Crawling Between Heaven And Earth (2 page)

Elroy stood by the sofa, staring down at Jonni's body. "I knew something had gone wrong," he said.

"Just don't touch anything," I told him, feeling tears well up in my eyes, moist, warm tears roll down my face. Damn, what did Jonni want to go and do this for? She was so young, so pretty. And, unlike me, she hadn't thoroughly fucked up her life, yet. She should have at least tried her hand at fucking it up further, before giving it up. I stumbled to the kitchen, blinded by tears, looking for a phone. I had to call nine-one-one. I had to get the police out here.

"She's not dead," Elroy said. "She just needs waking up."

I didn't even attempt to argue. No one that cold could be alive.

In the kitchen a narrow cubicle with a stove and a sink piled up with dirty dishes I found a small, white wall-phone and managed to blink away enough of my tears to dial. I'd no more than dialed the nine when I stopped.

From the living room came the sound of Elvis singing "Are you lonesome tonight." A bright light shone through the kitchen doorway.

Damn, I'd told Elroy not to touch anything. Did he have to go and turn on Jonni's music, and every damned light? Damn the man.

I slammed the phone down and walked into the living room, to give him what for.

And stopped. He hadn't turned on any music. Nor the lights.

Elvis, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, stood in the middle of the living room, dressed in a white-sequined polyester jumpsuit, leaning over Jonni and singing, "all my dreams fulfill." Light shone around and from him.

And Jonni, Jonni who had been cold and dead, sat on the ratty batik sofa and stared up at Elvis, her eyes full of wonder, her cheeks red.

I couldn't speak. I could take walk-ins. I could take attempted possession. I could take a hundred different things, but Elvis materializing in Jonni's living room was just too much. To say nothing of this resurrection business.

I leaned against the wall and wondered what had been in that Rice-dream bar.

Elvis took off his scarf and handed it to Jonni.

Jonni, a dazed, enchanted-looking Jonni, clapped enthusiastically.

"Jonni?" I managed to say.

The light went out. I blinked. It wasn't Elvis. Only Elroy, who stood there, with his hip poked out, his lower lip sticking forward in a rakish pout. "See?" he said, turning around. "I told you she just needed waking."

I shook my head. Side-effects of working in a New Age store. You eventually went as nuts as the customers.

I approached Jonni gingerly. She had been dead. I was sure she had been dead. "Are you all right?" I asked her.

"Yeah," she said, in her thin, little-girl voice. "Yeah. I had a bad argument with Pete and I took some sleeping pills and slept late, that's all. You guys want me to come in to the store?"

"Yes," Elroy said, unequivocal. "Why don't you go get dressed?"

"I'll go with you," I volunteered, not willing to let her out of my sight, lest she should revert to a dead state. I followed her up a rickety stair and into a messy room, where I watched her change into a pair of jeans and T-shirt. And heard the full account of her row with Pete, told in a strangely detached voice.

"And Elroy woke you?" I asked, bringing her back to the present.

"Yes," she said, and wrinkled her perfect brow. "Only . . .I didn't even know he was an Elvis impersonator."

Elvis impersonator? So, she'd seen it too? Were hallucinations shared, now?

I led Jonni downstairs and out the door, to the car.

Elroy had cleared a space for her in the back by piling the teddy bears in unholy confusion on one side of the back seat. He sat her down with unusual solicitude, then opened the door for me.

Once I was in and we'd started the drive back to the store, he said, "I hope I never catch you taking sleeping pills again, young one. I don't want you taking any of that trash. That stuff can kill you."

I almost told Elroy that we'd all seen the this-is-your-brain-on-drugs commercial, but it struck me that Jonni, whose full name was Jonnitan and whose parents had met in a hippie commune,
might
never have heard any anti-drug speech from someone she respected. So I let Elroy ramble on in his odd, chewed-up speech.

He sounds just like Elvis, I thought. And his gestures, his hip-positioning, his lower-lip pouting, his disapproving sneer. All of them are just like Elvis. "So, you were an Elvis impersonator, when you were young?" I asked him, when I thought that Jonni had enough sermonizing. Besides, he'd started quoting the gospels mixed up with vintage New Age sayings and stuff about a higher plane.

My question brought him up short. He turned to stare at me. "A what?"

"An Elvis impersonator," I said, just as the weird thought ran through my mind that there had been no impersonation involved. Looking down, I saw that he wasn't wearing any belt buckle, certainly not a huge, gold-and-jewels one. Had I dreamed that, too?

I was so shocked that when I paid mind to Elroy again, he had launched off in another sermon of some sort, this one apparently directed at me, "besides, young lady, unlike some people I don't go through life playing no phony role. It's just that sometimes you're required to be what people need, what people think you should be, and in a way to expiate and to cleanse the sins of who you were or they think you were. For instance, all those ice creams you eat"

"I pay for them," I protested.

"Damn right you do. You can die of overweight, you know. And besides, as my mama used to say"

He had parked in front of the store by the time he finished his sermon. I almost ran out of the car, confused, baffled, feeling like I was having a weird dream and definitely very tired of Elroy's sermon.

Mark was at the counter, on the phone, with a pile of books in front of him and a pricing gun in his hand. He looked up and mouthed at me, "Jonni?"

"She's fine. She's coming in," I said. I wanted to tell him she'd been dead and Elroy had taken on Elvis' form and resurrected her, but then Mark would just tell me I'd been working for Eternal Life too long. And maybe I had.

"Well, ma'am, if you are possessed by a malevolent entity, I'd say you definitely should quit your job with the nuclear power plant," Mark said, into the phone.

I moved in beside him, took the price gun from his hand, determined to start work and forget what must have been a dream, had to have been a dream.

Looking down at the cover on the first book on the pile, I gasped.

Mark covered the mouthpiece on the phone. "Elroy had them vanity published. Isn't it a hoot?"

I looked at the cover again, speechless.

It showed a figure in a white jumpsuit, surrounded by light. On the top it said Elroy Peters. And on the bottom, in black letters, was the title:
Elvis Died For Your Sins.

I have a Southern friend who talks endlessly of civil war minutia. He happened to mention that Stonewall Jackson was killed by friendly fire. With one thing and another, next thing I knew I found myself writing this story.

(preceding pages rendered illegible through water damage and age) . . .possible that he had been wounded early in the day, more than twelve hours beforehand, and just as possible that all those hours he had lain for dead, in that great butcher-shop that Gettysburg had become.

I'm not sure when he was brought to the hospital we'd established at Plank Farm.

Situated three miles west of Gettysburg, the farm consisted of a good sized building on the west bank of Willoughby's Run. A few of us, medical men, had claimed it early in the morning of Wednesday, the first of July 1863, and since then we'd been disposing sick and wounded where we best could. Beds and mattresses, as well as anything that could be pressed into service as such, had long since been occupied by wretched sufferers.

We had the orderlies bring straw from the barns and spread it on the floor, so that more room might be made to care for afflicted men.

The man I wish to tell you about lay on the floor of the front parlor, upon the already blood-soaked straw, amid scores of wounded, moaning, crying men.

I thought he was dead. Surveying him from the narrow corridor about six feet away, I thought he couldn't be anything but dead and must have died the moment he received his wound. I couldn't imagine why anyone had dragged his corpse in.

His head was all a mass of gore, from which nothing human emerged.

Yet, the gore appeared to move.

Curious, I stepped amid the wounded, careful to avoid touching the infection-swollen limbs and extricating myself from hands that grasped my ankles.

To be honest, I no longer noticed the grabbing hands, nor the piteous moaning of the poor sufferers, nor could I any longer smell the miasma of putrefaction and illness that pervaded the room. I'd smelled its like or much worse after other campaigns and in other hospitals, worse provisioned than this.

In those other necessity-engendered hospitals, the wounded had lain in tents that could not keep the water fully away from their tortured bodies, and had been crowded so tightly together that there had been no room to step between them.

At least here there was plenty of room around this man for me get close to him. Close enough to realize that what moved amid the gore and blood on his face was no human muscle but a mass of maggots that writhed and danced like children at a feast, all the while making a sound like hogs feeding on mash.

Revolted, my stomach reacting to this sight with a violence I hadn't experienced since the early days of the war, I attempted to find an orderly that would take the corpse away, before its corruption contaminated the living bodies lying beside it.

But just then the assumed corpse spoke, a whisper barely audible above the sound the maggots made while feasting his still-living flesh. "France," he said, with startling clarity. "And the English, too." His voice subsided into a low sound that might not have been more than labored breathing.

His uniform might be a mishmash of Confederate and Federal issue, but his voice held the slow accent of the South.

I rushed out to the yard of the farmhouse, where I found a pail and filled it with water from the pump, displacing the walking wounded who had been taking turns pumping cold water over their afflicted limbs.

Though his words held no meaning for me, they were words, the words of a fellow human being suffering the tortures of hell while in this world. And his accent was the accent of a compatriot. To assist him and others such as him, I'd left my studies in England to come to the succor of my homeland, when it first seceded from the Union.

I'd come back, against my mother's besieging and my father's instructing, and through two years of hard, bitter campaigning, I'd lived to endure the full pain of my decision. But I'd never regretted it, because what use is man if he doesn't do something for his fellow?

I took the pail with water and a discarded rag that I found in a corner of the yard.

Kneeling by the wounded man, I did my best to clear away the blood and gore, and the vermin that infested it. As I cleared the gore, I found his injury was less than I'd at first suspected.

The right half of his head was intact, his elongated dolichocephalic cranium covered in pale blond hair. But the left half couldn't be cleaned. It remained a mass of gore and hair, with bits of bone and metal sticking to it. I could do no more than clear away the vermin and wrap his head in the cleanest ligature to be found.

He would be very young, perhaps twenty at most, and at one time might have been thought handsome, with clean-cut squarish features, somewhat obscured by a puffy swelling of his face.

As a man who'd long been interested in the human brain and the science of phrenology, I marveled at his being still alive despite his wound and wondered what faculties he would find missing, should he survive.

 . . . . . .(pages missing, where a rat gnawed at manuscript) . . .as well as procuring food from the vegetable gardens and pens of the farm, besides keeping those wounded who could and would move about for their own purposes from eating all of it, leaving nothing for the worst sufferers.

While at these labors, I found a bottle of spirits in an unused cupboard and I thought it might be used to comfort some of those in worst extremities. I have to confess I thought foremost of my head-wound case, the nameless man who, as I've written earlier, had made wondrous progress in the last five hours, so that he sat up and looked about with remarkably clear green-brown eyes.

However, upon reaching the front parlor, where he had lain, I saw that his space had emptied, though all about it the wounded lay crowded as before. He must have died.

Yet, as I walked to the door, I looked at his spot once more and saw him standing where he'd once lain.

He looked startled, scared, his eyes wide and unreasoning, like the eyes of a horse about to rear.

I hastened to his side. He showed some hint of recognizing me and allowed me to sit him down.

I proffered the whiskey, and he took a healthy swig, capping the flask and handing it back to me, all as sane as you please. He might have been a fellow drinker on a social visit.

And then he spoke.

"How goes . . .the fighting?" he asked. His voice, scarcely louder than wind rustling through trees, sounded alarmed.

I shrugged. I knew little enough of it, being here, away from the action, and heard close to nothing from the mouths of those I treated. "I hear Stonewall Jackson's command took Cemetery hill," I said. "And it seems as though we'll carry the day, though we get so many dead and wounded, one way and another"

He nodded, as though he understood. The ligature on his head, brown with soot and seeping blood, had remained vermin-free. "So the Yankees won't win?" He spoke in the familiar accent of the Piedmont.

I shrugged again. "It looks like we'll carry this. And in a month the Yankees might well have capitulated and we all be home."

He raised a dirt-encrusted hand to his forehead, bringing it down again before touching that portion of it where the ligature hid broken bone and said, "I had dreams. Dreams like when one dreams of being awakened and in the dream walks and talks and does all the normal things of life. I dreamed I rose and walked as through an open door, and found myself back home, but the Union had won and scavengers from the North descended upon Dixie like vultures on an ill-dead carcass." He looked away. "My wife had died of dysentery. My farm was ruined. I had to sell the house."