Four Summoners Tales Part 29

"This is stupid," Big Tim Hawkins's widow said. "What is this supposed to-"

The swinging door at the back of the dining room squeaked open, and Martha Vickers walked in from the kitchen, wearing the same dress she'd been buried in.

The bullet hole in her right bicep was still open, a dark, winking wound. Above her left eye, the missing part of her skull-the part blown out by the cartel gunman's kill shot-had been covered by a thin membrane of skin like a birth caul. Even from across the room, Zeke could see the pulsing beneath it.

Screams filled the Magic Wagon.

Alan Vickers kept playing the flute, tears streaming down his face. He would not look at his wife. His dead wife, now up and walking, pale and sickly and shuffling but alive, a slow, uncertain smile making her lips tremble.

Zeke felt sick.

"Stop!" Lester shouted, storming across the room to knock the flute from Vickers's hands. "Stop it!"

The bone pipe-for it was bone, Zeke could see that clearly now-skittered across the floor. Vickers shoved Lester away and lumbered after it, s.h.i.+fting a table out of the way to retrieve it while his dead wife swayed in place, waiting for another note.

"What the h.e.l.l is this?!" Lester demanded, rounding on Enoch.

The little man had still not risen from the stool.

"It's exactly what it looks like," Enoch said, not smiling, his lip curling with hate. "Resurrection. Mrs. Vickers has been up and around for three days.Another week or so and she'll be good as new, if I let her stay aboveground that long."

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean if you let her?" Zeke snarled, feeling his own hate-and his own hope-rising like a cobra.

"It's all or none," Enoch said. "I can give this gift to all of you, bring back all of the folks the Matamoros cartel murdered back on October twelfth. If you want it. If you all agree. In exchange, you-and the dead ones, the ones you lost-will help me get my revenge. We will all have our revenge, as long as you all are in agreement."

Enoch rose and glanced around.

"I'll expect your answer by noon tomorrow."

"But what do we have to do for you?" Linda Trevino asked. "What do they-"

Enoch had started to move toward the door, but he paused and turned toward her. Zeke thought he caught a glimpse of the real pain inside the man, the loss and ruin.

"Does it matter?" Enoch asked.

When no one seemed to have an answer, he continued to the exit, people moving aside to let him out.

In his absence, the mourners could only stare at the resurrected Martha Vickers and her strange, lost smile, until her husband collected her and led her back out through the diner's kitchen.

3 Lester drove Zeke home in stony silence. The radio whispered, volume turned down so far that the music was barely audible. The sun had moved almost directly overhead and it felt too warm for February, even in South Texas. Zeke sat in the pa.s.senger seat and watched the fields rolling by, his heart numb and growing more so by the moment. He felt sick and hollow at the same time. Empty, as if he were the one who had died-and wasn't that the truth, in a way? Savannah had died just once, and he had spent the past four months doing the same, a little bit every day.

The thought made him cringe with self-loathing. f.u.c.k, listen to yourself.You get to watch the wind move the trees and the sun rise over the ranch.You get to breathe.

If a small cry came from his throat in that moment, as he turned fully away so that his friend could not see his face, Lester had the decency not to remark upon it. His own son, Josh, had been thirty years old, married and with his first child-Lester's first grandchild-on the way. Grief had become like a secret they shared.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Zeke whispered, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes, as if he could drive the image of dead Martha Vickers from his memory.

He couldn't, and neither could he stop himself from imagining Savannah standing there in the diner in Martha's place, alive but not quite alive, the bullet wounds she'd sustained beginning to heal.

How is it possible? he asked himself. How in the name of G.o.d . . . An icy knot formed in his gut. Maybe it wasn't in the name of G.o.d at all.

The big question was whether or not that even mattered. If Enoch had only been able to raise the dead, had them shuffling around looking the same way they had when they'd been buried, or worse, decaying . . . that would have been easier. Zeke would never have wanted Savannah to live that way, no matter how much the pain of her death gnawed at his insides. But if she could be fully alive again-really alive, restored to her true self-what then?

He'd never have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes.

Lester turned in through the gates of the Riverbend, which was the name Zeke's grandfather had given the Prater ranch in 1927, and drove back out to the pasture where they had left Zeke's truck ninety minutes and a lifetime before.When he skidded to a stop, clouds of dust rose up from the dirt road and swirled around them.

"What are we gonna do, Zeke?" Lester asked in a strangled voice. He looked pale and drawn, as if he'd aged twenty years in the past hour.

Zeke opened his door and put one boot on the running board. "What do you think we're gonna do? If there's even a chance, what else can we do? Go home and call Vickers, Lester, and tell him we're both on board."

Lester gripped the steering wheel, staring out the winds.h.i.+eld as if the dusty ranch beyond the gla.s.s was the starry nighttime sky and he sought the answers to every question he had ever been afraid to ask.

"It's unholy, Zeke. It must be. One of these days, we're gonna come face-to-face with the Lord. What do I say to Him on that day if we do this now?"

Zeke turned to stare at him, unable to keep the snarl from his voice. "You say,'Where the f.u.c.k were you on October the twelfth, you son of a b.i.t.c.h?' How does that sound?"

The main house was so quiet at night that Zeke felt like a ghost haunting his own home, but if he sat on the porch with a beer and listened to the wind, it brought him the sounds of laughter and camaraderie from the bunkhouse. Sometimes he welcomed those noises, but more often they pained him.

After Savannah's murder, the ranch hands had quieted down for a time out of respect. Most of them had been in Lansdale the night of the festival and somehow they had all come home unharmed, just as Zeke had. They had loved Savannah and doted on her like extended family, and her death left a wound in all of them, but in the end they weren't her family. Not really. They could move on and heal and Zeke could not, though he never blamed them for it.

When he heard a car door slam out in front of the house, he imagined it must be one of the hands getting up the nerve to approach the house to ask for an advance on his pay. Zeke tried to be as flexible as he could, as long as he didn't think the money was going to drugs or gambling and none of the hands borrowed too much up front. A couple of times it had bitten him in the a.s.s, with guys who'd taken off for greener pastures still owing him days or weeks of work, but for the most part, he had found honest men for the ranch.

Zeke didn't answer the knock at the door. He didn't feel capable of holding a conversation tonight. How could he pretend there was anything else that mattered to him beyond what he had seen at the Magic Wagon that morning? He remained in the easy chair in his living room, an ancient Cary Grant movie flickering on the television. He had barely paid attention to a moment of the film, but it was a balm to his soul, allowing him to travel back to a simpler, gentler time.

The knocking ceased for only a moment before his visitor began to rap again, harder this time. Zeke stayed in his chair, admiring the stern lines of Myrna Loy's pretty face. As a boy, he had found a genuine comfort in cla.s.sic cinema, inheriting the love of old films from his parents. Savannah had never understood his interest and had teased him about his boring taste in movies, but she had been sucked in the night he'd watched Rear Window while she did her homework on the living room floor, and Zeke had hoped to introduce her to other Hitchc.o.c.k films, and then to Bogart, who'd always been his favorite. He had hoped to share so many things with her, to watch her grow and learn and turn into a young woman and maybe a mother someday.

Despite the terrifying, monstrous miracle he'd seen today, he dared not allow himself to hope for those things again.