Deadman

by Jon A. Jackson

  This door was kept securely locked, but Helen knew where the key was kept under a nearby rock. She pried up the rock and found the key, then opened the tomblike cavity. Carrying two boxes at a time on the wheelbarrow, she transported the money down the path to the truck. She didn't bother the boxes of Joe's private papers and records, nor his guns—a carefully oiled and wrapped Stoner rifle, a Browning automatic shotgun, a Cobray automatic, and a couple of revolvers.

  It took her a good hour to haul the money down to the yard. The yellow pickup truck accepted ten boxes of cash in its box. She had to rearrange the boxes so that the tonneau could fasten down, but it was easy to do. There were a few boxes of money left up at the cache, but Helen didn't care. She had already loaded the truck with at least ten million dollars, perhaps more. One box that she couldn't quite fit in she regretfully tossed aside. There was no telling how much it contained. Some of the boxes held small bills, fives, tens, and twenties, and probably contained as little as $500,000. Others, with larger bills, could hold nearly a million. It wasn't worth opening them; there was a world of money in the back of the truck.

  She actually backed up over the dead man as she was leaving. Ordinarily that bump and the realization of what she'd done would have appalled her, even made her physically ill. Not any more. It was just another dead body, and she didn't even know who it was or what it meant. She drove forward, passing over the body again on her way out the gate.

  She was halfway down the long road that served as their drive when she slammed on the brakes and the yellow pickup skidded to a halt. What, she asked herself, was she thinking about? What was the use of hauling a naked rapist halfway down the mountain to dispose of him in an out-of-the-way irrigation ditch if she was going to leave another corpse lying in the drive in front of the house?

  Cursing, she turned the truck around and roared back up the road. Despite her feverish haste and anxiety she couldn't help noticing and appreciating the responsiveness of the truck. What a terrific gift! Then she put it out of her mind. Where to stash this new body, so an idle passerby—say, the UPS delivery woman—wouldn't see it and immediately call the cops? She needed at least a little time, a day or two, to get out of this country.

  Once again she got out the wheelbarrow and loaded the body into it with great effort. No point in going up the ridge and down to where she'd disposed of the rapist. The answer was obvious. She pushed the wheelbarrow up the small trail to the cache. It was an agonizing effort, but this body was clothed in a heavy coat and it didn't slip as much as the rapist's naked corpse. She dumped it unceremoniously into the cache, among the guns and the remaining boxes of money. She went back for two more loads, piling the bags and odd gear about the body that she had dumped against one wall of the cache, where it sprawled leaning slightly to one side, propped up by gear. The legs extended straight out before it, the soles of the cowboy boots splayed to either side. She slapped the corpse's greasy cowboy hat onto the lank and tangled hair and left, carefully locking the door and rearranging the debris to mask it. Then she put the key back under the rock. With any luck the body would never be found. It was an ideal tomb. Joe had often explained to her that the mine was so well drained and ventilated that the money and the guns would not be subject to damp, even in the spring runoff. The last thing he wanted was to come back from a trip and discover that rain or melted snow had seeped into his cache and mildew had ruined all his goods. Well, now it would serve a more solemn purpose.

  Somehow she couldn't be grateful to Joe for his foresight. She was angry instead. She had graduated from Michigan State University with honors; why should she have been brought to such a terrible place, to have to dispose of bodies that had nothing to do with her? For some time she had resented the way that Joe, a man with no formal education, had assumed a superior manner. Well, now his stupidity had done him in and she had successfully applied her own ability to think and plan in order to save herself and their goods. Angrily she wheeled the empty wheelbarrow down the path and parked it in the little shedlike garage where it belonged.

  She returned to the cabin and went to Joe's little alcove, where he kept his current bills and paperwork—nothing incriminating here, you could be sure—along with a couple of properly purchased guns, and selected one she'd always liked. It was a Dan Wesson revolver, a .357 magnum, and it came with several interchangeable barrels. She took three of the barrels and tossed them in a bag with a couple of boxes of ammunition. Then she went around and closed and locked the iron-barred shutters—more of Joe's security—and finally pulled all the shades and locked the back door. Everything was turned off, no lights, no burners on. She locked the front door and left, this time for good. She even stopped to lock the gate.

  An hour and a half later, having cruised effortlessly through some spectacular high-range country along Interstate 15, she crossed into Idaho at Monida Pass. According to her map, Salt Lake City was less than three hundred miles south. She would feel much safer there, two states away from Joe's cabin and two dead bodies, anonymous in a large city. She could check into a nice hotel and rest and assess the situation.

  7

  Dream Kill

  Does everybody dream of murder? Joe Service did. Not constantly; that might have driven him completely crazy. But he had a long time to dream, although a coma is not precisely like being asleep and, anyway, not everyone agrees on what a dream is. For the first few hours of his unconsciousness, the brain was doing many things, and there was a kind of shock period in which the semiconscious functions flickered in and out. There were terrible dreams in this period: jumbled, hectic replays of a bullet smashing into one's face, of the hand flying up in a futile gesture, looking over and over again at the hand of the killer, the bullet issuing from the barrel, the bullet spinning toward the face. The eye did see all of that and the brain is certainly capable of breaking down these images and replaying them in slow, slower, and dead slow motion, but it is more probable that Joe Service was more or less willfully creating this horrifying video punishment for himself. Why? Who can say? Perhaps it helped him, steeled him for the work ahead, the need to overcome this trauma.

  The real terror was to come, in the long dreamy days and weeks of coma. These were the dreams of murder. There were several, but one was prime: A child is swinging on a playground swing, usually a little girl of five or six, but sometimes it is a little boy. Another child appears, or rather doesn't quite appear, since he is the dreamer, and he looks out past his own blurry nose at the swinging child. The dreamer is eight and he carries a shotgun. Sometimes he stands behind the swinger, sometimes before. But in each case he raises the shotgun and fires.

  The immediate aftermath is never clear. This isn't one of those modern movies (nor even like the bullet dream) where one is shown in slow motion the impact of the shotgun pellets, the body flying, the blood exploding. In this dream there is a flash and the dreamer is thrown backward by the recoil, the gun flies away. Then the swing is drifting emptily, the open mouths of grownups moaning in dismay and despair, and demanding: Why? Why?

  And the dreamer says: I just wanted to see what it was like. And then the horrible, horrible realization of what has been done. The most central fact being: That person doesn't exist anymore. That person was a human being. That person had a life. Now it is gone. Absolutely gone. And you did it.

  And after a while there would come other dreams of murder. These varied considerably, but all of them featured an assailant who was armed and the dreamer responding to the threat by shooting first. He always shot first. Legally defensible, it was experienced as murder, nonetheless. In the most vivid of these, the dreamer is squatting, his back braced against a wall in a dark room. There is somebody else there, a woman weeping quietly. The dreamer is waiting and he waits a long time, looking about the darkened room fearfully, though not in terror, just alertly. And suddenly a man appears in a doorway, only very close to the floor, on the floor, in fact. And it isn't a whole man, at first. It is a long, snaky arm that carries a
long-barreled pistol that seems like a snake's head, or the fist is the head and the barrel is the tongue, and it slides into the room along the floor, looking about, licking about, and then the fist/head stops and focuses on the squatting dreamer, staring, and the finger begins an agonizing curl. The dreamer registers the threat. And he shoots automatically, without thinking. Several times. The pistol in his own hand jumping and jumping, until the head is dead.

  Except that the head isn't really dead. It takes a long time to die, while the dreamer sits by the body and waits, gun in hand, ready to shoot again. But finally it dies and the dream fades.

  There were more dreams, many more, all of them quite gruesome and awful, but the dreamer didn't really mind. Or, at least, the dreamer was resigned to this parade of nightmares, aware that this was life, some kind of life anyway, and not death.

  It had been clear for some time that Deadman was going to recover. What the doctors couldn't know was just how much and in what way he would recover. But there was considerable brain activity, that was obvious.

  He'd had surgery to reconstruct the jaw that had been fractured by the bullet. The bullet, or rather its various fragments, had been removed from behind the ear, magnetically drawn out of portions of the cranium and the jaw. Some of the fragments had been removed from the brain itself, although there didn't appear to be any loss of brain tissue. Dr. Wilder said it was all still there, though a little scrambled. Where there is no great displacement of tissue, the nerve paths seem quite capable of rerouting and reestablishing themselves, but it is always a chancy, iffy thing. The surgeon was sure that Deadman would be unable to move his right arm and leg, and so it appeared, for a while.

  A portion of the tongue had been destroyed as well, which added to the difficulties of potential speech, although Deadman was a long ways from speech. What he was looking at was a long period of rehabilitation, with the likelihood that he would never fully recover from this horrendous trauma.

  He had several assets, however, in his quest for recovery. One was his remarkable physical condition, now somewhat atrophied from prolonged confinement to bed. Another was Cateyo.

  For reasons she could not really articulate, Cateyo was deeply attracted to this patient. Although he obviously wasn't looking in top form at present, she could see that he was—or had been—a fine-looking young man with a remarkable physique. He wasn't much larger than her own five feet four inches, and that seemed to encourage her, or at least not intimidate her. He had been found in disreputable circumstances, true, which argued a kind of rough existence. Still, he may have been, as she was more than willing to assume, a completely innocent victim of a heinous crime. Probably a good Samaritan, if she could believe the press reports (derived from Jacky Lee's terse account), who had stopped to pick up a hitchhiker who turned out to be a robber and a would-be killer.

  Cateyo was, by contrast, a very sweet, good-tempered young lady who had experienced a kind of religious revival in the last couple of years. Cateyo's father had been deeply religious, a self-taught Montana range preacher. He'd never been ordained nor had he even studied the Bible in a formal way, but he had studied it intensely. Like many another self-taught man, this valley farmer had held idiosyncratic views of the Christian religion. Toward the end he'd been particularly interested in prophecy, poring over Revelation and St. John for some clue to what was going to happen. He was very surprised indeed when the heart attack hit him, while driving a load of hay out to the cows one bitter winter day. He didn't think it was supposed to go like that. There wasn't even time to be annoyed with God before the lights went out. The pickup truck just rambled across the field, dispersing the cows until it buried itself in a snowbank. A couple of hours later, one of his neighbors, or as it was more commonly reported, his neighbor's “Indin,” had noticed the truck in the snowbank, hay bales still aboard although now being eaten at by hungry cattle standing around. The Indin called old Yoder's daughter, away at St. James Hospital, in Butte.

  Cateyo had not previously been interested in religion, in reaction to her father's cranky obsession with it, but not long after his death (her mother having passed on a few years earlier), she met a young man at a party who seemed interested when she told him about some of her father's beliefs. She was attracted to this man who, like her patient, was smallish but intense. Alas, he proved not to be interested in her, it seemed, or a little leery anyway, and he soon moved on. But his interest in her father's ideas—if they could be called that—in a perverse way seemed to validate them, as ideas. Cateyo began to take them more seriously. Like her father she began to read the Bible very closely and develop her own ideas about Christianity. Intense ideas at that. Whereas her father had been fascinated with questions of the end of things, apocalypses and armageddons, she was particularly struck by the notion of new beginnings, rebirth, of a new life. St. Paul particularly fascinated her. She began to research his life and read books from the local Christian bookstore. She felt that she had a new life, all of a sudden, that she wasn't so aimless and lonely.

  Cateyo was a beauty. Pretty, with a full, squarish face and silky fair hair, she had one of those incredible complexions that explain how clichés like “peaches and cream” originate. Her eyes were wide and a clear blue. Her mouth was wide, as well, with full, deep pink lips over perfect white teeth. It's true that she was not very long legged, but she had nice proportions. A tendency toward sturdiness, perhaps, but as she was slim and in excellent shape, “stocky” wasn't likely to be the first word that sprang to the observer's lips . . . “solid,” perhaps. This was just a fine-looking young woman. The mystery was why she was so alone.

  This was one of those occasional, but well-known conundrums, and none of her friends could solve it. Is it possible to be too pretty, too sweet? Or was she just a little intense and introspective at times? Were most men just scared of her, awed by her vibrant loveliness? Or had they too quickly decided that she must be already taken? A fast-forward video of her life would show men rushing up to her, mouths open, stopping, then hurriedly retreating. She didn't have bad breath or an offensive odor. It was something else. It was a mystery.

  At a very early stage, when Deadman was still in a coma, she began to spend more time with him than was normal. Her supervisor, Janice Work, was concerned. Cateyo would come in at odd hours, at night sometimes, and just putter around Deadman's room. Nurse Work found her sitting by his bedside once, holding his hand and talking softly in the dim night. Deadman was totally unconscious. When Janice entered, Cateyo instantly shifted her hand into the position for taking a pulse and lifted her other wrist to check her watch, but Janice was not fooled.

  “Doing pretty well,” Cateyo said, dropping the patient's wrist. “I was just talking at him. I think it helps. He seems to like it.”

  “Sort of like talking to the houseplants while you water them, eh?” Nurse Work said, with an amused smile. “Well, he is kind of a vegetable, isn't he? But he'll come around. Listen, honey, you know better than to get too invested in a patient, don't you?”

  Cateyo laughed unconvincingly. “Me? Oh goodness, Jan. I guess I know better.”

  The next day Janice invited Cateyo over for volleyball and pizza with a group of other nurses and their boyfriends, but while she came and participated, it didn't seem to interest her much. An unattached intern was attracted to her, but she seemed distant and he soon shrugged and abandoned the chase.

  When Deadman came out of the coma, opened his eyes, responded, Cateyo was thrilled. She began to spend more time in his room, after her normal shift. This was more disquieting to Janice Work, but she didn't make much of it. She was too busy herself, and the other nurses were happy to have Cateyo help out, although they naturally kidded her a great deal about her “boyfriend.”

  One afternoon when Deadman was awake, Cateyo puttered about the room talking as usual, addressing him almost mindlessly as “Carmine.” “It's getting on toward winter, Carmine,” she said. “It gets so cold here in Butte, but I suppose you know
that. There will be ice-skating before you know it. The city floods vacant lots, you know. I'd love to take you skating, maybe up on the Hill, around Meaderville. Would you like that? I bet you're a real good skater, Carmine.”

  She happened to glance at him and was stunned to see him shake his head—carefully, as if it might fly apart—and close his eyes when she called him Carmine.

  “Not Carmine?” she asked, instantly receptive.

  Slight nod.

  “Deadman?” she asked, with a dubious, not quite approving tone.

  He shrugged minutely and tilted his head as if it didn't matter.

  Some days later, when she was once again pursuing this question of a name, he made a hand gesture, as if writing, and she brought him a pad and pencil. He struggled to make some kind of legible signs, but it was beyond him. Frustrated, he let the pencil drop, and it rolled off the bed onto the floor. But less than an hour later he made another attempt and this time succeeded in inscribing something that looked like a series of waves. Cateyo carried the scribble home and studied it, concluding that it meant “newman,” or possibly, “human.”

  “Newman?” Cateyo asked her patient the next day, holding up the note. The patient stared at her, expectantly or, it may have been, blankly. “New man?”

  The more-or-less shrug, the tilt of the head.

  It was more than enough for Cateyo. “Yes,” she said, emphatically and approvingly, “you are a new man. You have come out of your old life. You are born again. Hunh?”