A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  Without much concentration I saw that every single time I fell asleep I dreamed about the 1920s—or at least I dreamed about certain events as described to me by my mother. God only knew what was truth and what was fiction. My subconscious was only recalling what it had been told.

  I had the distinct sensation that I had forgotten something very important. I couldn’t quite get a grasp on what it was, whether it was something from one of the dreams or something my mother had told me or something that had happened the night I’d been shot. It was often said that gunshot victims don’t remember much around the time of the bullet. A kind of envelope of calm, sometimes as much as a half an hour or more, surrounded the impact of the shot. But I’d been shot in my sleep, or so I’d been told. How anyone would know such a thing was not clear to me at that moment.

  Long ago, Sheriff Skidmore Needle, then only a deputy, had told me that being shot in the real world was not much like what most people saw on television. For example, the mere awareness of the event could have a bearing on the victim’s reaction to it. That meant, he’d said, it was possible for a person unaware of being shot to have a better chance of surviving than someone who’d stared down the barrel. There would be no fear of death, no sight of blood, no pain—all of which would play a factor in the damage a gunshot might do. There would even be an absence of preconceptions about how a person is supposed to react when shot. Finally add to that the fact that the body produces chemicals very powerful in preventing great harm, and I began to realize how lucky I’d been. And while adrenaline alone might be enough to keep a mortal wound at bay, alcohol was a powerful anesthetic and had probably kept me even less troubled by pain and shock.

  I remembered that Skidmore had told me all of these facts over drinks, leading us to conclude at the time that a more or less steady supply of applejack just made good sense in the prevention of gunshot trauma. I had substituted a French country drink on the night in question, but I considered the theory proven. I was, after all, alive.

  I slightly adjusted the needle in my right arm and sat back in the bed. Eyes on the ceiling, I gave stern consideration to my perennial notion of dreams: that they were always a message from the subconscious to the conscious mind.

  A dream is a telegram composed in baffling poetry, I told myself. Decipher the poetry: get the message.

  But these dreams were influenced by actual events. They weren’t purely Freudian or Jungian. They were half-remembered stories, dim angles on true history. And how could I decode their message without the attendant facts?

  I would have to start by trying to recall the historical data. I pulled the bedsheet up a little, tried to relax and dig into the world’s most uncomfortable exercise: remembering things my mother told me.

  The first thing that came to me, oddly, was her indignation at the very word history.

  “Why isn’t it herstory in my case? In my personal case? It’s my story and I’m her.”

  “If the word history is gender biased,” I had responded, “and maybe it is, then the mere word herstory is not sufficient to balance the long centuries of unfairly tipped scales concerning the events on our planet—to date.”

  “Then I think,” she fired back, “that a person might be forgiven for referring to an account such as mine by using the word mystory.”

  “I see what you’re doing,” I told her with a growing ire. “You’ve done it before. I see that that the difference between mystory and mystery is only a single vowel.”

  “Ergo,” she would conclude, “my story is in fact, a mystery.”

  Difficult as it might have been for most people to believe, my mother and I had indulged in variations of that same dialogue perhaps a hundred times.

  Then, for no reason I could discern at that moment, another conversation came back to me.

  I remembered sitting in our kitchen eating grits. I couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve. It was early morning, the lights weren’t on, and ambient glow from the rising sun was rosy and gold. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my flannel shirt and jeans. The bowl was as white as the grits and they were salty; creamy from melted butter. My mother was standing at the sink looking out the window at the new light on the lawn. She had on a black dress, but I couldn’t remember why. She usually wore lighter prints.

  “I heard a preacher on the radio this morning,” she told me. “He said that if God had wanted the races to live together, He would have made us all the same color.”

  Then she started laughing so much that I thought she might choke.

  “It is my belief,” she managed to wheeze, “that God went scrambling for His Glasses when He heard that one.”

  I looked up from my grits with an expression that could only have been called, even at my young age, wry. “Why would he do that, Mother?”

  “Because we are all the same color. We’re just different shades. I mean, nobody’s green, right?”

  I knew she had something else in mind. She was trying to make some other point. Whenever she mentioned God she was making a point.

  “Is that preacher out of his mind?” she went on. “I believe that God adjusted His Glasses when he heard that moron, and then He took out His Big Giant Joke Book. He wrote down another couple of lines about just how funny human beings are, and then He turned his attention somewhere else. A distant star, maybe. Personally I’m not certain if He’s ever going to look back this way and I wouldn’t blame Him if He didn’t.”

  And so it went, in my darkened hospital room. For hours I endured confused “gusts of memory,” as Proust reports, that never lasted for more than a few seconds. Then, as he also did, I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream, like rooms in winter. I sorted through one image after another, lingering only long enough to be irritated, never long enough to actually absorb. My brain was a black cricket on a hot hearth, and would not stay still no matter how I tried to calm it down.

  9.

  At last, after a span of time longer than it took to create the Universe, seven o’clock sunrise came, and with it, Sheriff Needle.

  He barreled into the room and began talking as if he were continuing a conversation instead of starting one.

  “I want you to listen to this,” he was saying as he pulled up the chair and sat down, “and tell me anything you can think of, no matter what.”

  “Morning, Sheriff,” I said, sitting up.

  Nurse Chambers breezed in with a paper cup and straw. “Breakfast,” she said brightly.

  “It’s the 911 tape,” Skidmore went on, “and I’ve listened to it about a thousand times, but you know that story. I can look for a matching sock for half an hour and Girlinda can walk by the drawer, reach in, pick out the other sock, and shoot into the kitchen without ever breaking stride.”

  Girlinda Needle, the sheriff’s wife, twice shot, once because of me, was the strongest woman I had ever met, possibly the strongest woman on the planet. Also a superior cook and the proud owner of the largest contiguous series of burial plots in the county. She had a very big family.

  “So you want me to listen to the tape,” I concluded.

  “Sometimes you need a fresh look,” Nurse Chambers sympathized. “A new pair of eyes. Or, I guess, ears, in this case. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even recognize the voice.”

  “Right.” Skid fiddled with the handheld tape recorder.

  “He had a bad night,” Nurse Chambers confided to Skidmore.

  “I know,” he whispered back. “They told me.”

  “I can hear you,” I said. “I’m out of my coma. At the moment.”

  I accepted the cup from Nurse Chambers but did not drink.

  “Okay,” Skid said impatiently, “here it is. This is the voice of the assailant. The man who shot you.”

  The static from the tiny tape recorder sounded like distant rain, and then the operator’s voice stabbed the air.

  “911. What is your emergency?”

  “Dead man.”

  “Sir?”

/>   “There’s a dead man up on the top of Blue Mountain. Don’t know the address.”

  “Who’s calling? Please identify yourself.”

  “Never you mind who this is. I just killed that Fever Devilin. Shot him good in the heart.”

  “You are at the home of Dr. Devilin?”

  “So you think you know who he is, do you? Well you don’t know all there is to know. If you did, you wouldn’t call him a doctor, you’d call him a gob of spit.”

  “Are you calling to report—?”

  “I’m calling to tell you that he’s dead!” the voice interrupted. “And good riddance!”

  “Dr. Devilin is dead?”

  “Yes. Damn. I shot him and I wanted everyone to know I did it! You spread it around.”

  There was a buzzing noise.

  “Hello?” the operator said.

  Skid snapped off the recorder. “That’s it.”

  The air in the room suddenly seemed grimy because of the sound of the assailant’s voice. A contagious hatred had spewed out of his mouth, into the phone, and onto the tape. Even though we were in a hospital I had the sudden urge to sterilize everything in the room.

  “So.” Skid set the tape recorder in his lap. “Ever hear that voice before?”

  “I’d remember,” I assured him. “He really, really doesn’t like me.”

  “That’s not anybody from up here,” Stacey said grimly.

  “Agreed,” Skid said softly. “I mean, you might have made some enemies, same as I have, by rooting out miscreants, but I don’t know anyone around who would feel this way about you.”

  “Well,” I said, staring at my paper cup breakfast, “if it’s someone I don’t know, and I believe that’s the case, then this person’s feelings about me would be more about his own inventions than my actions.”

  “Yes,” Skid said, squinting.

  “Maybe it’s somebody from your old university days,” Nurse Chambers ventured boldly. “Winnie’s always telling me that the university is pit of flesh-eating vipers.”

  We both stared.

  “Well, that’s what he says.”

  She was right, of course. I had heard him say that phrase on more than one occasion, and I had experienced the snake pit myself. It just sounded odd coming from Stacey.

  “Didn’t we make a deal about your not ever calling him ‘Winnie’?” I asked softly.

  “Dr. Andrews,” she said to Skidmore, winking.

  “Okay,” Skidmore said, “but does she have a point?”

  “Not really,” I told them both. “Academic rivalries are personal. I’d recognize the voice of someone from the university who hated me that much.”

  Skid nodded. “Plus, the man on this tape doesn’t sound like the scholarly type. I reckon a college professor can come up with a better insult than ‘gob of spit.’”

  “Possibly,” I demurred. “But that particular phrase is exactly what Marlon Brando called Slim Pickens in the movie One-Eyed Jacks. Slim Pickens played the sheriff.”

  “What?” Nurse Chambers placed one hand on one hip.

  “It’s the only movie that Brando directed, I think,” I reported. “It’s a kind of Jacobean revenge drama played out in the old American west. Karl Malden is the bad guy, and his character is called ‘Dad.’ I mean, you don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Nurse Chambers asked the sheriff.

  “No idea,” he answered, standing. “But I’m disappointed that he doesn’t recognize the voice. That would have made things a whole lot easier.”

  “It’s not a very good recording,” Nurse Chambers told us, turning to check my IVs. “I hear myself on those things? Doesn’t even sound like me. I hate it.”

  “Wait.” Skid looked at the tape recorder. “Wait.”

  He fished in his pocket and withdrew another tape. He took the 911 tape out of the recorder and put the new tape in. Then he clicked the machine on and held it close to my face.

  “Say something,” he told me.

  “I agree with Stacey,” I said, smiling at her. “I hate the way I sound on these things.”

  Skid punched the off button, then the rewind. We listened.

  “Say something.”

  “I agree with Stacey. I hate the way I sound on these things.”

  “Oh my,” Stacey said softly, “that doesn’t sound anything like either one of you. I just heard you record it and I couldn’t identify those voices.”

  “Me too.” Skid stared at the tape recorder. “So, basically, we’ve got nothing.”

  “Well,” I began, “that tape doesn’t appear to help, but—”

  “What?” Skid put the little tape player in his front pocket.

  “Didn’t I mention something to you about a tin box?” I asked.

  “You did.” Skidmore looked at Stacey.

  “And didn’t you tell me that you didn’t find it on the mantel in my living room?” I tried to clear my head, distinguish between strange dreams and waking events.

  “We didn’t find anything like that in our original investigation,” he said impatiently.

  “Look,” I interrupted, shifting uncomfortably in my bed, “I realize that you think I’ve lost my mind, or some of it anyway. But that tin box had things in it that were important.”

  “Legal documents,” Skid said.

  “Money,” Stacey guessed.

  “No.” I struggled with my body in the bed. “I—it was something I found out about a long time ago, and it was very important to me when I was younger. But then when I left home, and I thought I was never coming back, I forgot about it. Or I deliberately put it out of my mind. I’m still trying to piece it all together. I just can’t quite remember everything.”

  “Fever,” Skidmore began quietly. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I know.” I sat back, staring up at the ceiling. “I’m not sure I do either.”

  “You’ve been having funny dreams,” Stacey said, arms folded. “I’ve come in here when you’re asleep and you talk up a storm.”

  “I have been dreaming very vividly,” I agreed.

  “That’s in all the books about coma trauma: when you wake up, you have all sorts of crazy nightmares, sometimes about the things that happened around you when you were unconscious. Happens all the time.”

  “How many coma patients have you actually dealt with?” I asked her.

  “Including you?” She jutted her chin in my direction, half flirtatiously, half defiantly.

  “All right.” I smiled. “Including me.”

  She smiled back “Exactly one. But I’ve been reading up on it because of you.”

  “Well, clearly the books are correct. But these dreams, they’re very confusing. I have the idea that they somehow relate to the man who shot me. I believe that they have to do with something important about—my family.”

  “Why’s that?” Skid’s voice was filled with indulgent patience.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I found a tin box when I was eleven years old. It upset my mother. She showed me a letter that someone had written to me, but it wasn’t signed and she hadn’t written it—she told me that my father hadn’t written it either.”

  Stacey put her hand on my shoulder. “Easy. You’re getting a little agitated. Hear the heart monitor?”

  One of the machines in the room was beeping urgently.

  “But what I’m saying is—”

  “That—what? There’s something in this box that made the man shoot you.” Skid was doing his best to follow my admittedly muddled train of thought.

  “Something my mother didn’t want me to find out. I remember that very clearly. She was very insistent on my not pursuing—something in the contents of the box wanted me to pursue—I’m trying to remember exactly, but the letter was anonymous, and my mother was worried.”

  “Yeah.” Skid stood up. “This doesn’t make much sense at all. I believe you need to rest up, get better
; get out of the hospital. And when you go back home, then maybe you can start thinking about how to make a contribution to my investigation into your assault.”

  “But, listen, this is a contribution,” I said, trying to keep him from leaving.

  “Based on your mother’s stories?” He shook his head. “I can’t believe—just let me remind you that your mother was very—what’s the word?”

  “Theatrical,” I suggested.

  “I was going to say crazy,” he continued, “but have it your way: she was a very dramatic woman. I always thought there was something wrong with her, and I liked her a whole lot better than you did.”

  “True,” I admitted. “So why am I dreaming about things she told me when I was eleven years old? All I can think about now is her strange behavior after I found that damned box. Why is that?”

  “Fever,” Nurse Chambers said sweetly, “sugar, you got shot in the gut, you died, you got frozen, you were brought back to life, and then you were in a coma for three months. It’s kind of a miracle that you can think of anything at all. If you add in the question ‘Why?’ then I believe you are only asking for a whole lot of trouble that you don’t really need right now.”

  “Amen.” Skid turned and headed for the door.

  I let out a sigh. “You’re right, of course.”

  The beeping machine began to calm down.

  “Good.” Skid headed for the door.

  “But I’m telling you that if you could find that box—”

  “Look,” Skid snapped, stopping in the doorway, “that’s what I was trying to tell you a second ago before you interrupted me—which you always do: after you mentioned it the first time, I went back to your house and looked again. No mantel clock; no tin box.”

  “No clock?” I blinked.

  “He took your clock?” Stacey asked.

  “Why would he take my clock?” I sniffed, starting to feel a familiar sensation of drowsiness. “Why would he break into my house, kill me, and take my clock? Maybe there’s something on the clock or in the clock … I mean, it was certainly an odd place to leave a box filled with important papers for all those years: on the mantel behind an old clock.”