Risen by Jan Strnad Page B

rest. For now.
    Haws still lived with Lucy, who cleaned houses to bring in her share of the rent. Like her mother, she was a heavy sleeper, but for a different reason. Lucy slept because she was depressed. She was not an attractive woman by most standards and had given up on herself early in life. She rose from the bed only long enough to make her meager living, to watch a little TV, or to open a can and heat contents to boiling. Unlike her brother, Lucy was cadaverously thin. Her depression had been with her so long that she couldn't imagine life without it. She was not like other people, certainly not like the happy, buoyant souls she saw on the television screen, and she did not expect anything to change. She tried not to inconvenience her brother, whom she loved and relied upon, and that meant staying out of the way, in her bedroom, in her bed, the covers pulled up tight over her bony shoulders. It was as good a place as any to be, for her, and if that's how she wanted to live, it was okay by her brother.
    Haws finished his washing and mending and pressing and draped his uniform on a wire hanger that he hung in a doorway. No point putting it in the closet when he was just going to put it back on in a few hours anyway.
    He showered and put on clean underwear and went to bed, not really tired but figuring that he should try to get some rest. He fell asleep in moments and slept like a baby until late Saturday morning. He woke feeling like a million bucks. With a bit of luck, this could turn out to be the best day of his life.

Eight
     
    Ma's Diner was already in pandemonium when Deputy Haws walked in.
    Claudia White, the night nurse at Cooves County Hospital, was in a screaming match with the Ganger boy who gripped a teaspoon in his hand as if it was a switchblade and looked ready to spoon her to death. Jedediah Grimm, the undertaker, had hold of Ganger by both arms but that didn't stop Ganger's elbow from shooting back where it caught Peg Culler and made her drop two armloads of breakfast specials. Nurse White's mother seemed on the verge of a heart attack and Reverend Small was urging everybody to calm down and Merle Tippert, owner of the Rialto Theatre, pounded the table and screamed for boysenberry syrup. Ma screamed at Tippert from the service window but Haws had no idea what he was saying because he'd lapsed into Mandarin or something...it might have been Tongues for all Haws knew. Tom Culler sat at the counter looking sick and Brant Kettering sat next to him scribbling furiously in his notebook. Everybody else either observed nervously or wolfed their food like they planned to sneak out on their check during the hullabaloo.
    Haws' arrival calmed the place down, but it wasn't because of the sudden appearance of the law. It was because, when he saw him, Galen Ganger's jaw dropped to the floor and he forgot all about Nurse White and the room spun and he fainted dead away. As a bonus, Tom Culler turned as green as a cartoon character and heaved his breakfast onto the countertop. It was everything Haws could have wished for, and more.
    ***
    Brant knew that the article ran long and was too raw for publication, but he wanted to write it out like it happened first and save it for his book. He could water it down and objectify it later for the Cooves County Times . He wrote:
John Duffy's alleged rise from the dead would be old news by the time the story made it to the Times . What I couldn't provide in terms of timeliness I determined to make up for with depth, or, failing that, width. I wanted to see what the town was thinking, and for that there was no better observation post on a Saturday morning than Ma's Diner.
For many of the citizens of Anderson, Saturday morning breakfast at Ma's was the social event of the week. Ma's had its regulars, like Merle Tippert who lived alone and ate most of his meals out and who reserved Saturday morning for his weekly treat of waffles and boysenberry syrup, the hell with what Doc Milford