Alexander Jablokov - Dead Man

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2024-11-25 0 0 50.22KB 27 页 5.9玖币
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DEAD MAN by ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
Our last story from Alexander Jablokov, “Market Report,” appeared in our
September 1998 issue. After much too long a hiatus, the author is writing again. He
is most of the way through a novel, Remembering Muriel, and has several other
stories in the works. In his new tale, he relentlessly hunts down the...
* * * *
Near Bellefonte, Pennsylvania
The breakfast rush was over. Pushed-back chairs stood at angles around
tables sticky with syrup. The waitress had slowed down and finally gotten the hair
out of her eyes. She poured the dead man another cup of coffee.
“These yours?”
The waitress didn’t answer the dead man’s question. She turned, instead, to
me. “Had too much Thanksgiving?”
I pushed the turkey and stuffing around on my plate. Chasing the dead man
had made me miss the holiday itself, and this had been an attempt to give myself a
treat. “Not hungry, I guess.”
“So why did you order it? You didn’t have to. I’m not your mother.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not.”
She prodded my backpack with a mustard-stained sneaker toe. “A gal could
trip.” Before I could stop her she stooped and tried to pick it up. “Damn! You travel
with your barbells?”
“Sensing equipment.” I had to say something. “Look for stuff along the old
rail lines. You’d be surprised at what you can find.”
“Really.”
“Yeah! All kinds of things. Lantern pieces. Spikes. Once I even found a
telegraph key. Imagine the messages it must once have sent.” Boring is best for
concealment. It’s the one thing no one ever tries to fake.
A big guy at a table near the door had been leading her with his eyes the whole
time I’d been there. She’d managed to serve him steak, home fries, three eggs sunny
side up, an English muffin, a bran muffin, three cups of coffee, and a mint-flavored
toothpick without ever glancing at him. He’d been glancing at our conversation,
which made me uncomfortable, but he now clapped on a fluorescent orange hunting
cap and lurched out, leaving a $10 bill folded into an origami swan balanced on top
of a napkin dispenser. The waitress scooped it up and, again without looking,
unfolded it and put it into an apron pocket. She snapped a wet rag and wiped down
the checked plastic tablecloth.
“Well, don’t get your ass shot off out there,” she said to me. “First day of the
season, everything that moves looks exactly like what they’re after.”
“Don’t worry. I found what I was looking for.”
She shifted her gaze to me. “Oh?” Her eyes were gray. Nothing spectacular at
all. “And what was that?”
I was getting too chatty. “Just some leftover junk. It’s not really what you end
up finding. It’s the sport.”
She snorted. I had just demonstrated that I was as dumb as the rest of them.
The dead man was waving his cup again. When she stooped to pour, he held
the cup away, balking her of her prey. “These yours?”
“What makes you think that?” A half-dozen watercolors hung on the
woodgrain-vinyl wall, between a clock that peeked out of a print of mallards taking
off from a slough and a rack of state capital plates with most of the states missing.
“I don’t know.” The dead man put on a sucked-in-cheek connoisseur
expression. “Something about the style.”
She shrugged resentfully. Though slender and flexible, she was older than she
looked at first. But that shrug had no doubt always looked the same, distinctive even
in a prenatal ultrasound. “Yeah.” It was a confession.
“Nice work.”
“Sure.”
“No, really. Got a minute?”
She gazed out through the window at the parking lot, where silent trucks
waited on the gravel for their hunters to return.
“You’ve, ah, got a theme, right? What would you call it ... industrial crap
versus weeds. Right there on the edge, where one becomes the other.”
“If you say so.” She started clearing the dead man’s plate.
“I’m not done.”
The way she yanked her hair back showed she didn’t believe him, but she put
the heavy plate, with its pink rim and smears of yolk, back down.
“I like this one. Rusted pump housing among spring skunk cabbages. And
this ... crumpled paper bag rhyming with the dried oak leaves around it. You don’t
call that a theme?”
“I call it something I saw.”
“You saw this one too?”
A pause. “Sure. I had to look. Made me late to work. Would you pass it by?”
“I wouldn’t pass it by, but I wouldn’t know what to do with it either.”
I snuck a glance, even though I didn’t want the dead man to know I was
paying attention to him. A pair of frog legs stuck out of freshly rolled asphalt. I
couldn’t figure out how she’d done it, but it really looked like steam still rose from
the pitch. The spotted legs gleamed with pond.
“Well, I didn’t either. Boss says it puts people off their feed.”
“He still lets you hang it.”
“He’s got to, doesn’t he? Who else would work here?”
The dead man’s body had been through a crash into a bridge abutment and a
lot of fugitive life he could in no way have been expecting. He looked pretty good,
considering, even heavy, with a roll pushing out against his corduroy shirt. When I
got hired, I’d spent a bit of time talking to the dead man’s uploaded personality. His
voice had been synthetic, so I hadn’t been able to get any clues about what his body
would be like from that. He’d sent me a picture of someone a few years younger
than he’d been when he had supposedly died. Vanity never disappears, I guess, even
when the body does.
Although this body had not. That was the problem I’d been hired to fix. I
hefted the bag that carried the upload gear I’d be using on him. Not quite barbells,
but it was heavy.
It kept me in shape.
* * * *
Near Monticello, Utah
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