Tim Curran - Resurrection

He cut through the Fisher’s yard and into the Boyne’s.

The Boyne’s weren’t bad people, when you got to know them. Margaret Boyne was a pissy old bitch who regularly reported people in the neighborhood for not cutting their grass or fixing their fences, and when she wasn’t doing that she pretty much liked to sit on her dead ass and feel sorry for herself. She had herself a job at a factory downtown, claimed she was some kind of production manager, but Craig had heard firsthand that the only production she managed involved a dustpan and a broom. She was too damn stupid and too damn lazy to do much else. Even so, word had it she had a hell of a time figuring which end of the broom you held onto and which actually moved the dirt.

Still, Craig figured, she wasn’t a bad sort.

Her son Russell lived with her. He had a kid somewhere, was pushing forty, but didn’t work on account of his bad ticker. Funny, that, because Russell smoked like a chimney and was one hell of a bowler, could throw a curve like you wouldn’t believe.

As Craig came up to the Boyne’s, he began digging through his bag, getting the delivery ready. When he reached the roof overhang, he dug out the Boyne’s mail. A gas bill from WisCon, a letter from Margaret’s sister in Clintonville, a big manila package from International Correspondence Schools for Russell-he was learning animal husbandry or mortuary science or something in his spare time, something he had a lot of-and a Priority Mail envelope from some law firm in Madison. Craig knew what that was all about. Frank Boyne, Margaret’s deceased husband, had gotten his arms chopped off from a sheet metal guillotine at Wisconsin Tool amp; Bearing over in Bethany, bled to death long before the ambulance arrived. The safety mechanisms were faulty and Margaret had promptly sued the manufacturer, Quisby Manufacturing Equipment, Inc. She received a nice fat check twice a year from them and would until the day she died.

As Craig made to stuff the mail in the box, he saw Russell watching him through the screen door. “Come on in,” Russell said.

Craig did, stepping into the screened-in porch after shaking the water from his slicker.

“You feel like a cup of coffee?” Russell asked.

“Can’t and you know why.”

Russell did. It was Hebert, the postmaster, he sent out spies to see if his letter carriers were working or screwing off. Craig had told Russell and more than once that he felt like he was being watched all the time.

Russell was sitting there, leafing through a magazine. It wasn’t Thursday, so he wasn’t off to pick up his mother. He never missed on Thursdays. Thursdays were paydays and Russell liked to help his mother spend her paycheck.

“What you reading?” Craig asked him.

“One of those Watchtower magazines.”

Sure, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were out in strength since the flooding began, prophesying the end of the world as they did every few years. Those damn JoHo’s. Craig had had to order them off more than one porch when they got in his way.

Russell was very enrapt by the magazine. “Says here, says right here how them UFO’s people see aren’t alien ships or any of that.”

“No? What the hell are they?”

“Says here they’re angels riding in the sky, keeping watch over the flock.”

“No shit?” Craig said. “Well, I’ll be damned. Them angels better start identifying themselves or the Air Force is going to shoot one of ‘em down.”

Russell, who usually got a kick out of Craig’s mouth, didn’t say anything. He was in a mood. Lots of people were in moods these days and lot more were finding religion now with the rising water. People were saying some nut was even talking on the radio about how to build your very own ark, of all things. But Craig was not surprised by any of it, not really. It followed the usual cycle; he’d seen the same damn sort of crazy thinking as Y2K approached. People started losing their heads when the weather got funny, when there was doom and gloom in the forecast. Craig had been hearing all kinds of wild shit since the flooding began.

He bid Russell good-bye, wondered if he’d get sucked in with the JoHo’s and start knocking on doors. Wouldn’t have surprised Craig a bit. The Boyne’s were okay, but they were soft upstairs. Whole family was like that.

Craig moved off down the sidewalk through the rain. He delivered to the Chambers and the Proctons, the Brietenbachs and the Sepperley’s. That last stop was a quick one, being that Wanda Sepperly was in her nineties and all her friends and family were long dead. About all she ever got were political fliers and JC Penney sale brochures. Sometimes, in the summer, Wanda would sit out on her porch, yellowed bones held together by the thinnest veneer of cellophane, and start talking about the ration books during the war or how that heat wave back in ’38 had been so bad that yards started on fire. But mostly she just sat and stared, barely casting a shadow, mumbling things that Craig could not hear and from the despairing, wizened look on her face, he always figured he was glad of that.

But now and again, she would scare him.

Sometimes her eyes weren’t rheumy and distant. Sometimes they would be far too bright and clear and it was on those days, sitting in that antique wicker rocker, that she would scare Craig. Scare him because those eyes seemed to know far too much. It was like she could look right inside your head and your greatest worry and your darkest secret were known to her.

It was not a pleasant thing at all.

Three years before, one hot July afternoon of yellow-baked lawns and whirring grasshoppers, Craig had stopped, dropped a few letters and she’d been looking that way at him. Not just looking at him, but into him.

“Hello, Mrs. Sepperly,” he’d said, the spit just drying up in his mouth. “How…how are you today?”

Wanda sat there, not rocking, just staring holes through him, a funny little smile on her narrow mouth, her eyes lit like ghost lights. That burning gaze almost made Craig take a step back and fall down the steps. He told himself it was probably heat exhaustion, heat stroke, that he needed to lie down, grab a cool drink. But he knew better. Because this was Wanda Sepperly staring at him, the old lady people called “Mother Sepperly” or “Gramma Sepperly” and very often, “that crazy gypsy fortune-teller.” The latter, of course, never to her face. Because although Mother Sepperly probably didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds and her mind was very often neither here nor there, but someplace else entirely, she still inspired a certain respect. And maybe that was because of her age and maybe it was because more than not were a little uneasy around her and possibly even frightened.

And Craig understood that fear that hot July afternoon. For Wanda would not stop staring at him and when she did speak, her voice was not cracked with age but lucid and smooth as that of a thirty-year old woman: “Craig, them pains you got in yer stomach, they ain’t gonna go away. You should see the doc before you start passing too much blood.”

Thing was, Craig had been having pains. And when he went to an internist, a bleeding peptic ulcer was discovered. Had it gone on much longer, the doc told him, he would have needed surgery. How Wanda Sepperly had known that was beyond him, but since that day Craig was more than a little intimidated by her. And a year later when Wanda told him he should be keeping a tighter reign on that wife of his, it turned out that Jean was indeed having an affair.

But how did you balance any of that out with logic or modern scientific reasoning?

You just didn’t; you accepted as Craig accepted. The old crones about town claimed that Wanda was what they had called “sighted” in the old days. But Craig didn’t want to know about that. He was nosy as nosy got, but there were some things even he didn’t care to know. And if the kids in the neighborhood claimed that she was a witch, Craig figured he didn’t need to know about that either.