No Cure for Death Read Free Page A

catch every few words; the blue eyes were moist.
    “Last night... last night I spent the evening with a friend of mine. Since I didn’t have a car, my friend offered to drive me home, to Mom’s house, where I’ve been living. Half... half a dozen blocks from home the air started to fill with black smoke. The sky was... it was orange. Our house was in flames.”
    She was squeezing my hand, now; she didn’t seem to know she was, but she was.
    “I... I jumped from the car before it even stopped, and started running. As I was running I saw a couple firemen trying to carry a burning sofa out of the... the blaze. On the sofa was... was what I could only make out as a... ch-charred lump. Which the firemen put from the sofa onto a stretcher, toput it in the ambulance that was backed up on the sidewalk. I looked closer, and... the charred lump... was Mom.”
    And now she cried. Finally she cried.
    I started, “You don’t have to...”
    But she went on. Choking back the tears, their wet trails shiny on her face, like thin narrow ribbons.
    “Mom’s hair was burned off, only short black stalks of it were still there. Her skin was showing through the burned strips of clothing that were on her, and h-her skin was ash-gray, where it wasn’t black. Her face was so... so burned it swelled three times normal size. It...”
    “Stop, Janet,” I said. “Don’t put yourself through this.” I’d taken a paper napkin and was dabbing at her face, drying the tears like a parent; she didn’t seem to know I was doing it.
    “They didn’t let me ride in the ambulance with her. They said she had to go to the University Hospital, in Iowa City, where they have this burn unit. They sent me to my friend’s house to stay the night; a doctor came with me to give me sedation, but I wouldn’t let him. Five hours later I called the hospital and a doctor told me that my mother’s condition was critical but that there was something weird about the nature of her condition: There were definite signs that led them to believe my mother was beaten—
badly
—before the fire.”
    And she looked at me with blue eyes that weren’t moist anymore; they were cold and clear and, somehow, frightened and frightening at the same time.
    Then Meyer came in, and said her bus was there. She got up quickly to go, and I followed along, getting in a couple quick questions, getting back a couple quick answers. One of them was “Yes,” when I asked if she’d call me when she got back from Iowa City, and let me know how she and her mother were making out.
    Then she was just this pale sad face in a bus window, gliding away from me.

FOUR
    Ten minutes after Janet Taber’s bus left for Iowa City, John’s bus pulled in.
    He stepped off the bus, two heavy bags in each hand and a clothes bag over one arm, and the smile under his sunglasses said he saw me. The sunglasses were wraparound goggles, two huge silver mirrors reflecting the sun, and the smile was John’s usual white dazzler, so the main impression of him at first glance was all sunglasses and teeth.
    Not that the rest of him wasn’t striking at first glance: there was the way he was dressed, too. He had on black leather pants and a yellow-dyed buckskin coat—they were big on the West Coast for a week or two that year—with the longest hanging fringe I’d seen since the day Roy Rogers came to town when I was six. An open-collared blue shirt was showing under the coat, and a gaudy multicolor scarf was tied in a confident knot around his neck. Only his short black hair, his erect posture and the stride he used as he approached me might tip you to his being an Army sergeant arriving home on leave.
    We clasped hands firmly and used our free hands to grip each other’s shoulder.
    “Hello, Mal.”
    I looked at his clothes and shook my head and laughed, and that patented smile of his gradually fizzled into an embarrassed grin.
    “John,” I said, “you
do
tend to overcompensate when you’re out of uniform,