Dance for the Dead (13 page)

“I’m sorry,”
Jake said. That was what people said when somebody died. A man his
age ought to have thought of something better than that by now, but
if he had, he never remembered it when he needed it.

“Somebody outsmarted me.
He knew what bait to use, and somehow he must have figured out a way
to be sure that this lawyer – the one who died – knew it
was there. But the trap he set wasn’t for a lawyer. It was for
someone like me.”

“How do you know that?”

“He knew that I would find
a way to get the boy into the courthouse before it opened in the
morning, or at least study the building so I knew the entrances and
exits and who was supposed to be where. So at the last minute he had
them transfer the case to a different court.”

Jake ate some of the corn bread
and honey, and thought about what she had said. “Who is he, a
cop?”

She said, “He was tracking
the boy all over the country for years. If you run into a crooked
cop, you can almost always avoid him by driving past the city line.
There’s hardly ever a good enough reason to follow you beyond
it. On one side of the line he’s just about invulnerable. On
the other, he has no legal power and the local police wonder what
he’s up to. No,” she said. “I think he’s
something else.”

Jake stopped pretending not to
stare at her face. “How did you get hurt?”

When she lifted her hands out of
her lap and picked up her coffee cup he saw her knuckles and fingers.
“At the courthouse,” she said.

Jake ate his corn bread, drank
his coffee, and considered. What she had wrong with her looked like
one shot to the side of her face, but there was a lot of damage to
her hands and wrists and probably elbows from somebody’s teeth
and facial bones. It was possible somebody was dead that she hadn’t
mentioned. “Should I be listening for sirens?”

“No. There was a judge who
made sure I got out before it got to that stage.” She noticed
his puzzled look. “There are people like that. I don’t
know if I ever told you about that part of it. People who have no
reason to take risks will do it. He knew he could get into trouble –
probably get disbarred or something – but he did it anyway.”

Jake answered, “People one
at a time are a lot more appetizing than you would think if you look
at them all at once.” He shrugged. “So you came home.”

She shook her head. “I was
trying, but something else happened on the way home. There was a
woman I ran into. She heard somebody talking about me in jail in
California. She needed my help to get out of trouble. I started to do
it. Then I realized I couldn’t. I gave her some identification
and some advice and left.”

“Was she in danger when
you left?”

“No.”

“Then that’s a good
place to stop,” he said.

She looked at him over the rim
of her coffee cup. He couldn’t see her mouth, just the deep
strange blue of her eyes against her olive skin. To Jake it was like
looking at both of Jane’s parents at once. The skin and the
long black hair that wreathed her face were all Seneca. But there was
her mother too, the liquid blue eyes that had originated somewhere
far from here in northern Europe. He tried to talk to the eyes
because he had some superstitious feeling that he had something in
common with them, some hope of talking to somebody behind them who
shared at least one or two assumptions. But even before he began, he
knew that it was nonsense. It was like thinking she was her mother
because she was wearing her mother’s dress. “I don’t
want to start giving you advice,” he lied. “I never have,
in spite of the fact that if everybody listened to me they’d
all be a hell of a lot less erratic, since I seldom contradict
myself. But I know something about how time works. No matter what you
do with yourself, the day comes when it ends. You die or go into
something else. If you spent your time catching fish, no matter how
long you stuck at it, on the day you quit there would still be some
fish out there somewhere. Not only can you not go back out and get
them, but you shouldn’t try.”

Jane stood up and changed into
the young woman next door again. She picked up the plates carefully,
one at a time, and put them in the sink. She stood tall and straight,
with her long black hair naturally parting to hang down her back, and
began to clean her kitchen.

Jake stood up too and signified
that he understood that their meeting was over. “Well, thanks
for the snack, but I’ve got a lot to do in the yard before
supper. It gets dark so damned early now, I barely have time to wake
up before the streetlights go on.”

Jane turned to him and gave him
a small kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, Jake.”

“I’ll be home if you
need anything,” he said as he walked to the door. “I
don’t imagine much of what’s in your refrigerator bears
looking at by now.” He stopped and glared suspiciously at the
keypad on the wall by the door. “Can I open this without going
deaf?”

“Yes,” she said.
“It’s turned off.”

He walked outside. “Don’t
forget to turn it on again.”

Jane closed the door and stood
beside it to listen to his footsteps going down the wooden steps and
scraping on the sidewalk before she moved away. She walked back into
the kitchen, washed the dishes, wiped the counters, and turned off
the lights. She had cleaned the oven and emptied the shelves of the
refrigerator before she had left to pick up Timmy and Mona in
Chicago, so she could think of no justification for doing anything
more in here. She walked out into the living room. She had given the
whole house a nervous cleaning before she had left, and it had been
closed tight with the furnace thermostat set to 50 degrees just to
keep the pipes from freezing if the winds coming out of Canada turned
fierce early, so there wasn’t even any dust.

She climbed the old varnished
staircase and walked into her bedroom. The telephone answering
machine glowed with a steady, unblinking zero. She stripped off the
clothes she had been wearing since she had left Michigan, stuffed
them into the laundry bag she kept in her closet, then walked into
the bathroom. She ran the water so that it cascaded into the tub hot,
turned the air steamy, and condensed on the mirrors.

She stepped into the tub and let
the water rise until it was close to the rim, then turned it off,
leaned back, and closed her eyes. She had slept very little for the
past few days, waiting until Mary Perkins was settled and breathing
deep, regular breaths before she stood up, moved a chair to the best
window, and sat watching the street outside the motel. Whenever she
had begun to doze off, she had found herself sinking into a dream
about Timothy Phillips.

She sat up, washed her hair,
then lay back down and submerged her head to let the hot water soak
away the shampoo and sting the bruises and abrasions on her cheek and
jaw. She held her breath for a minute and a half, hearing the old,
hollow sound of the pipes, feeling her hair floating up around her
face and shoulders like a cloud of soft seaweed. Then she slowly
lifted her head above the surface and arched her back to let the
long, heavy hair hang down her back, draining along her spine. She
lay back to feel the water cleaning every part of her body, slowly
dissolving away the feeling of dirt, like a stain, that she always
felt when she had been locked in a jail. The showers they had in
jails could never wash it out. It had to come off in water she found
outside.

Jane stayed in the water until
it was cold, and then got out and dried herself gingerly with a big,
thick towel, wrapped it around her, and brushed out her hair. Her
skin was tender now, as though all of her pores had opened and the
grime of the trip had been taken away, and then beneath that, a whole
layer of skin cells had come off. She felt new.

She put on a clean gray
sweatshirt, some soft faded blue jeans, and white socks, then lay on
her bed facing the ceiling, her arms away from her body. She
consciously relaxed each muscle, first her feet, ankles, calves,
knees, thighs, then her fingers, hands, wrists, forearms, biceps,
then her back muscles one pair at a time, from the waist to the
shoulders, and fell asleep.

Jake Reinert raked the leaves in
his back yard and put them into a new bushel basket. The problem with
planting trees when you were young was that the damned things got
bigger and more vigorous while you got older and stiffer, until you
found one day that you were too old to pick up all the leaves. His
problem was worse than most, because his grandfather had planted the
one over his head right now. It was absurd to keep picking up
sycamore leaves, but it was the first task that had presented itself
while he was looking for a way to keep himself from thinking about
Jane. The problem was that raking took so little thought that he kept
coming back to her.

He remembered the day he had
started worrying full-time, when Jane was ten or eleven. Jake had
been working in the chemical plant up in the Falls. It was good money
for those days, but it was heavy and hard, and the danger of it was
constant. There were caustic chemicals that would have to be poured
from the big vats a few times each day, and tiny droplets might hit
your overalls without your noticing it. By the end of the shift there
would be men in the shop whose clothes were already disintegrating,
with pinholes through their pants and shirts that were getting big
enough to meet each other. In those days nobody said much about it
because this was a part of the country where most people worked in
the heat of open-hearth steel mills, risked their limbs beside
drop-forges or hydraulic presses, or worked in the lumberyards, where
anything that made a noise had the capacity to cut you in two.

There were a number of Indian
fellows in the part of the plant where Jake worked. There were a few
Tuscaroras from the reservation in Lewiston, two or three Mohawks who
came over the Rainbow Bridge before dawn every morning from
Brantsford, Ontario, and four Senecas – two from Cattaraugus
and two from Tonawanda. They were always playing practical jokes on
each other and shouting across the shop in their languages and then
laughing. At lunchtime they all sat around one of the long
workbenches that was covered with butcher paper and played as many
hands of euchre as they could in half an hour, slapping cards down so
fast that sometimes it was hard to see them. There were about ten in
the shop but only eight played, so there were two games going at a
time. They made tally marks on the butcher paper to keep score.
Euchre usually went to ten, but they played to a hundred.

Jake had watched them for his
first couple of shifts on the job when one day he heard an enormous
roar of laughter. One of their interminable games had ended. The two
losers sat in their places looking as solemn and wooden as any movie
fan would have liked. The two winners stood over them and gleefully
flipped the cards against their noses while everybody else pointed
and laughed. If the loser was caught laughing or even let a muscle of
his face change, the penalty was doubled. Jake didn’t need to
have it explained to him. They were playing for Nosey, just like kids
had when he was growing up. Later, after he knew them better, they
had corrected him. The name of the game was some Indian word –
they all sounded like “yadadadadadada” to him. So he
said, “What’s it mean?” and one of them thought for
a second, and then said, “Nosey.”

They accepted Jake without
appearing to notice that they had, and during the summer, when people
took their vacation time, he would be the one they asked to sit in
for the absent player. One late July he had sat down with his lunch
and eyed the tally marks on the butcher paper, pretty certain that if
he and his partner, Doyle Winthrop, didn’t get lucky this was
their day to go home with red noses. Or redder, in Doyle’s
case.

One of the Mohawks came in from
the loading dock looking grim. He talked to two of the others in low
tones and then one of the others talked to three more on the other
end of the shop. Finally Doyle Winthrop looked back at the bench,
stared at Jake for a moment, and then came to sit down.

Doyle leaned on his elbows
across the table, stared directly into Jake’s eyes, and said,
“You were a friend of Henry Whitefield’s, weren’t
you?”

After that the details didn’t
much matter, but Jake listened to them anyway. Henry was an
ironworker. He had been part of a gang, all of them Iroquois, who had
been out west someplace building a big bridge. Doyle said a cable
that was holding the girder Henry was walking on had snapped, and
down went Henry. Theirs was the generation that had fought in Europe
and the Pacific, and the memory of it hadn’t gotten hazy in the
few years since. The Iroquois Confederacy had officially and
independently declared war on Germany, and all of this little band
that had somehow come to include Jake Reinert had seen friends blown
apart by heavy weapons. They were all acquainted with the feeling,
but none of them spoke again that day.

Jake had gone home early and
found his wife, Margaret, already next door with Jane and her mother.
Over the years after that he had tried to be helpful, but they
weren’t the sort of women who needed much help. Jane had been
good at schoolwork, and had never had the sort of critical shortage
of boys that would have required a fatherly man to come over and tell
her the story of the ugly duckling. She managed to get herself a
scholarship to Cornell and apparently did whatever they required of
her, because they gave her a diploma at the end of it.

Jake had only begun to worry
about Jane in earnest again a year or so after that, when her mother
died. Here she was a young, strikingly attractive girl with a college
degree and the whole world out there waiting for her. She came back,
moved into the old house next door, and lived there all alone. She
had always held jobs in the summers when she was home from school,
but now, as nearly as he could tell, her movements weren’t
regular enough to accommodate any job he had ever heard of. She was
not merely secretive about what she did, she was opaque.