A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak

by Molly O'Keefe

  Not that he would wish Vietnam on his brother. Not at all. But he couldn’t look at Christopher without thinking he would have made a good soldier. The heat and bugs would have killed him, though.

  Walt raised the bottle of bourbon to his lips with hands that shook.

  “You’re drinking?” Christopher’s face ran with sweat and the reflected light from the street lamp on the other side of the alley. “Mom made the effort to see you get some kind of medal and you’re sitting out here getting drunk?”

  Walt wiped his damp neck and nodded. That about summed the situation up.

  The silence really stretched and Walt wondered if he was supposed to say something, but before he could, Christopher took the two steps over to the loading dock and hitched himself up beside Walt.

  “What’s in the bottle?” Christopher asked.

  “Granddad.”

  Christopher held out his hand, surprising the hell out of Walt, who had for years before going to war tried to corrupt him with beer.

  “You don’t drink,” he said stupidly, but passed the bourbon to his baby brother.

  Christopher took a meager sip and shuddered. Walt felt a sudden broad river of good will, an accord with things that he hadn’t felt in a long time. He and his brother were going to sit out here and have a drink.

  It was better than getting the damn award.

  He toasted the moment and drank.

  “It looks like the moon is sweating.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pointed up to the misty sky. But Christopher didn’t look up; he watched his feet like they might walk away without him. “Did you see Hernandez in there with—”

  “Walt, we need to talk,” Christopher interrupted and Walt’s bonhomie evaporated and the episode dropped its shiny disguise. They were in a back alley, sitting in God knew what kind of filth. He was pained by his stink and grime, by his unshaved face.

  His brother, on the other hand, smelled like Old Spice and gum.

  This was no long overdue moment of brotherhood, here in the squalor.

  “Everyone’s worried about you,” Chris said, and Walt nodded. He knew that. He wasn’t sure what he could do about it, but he could feel their eyes on him, their concern like a too-heavy blanket. “Mom, Dad...”

  “I’m fine,” he lied.

  Christopher rubbed a hand through his hair and sighed. “Walt, you’re drinking so much. I gave you that job—”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Is that why you show up late?” Christopher asked. “You show up drunk or so hung-over you can’t even see straight. You barely work...”

  “I do my job,” Walt protested, though mostly on principal. His brother was right. He couldn’t muster up any deep pleasure or satisfaction about plumbing the new school out on Highway 10. But anything was better than staying home with Mom, who watched him like he was walking wounded, like at any moment he might bleed out all over the carpet.

  Apologize. Tell him you’ll try harder. That you want the job. Do it before it’s too late.

  The voice was left over from the years before the war. It’s like the seventeen-year-old basketball player was still inside of him, just opening his eyes after having them closed for the past four years.

  “We told you that you didn’t have to work. We said you could take all the time you needed. No one expects you to be ready to work after what you’ve...” He tripped over his words and Walt could feel the scar glowing along his carotid artery. Christopher cleared his throat and looked off into the dark alley. “You don’t have to work right now.”

  “I want to work.” That wasn’t true. He thought he should work—that it would help him. That work would tell him who he was and what he should do. If he held a wrench and a length of copper pipe, then clearly he was a plumber. That’s how simple it should be. But the wrench looked all wrong in his hand.

  Sweat ran into his eyes and he wiped his face hard with his arm, abrading the skin with the rough weave of his shirt. He pressed harder with his arm, raking his skin across the broad weave, digging at the sensitive skin near his eyes.

  Wanting, a little bit, to bleed.

  “Walt,” Christopher whispered. “Tell me what I am supposed to do.”

  Walt laughed.

  “This isn’t funny, Walt! I’m trying—”

  “You remember Minnesota?” Walt interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin?”

  Christopher paused. Shook his head. “Sure.”

  “Remember how cold it was there?”

  “Yes,” Christopher answered into the heat and silence.

  “It was nice there, wasn’t it?” Walt rested his head on the door and looked up at the sweaty moon. “So cold.”

  “You…you want to go up there? Take a vacation up there right now? Because you could go. You could take the time, maybe do some fishing.”

  “I’m not much of a fisherman anymore.” Walt heard the slow quiet hiss of disappointment leave his brother.

  He wants me gone, he thought and had another drink. The bourbon loosened his notoriously stuck tongue.

  “Remember the winter I told you I found that bear?” Walt rolled his head to look at his brother’s clean profile in the lamplight. “You were eight or something?”

  “I was ten,” Christopher murmured. “You were twelve.”

  Walt nodded and took another drink. Christopher was right. He was always right about those little details. Age. Who had who for a teacher.

  Christopher, after he stopped being such a baby, grew up to be a scientific kind of kid, always taking things apart to see how they worked. The summer before that Christmas with the bear, Dad had caught a frog and helped Christopher dissect it to find the heart and the brain.

  Walt had watched, feeling clumsy and left out.

  “You must have been pretty bored to believe me about that bear.” Walt laughed.

  “You were my big brother. I wanted to believe you.” Christopher’s smile was a thin, tight grimace. “And, yes, I was bored out of my head.”

  Walt had never expected Christopher to come along that day. There was no bear. He’d expected his brother to say no and then Walt would have told him how cool the dead bear was, how he could see the heart and the lungs, and too bad that Christopher was such a baby that he didn’t want to go.

  But Christopher said yes and started putting on his boots, and Walt’d had no punch line for the lie. No final trick that would fulfill his desire as a big brother to torture his little brother. So Walt just led his brother out into the woods and waited for something to come to him.

  “I got so panicked.” Walt looked at his hands and watched them shake. “The longer we walked, the more sure I was that I got us lost.”

  “You kept walking though.” Christopher’s laugh was the first easy sound between them. “We broke through the ice on that stream and you fell into that snow bank and I had to pull you out. But you kept going.” His brother said it like it was something honorable.

  “Yeah,” Walt said on a small huff of air. “I don’t know why I did that.”

  It had started to get dark and cold. And the longer they’d walked the surer Walt had been that they were going to die.

  “How long you figure we walked for?” Walt asked.

  Christopher shrugged. “A few hours, at least, before I stopped at that stream. Who knows how long you would have gone.”

  Once Walt had realized that Christopher wasn’t behind him anymore, he ran back to find his brother sitting on a rock next to the last stream they had crossed.

  “There’s no bear, is there?” Christopher had asked, in that serious way of his that was so strange from a ten-year-old. Walt could only shake his head, near tears with worry and embarrassment.

  “I think we’re lost,” Walt had finally admitted.

  But his baby brother had just scowled at Walt, the first in a long line of scowls, a thick history of distrust and worry, and a pity that settled between them lik
e fine dust.

  “You knew exactly what to do,” Walt said. “I was crying and scared, and you just turned around and followed our tracks in the snow back to the cabin.”

  “It wasn’t that big a deal, Walt. You always make those things into big deals.” Christopher grabbed the bottle and took a long drink, like a man suddenly dying for the taste of cheap bourbon.

  Walt, surrounded by heat and the smell of garbage, peered into the darkness of the alley and couldn’t see his tracks.

  He had gotten here and now he couldn’t get his bearings. Couldn’t find home.

  Oh God, Chris, please help me. I’m lost.

  Christopher put down the bottle and leaped off the loading dock. He swept the grime from his brown pants. “I am really sorry for whatever happened to you over there—” Christopher’s voice cracked. “This war…it’s terrible. I know—”

  From nowhere, or perhaps from those places in his memory and gut that he was trying to drown with bourbon, Walt started to laugh.

  He howled until tears gathered in the corners of his eyes and ran down his face like beads of sweat. He held his stomach and accidentally knocked the bottle of Granddad off the landing. It shattered into a million pieces and Christopher swore and jumped out of the way, but was still sprayed with the cheap liquor.

  The laughs were giant hiccups, like someone was yanking on his diaphragm, trying to pull out something stuck there in his gut.

  “What do you know, Christopher? Huh?” Walt wiped away the tears, but they kept coming faster.

  “What do you want me to say, Walt? If you keep drinking like this, I can’t keep you on the job. You’re a liability.”

  “I’m a war hero,” Walt whispered.

  “I know,” Christopher said, his eyes wet. “And it’s breaking our hearts.”

  15

  Walter’s knees buckled and he fell backward in the mud and grass of the little girl’s—Beth’s—backyard. It sure as hell wasn’t the alley with all the broken glass and shame.

  “Well, that wasn’t quite what I had in mind,” Peter said from somewhere behind Walter.

  “No shit.”

  Walter closed his eyes until the world stopped spinning. Until he stopped seeing the look on his brother’s face.

  “It’s mind over matter, Walter, with the dizziness.”

  Walter lifted his head and searched out the boy. He was sitting cross-legged on the porch beside Beth, watching her industriously braid a doll’s yellow yarn hair. He was in a sea of pink plastic and blond yarn.

  “Well, maybe if I wasn’t being jerked in and out of these damn days, my mind could get used to it.”

  “Maybe.” Behind his glasses, the boy’s eyebrows nearly skyrocketed off his head. “If you wouldn’t make a mockery out of the days that are supposed to be good memories, I wouldn’t have to jerk you around. Seriously, you were getting an award!”

  “You sound like my old man.” Walter groaned and rolled to his side, the nausea gone, but the shame lingering like grease.

  The boy muttered something about not blaming the old man, but Walter ignored him. The novelty of this little adventure had worn off. It wasn’t going to be all basketball games and MaryAnn Arneson’s breasts. Every day that boy had in his computer was going to be some day Walter had messed up.

  The boy grabbed his pager and Walter sighed, resting his head in the mud, wondering who he needed to talk to, or pay, or beg to get out of this mess.

  “I’m going to have to move you up a level.”

  “Level?”

  “You were considered an easy file. Statistically, men like you either go back and relive your war hero day or the day they married their soul mate.”

  Walter closed his eyes, denying both days.

  “I’ve got people piling up out in that hallway,” Peter groused. “I need more time.”

  “I’m not stopping you!” Walter cried. “Let me go so you can get back to work!”

  “I’m not going over this with you again, Walter.” If looks could kill, Walter would have been...well, more dead. Skewered to the ground perhaps. “There.” The kid tapped one more button, slid his fancy machine back into his pocket, and grinned like the smug little prick he was turning out to be. “You are now considered a special case.”

  “Good for me,” Walter muttered, flopping back in the mud. The sky was the bluest thing he’d ever seen. “What do I get?”

  “Me.”

  Walter sat up. Shaken.

  It couldn’t be.

  He turned toward the swing set, searching out the new, terribly familiar voice.

  “Over here, Walter.”

  Walter whirled toward the house and there, standing next to Peter, was his cousin Dan.

  “Hello, Walt,” Dan said, older and paunchy in a yellow golf shirt and tweed jacket. He pushed open a door to a dark room filled with pink spotlights and a thumping bass line. “Let’s go have a drink.”

  Walt followed Dan to a black bar lit up with purple and blue neon.

  Topless women danced slowly on top of it.

  Walter tried not to stare. Nudie bars were not his kind of place, hadn’t been even when he was on the road all those years. Not even when Rosie died. The straightforward commerce of it had just always been too much for him.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Not everything is about you, Walt,” Dan said. “Hey there, Patty,” Dan called to a topless redhead behind the bar. “Two beers and two chasers.” He sucked in his gut so he could slide sideways onto his stool. “Have a seat, cuz.”

  The smoky pink lights picked up the silver in Dan’s sideburns, the red spider veins across his nose.

  His cousin, forgotten all these years, had gotten old. When Dan turned eighteen he’d hitchhiked to Milwaukee and the family never heard from him again.

  And once he was gone, no one even uttered his name.

  He’d been a ghost, banished to the attic in old scrapbooks kept by Grandma, only coming out in the warnings the adults gave kids on July Fourth. “You could hurt yourself,” he’d told Jennifer. “I knew a guy who blew off his whole hand.”

  “How...ah...how have you been?” Walter asked, sitting on the stool next to him.

  “Dead mostly.” Dan laughed. He stuck out the belly that strained against his yellow golf shirt and stroked it like a lover. “The good life caught up with me,” Dan said.

  Patty behind the bar set them up with cocktail napkins.

  “Watch this,” Dan whispered, the devil in his grin. He put his prosthetic hand on the bar, frozen in a plastic C-grip with a black leather glove slid over top.

  “She hates this,” Dan whispered.

  “Here you go,” Patty said, setting the beers and shot glasses down on the bar.

  “Be a sweetheart, would you?” Dan asked, lifting his hand just slightly off the black plastic bar. Patty looked at him, expressionless except for the pop and chew of her gum.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Dan shook his head, playing at contrite. “Sorry, doll.”

  Patty sighed heavily and picked up the pint glass and wedged it, none-too-carefully in the prosthetic’s C-grip. It squeaked, and beer sloshed all over the bar and Dan’s sleeve.

  “Jackass,” Patty muttered, just loud enough so Dan could hear and then walked away through the neon lights, turning at once blue then purple.

  Dan laughed and lifted his hand with the beer. “Cheers, cuz,” he said, clumsily knocking the rim of his glass to Walt’s.

  “I don’t drink.” Walt stared at the beaded pint glass.

  “I hate to be the one to remind of you the unpleasant reality of your situation, but you are dead. One beer isn’t going to kill you.” Dan laughed into his pint glass and finished off the second half of his beer.

  “What happened to you?”

  “You mean when I hitchhiked the hell out of town or when I died?”

  Walter shrugged. Either. Both.

  “I lived in Mexico for seven years. And then I
got a job driving rigs from Mexico City to South Bend, Indiana. Then I started my own company.” Dan sighed heavily and braced himself against the bar. “Heart attack at forty.” He wiggled his eyebrows at Walt. “I was doing the deed with the most beautiful woman in the world. I came and croaked.”

  Walt figured his face was about as neon red as the signs behind the bar. He grabbed his beer and took a drink.

  The bitter sweetness filled his mouth, gushed over his tongue, across the roof of his mouth and then it was gone.

  Another tease.

  “The news of my death didn’t make it back to the family, huh?” The pint glass squeaked against Dan’s prosthetic as he twisted it free. He set it on the bar and tossed back his shot. “Can’t say I’m shocked.”

  Walt spun on his chair and looked out at the empty club filled with strippers but devoid of clients. “Where the hell are we?”

  “Heaven.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Walt gasped. Surely not. If this was truly heaven, Rosie would be destroyed with disappointment.

  “Doesn’t fit your idea of heaven?” Dan asked. “You want the strippers to wear wings?”

  “I don’t have any idea of heaven,” Walt said. “But my wife won’t be too pleased with this.”

  “You have no concept of heaven?” Dan asked. “Not even a hope?”

  “You’re telling me heaven is what you hoped for?” Walter asked, not believing it for a second. “I’m dead Dan, not an idiot.”

  “Well, if this isn’t your idea of heaven, let me introduce you to the Velvet Touch.” Dan clapped Walt on the shoulder. “The finest gentleman’s club off the Indiana Toll Road.” He checked his watch, which was secured around the black-gloved prosthetic. “Sunny’s on in about ten minutes so we better make this quick.”

  “Make what quick?”

  “You have to pick a day.” Dan signaled Patty for more drinks. And Walter hung his head.

  “Do I have to explain this to you, too?”

  “No,” Dan said. “You don’t. You need to stop pretending like your shit was so much worse than anyone else’s shit and pick a damn day so Peter can keep doing his job and death can move on.”