Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  “You’re my best friend, Connor. I’m sorry.”

  “I knew that too, you miserable old son of a bitch,” Connor said.

  “All right, then,” said Grandpa. “Just so you know.” He fell asleep.

  Connor shook my hand at the backdoor and got into his Beetle. At another hour, perhaps, we would have talked, but it was so late, the events that had just taken place seemed already to be cast in a surreal, distant past. I listened to him drive down the road and then went back to bed.

  I may have slept for an hour or two. I was awakened by the sound of a timid knock at my door. When I opened it, Grandpa was standing there in his funeral suit, a small suitcase on the floor next to him. He refused to look me in the eye.

  “Will you take me to the hospital now?” he asked.

  I wanted to ask him how he felt, but something told me I should never mention the events of the previous night to him. Instead, I dressed and drove him to Mannville General Hospital, where I waited while he checked himself in. It was the second time in my life I’d left him there. This time, though, there was no Elsa Wheeler from the county waiting to haul me off to the Shumachers. Grandpa and I shook hands formally at the admissions desk.

  “I’ll come see you tomorrow,” I said.

  “No visitors,” said the nurse.

  “Can he call me?” asked Grandpa. He was already looking jumpy; it was his second day without a drink, and he was nervously scanning the walls. More snakes? I wondered. I debated whether I should tell the nurse about last night.

  “No phone calls tonight,” said the nurse.

  “This is my grandfather,” I said. “I’m going to call him when I feel like it.”

  “Young man, we have rules here,” said the nurse. “Particularly in this kind of situation.” She nodded at Grandpa when she said that. “So if you can’t abide by them, then you’ll have to go somewhere else.”

  “Forget about it,” said Grandpa. “Call me tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  “You’ll be alone on your birthday.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. I’d forgotten about that. I would be turning sixteen soon. And he would be turning sixty-four. “So will you.”

  “I’m too old to give a shit about birthdays anymore.”

  “We don’t allow profanity in this hospital,” said the nurse.

  “I hope someday you can forgive me for all this,” said Grandpa.

  “Knock it off,” I said.

  “All right, then.”

  We hugged.

  I turned and walked out of the lobby to the waiting Galaxie in the parking lot. Then I turned around and went back into the lobby. As I’d hoped, Grandpa was gone, and the nurse was sitting alone at the desk.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I wanted to tell you about something.”

  She looked at me expectantly, her eyebrows arched, a pencil poised as if she was going to write down every word I said. I wanted to tell her about the snakes. I didn’t know anything about delirium tremens yet, that seeing snakes or worms or spiders is common in those who quit drinking after years of heavy alcohol abuse. I was afraid it was one more manifestation of the Mann curse, like the nightmare of Mary Rory. But there was something in her manner, her supercilious attitude, that struck a chord of pride in me. Mann pride. I could not admit a weakness to this woman. I would not add to the gossip about our family. And I didn’t like the way she’d spoken to Grandpa. So instead I said, “My great-great-grandfather built this hospital. We used to own this whole damn town and everything around it for a ten-mile radius. So I’ll thank you to remember that when you’re talking to my grandfather.”

  The nurse opened her mouth and then snapped it shut. I turned and walked out.

  When I got home I made a thorough search of the house, from attic to basement, and collected nearly seventy whiskey bottles. Most of them were empty—Grandpa never threw anything away—but there were a few full ones. I took them in boxes out to the yard and threw them, one by one, into the old brick oven next to the carriage house. They each exploded with a satisfying pop, the full ones sending lovely arcs of amber poison through the air. When I was finished, I built a bonfire of paper and wood on top of the shattered glass, soaked it with gasoline, and set the whole mess on fire. It burned for the rest of the day, great black clouds of smoke roiling out into the Mannville sky. I sat in the yard in a lawn chair and contemplated the blaze, and the snakes, and the old farmhouse, and for the thousandth time in my life thought about what it was like to be part of the clan called Mann. There was this new thing with us now, these snakes, this disease. I wondered if heroes were supposed to get diseases. And I wondered what it would be like to live alone.

  But I found, not entirely to my surprise, that I liked living alone. It was easier to write when I knew the house was empty. I settled down to some good serious work. My training in the Orfenbacher method was over, but the second round of my training, my training as a writer, had begun.

  I’d learned, in the course of my reading, that all the great writers had routines. They woke up at certain times and wrote every day for a prescribed amount of hours. They either made sure they were drunk or that they’d had nothing to drink; that they’d eaten or had empty stomachs; that there was plenty of noise or that there wasn’t a sound. The formula went on and on, diverging in endless confusing paths that seemed to lead nowhere. I’d been researching methods in the hope of finding one that would suit me. I quickly realized, however, that what worked for others wouldn’t work for me, and that I would have to figure it out for myself.

  So I awoke to my alarm clock at five each morning. I made a pot of coffee and opened a fresh pack of cigarettes, carried it all upstairs to my desk, and rolled a new sheet of paper into my typewriter. There I sat and stared out the window for several minutes, smoking and sipping coffee. When a word came to me I typed it out. The words came in no particular order and didn’t seem to have anything to do with each other. The first one was the hardest. The second one was usually connected somehow to the first, but might belong before it instead of after, and the third would fit in somewhere. After I had twenty or so words like this, spaced out like distant cousins, I would set about figuring out how they were related. They were usually nouns. If I took each noun to symbolize a separate event in a story—a story that didn’t exist yet—then I would have enough material to make something up. I moved the nouns around and joined them with text in between, sometimes several pages. It was a sloppy way of doing it, but it was all I could think of at first, and it’s probably due to this half-assed noun formula that most of my early stories after “Willie Mann and the Rory Fortune” made absolutely no sense. But I didn’t know that at the time. I was pleased that I was writing at all, even though it still hurt and I still hated it, in the way that athletes hate training—not a true hate, but a sort of grudging acceptance that it is necessary. Soon I was thinking of moving on to verbs.

  In the weeks that Grandpa was drying out in the hospital, I wrote fifteen stories. My solitude, instead of stifling me as I had feared, seemed to enhance my creativity. And I was waiting for news about my first story, “Willie Mann and the Rory Fortune.” I’d sent it to a magazine that Doctor Connor helped me pick out. He said that a fast response time was good, so when only a month passed and I found a letter from the magazine in the mailbox, my heart leaped with joy. Inside was a form letter. “Dear contributor,” it said, “thank you for your interest in our magazine, but…”

  A rejection letter. I took it upstairs and stuck it in one of my notebooks. It would not be my last, I knew.

  Also, I bought a motorcycle. It was a 1977 Kawasaki KZ1000, an old cop bike I’d picked out of the newspaper one day. “Needs work,” the ad had confided, but that was right up my alley—along with my father’s tendency to throw himself off roofs and do stunts in midair, I’d inherited Grandpa’s mechanical facility. I kept the bike in the garage. After I was done writing for the day—at least four hours every morning, I�
��d promised myself—I went out to the garage and worked on it. Grandpa assisted me over the phone in our nightly conversations. The snakes, he said, had stopped crawling on him, his hands no longer shook, and he’d actually made a friend there.

  “I haven’t had a friend in decades,” he said. “Except for Connor.”

  I was happy for him, but I had other things on my mind. “Where do I get gaskets for these damn carburetors?” I asked. “The old ones are all cracked.”

  “Ask George. He’ll have ’em. You know, we watch the news together every night.”

  “Who? You and George?”

  “No, my friend.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “It’s a she,” he said. “Her name is Mildred.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  “I’m too old for that nonsense,” he scoffed. “Boy, she’s a smart one, though. She’s got something to say about everything. You’d like her.”

  “How old is she?”

  “At my age, boy, you don’t ask questions like that. You’re just grateful for what you can get. What did you do on your birthday?”

  “I forgot about it,” I said. My sixteenth birthday had come and gone without so much as a nod of recognition from me. “I think I just worked on my bike.”

  “I’ll bring you a present when I come home.”

  “I can’t figure out how to straighten the handlebars,” I complained.

  “I’ll show you when I get back.”

  “That can be my present, then. When are you coming home?”

  “In ten days.”

  “I cleaned out the house.”

  “Good job. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  What I meant, of course, was not “Don’t mention it.” What I meant was a million other things—such as What took you so long to do this? What would our lives be like if you’d quit sooner? What would they be like if you’d never started? But I didn’t know how to say any of those things to him, and I was still too young to understand the implications of the spiritual rebirth of my grandfather. I focused on small things, took baby steps. I just wanted him home with me, so he could help straighten out the handlebars.

  But I was able to straighten the handlebars by myself, and within a week the bike was running smoothly. My life was changed irrevocably and forever. I soared along the back roads of Erie County, breathlessly covering hundreds of miles, helmetless and limited only by how long I could stand to ride. Riding a bike is physically punishing; sometimes you have to hang on for dear life, clinging to the machine by your fingertips and toes. My chest stung with the impact of a thousand hapless insects, my eyes watered permanently from the wind, my hands became cramped in the shape of the handgrips. But I loved it. Little by little, I was making up for all the things I’d never seen and all the places I’d never been. I sped through tiny country towns so far off the main roads that Time seemed not to have bothered with them—little one-horse towns even smaller than Mannville, with maybe a gas station and a general store, and every third vehicle on the road an Amish buggy. It was nearing the end of summer, and evenings were the best time for cruising, with their soft warmth and gentle smells.

  The odors of the country are myriad and unique: manure, fresh-cut hay, fields of burning cornstalks, the sweat of horses. I understood then why dogs like to ride in cars with their heads lolling out the window. Fully half the mysteries of the world are encoded in smells, smells that are hidden from those who ride, sheltered, in cars. I whirred along tiny country lanes, surprising men loading hay into giant wagons, zipping by the Amish buggies as though they were standing still. The taste for freedom began to expand in me like a slowly inflating balloon. I knew the time for leaving Mannville would be coming soon. It was as inevitable as the approaching winter.

  Grandpa came home from the hospital in early September, nearly five weeks after he’d gone in. He’d put on weight, and his eyes were alert and clear. After cleansing the house of any traces of alcohol, I’d gone through it again with all the implements of purification: warm soapy water, bleach, oil soap, broom, mop, rags, lemon-scented furniture polish. It had taken me nearly two weeks to accomplish, but the house gleamed from the inside out. He stepped inside and inhaled.

  “The old days are over,” he said. I knew he was talking about his drinking days, the days when the house was falling into disrepair and decay, the days when he ignored me in favor of his bottle and his memories. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. Tears came to his eyes.

  “I have so much to tell you,” he said, in a broken voice, “that I don’t know where to start.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” I said, embarrassed.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, wiping his eyes. “If drying out didn’t kill me, nothing will.”

  Grandpa was not alone; he’d brought Mildred with him. She was a tiny, pretty woman with sharp gray eyes and a birdy way of talking that belied her tremendous energy. She nodded in approval as she stepped inside our farmhouse for the first time. “It’s clean,” she said, “and coming from me, that’s a compliment.”

  “It’s not always like this,” I said.

  Mildred smiled. “It will be from now on,” she said, and that was how I knew she’d come to stay.

  Mildred had raised seven children over the course of almost thirty years, Grandpa told me later, and her husband had beaten her regularly all the way through it. She’d stayed first for the kids, and later because she’d grown attached to drinking her way through her days, which was easier than leaving. I peered closely at her when I thought she wasn’t looking. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would drink at all, and I couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to hit her—she was too little. But alcohol was insidious; it didn’t choose its victims on the basis of appearance. I liked her immediately.

  “Mildred’s going to live with us,” Grandpa said to me late that evening. “That is, if it’s all right with you. It’s as much your house as mine now. You’re old enough to have a say in things now.”

  “Are you guys getting married?”

  Grandpa snorted. “No,” he said. “We know better than that.”

  “You mean you’re going to shack up?” I was only teasing him, but his face grew red and he looked down at his hands.

  “I didn’t know you were so moral,” he mumbled.

  “I was only kidding,” I said, remembering my adventures with Elsie Orfenbacher, and my so-called murder of Jack Simpson. I had no room to preach to anyone about morality. “I think it’s great. Really. I like her.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “We’re taking it slow,” he said, and he was so relieved he wrapped his arms around me and squeezed.

  I didn’t understand what he meant by “taking it slow” until I helped Mildred move her few possessions into a bedroom separate from Grandpa’s. It was on the second floor, and it had last been occupied around the turn of the century by one of Grandpa’s ancient aunts. There would be no hanky-panky between Grandpa and Mildred, I gathered, at least not yet. Privately I wondered if they were too old for that sort of thing. They seemed to enjoy spending their evenings simply sitting together in the living room and reading aloud to each other, occasionally helping the other stifle the sudden urge for a drink. Grandpa had been in the hospital nearly three times as long as was normally necessary, partly because he had suffered serious liver damage. His body was accustoming itself to not drinking, but his mind was still restless. Sitting in the living room had always been one of his favorite pastimes, except he’d always had a glass of whiskey on his knee.

  “Mildred helps me forget about all that,” he said, “and I do the same for her. We keep each other’s minds occupied.”

  Mildred herself told me she was grateful that I hadn’t objected to her moving in with us. “Seven children I have,” she said to me, “and not one of them has written or called in almost ten years. Not that I blame them, you understand. They hated their father, an
d I didn’t lift a finger to change anything. I couldn’t, you see. And my husband is dead now. So I would have been all alone, all alone in the world, if I hadn’t met your grandad.” Her explanation of her previous life went no further, but I thought I understood. I knew something about cruel fathers. I found myself tempted to tell her that I’d rid the world of another cruel father, one who used to live up the hill and who had done things even Mildred’s husband would probably have found unspeakable. But I managed to hold my tongue, even though I think Mildred would have approved.

  Mildred and Grandpa seemed to take to the sober life as though it had secretly been what they’d wanted all along. Mildred gravitated naturally to the kitchen, which soon became a bustling private enterprise that churned out cakes, cookies, roasts, and stews on a grand scale. She cooked enough food to supply a small restaurant. Grandpa and I both began to put on weight, and I gave silent thanks that I had eaten my last fried baloney sandwich. Grandpa began to take up his old hobby of tinkering with machines, and he spent most of his time in the garage, repairing everything he could get his hands on. Soon the house began to look as good on the outside as it did on the inside: shutters were painted, electrical fixtures were replaced, the yard was mowed. He pruned the trees and plowed up a garden.

  “This is pretty damn near the spot where everything happened,” he told me one day, pointing to his little spaded-up patch of earth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The treasure,” Grandpa said. “This is where Willie found it.”

  I stared at the spot, awestruck. Somehow the notion that the events of one hundred and twenty years ago had a physical location had never occurred to me. I was once again overwhelmed by the weight of our history. It thrilled through me like a bolt of lightning.

  “We ought to put up a monument, or something,” I said.

  “No,” said Grandpa, his voice dark and sad. “It wasn’t all good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Grandpa had read my story, and found it amazingly accurate, considering how I had come by my information. “You hinted at it yourself in your story,” he said now. “Don’t you remember?”