by Strnad, Jan
***
It was as if someone had left the window to Peg's brain open and flies had gotten in, but it was only her own thoughts that were swarming. She was worried about Tom's growing bond with the Ganger boy, she kept flashing on the morning's altercation at the diner, she didn't know what to make of John Duffy's miraculous rise from the dead, and there was the persistent and familiar question that cropped up at every occurrence of stress: What does this mean for Annie?
If people could come back from the dead, couldn't they just as easily...even more easily...come out of comas?
Why was John Duffy, a known wife-abuser, chosen for this miracle over her own sweet, innocent baby?
Did anything at all make sense? Or was the whole world some sort of monstrous practical joke on humankind?
Against the buzz of thoughts like these, who ordered dressing on their salad and who wanted it on the side could not compete. On top of that the diner was uncommonly busy, and John Duffy was the hot topic at every table. Peg found herself at times wishing the man had stayed dead.
People tend to gather together in a crisis and the fact that they were gathering now made Duffy's rise that much more ominous. Peg had to make more apologies to customers that afternoon than she'd made all year to date, which Ma was quick to point out to her. She looked so miserable, though, that he offered to call in Cindy Robertson and let Peg off early. She took Ma up on his offer and left as soon as Cindy arrived. She drove straight to the hospital to check on Annie.
She noticed Brant's car in the lot and learned that he was in Doc's office. The admissions nurse told her that Brant and Doc had just returned from a confab with Reverend Small and Peg could guess the subject of the conversation. She knew Brant well enough to take his visit to a church as another bad omen.
Her outlook, then, was bleak when she stepped into Annie's room and saw the stranger bending low over the bed, obviously not a nurse or even an orderly. She couldn't see his face or what he was doing, but he was dressed in worn-out blue jeans and a shirt that badly needed laundering and Peg's protective instincts kicked into overload. She yelled out, "Hey!" and marched in ready to leap on his back.
The stranger whipped around like a mongoose at the hiss of a cobra. "Mom!" Tom said, "Jesus, you scared the shit out of me!"
Peg was suddenly lightheaded. I didn't even recognize my own son, she thought. There had been a time when she could have picked him out on a playground among thirty other kids at five hundred feet. She'd have known the way he ran, the way he stood and fidgeted with his fingers, his laugh even when mingled with a dozen others. She'd known his every pair of pants and every shirt and how long he'd worn them without changing. She could have picked out his silhouette at twilight, running toward her along the sidewalk or dangling from a tree limb or just sitting on the riverbank lost in his own thoughts. That was years ago, and every year since had seen that intimacy erode, had brought her closer to this single, pulse-fluttering, upside-down moment when she looked upon her son and beheld a stranger.
Oh, shit, she thought, I've lost him in my own mind.
"She isn't breathing right," Tom said. "Listen."
Peg put her ear to Annie's chest and listened to the rasp of her breath. "Get Doc," Peg said, and Tom dashed out of the room. He returned with the doctor and Peg spied Brant hovering around the doorway, watching.
Doc put a stethoscope to Annie's chest and gave a listen. "We detected this earlier," he said. "I think it's just a little water that's collected in the lungs. We x-rayed her to check for pneumonia, but the x-rays were clear. We're giving her a diuretic now. If the drug doesn't take care of the problem, we'll go in with a tube, but I'd like to avoid that if possible."
After a few more reassurances Doc left and Brant entered.
"I don't want to intrude," he said. Peg told him not to be silly and to pull up a chair.
"I understand you've become a church-goer," she said.
Brant laughed and told her about his visit to the Duffys and his and Doc's conversation with Reverend Small, and Peg filled Brant in on the general buzz at the diner. Tom listened with what Peg took as polite interest. She expected him to excuse himself at any moment, but maybe the gathering instinct was working on him, too. Something had brought him to the hospital, and something held him here now. For some reason the image of crows grouping on a wire before a storm came into Peg's mind.
"The big question in town," Peg said, "seems to be, 'why Duffy?' What makes him so special?"
"It certainly wasn't his karma," Brant agreed.
Tom studied the pattern of the tiles on the floor. As usual, the populace of Anderson was off on a tangent. Duffy wasn't the only one chosen, but how was anyone except Tom and the other boys to know that? Not that Deputy Hawg was any more deserving of divine intervention than John Duffy was, but if anybody was likely to figure this thing out, it might be Brant, and he was as far off base as everyone else.
As usual, Tom felt himself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Brant needed facts that only Tom was able to provide...well, that only Tom was likely to provide. He might do it, too, if Peg weren't there. She'd run to the Sheriff for sure, Galen being involved and all. For that matter, so might Brant. Then again, Brant would grasp the concept of confidential sources, or should, anyway. There was a time when Tom would've taken Brant into his confidence immediately, but that was before the "My Town" business. Brant might not have the guts to do what was needed now, but who knew what was needed? Damn, this shit was confusing. Tom felt himself sliding into the Blacklands, but he fought it. This wasn't the time or place....
"Tom?"
Tom started. He hadn't noticed that Brant was speaking to him.
"Sorry," Tom said.
"Lost in thought?" Peg asked. "I know how it is. I was the same way all day."
"I was just going to get us some coffee," Brant said. "Want a cup? It's even worse than Ma's."
"I'll go with you," Tom said. He got out of his chair and then for some reason he bent down and kissed Peg on the forehead. It took her by surprise. He hadn't done that since...ever. "Back in a minute," he said.
"I'll be here," Peg said.
Brant and Tom left and Peg was grateful for a few minutes alone. For one thing, she felt like she was going to cry, and she wanted to give in to it this time, and she wanted to have it over with before they got back.
***
"What's on your mind?" Brant asked.
He and Tom stood in front of the coffee machine in the waiting room. Brant held one cup of foul black liquid in his hand and another was filling as they watched. Clearly there was something Tom wanted to tell him that he couldn't bring up in front of his mother. While eager to rebuild the bridge between himself and Tom, Brant still hoped that Tom's next sentence wouldn't contain the phrases "a few bucks," "there's this girl," or "a single homosexual experience." What Tom did say was not much of a relief, though.
"Can you keep a secret?" Tom asked.
"Helluva thing to ask a reporter," Brant said. "But if it's something personal...." He pried the second cup of coffee out of the machine.
"It's about Duffy. I mean, sort of. I think it's about Duffy." Tom was well aware that he sounded like a typical tongue-tied teenager and he struggled to transcend the stereotype. "It's serious," he continued, "and I need advice, and it might help you...figure things out. But I need your word."
"To keep it to myself?"
"Right."
"I don't know, Tom. I want to help, and if you know anything that'd make sense of this Duffy business...."
Tom told himself that he was an idiot. Brant was no different from any other adult in Anderson. "Forget it," he snapped. He spun on his heels and was headed for the door when Brant called after him.
"Wait!"
Tom turned and glared at Brant as the reporter hurried to catch up with him, scalding hot coffee spilling across the backs of his fingers.
"This secret," Brant said, "were any laws broken?"
"Yes."
/> "Was anybody hurt?"
That was a tough one. "Not permanently," Tom said.
Brant thought it over for a second. "Okay," he said, and then he told Tom to meet him in front of his office in an hour. Tom nodded his agreement and headed into the deepening twilight.
So he had an hour to think about what he was going to say, if he decided to show up at all. He still wasn't sure he could trust Brant.
Maybe it was time to play his ace in the hole. Maybe it was time to let Brant know that Tom knew more about him than Brant suspected.
***
Peg was reading to Annie when Brant got back to the room. He entered quietly, set the coffees on the bedside table, and peered over Peg's shoulder.
"So Booboo Bunny," Peg read, "although she was very afraid, poked her tiny pink nose out of her den and said, 'What do you want, Mr. Bear?' Mr. Bear smiled his best smile and said to Booboo Bunny—"
Brant put his hand on Peg's shoulder and read, in a voice that he hoped was suitably bear-like, "'Come out, come out, Booboo Bunny! I want to see your long, beautiful ears!'"
Peg smiled up at him. He gave her a look of mock reproach and she quickly jumped into the role of Booboo Bunny.
"'Do you really think I have beautiful ears?' asked Booboo Bunny. And she poked her head out of her den just far enough to show Mr. Bear her tall, fluffy ears."
"'Oh, you have very soft, fine ears!' said Mr. Bear, 'but I'm sure the fur on your lovely neck is even softer and prettier!'"
Peg felt the hair on her neck stand at attention as a chill ran up her spine. "'Really?' said Booboo Bunny. She took the little-bittiest bunny hop and eased her neck out of her safe, warm den...."
***
Madge Duffy nursed her bruised jaw with the ice pack. John sat across the kitchen table from her, looking sorrowful.
"I said I was sorry. I just lost control for a minute, that's all," he said.
So this was the way it was going to be. Abuse and control, the same as always, followed by remorse that appeared genuine yet failed to move Madge emotionally—except to instill in her a profound sorrow for her never-changing state.
She wondered: What kind of half-baked miracle was it that taught a man remorse but left the evil within him intact?
She didn't know if she could endure more years of this life. Was this living, to be reduced to a machine that followed orders like a robot, to be a punching bag for a sick man's anger? Was this the Madge she wanted to be, would consent to be, would settle for being for the rest of her days?
She glanced over at her husband, whose head was bowed in shame. He'd apologized for hitting her and she hadn't said a word. She'd just calmly walked into the kitchen and taken the familiar ice pack out of the drawer and filled it with cubes from the freezer and sat down to think things over. He'd come in and sat across from her and for half an hour neither had uttered a syllable.
Odd state of affairs, sitting at the table with a man who, about this time the day before, she'd killed with a kitchen knife. Yes, killed. Who would have thought she'd be capable of such an act? Yet she had done it, and she would do it again, do it in a New York minute, if she thought there was any point. But who's to say he wouldn't come back as often as she could murder him? He was like a stain that wouldn't come out, or that crack over the mantel that, no sooner would she get a coat of spackle and paint over it than the house would settle another sixteenth of an inch and there it would be again.
It was just hopeless, her situation. Hopeless. She thought about the pistol that John kept in the drawer in the night table beside the bed.
She wondered if this was how her mother had felt. Had she sat in her own kitchen with an ice pack on her jaw while the poison under the sink whispered to her?
"I'm going to go lie down for awhile," she said flatly.
John watched her leave. Moments later he heard the bedroom door shut.
***
In some ways, this was the part Seth loved most—early on, when there was time to play.
Soon enough events would whirl and spin under their own momentum. Soon enough they would tear through the middle of town, crashing and roaring and ripping up lives by the roots, tossing them this way and that, exuberant and destructive as a storm. Death would crackle like lightning, victims would howl like the wind. It would be a fine spectacle and he anticipated it eagerly.
But now, he played a gentleman's game of carefully maneuvered pawns and cunning traps. Now was the time to manipulate, to roll the first pebbles gently down the hill and delight in the mathematical beauty of their inevitable collisions.
John Duffy was such a stone. No doubt, a miserable stone at this point, stupefyingly predictable and dull. But Madge was a delight. A good woman by any measure, she'd surprised him with the delicious murder of her husband. And now...well, that remained to be seen.
Then there was the Ganger boy. If any soul in Anderson was ripe for seduction, it was the Ganger boy.
Twilight, and the air was getting chilly. Seth started a fire in the fireplace and poured himself a glass of a surprisingly piquant pinot noir from California.
And Peg Culler, he thought.
Yes. That would be the test, wouldn't it?
Ten
Brant sat at his desk in the Times office and looked at the photocopy of the grainy newspaper photo of himself a few hundred years before—his picture above a byline in the Chicago Sun-Times. Only the byline seemed to belong to someone with a different name.
"What of it?" Brant said. He tossed the printed out sheet back to Tom.
"You used to be somebody." Tom snapped the sheet with one finger. "This was hard-hitting stuff. Mob stuff. Real reporting."
Brant shrugged. "A story's a story."
"Except when it's hog prices."
"So what's your point?"
"Why'd you run?"
Brant sighed.
"My car leaked oil. The manager of my apartment building complained about the stains on his nice, pretty garage floor. So one day I drove to the shop and they put my car on the lift, and the next thing I know every mechanic in the place is standing across the street and the bomb squad's removing a suspicious device from the undercarriage. A patch of faulty wiring was all that kept me from being blasted all over the Near South Side."
"So you ran."
"Like the wind. I figured a Pulitzer wasn't worth much to a dead man."
Tom nodded. He folded the clipping into neat quarters.
"Witness protection?"
"Hardly. Just a discreet adoption of my mother's maiden name. As long as I'm no longer a thorn in their side, they probably don't even give a damn. Probably."
Tom slipped the clipping into his back pocket.
"Okay, then," he said. "Rat on me to the Sheriff and I'll tell them where you are."
"Deal."
***
Brant spent the next half hour trying to pretend that he wasn't paying any attention to the teenager huddled in the shadows, knees drawn up to his chest, whose low voice quietly and matter-of-factly detailed one of the most deliciously lurid stories Brant had ever been privileged to hear. Brant's fingers flew over the Mac's keyboard, trying to get it all down and get it right. It seemed typical of Brant's career—and of the whimsical humor of the journalism gods—that Brant was able to obtain this story only by swearing on his dear mother's grave not to publish it.
Tom had objected at first to Brant's note taking, but he accepted it when Brant pointed out that any other activity would arouse suspicion on the part of passersby. Besides, if Brant was supposed to help Tom puzzle something out, having a few written notes would save Tom a lot of repetition.
It was Tom's idea to leave the overhead lights turned off and to locate himself where he was invisible from the street. Deputy Haws drove down Main Street several times every night and Tom insisted that it would do no good for them to be seen talking together. Tom had gone so far as to park his Honda in front of the Rialto a couple of storefronts away, buy a ticket to see A Little Prin
cess, and then sneak out the exit and over to Brant's office, wondering as he did so if he was the first person to ever sneak out of a movie theater. They both realized later that they could have met at Brant's home, but there were risks associated with that, too—where to hide the Honda, for instance—and decided to stay put after they got the basic seating arrangement worked out.
Tom started slowly, but once he'd decided to tell all and let the chips fall where they may, he seemed unable to hold the words in. When he reached the part about Galen kicking Deputy Haws and the gun going off and the deputy falling dead onto the pavement, Brant called a time out. Since Brant had seen Haws himself earlier that day, alive and apparently healthy, he could divine where Tom's story was headed. So many questions rushed into his head, pushing and crowding like lemmings rushing to the sea, that Brant decided to hear the whole story first and try to fill in the whys and wherefores later.
Tom told about burying Haws' body in the woods and then about his and Galen's shock at Haws' sudden appearance at Ma's. Galen's fainting spell made a lot more sense to Brant now, as did Tom's regurgitation. Tom went on to describe later events as related to him by Galen.
"So now it's wait and see, is that it?" Brant asked.
"Yeah."
"Haws didn't say when he'd be stopping by Galen's?"
"Just that he should stay home tonight."
"And Haws never said what he wanted?"
"I don't think it's to give him a merit badge for grave digging."
They sat in the quiet office for some time without speaking, Brant in an island of light from his desk lamp and the glow of the computer screen, Tom hunkered in the shadows.
Brant did not question Tom's story for a minute. Incredible as the story was, he took it completely at face value. Duffy's rise had become real enough, and what can happen once can happen twice, but mainly it was Tom's demeanor that convinced him that the boy was telling the truth. Sure, the boys might have been mistaken about Haws being dead. They weren't doctors or coroners or undertakers, after all. But the coincidence was too strong—two people apparently rising from the dead on the same night...it could be some kind of contagious hysteria, he supposed. But that wasn't what his gut was telling him.
