by Allen Eskens
“If you don’t give up your source, how can you prove your case? Libel law…Times v. Sullivan…” Lila began speaking as though she were reading from a flash card—her preferred method of study. “There’s a different standard if Dobbins is a public figure, and as a state senator, he’s got to be a public figure. They’d have to prove that you wrote the article with actual malice—that you knew it was false and wrote it anyway.”
“My story wasn’t false.”
“But your witness is someone you won’t disclose. You have nothing to contradict their version of events. You see how this looks, don’t you? You’ve put yourself into a box.”
“I can’t give up my source,” I repeated. “I won’t.” But even as the words left my lips, I knew that Lila was right. I was screwed. My mind flashed back to my conversation with Allison and the prospect that I would get fired over this, and I was once again on the verge of throwing up. I leaned forward on the couch and cupped my face in my hand. Slow breath in. Slow breath out. Lila brushed her hand up and down my back, which didn’t help but was a nice gesture.
And then Jeremy spoke. I had forgotten that he was sitting on the couch with us. “Joe,” he said. “Maybe it will be all right.”
I sat up and looked at my brother, his hands on his lap, the book lying beside him, the expression on his face one of uncertainty, probably questioning whether his response was appropriate in that situation. I have no doubt that he didn’t understand what a lawsuit was, but he understood my reaction to it. He understood that the papers in Lila’s hands had hurt me somehow. That was all he needed to know. And the thing he thought to say was the one thing that I wanted to hear—that everything would be okay.
I smiled. “Of course it’ll be okay.”
“That’s right,” Lila said, tossing the papers to the floor.
And with that, Lila and I came to an understanding that, at least around Jeremy, nothing bad had happened that day. We dropped the subject and pretended that it was a normal Tuesday. She went back to her studies, and I went to the kitchen where I could sit on the floor, out of Jeremy’s sight, and let the world around me spin out of control. Yet, as bad as that day had been, the day that followed would prove that things can always get worse.
Chapter 2
I considered taking that next day off, calling in sick to tend to my wounds. I didn’t want to wade past the downturned eyes of my colleagues or hear the low hiss of whispers escaping from the breakroom as they discussed my failings. But I needed to face this thing. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and staying home would have made me appear guilty. Besides, staring at my apartment walls would only let the worms of my self-pity burrow deeper into my brain. Working on another story might help keep my mind off the lawsuit. Who knows, I might even get my appetite back.
The AP office was housed in the Grain Exchange Building, a nine-story structure that probably constituted a skyscraper back in 1902 when they built it—the sky being so much lower back then. It stood hunched and heavy on the northern edge of downtown, the thick-fingered uncle of the Minneapolis skyline. Over the past four years, I had come to see that office as my second home. Now, as I walked to the elevator, an image popped into my head of my being escorted back out with a box of my personal effects in my arms. Do they really do that when they fire someone?
On the fifth floor, I punched the code into the key pad and entered the office of the Associated Press, a smaller space than most people might expect, especially if their concept of a newsroom comes from movies like All the President’s Men, where a small army of reporters fills an entire floor. The AP office, which covered news in a four-state area, was just big enough to house six reporters, a breakroom, a conference room, and a separate office for Allison Cress.
We wrote the news while sitting at workstations, a modern form of cubicle with shorter walls so that you had the confinement of a cubicle, but not the privacy. The setup had the appearance of a big raft made up of six inner tubes tied together. I was fine with having no walls, though, because I worked on the windowless side of the raft. In slow times, I could look out through the windows—my view bouncing off the top of Gus MacFarlane’s head—and let my daydreams catch the breeze. Those musings usually transported me to the glass towers of Manhattan, or the granite enclaves of Washington, DC, places where I had once hoped my career might take me. Now, my highest aspiration was to make it to quitting time and still have a job.
I had just plopped down into my nest, when Gus leaned toward my workstation and whispered, “Hey, Joe, Allison said she wanted to see you when you got in.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach. “How’d she look?”
Gus pondered that for a second before answering, “Serious.”
I started to get up, but then I changed my mind and sat back down, taking a minute to clean up my browser history. It’s not that I had anything scandalous to hide, but I didn’t want my replacement to know how frequently I used my thesaurus, and that I still struggled with the proper use of lie, lay, laid, and lain. I looked in my drawers to get an idea of how big of a box I would need for my stuff, and the answer depressed me. The entire accumulation of my personal items would likely fit into a shoe box. Maybe, subconsciously, I’d been preparing for this day all along.
A gurgle churned in my stomach as I made my way to Allison’s office. She had always been a good boss. Smart. Levelheaded. I was going to miss her, and it killed me to know that I had pulled her into my mess. I paused at the door to gather myself, then knocked.
“Come in,” Allison said.
When she saw me, her neutral expression took on weight.
“Hi, Joe. Have a seat.” She waved me to a chair. I closed the door and sat down, my hands already sweaty against the tan vinyl of the armrests.
“Am I fired?” I asked.
“What?”
“If you’re going to fire me, do it quickly.” I kept my eyes open, but I held my breath.
“No, Joe. That’s not why I wanted to see you.”
I slowly exhaled.
Allison gave me a half-smile. “If that were the case,” she said. “I’d probably be heading out the door with you.”
I wanted to say that I was sorry, but I was pretty sure she knew that already.
“Joe, do you have any relatives in Caspen County?”
“Caspen County? No. Not that I know of. Why?”
“Not that you know of?”
“My family tree is more of a patch of scrub. I can never be sure what’s out there. I have a brother, Jeremy, but you know about him already.”
“What about the rest of your family?”
I hesitated, but then answered. “I have a mother in Austin, but I haven’t spoken to her in years.”
“What about your father?”
“My father? He took off when I was born. Left me with nothing but his name.”
“You have the same name as your father?”
“Yeah, but I never…” I sat back in my chair, seeing now that Allison was drawing me to a specific target. “What’s going on?” I asked.
She picked up a piece of paper. “Do you have any idea where your father might live now?”
“None whatsoever,” I said with a hint of pride. I had managed to live my entire life without ever seeing the face of the man whose name I carried. I convinced myself that other than donating his spermatozoa to my cause, my father could just as well have been a myth, a fairy tale that fed my childhood imagination, something I had discarded long ago, tossed aside like an outgrown pair of sneakers.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
She slid a piece of paper across her desk to me, and I read it. It was a press release about a man named Joseph Talbert who had been found dead in a horse barn by sheriff’s deputies in rural Caspen County, Minnesota. The press release stated that foul play was suspected.
“Do you think that might be your father?” she asked.
There had to be a lot of Joe Talberts walking around this planet at any given m
oment, but this one died in Minnesota, and it involved foul play; those two factors had to increase the odds that this man might be my father.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Other than a few stories that my mom told me, I don’t know anything about him.”
“You think your mom might know if he lived in Buckley?”
“Like I said, I don’t talk to my mother.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to pry. I just thought you should know. I mean if it were my father—even if I’d never met him, I’d want to know.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. My tone had turned cold; that wasn’t my intention.
“Are you okay?”
“Honestly, Allison, I’m not sure.”
“There’s one thing more,” Allison said, pulling a second piece of paper out of her drawer. “I asked the Sheriff’s Office in Caspen County to send me a picture of the man they found dead. Would you like to see it?”
I stared at the paper in her hand, unable to answer. This man meant nothing to me—less than nothing. I should have walked out of Allison’s office and left it that way, but I didn’t. I held out my hand, and she handed me an old mug shot. And just like that, the myth that was my father began to grow flesh and bones.
Chapter 3
When I was in fourth grade, a kid named Keith Rabbinau called me a bastard. I wasn’t sure exactly what the word meant, though I’d heard my mother use it often enough, a blunt-tipped arrow shot at the many men who’d screwed her over. Back then, the word bastard fell into a basket of swear words that I could use with some dexterity. That day in fourth grade, however, I learned that bastard had a special meaning, making it a glove that fit some of us better than others.
Rabbinau’s attack came out of the blue. We weren’t in an argument—not that he and I were ever all that far from a fight at any given moment. Keith was one of the few kids in my class who knew about my mom. What I had pieced together was that our mothers had been friends at one time, back when they were both young and new to the bar scene in Austin. My mom’s version of the fall of their friendship was that Libby Rabbinau, the tramp, stole a piece-of-shit named Willard away from her. I used to wonder why my mother cared that Willard had been stolen away from her if he was such a piece of shit. That mystery got cleared up as I came to know my mother better.
When Keith called me a bastard, I quickly returned the insult, calling him a bastard, to which he replied, “I’m not a bastard, I have a father.” His response threw me because I didn’t understand how fathers figured into our little clash. Before I could think of a comeback, Keith read my face and started heaping it on.
“You don’t even know what a bastard is, do you?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Just look in the mirror and you’ll see a bastard.”
“A bastard is a kid that doesn’t got a dad,” he said. “You don’t got a dad, so you’re a bastard.”
“I got a dad,” I yelled back.
“No you don’t.” Keith smirked. “My mom says that your mom’s a drunk, and a bitch, and no man’s gonna stay with her no matter what. That makes you a bastard. Joey the Bastard. That should be your name. Joey the Bastard.”
Some of the other boys on the playground sensed the tension and started forming a small circle around us. A couple of them repeated, “Joey the Bastard” in taunting fashion. How Keith didn’t see this next part coming is beyond me.
Anger clogged my ears, turning Keith’s words into a thick, watery hum. I charged in and shoved my hands into his chest, sending him stumbling backward to the ground. He looked up at me with wide eyes, as if my assault had been the last thing he expected. I watched his mask of shock give way to rage—and it was on.
Keith scrambled to his feet and came at me with his head down, throwing a shoulder into my chest and clasping his hands around my torso. Landing on my butt with his weight on top of me, I twisted to my right, then to my left, trying to roll him off. He lost his balance enough that I was able to get beside him, my arm now around his neck. With him pinched in a headlock, I fought to steady my hold.
By now, a throng of kids had amassed around us, some cheering me on, and some shouting Keith’s name, exactly what I’d been hoping for. With our skirmish raising that kind of ruckus, it was only a matter of time before a teacher would break up the fight. It would be a draw.
I took my eyes off Keith for a second to look beyond the mob. No teacher yet. And that’s when Keith dropped a shoulder and rolled into some kind of jujitsu move that sent me flipping over his back. I closed my eyes as my head hit the ground. When I opened them again, Keith was climbing onto my chest, his arm cocking back. I raised my head, hoping to take the force of his first punch in the top of my skull instead of the face, a move I saw on TV once. It didn’t work.
He hit me square in my left cheek, and everything went black and sparkly. I was expecting another punch, and frankly I had no plan on how I might avoid it, but it never came. I felt Keith being pulled off my chest as the chants of the mob died in the breeze. When I opened my eyes, one of the teachers was holding Keith away from me and yelling for me to get up and follow him.
When Vice Principal Adkins asked me what caused the fight, I didn’t answer. The teacher who broke up the scuffle told Mr. Adkins that they found Keith on top, so they assumed that he had been the instigator. Keith, however, said that I started it, that I’d gone crazy and attacked him for no good reason. In the end, Adkins leveled the same punishment against us both. We were to go to the library, open a dictionary to a particular page, and write out every word and definition from that page. He could have assigned a hundred pages to rewrite that day; it wouldn’t have mattered to me. The punishment wasn’t the thing that left the mark.
As soon as Keith left the office, he ran to find the smallest dictionary in the library, calling dibs on it, and leaving me with the huge Merriam-Webster. Keith had apparently done this punishment before. I opened my dictionary and started to turn to the page chosen by Adkins, but then paused and flipped back until I found the word bastard.
Bastard:
1) a person born of unmarried parents; an illegitimate child;
2) something irregular, inferior, spurious or unusual.
There were expansions on those two definitions, but I didn’t read any further. I began writing the punishment, my world now colored by the understanding that I was illegitimate and inferior. I was a bastard.
The tongue-lashing I got at school was nothing compared to what awaited me at home. The school had called my mother and told her that I’d been in a fight. That would have been bad enough, but it was the fact that I had been bested by the son of Libby Rabbinau that truly got my mom’s teakettle to whistle. When I walked in, she was waiting with a beer in her hand and a scowl on her face. “What the hell’s gotten into you, Joey?” were the first words out of her mouth.
I didn’t expect to see her home, because back then she had a job serving cones at the Dairy Queen, one of the few times in my life that I can remember her holding employment for more than a few weeks. When I walked into the apartment, the heat of her anger was already thick in the air, so I didn’t respond to her question.
“I had to miss work today. That’s fifty bucks out of my paycheck because of you.”
I wanted to ask how getting my ass kicked caused her to miss work. They didn’t bring her down to the school for a conference. They knew better. My mother was a grenade just looking for someone to pull the pin.
“How do you think it feels to have to call in sick because your son can’t stop and think for once in his life? And Keith Rabbinau? You had to pick a fight with Keith Rabbinau of all people? You let that little prick get the better of you? I bet he ain’t got no shiner on his face.”
My head sank under the weight of my shame.
“Of course not,” she said. “I can just hear that bitch Libby laughing because her son beat you up. What was this fight about anyway?”
I looked up to see if her question might be rhetorical, jus
t another ripple in the skipping stone of her tirade, but she stared at me with her hand on her hip awaiting my response.
“He…called me a bastard,” I said. I didn’t tell her about how Keith called her a drunk and a bitch. Even at ten, I knew that such a revelation had no upside.
“Well, you are a bastard, goddamn it. That no-good piece-of-shit father of yours didn’t want nothing to do with you. You got into a fight about him? You may as well…just…” She waved her beer hand around in the air as if the gesture filled in the words that escaped her. Then she took a drink. “Face it, he screwed us both. You have a problem with being a bastard? Take it up with your father. And good luck finding him.”
This next part came out of my mouth before I could stop it. I said, “If he was such a no-good piece of shit, why did you go out with him? Why would you name me after him?”
Those words hit my mother hard, twisting every muscle in her face and causing red blotches to bloom on her neck. She slammed her beer can down on the table and took a step toward me, her arm shooting out to the side, her finger pointing at the door to my bedroom. “GO—TO—YOUR—ROOM!” she screamed.
She didn’t have to say it twice. I ran to my bedroom, closed the door behind me, and sat with my back pressed against the door, my ten-year-old body ready to block any attempt she might make to come inside. I didn’t want to hear another word from her, but more than that, I didn’t want to lose my grip on the venomous thoughts that lay coiled in my brain. Some things were better left unspoken. I was a bastard. She was a drunk and a bitch. Those were the monuments we built to each other―the ones that would survive the eventual fall of our relationship.
As my anger thinned, I spotted Jeremy rocking forward and back on the bottom bunk of our bed, the tendons in his jaw flexing as he gnashed his teeth together, his right thumb rubbing the knuckle of his left hand, his skin red from the effort. I slid away from the door, scooting across the floor until I was in his line of sight.
“Jeremy, don’t do that,” I said, putting my hand on his thumb. “You’re going to get a sore. It’s okay, Jeremy.”
