Dance for the Dead (14 page)

If he managed to plant himself
so that he was impossible to ignore while she was out front mowing
her lawn and ask her a question like, “What are you doing these
days?” she would say in her friendliest way, “Mowing my
lawn.” Then she would flick the conversation out of his hands,
fold it into a joke, and toss it back to him. “When I get done
with this one I’m heading over to your house to do yours.
You’re turning that place into an eyesore and lowering property
values from here to Buffalo.”

It was around this time that
Jake had begun to notice the visitors. Maybe they had been coming for
a long time, and he hadn’t noticed because he was still going
to work every day. But there they were. The strangers would come to
her front door. Some were women, but most of them were men. The door
would open and they would disappear inside. Sometimes late at night
he would hear a car engine and then they would be gone. A lot of the
time Jane would be gone too, and not return for a month or more.

After a couple of years of this
he pretended he didn’t know where the boundary was between
small talk and prying. He asked her where she was getting the money
to live. She said she had a “consulting business.” That
pushed Jake four or five steps past the boundary and made him
determined to find out what was going on. Various theories suggested
themselves. She obviously had plenty of money that she wasn’t
prepared to account for in a way that might set anyone’s mind
at ease.

He had worried himself five
years closer to the grave before he heard her burglar alarm go off
one night. He rushed to his corner window and flipped the switch to
turn on the porch light that he used so seldom he wasn’t even
sure the 250-watt bulb was good anymore. There, caught in the sudden
glare, were not one or two but four men. The one nearest him reached
into his coat and produced a pistol. It wasn’t the standard
revolver the Deganawida police carried. It was big and square like
the .45 Colts they used to issue in the army. Jake still considered
it a great piece of fortune that the man’s second reaction to
the light had been to turn his face and then his tail rather than to
open fire.

After that night he had sat Jane
down and demanded answers to the questions he had been asking less
and less politely for years. The ones he got weren’t the sort
that would induce a reasonable person to sleep much better. A man who
had the sort of enemies other people only dream about had managed to
get himself tracked to her door, and the four of them had tried to
break in to see if there was anything in there to help them learn
where he was.

Now Jake took his bushel basket
and dumped the leaves into the big barrel by the garage. This part of
the country was different from other places because the Indians had
never left. There were so many differences between groups – the
English from Massachusetts who had fought here in the Revolution and
seen how much better this land was; the Irish recruited from their
bogs to dig the Erie Canal, supposedly because somebody figured they
could survive the swamps but maybe because nobody cared if they
didn’t; the German farmers who arrived as soon as there was
enough water in the ditch to float their belongings here on canal
boats – that the Indians weren’t much stranger to them
than they were to each other. After that the rest of the world
arrived.

The names of most places stayed
pretty much whatever the Seneca had called them, and the roads were
just improvements of the paths between them. The cities were built on
the sites of Seneca villages beside rivers and lakes, plenty of them
with Senecas still living in them, at first just a trading post and
then a few more cabins, and then a mill.

Even now things that people
thought of as regional attitudes and expressions came straight from
the Senecas. When anybody from around here wanted to say they were
still present at the end of a big party, they would say they had
“stayed until the last dog was hung.” Most of them
probably had no idea anymore that they were talking about the Seneca
New Year’s celebration in the winter, where on the fifth day
they used to strangle a white dog and hang it on a pole. Nobody had
done that for at least a hundred years It was easy to forget about
Indians as Indians or Poles as Poles most of the time, so people did,
but whenever Jake got to the point where he was pretty sure everybody
was just about the same, one of them did something that was
absolutely incomprehensible unless you compared it with what her
great-grandpa used to do.

Jane
awoke suddenly in the darkness. Her hands could feel the stitched
outlines of the flowers on the quilted bedspread her mother had made.
She was puzzled. It took her a moment to remember why she was in
Deganawida, sleeping fully dressed. She could tell that her mind had
been struggling with something in the darkness, but whatever it was,
she had not been able to bring it back with her this time. There was
a sound still in the air, maybe left over from the dream, and then
she heard it again: the ring of the doorbell.

She stepped to the window and
looked down at the front steps. She could see the faint glow of the
porch light on Carey McKinnon’s high forehead. He was carrying
a big brown shopping bag. She hurried to the mirror, turned on the
light, brushed her hair quickly, then rushed into the bathroom and
reached for the handle of her makeup drawer, but the ring came again.
She had no time.

She came down the stairs,
crossed the living room, and swung the door open. She stayed back out
of the reach of the bright light on the porch and said, “Oh,
too bad. I was hoping it was Special Delivery.”

“No, you weren’t,”
said Carey. “They don’t come at eleven o’clock at
night. I happened to be passing by on the way home from work, and I
saw your car was back.”

“No, you weren’t,”
she said. “Deganawida is north of the hospital. Amherst is due
east.”

“I had to stop near here
to buy myself these flowers.” He opened the bag and held up a
dozen white roses. “Since you’re up anyway, could you do
me a favor and put them someplace?”

“Oh, all right.” She
reached out and took them. “I suppose you’d better come
in while I do it. I don’t want you scaring Mrs. Oshinski’s
Dobermans.”

He stepped in and closed the
door behind him. She knew she had imagined he had ducked to come
through the doorway; he had just looked down to plant his feet on the
mat. But he had always given the impression that he was a big boy and
still growing, and it had never gone away, ten years after college,
when his sandy hair was already thinning a little at the crown.

He followed her into the
kitchen. “So how was your trip?”

“Who said I was on a
trip?”

“Oh. Then how did your car
like its month in the shop?”

“I was on a trip,”
she conceded. “California. It’s pretty much as
advertised.”

He nodded. “Warm.”

“Yeah. What’s a
doctor doing coming home this late? House calls?”

“Dream on. I’m
working the emergency room. Night is the time when roads get
slippery, fevers go up, people clean loaded guns.”

Jane snipped the stems of the
roses and skillfully arranged them in a cloisonné vase that
had been her grandmother’s, then placed the vase on the dining
room table.

“Beautiful,” said
Carey. “Good place for them, too.”

“They’re right where
you won’t forget them when you leave.”

“No, you might as well
keep them. They’re all wet.” He pretended to fold up his
shopping bag. “Oh, I forgot. They gave me this too.” He
held up a bottle of champagne. “Two-for-one sale or something.
I couldn’t understand the lady in the store. Thick Polish
accent.”

“Your mother was Polish.”

“Was she? I couldn’t
understand her either.” He walked to the sink, popped the cork
on the champagne, and plucked two glasses out of the cupboard.
“Explains a lot. Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell
me. Nice woman, though.”

Jane had to step into the light
to take her glass. Carey clinked it gently with his, then followed
her into the living room.

“So why are you working
the emergency room?” she asked as she curled her legs under her
on the couch. “Finally piss somebody off?”

A change came into his voice as
it always did when he talked about his work. “I decided I
needed a refresher course, so I took over the evening shift a couple
of weeks ago. If Jake asks, I’ve still got plenty of time to
check my regular patients for suspicious moles.”

“Why does a young quack
like you need a refresher course? Doze off in medical school?”

“I guess I should have
said ‘a reminder course.’ It’s basic medicine. The
door at the end of the hall slides open, and in walks Death. You get
to look him in the eye, spin him around, and kick his ass for him.
It’s exhilarating.

Besides, the regular guy asked
me to help him out. E.R. doctors last about as long as the average
test pilot, and he’s approaching the crash-and-burn stage. They
don’t always win.” He seemed to notice her listening to
him. “You look awful, by the way.”

“Sweet of you to say so.
That’s how women look when you wake them up.”

He turned his head to the left
to call to an invisible person. “Nurse! More light!” Her
eyes involuntarily followed his voice, and he turned on the lamp
above him with his right. “Wow. Pretty good contusions and
abrasions. Finally piss somebody off?”

She knew she wasn’t going
to get the car accident story past Dr. Carey McKinnon. “I was
mugged outside my hotel.”

“I’m sorry, Jane.”
he said, tilting his head to see her more clearly. “What
happened?”

“It was nothing, really.
He came out from behind one of those pillars in the garage under the
hotel to grab my purse. I yelled and the parking attendant came. He
got away.”

“Is he all right?”

She frowned. “Why would
anybody say that?”

“Your hands.”

“Oh,” she said.
“Well, I did resist a little. I’m not dumb enough to die
for a purse, but he scared me.”

Carey was already on his feet
and moving toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I left my bag in the car.
I always have one with me in case there’s a chance to bill
somebody.”

“You’re a dear
friend, but I like you because your big feet tromp my snow down in
the winter so I can get my car out. Who said I wanted medical
treatment from you?”

“I just need to bring it
in. Old Jake probably recognized my car, and he’s handy enough
to break in for the drugs.”

Carey stepped outside. She heard
his trunk slam, and then his feet coming back up on the porch. In a
moment he was inside, the black bag was open at her feet, and he was
sitting beside her turning her head gently from side to side. He took
a bottle out of his bag and poured something out of it onto a ball of
cotton. He swabbed her face with the cold liquid and then stared into
her eyes with a little flashlight. He took her hands in his and
studied them, then bent her wrists a couple of times, staring as
though he could see through to her bones.

“Doctor?” she said.
“Just tell me, will I be able to play the piano?”

“Heard it. You couldn’t
before.” He didn’t smile. “The wrist is only a mild
sprain,” he said. “It’ll be okay in a few days. The
lacerations on the knuckles look good already – probably
because you didn’t put makeup on them. You’re lucky.
Human teeth are an incredible source of infection.” He took a
small aerosol can out of the bag and sprayed her hands. It felt
colder than the disinfectant, but as it dried, the pain seemed to go
away. He lifted her hand and kissed the fingertips. “I just
like the taste of that stuff.” He looked at her cheerfully.
“You want to know the truth, it helps things heal. We don’t
tell people that, of course.”

Jane couldn’t think of a
retort. In all of the twelve or thirteen years she had known Carey
McKinnon, they had been buddies. They had kissed hello and goodbye,
but he had been the friend she could call so she didn’t have to
go to a movie alone or eat at a table for one. The champagne was a
pleasant surprise, but the roses brought with them a new ambiguity,
and it was growing and getting more confusing.

“Stand up,” he said.
She stood up. He moved her arms and felt the elbows, pressed the
radius and ulna between his fingers. He put his big hand under her
rib cage and poked her a couple of times with the other. “Does
that hurt?”

“Uh! Of course it hurts.
Cut it out,” she said. At another time she would have poked him
back, but now he was being a doctor – at least she thought he
was.

“Your liver didn’t
pop loose, anyway,” he said. “You can have champagne
without fear of death.”

“Oh?” she said. “How
long have I got?”

“What do I care?” He
sipped his champagne. “I’ll have been dead for twenty
years. You pamper yourself like a racehorse, and women handle the
wear and tear better than men.” His eyes swept up and down her
body with a frankness that she wasn’t positive was detachment.
“It’s just a better machine.”

“Then you must really be
walking around in a piece of junk,” she said. She stretched her
sore arms and rubbed her shoulders.

“That’s only muscle
pain,” he said.

“Well, don’t sound
disappointed. It’s the best pain I can manage right now.”

“A big shot of adrenaline
comes in and your muscles go from rest to overperformance in a second
or two, and they feel the strain. In two days you’ll be back
out there teaching truck drivers to arm wrestle, or whatever it is
you do.”

“Consulting.”

“Insulting them –
whatever,” he said. He started to close his bag, but then
spotted something. He picked up a clear bottle with a liquid in it
that looked like vinegar. “Try this stuff.”