Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  I could practically hear the bagpipes wailing and screeching away, from somewhere deep in my mind.

  As Willie Mann wrote in one of his less esoteric but just as philosophical moods:

  Be careful what you request of Our Maker. He grants all heartfelt prayers; but he doesn’t give us what we want, only what we need.

  And just as this final prayer to the Almighty left my lips and floated upward, I saw David Weismueller’s Corvette cruise by in second gear. Even the car seemed out to get me. The sight of it went straight to my gut in a cold lance of anticipation. This is it, I thought. Today is a good day to die.

  I jumped out from behind the trees. He must have seen me immediately, for the Corvette ground to a halt in the dusty road. I announced myself anyway.

  “Weismueller!”

  There was the sound of a clanking transmission as the Corvette went into reverse.

  “Come out and play!” I screamed. I was feeling crazy. It was delicious.

  Weismueller stepped on the gas and the Corvette zoomed backward. I stepped into the ditch again; I felt a slight breeze as the car passed, barely missing me. He was not playing, I realized. He’d gone insane. He really wanted to kill me.

  I jumped back into the road again and faced the car. Weismueller was not alone; there were two other football players in the car with him, and they were all staring at me with the same kind of mad-dog look in their eyes.

  I stood in front of the car. Weismueller inched it forward until the front bumper was touching my knees. I held my ground, hardly daring to breathe. I wasn’t going to move first. He had the power in his sneakered right foot to kill me then and there if he so chose, simply by stepping on the gas. We stayed like that for a long time, although exactly how long I never knew. It seemed, of course, like an eternity. More likely it was three or four seconds.

  Instead of stepping on the gas, he got out of the Corvette. I breathed again; at least it wouldn’t be death by car. The other two also got out. They were also linebackers, large and powerful boys who were publicly lauded every Friday night for their ability to disable and even maim rival football players. They were the modern warrior-heroes of Mannville, and for the moment they had decided their brutal energy would be focused on me. It was highly ironic, I thought. I posed no threat to them. I didn’t want to score goals on them. I just wanted to get on with my life.

  “This is between me and Weismueller,” I said to the two linebackers. “You guys stay out of it.”

  Grinning madly, the two looked at their leader. He ignored them, choosing instead to lock eyes with me. I stared back at him. My knees filled with water.

  “C’mere, you little faggot,” said Weismueller. Instead I stepped back two paces, which seemed to infuriate him. “What’s the matter? You afraid?” he roared.

  “Think about it, you moron,” I said calmly. “There’s three of you, and you’re all bigger than me. Of course I’m afraid.”

  They said nothing. One of them snorted. I could see that my logic hadn’t registered.

  “I didn’t start this,” I went on. “You decided to pick on me for no reason. That’s the kind of guy you are. You like hurting guys smaller than you? Fine. You’re the coward. Not me.”

  “Shut up,” said one of the two linebackers. I think his name was Pfeiffer. The other was named Olmacher. In eight years Olmacher was going to die in the Gulf War, his transport destroyed accidentally by an American missile. But at that moment he was very much alive and towering over me, blissfully unaware of his fate.

  “No, I won’t,” I said to him. To Weismueller, I said, “I don’t know why you want to beat on me, but if you’re going to do it, then let’s get it on.”

  “He’s darin’ ya, Dave,” said Pfeiffer.

  “I know it,” said Weismueller.

  “I’ll fight you,” I said. “I don’t know what you think you’re proving, but I’ll fight you if you force me to, and I’m going to hurt you as much as I possibly can before I go down.”

  “You’ll go down,” he promised.

  “Sure I will,” I said. Then I executed the move I’d been rehearsing in my mind for the last several weeks. I stepped forward, dropped to one knee, and sent my fist crashing into where I surmised Weismueller’s testicles were lurking, nestled like two soft and unshelled eggs in the recesses of his jeans. I hit him as hard as I possibly could. I was small, but not weak, and Weismueller was completely unprepared. He hit the ground as if he’d been shot, in too much pain even to cry out. Then I was on him. I’d forgotten completely about Pfeiffer and Olmacher. Later, in thinking it over, I realized they had intended to let it be a fair fight, as much as was possible considering the difference in size between Weismueller and myself. They let us go, standing over us, shouting encouragement to their warlord.

  I used both my fists on Weismueller’s face. For as long as I had him down I was going to make the best use of my time. I was once again the mad Celtic warrior. My blows were surgical and precise, not wild but well aimed. The first one flattened his nose, and blood leaked from him suddenly in thick rivulets. I hit him several more times before one of the other two—I never knew which—pulled me off, stood me up with one hand, and backhanded me with the other. It was only one hit, but that was all it took. I lay on my back and looked up at the sky. Something had cracked deep in my head. I didn’t feel like moving.

  “That was dirty, Mann!” shouted Olmacher, or perhaps Pfeiffer. “You hit him in the nuts!”

  I had no choice, I thought to myself. Someone was kicking me in the ribs, but it might as well have been someone else they were kicking. I had left my body completely. Then I heard the car start. I wondered idly if they were going to run me over. They came close; the tires passed inches from me. Then I closed my eyes.

  I must have been unconscious for a while because the next thing I was aware of was Annie standing over me, calling my name frantically. I opened my eyes but had to close them immediately. The sun was like tiny daggers at the back of my head. I tried to sit up.

  “Don’t,” said Annie. “I already called the doctor.”

  “What doctor?”

  “Connor,” she said, concerned. I knew full well that there was only one doctor who would make a house call, or in this case a side-of-the-road call. She was worried, she told me later, that I would be simpleminded for the rest of my life. They had hit me that hard.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “A few minutes,” she said. “I saw the whole thing. Don’t get up! Don’t.”

  “I have to.”

  “You can’t.”

  I tried to get up anyway and collapsed immediately into a sitting position. “All right,” I said.

  “You probably have a concussion.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Yes you do. I saw him hit you. He hit you hard.”

  “I hit him hard too.”

  “You certainly did. You hurt him a lot worse than you got hurt.”

  “Really?”

  “Think about it,” Annie said. I thought about it.

  “You’re right,” I said happily, as the warm glow of victory began to settle over me. “I bet I hurt him pretty bad.”

  “Which is exactly what he deserved,” said Annie. She was looking at me differently now. It was a curious look, as though I’d just done something totally unexpected and wonderful and her opinion of me had changed because of it. Perhaps she thought me capable now of rescuing her from her father once and for all. Perhaps she knew now that I wasn’t kidding about it.

  Doctor Connor’s car pulled up next to us and he got out with his black leather bag. I hadn’t seen him in several years, not since his argument with Grandpa; he looked no different than I remembered him, tall and lanky, with the same pair of glasses forever sliding off the end of his nose. He had aged, with the peculiar grace of old country doctors, hardly at all.

  “Hello, young William,” he said sternly. “I haven’t seen you in quite some time. Been fighting?”
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  “Yeah.”

  “Win? No, don’t answer. Nobody ever wins a fight. Foolishness, all of it. Hold still.” He felt the back of my head gingerly. I winced. He clucked over me for several minutes, asking me if I could move this, wiggle that, while Annie told him what had happened. One or two cars came by and slowed as the drivers looked at us curiously. I knew the story would be all over town by evening.

  “You probably have a concussion,” he told me.

  “See?” said Annie. “I told you.”

  “I don’t,” I said again. I’d heard enough about concussions to know that I didn’t want to have one, regardless of whether I actually did or not.

  “I’ll take you home,” said Connor. “Your grandfather can take you to the hospital. Where, I might add, I insist you go. Today. Tonight, at the latest.”

  “Grandpa’s missed having you around,” I said. I don’t know why I said that; I didn’t even know that it was true, but it flashed into my head. “He’s sorry about everything.”

  Doctor Connor said nothing to that, but in the softening of his eyes I could see he had heard me. He and Annie helped me stand, waves of nausea washing over me, and put me in the backseat of the car. Annie sat with me and I laid my head in her lap as we drove the short distance to the old farmhouse. Grandpa was standing out in the yard as we pulled in. The sudden appearance of Connor in our driveway seemed to stun him momentarily. Then he came toward us as Annie and Connor got out and helped me from the backseat.

  “Connor,” said Grandpa shortly.

  “Tom.”

  “What happened?”

  “Fighting,” said Connor.

  “Right. Thanks for bringing him home.”

  “Why don’t you guys just shake hands,” I remember mumbling. “Shake hands and get it over with.”

  But I don’t remember if they did or not.

  They took me into the house. Doctor Connor hovered somewhere in the background as I was put to bed. Annie stayed with me as he and Grandpa conversed in the hall outside my room, their tones low. I was reminded pleasantly of Connor’s frequent visits to our house when I was younger, and how the rumble of their deep old-man’s voices had soothed me as I drifted off to sleep at night. I was once again the subject of their conversation, except this time Grandpa merely listened and agreed instead of arguing, as Connor lectured him on what needed to be done with me; and this time I wasn’t falling into the magical sleep of a young child, but lurking on the far side of wakefulness as my body set about repairing itself. Annie stroked my forehead as the two of them talked in the hall. Then I heard Connor’s departing footsteps and Grandpa came back into the room.

  “Fighting,” he said simply. For a moment I was reminded of Mrs. Shumacher when she grabbed Trevor and me by the scruffs of our necks like two half-grown puppies and smacked our foreheads together. “No fighting,” she’d said, which in her lexicon meant not only that fighting was wrong then, but that I was never, ever to participate in it again in my life. I had disobeyed her, but not without reason.

  Grandpa sighed. “You gotta do what you gotta do, sometimes,” he said, thinking perhaps of his journey to the South Pacific to kill the Japanese. “Who started it?”

  “I did.”

  “No he didn’t,” said Annie. “Mr. Mann, there’s this guy at school named David—”

  “I started it,” I said. I didn’t want Grandpa to know. I still don’t know why I lied to him that day. All I knew was that I would rather have him thinking I picked a fight with David Weismueller for no reason than that he’d been picking on me all this time. Scenes from Lord of the Flies played through my mind repeatedly. I didn’t want Grandpa to think of me as some pathetic little weakling being chased around an island. I was, I think now, delirious with concussion, and also with the onset of a fever that I could feel already sneaking into my bones.

  I spent the rest of the evening drifting in and out of strange dreams. In some of them I was on the island with Grandpa and Enzo Fujimora, and they were chasing me around with a wooden spear, chanting, “Kill! Kill!” In others, the three of us roamed around together, each of us armed with a spear, but there was nobody to chase; desolate, we searched every rocky crag and tiny jungle glen for a victim, but we couldn’t find any, and finally we gave up. I dreamed too of Annie, and these dreams led me into the mysterious region where only grown men could go, the region I could only hint at to myself when I was awake. It seemed she was already there, waiting for me, and all I had to do was find the path. But you had to be a man to do that, and I was still only a boy.

  “I’m a man,” I must have muttered in my sleep, for I woke to hear Grandpa say, “Yes, you are a Mann, and you’re the best damn one of them so far.”

  Annie had told him the real story while I was asleep. That was the thing about Annie. She absolutely could not tolerate another person’s lie.

  I didn’t go to school the next day. I went to the hospital instead, where they X-rayed my throbbing head and told me I did indeed have a concussion. Grandpa had wanted to take me in right away, but I begged him to wait—my head hurt too much to move. I spent the rest of that day in bed, and I knew I was truly sick because I didn’t grow restless. Instead I welcomed the chance to rest. I dreamed throughout the day and slept all night without waking once.

  The next morning I awoke with the sun and went downstairs. Grandpa was already awake, as always; he still arose before dawn each morning, to water livestock that no longer existed and to ride along fences that had long since been jumped by ostriches and then bulldozed. He’d ransacked his ancient store of preserved herbs and was brewing up a concoction for bruised heads, which he made me drink without argument. I obeyed. It tasted awful, but I knew from experience that Grandpa could cure anything with herbs. We sat together at the kitchen table, he sipping a small glass of whiskey and I drinking his potion.

  “Who started it?” he asked me, of the fight.

  “He did.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He just started picking on me.”

  “When?”

  “A few months ago.”

  “He ever hit you before?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did you feel when you were pounding him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. “Annie told me how you settled his hash for him. Good. I’m glad. What I want to know is, how did it feel when you were beating his face into mush?”

  I was silent. It was a disturbing question because I didn’t like the answer. What was worse, I knew Grandpa already knew what I would say. He just wanted to hear me say it.

  “Good,” I admitted.

  “Huh.”

  “I mean…I’d rather it never happened, but still…while it was happening, it felt…just good.”

  “You’re your father’s son, all right.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He used to say the same thing,” said Grandpa. “Kids used to pick on him a lot. And he had to fight them. I never punished him for it because they left him no choice. Eddie wasn’t a mean kid. He didn’t like fighting.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “But when he got going on a kid, it wasn’t pretty. He got mean. He got crazy. A couple of times I had to talk to the police about it.”

  “The police?” I was shocked. My father, a delinquent?

  “Yeah. Nobody ever pressed charges, because there was never any doubt Eddie was defending himself. But he went beyond defending himself. He went berserk.”

  “How?”

  Grandpa kneaded his knuckles uncomfortably. “I don’t like telling you this, but you’re getting older and you need to know. Can you handle this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Grandpa sighed heavily. “Once he bit a kid’s ear off.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said, nauseated.

  “No. I couldn’t believe it myself. He didn�
��t even remember doing it. At least that’s what he said, and I believed him. He felt horrible about it later, too. He said he tried everything he could think of to get out of fighting the kid, but when he saw he had no way out, he made up his mind and the world changed color. Does that sound familiar?”

  I thought back to the fight. The world had changed color for me too. It seemed red, as though my eyes were coated with a thin film of blood. And the power that surged in my arms was intoxicating, all the more so because it was power I didn’t ordinarily possess. For a few brief moments, I realized, I had been entirely capable of killing David Weismueller.

  “Yes, it does,” I admitted.

  “Be careful of it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not easy to explain. There’s a lot more to it. Violence is usually a bad idea, just put it that way. Only use it as a last resort.”

  “It was a last resort!”

  “I know. You were justified. That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  “Some families,” said Grandpa, “have bad tempers. Really, when people say they have a bad temper, they’re just making excuses for themselves. Everyone has a bad temper. It’s just that some people are better at controlling it than others. Now we Manns,” he continued, “are actually quite good at controlling ourselves. We’re not mean. We don’t pick on people because they’re smaller than us.”

  “How could we? Everyone’s bigger than us!”

  “You know what I mean. A Mann is the nicest fellow you’d ever want to meet, until something or someone he cares about is in danger.”

  “Or himself.”

  “Or himself,” said Grandpa. “But we don’t worry about ourselves as much as we worry about other people.”

  “We don’t?”

  “Think about it. Think about Annie. You worry about her all the time.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What I’m trying to tell you is you need to be careful of your temper. It’s a genetic thing. We have a history of…of going above and beyond what’s required, if you know what I mean. In certain situations. Once we decide to blow our cool, that’s it. Bad things happen.”