ten years after college, when his sandy hair was already thinning a little at the crown.

  He followed her into the kitchen. “So how was your trip?”

  “Who said I was on a trip?”

  “Oh. Then how did your car like its month in the shop?”

  “I was on a trip,” she conceded. “California. It’s pretty much as advertised.”

  He nodded. “Warm.”

  “Yeah. What’s a doctor doing coming home this late? House calls?”

  “Dream on. I’m working the emergency room. Night is the time when roads get slippery, fevers go up, people clean loaded guns.”

  Jane snipped the stems of the roses and skillfully arranged them in a cloisonné vase that had been her grandmother’s, then placed the vase on the dining room table.

  “Beautiful,” said Carey. “Good place for them, too.”

  “They’re right where you won’t forget them when you leave.”

  “No, you might as well keep them. They’re all wet.” He pretended to fold up his shopping bag. “Oh, I forgot. They gave me this too.” He held up a bottle of champagne. “Two-for-one sale or something. I couldn’t understand the lady in the store. Thick Polish accent.”

  “Your mother was Polish.”

  “Was she? I couldn’t understand her either.” He walked to the sink, popped the cork on the champagne, and plucked two glasses out of the cupboard. “Explains a lot. Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me. Nice woman, though.”

  Jane had to step into the light to take her glass. Carey clinked it gently with his; then followed her into the living room.

  “So why are you working the emergency room?” she asked as she curled her legs under her on the couch. “Finally piss somebody off?”

  A change came into his voice as it always did when he talked about
his work. “I decided I needed a refresher course, so I took over the evening shift a couple of weeks ago. If Jake asks, I’ve still got plenty of time to check my regular patients for suspicious moles.”

  “Why does a young quack like you need a refresher course? Doze off in medical school?”

  “I guess I should have said ‘a reminder course.’ It’s basic medicine. The door at the end of the hall slides open, and in walks Death. You get to look him in the eye, spin him around, and kick his ass for him. It’s exhilarating. Besides, the regular guy asked me to help him out. E.R. doctors last about as long as the average test pilot, and he’s approaching the crash-and-burn stage. They don’t always win.” He seemed to notice her listening to him. “You look awful, by the way.”

  “Sweet of you to say so. That’s how women look when you wake them up.”

  He turned his head to the left to call to an invisible person. “Nurse! More light!” Her eyes involuntarily followed his voice, and he turned on the lamp above him with his right. “Wow. Pretty good contusions and abrasions. Finally piss somebody off?”

  She knew she wasn’t going to get the car accident story past Dr. Carey McKinnon. “I was mugged outside my hotel.”

  “I’m sorry, Jane,” he said, tilting his head to see her more clearly. “What happened?”

  “It was nothing, really. He came out from behind one of those pillars in the garage under the hotel to grab my purse. I yelled and the parking attendant came. He got away.”

  “Is he all right?”

  She frowned. “Why would anybody say that?”

  “Your hands.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I did resist a little. I’m not dumb enough to die for a purse, but he scared me.”

  Carey was already on his feet and moving toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I left my bag in the car. I always have one with me in case there’s a chance to bill somebody.”

  “You’re a dear friend, but I like you because your big feet tromp my snow down in the winter so I can get my car out. Who said I wanted medical treatment from you?”

  “I just need to bring it in. Old Jake probably recognized my car, and he’s handy enough to break in for the drugs.”

  Carey stepped outside. She heard his trunk slam, and then his feet coming back up on the porch. In a moment he was inside, the black bag was open at her feet, and he was sitting beside her turning her head gently from side to side. He took a bottle out of his bag and poured something out of it onto a ball of cotton, He swabbed her face with the cold liquid and then stared into her eyes with a little flashlight. He took her hands in his and studied them, then bent her wrists a couple of times, staring as though he could see through to her bones.

  “Doctor?” she said. “Just tell me, will I be able to play the piano?”

  “Heard it. You couldn’t before.” He didn’t smile. “The wrist is only a mild sprain,” he said. “It’ll be okay in a few days. The lacerations on the knuckles look good already—probably because you didn’t put makeup on them. You’re lucky. Human teeth are an incredible source of infection.” He took a small aerosol can out of the bag and sprayed her hands. It felt colder than the disinfectant, but as it dried, the pain seemed to go away. He lifted her hand and kissed the fingertips. “I just like the taste of that stuff.” He looked at her cheerfully. “You want to know the truth, it helps things heal. We don’t tell people that, of course.”

  Jane couldn’t think of a retort. In all of the twelve or thirteen years she had known Carey McKinnon, they had been buddies. They had kissed hello and goodbye, but he had been the friend she could call so she didn’t have to go to a movie alone or eat at a table for one. The champagne was a pleasant surprise, but the roses brought with them a new ambiguity, and it was growing and getting more confusing.

  “Stand up,” he said. She stood up. He moved her arms and felt the elbows, pressed the radius and ulna between his fingers. He put his big hand under her rib cage and poked her a couple of times with the other. “Does that hurt?”

  “Uh! Of course it hurts. Cut it out,” she said. At another time she would have poked him back, but now he was being a doctor—at least she thought he was.

  “Your liver didn’t pop loose, anyway,” he said. “You can have champagne without fear of death.”

  “Oh?” she said. “How long have I got?”

  “What do I care?” He sipped his champagne. “I’ll have been dead for twenty years. You pamper yourself like a racehorse, and women handle the wear and tear better than men.” His eyes swept up and down her body with a frankness that she wasn’t positive was detachment. “It’s just a better machine.”

  “Then you must really be walking around in a piece of junk,” she said. She stretched her sore arms and rubbed her shoulders.

  “That’s only muscle pain,” he said.

  “Well, don’t sound disappointed. It’s the best pain I can manage right now.”

  “A big shot of adrenaline comes in and your muscles go from rest to overperformance in a second or two, and they feel the strain. In two days you’ll be back out there teaching truck drivers to arm wrestle, or whatever it is you do.”

  “Consulting.”

  “Insulting them—whatever,” he said. He started to close his bag, but then spotted something. He picked up a clear bottle with a liquid in it that looked like vinegar. “Try this stuff.”

  “What is it?”

  He handed it to her. “Don’t look free samples in the mouth. Doctors get an incredible number of them, and once in a while you get something you can give your friends legally. This stuff is terrific.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It’s not medicine. It’s just glorified massage oil. It’s got a very mild analgesic in it, so it puts a deep warmth on sore muscles.”

  Jane opened the bottle and sniffed it. “You’re not lying, anyway. It smells too good to be medicine.”

  He took it back. “Come on,” he said. “Lie down and I’ll put some on you.”

  “Lie down, Carey?” she asked. “Could you be a little more specific, please? Or maybe less specific?”

  “I assure you, madam, I am a qualified physician. Board-certified. Climb up there on the board.” He pointed to the dining room table.

  She walked uncertainly in that direction and stared at the table skeptically. “The table? Are you sure?”

  “Well, if I asked you to lie down on your bed, would you do it?”

  “Maybe,” she said. Then she wondered how much she had actually meant by that. If it wasn’t what she was afraid it was, why had she hesitated?

  He said, “Okay, if it’s not occupied, let’s use it.” He walked to the stairs.

  Jane took a big gulp of her champagne. They had been friends for so long that the possibility of a sudden change was unsettling. She didn’t want to lose him. She picked up the bottle and followed. “I was thinking about you a few days ago,” she said. “I was talking to a little boy.”

  “Tall or short?”

  “Uh … tall, I guess, for his age. He’s eight.”

  “Tell him surgery, then. Dermatologists are short, as a rule. Surgeons are tall.”

  He stopped at the door of her bedroom, and she edged past him and sat on the bed. She looked up at him. “Are you sure you’re not just trying to get funny with me?”

  Carey sipped his glass of champagne thoughtfully. “It’s crossed my mind. Always does. We never have before, and this may not be the best time to start. I sure don’t want to lose you just because we disagreed on how to go about it. It’s kind of tricky, and you’re a very critical person.”

  “I am not,” she said. “But what if it turned out to be an awful mistake? Would you still be able to call me up when you wanted to go someplace where no respectable person would go with you?”

  “It’s hard to know. How about you? If you needed somebody to make fun of, would it still be me?”

  She stared at him for a moment. “I don�
��t know. I guess we should talk about it sometime when we’re not exhausted and the bottle’s still corked.” She flopped onto the bed on her stomach with her arms bent and her hands under her chin. “Right now I need an old friend who’s willing to rub my sore back.”

  He sat on the bed beside her, lifted the sweatshirt a few inches, poured a little of the oil in his hand, and then slowly and gently rubbed it into the small of her back in a circular motion.

  “Ooh,” she sighed. “That’s good.”

  He worked patiently, his strong hands softly kneading the sore muscles in exactly the right spots, working up higher on her back now, to the shoulder blades. She could feel the tight, hard knots of muscle relaxing under his touch. The hands kept moving inward toward the tender muscles along the spine. When he stopped to pour more oil into his palm, Jane pulled the sweatshirt up almost to her shoulders, hesitated, then slipped it up over her head and set it beside her. She was naked to the waist now, but it had seemed that making him work under a shirt was idiotic. If Carey saw her breasts, he saw her breasts.

  His hands were on her shoulders, and then the connecting muscles to her neck and then along the back of her neck to her scalp. She felt goose bumps and shivered, then relaxed again. She was so loose and at ease now that all the muscles on the top half of her body were on the edge of some kind of sleep, a paralysis of laziness, so happy not moving that they didn’t quite belong to her anymore. They were just there waiting for him to touch them again.

  Carey said, “How’s it going so far?”

  “I’m ready to die now,” she announced. “Just give me more champagne and keep rubbing, and you can tell them to pull the trigger whenever.”

  He worked back down her spine, and she began to imagine that she could see him clearly from the position of his hands on her skin. She remembered telling Timmy about him. She had said he was special, and he was. Without warning, the word angel appeared in her mind, and she laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” she answered with the smile still in her voice. “You’re being an angel.”