Salem's Lot

5

Ben thought how apt his phrase had been: Let the machinery take over. It was very much like a machine-one of those elaborate German contraptions constructed of clockwork and cogs; figures moving in an elaborate dance.

Parkins Gillespie arrived first, wearing a green tie set off by a VFW tie tack. There were still sleepy seeds in his eyes. He told them he had notified the county ME.

‘He won’t be out himself, the son of a bitch,’ Parkins said, tucking a Pall Mall into the corner of his seamed mouth, ‘but he’ll send out a deputy and a fella to take pitchers. You touch the cawpse?’

‘His arm fell out of bed,’ Ben said. ‘I tried to put it back, but it wouldn’t stay.’

Parkins looked him up and down and said nothing. Ben thought of the grisly sound the knuckles had made on the hardwood floor of Matt’s guest room and felt a queasy laughter in his belly. He swallowed to keep it there.

Matt led the way upstairs, and Parkins walked around the body several times. ‘Say, you sure he’s dead?’ he asked finally. ‘You tried to wake him up?’

James Cody, MD, arrived next, fresh from a delivery in Cumberland. After the amenities had passed among them (‘Good t’seeya,’ Parkins Gillespie said, and lit a fresh cigarette), Matt led them all upstairs again. Now, if we all only played instruments, Ben thought, we could give the guy a real send-off. He felt the laughter trying to come up his throat again.

Cody turned back the sheet and frowned down at the body for a moment. With a calmness that astounded Ben, Matt Burke said, ‘It reminded me of what you said about the Glick boy, Jimmy.’

‘That was a privileged communication, Mr Burke,’ Jimmy Cody said mildly. ‘If Danny Glick’s folks found out you’d said that, they could sue me.’

‘Would they win?’

‘No, probably not,’ Jimmy said, and sighed.

‘What’s this about the Glick boy?’ Parkins asked, frowning.

‘Nothing,’ Jimmy said. ‘No connection.’ He used his stethoscope, muttered, rolled back an eyelid, and shone a light into the glassy orb beneath.

Ben saw the pupil contract and said quite audibly, ‘Christ!’

‘Interesting reflex, isn’t it?’ Jimmy said. He let the eyelid go and it rolled shut with grotesque slowness, as if the corpse had winked at them. ‘David Prine at Johns Hopkins reports papillary contraction in some cadavers up to nine hours.’

‘Now he’s a scholar,’ Matt said gruffly. ‘Used to pull C’s in Expository Writing.’

‘You just didn’t like to read about dissections, you old grump,’ Jimmy said absently, and produced a small hammer. Nice, Ben thought. He retains his bedside manner even when the patient is, as Parkins would say, a cawpse. The dark laughter welled inside him again.

‘He dead?’ Parkins asked, and tapped the ash of his cigarette into an empty flower vase. Matt winced ‘

‘Oh, he’s dead,’ Jimmy told him. He got up, turned the sheet back to Ryerson’s feet, and tapped the right knee. The toes were moveless. Ben noticed that Mike Ryerson had yellow rings of callus on the bottoms of his feet, at the ball of the heel and at the instep. It made him think of that Wallace Stevens poem about the dead woman. ‘Let it be the finale of seem,’ he misquoted. ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’

Matt looked at him sharply, and for a moment his control seemed to waver.

‘What’s that?’ Parkins asked.

‘A poem,’ Matt said. ‘It’s from a poem about death.’

‘Sounds more like the Good Humor man to me,’ Parkins said, and tapped his ash into the vase again.