Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  I participated in more of these searches than anybody else, but that was mostly for appearance’s sake. I knew the whole business was useless, a farce. Annie, wherever she might be, wasn’t going to be found. No evidence that she’d been kidnapped or murdered or that anything at all criminal had happened to her was discovered. In fact, there was nothing to suggest anything other than that she’d simply had enough of Mannville and the people in it, and the memories it would hold for her, and decided to seek her fortune elsewhere.

  I was questioned once officially by Madison and perhaps two hundred times unofficially by everyone else. During these interviews I did my best to appear worried, perhaps even a bit remorseful, as if I was searching my conscience for anything I might have done to make her leave. But this was an act, and everyone else was acting the same way. I knew Annie was fine. I even thought I knew where she was, although I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone. And I had no intention of showing the note she’d left me either. I ate it. Right there, standing next to the mailbox.

  There was a funeral for Mr. Simpson, which was, to my surprise, very well attended. It seemed that everyone, not just Madison, found his death suspicious. Word had gotten out that he’d been found naked, and in his daughter’s bedroom, no less. These circumstances, combined with Annie’s disappearance, made for the biggest gossip mine in Mannville since the Fiasco of the Ostriches, and nobody wanted to miss out on the closing ceremonies of his scandalous life in case something dramatic would be revealed at the very last moment. Mannville was suddenly populated with amateur detectives. People shared theories, pieced together clues, and jumped to conclusions so far off base they were just distant spots on the horizon of credulity. One version had it that Mr. Simpson had surprised aliens in the act of abducting his daughter, and they had zapped him with their death-rays. The black-clad figure spotted in the woods—which was me, of course—was one of them. This theory was given credence by the report of a UFO sighting in Erie, an hour and a half to the west, the night before Simpson was found.

  Grandpa and I went to the funeral in the old Galaxie. I’d roused him from his stupor enough to make him understand that Jack Simpson was dead; the news, amazingly, seemed to sober him up. He sat in the rocking chair, fully aware and awake, his chin in his hand and a thoughtful look on his face.

  “How’d you say he died?” he asked me. He formed the words slowly, strenuously.

  “Heart attack.”

  “Huh.”

  That was the longest conversation we’d had in years, or so it seemed.

  Grandpa wore the same clothes to Jack Simpson’s funeral that he’d worn to his mother’s funeral when he was a young man, or so he claimed. Whiskey kept him thin, he said, by eating up his insides, which was why he was still able to fit into the old suit. But he drank no whiskey that morning as we were getting ready to go. The suit was patched and worn, over forty years old, and Grandpa, completely sober for the first time in years, stood stiffly at attention in the churchyard as if he were wearing a military uniform of embroidered gold, ignoring the stares we received.

  And boy, did people stare. They stared because Grandpa and I were never seen together in public. They were used to seeing me alone, of course, carrying groceries around under my arm—or sometimes on the cursed Gruber Grocery bicycle. But Grandpa himself had hardly left the house in at least five or six years. There were some older folks looking at him out of the corner of their eyes, with expressions that said, “Oh, yeah,” or “Jesus, he’s still alive?” and I could tell they’d forgotten all about him.

  “Why are you going?” I asked him, as we were getting ready. “I thought you hated him.”

  “I don’t hate anybody,” Grandpa explained. “I just…well, it’s no good speaking ill of the dead. There’s…there’s an obligation.”

  His awareness of the world around him was beginning to return. I had no explanation for it, except maybe that the death of his enemy had reminded him that he was still alive, that he’d won some kind of contest. I was immensely relieved.

  “What do you mean, an obligation?”

  Instead of replying, Grandpa began muttering to himself. I knew better than to press him for details. I was just glad he was alive. I surprised him by throwing my arms around his brittle old frame and grabbing him tight. He stiffened, putting one hand on my shoulder instinctively as if to fend off an attack. But after a moment he appeared to remember that I was his grandson, and he put his arm around my neck and clenched me to him.

  “Strong as an ox,” he’d said. “Like your dad.”

  It seemed that everyone had forgotten about Frederic, too. He wasn’t present at the funeral—not that I had expected him to be. But I wondered if anyone had noticed him lying there in the back room as they were hauling away the carcass of his father. I hoped he wasn’t still there, gamely breathing away and waiting for someone to come back for him. There were, in fact, no Simpson family members at the funeral at all. Annie had disappeared, Frederic was simply Frederic, and Annie’s mysterious sisters, whom I’d never even met, had stolen away over the years until it was just the three of them left: a ruined Annie, her demonic father, and her vegetative brother, a twisted and pathological trinity.

  Grandpa and I stood together near the outer fringe of the gathering listening to the preacher intone his ritual speeches over the coffin that contained the last of Jack Simpson. Nothing exciting happened, as folks seemed to have hoped—no sudden appearance of Annie, no thunderbolts from the sky, no alien spacecraft. When it was over and he was buried, we got back in the Galaxie, and Grandpa said, as I was pulling out of the church parking lot, “Jack Simpson drank himself to death, didn’t he?”

  I shuddered as I remembered his zipperlike scar. “Yeah,” I said. “More or less.”

  “I’m headed the same way.”

  I was startled to hear this. Grandpa rarely, if ever, indulged in reflections of this type. He knew he drank; I knew he drank; everyone knew it, and that was the way it was. The end result of a life of hard drinking was well known to everyone. You ended up like Jack Simpson, killed by your own abused heart. But this was the first time I’d ever heard him admit it.

  “Yes you are, I guess,” I said.

  We drove in silence.

  “How well did you know Jack Simpson?” I asked him after a while. “I mean, were you and he ever friends?”

  Grandpa snorted. “No.”

  “Then what was all that stuff about an obligation?”

  Grandpa thought. “We were never friends, but we knew each other,” he said finally. “He was younger than me by some years, but not many. Below me in school. Our boys grew up together. Eddie and Frederic. I told you that.”

  “Yeah. I remember.”

  “Freddie used to stay over at our place all the time. When things got rough. Simpson used to beat on him and the girls when he got drunk. Up to the time he stole that car, he used to come over whenever he felt like it. Didn’t even need to knock. He knew he was always welcome. He even had his own room, right next to Eddie’s. But after he got in that trouble with the police, and his old man knocked him real good for that, he ran off. Joined the Army. Then he got hurt.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “Land mine, they said.”

  “They said?”

  “Or maybe a grenade. I don’t remember which. Simpson was always mean,” said Grandpa, returning to the subject of his nemesis. “He used to torture younger boys. I remember fighting him a few times myself. Never liked him. Got into a lot of trouble in high school. That family was trouble even then. Have been since forever. He took to drinking early too.”

  There was a pause.

  “Like me,” he added.

  After another lengthy moment he said, “When you come right down to it, boy, there never has been a hell of a lot of difference between Jack Simpson and myself. I never knocked my kid around, but that’s about it. We’re both useless old drunks.”

  “Don’t say that. There’s
nothing the same about you two.”

  “I know what I’m talking about. I’ve got hindsight, and you don’t. You think it’s too late for me to quit?”

  “Do I think…? No. Not yet.”

  “It might be.”

  “You could do it, if you wanted to.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He was staring out the window.

  “All right, then. When we get home I want you to clean out the house.”

  “What?”

  “Clean it. Top to bottom. Throw out every bottle you can find.”

  “Throw out the bottles?”

  “I’m quitting,” he said. “I’m going to check myself into the hospital for a while. When I come back I don’t want to find any temptations lying around. Will you do it for me?”

  “I…you’re serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious.” And to tell the truth, there was a determination in his voice that I’d never heard before.

  “Yeah. Yes, I’ll do it. Of course I will.”

  “Seeing Jack Simpson go to his reward without ever having made amends got me to thinking. I have some things to set right before I die. And I might not be living that much longer. I’m pickled,” he said, “from the inside out. Drying out might kill me, but it would be better than living like I have been. And I owe you an apology.”

  I was speechless. My eyes were growing wet.

  “I’ve hardly been any kind of father to you at all,” said Grandpa, tears of regret welling up in his own eyes. “I’ve been drunk for forty years. I saw the way folks were looking at me back there.”

  “Who cares how they were looking at you? You always said that didn’t matter.”

  “I care!” Grandpa put his fist to his lips. He was getting choked up. After a moment he regained control of himself. “It does matter. And I’m sick of it. I’m tired of living like a boogieman. Everyone thinks I’m a nut.”

  “No they don’t,” I said. “They just think you’re eccentric.”

  Grandpa sighed.

  “They’re half-right,” he said. “But listen. Something weird happened while we were in the churchyard.”

  “What was it?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I left my body.”

  “What?”

  “I just flew out of myself,” he said. “I could see myself standing there, and you next to me—God, you’re getting tall—and for the first time in I don’t know how long, I could see myself as others see me. And it wasn’t pretty,” he finished lamely, his fist dropping back in his lap. “My nose is all red and my eyes are permanently swollen. I look like what I am. A drunk. And I could hear people’s thoughts.”

  “Their thoughts?”

  “About me. Not everything, just me. And they were thinking, ‘That old drunk is still alive?’”

  I didn’t tell him I had read the same thoughts in their minds. I was getting spooked enough as it was.

  “Well, yes I am!” he roared, smacking the dashboard. “I’m a long way from dead yet, goddamn it! And I’ve wasted enough years sitting around feeling sorry for myself. It’s time for that to stop. So clean it out, boy. Clean out the damn house. That’s a polite order. I’d do it myself, but I don’t think I’m strong enough. If I picked up a bottle I wouldn’t put it down.”

  “All right,” I said, and with that simple acknowledgment, the redemption of Thomas Mann Junior had its beginning.

  He sat in his rocking chair for the rest of the day. I called the hospital and told them we would be coming in tomorrow.

  “They’re getting a room ready for you,” I said. “You want me to start cleaning out the bottles now?”

  “Don’t leave me alone in here,” he said.

  So I sat next to him on the couch and watched him reach for where his glass would be about thirty times. After an hour he held up his hand.

  “Look at this,” he said. It was shaking. “I’m as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I better have a drink.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Just one, Billy. Just to keep me from shaking.”

  “It won’t be just one,” I said.

  “A little one.”

  “No.”

  “All right, damn it,” he sighed. “Will you make me something to eat?”

  “Sure,” I said. I went into the kitchen and got out all the makings of a fried baloney sandwich feast. When I stuck my head through the doorway to check on him, I saw him stowing a small bottle underneath the couch cushions and wiping his lips.

  “Hey!” I said.

  He started. I went to the couch and retrieved the bottle. It was a silver hip flask.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Look,” he said, holding up his hand again. It was perfectly still.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “You have to get over these shakes the hard way.”

  “Don’t throw it away,” he said guiltily. “It’s an heirloom.”

  I poured the whiskey down the sink and rinsed out the hip flask. After that I refused to leave him alone in the room. We ate with our plates balanced on our knees, with me staring at him and him looking at the floor. After we had eaten and some more time had passed, he began to shake again, but he didn’t ask me for another drink.

  We went to sleep early. I searched his bedroom before leaving him to sleep for the night. I found a bottle in the closet and another one under the bed. Before I went into my room, I made sure his bedroom door was open, as well as mine, so I could hear him. I lay with one ear cocked to listen for the sounds of rustling sheets or the unscrewing of a bottle cap. The house was still lousy with whiskey—I hadn’t wanted to leave him alone long enough to start throwing away all the bottles he must have had stashed here and there. I looked up at the ceiling and thought disjointed thoughts.

  I was awakened sometime after midnight by shouting. Alarmed, thinking maybe someone was breaking into the house, I raced to his bedroom and flicked on the light. I found him sitting in his underwear in the corner, rubbing frantically at his arms.

  “Grandpa!” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Jesus!” he shouted. “Get ’em off me!”

  I looked; there was nothing on him. But he continued to brush at himself in a panic.

  “There’s nothing there,” I said.

  “Snakes!” he shouted. “This fucking room is full of snakes!”

  What the hell was this now? I wondered. “There’s no snakes in here, Grandpa,” I said. I checked under the bed, just to be sure. There was nothing there except a few dust bunnies. But Grandpa continued to scream. Large round tears, the tears of a small boy, began to roll down his face.

  “Look,” I said. I grabbed his hands. “Look at me. Look at my hands.”

  “Don’t,” he sobbed. “They’re biting snakes.”

  “See my hands? There’s no snakes on them, are there?”

  “Yes there are, yes there are!”

  “There’s no snakes in here,” I said. I was beginning to get scared. I sat down next to him and put one arm around his shoulders. I drew my feet up under me—just in case there were snakes after all. But of course there weren’t. And my touch seemed to calm him; after a moment he relaxed, though he continued to sob in deep, hiccuping gasps.

  “Oh, fucking snakes,” he said. “Oh, I’m seeing snakes.”

  “They can come on me,” I said. I pulled him tight. “I’m not afraid of snakes. Let them come on me. They won’t bother you any more.”

  Grandpa began muttering to himself. He rocked back and forth, back and forth.

  There was a phone in his room. I picked it up—mercifully, the phone bill had been paid. I heard a dial tone. I dialed Connor’s number and listened to it ring. He picked it up after the third one.

  “Hello, this is the doctor,” he said. His voice was calm and perfectly alert, though I knew full well that five seconds earlier he’d been sound asleep.

  “This is Billy Mann,” I said. “Grand
pa decided to go sober today and now he’s seeing snakes. Can you come over?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Billy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said, and he hung up.

  I left Grandpa sitting against the wall and went downstairs to open the front door. Then I went back upstairs to Grandpa’s room. He hadn’t moved. Several minutes later I heard the whirring of Connor’s Beetle pulling into the driveway. He came in the front door and headed directly up the stairs. He was still in his pajamas, and he was carrying his black leather bag.

  “Howdy there, Tom,” he said, setting his bag on the floor. “Hi, Billy.”

  “Snakes,” said Grandpa.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while, Tom,” said Connor, as calmly as if they’d bumped into each other at the grocery store.

  “Yeah.”

  “Billy says you laid off the hooch.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Grandpa. He was rubbing his hands over his eyes, as if trying to wake up.

  “Here’s a little something to help you sleep,” said Connor. He handed me a pill. I went into the bathroom and got a glass of water. When I came back into the room with it, Grandpa was in bed again, the covers pulled up to his chin.

  “Here you go,” I said. Grandpa swallowed the pill with a sip of water and laid his head back down on the pillow.

  “You’ll sleep now,” said Connor.

  “I’ll sleep now,” Grandpa echoed, his voice already fading.

  “It’s the hospital tomorrow for you,” said Connor.

  “We already called,” I said.

  “Good. I can check in on you there, if you want.”

  Grandpa nodded.

  Connor motioned to me and we headed out of the room. We were nearly through the door when I heard Grandpa’s voice.

  “Connor,” he said.

  Connor turned.

  “Yes, Tom?”

  “That wasn’t me that screamed at you that day,” he said. I knew he was talking about the fight they’d had when I was still small, before I’d gone to school. His voice was barely a whisper. “It was the booze.”

  “I knew that all along, Tom,” said Connor.