A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  “A hundred and eighty-seven,” she corrected, squinting.

  “But also because,” he went merrily along, “you’re not right. You’re—I’m sorry, Fever—you’re a little bit out of your mind. I don’t think it’s anything too dire, because you were always giving off hints of this sort of thing. But a coma is a coma—it’s not something to be trifled with. And you’re trifling with it. Ask anyone.”

  Lucinda’s expression softened. “Sweetheart, he’s right. If you could see yourself from the outside, the way we see you, you’d be really worried too. You’re having hallucinations, you’re passing out, you’re making things up as you go along and you think they make sense, and maybe they do to you, but they’re just … they’re very nonsensical.”

  “Very surreal,” Andrews agreed.

  I was momentarily at a loss for words. They’d knocked the wind out of me, certainly. But they’d also held up a mirror, and I could see myself a bit objectively. I did appear to be crazed. And I hadn’t even mentioned talking with the ghost of my mother twice very recently.

  On the other hand, there was the red tin and its contents. I turned to look at the items on the kitchen table.

  “Then what do you make of these things?” I asked them.

  Lucinda sighed. “All right, let’s say that you did just find this tin in your mother’s room, after all these years. These things are just her keepsakes, her mementos. You know what a strange person she was. Who can say why she kept these things?”

  “I’m not making up the connection between the letter and the newspaper article.” I tried to sound more convincing than I felt. “You can see that the article is about missing relatives of Jelly Roll Morton and that the letter is about a boy born in New Orleans, where Jelly Roll was from, whose last name was given as Morton.”

  “I can see that your mother thought there was some connection, maybe,” Andrews shrugged. “For some reason.”

  “All right, but you don’t think it’s strange that my mother had in her possession a letter addressed to someone in the Newcomb family?”

  That silenced them both.

  The Newcomb family had founded the town when our mountain was first settled. We had been called Newcomb Junction until the 1920s. The family had ties to great wealth in other parts of America, but this particular branch had helped to define the concept of Southern Gothic. One of their offspring, Tristan, was the famous, self-named Newcomb Dwarf, who had owned the traveling show that had employed my parents. And most people in town still refused to discuss Orvid Newcomb, another little person—and a professional hit man—who claimed to have been a relative of mine.

  “And at the very least,” I continued, a bit more sure of myself, “you have to admit that I’m not making up the name T-Bone Morton. There was such a person, and he was somehow connected to this Chester Morton who is somehow connected to me.”

  “No,” Andrews insisted. “No such thing. You’re making random items into a pattern. That’s what your brain does, it finds meaning even where there isn’t any.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said, irritation growing. “I said the name Chester and less than a day later I found evidence of Chester. You think that’s a coincidence?”

  “Do you hear how crazy that sounds?” he shot back. “Do you understand that from my point of view you wanted to prove something so you went and found something you already knew was in your house that would make a connection—?”

  “Why the hell would I do that? What would be my motive?” I was nearly shouting.

  Thank God Lucinda was there. She stood up and stopped us both. “All right, look!”

  Andrews had never heard that tone of voice from her, and I had only very rarely. It was the sound of absolute authority, and it silenced us both.

  “I don’t know what any of this means,” she said to Andrews, “or if it means anything at all. But Fever has a history of being right when everybody thinks he’s wrong. He’s also just reminded me that he is who he is, and that’s fine with me. I like who he is pretty good. You can’t make the rain stop from falling just because you don’t like to get wet. He’s got to do what he does. I know that.”

  “Fish gotta swim,” I said to Andrews. “Birds gotta fly.”

  “Shut up, Fever,” she snapped. “I’m getting to you. I brought you back to this life for a reason, and I’ll do it as many times as I have to, because I’m not going to hang around this old world without you. But you’re taxing my patience. You have got to quit trying to deliberately kill yourself!”

  “I promise,” I answered instantly.

  “And you have got to set a date with me. By the end of the week. Or else, and I mean it.”

  “A wedding date?” Andrews asked, hushed.

  “Hush!” She was staring at me.

  “Hm. What’s today?” I asked, dazed.

  “It’s Thursday.” She wore no aspect.

  “So. By the end of the week means, what? Tomorrow? Saturday?”

  She looked away. “I’m going to work now. You’ll do what you’ll do.”

  It sounded like a threat.

  “Can I come over for dinner on Saturday?” I scrambled toward her. “We’ll talk about it then?”

  “Why don’t I come here,” she sighed. “That way it’ll make you come home from wherever it is that you’re going to go and at least I’ll know that you’re still alive.”

  “Seven o’clock?” I said, softer.

  She turned to Andrews. “You watch out for him, hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you remember that he’s usually right when most people think he’s wrong.”

  Andrews smiled. “Well, I have to admit that’s true.”

  She left. I tried to follow her out the door, but she waved me off, clearly still perturbed.

  Andrews clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and cleared his throat. “That was fun. What’s next?”

  “We have to find this guy,” I answered, heading upstairs.

  “Chester?”

  “No. The so-called Earl of Huntingdon. I’m taking a shower and changing clothes.”

  “Where do you think you can go to find him?” Andrews demanded to know.

  “We’ll start at the hospital. I think he might work there.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” he mumbled.

  But he followed me up the stairs.

  22.

  Andrews complained all the way to the hospital. His comments were generally punctuated by inventive profanity, some of which approached a kind of poetry—if that poetry had been written by William Burroughs or Charles Bukowski.

  Otherwise, the morning was lovely. Snow was melting but still white, sun was warm and golden, cardinals shot though the barely budding maple limbs like red arrows. Andrews alone was impervious to the beauty of the almost-spring.

  He posed his final question as the hospital came into view around a curve in the road. “Why didn’t you just mention this to Lucinda before she left your kitchen?”

  “Plenty of reasons,” I answered him calmly. “The primary one is that I didn’t think of it until after she left. But even if I had, I think I probably wouldn’t have brought it up. She was pretty angry, don’t you think?

  “She was that,” he reasoned.

  We pulled into the visitor’s parking lot.

  “And I thought you might be eager to see young Nurse Chambers,” I concluded, eyeing him sideways.

  “Shut up.”

  He actually blushed, which took me completely by surprise.

  “Wait,” I managed to get out, “you actually like Stacey.”

  All he could do was nod.

  I shook my head. “Love finds Andy Hardy.”

  “You watch too many old movies,” he mumbled, climbing out of the truck.

  Across the parking lot, in through the automatic doors, and straight to the first-floor information desk, Andrews avoided looking at me.

  The person at the desk didn’t recognize me, but smiled at
Andrews. Her name tag said “Becky Mayfield.”

  “Dr. Andrews,” she said, as if they had shared some secret.

  “Hi.” He blushed again. “You remember Dr. Devilin.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “You’re Fever Devilin?”

  “I am,” I confirmed.

  Her hand shot out. “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  I took her hand. I couldn’t figure out if she had heard wild stories about me and was fascinated to see the thing in the flesh, or if she was overdoing her manners because the head nurse of the hospital was my fiancée. But there was something more to her behavior than simple, polite curiosity.

  Whatever her ideas, I charged ahead. “We’re actually looking for someone who helped me when I was a patient here recently. He’s an older African-American man with an obvious New Orleans kind of accent. Do you by any chance know who I’m talking about?”

  “No.” She frowned, thinking. “I don’t think there’s anyone like that working here, unless he’s very new.”

  “Is there any way I could have a look at some kind of list of employees, like orderlies and nurses, that sort of thing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, clearly conflicted. “I mean, I’d have to check with Lucinda Foxe, you know, to see if that would be all right.”

  “I understand completely,” I told her. “I’ll speak with her myself.”

  “Okay, good,” she sighed, very relieved. “I expect you’ll have a better chance of getting her to say yes than anyone in this hospital.”

  “Is Nurse Chambers on duty?” I asked, with a sideways glance at Andrews.

  “She sure is.” Becky Mayfield was very obviously aware of the relationship between Andrews and Nurse Chambers. Her grin was so significant that it threatened to crack some of her teeth. “Shall I page her?”

  “No,” Andrews said quickly.

  “Actually, we would like to say ‘hey’ to her,” I added. “Do you have any idea where she might be?”

  “Let me check.” She couldn’t stop grinning, and consulted a clipboard and then her computer screen. Finally she concluded: “Second floor, try the station first.”

  “Will do,” I assured her, “and thanks.”

  As we hurried away toward the escalator, Andrews leaned close to me.

  “Are you just trying to embarrass me?” he asked.

  “No,” I assured him, “I’m trying to find this Earl of Huntingdon character. And Stacey, despite her current choice in amorous companions, is generally very smart. She’s also a great gossip. If this guy actually works here, either she’ll know him or she’ll know who would know him. Don’t you think?”

  “Well,” he admitted, “you’re probably right about that.”

  We stepped onto the escalator and we both leaned forward. I felt a little dizzy, and took hold of the moving black rail. It seemed to be moving at a slightly different speed than the silver stairs, and I was further disoriented. Mostly to focus on something else, I tried to laugh.

  “And don’t you want to see Stacey anyway? She really likes you.”

  “I know,” he answered sheepishly. “We became something of an item during your long winter’s nap.”

  “She told me.”

  “I think it might be getting serious.”

  “Oh,” I realized, “and that’s making you uncomfortable.”

  “If by uncomfortable you mean panicked, then, yes.”

  We came to the top of the rise. I stepped off the stairs, took a few more strides, and tried to get back my equilibrium. Unfortunately, Andrews noticed.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, taking my arm. “You’re not going to pass out again, are you?”

  I shook him off with a little less patience than I should have. “I’m fine.”

  He stopped walking.

  “Sorry.” I closed my eyes. “I really can’t stand people treating me like an invalid.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly, “then quit acting like one. If you stop falling asleep at odd moments, I’ll stop grabbing you when it looks like you’re about to. Deal?”

  I sighed as heavily as I could to show my discomfort, and motored ahead toward the nurse’s station. As luck would have it, Stacey was there, staring at something on the desk in front of her.

  “Nurse Chambers,” I began, still ten feet away from her, “I’ve brought you a surprise.”

  She looked up and her entire body lit up. “Winnie!”

  I winced. “Didn’t we have some sort of arrangement about your using that name?”

  She ignored me completely, stood, and tried to get at Andrews over the counter of the station. Despite himself, he was grinning like an eleven-year-old and moving at an alarming rate of speed toward her open arms.

  Their embrace was relatively brief, but it made up in quality what it lacked in duration.

  Before they could speak, I felt I ought to interject, “We’re here on business. We’re looking for a hospital employee, someone that I think is connected to my situation.”

  Stacey glanced my way. “You think somebody that works here shot you?”

  “No,” I said quickly, “but there’s a man who gave me tea in my room who knows something about the whole business.”

  “Stop saying business,” Andrews snapped. “I’m humoring your weird hunches because Lucinda told me to and because, in this particular instance, I get to see Stacey. But this whole mess in your head is anything but businesslike.”

  I addressed Nurse Chambers. “I’m looking for an African-American man in his fifties who works here as an orderly or a nurse or a nurse’s aide. He has a very distinguishable accent.”

  Stacey grinned. “Very funny.”

  I took a step closer to her. “Why would that be funny?”

  “Well,” she answered, a little uncomfortably, “we only hire female nurses, our aides are all student interns from the college down in Habersham County, and the cut-off age for orderlies is thirty.”

  “Really?” I marveled.

  “We’re run by a business group, Dr. Devilin,” she said, her voice lowered. “They have rules and insurance issues and all kinds of other instructions for us and we have to follow them because we want to stay open. Because the people in this county need us. If I don’t worry about all that too much, then I can just fill out the right forms, give the right answers to ten or twelve questions every month, and I get to do my job, which is making people better. Like you.”

  I had clearly hit a nerve. Nurse Cambers was obviously unhappy about the way the hospital was run. It seemed ill advised for me to pursue that particular line of questioning at that moment, though I felt compelled to take up the matter of political and economic considerations in the running of county hospitals with the head nurse—at another place and time.

  “So the man I’m describing could not really be an employee here,” I concluded.

  “No.” She exhaled, realizing that she’d gotten a little more upset than she should have.

  “That tells me something.” I nodded.

  “It tells you that this is a dead end.” Andrews took Stacey’s hand and said, “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Anything unusual about any of the orderlies that you do have working here?” I asked on impulse.

  She thought for a second and said, “There was one who came down here from up North, studying to be a radiology tech, I think he said, but he quit or got fired—we’re not supposed to ask. He got here in January, I think, but I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “Mean anything?” Andrews asked.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Sorry the man you’re looking for isn’t here,” Stacey said sweetly.

  “Well, if he’s been around these parts for any time at all,” I said vaguely, “someone’s got to have seen him. He’s ‘as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food ’cake.”

  “Nice,” Andrews grinned. “You stole that from Raymond Chandler?”

  I shrugged. “He stole it fro
m Dickens—the spider on Miss Havisham’s wedding cake.”

  “What are you talking about?” Stacey said.

  “Metaphorical language,” Andrews said. “The grammar of dreams.”

  * * *

  I had decided that a trip into the actual town of Blue Mountain was in order. If our man had been anywhere around the area, people would have noticed and would have opinions and gossip about him. It was the nature of our town, maybe all small towns, that a stranger would be welcomed, treated with respect, and then talked about behind his back. Especially a flashy stranger with a funny accent.

  I realized as we drove down Main Street that I hadn’t been into town for more than a month before my attack, so it had been closer to five months since I’d seen the place. Nothing was different, of course, from the last time I’d seen it except for the snow. It was mostly melted, the air was clean, and no one was outside. Still, I looked at Main Street with new eyes—the eyes of a man returned from the dead.

  I felt very sad to approach the empty storefront where Miss Etta’s diner had been only the year before. A sense memory filled my head with the glorious smell of golden squash and onions, fried okra crisp as popcorn, cornbread like cake that a bride would eat at her own wedding. Etta had opened her dining establishment at the age of twenty and, without much further effort on her part, she had turned seventy-five before she’d passed on. I still imagined her, asleep as usual, in a very uncomfortable chair close to the kitchen door, her hair like white smoke, wreathed in a pale halo just above snowy eyebrows. Her face, ancient but barely wrinkled, had always been the very model of serenity.

  But her diner was just a big empty room now.

  Andrews refused to look at it as we drove up, but we were both thinking the same thing: who’s going to feed us all, now that Miss Etta is gone?

  “Pull over,” I said suddenly. “In front of Miss Etta’s.”

  “Really?” Andrews sighed, a little exasperated, but he pulled the truck into a spot right in front of the place. “I guess I miss her too, or, truth be told: her food. Hard to say that you knew the actual woman since she was asleep most of the time. But, man, was everyone in the state at her funeral, or what? I’ve never seen so many—”