Resurrection Man (28 page)

He sat down on the end of the dock, his polished Italian shoes hanging over the dim water. The wooden planks creaked and rocked. Who was it who said we can never step in the same river twice? Diogenes? Father would know.

Father would have known.

He remembered his father's face in the bureau mirror one week ago, bending over the body lying there.

And like the touch of death, Dante felt the first hint of understanding. "Oh God," he whispered.

You have begun to guess what you have always known.

Jet, he thought desperately. Must get Jet.

Turning, he ran up the hillside, great frantic strides, tripping through the remains of Mother's garden, pulling the kitchen door open and shouting Jet's name.

The living room was dim and murmurous with condolences. On the dining table tall candles in polished silver candlesticks presided over trays of food brought over by their friends and neighbors: lasagna and tuna casserole, bowls of potato salad, jelly salad, mashed potatoes and coleslaw and poundcake and cherry pie and Corning-ware dishes wrapped in aluminum foil. Mother stood pale and composed at the bottom of the table, accepting sympathy.

Jet was standing with Mrs. Parret, the secretary at the local school, listening to her with a strange kind of wonder. There was something in his face almost like gratitude.

Dante called his name. Whatever Jet saw, looking at him, turned the uncharacteristic warmth in his eyes to ashes.

"You've got to come with me," Dante gasped, dragging him from the room. People were staring at them, Sarah too, distraught and murderous all at once, but he didn't care; Christ, if what he guessed were true, there was so much more to pay for than a disturbance at the reception. "Get shovels," he cried breathlessly, pushing Jet through the back door. "We've got to dig up the body. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus."

Jet looked at him, breath smoking in the twilight, face pale beneath his ghastly birthmark. "Okay. Okay," he said, catching Dante's panic.

Together they raced down to the boathouse.

*   *   *

It was dark by the time they reached the island. Jet crouched by the graveside, shining a flashlight into the pit. Dante dug like a madman, heedless of the mud spattering the expensive new suit he'd bought for the funeral. The blade of his shovel struck something firmer than dirt. Flinging it aside, he used his hands, crouching by the head of the grave, scooping out the cold black earth until his cuffs were black and his dirty fingers were stiff and numb. The body had begun to putrefy. The stink of it clung to him, wrapped around the smells of cold mud and leaves. Under the flashlight's weak beam, pale as moonlight, Dante's hands slowed, brushing dirt from the corpse's face, smoothing its thin hair, cleaning mud away from its sunken eyes.

"Oh my God," Jet whispered.

"I knew it. I knew it all the time," Dante said dully. Gently he brushed the dirt from his father's thin lips. Gently he closed the lids of his father's old blue eyes, empty now in death.

*   *   *

"What do you mean, you knew?" Jet asked, some time later.

"It was his body. It was his body on the bureau. It was his body we opened up and I knew it, I knew it. But I wouldn't let myself know."

Slowly Jet nodded. "And that shaped what we saw."

"I'm the angel. Remember?. . . I knew he was going to die, I knew it all along. But I wouldn't tell myself. I could have saved him, but I didn't."

*   *   *

"It's a new world," Dante said. "Magic isn't just a few psychos having visions. It's real. In a few more years it will be realer than everything else." He stroked the thin hair on his father's forehead. He thought, I get it, Jewel. I finally really get it.

"Listen," Jet said. "I mean, should we...?" He nodded awkwardly at Dante's discarded shovel..

"Not yet."

"Okay."

Dante remained sitting by the grave edge, dry as dust. Empty. He straightened the cuffs on his slacks. Pulled up his socks.

Jet turned off the flashlight and stood up. "Moon's coming up early," he observed. "Full, pretty much." Dante didn't answer.

"Christ, it's cold," Jet said. "Wish I'd thought to grab a coat."

"Take mine."

"You'll freeze."

"No, seriously. I can't feel it," Dante said. He stood and gave Jet his charcoal-gray suit jacket. It was a heavy wool blend, subtly veined with dull red threads that picked up the garnets in his cuff links.

"Thanks," Jet said.

*   *   *

"I tracked down Confidence yesterday, after the reception," Jet remarked, some time later. Dante didn't comment. "You know what he said, about winning my soul from Pendleton?—'Worst deal I ever made.' That's what he said." From out of the darkness, Dante heard jet's soft dry laugh. "Talk about disillusioning."

Dante could barely feel anything: cold, grief, guilt. But he discovered he was glad, to hear Jet's cool voice coming out of the darkness.

"Turns out every Sending gets a soul. Once you're in the world, you're real; that's what Confidence said. Like a sandbar in a river: a soul just silts up against you. After a few years, Confidence had to live for more than the hustle. Started betting on baseball, then fell in love with the sport. Kept the box scores from all the Red Sox games, made lousy bets on them, hoping they would win. Met a nice girl. Settled down. Two kids. Hey presto: a life. And hey presto, a soul to go with it."

Dante blinked. "That means you must have had one too."

"Yeah."

Jet swung his foot; Dante heard the sound of it, scuffing aimlessly in the leaves. " 'I have no soul, I am different, I am not human; Dante must do all the living while I stay in the shadows and watch.' "

"I never forced you to."

"But those were the rules," Jet said. "I made them up myself."

He shrugged. "...We do not make these choices with our faculties complete. I was two weeks old when I decided you were the only thing that mattered. By three years I was a satellite more fixed to you than the moon is to the earth... By fifteen, of course, I was aware of your limitations as a god," Jet added wryly. "Your obtuseness, your maddening refusal to see."

"I had my reasons for not looking," Dante said grimly.

"Your neglect." Jet paused. "...But the die was cast, there was no going back. I had cried out for a king and gotten a log; it has happened before."

After a while he said, "Later on, when she was wiser, Jewel's were the best Sendings. That's what Confidence said. Other Sendings might take years to work out from under their angel's preconceptions. Jewel birthed hers with the fewest strings attached. But Confidence was her first, and it seemed like a fine thing, to play for the soul of a firstborn son..."

Dante said, "I must have known for years that Dad was sick. For years. Ever since the body started growing under the blanket on my dresser."

Still low on the horizon, the moon cast a spectral light over the river valley; just enough for Dante to catch a dim blur when Jet gestured with his hands. Just enough to show Jet's thin shape beneath the willow tree, a shadow moving against a backdrop of shadows. "I mean, good Lord! The prospect of actually having to live a life, instead of simply scrutinizing you ridiculous humans through
The New York Times
! Now I must decide, do I like blues or jazz? Detective novels or spy thrillers? Imagine: to be reduced to coming to you—ugh!—for advice about women!—The whole concept is terrifying."

"Whole new worlds to brood about," Dante agreed.

Jet sighed. "It's not a very attractive habit, brooding, but I am good at it. I give myself credit for that."

*   *   *

"I can't stand it," Dante announced.

"I beg your pardon?"

Fiercely Dante turned back to the grave. He began flinging the dirt off his father's body, throwing it in ferocious handfuls into the darkness. The bandage on his right hand was black with mud. "I can't stand it. I will not allow this." He leaned over the grave and shouted into it. "
Do you hear me, Jewel!
"

Jet returned to the grave, put a hand on Dante's shoulder. "'Hey," he murmured. "Easy does it."

"
Do you hear me, Jewel!
Bring it on, angel. Bring on your god. I have my hand over my dead father's face, you witch, you madwoman. You want me to look? Well I'm
looking
!"

Hunching over he yelled into his father's lifeless face. "I'm the fucking Resurrection Man, god damn it, and I'm coming to get you!" He grabbed the corpse and pulled its shoulders free of the earth, shaking it in fury from side to side. "Wake up! Wake up, you son of a bitch! I'm talking to you!"

"Dante! Get a hold of yourself!"

Dante whirled, clubbing Jet hard across the face with the back of his hand. "Leave me alone," he hissed.

*   *   *

(And deep, deep inside himself he raised the scissors off Jewel's desk.
You don't want this
, Jewel whispered, eyes black and steady as gun-barrels.

"Fuck you," Dante said. And plunged the scissors into her neck.

A storm of colored wings burst around him.)

*   *   *

As he stared at his father's corpse in its shallow grave, the long incision down its chest split open. Spiders streamed out.

"Oh my God," Jet said weakly, grabbing the flashlight. Hundreds of black bodies jerked and scuttled under its pale beam. Thousands of thin black legs.

Dante felt himself tearing apart like a wet paper towel, all the scar tissues of his life ripping open, spilling out the secrets he had tried so hard not to see. Jet's loneliness ran out of him like blood, and Sarah's dreadful pain, all stringy hair and savage wit: Grandma Ratkay, pawing at his shirt, and the blind panic as he tried to pull away from her, she stank so much of coming death. The arguments between his parents; the time Anton called his wife a bitch when he didn't think the kids could hear.

And spilling out too, the thousand memories of his father weary, coughing, incomprehensibly small and tired, his neat hands trembling, and I knew, Dante thought. Oh, God, I knew it all along.

Jewel's god gushed up inside Dante and filled his lungs, fountained from his fingertips, his nipples, the ends of his hair; blinded him, spilling from his eyes. It moved through Dante like a hurricane blowing through an empty shirt, distending him, whipping him senselessly this way and that. Dante fell flat, stunned. A ragged, heartbroken sound whispered out of the darkness. It was Jet, sobbing. He too lay blasted on the ground.

Jewel's god poured into the dead body of Dante's father, filling it up, opening its eyes, speaking through its mouth.
You called me
, it said.
I have come.

*   *   *

Years passed.

What do you want?

Dante was breaking apart. Now the dreadful secrets were crawling out of him, about Duane the bully and Jet, Mrs. Farrell and his father dying dying dead. He felt his hands twitch and tremble, beginning to detach themselves from his wrists, starting to scuttle into the darkness.

His whole body was crawling, shivering, breaking into spiders.

Unimaginably distant, his light voice ragged and fraying, Jet laughed at the god in Dr. Ratkay's body. "I think you should know we were raised atheists," he whispered. "—On moral grounds."

Jet screamed. With angel's eyes Dante saw the butterfly tear from his cheek and circle in the air. A few drops of blood fell from its twisting wings.

"Oh, Jet," Dante whispered. To Jewel's god he croaked, "I want my father."

Your father is in Hell.

"Then take me there."

Dr. Ratkay's body smiled gravely.
The descent to Hell is the same from every place.

*   *   *

And then Jewel's god was gone. In the deafening silence Dante lay sprawled over his father's grave, flat as veins empty of blood. He could see Jet's body, a lump of shadow in the moonlight a few feet away.

"Jet?"

"Jet? You okay?"

"Definitely not." Jet groaned. He gathered himself slowly together, each gesture brittle and hesitant, as if testing for broken bones.

"Hey," Dante said, starting to move.

"Hey what?"

"Shit, ouch. I've got something in my hand. Ouch." Gingerly Dante opened the bandaged right hand that had been lying on his father's face. Something glimmered there: little barbs of moonlight. "Hey. It's the lure."

"The lure?"

"Yeah. You know. The one I used to find Pendleton's thumb. I wonder what I'm supposed to do with it."

Jet experimented with breathing, seeing how much air he could take in before his ribs hurt. "Just out of curiosity, Dante—not meaning to intrude—but are you going to have another crazy fit any time in the near future?"

Gingerly Dante sat up, cupping the lure carefully in his right hand. "I'd have to say the odds favor it."

Jet grunted. "Great." Dante saw him reach up to touch his face. "Ow. Hey." He fumbled for the flashlight, found it, turned it on himself. "Hey. Dante."

Dante whistled. Lit from below, Jet's sharp face appeared positively diabolical: knife-blade cheeks, thin mouth, obsidian eyes glinting beneath ferocious brows. But where the birthmark had been, only a faint cobweb of white lines remained, like threads of scar tissue. "The butterfly's gone."