Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  I called the police only after I had managed to pack a bag and was sure I could get out of the house before they arrived. I would have just left him there to rot, but I had my brother Frederic downstairs to think of. It would have been weeks, perhaps months, before anyone would have found out that I was gone and he was dead, and Frederic would have starved to death before that. Poor Frederic; I’ve never known him. He was hurt before I was even born, and he’s been like that now longer than he was healthy. Maybe I should have left him to die after all. He would have been better off. It’s been twenty-five years since he’s made a sound or moved, and it makes no sense to keep him alive, but my father would never hear of pulling the plug on him. I don’t know why he insisted on keeping him alive in that kind of condition. It was pure torture. No, I do know why. It was because he was his only son, and I guess he didn’t want to let go of that. My father believed girls were worthless. He must have told me a thousand times how disappointed he was when I was born. I hope wherever Frederic is now they’re taking better care of him, and that they realize he’s never going to get any better and they might as well end it for him. There’s no point in keeping him in misery any longer. I am convinced he can hear and see and understand everything that happens around him but that he can’t break out of himself. He must be insane by now. He must pray for death constantly. I hope it comes for him soon, and quickly. My father used to say he was the only one of us that was ever any good.

  After I left the house, I disguised myself as best as I could and got on the main road. It was too risky for me to go into town and take a bus, so I hitchhiked, and I almost gave up the whole plan right there. It was a mistake. I was picked up by an older man who seemed very interested in taking me home with him, and it was only by begging and pleading that I got him to drop me off in Springville. I had to threaten to call the police, but I hoped like hell I wouldn’t really have to because they would have hauled me back to Mannville. By then I was ready to kill every man I saw. I got a ticket to Montreal in the Springville bus station. While I was waiting in the depot, three men tried to hit on me, one after the other. By the time the last one came along I was screaming at the top of my lungs. People must have thought I was crazy, and I guess I was by that time. One of them tried to put his arm around me and I elbowed him in the stomach. The security guard looked up from his newspaper for perhaps a second, and then ignored me. It’s a different world for women, Billy. Although I haven’t had a day like that since then—I don’t know what it was about that day, or the kind of energy I must have been sending out to attract those freaks—it could easily happen again, at any time, and I’m always on my guard.

  So here I am in Montreal. I’m old enough to work, but barely, and for a while it didn’t look like this was going to work out. I thought I would have to come back to Mannville. But I had managed to save up quite a bit of money. I’ve been saving for this move since I was little, you know. I knew the day would come and I dreamed of it every night as I stared out my bedroom window. I didn’t think it would come quite so soon as this, though. I was still a little unprepared. But you saved me another two years of misery, Billy, and for that I will always be grateful. I couldn’t bring myself to run away before he was dead. I don’t know why. I was going to leave when I was eighteen. That way I knew there was no chance of me being brought back. If I had made it up here and he had found me and had me sent home, I would have killed myself. I know it. Sometimes I’m afraid I still might do it anyway. Sometimes I forget he’s dead, and I imagine that he’s out there looking for me. When I remember he’s gone, that can be even worse—I’m afraid of his spirit more than I was of his body because it was his spirit that made him do those things to me. Now I worry he can see me all the time, that he stares at me in the shower and while I’m going to the bathroom. I worry that I’m losing my mind. But when I’m rational, I remember that hell is a place with no windows for him to see out of, and that perhaps I really am safe from him. Finally.

  I have a job and a tiny apartment. I work in a Middle Eastern restaurant, cleaning toilets in the morning and serving food in the afternoon and evenings. I’m sure the owners know I’m here illegally and that I’m really too young to be working, but they don’t seem too interested in who I am and that is a very valuable gift. Anonymity and secrecy are the things I value most right now. That’s why I’m taking such a big risk writing to you. Please, please don’t show this letter to anyone, and destroy it after you read it. I’m giving you my address, but please don’t write it down anywhere. Memorize it. You can write me if you want. I might even like you to come see me. But be warned that I am not the same person you knew in Mannville. Already I have begun to change drastically, and I like it. I have no intention of being the person I once was ever again. I will always know you, always have you in my heart. But things will be very different with us from now on. And let me know first if you decide to come up. I will need to get a few things ready.

  I always tried to be normal. I always wished I was a normal girl from a normal family. I even had a picture of my father hanging on my bedroom wall. That was how bad I wanted to pretend everything was fine. But the time for pretending is over now, isn’t it?

  Love,

  Annie

  In October I said to Grandpa, “I think I’ll take a trip up north.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Really? And where did this idea come from?”

  I shrugged, trying to conceal my unease. I didn’t want Grandpa to know where I was going, or why, but I had to tell him something, and it was useless to lie. He could still read my thoughts, almost without effort.

  “I have my reasons,” I said.

  “I’m sure you do,” Grandpa replied. “But that’s not what I asked you, is it?”

  “No.”

  “What I’m asking you is what those reasons are.”

  “I know!”

  We were silent for a moment.

  “Are you going to tell me?” he asked finally.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Well,” he said, “what kind of father figure would I be if I just let you go off without even asking where you were headed?”

  “Not a very good one,” I admitted.

  He looked at me carefully.

  “Is it about that Simpson girl?”

  “Not ‘that Simpson girl,’” I said hotly. “She has a name.”

  Grandpa smacked his knee. “Do you mean to say you’ve known where she’s been all this time and you didn’t bother to tell anyone?”

  “I couldn’t,” I said. “I promised her.”

  “When? When did you promise her?”

  Always, I thought. I promised her always, from the time I first knew what was going on in that house.

  “Right before she left,” I said. It wasn’t exactly true, but it was true enough. Some promises didn’t need to be said out loud.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” said Grandpa. “If that doesn’t beat the hell out of everything I’ve ever heard. You knew. All this time you knew!” He took off his fedora and scratched his head. His right foot began tapping out a frustrated rhythm on the floor.

  “Grandpa,” I said. “Think about it for a minute. If you were me, would you have ratted on her? After everything that happened up there?”

  “Up there,” Grandpa knew, meant up in the big old white Simpson house on top of the hill.

  “No,” said Grandpa. “I wouldn’t. But that’s not the point.”

  “Then what is the point? Why are you so mad?”

  “Because I thought she was gone for good,” said Grandpa.

  “Now wait a minute! That’s not fair! Just because of her dad, you think she’s a bad person! You told me yourself she wasn’t like the rest of them! She’s not! She’s—”

  “Just you calm down,” said Grandpa. “I don’t think she’s a bad person.”

  “Well then, what is this all about? Why were you hoping she was gone for good?”

  “I just don’t want you to see her anymore
,” said Grandpa. “Ever.”

  “You can’t do that,” I said. My voice was low and shaking with rage. “You have no right to do that! And there’s nothing you can do about it anyway! You can’t stop me! Not without telling me why!”

  “I can’t tell you why,” said Grandpa. “I can’t. I just don’t want you to go see her, wherever she is. It’s not right for you to see her again. That’s all. It’s just not right.”

  I was shaking so violently now that my vision began to blur.

  “Not good enough,” I said. Then I turned and walked out of the house and out to the road.

  Grandpa came to the door.

  “Hey!” he shouted after me.

  “Not good enough!” I screamed at him. “You can’t keep things from me anymore! It’s not fair! I have a right to know everything! I’m a Mann too!”

  “You get your ass back here right now!”

  “No!”

  “Where are you going?”

  Instead of answering, I shot him my middle finger.

  “Goddamn it!” Grandpa roared. “You do as I tell you! Get back here!”

  “You’re not my father! I don’t have to listen to you!”

  “I raised you from a pup, boy! You mind me now!”

  “You were drunk!” I shouted. “You were drunk the whole time! I raised myself, and you know it!”

  There was a stunned moment during which Grandpa and I stared into each other’s eyes across the driveway. I’d always sworn I would never say that out loud. There’d always been something in me that wouldn’t allow me to blame Grandpa for who he was, for all his weaknesses. After all, he was my grandfather and my father and my mother all rolled into one, and when you came right down to it, he was all I had in the world. He was my entire family. But I said it then, even though I’d never wanted to, and it stopped him. I can still feel the twinge of pain I felt then as I saw Grandpa’s shoulders sag and his eyes go hollow. He turned away from the door as if he’d been shot in the gut and went into the house.

  There have been many nights since then when I wished I could go back and unsay that, long lonely nights when I couldn’t get to sleep in those wee, dim, oddly reflective hours when we adults are haunted by the misdeeds we have done.

  But there are other times when I think it had to be said. And you can’t turn back the clock.

  I turned my back on the farmhouse and began to jog. I ran down Mann Road and turned north onto the County Road, increasing my pace to a flat-out sprint. I wasn’t headed anywhere in particular—I thought maybe I would go down to the Lake and throw rocks into the water for a while until I calmed down. The Lake was good for that. I could go swimming, maybe—I had no bathing suit with me, but there was a hidden stretch of beach where I could go skinny-dipping. Instead, however, I found myself turning up the long dirt drive that led up the hill to the Simpson house. I followed my feet, not really knowing what my intentions were. My rage abated as I drew nearer. I stopped at the foot of the hill and stared up at the house. Gradually I forgot about Grandpa, until there was only the house in front of me. It seemed to breathe chill waves of despair that washed down the hill and dwarfed me in their grandeur. I shivered.

  Small-town people are funny. Morbid curiosity had flared in the wake of Simpson’s death—it was the main topic of conversation in Mannville for months—and yet the causes of it, the story behind Jack Simpson and his fucked-up family and his gradually disappearing daughters, were themselves taboo. After all, if people had begun to raise those questions, the inevitable question, the most important one, would have to come up: Why didn’t we do something about it, before it was too late?

  We of small-town America still believe in placating ghosts, I guess. Or maybe it’s just us Mannvillians.

  In any case, the Simpson house had been left unmolested since the day Jack Simpson died. You’d think it would have become a popular make-out spot for teenagers, a place for kids to go make noise and break things. But I guess everyone had always known what was going on up there, and the wound was still fresh in people’s minds. When folks did speak of the Simpson family, it was in whispers; not enough time had passed for the story to fade into legend, and people were afraid of conjuring up whatever evil spirits had driven the Simpsons to ruin. In any event, the house was left undisturbed, a monument to typical neighborly blindness.

  But I’ve never considered myself a typical Mannvillian. And the criminal must always return to the scene of the crime.

  A notice on the door informed me in large red letters that the property was condemned as unsafe. Damned is more like it, I thought. But nobody had taken the time to board up the windows or doors, and entering the house was as easy as walking in the front door, which was ajar.

  “Hello!” I shouted.

  Nothing, of course.

  “Simpson, you fucker!” I screamed.

  But there was no response. The house wasn’t just empty—it was dead, as dead as Jack Simpson. The furniture—the same ravaged couch I’d seen the day I rescued Grandpa, the ancient and rickety kitchen chairs, the linoleum and the rugs worn almost into nothingness—all of these things had been left exactly as they were on the day Jack Simpson keeled over upstairs in his daughter’s bedroom. The house was a monument to decrepitude. Even the same old television set was still there, the small gray screen set in the massive false-wood console staring back at me uncomprehendingly. I flicked the power switch—nothing. The juice had been cut off.

  “I’ll fix you,” I said to the television. I went outside and hunted around in the yard until I found a rock the size of a softball. I heaved it through the television screen. It exploded with a satisfying crunch of bulbs and tubes and artificial wood.

  That felt so good I went outside and gathered up a whole armful of rocks. Several windows had already been broken—some by the elements, some by Simpson himself probably, in one of his fits of drunken rage—but most were still intact. I set about remedying this situation. One by one, I wound up and pitched rocks through all the windows on the first floor. I was Sandy Koufax, I was Honus Wagner. There was nobody living close enough to hear the noise of breaking glass, but I wouldn’t have cared if there had been. The house, I’d decided, had to go.

  When I was finished with the first floor I got another armful of rocks and went upstairs. None of the windows there had been touched yet. I threw rocks through all of them except for those in Annie’s room, feeling not anger but a cold and delicious satisfaction as each thin, clear, rigid membrane of windowpane popped under my barrage. There were mirrors, too, and these I flung against the walls with deliberate abandon—but still I avoided Annie’s room. Soon the floors were crunchy with broken glass. I could burn this place down, I thought. I had a lighter in my pocket. I picked up a shred of newspaper from the floor and ignited it there in the upstairs hallway. It smoldered, flared up, and died. I let it flutter to the floor and stomped on it. Not here, I thought; her room. Let the fire come from Annie’s room. Let it come and purify this house.

  I went down the hall. The door to her bedroom was shut. I opened it slowly. The hinges grated as the door swung open. I stepped inside.

  It was as though I’d entered another house, or another world altogether. Annie’s bedroom, in defiance of the laws of nature, was still immaculately clean. Sunlight streamed cheerily through the windows, illuminating the made-up bed, the spotless floor, the pictures of unicorns and the photograph of her father hung neatly on the walls. It was ruffled and pink, a little girl’s room, not the room of a teenager. The details of it had escaped me on my prior visit. Annie would have done all this herself, I thought. I could see her down at Jo-Ann’s Fabrics, picking out exactly which frilly trappings would best portray the illusion of happy girlhood. “I’ll take these, please,” I could hear her say in her serious, studied way, pointing with a neatly manicured finger to the one sample among dozens that best promised to carry out the lie for her. She would not have looked up to meet the gaze of the saleswoman, because she wouldn’t want her
to see that it was all a lie. That it was part of the pretending.

  Which was now over, if her letter was to be believed.

  Here is the spot, I said to myself. This is the very piece of floor on which Jack Simpson breathed his last. And over here, ladies and gentlemen (for I was now conducting an imaginary tour group through the room), is the exact bed on which he often and gladly did things to his last remaining daughter which I won’t go into here. The other daughters were all used up, you see. He drove them all crazy and then they skipped town, so she had to do. This is the scene of Mannville’s greatest crime. No flash photography, please. And I myself am a criminal too—a murderer, yes, so take a good look if you’ve never seen one before. I’m the one who sent Simpson packing, and I’ve come back one last time to revel in my triumph over the forces of evil. No, no, don’t applaud. It was just another one of my duties as the only son of Mannville’s hero and ace fighter pilot, Lieutenant Eddie Mann, USAF (dec.), of whom you all no doubt have heard. I’m just keeping up the old traditions. I don’t expect any thanks. And now, let’s all proceed downstairs again and out of the house. In fact, you should all just go home, and don’t come back. I have big plans for this room, and I don’t want any of you to get hurt.

  I had my lighter in my hand. My thumb rested on the wheel.

  But instead I sat down on her bed. The covers had been neatly straightened and tucked in under her pillow. Even after three months, I marveled, there wasn’t a wrinkle in them. That was Annie to the last. She would make her bed every morning even if the world was ending. I sat and listened for her, tried to smell her, waited for any sign that she was coming back. But I knew that was ridiculous. She never would come back, and I didn’t want her to anyway, even though her absence felt to me like a bone that had been yanked from my body, as if our lives together were a tune so far only half played.