Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  “No,” I said.

  “Money is as much a curse as a blessing,” Grandpa said. “Crazy things started to happen to the family after they became rich.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Greed,” he said. “Greed moved in and decency moved out.”

  “What happened?”

  Grandpa sighed. “I don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “Those things were still going on when I was little.”

  “You mean people were jealous of each other?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Did they try to cheat each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “You remember Willie’s brothers? Andy and Poky Boy?”

  “Why did they call him Poky Boy?”

  “Because he was so slow. Poky means slow.”

  “What about them?”

  “Willie had told everyone in the family they were entitled to equal shares of the money, but only after he took his cut.”

  “So then he was the greedy one!”

  “No. He didn’t keep very much of it at all. He built the hospital, he built the farmhouse, he started up the farm. He didn’t spend anything on himself. Everything he did was for the future. For you,” he said, stabbing me in the chest with one finger, “except I fucked it up.”

  “You couldn’t help it,” I said loyally. In truth, since the money had never been mine, I didn’t miss it.

  “Well, God bless you for saying that, but you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Anyway. Willie’s brothers didn’t like what he was doing. They thought they should keep all the money among themselves. Divide it all up first, you see, and then spend it however they wanted to.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “That way, they would have more to blow on whatever they wanted. But Willie wouldn’t let them, because it was his money. So there was fighting.”

  “Fistfighting?”

  “Well, yes. Sometimes.”

  “You mean there was more than one fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “You ever read the Bible?”

  “Little bits of it.”

  “Remember Cain and Abel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Brothers.”

  “Yeah.” I was getting impatient.

  But Grandpa was not to be hurried. He leaned on his shovel as he spoke, pushing his fedora back on his head.

  “God punished Cain because he killed his own brother,” he said. “And the reason he killed him was selfishness. Jealousy.”

  “And?”

  “Well, Andy got drunk one night and started in on Willie. Pushing him around and such.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was mad at him for not giving them their share of the money right off. Willie wouldn’t fight back. He couldn’t anyway, because of his leg. And he always said he’d had enough of fighting to last him the rest of his life. So Andy just pushed him around, and Willie let him do it. He kept trying to leave, but Andy wouldn’t let him. They were alone in the house. It was this house, in fact. In our very own kitchen.”

  “What happened?”

  “Poky Boy came in in the middle of it. He asked what was going on. Willie wouldn’t say anything. He just kept trying to walk out the door to get away from Andy, and Andy kept grabbing him and shoving him against the wall. And Poky Boy didn’t like that. He was a softer, gentler kind of fellow, and even though he wanted the money too, he wouldn’t have hurt Willie to get it. So he hauled off and hit Andy to keep him off Willie.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. And Andy beat the shit out of him,” said Grandpa. “He beat him to death, right there in the kitchen.”

  “He killed him?”

  “Right there where Mildred is doing her cooking. Knocked his head against the stove. Didn’t kill him right away. He was laid up for three days in bed, unconscious, and they thought he might pull through, but he died one night. Wasn’t nothing they could do to save him. Medicine in those days wasn’t near what it is now.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Andy couldn’t take it,” Grandpa went on. “Nobody in the family would speak to him for the three days that his brother was laid up. Except Willie, of course, because Willie was that kind of guy. Andy begged Willie to forgive him, and Willie said he would. He sort of felt like it was all his own fault anyway, for finding the money in the first place. Then Andy told him that he couldn’t stand to live anymore. Willie said he understood, but that he ought to make a go of it anyway. Andy said he would try, but he didn’t mean it. And he hanged himself.”

  “Where?”

  “Second-floor bedroom, last one on the left at the south end of the hall.”

  “Jesus.” No wonder the house was full of ghosts, I thought.

  “Then things went downhill,” Grandpa went on. “Daddo died. Their mama died, mostly of a broken heart. Their father took to drinking hard, and it killed him off within a few years. That kind of thing is in the blood. Pretty soon Willie was the only one left in the house. He finally got married, just to keep himself from going crazy, and he had my father, and then my father died too young. Then I was born. Thank God,” he went on, “Willie died before he could see how bad things finally got, after I came back from the war. Sometimes I think the dead are the lucky ones. Anyway. That’s the story.”

  We stood in silence for several moments as I digested this new information and Grandpa reflected.

  “You still have those nightmares?” he asked finally.

  “No.”

  “That’s good,” he said, relieved. “Neither do I.”

  “Maybe it’s over,” I suggested.

  “Well, I should hope so.”

  “Me too.”

  “I want to read the diary,” I said.

  Grandpa sighed. “Fujimora promised me he’d come back with it,” he said. “He’s not late yet, either. We swore to each other.”

  “How will you know when it’s time to go there?”

  “If he dies first,” said Grandpa, “I’ll just know. Same way I know everything else I know without being told. Just like you. Same way we all had the same dream. He and I are connected, and so are you. But I don’t think I’ll be going there. I think it’ll be him who comes here.”

  “Not soon, I hope,” I said, alarmed.

  “No. Not soon.”

  Mildred came out on the back porch and rang the old iron dinner triangle. Grandpa and I started. We looked at each other and grinned.

  “It’s nice to have a woman around again,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never lived in the same house with one before.”

  “You’ll like it,” said Grandpa. “They make life worth living.”

  We went into the house together for lunch.

  10

  My Sixteenth Year Continued; Middlism; How I Decided to Conquer the World; I Have a New Dream

  From the diary:

  Universal signs, those clues to our destinies, are everywhere. It is up to us whether or not we follow them—but they are there nonetheless.

  And also:

  The extent of a man’s greatness is determined by his ability to follow his proper direction. We create our own destinies, and yet we do not. We forge a new path as we proceed, and yet the path already exists beforehand, though it is not always well marked. This is the paradox of life; and a paradox is not a riddle to be solved, but a place to dwell in, if only for a brief time.

  Early in the fall of my junior year, another strange wrinkle occurred in the fabric of my life. It announced itself as a letter in the mail. Insignificant details come back to me from that day: it was a Tuesday afternoon in mid-September, and the weather was clear and crisp. I was wearing jeans. None of this has anything to do with what happened later, of course, but the mind of a writer remembers best of all those things that seem to have nothing to do with anything, to have no connecti
on to the general flow of events: a snatch of conversation, the luffing of a flag in the wind, the smell of someone baking cookies in a kitchen three blocks away. But writers understand, perhaps better than anyone—or maybe just differently than everyone else—that there’s no such thing as an isolated incident, no such thing as an insignificant detail. Details are remembered precisely because they are important, because they can be pieced together later, added in tiny fragments one by one until they form a tapestry of considerable proportions. Life is composed of details as tiny as an unexpected letter in the mail on an autumn Tuesday. Such are the swatches from which my life is woven, the weather the warp, the letter the woof, that day the image that emerges.

  Getting a letter in itself wasn’t so unusual. I often received mail, mostly letters of regret from literary magazines. Every two or three weeks I gathered up my courage and my spare change, photocopied my short story about Willie on the rickety old Xerox machine at the Mannville Public Library, and mailed it off to various small presses around the country. Then I sat back and waited for the rejection letters to pour in. This process is known as submitting, which I’ve always believed is the perfect term for the whole business of trying to get published. I felt not that I was simply asking the editors of these magazines to look at my work, but that I was crawling before them in abject humiliation, my chest bared for the editorial knife, which they unfailingly plunged into my young and tender heart. “Dear Author,” their rejections usually went, “we thank you for the opportunity to look at your work, but unfortunately at this time…”

  Or something like that. The words varied slightly from letter to letter, but the overall message was “Not good enough.”

  The letters came trickling in one and two at a time throughout that fall. I was probably the only kid at Mannville High who raced home from school every day for news of whether or not he’d arrived in the literary world.

  But this particular letter was unusual for two reasons: it bore no return address, and it had a Canadian postmark. I was nonplussed. Although the Canadian border was barely an hour away by car, Canada seemed to me an utterly foreign land. I’d certainly never been there, and I hadn’t submitted my story to any Canadian literary magazines. It had never occurred to me that Canada had literary magazines. There was an electric instant in which I realized what a fool I was: of course Canada had literary magazines! There was an entire nation directly to the north of me, not just a nation bounded by political borders, but a whole other literary universe to explore! So far, I reflected, I’d met with no success whatsoever in America. But Canada! I thought. Maybe they want to publish me!

  But of course I hadn’t yet submitted my story to any Canadian presses. Who, then, could be writing to me from Quebec?

  Then I remembered: Annie.

  I don’t mean to imply that I suddenly remembered her. The fact was I hadn’t forgotten her, not for an instant. How could I? Each morning I rode my motorcycle to school along the same route she and I had walked every weekday since we were small children, and I pretended she was with me, sitting behind me on the bike with her arms wrapped around my waist and laughing in my ear. And without her, I was completely alone. Since my battle with David Weismueller I had no enemies, and in fact—according to the peculiar laws of male social order, which I didn’t yet completely understand—I’d earned a grudging respect from him and his athletic cohort. Nobody bothered me anymore. But I didn’t have any friends, either. The boys of Mannville were generally suspicious of me, with my longish hair and my artistic pretensions, and the girls bored me with their endless nattering about who was going out with whom and who was getting married after high school. Annie’d been the only person of my age in Mannville who understood me. Things had come full circle. My world was once again reduced to the farmhouse, and to Grandpa. True, now there was Mildred, and also my bike, but life in general seemed hollow without someone to share it with. I would have liked it if Annie had been there each day to open the mailbox with me. The blows of rejection would have been easier to bear, I believed, with her matter-of-fact outlook on things: “Buck up, old bean,” I could hear her say. “Those twerps wouldn’t know a literary genius if one came up and spit in their eye.”

  Nearly three months had passed since the morning I murdered or did not murder Annie’s father. Nobody, including me, had seen or heard from her in all that time. It was as if she’d simply vanished. I was even beginning to wonder if the wild tale of her abduction by aliens was possibly true. Madison had for a while kept a sort of unofficial watch on me, as the most likely candidate for her to contact if she was still alive. I knew very well that she was alive, but nobody else did, and though I felt vaguely guilty about leading everyone on, I knew it was better than telling them the truth. Nobody could know my suspicions about where Annie had gone. The success of her future sanity depended upon it.

  All these thoughts flashed through my mind in less than a second as Grandpa handed this new letter to me. I checked his face quickly for signs of curiosity or intrigue, but if he’d guessed who the letter was from, he wasn’t letting on.

  “Mail for you,” he said simply, and he went back out to the garage, where he was repairing a radio. He’d decided recently to branch out into electronics.

  I pinched the envelope between my fingers. It was weighty and thick, a long letter. I took it up to my room and opened it. A light odor wafted out—not perfume; perfume was never Annie’s style. It smelled foreign, somehow, like some kind of unusual cooking. Here and there the paper was translucent with grease stains. I began reading:

  Dear Billy,

  I presume you got my two-word note on that awful morning, that you knew it was from me, and that you understood it. That’s one thing about you I’ve always been able to count on—you understand everything about me, usually without having to be told. I’ve never had a connection like that with anybody else, and I probably never will again, which is why it hurts me so much to tell you that I’m not sure I can ever see you again. And that too is something I hope you’ll understand without me having to explain it, but I feel I owe you an explanation anyway.

  I’m very confused right now. At the same time, however, I feel free. That’s a first for me, and I want it to make you happy for my sake. I’m in Montreal. I told you once a long time ago that I dreamed of coming here, and I know you remember that. All those years of studying French on my own have paid off. I spoke like a typical American tourist when I first arrived here, but thanks to my hard work and a little luck, I’m picking up Quebecois pretty fast. Quebecois is a French dialect, and it’s probably ruining my chances of ever speaking the French they speak in France, but that’s all right. I like it here. I think I’m going to stay for a long, long time.

  I have so much to tell you, and it all seems jumbled in my head. I’m not like you. Words don’t come for me so easily. Thank God you already know so much about me, or this letter would be ten times harder to write. I guess there’s no reason to start at the very beginning of everything, because that would just be repeating everything you already know. So I’ll start where we left off, the last time we saw each other, or to be more exact, the last time you saw me.

  I know you were in my house that morning. The drug my father used made me look unconscious, but I was still able to take in vague sensations, although—as I told you that horrible day, the last time we talked—I wouldn’t remember anything very clearly afterward. I remember seeing you bend over me, looking at me to see whether or not I was dead. I could tell it was you even through the ski mask. And I knew you were hiding in the closet when he came back into the room, and I heard you jump out and scare him. I had been hoping you had a gun or something like that to kill him with. I didn’t want you to get in trouble, or to have a murder on your conscience for the rest of your life, but all the same I hoped you would kill him, even though I’d told you I didn’t, and you didn’t disappoint me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You really are my hero, Billy. You really did come to my rescue after all, jus
t like you always said you would. And let your mind be at ease about the death of my father, because I know you, and I know you must feel guilty. It was really his heart that killed him, not you. It was only a matter of time before it went out on him. You were just trying to protect me.

  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for allowing those things to happen to me. I hate it that I had to wait to be saved by someone else, but as long as that’s the way it happened, I’m glad it was you. I just didn’t know what to do. There didn’t seem to be anyone I could tell besides you. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but the shame I felt over what my father was doing to me was huge. I was afraid if I told someone, the whole thing would somehow backfire and be made to look like my fault. It’s irrational, I know. But I’ve been doing some reading, and they say that kind of feeling is pretty common among people like me.

  “People like me.” I hate it that I belong to a group of victims. I hate whiners, hate helplessness. I despise weakness and I always have.

  And despite the fact that you saved me from him, I’m not sure I can ever forgive you for having sneaked into my house and seen me at my most vulnerable. Does that make sense? I don’t care, really, if it does or not. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but that’s the way it is. You saw me with my nightdress pulled up. I don’t care about that, that you saw me naked. That’s not what I mean. It’s hard for me to explain. You knew what was going on because I told you, and I even felt shame over that.

  There was a time when I thought you and I would grow up and get married, or at least become lovers. But what I told you that night in the car still goes. I don’t think I can ever physically love a man, ever. The very idea of it repulses me. That’s partly what I’m trying to tell you in this letter, to silence any doubts you might have about our future and make sure everything is clear. I love you deeply, truly, wonderfully, permanently, but we will never be lovers like you wanted to be that night. It’s not because of a lack of feeling for you. It’s not even that I don’t find you desirable. Call it association. It’s not you that disgusts me—it’s me, my own body. I don’t want anyone to touch it ever again. I hope you can understand that. You’re a normal healthy male but not so testosterone-ridden that you can’t understand what it feels like to be vulnerable, and not so egotistical that you think you can talk me out of it. If you were to see me again—and that’s a big if—I want to make absolutely sure you understand this, so that there’s nomistake, no confusion, and no hurt feelings.