A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  “You don’t want to wait until the program gets done with everything?” Melissa asked.

  “I don’t have any idea how long it’ll take for that to happen,” he snapped, “and if these two morons just came from breaking into some secret vault they got over there, I need to get over there and mess with Travis before they clean it up.”

  “Well I guess you could also get a recording of Travis’s voice,” Melissa snapped right back, “so we can see does it match up with the one on the tape!”

  Skidmore exhaled. “Yes. Good idea. I should use the—?”

  “Use the shoulder radio-recorder that the State Patrol gave us,” she sighed. “That way you just wear it, it looks official, you turn it on before you get out of the car, and it records the entire conversation.”

  “Okay.” He shook his head.

  “Did you talk?” I whispered, glancing into the kitchen at Melissa.

  “Didn’t get a chance to,” he whispered back. “After I left you’uns, I saw her pull in at the station with all this computer mess.”

  I nodded.

  “Melissa?” he called out.

  “Sir?” she answered.

  “If either one of these two children tries to set one foot out of this house while I’m gone,” he told her in no uncertain terms, “you have full authority to shoot them both.”

  “Both?” Andrews asked reflexively. “If he tries to leave, I get shot?”

  “Teach you both a lesson you won’t soon forget,” Skidmore told him.

  “Shoot to kill?” Melissa asked cheerfully.

  “You do what you have to do,” he answered.

  “All right,” I said, hauling myself off the sofa and wincing at my sore leg, “then you can see yourself out. I’m going upstairs to check my wounds.”

  “Wounds?” Skid asked, genuinely concerned.

  “I hurt hands and feet getting in through the window over there to get that folder,” I told him, heading toward the stairs. “I want to anoint myself with Neosporin.”

  “I hurt my back,” Andrews chimed in, following me.

  “Good,” Skidmore concluded. “Go upstairs. Stay there. I’ll be back directly.”

  Melissa made a great show of taking her pistol out of its holster, checking it for bullets, and laying it on the table beside her laptop, all without looking our way.

  “Sheriff,” she said very casually, her eyes still on the computer screen, “before you leave over there to Fit’s Mill, would you have a look at this? I think you’re going to find it very interesting.”

  I started to say something about how that might be the moment for Skidmore to talk with Melissa, but Andrews read my mind and shook his head. So I began, instead, to hobble up the stairs.

  Melissa called after us. “You’uns don’t mess around with the sheriff today, hear? He’s got something on his mind that’s worrying him. I don’t know what it is, but he’s in a rare mood. Fair warning.”

  I heard Skidmore say, “You know I’m worried?”

  But I didn’t hear the rest. I realized at the top of the stairs that I had successfully fought off a sleep attack, and was quite pleased with myself, but also entirely exhausted.

  “I think I have to lie down,” I mumbled to Andrews.

  “I should think that would be the case,” he agreed. “You haven’t had a nap in—what?—three or four hours?”

  “Very funny,” I mumbled, lumbering toward my bed. “You didn’t think I should mention Melissa’s … situation just now?”

  “I did not.” He followed me into my room. “If she wanted to chat about it, she would. Clearly, it’s a private matter.”

  I nodded my agreement and collapsed onto my quilt.

  “Look,” I announced as he took a seat at my desk, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Oh, God,” he said instantly. “Not that.”

  “What does it really mean if I’m related to Jelly Roll Morton?”

  “It means enough to Travis and his ilk,” Andrews answered, “that they want you dead.”

  “No.” I tried to focus clearly, squeezing my eyes shut, willing myself to stay awake. “Travis might not like it and he might even make fun of it or use it as a kind of justification for all the weird anger he’s felt toward me since the school days. But it wouldn’t mean enough to him to want to kill me. All this time up here in these mountains, and you still don’t understand that it’s all right to torment the oddballs, but ultimately we’re family. If you started saying the same kind of thing to me that Travis has said to me all my life, and he heard you? He’d kick you to the ground before you knew what was happening. We can make fun of each other, but if anyone else does? Hell to pay.”

  “‘He may be a fool, but he’s our fool.’”

  “What?”

  “It’s a Randy Newman song. Something about Lester Maddox, the cracker governor of your state back in the bad old days. ‘He may be a fool, but he’s our fool.’”

  “Well, I don’t know the song,” I admitted, “but the sentiment is right on the money.”

  “You don’t think Travis tried to kill you,” he went on. “Despite evidentiary events to the contrary.”

  “I think it’s a family problem.”

  “What?”

  “Who was it, when they were describing the conflict between Judaism and Islam, said that family squabbles are the worst?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to say.” Andrews inched his chair closer to the bed. It was clear he thought I was falling asleep again.

  “I think that someone related to Chester and Eulalie Echo is trying to kill me,” I said as plainly as I could, “and anyone else related to the mixed-race coupling of T-Bone Morton and Lisa Simard.”

  “Because?”

  “Because that kind of hate is a cellular poison,” I explained. “You teach it to your children from the day they’re born, and they stay mad about it for all the rest of their lives.”

  “But—no, wait,” Andrews said haltingly.

  “I’m descended from Eulalie Echo too,” I reminded him, “if I’m really related to Jelly Roll Morton. In this scenario, they would be my maternal great-greats or something like that. Maybe three greats.”

  “You’re heir to madness and rhythm.” He smiled. “I like that.”

  “If it’s true.” I yawned.

  “Don’t you want to believe it?”

  I smiled. “Not if it’s not true.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve spent a long time trying to become exactly who and what I am,” I said, lying down on the bed. “That’s been difficult enough so far. Throw into the mix that I have this kind of thing to deal with, and I could easily become distracted from the real job.”

  “What real job?” His voice seemed to be coming from a long way off.

  “The job of becoming who I am,” I murmured. “I just told you.”

  He said something else, but it seemed to be in a language I didn’t know. And I could barely hear his voice over the cornet solo.

  * * *

  The tiny club was very loud. T-Bone Morton sat in a chair far away from the bandstand, but his left foot was still keeping time with the drummer. The tune was “Honeysuckle Rose” and the cornet solo was red hot, very high, and confection sweet.

  T-Bone was not on stage because he was minding the baby. His infant daughter lay sleeping in his arms as if she were in a peaceful forest or a silent nursery. T-Bone couldn’t stop smiling.

  “That’s my girl,” he was thinking to himself, staring down at her as she snored. “Loud jazz is mother’s milk.”

  Out of the crowd came a tall, thin man in a black suit. He was not smiling. He walked with stilted purpose through the obstacle course of human bodies and bar stools. Lisa saw him before T-Bone did. She swept around from behind the bar and planted herself between the man and her family.

  “Qui êtes-vous?” she demanded.

  “Sturmabteilung,” he mumbled in German.

  “Allez-vous!” she
yelled.

  The man looked directly at T-Bone and said very clearly, “Schwarzes tier!”

  There was suddenly a pistol in his left hand. The only thing between the barrel of the gun and T-Bone’s heart was the infant daughter, still sleeping.

  Lisa smiled at T-Bone over her shoulder as she took one step to her left. It was like a dance, a graceful dip and sway, very beautiful. She did it just as the gun went off. The bullet went though her but T-Bone had already bent his body over their child. The bullet thudded into the wall behind the table where T-Bone had been sitting.

  Lisa seemed to drift to the floor like a feather sifting through the air.

  The man with the gun stood over her, staring down, watching her bleed. He raised his gun again, to aim it at T-Bone, but T-Bone was gone. Suddenly the man was shoving and grunting past the stunned members of the immediate crowd. The band hadn’t stopped playing. No one knew, for another few seconds, what had happened. By the time they did, the man with the gun had made it to the door and vanished into the Paris midnight.

  Lisa Simard was dead. In the alley behind the club, T-Bone Morton couldn’t breathe; his baby opened her eyes and started to cry.

  * * *

  Suddenly I could hear Andrews over the baby’s crying and the echo of the gunshot, like distant thunder.

  “Get up!” he was yelling, headed out my bedroom door.

  I opened my eyes, disoriented. I blinked. I could hear Andrews crashing down the stairs. There was a louder noise on the front porch, and something else I couldn’t quite make out.

  Just as I realized something bad had happened, I heard Andrews from below.

  “Oh my God!” he howled. “Melissa!”

  I realized that the gunshot I had heard had been downstairs in my kitchen, not just in my dream. I bolted out of the room and down the stairs. I could see, as I descended, that Andrews was frozen in the doorway. I was scrambling so fast to get to him that I nearly fell.

  I hit the bottom of the stairs, and couldn’t figure out why Andrews hadn’t moved or spoken.

  I lumbered toward him and knocked him forward, onto the front porch.

  He stumbled sideways and shouted, “No!”

  And I was presented with an almost exact image from my nightmare. A tall, thin man in a black suit stood over Melissa Mathews, watching her bleed. When he looked up, and our eyes met, I registered recognition. He was young. His crew cut made his ears bigger than they already were. He was a funny-looking, goofy kid. I struggled to place where I’d seen him before.

  He seemed to be watching my confusion. It made him grin.

  Andrews had tumbled to his side because of me and I instinctively went to help him up.

  “Let him be,” the kid said. He sported an unusually midwestern accent.

  I only half-heard him, and disregarded him utterly. Which proved to be a permanently terrible mistake.

  Without even looking directly at him, the kid casually pointed his pistol directly at Andrews and fired twice. Andrews never made a sound. His body thudded to the deck of the porch and was still as a stone.

  “Upstairs,” the kid said, the gun pointed squarely at me.

  “What are you doing?” My head was swimming.

  “Upstairs, I say,” he told me, flailing the air with his gun.

  I stumbled backward, grabbing the door frame. He flew toward me; jabbed the gun in my ribs.

  “That’s right, you son of a bitch,” he said into my ear. “It’s me.”

  I had no idea who he was.

  He spun me around and shoved me forward. I fell toward the banister and righted myself just as I felt the stab of the pistol in my lower back. I was genuinely terrified that I would pass out. There was no question of my being able to defend myself in such a disoriented frame of mind—and body. All I could do was stagger up the stairs and try to breathe.

  We reached the landing and he kicked me toward my room.

  “I want you in that bed,” he growled, “so I can finish what I started, exactly the way I done before, only right this time, don’t you know.”

  My head was pounding, and my brain felt as if it might be boiling in my own blood. I could barely hear him—or move, or breathe, or speak. I was absolutely certain he was about to shoot me very dead.

  Something frenzied in me tried to catch hold of anything I might use as a weapon. The door? Could I slam the door on his gun hand? My lamp? Could I bash in his head with my lamp? The bed? Could I throw him onto the footboard and knock him unconscious?

  I happened to glance, then, at the Currier and Ives picture of a sleigh being pulled by two horses, and everything suddenly seemed to go into slow motion. I felt light-headed, and barely moved. My breathing was shallow, and the images of ordinary reality faded.

  I saw a face that was not a face and it said, very softly, “Do you recognize me?”

  “No,” I think I said. “Should I?”

  “We only have a moment together.” It hovered like a mist in the room beside my bed. “Do you have a story to tell me?”

  I could not look away. “A story?”

  Then the angel vanished.

  In the next second, the kid was shoving me forward again, and I tumbled into my bed.

  He stood over me and for the first time I saw him in the right light. He was the goofy orderly I had seen when I’d first awakened in the hospital.

  “Are you Albert?” I asked. “Are you the orderly who was going to bring me soup?”

  “So you know who I am,” he sneered, the gun inches from my head. “I was afraid you might give me away at the hospital, but when I saw that you didn’t recognize me, I still thought I had a chance. Until Earl showed up.”

  The gun in my face was like the nail I had used several days previous: it worked to keep me awake. But I felt the impending, familiar, sickening sensation of slipping into unconsciousness about to overtake me. I thought that if I could rouse myself, I could overpower the boy and call for emergency help. But my limbs were lead, and my head was filled with vapor.

  “Who is Earl?” I sat up with my back against the headboard.

  “You know very well who he is,” he snapped. “Earl Hunt. Your guardian angel. Only he ain’t around now. I seen to that.”

  “I don’t know you,” I said, trying to stall and let my head clear, “and I don’t know anybody named Earl Hunt.”

  “I don’t care what you say,” he told me, and I believed him, “I’m going to kill you today for good.”

  “You were in the meeting hall at Fit’s Mill, with Elder James,” I realized. “I saw you but I didn’t see you.”

  “So it’s all coming clear to you, is it?” He grinned. It was not a happy expression.

  “No,” I said firmly, the clouds in my cortex dispersing only slightly, “none of this is clear to me. But I guess you’re the one who shot out the back window of my truck.”

  “What?” he sneered. “ I ain’t shoot up your truck. All I want to shoot is you. And you know why.”

  At that moment I saw that he was holding my other tin box, the one I’d found in my mother’s room. He had it tucked under his arm, near his armpit. For some reason, that made me angrier than anything else. Then, for some reason not entirely clear, the anger actualized something in my brain. I realized why I had seen an “angel” in my room. I knew that my own subconscious angels were directing me to do what my conscious mind had already conceived. I had to wake up to my true self. I had to use the tools that I had always used. I couldn’t muster the strength needed to overcome this particular demon physically, but I also couldn’t allow him to take my own personal folklore away. So I had to attack him on the battlefield of his own mind.

  “I think you have something interesting to tell me,” I said calmly. “Do you? Do you have a story to tell me?”

  He cocked his head like a troubled dog. “A story?”

  “I’m asking because I have to be myself,” I told Albert, partly to confuse him, partly to say out loud what I was thinking, to convi
nce myself.

  “What?” He did, in fact, seem confused for the first time.

  “I’ve been letting events shape my perceptions rather than allowing my perceptions to observe the events.” I exhaled.

  “Are you trying to mess me up?” He raised his gun. “It won’t work.”

  I settled in my body and in my mind. I assumed the tone of voice and facial expression I had used all my life, hundreds of other times, to get people to tell me their stories.

  “I know,” I said soothingly. “But you do have something you want to tell me.”

  “About what?” he growled.

  “You want to tell me why you’re here,” I said simply. “You want me to know what this is all about before you kill me. That’s why you didn’t just shoot me on the porch with the others. You wanted me to understand what I’ve done wrong, and why this retribution is righteous.”

  He nodded without realizing it. “You need to know, all right.”

  “Then tell me.” I sat back and waited.

  Silence, as I had so often learned and relearned, could be an interviewer’s best instrument. If I sat comfortably in my own silence, ignoring the gun that was pointed at me, oblivious to anything but the boy’s face and voice, he would fill the void.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start,” he sneered. But I could see that he had already begun to think about what he wanted to tell me. It was in his eyes as clearly as if he had already begun.

  And that reminded me of another lesson often learned: most people operate under the illusion that they aren’t transparent. Most people think they can hide what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling. But they can’t. Not from me.

  “Why don’t you begin by telling me about Chester and Eulalie Echo,” I said.

  It was a gamble, but not much of one. If he didn’t know who those people were, he’d continue in his confusion. If he did, he’d want to tell me about them. Or it would make him angrier and he’d just go ahead and shoot me. Either way, I’d have less to worry about.