Authors: Jan Strnad
Bright light, white hot, washed over him and a jumble of voices filled his ears. Then everything turned into a loud, chaotic roar and he let go, he didn't care, he just let go and the black wave washed over him and, for a moment, nothing hurt at all.
***
This was the way life was supposed to be.
The sun shining and water gently lapping at the dock and a warm breeze sighing over your naked body. It didn't seem to Merle that it was so much to ask, just to be left alone when you needed it, to get rid of the press of the city and strip bare and bask in the sun for a few hours like a lizard or a butterfly or a lazy old dog. Harming no one, not meaning to offend.
So why were Merle and his fellow nudists so persecuted?
They'd been granted the dock, but it was a fragile treaty, written on the wind. Every time some Mrs. Grundy filed a complaint with the county they had to go through the same song and dance to keep their hundred square feet of space, even though it was set back in the farthest cove where only the most diligent seekers could find them. As if it was going to kill anybody to glimpse a bit of bare skin now and again, anyway.
It was one more sign that civilization was going to hell in a hand basket, according to Merle.
Merle Tippert, the town grouch, wasn't what most people thought of when they thought of nudists.
They might think of well-proportioned young women playing volleyball or riding horseback or sunning themselves in the company of other well-proportioned young women. Certainly that was the image promoted by the "social documentarians" who published nudist magazines in the 1950s, before Hugh Hefner demonstrated that you didn't need an anthropological reason to print pictures of naked young ladies.
They might think, right or wrong, of bare bodies engaged in fruity New Age rituals involving body paint, Gaia the Earth Mother, and flutes.
But they certainly did not think of an ancient grouser sitting naked on a dock at the Cooves County Reservoir. Merle with his family-rated movie house would seem like a particularly unlikely candidate for parading around nekkid, as uncomfortable as he was with sexual matters. But as any true nudist (or "naturist" as the group preferred to be called) could tell you, the surest way to short-circuit sexual impulses was to eliminate the tease factor, for what is sex without mystery?
That most people could not think of nudity without connecting it to sex was more evidence to Merle that most people had shit for brains.
Merle was not alone on the dock this Sunday afternoon. Also enjoying the unseasonably warm weather were Jack and Dolores Frelich—he was an engineer on the nuke plant construction project, she was a bookkeeper there—and Hiram Weems, an insurance agent for the tri-county area who made a point of stopping by when he was in the vicinity, weather permitting.
Merle sat on the edge of the dock on a ragged towel he kept for this purpose and dangled his feet in the water. Sometimes fish would nibble at his toes, but he didn't mind. He wished that he and his Indian maiden, Princess Tall Pine, had had a lake such as this to swim in back in 1932. Back then, when there was still a decent patch of country between towns, this land had belonged to farmers like his father and mother, and kids like Merle grew up half wild. Trees grew along the river and he and Princess Tall Pine spent many hours among them, running from the cavalry and building lean-to houses and cooking meals stolen from their families' kitchens. They ran around naked much of the time, sometimes fashioning loin cloths out of rags, but there was nothing dirty about it. They never even played at any of the sex games kids play. Theirs was a pure love, innocent and timeless. Naked was the way to be when you were seven years old and lived in the woods and you were Indians and it was 1932.
Princess Tall Pine's Christian name was Ellie Driscoll and she was one of seven Driscoll kids whose parents farmed a poor piece of dirt not far from the Tipperts' place. Her hair was dishwater blonde but Merle always thought of it as jet black as befitted an Indian princess. Merle's Indian name changed from day to day. Often he was the powerful Great Bear, sometimes he was Sees Like A Hawk, sometimes Chief Many Scalps. Ellie was always Princess Tall Pine.
One day Ellie's younger brother got tonsillitis and the doctor came to the Driscoll house to snip out the boy's tonsils. They had him breathe chloroform until he was woozy and laid him on the kitchen table and the doctor performed the surgery. Even though Ellie wasn't sick, she was the only other Driscoll kid who hadn't had her tonsils out and so the doctor snipped her, too, while he was there.
Ellie's brother recovered but Ellie caught some kind of infection and they took her to the hospital to die. They didn't let Merle see her but they said he could go to the funeral. He saw the doctor there and glared at him all through the service. Outside the cemetery, as they were leaving, Merle chucked rocks at the doctor's car until his father boxed him on the ears, saying, "What's the matter with you?" and commanded him to show some respect for the dead.
Merle, now in his early seventies and never married, muttered the word "doctors" and leaned over and spat into the reservoir. His old tanned hide was loose and baggy and folded many times over his pot belly and a lot of folks would have found it a disgusting sight, but Merle thought, So what? He came into the world naked and, God willing, he'd go out the same way. Who cared what anybody thought in this ass-end-up world anyway? In his mind he was still young and he still sported with Princess Tall Pine in a world that existed only in the memories and dreams of old coots like himself.
He jumped at the explosion behind him.
"What in the hell—?" he said and he turned around to see Deputy Haws standing over the body of Hiram Weems, the traveling salesman, holding a smoking pistol. Jack and Dolores Frelich stared at the deputy in stunned disbelief. Haws moved his gun over to point at Jack and shot him through the forehead. Dolores screamed and tried to get up and run but she was too slow. Haws fired again, shot her right through the chest, and she fell to the dock with a dead thud.
Merle took all this in and couldn't believe it. He couldn't get his mind around it somehow, it made no sense. He didn't have time to summon up remorse at the loss of three lives or even to be properly frightened for himself. Then the gun barrel was pointed in his direction and Haws was looking at him coldly and there was another explosion.
Merle knew he was dying as the impact caught him in the sternum and blew him off the dock. He fell into the cold water and blood streamed from his chest. He surfaced, gasping for air, and Deputy Haws stepped over and got down on his hands and knees and reached down, laid a heavy hand on the top of Merle's head, and pushed him back under. Merle struggled but couldn't break the deputy's grip. After a few moments he gave up. He floated there under the surface, his chest on fire, and watched his blood gush into the water and swirl before his eyes. He watched it and he felt the coldness creep into his limbs and he thought,
Here I come, my princess, here I come....
***
In the office of the
Cooves County Times
where Brant had gone to write up his impressions of the morning's service while they were still fresh in his mind, the phone was ringing. Brant didn't answer. He'd already heard about the accident that claimed the lives of Irma Klempner and the Ganger boy and put Franz Klempner in the hospital, and he was busy in the bathroom with his bowels doing a damn fine impression of Mt. Vesuvius. They always turned volcanic when events weren't adding up the way Brant wanted.
He sat on the toilet and thought about all the things that were vexing him:
—That people were coming back from the dead.
—That Deputy Haws could be murdered and risen and not tell anybody about it, not even his boss and supervisor, Sheriff Clark.
—That Haws had met with his alleged murderer, the Ganger boy, outside the church just a few minutes before Ganger's so-called "accident."
—That Irma Klempner perished in a car crash before Brant or anyone else could ask her about the enigmatic "Eloise."
—That Haws knew that Brant had seen him with the Ganger boy and might do something about it.
It was all very strange and unsettling and terrifying. No wonder Brant's guts were in an uproar. They didn't want to believe what seemed to be going on any more than his brain did.
Brant sat with his spinning head in his hands, his pants wrapped around his ankles and a telephone ringing off the hook on the other side of the wall and his bowels threatening to blast him halfway to Timbuktu. He rubbed the palms of his hands together. They were sweaty and cold.
He felt like a condemned man. He sensed unknown forces descending on him as Galen Ganger must have descended on the Klempners, swooping in like a hawk on a field mouse.
He had to do something, and soon. But what, damn it?
What?
Peg thought that Brant was pale as he walked into Ma's Diner and ordered a cup of coffee. She smiled at him and he sort of smiled back but his heart wasn't in it. She prepared herself for a let-down.
All afternoon, all she could think about was tonight's dinner with Brant. She still didn't know what to make of John Duffy's resurrection but her brain had quit thinking about it, bombarding her instead with questions like, Should I mash some potatoes? and What if he hates creamed corn? She was a fluttery school girl again. Brant had brought back to life a part of her that had been dead. Chalk up another miracle resurrection in Anderson.
Now here Brant came dragging himself in like a whipped dog. He looked shifty. His eyes darted this way and that and he was jumpy. If he'd been a stranger Peg would've figured him for an escaped convict. He even asked if Deputy Haws had been in lately. Since he wasn't on the lam, he must have been planning to break their date and he was just waiting for the right moment to tell her. He kept ordering coffee and watching the people in the diner come and go.
She decided she had to talk to him.
"Cindy's filling in for me this evening," she said. He jumped at the sound of her voice, as if he hadn't seen her coming. In fact, he'd been staring into his coffee cup like a gypsy reading tea leaves for the past five minutes. "So I can get off early and fix us a nice dinner," she added.
He replied, "Oh. Good."
"It'll be a treat for Tom, too. He hasn't had a home-cooked meal in I-don't-know-how-long."
"Um," Brant said. He stirred his coffee, though Peg hadn't seen him put anything in it.
She felt like she'd just walked up to a boy at a high school cotillion and flirted with him and now she was standing there waiting for him to ask her to dance and instead he just looked at the floor and looked at the ceiling and made some comment about how hot it was. Obviously she had to take the bull by the horns.
"I figure about seven," she said.
"Seven what?"
"Dinner at seven. You're coming, right? You're coming to dinner?"
"Sure," Brant said flatly, "I'm looking forward to it."
"Well okay then," Peg said a bit snappishly.
"Okay," he replied.
"Okay."
She spun on her heels and marched away and became very busy with some little boxes of breakfast cereal. He would call her, she knew, about ten minutes 'til seven, after she'd bought groceries and cooked dinner and fretted and stewed and cleaned and made sure everything was just so, and tell her he couldn't come, that something had come up. She started preparing what she was going to say to him then to cut him down to size.
Brant hadn't completely forgotten about dinner with Peg but it wasn't uppermost on his mind anymore, either. The longer he thought about the day's events the more sinister they became. He remembered how, on Saturday morning, Jed Grimm and Deputy Haws had loaded the Ganger boy in Haws' police car. Was Grimm in on it, too? Had he had a stroke or something in the night and risen and nobody knew it?
Hell, people could be dying and coming back all over town and who'd know? How could he tell who he could trust and who he couldn't?
Paranoia is a terrible thing, especially when people are out to get you. If he wasn't careful, Brant could cut himself off from friends and foes alike.
Okay, Deputy Haws and John Duffy were definitely Risen. What about Reverend Small? No hard evidence of it yet, but he was a maybe. Then again, everybody in town was a maybe. Jed Grimm was doing what anybody would have done in his place, he didn't necessarily know that he was putting the Ganger boy in the hands of the man he'd murdered. Tom Culler wouldn't have confided all his fears about Haws if he was one of the Risen, so he was safe...unless he'd died after leaving Brant's office on Saturday night and come back.
Wasn't there some test Brant could perform to find out? In the movies, when people were under the control of aliens there was a parasite or little metal doohickey in the back of their necks. Or that other one, the terrifying one...
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. The pod people didn't have emotions. But according to Madge Duffy, John had come back better than he was before.
What was he doing, basing life and death decisions on B-pictures? It was a sure sign that he'd lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction!
Time to return to Planet Earth. Drink his coffee. Have a nice dinner tonight with Peg.