THERE WAS ONE OTHER CALL I was expecting, and sure enough, eventually it came. I was expecting it to come at about two in the morning, but the phone rang at seven at night, and I just knew it was him, I had known all day at work that it was going to be him, it was a little gift that Mrs. Maggaroulian had given me, knowing when my father-in-law the Bat would call me before he actually did. Maybe I knew these things because I was carrying his grandchild, but I don’t think that’s it. I think I picked it up from Mrs. Maggaroulian, what Weekly World News calls “precognition.”
After I was a full-fledged married woman, the Bat had stopped stalking me, and Oscar and me, we sort of forgot about him, just figured that he had retreated into his bat cave for a while until he decided to be decent. Oscar didn’t need anything from the house — he’d taken all his stuff out of there a long time ago — so we were what you would call out of touch with the Bat.
Anyway, the phone rang and I answered it.
“This is Mac Metzger,” the Bat said. “I thought I had better talk to you.”
“Oh, hi,” I said.
I waited for him to say something. Then he said, “Lot of water’s over the dam, ain’t it?”
“I guess so.” Then I asked, “Uh, water?”
He ignored the question. “I hear tell you’re in the family way.”
“Yes,” I said. “How’d you know?”
“Word gets around. Well, besides,” he said, “I guess I got some apologizing to do.”
“Apologizing? For stalking me?”
“No. On account of I was drinking so much, last time I saw you. Well, finally I quit it, praise God.”
“You did?” It seemed we were both doing New Year’s resolutions, without the New Year to help us out.
“Swore it off. Had to. The long arm of the law caught me falling down, you might say, and they were going to confiscate my truck and my license, so I had to go into this treatment group. I did it. I swore it off and I’m making amends. Hardest thing I ever managed to do.”
“You sound different.”
“Well, I am different. Ashamed of the way I acted. I don’t know what-all got into me. And besides I forgave you for all the stealing, you loaded down with my stuff. I didn’t care about that worldly goods anyway. It was castoffs. You could have had it, you being Oscar’s wife, if you’d asked.”
“I never stole anything. Really.”
“Okay.” He waited. “I know that was what you said. Well, you got your story and I got mine. Difference of opinion. I guess everybody’s got a story, right?” He waited for me to agree with him, and when I didn’t, he said, “Anyhow Oscar’s gone. Poor kid. I guess I was angry at him way too much.”
“That’s right.”
“I was so surprised and done in by events that I pretty much got dead drunk when you asked me for help on the funeral arrangements. I don’t know what got into me, what I done or said. The devils, I guess. I got a problem with the devils, I can tell you right now. Sorry I couldn’t do more. A kid his age, he was too young to have a heart attack. You told me where you put his ashes, but you’ll have to tell me again. I blacked out on everything after he died.”
“In Saginaw Forest,” I said, lying to him.
“That’s a pretty place, I been there. Well, now he’s dead, Oscar might do the trees some good, the way he did you. He was a handful. And sometimes he sure acted too smart with me. That boy was constant trouble.”
“He did me some good,” I said. “He was the best person I ever knew.” I could have hung up, but I didn’t. “Yes,” I said. “He was.”
“Well, is that a fact? I’m sure glad. You know, Oscar was so often a terror, and when he wasn’t a terror, he couldn’t be moved off the sofa. The drugs did that to him. They made him lazy, and then he had a mouth on him when I’d get on him. We had quite a household. Between us, it was like a war, so I’d make myself scarce, and when I was around, he could be as mean as my own daddy had been. ‘Course I miss him. You always miss your children.”
“Yes,” I said.
“It must be there was a side to him I almost never saw. I was mostly proud of him when he was running. That boy could run the relay as fast as anything, and that was when I was happy to claim him as my own. But so much of the rest of the time, I just had to put up with him and his drugs and troublemaking and his smart mouth, but like I say, maybe there’s another side to matters and I’d like to hear your side. You probably saw things I never saw. You got a side?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have a side.”
“Well, see, that’s just what I’m saying. You got a side. You’ve got a story. You probably got a story about Oscar. You probably know something about him that even I never got me no idea of.”
“Probably.”
“So what I was thinking was, you should tell me your side, since I want to hear it so much, with my son dead and gone and his ashes in Saginaw Forest.” The Bat waited, and all at once I thought I had caught his drift. “We oughta you and me meet face to face, so you can tell me your side,” he said, as if thinking it over. “I want to hear about Oscar from you.”
There was a long pause in there, while I waited. “What’re you suggesting, Mr. Metzger?”
“You mean I’m not being clear? I sure thought I was. Goddamn if I’m confusing you. I was kinda hoping you’d invite me over that apartment of yours.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe a restaurant’d be better.”
“You want to come over here?” he asked. “It’s kinda dusty. I’d have to clean up and mostly I’m too tired at the end of the day to do that.” He sighed. “I could, I guess. Okay, you’re invited.”
“No. I’d rather not come over there.”
“Well we got ourselves an impasse, then,” he said. “I don’t want to go to a restaurant, myself. I don’t ever do that. So we’ve got a failure of the meeting of minds.”
“I know what we’ll do,” I said. “I just had an idea. Why don’t you come over here and meet my parents? I’ll invite them, too. You know, like how the in-laws meet when their kids get married? The grandparents, now. Just ’cause Oscar’s dead doesn’t change that. What d’you think?”
I had outfoxed him and he knew it. “It’s your side I want to hear, not theirs,” he said, all of a sudden somber.
“You’ll get mine and theirs.”
“I was never much for relatives,” the Bat said, “of the conversational variety.”
“But that’s what I am.”
“Oh all right,” he said angrily, like I’d been beating him at a game. “Invite your parents if you want to. Sure, I’d be happy to meet them.”
I had sudden shooting pains in my stomach, which the Bat was causing just by talking to me.
“So,” he said. “When should I come? How about tonight?”
“I have to work,” I said. “It’s too soon.”
“You don’t think much of me, do you?” he asked me suddenly, a question I wasn’t about to answer.
“You’re fine,” I said. “I don’t think of you one way or another.”
He cleared his throat, an awful sound. “Sorry,” he said. “I got this thing caught in my throat. So, how about Saturday night?”
“Well, I’ll call my parents and then call you back.”
“You do that. I will wait right here by the telephone for that callback from you.”
I called my parents, reached my mom, who was overjoyed that I was inviting her and delighted to be meeting Oscar’s father, and I called the Bat again. So as a plan it was accomplished.
I bought bags of potato chips, and pop, and beer, and some potato salad, and hamburgers, and the hamburger buns, and the ketchup and relish and pickles. Good-time food. It wasn’t a picnic but I figured picnic food would put everybody into a better disposition and help them get along with one another.
I guess I should have been afraid, but it didn’t occur to me to be, with my parents there.
That night it snowed, this being December, and I’d i
nvited my parents early, but they didn’t come when they were supposed to. I kept checking my watch as I buttered the buns. It was one of those best-laid-plans deals. When the phone rang, sure enough, it was my dad saying they had slid off the road and had to call a tow truck, and they’d be there eventually, but they were going to be late. “Delayed” was the word he used. And had I seen the snow, my dad asked, how it was coming down?
That was about when I heard the Bat’s knock on the door. With this building, there’s a front door that’s supposed to be locked, but no one ever keeps it locked, they’ve always got bricks propped against it. Anyone can get in. Anyone did. And he was knocking at my door right now.
No point in looking through the peephole. You didn’t need Mrs. Maggaroulian to tell you what was on the other side. The only thing was, when I opened the door, he didn’t look bad or mean, but more like a loser standing in line at the unemployment office, humbled, ready to ask the passers-by for a quarter.
He had a layer of snow on his head. Snow was on his shoes. And he was, all over again, small. I kept expecting Oscar’s father to look like Oscar, but instead he was a miniature, shorter than me, and the only feature Oscar’d got from him was a sort of cheekbone thing, which, for a second, made me homesick for my late husband. The Bat was holding a tallboy, and he didn’t look sure of himself. Carrying a beer? What had happened to his promise to swear off the alcohol? He was half-smiling, almost panting with the effort of it, wearing a jacket, a wrinkled necktie, and snowy shoes.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi there, daughter.” His voice rasped and rattled. He moved from foot to foot. “You gonna invite me in?”
“Sure,” I said. I helped him out of his jacket and hung it in the closet. He kept his cap on. I turned around and walked back toward where the three chairs were and the hideabed. I heard him following me. He let out this cough that went on and on and sounded like the end of the world. I sat down in one of the chairs and waited for the coughing event to cease. Finally it did.
“I got phlegm,” the Bat informed me. He looked around my apartment. Then he sat on a chair and gave me a look in which cheerfulness and meanness were mixed equally. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Snows get into my lung cavities and I can’t get ’em out.” The coughing started up one more time. When he stopped, he said, “It’s bad. Don’t really know what it is. Don’t want to know.”
“You should see a doctor,” I said.
“You think so? All they have is bad news and bills you can’t pay. No, I’d rather see myself in hell first,” he told me. He tried to lean back, and when that didn’t work, he leaned forward. He smiled at me. “Here, you want this beer for your party?” He handed me the tallboy and reached into his shirt for a cigarette, which he proceeded to light. “You want to know what I do? For the lungs?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I go to a healer. We got this healer in our church. He lays his hands on me.”
“Does it help?”
“Wish I knew. I couldn’t say. I’m neither dead nor alive. You got an ashtray?”
I brought over a dish I kept under the sink and handed it to him. “There.”
“Thank you,” he said, fingering the ashtray and then peering at me. “I reckonized it. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to get to know you. A little, anyways. You don’t know me. For like an example, you don’ know I’m a Christian man. Go to a church, go to a healer.” He crossed his arms, holding the cigarette, and touched his forehead. I was watching the snow on his cap and his shoes. I was waiting for it to melt.
“No, I knew that. The church part.”
“How come?” He looked at me, squinting his eyes.
“Oscar told me.”
He shook his head, and water dripped down from his hair, but the snow remained on his shoes. He laughed. “I was born in Kentucky where we had a healer living on the same street. Old woman named Gladys — there was a scary and amazing power she had, so I’ve always believed in it more than medicine. She happened to be a great-aunt of mine. She called me Little Mac.”
“Like the hamburger.”
“Hunh?”
“You know. The Big Mac.”
“Oh, right.” He turned his eyes upon my apartment. He looked long and hard at the window. “Did you ever happen to come to Jesus yourself?”
“No, actually, he came to me. At a party. He asked me for directions.”
He stared at me for several moments. He stood up, went to the window, then sat down again. “That’s blasphemy. Well, I forgive it. Where’s your parents that you said was coming?” He scratched at a scar above his left eye. I couldn’t help it: I was watching him closely.
“They’re late.”
“I can see that. It must be they had trouble on the road. Weather reports give, I dunno, five-six-seven inches of snow.”
He threw me a look, the very same one I saw him give me when I walked past him out of Oscar’s bedroom into the hallway. I couldn’t say for sure, but I thought he was calculating his chances.
“Now you tell me about yourself,” the Bat said. “Let me hear your story. I’d like to hear that, where you come from and everything.”
I talked for ten minutes, yakking away, hoping my parents would arrive to get me out of this mess. But they didn’t come and didn’t come, and meanwhile, in the middle of my life story, the Bat went to the refrigerator and found himself a beer, not the tallboy he had bought but another one, which he opened and drank in about five seconds. I remembered that he wasn’t supposed to drink, that he had sworn it off and was supposed to be clean. Then he opened another beer and brought it over to his personal chair. He was, like, proportionating me all over again, his eyes like lizards crawling up and down my arms and legs. The phone rang once more and I ran to answer it. It was my dad, calling from his car phone, saying the axle was bent and they couldn’t drive it, seeing as how the car had gone into the ditch and the front end was broken open. I didn’t want to sound desperate so I just went uh-huh, uh-huh. My dad said if he could figure out a way to get over here in the next half-hour, they’d come by cab, if the cabs were running.
I went over to the boom box and put some music on softly, radio-type tunes.
“Who was that?” the Bat inquired, from his chair.
“My dad.”
“Still late, those two. Am I right? Well well. Just us, you and me, Missy and Mac. I kinda like the sound of that. ‘Missy and Mac.’ Do you believe in Jesus, Missy?”
“Back to that topic? Sure,” I said.
“Me too. You know why?”
“No.”
“’Cause he’s interested in me the way he’s interested in everybody. Being the way I am, big trouble in a small shape. Hey, I got a riddle for you. What’d the elephant say to the naked man?”
“I don’t know.”
“ ‘How do you eat with that thing?’ ” He smiled fiercely. “Get it? ‘How do you eat with that thing?’ I think that’s funny. You know, Oscar always said you were pretty, and I guess you are, but it’s more like country-cute.” He studied me for a moment. “With that toothy smile you got.”
“Thank you.”
“I can see why Oscar’d want to sleep with you and even marry you. All that marriageable cuteness in one package and such.”
“What was Oscar’s mother like? He’s told me —”
“ — Do you mind me saying what I just said, a dirty word or two? Sometimes I cain’t help it.”
“Well, no.”
“You should of. You should of said, ‘Mac, don’t talk that way, it’s nasty.’ Like that time I called you a dirty word. I shouldn’t remember doing that, but I do.”
“Well, it is nasty, I guess, but —”
“ — Not as nasty as the act, y’know. Which you did in my house, can you remember it? Walkin’ past me on display? That got me started.”
“I’m sorry for that.”
The Bat reached down and took a swig of his beer. He appeared to think for a mom
ent. “So you can apologize after all. I liked it though.” He stared at me. “Seeing the features of yours. You sure are pretty.” He appeared to think for another moment. “Your parents ain’t comin’, right?”
“No, they’ll be here any minute.”
“I don’t think so. I think you’re puttin’ me on. You’re just actin’. That’s all you ever done with me, was pretend. I had high hopes, drivin’ over here in my four-wheel. Missy and Mac, I thought, maybe we can be friends.” He stood up and walked toward the kitchen area. He scratched his scalp with the beer bottle. “You think I’m a bad person? Honestly? Tell me now.”
“I don’t know what you are,” I said.
“That’s the ticket.” Now he scratched his ear with his index finger, then examined the finger. I wanted him to stop all the scratching. “That’s the ticket right there. I don’t know either. I just don’t know what I do from minute to minute. Goddamn, I am confused.” He stared up at the ceiling. “Lord, I am confused and tired. I am forever gettin’ tired. You think, Missy, we could, y’know, somehow, well, be friends, and I could someday, when your baby comes, help you out? I’d like to do that. Babysitting. I might help.”
“I think so.”
“I think so too. We could start all over. Like nothin’d ever happened between us. ’Cause I’ll be a granddaddy. We could give it a baptism. Wash it in the blood of the lamb. What you gonna name it?”
I told him I didn’t know.
For a moment this thing happened on his face. I had never seen it there before and I couldn’t be sure I was seeing it now. His face calmed down for a few seconds, settled into itself. He was peaceful and quiet. I saw at that moment that all my worries about the Bat were mistaken. He was just a harmless little middle-aged guy who drank way too much and who had once followed me around and who had trouble with demons.
“You wanna give me a hug?” the Bat asked. “A hug for the father-in-law?”
“Well, not quite yet,” I said, softening. “Maybe later. Soon. In a little while.”
“Okay,” the Bat said, scratching himself higher, on his chest. His face was getting dazed again, maybe from the beer. “If you’ll excuse me, I gotta go for a pee.”
The Feast of Love Page 25
