Shades of Eva, page 13
“I’m going home to take care of some things, and I need to do it sober.”
“Sounds like I’m losing some business,” Scotty said, throwing a towel over his shoulder and recapping the Jameson. We could hear the faint scream of a cruiser’s siren approaching.
“Meade won’t give you any more trouble,” I said. “Things will pick up with the locals once they realize he’s gone.”
Scotty thanked me, for the money and for the time we’d spent together. I thanked him for listening, and wished him well.
I exited the bar. Meade was sitting up, leaning crookedly against the front of the building. Several onlookers cleared a path for me. A police cruiser turned the corner two blocks away and was speeding toward us, lights and siren ablaze. I was standing over Meade and then knelt down to say my last goodbyes to him. He was still near tears, mostly from embarrassment, probably, and pinching the bridge of his nose trying to stem its bleeding.
“Get the fuck away from me!” he said.
I didn’t move. I stared at him, eye to eye. I wanted him to know what sobriety looked like, face to face. “Don’t bother to come back here,” I said. “It’s always going to be this way, Jake.”
Meade didn’t respond. He looked away, defiantly. I think he was trying to save face. He looked very sad, though—it was unmistakable. I knew that look all too well from the man in the mirror. He was lost much like I was lost. I could see it in his vacant stare. I could see the sorrow of unspecified loss in his eyes.
I hefted him to his feet. “Now stand up!”
“What are you doing?” he said.
I brushed some dirt off his shirt, and reached out a hand to a man who was holding Meade’s hat. “Someday you’ll understand,” I said.
The man gave me the hat and I affixed it to Meade’s head just as the cruiser pulled up to the Den. He parked, unbeknownst, right on top of Mead’s knife. The siren extinguished. An officer exited the car and hollered, “What the hell’s going on here?” No one answered him. “I said what’s going on here!” he repeated.
Meade was silent. I was silent. Onlookers were alternating stares at me and then Meade, and then to each other. Meade had turned to look at something down the street. I followed his gaze. I thought I saw a golden Grand Prix turn a corner, but I wasn’t sure.
“I fell,” Meade said, dabbing at his nose again. “This man was helping me.” He gestured to me.
I put an arm around Jake.
“This man was helping you?” The officer said, pointing to me.
Meade nodded.
“Bullshit! What happened here? This wasn’t no fall. I got a call for a fight. Now who did this to you?”
Meade still wasn’t answering.
The officer asked the crowd the same. “I know he didn’t just fall. One of you knows something!” He approached one of the men who’d been playing cards with Meade. The one I’d elbowed in the jaw.
The man just shook his head.
No one looked at me at that point. They looked right through me. I think it’s because they couldn’t see the drunk I used to be anymore. That man was gone.
***
Part 2 - Homecoming
Chapter 15
Sunday, April 21, 1995
Our flight landed in South Bend, Indiana around seven o’clock the next evening. Amelia gave an airport rental car agent a hundred dollar bill in exchange for a set of keys to a Pontiac Bonneville, and told him to keep the change.
She stepped into a restroom carrying her backpack.
I walked over to a television broadcasting the day’s news overhead a bank of chairs. It was the latest in the OKC bombing. They’d actually located someone. I was half-expecting to see police digging some disheveled Unabomber-look-alike out of some subterranean rat hole, but the footage I was looking at was the footage of police escorting a clean cut and somewhat handsome young man in handcuffs to a police cruiser. He was standing tall, almost proud, I’d say. He had the appearance of your all-American guy next door.
Amelia came out wearing a different set of clothes. She’d removed the jeans, button up shirt and leather overcoat she’d worn on the flight over, and had exchanged them for something more casual that showed a bit more skin: a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops. She had donned a pair of sunglasses to complete the look.
I gestured to the TV above the chairs. “Looks like they found the Oki-Unabomber,” I said. “His name is McVeigh.”
They had displayed the bomber’s name. Amelia seemed to be studying McVeigh’s face, as if it were possible that she knew him. I brought it to her attention that he was ex-Army. That seemed to piss her off. She watched the broadcast for a minute and then shook her head in disgust.
“Fucking lunatic!” Amelia exclaimed. “I have problems with authority, too, but clear the fucking building already!”
Her remark held a hint of compassion, but only a hint. Clearing the building was the least McVeigh could have done before he blew it to Smithereens. But clearing the building defeated his purpose. He was trying to make some point I suppose, like any terrorist, by killing a bunch of innocent people. I just shook my head in shame at what the human race was capable of.
They put a picture of the Murrah Federal Building’s burned-out shell on the screen. Amelia didn’t react to the images like I thought she might. It was almost as if she’d seen quite a few such blown-out, blown-apart buildings. Her reaction was that vacant. Come to find out later, she had.
She turned away from the gore and said, “Let’s go.”
I lowered the Bonneville’s passenger side window and stuck my hand out to airplane the wind as we put South Bend in the rearview mirror. Amelia lowered her window and withdrew a cigarette from her handbag. She popped the car’s lighter, gesturing a smoke to me, which I accepted. If I wasn’t going to drink, I might as well smoke.
“Who did you rent Mom’s house from?”
“Man named Armstrong.”
The name didn’t ring a bell. I don’t know why it would. The lighter clicked ready and Amelia lit up, and then handed the lighter to me.
“Did you use an alias to rent the place?”
She took in a long puff of smoke and blew it at the dash. The question seemed to amuse her. She smiled. “Yes. Emily Grand.”
I smiled with her. The name on her ticket had read Emily Biggs, so she had at least two aliases using her Aunt Emily’s namesake. I’d had several aliases in my lifetime—Elmer Gerard being the latest for the flight over, and least palatable to me. Thought it sounded too hillbilly. It wasn’t the only alias Amelia had in mind for me in the upcoming days, and I wouldn’t like those, either.
I was studying the Marlboro Amelia had handed me. “Mom used to smoke this brand,” I said, taking in a nice long drag to commemorate my return.
“I know,” Amelia said.
I waited for her to tell me how she knew that, but she didn’t offer anything up, and I didn’t ask. I presumed she’d found an old carton of Marlboro Reds in my mother’s teeny-bopper bedroom closet or something; or maybe that was just the brand the women of Coastal State smoked in their day. It didn’t matter. It tasted good, so I left it at that.
Amelia asked me if my mother ever talked about her childhood home. She hadn’t. “I don’t think she remembered the place,” I said.
“That’s sad,” Amelia replied. “I’m sure she had some happy times there.”
I nodded.
“How about her mother? Did she ever talk about Ellie?”
I had to explain that mom couldn’t remember Ellie, at least from what I could remember.
“Did you guys see much of Ellie when you were little?”
“Once maybe. She had moved to Gary before I was born to stay with my uncle. They never really came around.”
“Ellie died in the fall of 1970,” Amelia reasoned, “which was right around the time of the shooting.”
“Right.”
“She died not long after your mother came home. Did your mother get to see her before Ellie died?”
“No. She didn’t. Mom couldn’t even remember her mother’s name.”
Amelia was shaking her head. “What do you mean she didn’t remember her name?”
“She’d been lobotomized.”
Amelia sighed. “That’s right. That must have sucked.” That was the understatement of the century, one of Amelia’s few. “So Brad had to fill her in?”
I was shaking my head. “Dad wouldn’t tell her anything about Ellie—not even her name.” I inhaled again and scanned the long open road ahead of us.
“That asshole! Did he at least tell her she was in the hospital dying?”
Again, I had to shake my head. “Nope.”
“So did anyone tell her?” There was a hint of horror in Amelia’s voice. Or maybe it was pity. I wasn’t sure.
“Dad—and the docs at the Asylum—thought it might hurt her recovery from the lobotomy if she knew her mother was sick. The stress and all! They told Dad to wait. It was still a while before Mom found out.”
Amelia was still shaking her head. “I can’t imagine what your mother must have been going through. I can’t imagine not being told something like that! Hell having no idea what her name was, for Christ’s sake.”
“I told you that life was hard.”
“He could have at least told her Ellie’s name!” Amelia just shook her head some more and puffed smoke in the air.
“You know I was mute after the shooting,” I said, “and it was Ellie’s name that brought me out of my silence.”
“How’s that?” Amelia replied.
“I’d lost my voice after the incident, right before Mom had her lobotomy. I couldn’t talk for nine weeks. Mom came home a blank slate, but she started remembering bits and pieces. She wanted to know where her mother was, and oddly, what her mother’s name was.”
“So you told her Ellie’s name?”
“Yes.”
“Were you the one who told her Ellie died?”
“Yes, I guess I was. Just after Dad left.”
“He left that to you, huh? Unbelievable! Did you even know why she died?”
I shook my head. “No. I still don’t.”
“So what did you tell her if you didn’t know what happened?”
“Once I got the gravel out of my throat, I just told her she died. Didn’t give her a reason.”
“That’s sad,” Amelia said. “Sort of anticlimactic, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your grandmother was diabetic. Stepped on a nail watering Ully’s flowers and died of Gangrene. It was a slow, gruesome death.”
“Well, that’s nice to know!” I exclaimed. “At least she didn’t kill herself!”
Amelia giggled, and then grimaced.
“I did try to fill in some details,” I told Amelia, who then asked me what those were. “I made up things,” I told her. “Picnics they never had. Trips they never took together. Songs they never sang, but liked. I described the way I thought Ellie must have felt when they hugged, even the smell of her perfume. I even named it. I called it Marigold.”
“As in the flower?”
“Mom’s favorite.”
“Well, aren’t you creative!”
“I’ve never seen the house she grew up in,” I continued, “but I tried to describe it to her.”
“How did you describe it?”
“Big. Palatial. Clean.”
Amelia began laughing, and then nodded as if she knew how I would have described it. “It’s not all that palatial, Mitchell.”
We’d just crossed the Indiana-Michigan border, so the sign said. It read: Welcome to Pure Michigan. Pure was in large, italicized lettering.
Pure was not how I remembered the Wolverine state. I had also forgotten how flat this part of the country was compared to the rolling hills of north Washington. The mountains I was accustomed to give a depth to the land. The horizon of Michigan seemed an alien scape somehow, a land where the sun set much too low and seemed to set so much further away. Lower Michigan seemed to me a bigger land, like Bozeman, perhaps, one in which if you had to run there was no mountain to run to—no sea to submerge yourself in—only a barren flatness that offered few hiding places.
So do you know much about your grandpa Virgil?” Amelia asked, interrupting my daydream.
“Only what my uncle Ully told me,” I responded.
Amelia raised her eyebrows, but didn’t appear pleased with my answer. She probably assumed whatever Ully told me about his father was likely as big a pack of lies as the one I’d sold my mother about Ellie. But he didn’t lie. Ully was spot on about his dad.
“So what did he tell you?”
“Ully said his father was strict,” I said. “That was the word: strict. Of course he’d say that when he was beating me for something, like dreaming, as if pointing a finger to his father’s brutality somehow minimized his own.”
Amelia just shook her head.
Funny all I could remember about Ully’s description of Virgil was the word strict set in the context of another ass-whipping. The picture of Virgil that Ully had left me with was a mirror image of Ully, and my own father, truth be told.
In that car that day, I became aware of just how easy it was for the cycle of abuse to keep on cycling. Virgil beat Ully. Ully beat me. Dad beat me, and Dad’s dad probably beat Dad. It was the way things were done. I knew no difference.
I could sense Amelia shaking her head in disgust at Ully’s description of his father. Maybe she was thinking what I was thinking: that the fantasies of a little boy are more compassionate than the brutal reality of grown men.
“It was a nice picture you painted of Ellie, Mitchell,” Amelia said, paying homage to those childhood fantasies. “Your uncle could have painted a similar picture of his father for you—but he didn’t. He chose cruelty, and for that choice, cruelty is going to be revisited on him.”
“Cruelty begets cruelty,” I responded.
“I don’t believe in hitting a child,” Amelia said, tossing the finished butt of her Marlboro out her window. I watched that Marlboro fly as Amelia chased it with the last stream of its smoke.
The sun disappeared beneath the horizon as we entered River Bluff, and its descent seemed to suck the rest of the heat from an already cold atmosphere. I felt cold. I felt…home again. I rolled up my window and nodded. I didn’t believe in hitting a child either. Perhaps the only way to stop the cycle of child abuse is to take the abuser to task like any brave person would, not other children, as cowards so often do.
We arrived downtown River Bluff at 8:30 p.m. Unlike South Bend, it was as if Father Time had forgotten about this place. Everything was almost as I remembered it. There were more trees along Main Street than there were back in 1970, though. That was the primary difference. Perhaps that was Father Time’s contribution to River Bluff—the trees—which was alright with me.
I could feel my heart thumping as we idled at a red light at the bottom of Main Street. I needed a drink and I needed one soon, but drinking wasn’t an option. I had made a decision to go cold turkey from the bottle, as stupid as I knew it might be, but for once in my life I was going to try and stick to a decision.
I looked up the block trying my best to slow my breathing and also my pulse, trying to quell the laughing voices emerging from the back of my head that seemed somehow connected to this place. Though it was dark, I could almost see Mom and the little boy I used to be walking down that very block toward the Francesca Restaurant. We’d go there at least once a month for the best hamburgers in town. I tried to see if I could still see the Francesca marquee lit up, but I couldn’t; not that it wasn’t there, but there were too many trees along the streetscape now to see things like marquees.
Mom didn’t drive a car. She couldn’t. They didn’t teach things like driving a car to mental patients. Go figure. She never learned, and Dad was gone. So we walked or took cabs if we had the money or if the weather was too bad. We’d leave the Francesca and walk up the street to Lenni’s Candy Store, and then a little further to Roderick’s Bookstore, where Mom let me roam and read and explore.
The light turned green. Amelia drove another block to a convenience store and pulled in. “We need to stop for a few things,” she said, and shut the car off.
I sat there tapping the console nervously.
“Getting out?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“I don’t buy for anyone. You want your crutch, you’ll get it yourself.”
My crutch!
“I’m fine,” I said, clenching my teeth together, refusing to look at her.
She took another look at the hometown kid, and then went about her business.
I hadn’t told Amelia about my little pledge of sobriety. I wanted to keep it that way, private that is, at least for a little while in case it was just another of my many whimsical self-pledges I’d made that I had no earthly chance of keeping. I’d tried to quit drinking before, and it usually ended in disaster—that is with a total binge, a good fight, and a terrible hangover—and always ended after about two days.
At least if I had to take a drink I could spare myself the indignity of having announced such an improbability. Amelia had a slightly more critical eye on me than Scotty the Barkeep or any romp-in-the-sack from out West. For some reason, her opinion of me was mattering to me, and that mattering seemed to be adding to the stress I was feeling.
Within minutes, she came out carrying a brown paper sack and a plastic bag. She got in and sat down, removed a fresh pack of Marlboros, opened it, withdrew one, then lit it. We sat there for a few minutes. I was wondering what she had in the brown sack, but too nervous to ask.
Amelia pulled a couple lottery tickets from her bag and clipped them to her sun visor. A neon Mega Millions Jackpot sign was flashing $121 MILLION in big red numbers in the store’s window.
“What will you do if you win that?” I said. “A lot of zeros in that number.”
“If I win I’m buying a hundred acres somewhere, and I’m going to build me a business from the ground up.”
“Don’t you have an office somewhere?”
