‘My wife’s personal term for soul is personality. As in “There’s something incorrigibly dark in your personality, Eldred Ewell, and Dewars brings it out.” ’
The hall floor was pretty definitely white tile, with a cloudy overwaxed shine in the bright fluorescence out there. Some kind of red or pink stripe ran down the center of the hall. Gately couldn’t tell if Tiny Ewell thought he was awake or unconscious or what.
‘It was in the fall term of third grade as a child that I found myself fallen in with the bad element. They were a group of tough blue-collar Irish lads bussed in from the East Watertown projects. Runny noses, home-cut hair, frayed cuffs, quick with their fists, sports-mad, fond of sneaker-hockey on asphalt,’ Ewell said, ‘and yet, strangely, I, unable to do even one pull-up in the President’s Physical Fitness Test, quickly became the leader of the pack we all fell into. The blue-collar lads all seemed to admire me for attributes that were not clear. We formed a sort of club. Our uniform was a gray skallycap. Our clubhouse was the dugout of a Little League diamond that had fallen into disuse. Our club was called the Money-Stealers’ Club. At my suggestion we went with a descriptive name as opposed to euphemistic. The name was mine. The Irish lads acquiesced. They viewed me as the brains of the operation. I held them in a kind of thrall. This was due in large part to my capacity for rhetoric. Even the toughest and most brutish Irish lad respects a gilded tongue. Our club was formed for the express purpose of undertaking a bunko operation. We went around to people’s homes after school, ringing the doorbell and soliciting donations for Project Hope Youth Hockey. There was no such organization. Our donation-receptacle was a Chock Full O’ Nuts can with PROJECT HOPE YOUTH HOCKEY written on a strip of masking tape wrapped around the can. The lad who made the receptacle had spelled PROJECT with a G in the first draft. I ridiculed him for the error, and the whole club pointed at him and laughed. Brutally.’ Ewell kept staring at the crude blue jailhouse square and canted cross on Gately’s forearms. ‘Our only visible credentials were kneepads and sticks we’d purloined from the P.E. stockroom. By my order, all were held carefully to conceal the PPTY W. WTTN ELEM SCH emblazoned down the side of every stick. One lad had a goalie mask on under his skallycap, the rest kneepads and carefully held sticks. The kneepads were turned inside-out for the same reason. I couldn’t even skate, and my mother absolutely forbade rough play on asphalt. I wore a necktie and combed my hair carefully after each solicitation. I was the spokesperson. The mouthpiece, the bad lads called me. They were Irish Catholics all. Watertown from east to west is Catholic, Armenian, and Mixed. The Eastside boys all but genuflected to my gift for bullshit. I was exceptionally smooth with adults. I rang doorbells and the lads arrayed themselves behind me on the porch. I spoke of disadvantaged youth and team spirit and fresh air and the meaning of competition and alternatives to the after-school streets’ bad element. I spoke of mothers in support-hose and war-injured older brothers with elaborate prostheses cheering disadvantaged lads on to victory against far better-equipped teams. I discovered that I had a gift for it, the emotional appeal of adult rhetoric. It was the first time I felt personal power. I was unrehearsed and creative and moving. Hard-case homeowners who came to the door in sleeveless Ts holding tallboys of beer with stubble and expressions of minimal charity were often weeping openly by the time we left their porch. I was called a fine lad and a good kid and a credit to me Mum and Da. My hair was tousled so often I had to carry a mirror and comb. The coffee can became hard to carry back to the dugout, where we hid it behind a cinderblock bench-support. We’d netted over a hundred dollars by Halloween. This was a serious amount in those days.’
Tiny Ewell and the ceiling kept receding and then looming in, bulging roundly. Figures Gately didn’t know from Adam kept popping in and out of fluttery view in different corners of the room. The space between his bed and the other bed seemed to distend and then contract with a slow sort of boinging motion. Gately’s eyes kept rolling up in his head, his upper lip mustached with sweat. ‘And I was revelling in the fraud of it, the discovery of the gift,’ Ewell was saying. ‘I was flushed with adrenaline. I had tasted power, the verbal manipulation of human hearts. The lads called me the gilded blarneyman. Soon the first-order fraud wasn’t enough. I began secretly filching receipts from the club’s Chock Full O’ Nuts can. Embezzling. I persuaded the lads it was too risky to keep the can in the open-air dugout and took personal charge of the can. I kept the can in my bedroom and persuaded my mother that it contained Christmas-connected gifts and must under no circumstances be inspected. To my underlings in the club I claimed to be rolling the coins and depositing them in a high-interest savings account I’d opened for us in the name Franklin W. Dixon. In fact I was buying myself Pez and Milky Ways and Mad magazines and a Creeple Peeple-brand Deluxe Oven-and-Mold Set with six different colors of goo. This was in the early 1970s. At first I was discreet. Grandiose but discreet. At first the embezzlement was controlled. But the power had roused something dark in my personality, and the adrenaline drove it forward. Self-will run riot. Soon the club’s coffee can was empty by each weekend’s end. Each week’s haul went toward some uncontrolled Saturday binge of puerile consumption. I doctored up flamboyant bank statements to show the club, in the dugout. I got more loquacious and imperious with them. None of the lads thought to question me, or the purple Magic Marker the bank statements were done in. I was not dealing with intellectual titans here, I knew. They were nothing but malice and muscle, the worst of the school’s bad element. And I ruled them. Thrall. They trusted me completely, and the rhetorical gift. In retrospect they probably could not conceive of any sane third-grader with glasses and a necktie trying to defraud them, given the inevitably brutal consequences. Any sane third-grader. But I was no longer a sane third-grader. I lived only to feed the dark thing in my personality, which told me any consequences could be forestalled by my gift and grand personal aura.
‘But then of course eventually Christmas hove into view.’ Gately tries to stop Ewell and say ‘hove?’ and finds to his horror that he can’t make any sounds come out. ‘The meaty Catholic Eastside bad-element lads now wanted to tap their nonexistent Franklin W. Dixon account to buy support-hose and sleeveless Ts for their swarthy blue-collar families. I held them off as long as I could with pedantic blather on interest penalties and fiscal years. Irish Catholic Christmas is no laughing matter, though, and for the first time their swarthy eyes began to narrow at me. Things at school grew increasingly tense. One afternoon, the largest and swarthiest of them assumed control of the can in an ugly dugout coup. It was a blow from which my authority never recovered. I began to feel a gnawing fear: my denial broke: I realized I’d gradually embezzled far more than I could ever make good. At home, I began talking up the merits of private-school curricula at the dinner table. The can’s weekly take fell off sharply as holiday expenses drained homeowners of change and patience. This bear-market in giving was attributed by some of the club’s swarthier lads to my deficiencies. The whole club began muttering in the dugout. I began to learn that one could perspire heavily even in a bitterly cold open-air dugout. Then, on the first day of Advent, the lad now in charge of the can produced childish-looking figures and announced the whole club wanted their share of the accrued booty in the Dixon account. I bought time with vague allusions to co-signatures and a misplaced passbook. I arrived home with chattering teeth and bloodless lips and was forced by my mother to swallow fish-oil. I was consumed with puerile fear. I felt small and weak and evil and consumed by dread of my embezzlement’s exposure. Not to mention the brutal consequences. I claimed intestinal distress and stayed home from school. The telephone began ringing in the middle of the night. I could hear my father saying “Hello? Hello? ” I did not sleep. My personality’s dark part had grown leathery wings and a beak and turned on me. There were still several days until Christmas vacation. I’d lie in bed panicked during school hours amid piles of ill-gotten Mad magazines and Creeple Peeple figures and listen to the lonely handheld bel
ls of the Salvation Army Santas on the street below and think of synonyms for dread and doom. I began to know shame, and to know it as grandiosity’s aide-de-camp. My unspecific digestive illness wore on, and teachers sent cards and concerned notes. On some days the door-buzzer would buzz after school hours and my mother would come upstairs and say “How sweet, Eldred,” that there were swarthy and cuff-frayed but clearly good-hearted boys in gray skallycaps on the stoop asking after me and declaring that they were keenly awaiting my return to school. I began to gnaw on the bathroom’s soap in the morning to make a convincing case for staying home. My mother was alarmed at the masses of bubbles I vomited and threatened to consult a specialist. I felt myself moving closer and closer to some cliff-edge at which everything would come out. I longed to be able to lean into my mother’s arms and weep and confess all. I could not. For the shame. Three or four of the Money-Stealers’ Club’s harder cases took up afternoon positions by the nativity scene in the churchyard across from our house and stared stonily up at my bedroom window, pounding their fists in their palms. I began to understand what a Belfast Protestant must feel. But even more prospectively dreadful than pummellings from Irish Catholics was the prospect of my parents’ finding out my personality had a dark thing that had driven me to grandiose wickedness and left me there.’
Gately has no idea how Ewell feels about him making no responses, whether Ewell doesn’t like it or even notices it or what. He can breathe OK, but something in his raped throat won’t let whatever’s supposed to vibrate to speak vibrate.
‘Finally, on the day before my gastroenterologist appointment, when my mother was down the street at a speculum party, I crept downstairs from my sick bed and stole over a hundred dollars from a shoebox marked I.B.E.W. LOCAL 517 PETTY SLUSH in the back of my father’s den’s closet. I’d never dreamed of resorting to the shoebox before. Stealing from my own parents. To remit funds I’d stolen from dull-witted boys with whom I’d stolen them from adults I’d lied to. My feelings of fear and despicability only increased. I now felt ill for real. I lived and moved in the shadow of something dark that hovered just overhead. I vomited without aid of emetic, now, but secretly, so I could return to school; I couldn’t face the prospect of a whole Christmas vacation of swarthy sentries pounding their palms outside the house. I converted my father’s union’s bills to small change and paid off the Money-Stealers’ Club and got pummelled anyway. Apparently on general bad-element principles. I discovered the latent rage in followers, the fate of the leader who falls from the mob’s esteem. I was pummelled and given a savage wedgie and hung from a hook in my school locker, where I remained for several hours, swollen and mortified. And going home was worse; home was no refuge. For home was the scene of the third-order crime. Of theft cubed. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned. There were night terrors. I was unable to eat, no matter how long after supper I had to stay at the table. The more worried about me my parents became, the greater my shame. I felt a shame and personal despicability no third-grader should have to feel. The holidays were not jolly. I looked back over the autumn and failed to recognize anyone named Eldred K. Ewell Jr. It no longer seemed a question of insanity or dark parts of me. I had stolen from neighbors, slum-children, and family, and bought myself sweets and toys. Under any tenable definition of bad, I was bad. I resolved to toe the virtuous line from then on. The shame and horror was too awful: I had to remake myself. I resolved to do whatever was required to see myself as good, remade. I never knowingly committed another felony. The whole shameful interval of the Money-Stealers’ Club was moved to mental storage and buried there. Don, I’d forgotten it ever happened. Until the other night. Don, the other night, after the fracas and your display of reluctant se offendendo, 337 after your injury and the whole aftermath… Don, I dreamed the whole mad repressed third-grade interval of grandiose perfidy all over again. Vividly and completely. When I awoke, I was somehow minus my goatee and my hair was center-parted in a fashion I haven’t favored for forty years. The bed was soaked, and there was a gnawed-looking cake of McDade’s special anti-acne soap in my hand.’
Gately starts to short-term recall that he was offered I.V.-Demerol for the pain of his gunshot wound immediately on admission to the E.R. and has been offered Demerol twice by shift-Drs. who haven’t bothered to read the HISTORY OF NARCOTICS DEPENDENCY NO SCHEDULE C-IV + MEDIC. that Gately’d made Pat Montesian swear she’d make them put in italics on his file or chart or whatever, first thing. Last night’s emergency surgery was remedial, not extractive, because the big pistol’s ordnance had apparently fragmented on impacting and passed through the meters of muscle that surrounded Gately’s Humorous ball and Scalpula socket, passing through and missing bone but doing great and various damage to soft tissues. The E.R.’s Trauma Specialist had prescribed Toradol-IM 338 but had warned that the pain after the surgery’s general anesthetic wore off was going to be unlike anything Gately had ever imagined. The next thing Gately knew he was upstairs in a Trauma Wing room that trembled with sunlight and a different Dr. was speculating to either Pat M. or Calvin T. that the invasive foreign body had been treated with something unclean, beforehand, possibly, because Gately’s developed a massive infection, and they’re monitoring him for something he heard as Noxzema but is really toxemia. Gately also wanted to protest that his body was 100% American, but he seemed temporarily unable to vocalize aloud. Later it was nighttime and Ewell was there, intoning. It was totally unclear what Ewell wanted from Gately or why he was choosing this particular time to share. Gately’s right shoulder was almost the same size as his head, and he had to roll his eyes up and over like a cow to see Ewell’s hand on the railing and his face floating above it.
‘And how will I administer the Ninth Step when it comes time to make amends? How can I start to make reparations? Even if I could remember the homes of the citizens we defrauded, how many could still be there, living? The club lads have doubtless scattered into various low-rent districts and dead-end careers. My father lost the I.B.E.W. 339 account under the Weld administration and has been dead since 1993. And the revelations would kill my mother. My mother is very frail. She uses a walker, and arthritis has twisted her head nearly all the way around on her neck. My wife jealously protects my mother from all unpleasant facts regarding me. She says someone has to do it. My mother believes right this minute I’m at a nine-month Banque-de-Genève-sponsored tax-law symposium in the Alsace. She keeps sending me knitted skiwear that doesn’t fit, from the rest home.
‘Don, this buried interval and the impost I’ve carried ever since may have informed my whole life. Why I was drawn to tax law, helping wealthy suburbanites two-step around their fair share. My marriage to a woman who looks at me as if I were a dark stain at the back of her child’s trousers. My whole descent into somewhat-heavier-than-normal drinking may have been some instinctive attempt to bury third-grade feelings of despicability, submerge them in an amber sea.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Ewell said.
Gately was on enough Toradol-IM to make his ears ring, plus a saline drip with Doryx. 340
‘I don’t want to remember despicabilities I can do nothing about. If this is a sample of the “More Will Be Revealed,” I hereby lodge a complaint. Some things seem better left submerged. No?’
And everything on his right side was on fire. The pain was getting to be emergency-type pain, like scream-and-yank-your-charred-hand-off-the-stove-type pain. Parts of him kept sending up emergency flares to other parts of him, and he could neither move nor call out.
‘I’m scared,’ from what seemed somewhere overhead and rising, was the last thing Gately heard Ewell whisper as the ceiling bulged down toward them. Gately wanted to tell Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D. with Ewell’s feelings, and that if he, Tiny, could just hang in and tote that bale and put one little well-shined shoe in front of the other everything would end up all right, that the God of Ewell’s Understanding would find some way for Ewell to make things right, and then he could let the d
espicable feelings go instead of keeping them down with Dewars, but Gately couldn’t connect the impulse to speak with actual speech, still. He settled for trying to reach his left hand across and pat Ewell’s hand on the railing. But his own breadth was too far to reach across. And then the white ceiling came all the way down and made everything white.
He seemed to sort of sleep. He fever-dreamed of dark writhing storm clouds writhing darkly and screaming on down the beach at Beverly MA, the winds increasing over his head until Herman the polyurethane vacuole burst from the force, leaving a ragged inhaling maw that tugged at Gately’s XXL Dr. Dentons. A blue stuffed brontosaurus was sucked upward out of the crib and disappeared into the maw, spinning. His mother was getting the shit beaten out of her by a man with a shepherd’s crook in the kitchen and couldn’t hear Gately’s frantic cries for help. He broke through the crib’s bars with his head and went to the front door and ran outside. The black clouds up the beach lowered and roiled, funnelling sand, and as Gately watched he saw a tornado’s snout emerge from the clouds and slowly lower. It looked as if the clouds were either giving birth or taking a shit. Gately ran across the beach to the water to escape the tornado. He ran through the crazed breakers to deep warm water and submerged himself and stayed under until he ran out of breath. It was now no longer clear if he was little Bimmy or the grown man Don. He kept coming up briefly for a great sucking breath and then going back under where it was warm and still. The tornado stayed in one place on the beach, bulging and receding, screaming like a jet, its opening a breathing maw, lightning coming off the funnel-cloud like hair. He could hear the tiny tattered sounds of his mother calling his name. The tornado was right by the beach house and the whole house trembled. His mother came out the front door, wild-haired and holding a bloody Ginsu knife, calling his name. Gately tried to call for her to come into the deep water with him, but even he couldn’t hear his calls against the scream of the storm. She dropped the knife and held her head as the funnel pointed its pointy maw her way. The beach house exploded and his mother flew through the air toward the funnel’s intake, arms and legs threshing, as if swimming in wind. She vanished into the maw and was pulled spinning up into the tornado’s vortex. Shingles and boards followed her. No sign of the shepherd’s crook of the man who’d hurt her. Gately’s right lung burned horribly. He saw his mother for the last time when lightning lit up the funnel’s cone. She was whirling around and around like something in a drain, rising, seeming to swim, bluely backlit. The burst of lightning was the white of the sunlit room when he came up for air and opened his eyes. His mother’s tiny rotating imago faded against the ceiling. What seemed like heavy breathing was him trying to scream. The skinny bed’s sheets were soaked and he needed a piss something bad. It was daytime and his right side was in no way numb, and he was immediately nostalgic for the warm-cement feeling of when it was numb. Tiny Ewell was gone. His every pulse was an assault on his right side. He didn’t think he could stand it for even another second. He didn’t know what would happen, but he didn’t think he could stand it.
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