The Totem

by David Morrell

  One day in late September, Slaughter managed the strength to go into town. He still was weak and light-headed, but he was alive, and that was really all he wanted, that and his new purity, his courage. He drove in to see the medical examiner. Because he had only one arm, he had to drive an automatic, and he wasn't with the force now, Rettig ran that, so he didn't have a cruiser. He parked at the house, which he had never been to, fumbled to open his car door and got out, walking across the grass. He felt off balance from the change of weight because of his missing arm, and he moved slowly, glancing at the boxes and the suitcases stacked on the porch.

  The medical examiner came out to face him.

  "I heard you were leaving," Slaughter said.

  "That's right."

  "I hate to see you go."

  "Well, it's like King John and his pears."

  "His what?"

  "His pears. They say he died from a surfeit of them."

  And Slaughter only stared.

  "You know, the Magna Carta."

  "Yes, I know which John you mean."

  "He slept once at a convent. He'd been screwing all the nuns, or so the story goes. The outraged monks put poison in his food, although his death was caused, they claimed, by getting sick from eating too many pears."

  "I don't quite get the point."

  "Well, it's like…" The medical examiner paused. "It's like I'm suffering from a surfeit of death. Too much death. You don't know how it was."

  "I have a fair idea."

  "No, you missed it. All the cleanup. All the bodies they brought in. From the commune. From here in town. I stayed this long because I thought I could forget it, but I can't. It's too much, too damned much altogether."

  Slaughter glanced at the weed-choked grass. He took his time. "Well, I won't argue."

  "There's no sense. I'm going to Chicago. Hell, I'm going to be a doctor."

  "That's what you are now."

  "But only for the dead. I'm going to treat the living now. I never want to see another corpse again."

  And Slaughter nodding, continuing to stare.

  "Resurrection," the medical examiner told him.

  THIRTEEN

  Slaughter drove back to where he now was living, not to his place but to Wheeler's ranch where Lucas now was the owner. Sometimes Marge came out to cook for them, but mostly just the three of them were out there. Slaughter helped to tend the stock as best he could when he wasn't tending to the needs of Dunlap. Everyone finally had gained what each had wanted. Lucas had a father. Slaughter had another chance to have a son. Dunlap had his story, and his mind was now at rest, though not his body. Slaughter cleaned it, fed it, cared for it. He wasn't quite sure why, except that this man had become a friend, and anyway nobody else would take this man. Dunlap's wife had finally divorced him.

  Life was peaceful. The full moon on the summer solstice had intensified the brilliance of the prior night when Slaughter had lost his arm. The fire, though, had destroyed the commune, all its members, those that Slaughter's group had not already destroyed. The town had lived in terror, but the help from outside had arrived. The infected animals and cattle were exterminated. The valley was a wasteland that at last had started its revival. Part of what had helped had been the storm that followed with the wind and cleansed the valley after flames had purified the mountains.

  One discovery had been important. After the figure who had staggered into town at last had died, samples of the creature's blood had been enough to produce a vaccine that would stop the infection from spreading. The virus was no longer a threat, and as Slaughter sat now on the porch, he noticed that the blanket he had placed on Dunlap's knees was sagging.

  Slaughter stood from where he rested in a hammock. He walked over and used his remaining hand to arrange the blanket.

  "There. That's better. There'll be a frost they say tonight. We don't want you to catch a cold."

  Dunlap rocked and gazed in peace toward the rangeland.

  "That's the stuff. You thirsty?" Slaughter asked.

  Dunlap continued rocking.

  "Have a drink."

  Slaughter poured a glass of beer and tipped it up to Dun-lap's lips. The reporter swallowed, drooling.

  "There. That's just the answer."

  Slaughter wiped Dunlap's lips and drank from the same glass. "Nice place, don't you think? Do you guess you're going to like it here?"

  Dunlap kept rocking.

  "Sure you are. It's lovely. Just the place for us."

  Then Slaughter returned to the hammock where he lay back, sipping. Life was good now. He had earned it. As he glanced out toward the rangeland, he saw Lucas riding on his pinto, admiring the other horses. There were cattle on the range as well. When Marge arrived tonight, she would watch over Dunlap while the one-armed man and the son in need of a father would ride out to check the steers, and in the meantime, Slaughter leaned back, smiling, as the setting sun cast an alpenglow on Lucas who rode straight and strong, and a colt veered from its mother, and they gamboled in the sun.

  About the Author

  My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. Books and movies were my escape. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). To make a new start, my wife and I moved to the mountains and mystical light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my work changed yet again, exploring the passionate relationships between men and women, highlighting them against a background of action as in the newest, Burnt Sienna. To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  ***

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