Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  On the way to school Annie and I compared lunches, and if she didn’t have enough I would give her some of mine. She packed her own lunch every morning, but often there was little to put in it: a hardboiled egg or two, or a peanut butter sandwich. Doritos were her favorite. Mine too. They were the only thing I was jealous of giving her. Anything else I had was hers unconditionally, even my fried baloney sandwiches.

  She asked me once if I didn’t ever get tired of eating fried baloney sandwiches.

  “No,” I said, truthfully, although today, as a grown man, just the thought of eating one will make me nauseous. I calculated once that I had probably eaten around four thousand fried baloney sandwiches by the time I was thirteen.

  “You do your homework?” I asked her.

  “Yes!” Primly said, always, as though she was shocked I would have thought otherwise. Annie always did her homework. She did it in the trees behind her house when the weather was fine, or in the public library when it wasn’t, or sometimes at my house. She couldn’t do it at home because she had no desk and she shared a room with three sisters. Besides, he wouldn’t have let her alone long enough. “Did you?”

  “I did some of the math. I already read this damn novel a couple of years ago, though.” I’d had to read Lord of the Flies for English class. I thought it was one of the scariest books I’d ever read because it was so true. Even if it hadn’t actually happened, it seemed like the type of thing that was not only possible, but probable. A gang of boys marooned on a desert island, the way Grandpa had been, hunting down another boy because he was fat and slow and different and because they had reverted back to their animal instincts: it happened every day, in small ways, really.

  “Don’t swear.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s mentally unhealthy,” she said. “And someone with your vocabulary ought to be able to think of other ways to express himself.”

  “Mentally unhealthy?”

  “You need a sound mind in a sound body,” she said. “So you can be strong enough to rescue me.”

  I smiled at that. We were just barely teenagers now, but she still remembered the great plan I had contrived to rescue her when I was small. Many years later, she would tell me that not only hadn’t she forgotten it, but she thought about it every night as she went to sleep. Sometimes, she said, even though it was only the fantasy of a little boy, it was the only thing that kept her going: the idea that someone, someday, would come barging in and change everything for her.

  We were forced to meet in secret at the base of the hill, as we’d been doing almost every day since we were seven. The need for secrecy was something we never mentioned. We skirted around it. Whenever we said, “Meet you later,” it meant “See you at the bottom of the hill, safe from his eyes and close to the woods, so he can’t get you and so we can hide if we need to.” “So you can rescue me” was only half a joke. Annie was seriously in need of a four-alarm rescue mission, complete with commandos in camouflage and face paint. The problem was, I was the only one who knew it, and I didn’t know how to do it myself.

  It was a three-mile walk to school. Grandpa offered repeatedly to take us in the Galaxie, but I shunned the idea. Mornings with Annie were a rosy, luxurious time, and I lengthened our walks as much as possible. I know now I was already completely in love with her. We’d stopped holding hands and we never kissed, but I thought someday we might, and the anticipation hung over me as thickly as if I’d been spread with jam. We brushed arms sometimes as we walked. Her skin was soft, her arms covered with a fine golden fuzz, barely visible unless the light struck them just right. They were lovely, perfect arms, although she often had to wear long-sleeved shirts to hide the bruises from where her father had grabbed her. Touching her sent a thrill through me so powerful I could scarcely breathe; it was a rapid surge of energy, beginning in my groin and shooting simultaneously out the top of my head and through the bottoms of my feet. Any boy who has ever been in love knows this feeling. It consumes you, controls you—you have the feeling it has grabbed you by the nose and is just pulling you along, leading you closer to your final goal. I myself had no idea what that final goal was. I knew it was there because I could feel it. I thought it probably was “making out.”

  Making out was something I’d heard of at school. Some people did it and some didn’t. It was common knowledge into which category each person at Mannville Junior-Senior High School fit—whether you had or hadn’t made out with someone—and I had been in the latter category for too long. Soon it would be time to make the move. There were some minor obstacles to overcome first. First, Annie was four inches taller than I was, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to circumvent that. Standing on a chair to kiss her was out; it was too undignified. I felt I ought to be able to sweep her into my arms and pull her to me so that her petite shoes were dangling just off the ground. First, however, I needed a magical growth spurt to bring me to the level of her lips.

  Also, I hadn’t the slightest notion of how to begin kissing someone. Grandpa and I still didn’t have a television, or I might have had some idea of how these things worked. It was my understanding that people kissed on the television all the time. I’d watched a few shows at other people’s houses, and I was shocked at how openly this kissing took place, as well as at other things I couldn’t quite believe I was seeing. It was from television that everyone else my age learned their way around the adult world, and as a result I was at a serious social disadvantage.

  I was also having another problem. It was The Steamroller.

  The Steamroller was not a piece of construction equipment. It was a person, specifically David Weismueller, who had sacked more quarterbacks than any other linebacker in Mannville history and who occupied my father’s old place as football hero of the town. He was famous; he had his picture in the Megaphone almost every weekend, just like my dad. It was ironic, that, because my father had been a quarterback himself and would have gone face-to-face and toe-to-toe with David Weismueller had they known each other on the scrimmage field, and would have put him in his place. Not only would my father have eluded Weismueller, he would have beaten the living daylights out of him. That was what I imagined, anyway, because David “The Steamroller” Weismueller wanted to beat the living daylights out of me, to steamroll me mercilessly until I was flat, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  David Weismueller was handsome; I was ordinary. He was muscular; I was puny. He shaved every morning; I dreamed of it, and conducted weekly inspections of my chin in the mirror, all of them so far futile. He drove a red Corvette, which his father had bought him; I walked everywhere I went, or I rode in the back of Grandpa’s Galaxie like a little kid. He’d been going steady with a cheerleader named Sherry Anderson for two years, and everyone knew they did it—it, the big It, the only it that really matters to high-school boys—on the weekends; sex was so far removed from my world that I couldn’t even begin to fathom the road The Steamroller must have taken to get there. David Weismueller was what Jane Goodall would have called an “alpha male.” If we had been gorillas, she would have taken copious notes on him, and ignored me altogether.

  The Steamroller had taken it upon himself to shove me around whenever he saw me, which was why I had to keep my fists at the ready at all times. I was hoping for the chance to nail him in the balls one day. I hadn’t had the chance to do it yet, but things were coming to a head, and my genetic warlike instincts were becoming aroused for the first time since my battle with Trevor six years ago. I was small, but I knew I could hurt him at least a little. I didn’t know why he’d chosen me to pick on. I suppose he had to have somebody. Life, I was beginning to realize, was Lord of the Flies all over, every day. The real reason I hadn’t wanted to read the book again was that it was too much like my own pathetic existence.

  “I don’t see it,” said Annie. She was referring to his Corvette.

  “He’ll be around,” I said grimly.

  “I don’t see why you don’t tell someone.” />
  “It’s not so bad as that.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “There’s no reason for you to put up with it.”

  “There’s no reason for you to put up with it either,” I said, and we both knew that I was talking not about David Weismueller but about her father, which was not something I was supposed to bring up. I had just violated an unspoken rule.

  “I’ll see you later,” Annie said, her mood unreadable, and she left me to head toward the eighth-grade classrooms. We were both still in junior high, but next year I would skip ahead to the tenth grade, which meant I would be in the senior high building while Annie was still in the junior high. I wasn’t looking forward to that. If anything, it was she who should have been ahead of me. Annie was a genius. She was teaching herself to speak French from a series of language tapes she’d bought with money she saved from doing odd jobs for neighbors, or pilfered from her father. She was, she said, going to become fluent in French and move to Montreal after high school; and I had no doubt that if that was what she wanted to do, then she was going to do it.

  Just as Annie walked away, I saw him. The Corvette was cruising like a hungry shark down Frederic Avenue, which ran in front of the main doors of the senior high building. I neither slowed nor hurried my pace, but my heart began to thump rapidly and I felt hot blood pulsing through every inch of me. It was definitely David Weismueller. I knew that car well. Dreams of him in his Corvette were beginning to supplant the dreams of soldiers chasing me through the woods.

  A moment later he saw me, stepped on the gas, and roared up to where I stood. Then he unfolded himself from the driver’s seat and stood before me, a splendid example of Homo erectus more than Homo sapiens, but bent over considerably so that he could push his face threateningly into mine.

  “What did you say?” he said.

  This was his most common opening, to pretend I’d just said something to him that no man of honor could ignore. It was useless to protest, although I usually did anyway. But this morning I was feeling different. My eyes swept him from toe to head, taking in his sneakers, his jeans, his letterman’s jacket, and finally his eyes, which were as vacant and glaring as two laminated meatballs.

  “I said your mother sucks large dicks,” I replied. “She sucks for bucks. Ten dollars a pop. I think you’re the only guy on the football team who doesn’t know.”

  David Weismueller’s neatly shaved jaw dropped about three inches. I knew it would be wise to shut up, but it was already too late. I threw caution to the wind.

  “Or maybe you do know,” I said. “Maybe she practices on you. Maybe she taught you how to suck ’em too.”

  “You’re gonna die,” he said.

  “We’re all going to die someday.”

  “You’re gonna die today,” he said, and at that moment I believed him. I dropped my backpack on the ground and stepped back two paces. Then I raised my fists and squared off.

  “Bring it on,” I said.

  But he was too smart for that. There was already a small crowd around us, and from the corner of my eye I could see the parking lot monitor running toward us. If he’d hit me then he would have been in big trouble.

  “Watch your back, shithead,” he said. He was shaking with rage. “Don’t go to sleep. Ever. I’m goin’ faggot-hunting, and you’re the faggot.”

  “All right, you guys,” said the monitor, a teacher’s aide named Drew. “You want to get written up, Weismueller? Or you, Mann?”

  “I really don’t care,” I heard myself saying. I was seeing red.

  “What was that, Mann?” said the monitor.

  I said nothing more. I picked up my backpack and headed off toward the junior high building, feeling the disbelieving stare of David Weismueller burning twin holes in the back of my head. He was right; I was doomed.

  A feeling of calm resolution settled over me for the rest of the day. It was almost a relief, actually. Now that the inevitable was imminent, the fear was gone, and I was clearheaded and ready. I went through the motions of going to classes like a condemned man who eats his last meal. I never paid much attention in class anyway because I knew most of the time what the teacher was going to say before he said it. The only time I allowed myself to get involved in anything that day was during a discussion in English class on Lord of the Flies.

  “What happened with these boys while they were on that island?” my English teacher, a tall, gangling man named Mr. Doddy, had asked. “Why did they behave like animals?”

  “Human beings are animals,” I heard myself saying.

  “And what exactly do you mean, Mr. Mann?” Mr. Doddy was thrilled—it was rare for a student to actually participate in one of his discussions, especially me.

  “They were far from society,” I explained. “They had to make their own laws. Also, they had to survive, which meant they had to kill. Like how they killed the wild pig.”

  Mr. Doddy had his hands folded in front of him and was staring at the ceiling in a kind of professorial rapture. “Please continue, Mr. Mann,” he said. “This is most fascinating.”

  I grew red in the face, self-conscious, but I continued. “Their killer instincts were awakened. When we live in society, we put those away because we have to get along. But they were on a desert island, and they didn’t have anyone to make laws for them, so they had to make their own. But they weren’t like the laws we have. They were the old laws, the ones we had to obey when we were living in tribes.”

  “Yes, indeed, Mr. Mann,” said Mr. Doddy. “What you are suggesting, then, is a kind of reversion to a way of life that no longer exists today, but that was most common when we had to fight a daily fight just to survive. Correct?”

  “I think those laws pretty much still exist,” I said. There were a few snickers from those who had witnessed my confrontation with The Steamroller that morning. I ignored them. “We’re still bloodthirsty. Like animals.”

  Many years later, I would read what my ancestor Willie Mann had to say on the subject of human nature with respect to our animal instincts:

  In most of us, the ancient urge to kill the weak has been suborned by the need to co-exist with other humans in society, according to modern laws. But we are fooling ourselves if we think we no longer carry these animal desires within us, just because we are “civilized.” They lurk just beneath the surface, ready to reappear at a moment’s notice, and they are as well oiled and smooth in their functioning as if they had never been dormant. Let none of my descendants forget that we are, at best, fancified apes who have shaved our fur and put on airs; and indeed, we have been putting them on for so long now we think they are our nature. They are not. Put the question to any veteran of any war, and he will tell you of the blood lust that erupts in mortal combat in all of us men, from private soldier to the highest general in the land, as naturally as though we had descended from the trees only last week.

  But neither myself nor Mr. Doddy had yet heard of Willie Mann’s diary. If we had, perhaps we’d have referred to it in our classroom conversations. I like to think it would have replaced all other classroom texts in use in high schools across the country then, simply because it contained all the ideas found in the great works of Western literature from Shakespeare to the present: birth and death, love and hatred, war and peace, greed, lust, envy—the list goes on and on. But the diary hadn’t been returned to me yet, and the world was proceeding on its tottering circular path, unilluminated and ignorant of the genius of my great-great-grandfather.

  I managed to send a note to Annie during lunch. It said:

  The shit is hitting the fan today after school. You’d better walk home by yourself. I’m in for it.

  She wrote back:

  I wish you’d tell someone. But if you won’t, I hope you kill him.

  I grimaced at that. I felt exactly the same about her; and her situation, to my way of thinking, was far more desperate than mine. I didn’t live with David Weismueller, after all. At least I was
safe when I went home.

  Our usual route home was to walk down Frederic Avenue to Third Street, down Third Street to the County Road, and then to our separate houses, mine at least warm and welcoming, if haunted, hers a cold and terrifying place. That day, however, instead of following this route after school, I crept behind the school buildings and ran crouching through a number of backyards. A few people were out weeding or mowing their lawns, and they stared at me curiously as I sneaked along across their property. I merely waved and grinned at them. “Playing Capture the Flag,” I said. “Seen a bunch of guys come through here?” And they would shake their heads and smile, thinking, no doubt, “Boys will be boys,” or something like that. If only they had known. Only my pride prevented me from throwing myself on my knees in front of them and begging safe haven, or perhaps a ride home to the farmhouse, with me in the backseat under a blanket hidden safely from The Steamroller.

  I made it to the County Road without incident. Once there, I ducked immediately into the trees and followed the road for several yards. I’m going to make it, I thought, at least today.

  And then I stopped.

  Why, I wondered, should I allow this Neanderthal to ruin my peace of mind? If he doesn’t get me today, he will tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then next week. It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair. I’m sick of it. I’m going to fight him. Maybe he’ll kill me and maybe he won’t. But I’m done hiding from him. I’m just as good as he is. What’s more, I’m a Mann. And an accomplished stunt artist. And a Celt, goddamn him. I’m a crazy Celtic warrior with blue paint on my face and the skins of three foxes wrapped around my waist. Send him to me, God. Bring him on to me right now.