I stood at the side of the bed and looked down. He was unshaven, long-haired, a perfectly blank expression on his face, a man in his early forties who had checked out permanently when he was twenty or so. Where his arms and legs should have been were only four rounded stumps, cut and neatly trimmed by the U.S. Army. The same old tubes ran around him like so many plastic snakes, and the respirator clicked and hummed and hissed as it always had. This is what the Army does, I thought. It repackages you. And you always come home in worse shape than you were in when you left.
“What the hell happened to you, anyway?” I whispered. His eyes did not flicker in the slightest. He gave no indication that he knew I was there.
“Do you remember my dad?”
Nothing.
“My Grandpa told me about when you stole that car from him. He’s sorry he called the police on you. He said he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known it was you.”
Nothing again.
“He knew you weren’t a bad kid,” I said. Then I realized that even if he could hear me, he would have no idea who I was.
“I’m Eddie Mann’s son, Billy,” I told him. “You were my dad’s best friend.”
Frederic—that was his name, I remembered—just breathed away. In thinking back on his condition now, I assume he must have had some sort of damage to the part of his brain that controlled his higher functions. He could blink and breathe, but that was about it. I never learned exactly what had happened to him to make him the way he was. It was possible that nobody knew. A direct hit by a mortar shell, perhaps, or maybe he had stepped on a mine in some rice paddy deep in the interior of Vietnam. It might have been that his mind worked perfectly and he was merely paralyzed, on top of being a quadruple amputee. I like to think that he heard every word I said, and understood me. On the other hand, I would prefer for his sake that he was not capable of thinking at all. For to be trapped in that filthy bed, in that house, completely aware of everything that was going on around you and unable to do anything about it, would be a fate worse than the worst kind of hell I can think of.
Time to get out of here. I stole along the hallway again, then through the living room to the stairs. I stopped there and listened again. There was an angry voice, muffled by walls. Then there was crying. My God, I thought, could I be right? Could it really be happening right now? I sneaked up the stairs. The sounds seemed to be coming from a bedroom to my right, just around the corner. The shouting was louder now. I had just identified which door it was coming from when it opened, and Mr. Simpson came out.
I drew back and froze. If he turned the corner to go down the stairs, he would see me. If he saw me, he would kill me. I didn’t even have the strength to get down and hide. Terror shot through me like a flight of arrows. I felt my bowels clench and my stomach churn. But he didn’t turn the corner; he went instead into the bathroom, next to the door from which he’d come. He closed the door and I heard him turn on the faucet.
I peeked cautiously around the corner. The bedroom door was open and the light was on. There was an item or two of clothing on the floor, and I could see the end of a bed. On it there was a naked foot. A small, slender foot. Annie’s foot.
Without thinking, I crept down the hallway and into the room. I had lost all control of my plan now. Seeing Frederic had unnerved me, and I was thrumming with adrenaline. I was a spy wandering aimlessly, deep in enemy territory, and it was only through sheer dumb luck that I hadn’t been caught yet. All instinct for caution had fled. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I went quickly into the bedroom, my hand upraised to put over Annie’s mouth if she should be startled.
She lay on the bed in much the same attitude as her brother downstairs, staring vacantly at the ceiling, unblinking. She wore a nightdress, which was lifted halfway up her thighs. Was I too late? I wondered. Had he already done it?
“Annie,” I whispered. She didn’t move.
“Annie!” Not a sound, not a glance. She stared upward, unmoving. I reached down and touched her shoulder. She didn’t flinch, didn’t shiver. I bent my ear over her mouth. Yes, she was breathing. There was a faint medicinal odor to her breath. He had drugged her. I was too late to stop that. But I wasn’t too late to stop the rest of it.
Just then the sink stopped running and the bathroom door opened. I opened the closet door and slid inside, pulling it closed after me just enough so that I could see through a tiny crack. The heavy steps of Mr. Simpson came back down the hall into the bedroom. I looked through the crack in the door.
Simpson was taking off his shirt. I was horrified by the sight of his flabby alcoholic torso, his belly covered with stretch marks like a woman who has given birth not once but dozens of times. Not even Levi Miller’s wife, with her fifteen children, had stretch marks like that. And I learned something I hadn’t known about Mr. Simpson—he had a long scar on his chest, like a zipper, extending the length of his sternum. It was the mark of heart surgery. Somewhere, sometime, some misguided surgeon had decided he would try to extend this miserable life by ten or twenty years, as if it were worth saving. As if the world would benefit by the continued presence of a monster.
Simpson bent down and did something to Annie, moved her, or flipped her over; it was unclear what. But she didn’t offer any resistance, or make a sound. She was out cold.
It occurred to me then that I was near the breaking point. I’d had no idea what I was getting myself into. Long ago, I had promised Annie I would rescue her from her father. But that was before I knew how evil he truly was. I’d always imagined myself kicking in the door, backed up by a detachment of Marines, perhaps, and spraying the house with machine-gun fire before throwing her over my shoulder and carrying her to safety. In my daydreams I was never scared or uncertain, and the outcome was never in doubt. But this was a different story. If Simpson caught me he would beat the living daylights out of me, and it would be worse than anything David Weismueller ever could have done.
I had to think.
There was no way I could take a picture of them. With a start, I realized I didn’t even know where my camera was. I could have left it any number of places in the house. With my luck, Simpson would find it before I managed to escape. What was worse, the word MANN was written on the bottom of it in white indelible ink. If he saw that, he would know for certain I was there. My great-grandmother Lily had never imagined that she would be endangering my welfare by labeling her camera. It was, I thought furiously, another example of how history reaches out to fuck us over.
I heard the unzipping of pants and the clink as the belt buckle hit the floor. I was afraid I was going to be sick. It was now or never, I said to myself. I didn’t know what to do, but there was no way I could stay there in the closet and listen to this man rape his daughter. I wished for a gun, or a knife, or anything to kill him with. Failing that, I wished for a modern camera. I wouldn’t even be able to prove any of this had happened. Doctor Connor would believe me, but that was about all I could hope for. I was breaking as many laws as I was preserving. I myself could be arrested for what I was doing, sent to the boy’s home in Gowanda, where I would probably be raped myself. I was almost crying. This was too much. It was more than any fifteen-year-old boy could be expected to handle.
But I was not, I remembered, just any fifteen-year-old boy. I was a daredevil, and the son of a daredevil. The blood of heroes coursed through my veins. And what was more, I was a Mann.
I pushed open the closet door.
“GET OFF HER!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
The effect upon Mr. Simpson was immediate and dramatic, and better than anything I could have hoped for. He was just about to get on top of Annie, who had been rolled over onto her stomach, her nightdress lifted up now over her buttocks. He was naked, and completely unprepared for the sight of a black-clad, ski-masked stranger emerging from his daughter’s closet. A lifetime of hard drinking, heavy smoking, and greasy food had already left its mark on his heart. He stood up rapidly, like a small boy caught in s
ome misdemeanor, putting one hand on his chest. He spun around slowly to look at me.
“Ahhhh!” he said softly, his piglike eyes popping out of his head. “Ahhh! Ahhh!”
I stood and watched him, mesmerized.
“Waahhhh…” he said, in a deep, froglike voice, and slowly, almost gracefully, he toppled over like a short thick tree, hitting the floor with a house-shaking thud.
He seemed to take a long time to fall. The scene was replaying itself in my mind even before it was complete. For one revolting moment, our eyes locked. I couldn’t look away. Down, down he went, sideways, and when he hit the floor the windows rattled, and I was sure the noise could be heard as far away as the center of town.
I stood there for several long moments. Simpson, lying on the other side of the bed, was invisible to me. I waited. After a time there came a hissing sound, like air being expelled through a tiny hole.
My God, I thought—he’s deflating.
I waited another moment. His head did not reappear over the bed. He said nothing. Nobody moved. Annie was still unconscious on the bed. Delicately, I reached down and pulled her nightdress back over her bottom, not looking at her as I did so. So far, she didn’t even know I’d been there, and it was beginning to look as if she never would. Phase Two of my plan was creating itself in my brain as the seconds ticked by, and it looked like a good one.
I stepped around the end of the bed and looked down.
A pool of urine was rapidly spreading around Simpson’s body as his bladder relaxed. One eye was shut. The other was horribly half-open, the eyeball itself twisted around out of sight so that only the white part showed. His pudgy hand was still pressed to his chest, in a final, fruitless effort to encourage life to remain. I stood there for a long time, waiting, wanting to make sure but not able to bring myself to touch him. After five minutes or so of stillness, I was certain.
He was dead. And I’d killed him. I’d scared Mr. Simpson to death.
I had very little time to waste on reflection.
I ran down the hallway, back down the stairs, into the living room, and down the back hallway. There was my camera. It was sitting outside the door of Annie’s brother’s room—who, I hoped, would soon be going somewhere he would be taken care of. I ran out of the house and back down the hill, still avoiding the road. It was more important than ever now that I not be seen by anyone. It was also very important that I carry on with my normal life, that I not appear to deviate from my routine in the slightest. When Annie woke up, she would know what to do. Until then, I would have to wait. I couldn’t just call her out of the blue and ask casually how things were going. I had never called her in my life; the constant malevolent presence of her father had forbidden that.
Annie would wake up from her drugged stupor, see her father on the floor, and call the police. There was absolutely no reason for anyone to suspect that I’d had anything to do with it. Nobody would question me, nobody would even think that I’d been there. I had carried out the perfect crime. It was all the more perfect because it had been spontaneous, not at all a part of my original plan. It wasn’t really even a crime in the traditional sense. I hadn’t intended to kill him. I had only wanted to prevent the awfulness from happening to Annie one more time. If killing him was what it took, then so be it. He didn’t deserve to live anyway.
Willie writes of the gentle art of murder:
I am guilty of the murder of one of my fellow humans. I killed him during wartime, when murder is generally encouraged; yet his uniform was of the same color as mine, and therefore I was punished. Circumstances dictated that I should kill him, or else he would have gone on living, and that was not an acceptable alternative. Yet my intention was not evil, and the act itself was perpetrated without premeditation. My conscience has troubled me greatly nonetheless. Persons in the future reading this diary may wonder how it was that I came to kill only one man in the course of my military career. Let them read on; all shall be made clear.
It would be four more years before I read this entry. The relief it gave me would be stupefying. I was not the only Mann to kill someone. Although my great-great-grandfather’s crime didn’t justify my own, at least I could read of his guilt and somehow be strengthened by it.
The sun had risen over the eastern corner of the Lake.
I hid my dark clothing in the back of my closet and ditched the old Brownie camera in the attic. There was really no reason to hide anything. Nobody would be looking in my room for clues to Simpson’s death. They wouldn’t even know it was a murder.
“I killed a Simpson,” I whispered aloud, into the still, early morning.
It had not been the kind of killing that leaves one sick afterward with the excess of rage. I had not bludgeoned, beaten, shot, drowned, electrocuted, gassed, hung, or garroted him, nor had I used any of the other methods humans have devised for killing each other. I simply scared him to death, surprised him into heart failure. Perfect. It was perfect.
It was now near six-thirty A.M. From the direction of town, I heard the whine of Mannville’s ambulance. I listened carefully. Gradually it increased in pitch and volume as it drew nearer, and then abruptly changed pitch as it sped past the foot of Mann Road on its way up the hill. Don’t bother hurrying, I thought. The doctors can’t repair his heart now.
This meant that poor Annie had woken up and found him. What would she think? Would she wonder what had scared him? Would she be scared herself, or would she fall on her knees, carefully avoiding the puddle of piss that was her father’s last gift to the world, and thank God for delivering her? Would she ask herself whether he had forced himself on her one last time before his sudden departure, or would she somehow know that he hadn’t?
Not that it could possibly matter, I thought. There was no way for me to know how many times it had already happened; but once was enough. Annie would never quite be Annie again.
9
My Sixteenth Birthday; I Am Discovered, and Elsie Moves On; Mr. Simpson’s Funeral; Grandpa Gets Better
It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that I heard from Annie. Nobody had reported the death of Mr. Simpson to me yet, and I was still playing dumb, but my jaw ached from grinding my teeth all night, and there were bags under my eyes—the suspense was already beginning to tell on me. And I’d had a new nightmare the night before. It was a vague and dark one, full of shadowy, reproachful figures, and when I awoke I remembered nothing except the old feeling I’d had when I was young and the house was full of ghosts. It was the fear of death, and the despair that comes with it.
I went to work at Gruber’s late in the morning. Mr. Gruber was oblivious to any changes in me, as he was oblivious to everything that didn’t involve football or his grocery. The Buffalo Bills had been victorious the night before, and that was foremost in his mind; all he could talk about was Jim Kelly, the quarterback. Mrs. Gruber, however, darted sharp glances at me from half-lidded eyes as she totted up sums in her big black book. I knew I was behaving strangely, perhaps even guiltily. But there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. My actions felt beyond my control. Several cans of beans slipped out of my hands and dropped to the floor, and instead of picking them up I watched helplessly as they rolled under the counter, where they disappeared. Mrs. Gruber threw down the ledger in which she was writing and said sharply, “Come with me.”
I followed her into the back of the store, my heart cold and shivering.
When we reached the rear exit, she said to me, “You’re young.”
“Ma’am?”
“Too young. For some things, anyway.”
I said nothing. Too young to have killed someone? How did she know?
“From now on,” she said, “you’re not to deliver any more groceries to Miss Elsie Orfenbacher.”
Jesus. So that was it. I’d forgotten all about Elsie. In fact, today was the day I was supposed to go to her place. For a “lesson,” as we called it.
“You can’t help the way you feel,” she went on, her tone softenin
g. “You’re a young man, and soon you’ll be old enough to do whatever you want. But when you’re in this store, we’re responsible for you. You’re a minor, after all. And it’s obvious you’re upset about something. You’re not yourself today, Billy. You haven’t been for some time.”
I still said nothing.
“It’s illegal, Billy,” she said. “She could be arrested for it. We could get in trouble for it too. You’re too young even to be working here, really. Did you ever think of that?”
Numbly, too ashamed to look at her, yet relieved that our topic of conversation was merely sex instead of murder, I shook my head. The idea that I could get the Grubers in trouble with the law had never occurred to me.
“You don’t have to worry about me telling anyone,” said Mrs. Gruber. “And I’ve already called her and told her to buy her groceries somewhere else, so you don’t have to worry about telling her either.”
“You did?”
“Yes, I did.” Her lips were set in a firm and self-righteous line, thin and dark like the rest of the lines in her face. The Grubers were getting old, I thought. In fact, they were old. “There are some things that are none of my business and some things that I can’t keep my mouth shut about. This is one of the things I can’t just sit back and watch happen. We’re responsible for you while you’re here. And that will be the end of that. Clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re not in love with her, I hope?”
I thought about that. I’d never given any consideration to whether or not I loved Elsie. Nor had it ever come up in our limited conversations, which usually consisted of her complaining about everything and everyone in the world, and me nodding my head.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I guess I’m not.”
Eddie's Bastard Page 23
