Risen (13 page)

Brant asked Carl if he'd thought about tenting the house.

"No, that's for termites," Carl informed him. He hoisted the sprayer into view. "I've sprayed with everything in the store, even stuff I'm not supposed to sell without a permit. I thought I had them licked there for awhile, but...." He shook his head. "I could swear I heard them in the night, in the walls, under the floor, made a helluva racket. Regular cockroach jamboree down there. Joists were thick with them when I looked this morning. Damn brazen, too. I shined the light on them and they just stood right there looking back at me like to say, 'What the devil do you want down here?' They're dead now, though. Bernice threw a fit about the poison. Say, you wouldn't want to keep a cat or two for a couple of days?"

Brant said "No, thanks," and wished Carl luck and drove on to the hospital.

He had to wait to see Doc Milford. Annie Culler was having trouble breathing and Doc suspected fluid in her lungs. They'd taken her in for x-rays and Doc had a few minutes while waiting for the results. Brant told him about his interview with John and Madge Duffy.

"It sounds to me like they just want to put the whole thing behind them," he said.

"I wish it was that easy for me," Doc replied. "Did you get a look at him?"

"Just as you said, not a mark on him."

"You're not a religious man, are you, Brant?"

Brant acknowledged that he wasn't.

"Neither am I," Doc said, "not in the strictest sense. Still, there isn't a doctor living who hasn't had a miracle case or two in his career. Someone who shouldn't make it, does. Someone who shouldn't wake up, wakes. The little Culler girl, for instance. I'd bet a dollar to a donut that she never regains consciousness. If she were my own daughter, I'd have pulled her off life support months ago. But Peg has faith, so who am I to say that Annie won't be that one in a million who pulls through against all odds? She could go on to be a normal little girl and a sullen teenager and the mother of three and the first lady President of the United States for all I know.

"But John Duffy, he's something else. Duffy's right up there with multiplying loaves and Sunday strolls on top of Lake Erie. It couldn't happen, but it did."

Doc Milford chuckled.

"I even tracked down his birth record," he said, "to see if he might have been twins. You know, somebody pulling a switch on me. No such luck. Not even a brother or a sister. So, there is no rational explanation for John Duffy whatsoever. Unless you believe in miracles."

Brant shifted uncomfortably in his chair. If Doc was talking miracles, there might be something to it, and that meant the inevitable interview with the local guru. "I guess I'd better see Reverend Small this afternoon," he said. "Come with me."

"Why? Do you need help finding the church?"

"No, but I'd like a doctor there in case I break out in boils. Got a free hour?"

"I'll make one."

***

Brant did not break out in boils or burst into flame when he set foot inside the First Methodist Church, but his stomach did flip-flop and he felt his forehead bead up with sweat. He wondered, because of his obvious aversion to all things religious, if he weren't suppressing memories of being molested by a church leader as a child, but since he hadn't been raised Catholic he didn't think that was likely.

Reverend Small was setting out hymnals for the next day's services when Brant and Doc walked in. The sanctuary smelled, well, like a sanctuary, and the scent was probably what triggered Brant's gastronomic response. It was the unforgettable mixture of wood and Pledge and holiness that defines middle American churches from east coast to west, from North Dakota down to Galveston Bay.

They exchanged greetings and quickly got down to business.

"You have a very spirited community here," Small offered, and Brant smiled.

"You mean that little fracas at Ma's this morning? That was nothing. Wait'll an election year and you'll see some real fireworks."

"What do you make of the Duffy situation, Reverend?" Doc asked. "Are we talking 'miracle' here?"

"Well—and no offense intended, Doctor—but it's either that or gross medical incompetence. Not having been at the hospital...."

Doc whipped a set of prints of the Duffy photos out of his inside jacket pocket with a speed that would have dazzled a gunfighter. To his credit, Reverend Small was noticeably unsqueamish as Doc led him through the photos one by one, describing Duffy's state in medical terms that led inevitably to the same conclusion: Duffy was as dead as a holiday ham when they wheeled him down to the morgue. If his death was a hoax, it had taken the participation of John Duffy, his wife, the Sheriff, Doc Milford, Nurse White, and Curtis Waxler the janitor (who had eventually turned up at the grade school playground on top of the jungle gym with no recollection of how he got there) to pull it off. Not to mention the able assistance of a top special effects makeup team.

And for what? If John Duffy were a glory hound of some sort, it might make sense. But why stage such an elaborate hoax just to retreat and clam up like an indicted Senator?

"For one," Reverend Small said, "I'm perfectly willing to accept the notion that the Good Lord, in His generosity, chose to smile upon the Duffy family, if not for John Duffy's sake, then for his wife's. Miracles happen. After viewing your photos, Doctor, I'd say I'm convinced. Thank you."

"For...?"

"For giving focus to tomorrow's sermon. Congregations don't respond well to ambiguity. They worship conviction. A minister who isn't sure about things soon finds himself without a flock."

"Like a shepherd with no sense of direction," Brant suggested.

"That's a good analogy. May I use it?"

Brant nodded his assent. "Myself, I've always been skeptical of people who had all the answers," he said. "Take the good doctor, here. I'm sure he'd freely admit to certain gaps in his knowledge of medicine."

"Medicine often seems to be more gaps than knowledge," said Doc. "Everything we learn somehow raises more questions."

"So it stands to reason that when it comes to comprehending the basic forces of the universe—God, in other words—we pitiful little human beings would be as much at a loss as, say, a housefly to understand Wall Street, molecular physics, or the federal income tax. Yet we're surrounded by people—the holy men of every denomination—who claim to have the inside scoop." Brant shrugged. "I'm skeptical."

"As well you should be," Reverend Small replied. "Nonetheless, your fellow houseflies demand such answers, and we clergy do the best we can to provide them."

"Even when you have to make something up."

"Unlike reporters, you mean." The preacher smiled.

Doc Milford had been regarding the exchange with amusement. "What strikes me," Doc said, "is how this 'miracle' occurred fewer than two weeks after your arrival. I guess if a preacher wanted to impress his new town, a resurrection's one way to do it."

"Well," Small replied, "with Anderson, I wanted to hit the ground running."

"Maybe I wasn't kidding," replied Doc.

"Maybe I wasn't, either."

The sanctuary fell deathly quiet for some moments. Then Brant's bowels gurgled and he suggested that they'd taken enough of the Reverend's time.

***

It was as if someone had left the window to Peg's brain open and flies had gotten in, but it was only her own thoughts that were swarming. She was worried about Tom's growing bond with the Ganger boy, she kept flashing on the morning's altercation at the diner, she didn't know what to make of John Duffy's miraculous rise from the dead, and there was the persistent and familiar question that cropped up at every occurrence of stress: What does this mean for Annie?

If people could come back from the dead, couldn't they just as easily...even more easily...come out of comas?

Why was John Duffy, a known wife-abuser, chosen for this miracle over her own sweet, innocent baby?

Did anything at all make sense? Or was the whole world some sort of monstrous practical joke on humankind?

Against the buzz of thoughts like these, who ordered dressing on their salad and who wanted it on the side could not compete. On top of that the diner was uncommonly busy, and John Duffy was the hot topic at every table. Peg found herself at times wishing the man had stayed dead.

People tend to gather together in a crisis and the fact that they were gathering now made Duffy's rise that much more ominous. Peg had to make more apologies to customers that afternoon than she'd made all year to date, which Ma was quick to point out to her. She looked so miserable, though, that he offered to call in Cindy Robertson and let Peg off early. She took Ma up on his offer and left as soon as Cindy arrived. She drove straight to the hospital to check on Annie.

She noticed Brant's car in the lot and learned that he was in Doc's office. The admissions nurse told her that Brant and Doc had just returned from a confab with Reverend Small and Peg could guess the subject of the conversation. She knew Brant well enough to take his visit to a church as another bad omen.

Her outlook, then, was bleak when she stepped into Annie's room and saw the stranger bending low over the bed, obviously not a nurse or even an orderly. She couldn't see his face or what he was doing, but he was dressed in worn-out blue jeans and a shirt that badly needed laundering and Peg's protective instincts kicked into overload. She yelled out, "Hey!" and marched in ready to leap on his back.

The stranger whipped around like a mongoose at the hiss of a cobra. "Mom!" Tom said, "Jesus, you scared the shit out of me!"

Peg was suddenly lightheaded. I didn't even recognize my own son, she thought. There had been a time when she could have picked him out on a playground among thirty other kids at five hundred feet. She'd have known the way he ran, the way he stood and fidgeted with his fingers, his laugh even when mingled with a dozen others. She'd known his every pair of pants and every shirt and how long he'd worn them without changing. She could have picked out his silhouette at twilight, running toward her along the sidewalk or dangling from a tree limb or just sitting on the riverbank lost in his own thoughts. That was years ago, and every year since had seen that intimacy erode, had brought her closer to this single, pulse-fluttering, upside-down moment when she looked upon her son and beheld a stranger.

Oh, shit,
she thought,
I've lost him in my own mind.

"She isn't breathing right," Tom said. "Listen."

Peg put her ear to Annie's chest and listened to the rasp of her breath. "Get Doc," Peg said, and Tom dashed out of the room. He returned with the doctor and Peg spied Brant hovering around the doorway, watching.

Doc put a stethoscope to Annie's chest and gave a listen. "We detected this earlier," he said. "I think it's just a little water that's collected in the lungs. We x-rayed her to check for pneumonia, but the x-rays were clear. We're giving her a diuretic now. If the drug doesn't take care of the problem, we'll go in with a tube, but I'd like to avoid that if possible."

After a few more reassurances Doc left and Brant entered.

"I don't want to intrude," he said. Peg told him not to be silly and to pull up a chair.

"I understand you've become a church-goer," she said.

Brant laughed and told her about his visit to the Duffys and his and Doc's conversation with Reverend Small, and Peg filled Brant in on the general buzz at the diner. Tom listened with what Peg took as polite interest. She expected him to excuse himself at any moment, but maybe the gathering instinct was working on him, too. Something had brought him to the hospital, and something held him here now. For some reason the image of crows grouping on a wire before a storm came into Peg's mind.

"The big question in town," Peg said, "seems to be, 'why Duffy?' What makes him so special?"

"It certainly wasn't his karma," Brant agreed.

Tom studied the pattern of the tiles on the floor. As usual, the populace of Anderson was off on a tangent. Duffy wasn't the only one chosen, but how was anyone except Tom and the other boys to know that? Not that Deputy Hawg was any more deserving of divine intervention than John Duffy was, but if anybody was likely to figure this thing out, it might be Brant, and he was as far off base as everyone else.

As usual, Tom felt himself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Brant needed facts that only Tom was able to provide...well, that only Tom was likely to provide. He might do it, too, if Peg weren't there. She'd run to the Sheriff for sure, Galen being involved and all. For that matter, so might Brant. Then again, Brant would grasp the concept of confidential sources, or should, anyway. There was a time when Tom would've taken Brant into his confidence immediately, but that was before the "My Town" business. Brant might not have the guts to do what was needed now, but who knew what was needed? Damn, this shit was confusing. Tom felt himself sliding into the Blacklands, but he fought it. This wasn't the time or place....

"Tom?"

Tom started. He hadn't noticed that Brant was speaking to him.

"Sorry," Tom said.

"Lost in thought?" Peg asked. "I know how it is. I was the same way all day."

"I was just going to get us some coffee," Brant said. "Want a cup? It's even worse than Ma's."