Lying with the Dead Read Online Free PDF

Ass Burger.”
    “I love Maury so much,” I tell her now, “I never noticed anything wrong with him.”
    “That’s crap, Candy.”
    “Well, only that business with the fan, the way he watched it and made a whirring sound.”
    “Yeah, then when we got air-conditioning,” she says, “you couldn’t drag him away from the window unit. He’d squat there staring through the vent. I hoped he’d grow up to be a repairman. But no such luck. Remember how he played wrong with his toys? Give him a truck and he’d flip it over and spin the tires until he was hypnotized. Then he got that Hopalong Cassidy gun set for Christmas,” Mom goes on, “and treated the pistols like cars and crashed them into each other. By the same token, you’d expect he’d pick up a toy truck and shoot it. But there was never any logic.” Mom shakes her head. “Still, it wasn’t until Maury started school and other kids teased him that I knew something was wrong.”
    How could she not have caught on before then? I’m fifteen months older than Maury. It’s not like Mom never saw a normal child. Didn’t she wonder when he fell to pieces every time she switched on the vacuum cleaner? He was scared of being sucked into the bag, just like he was of getting washed down the drain when Mom pulled the bathtub plug.
    When it was empty, though, he loved the bathtub. He’d climb in with his clothes on and snuggle up. He liked the feel of the porcelain. I never figured out how to square this with the fact that he couldn’t bear to be touched. He loved me the most. He told me that all the time. But whenever I tried to cuddle him, he squirmed away.
    Mom passes me another picture. I must be about four, Maury just shy of three. Both of us have curly blond ringlets and we’re wearing matching white shoes and flouncy pinafores. Mom claims it wasn’t unusual in those days to dress little boys in girl’s clothes. But cute as he and I look together—honestly, Maury was prettier than me—I don’t think it was smart to twin us.
    “Isn’t this sweet?” Mom holds up a shot of me pushing Maury in his stroller. Then in what I don’t fancy is an aimless fall of her hand on a similar picture, she flashes one of Maury later on pushing me in my wheelchair. Like it might have slipped my mind, she asks, “Remember when you had polio?”
    The snapshot shows me smiling. Or fake-smiling. Sure, I was happy to be out of the hospital. On the other hand, I recognized even then that I was playing a role. Nobody loves a complaining drama queen. The script called for cheerfulness. That was the only part available to a kid who pulled through polio.
    Lately total strangers have started asking me about it. They’re not shy, and I don’t fault them for it. Who can blame anybody for being curious about a disease that doesn’t exist nowadays? A woman writing a book on polio even sent me a questionnaire. Everyone wants to know what it was like.
    How I caught it is a complete mystery to me. Mom kept Maury and me indoors during the hottest hours of the summer epidemic, and neither of us swam in a pool, public or otherwise. Yet polio singled me out and hunted me down like a dog after a rabbit.
    I had it a month before anybody realized I was sick. The chills and fever, the pins and needles in my leg, the fatigue and limping, they got lost in the family’s bigger problems. Things had gone belly up for Dad and he couldn’t pay his gambling debts. Scared of having his legs broken, he left town and laid low until he could make restitution. Meanwhile Mom found a job checking out groceries at Safeway. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem to have any problem dealing with the public. She kept the cutting remarks to herself until she got home. But she did claim that being around food all day sickened her so bad she couldn’t cook dinner. She gave Maury and me cold cuts.
    Sometimes she took Maury to Safeway with her and he spent hours jumping on and off the mat that opened the automatic