Dead Man (5 page)

“I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it,” said Marie like the little boy in the old
New Yorker
cartoon. They laughed, and Albie crowed; though he didn’t understand it, he loved that one for some reason, almost as much
as he disliked crucifers.

Eddie shouldered him and his outsized crash helmet, almost as big as he was, for the four-mile wobbly ride to the little corner
store. And told Albie that he had only one year left.

“Year for what?” the boy asked the top of Eddie’s head.

“Before you compose your first symphony. That’s what Mozart did when he was four.”

Albie thought about it. Not knowing what a symphony was, he finally said, “I’ll wait.”

When Eddie got back, Albie still on his shoulders and the food in saddlebags over the rear wheel, they all went exploring
through the salt marsh to the beach. The narrow trail led down into a big area of pickleweed, a lanky plant whose woody segments
held water the way ice plants do.

A shadow shot across them, making both Marie and Eddie duck. It struck the ground thirty feet away with a thump, extended
claws first, then flapped up again with a tiny rodent wriggling in its talons. It was a foot-long handsome bird with hooked
beak and heavily barred tail.

“Daddy! Look!”

“We see, Albie. It’s a…” He turned to Marie.

“Harrier hawk,” she said. “With a harvest mouse.”

“He gonna kill the mouse?” demanded Albie.

“I’m afraid that’s what he does for a living,” Marie said regretfully.

Further in, the pickleweed was replaced by bright orange splotches of parasitic dodder and stiff triangle-leaved salt-bush.
Marie broke off a stem so they could bite it and taste the salt.

“Could the hawk kill me?” said Albie suddenly.

“Not a chance, Tiger, you’re too big for him,” said Eddie. “In fact, there’s nobody around big enough to kill you.”

“That’s okay, then,” said Albie.

There had been heavy surf the night before, so out on the beach they found great washed-up strands of kelp, its strange broad
indented streamers looking as if they had been stamped out of green tin. The thirty-foot stalks, as big as a wrist, had heads
like bulls’ testicles. All smelling of salt and the sea and not unpleasantly of the deaths of the tiny marine creatures clinging
to it when the giant seaweed had been washed ashore.

Looking at the shredded, ragged leaves, Eddie was reminded of one of Marie’s favorite poems.

“’Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,’” he quoted,“ ‘For every tatter in its mortal dress…’”

“Except these tatters are on purpose,” she said. “They split under the force of the waves so the holdfasts won’t be pulled
off the rocks down below. But these were anyway.”

Eddie put his arms around her. “Let’s always hold fast,” he said to her in sudden inexplicable fierceness.

She laughed up at him. “Okay, big boy—forever.”

“That’s okay, then,” he grinned, in imitation of Albie talking about the assassin hawk’s activities.

Soaked in Bullfrog-36 to counteract depleted ozone, they sunbathed on a tiny wedge of sand available only at low tide, with
occasional forays into the frigid surf. Albie wanted to be carried in each time also, game to their last icy dash back out
of the water shrieking with frozen laughter.

Wrapped in towels, they watched a flock of sandpipers run seaward at the foot of each retreating wave, run back up at the
lip of each advancing wave, moving almost in close-order drill as they pattered about stabbing sharp slightly up-curved bills
into the sand for tiny living things.

Finally, they ate sandwiches and drank hot tea from a thermos, were waked from their nap by raucous western gulls squabbling
with two crows over a dead striped bass without any eyes. Sun-dried and salt-crusty, they explored a tidal pool in slanting
late-afternoon sunshine, moving down to it gingerly through the so-called black zone caused by lichens and blue-green algae.
The gelatinous coat that kept the algae moist between their twice-monthly spring tide soakings made for treacherous footing.

Albie was in his glory here, being a touchie-feelie sort of guy, totally unsqueamish, as usual finding the tidal pools the
high point of his day along the water.

“Mommy, what’s this?”

He was squatting on the algae, holding up a tiny, spiral-shelled creature for Marie’s inspection. He had long since learned
that Eddie was next to useless in identifying either living or dead things on the beach.

“That’s a periwinkle snail,” she told him. She squatted beside him. “They eat the algae by scraping it off the rocks.” She
turned the shell over, pointed. “See? Rows of teeth.”

“Lots
of rows of teeth,” said Albie solemnly.

“Thousands of them,” agreed Marie. “When the rocks wear the teeth down, the snail just rolls up a new set, sort of like the
teeth are on a conveyer belt.”

The barnacle zone was mostly acorn barnacles, their close-packed flinty white cones making the rocks also look white.

“But when a barnacle dies his shell gets taken over by periwinkles, or little bitty shrimp, or limpets…”

Back at the cabin at dusk, Eddie put briquets on the hibachi and grilled the steaks while foil-wrapped potatoes baked in the
coals and sweet corn roasted in its own husks. To Albie’s delight, no crucifers. But there was ice cream and a chocolate Sara
Lee with a single candle in it, and the cards and little presents they had picked out for Marie.

Finally, plates scraped and washed and leftovers in the fridge, Eddie started the fire laid in the stone fireplace. Albie
was suddenly asleep, tipped over on his side. Marie carried his small sleeping form into his bedroom as Eddie went outside
to bury the garbage in the mulch heap. Tree frogs trilled, branches rustled, something of consequence moved through the brush
flanking the sandy track leading in from the main road.

He looked back at the cabin under the cold pale blue light of a waning moon. Smoke swirled from the chimney with the night
breeze. Light shone from the windows. He shivered, somehow felt lonely even though everyone he truly valued—except for Shenzie—was
just inside.

Watchman, what of the night?

He went back into the cabin, hungry for Marie. She held out fisted hands with chess pieces hidden in them.

“Left,” said Eddie.

She opened her hand. “You get black.”

“Black’s good. I can do black.” He sat down at the table and offered her a shameless bribe. “If I win you get your
real
birthday present.”

She gave him a bawdy grin. “And if you lose?”

He brought out the book, beautifully wrapped by Doug Sherman, and laid it on the table beside the board.

“You get your
real
birthday present.”

“Ah-hah! Win-win for Marie!”

But when she sat down at the board, her face lovely in the flickering firelight, she was concentrating too hard on her usual
pawn first move, and spoke too casually without looking up.

“You know, honey, maybe Randy’s right.” When he didn’t immediately react, she sought his eyes. “Maybe
you’re treating the Grimes thing a little too much like just a game.”

“You know that all investigations
are
just a game, sweetie—move, countermove, just like chess.”

“But what if it isn’t just a game to somebody else?”

“You and Randy.” He shook his head in mock despair.

“You didn’t see Randy’s face when we left. I did. He’s worried, Eddie. Really worried.”

He reached across the chessboard for her hand. “Okay, when we get back I’ll just Close and Bill on Grimes, and forget him.
Like Randy says, I was only hired in the first place to find out if he was skimming or not.”

Her eyes glowed at him. She squeezed his hand. He grinned at her and picked up the wrapped package and gave it to her.

“Now that’s out of the way…”

The somber moment had passed. Marie always opened presents in the same way, starting sedately as if to save the wrappings,
then suddenly losing control and turning into Albie, ripping the paper to tatters no matter how beautiful it might be.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick
…

She went still, staring at the leather-bound
Tibetan Book of the Dead.
She turned it over and over, her eyes huge stars.

“Oh my God, Eddie,” she whispered, “it’s Alexandra Neel’s own copy! Oh my God! It’s the most beautiful… I don’t…”

She stood, eyes brimming, opening her arms to embrace him.

The cabin door crashed back against the wall. Two bulky men, silhouetted by moonlight, charged in with sawed-off shotguns
in their hands, heavy boots grating on the bare planks. Silver ring glinting on a finger. One, sunglasses, sandy hair. The
other, ski mask.

Eddie leaped up against the sudden sticky molasses slowness of terror as his conscious mind cried, No no no, stop, it’s just
a game, I don’t need to keep on with the investi—

He heard the roar even though he didn’t feel the shot pattern shred his shoulder, and rip his chest, and pop blood out of
the side of his neck, and burst his cheek so his teeth were bared all the way back to the jaw hinge.

He crashed down, upsetting the table, as the shotgun belched yellow flame to smash Marie back and up, her mouth strained impossibly
wide, her eyes wild, her hair an underwater slow-motion swirl, the black hole between her breasts blossoming red, her feet
coming up off the floor with the force of her death. Her face thudded down a yard from his, her utterly dead eyes staring
into his with inanimate patience.

Through cotton, Albie’s voice came faintly up the hall.

“Mommy! Mommy!” With terror in it.

No, Albie had never known terror. Mustn’t know terror. Eddie began a crabwise scrabble toward the voice. He couldn’t raise
his head, so he could see only Albie’s stubby legs appear in the doorway, hesitate as he surveyed the room.

A question this time. “Mommy?”

“Run,
Albie, ra—”

The second shooter blasted Albie’s legs back down the hall out of sight. No blood, no pellets striking flesh. Just the legs
disappearing as the door frame was splintered and pocked and ripped by the edges of the shot pattern.

A voice croaked despairingly, “I wasn’t ready… Oh Christ… I wasn’t ready…”

The first shooter fired again, almost casually. The twin charges of buckshot swept Eddie’s body back against the legs of the
table like a surge of floodwater. A widening red pool spread beneath his chest. His groping hand closed around
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
knocked from the table, held it.

His view was narrowing and darkening. His ears were failing. The voices were through steel wool.

“They… They all… dead?” Second shooter.

First shooter. “Yeah. We’ll check if he has any notes here, a computer… then we’ll burn the place down…”

Darkness. Silence.

Silence. Darkness.

I wasn’t ready…Oh Christ
…
I wasn’t ready
…

Not a voice. A thought. A bed. Harsh antiseptic smell.
Shush-shush
of rubber-soled shoes in the corridor outside.

He knew he was in a hospital. He just didn’t know why.

But then voices. Real voices.

“Goddammit, when
can
I see him? Every hour—”

“Every hour he lives is a miracle, the blood he’s lost, the mess they made of him. He’s alive only because a neighbor saw
the flames and dragged him out before the place collapsed. Right now he won’t remember anything anyway, Inspector. Why don’t
you let it go? Leave him alone.”

“How about I just see him as a friend?”

Sounds. Movement. The voices were stereophonic now because they were on either side of his bed.

“Will he ever remember any of it, Doc?”

“This much massive trauma, who knows? He should be dead, he may be paralyzed… Physical survival is fifty-fifty at best, who
can tell about memory?”

“Fifty-fifty? Was me, I’d make it,” said Randy’s voice thoughtfully. “I’d have too much to live for to check out yet.”

“In his condition, what could he possibly have to—”

“Death, Doc.” A pause, then Randy’s voice added, softly, “Was me, I’d be plannin’ a whole lotta other people’s deaths.”

Hearing that, knowing it to be true, Eddie died.

Leaving only Dain to live on.

Not that Eddie Dain knew any of this. The only thing functioning was his ancient lizard brain, nestled down there at the base
of the cortex. Hunger, fear, survival—those were what the lizard brain knew about. And only one of those, survival, meant
anything just then. If the organism could survive, the rest of what it needed would follow.

Because now some part of Dain had something to live for.

A whole lotta other people’s deaths.

DAIN

O thou of noble-birth, meditate upon thine own tutelary deity as if he were the reflection of the moon in water, apparent
yet inexistent in itself. Meditate upon him as if he were a being with a physical body.

T
HE
T
IBETAN
B
OOK
OF THE
D
EAD

Weight, 100 pounds. For two years, pain.

Constant. Low and throbbing, like drums. Or high and shrill, like red-hot irons laid lovingly against his flesh by medicine’s
benevolent sadism.

Start with the bones. Pins here, steel rods there.

Then, muscles and tendons. Slow, careful reconstructions.

Finally, the flesh. Operate, wait for the scar tissue to heal, operate again.

Now, the physical therapy. Move this finger. Wiggle that toe. Wonderful! Can you move that arm? Can that leg support…

No no, that’s fine. Falling down is part of the therapy. One, two, three, four, rest. Let the pulse slow… One, two…

Two years. Weight, back up to his original 140.

For the year after that, Las Vegas. At first he’d thought Phoenix, Santa Fe—just so it was desert. He thought he ended up
in Vegas only because more buses went there. Hot sun, dry air, burn out the pain that, often, had him sitting on the edge
of the bathtub with a razor blade against the inside of his wrist.