Resurrection Man Read Free

expected to believe in so monstrous a Divinity?"
    Yes, yes! Dante would think. That's what it's like to be an angel, too. A bully lords it in the playground and an angel spears him like a worm on a hook.
    But Father never understood.
    Dr: Ratkay was a man of precise and definite tastes. He read only classical philosophers, drank only French wine, and listened only to German composers, except in certain frivolous moods when he might condescend to play a Hungarian—Liszt or Kodaly.
    Dr. Ratkay brought his children up as atheists, on moral grounds. "You know what they used to call the grave robbers who sold bits of dead bodies for research?" he would ask. "Resurrection Men, that's what. There's your Christ for you, my children. A Resurrection Man, making pennies off a bag of old bones. 'Neither fear your death's day, nor long for it,' as Martial says. If there is a God, don't give Him the satisfaction. If there is a God, He is more than harps and grace and candlelight.
    "God hissed through the vents at Auschwitz," Dante's father used to say.
    God creeps on eight thin legs.

Y OU ARE OBSTINATE. PLIANT, MERRY, MOROSE, ALL AT ONCE. F OR ME THERE'S NO LIVING WITH YOU, OR WITHOUT YOU.   — M ARTIAL
    CHAPTER
TWO
     
     

    It was always the two of them. Dante quick and laughing, Dante the lead in the school play, Dante and the girls, Dante, Dante: his smile, golden. His touch, magic.
    ...And Jet always behind him, thin and dark as a shadow. Watching. Hardly real, the neighbors murmured to one another, glancing at the butterfly on his cheek. Already marked for some strange destiny.
    Only Dante was close enough to bully him, needle him, swap comic books, catch him crying at the end of
Charlotte's Web
. They grew up like twins together; to the rest of their little community on the outskirts of the city Jet was insubstantial, but to Dante he was always real enough to touch. He had felt Jet's wiry strength when they wrestled in the grass; tasted Jet's blood when they swore their brotherhood. Jet had saved his life.
    Of course that was only fair, after that day on the playground when Dante had lost his soul to save Jet's eyes.
    *   *   *

    The first time Jet saved his life it was 1969.
    Minotaurs were stalking Watts and Harlem in broad daylight. On the bright side, the oracle who had tried to save JFK was taken seriously enough to thwart an assassination attempt on Robert Kennedy. The United States and China, in a rare show of superpower responsibility, had brokered a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Vietnam, though ugly wars still burned in Georgia and Turkmenistan. Five thousand lottery families had settled into Perfect, U.S.A., but they still weren't getting the same kinds of health and productivity stats the Chinese routinely reported from the Permitted City, and the Administration was said to be looking for a different project to restore American prestige. Rumors abounded. Social activists clamored for the allocation of Great Society money to rebuild the Philadelphia slums, or integrate Indian and white cultures in the Great Plains.
    But President Kennedy was said to favor a return to good old Yankee know-how. He wanted a monorail grid, an orbital satellite, or maybe the creation of a government-directed research effort to capitalize on the new superconducting ceramics coming out of M.I.T.'s Materials Tech Division.
    In November of that year Aunt Sophie's coins foretold a harsh winter.
    Dante was breezing through Grade 5. It had been almost two years since he had last felt the angel in him stir and flex its wings. When he thought of magic, he thought of
Dr. Strange
and the Children's Rescue Society and
I Dream of Jeannie
.
    The river at the bottom of the garden rarely froze before Christmas, but just as Aunt Sophie had predicted, November ended with two weeks of hard cold. By the first of December ice stretched almost to the middle of the channel.
    Jet always said it was Dante who made the dare. Certainly it was Dante who