Resurrection Man Read Free Page A

left Sarah watching
Gilligan's Island
under strict orders not to leave the parlor. The boys snuck down to the river and it was Jet who went first, walking with his customary strange certainty, seven steps out onto the frozen surface and seven steps back.
    Then it was Dante's turn.
    It was half past four, but already the sun had slipped below the edge of the river valley. The air was as dim and heavy as Aunt Sophie's leaded crystal. Dante's breath smoked in the cold. Jet's didn't.
    Dante took a step out onto the ice. Near the bank it was white like frost, but over the channel it was the same murky blue as the sky. He walked out a little farther, trying to step in Jet's bootprints, knowing Jet's instincts would be better than his.
    On his fifth step, the ice creaked with a sound like wooden floorboards, only crisper. Dante stopped. Smoke curled from his mouth. (He imagined a winter palace, lit with candles of ice that threw off cold blue light and coils of white vapor.)
    On his sixth step he felt the ice shiver under his feet. The creaking was louder. (The light would come from the souls of little boys, one trapped inside each icicle. When a candle burned down to nothing, the boy inside would be gone forever.)
    Here the bank dropped sharply to a deep channel. If he felt the ice start to go he would have to throw himself back to the bank. If he went through he might get lucky and be able to touch bottom.
    The ice groaned and shuddered underfoot.
    Carefully Dante turned his head.
    "You can back out," Jet said. The butterfly clung to his pale face. It could have been resting on a scrawny snowman with coal-black eyes.
    Jet knew Dante was going to go through: suddenly this was very clear to both of them. He had led Dante out to the exact place where he would fall in and die. Dante would drown and Jet would have everything to himself: Dante's house, Dante's parents, Dante's room and comic books and chemistry set and toboggan. It was so obvious, Dante wondered why he had never seen it before: Jet wanted him to die.
    His left foot went through as he tried to turn around. He lurched back. Another plate of ice gave beneath his thigh. He yelled and twisted onto his front. More ice gave way. He was through to his hips, lying on his chest with his hands splayed out, reaching for the bank.
    Jet turned and ran.
    Dante screamed and clawed the ice, trying to drag himself up, but there was nothing to grab and his legs were heavy as iron. His muscles cramped in the unbelievable cold and his legs were two iron posts tied to his waist, pulling him into the black water. He had always imagined the river was still when the ice closed over it, but the current was murderous, dragging at his useless legs.
    He was going to drown. They would pull his white body out of the river and his father would weep as he sliced him open.
    And then Jet was flying down the riverbank, great stumbling strides, dragging an oar he must have pulled from the boathouse. Dante grabbed the wide flat blade and Jet, lying with his stomach on the ice, pulled with all his strength. Dante wriggled forward like a fish, working his hips back onto the ice, then his thighs, then churning and splashing to shore.
    Shivering and crying uncontrollably, he let Jet lead him up to the house. Mother, taking in his sniffles and his waterlogged clothes in a glance, sent him off to the bathtub, tight-lipped with fury. All the time he lay in the tub he could hear her hammering away at Jet, but Jet never said whose idea it had been to go out on the river.

    "'Of all the animals, the Boy is the most unmanageable,'" Father said at the dinner table that night. He glanced approvingly at Jet. "Good thought, to fetch that oar. If you'd reached out for my silly son here with your hand, you'd have gone in yourself. It happened six or seven years ago over in Millerton: five people drowned one after another, each one trying to pull the last one out. But for once, the fool seems to have profited from the wise