Shades of Eva, page 20
It was easier to walk blindly back then. It was safer for me. It was all I could do, because as much as I wanted to plan, I was still a drunk and it had only been twenty-four hours since my last drink, and the spirits were, indeed, calling.
As the night wore on, neither of us were able to sleep. We did little but toss and turn. I was restless for obvious reasons: I was thirsty, I was bunkside to a female MP, I was anxious as all hell to get our so-called mission going, and I was just plain curious about what Amelia did to those men who killed Joe and Amy. I finally mustered the courage between a toss and a turn to inquire, again, about those men.
“I was just wondering…about those guys in the car…the ones who—"
Amelia turned over, turned toward me and offered me the smile her daughter and her husband must have loved. “Three of them are in prison,” she said, interrupting me before I could finish. “I tracked them down. I turned three of them in.”
There was an awkward silence because there was an awkward omission. “I thought you said there were four men.”
“There were four.”
“Did you find them all?”
“Yes. I found them all.”
“The three you turned in didn’t do the shooting, then, did they?”
Amelia shook her head.
“You did something else to the fourth man, the shooter, didn’t you?”
Amelia rolled over and turned her scars to me, affirming my suspicion, somewhat, by her silence. Perhaps I’d asked one too many questions.
Amelia had a profound sense of fairness, and just like the men who abused my mother, and perhaps killed my brother, prison was too good for the man who killed Joe and Amy. Of that I was sure.
I just wasn’t sure what punishment fit such crimes, particularly when the punisher had the bias Amelia had. It was just one night ago when I had a conversation with Scotty the bartender in the Scorpion’s Den about such things. I was thinking back to amputations of things like pasts, of plucking out offending things from my life. I could still hear Scotty saying just get a lobotomy, as if justice and peace and healing were that simple.
I could feel myself nodding at the idea of an eye for an eye. It was frontier justice. A life for a life! But I’d never met anyone who’d actually adjudicated such a matter. I’d never met a killer or an executioner, and then again, I’d never slept beside a soldier.
“Your scars. Are they from the Army, or somewhere else?” I asked, changing the subject for the moment.
I could sense Amelia wrestling with her past, and almost felt guilty for inquiring of it. But wasn’t that what we were doing with each other? Probing? Not sexually, but psychically? Prodding each other to release something pent up, something akin to sexual energy yet far more diabolical?
“I was a POW, Mitchell. I have my scars, and you have yours. Thank you for asking about them.”
And then she closed her eyes. Within minutes she was asleep.
In the wee hours of the night when darkness is its most intense and quiet its loudest, when the pangs of withdrawal and the longing for healing most salient, sometimes it’s best to write. That night I wrote, but all I could manage to write was a short poem—I had no attention span to write anything longer. It went something like this:
I wish I could tell you who I am,
Or who I’m going to be.
I wish I could tell you what I’ve done,
And I wish you could tell me!
Any alcoholic will tell you that the tremors are the worst. Your body shakes uncontrollably. You sweat with first fever, and then chills. You feel as if your body is seizing, as if you’ve been poisoned in every cell of your being. Then comes the nausea, and then the headaches, then the hallucinations.
And then comes the rain.
The clock turned to 3 a.m. and I stood there, staring out the window toward a streetlamp in the distance, shivering watching the downpour, the reflection of the clock’s bright orange numbering in the window, and Amelia’s restless sleep. I looked around the room watching the shifting shadows on the walls around us, and the curtains swaying mystically in the breeze.
She’d been a POW. Amelia’s scars were mementos of her imprisonment, I was sure. They seemed to me to be intersections, not just mementos, inevitable collision points between opposing spirits. Incarnations of good versus evil. The old narrative of innocence meets guilt and the older still questions of which is which, born tactile and sadly palpable on the beautiful back of my new friend. A POW.
Those intersections leave scars. I thought maybe that Amelia was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, thus her scars. But the more I thought about it, good people didn’t let time pass. Amelia didn’t quit college by accident. She wasn’t in Iraq by accident. She didn’t trust her next location to the toss of coin as I did. She’d put herself somewhere specific to clean something up—to right something wrong in the universe—and for that she paid a price.
I didn’t want that to happen again. I didn’t want River Bluff to be the next Fallujah. In a way, we were entering a war. I just didn’t realize how risky a war it would be that night. Amelia had set out to find me, to right something else, and she was risking it all again—and for what? For me? For my mother? For family heirlooms and a body?
I was shaking, I was sweating, and I was remembering, and I couldn’t turn any of it off. I didn’t put the pen down; it fell from my hand by its own volition. I didn’t know what to do about those risks: Amelia’s or mine, or what to do about the shaking that was overtaking my body. I just knew I had to move.
So I stood up and shivered, my abdomen stinging, my stitches burning, and all because of the liquor. Invisible scars, I thought. I wondered if I could open up my abdomen and somehow take a peek at my liver if I wouldn’t see the actual scars I’d inflicted on it from my drinking, snakelike scars like those on Amelia’s back, maybe, just tinier.
Amelia hadn’t offered everything to me, but the bits of information she had given me formed a large offering. She had trusted me with a portion of her past, of her life, of some of the truths behind her scars, some visible and some not so visible. Maybe that sharing was one way to heal some of those scars, at least the invisible ones. It was more than enough for me that night, because it was more than I had ever had.
I’d like to tell you that there was never anyone in that shed that night when Mom killed a man there. I’d like to tell you that my parents’ marriage was okay, but that would be a lie. I’d like to tell you that at age five, whiskey turned my stomach. I would love to tell you that I threw it up when I took a drink, or never took it to begin with. But I can’t say any of that! Drinking in that rotten shed with my father was the only happy memory of him that I have. That’s when he smiled. That’s when he asked me what I did that day. That’s when he asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
In my delirium in that dark motel room, shaking more violently then I had all night; I couldn’t remember what I told him I wanted to be. But I had told him something. And something came to me—Dad’s laughter again. Whatever I said I wanted to be, Dad laughed. But that was okay. He was laughing, not screaming. He was happy, not hitting. If I had to invent a ridiculous, unmemorable dream just to make him laugh, then I would have. If I could have drank my way to oblivion to make Dad happy, I would have. If it stopped the beatings, it was worth drinking. The shed was a laugh factory, and the booze and my hangovers a running joke. My addiction was the court in which Dad’s jester son performed—and it made us both happy—at least for a while.
But it wasn’t funny anymore.
I kept looking around the motel room wondering, for some reason, if the ghost of my grandfather Virgil was going to reappear, and if it was really my grandfather who had appeared to me earlier. He hadn’t reappeared, yet, whoever he was, but I had the sense that he wasn’t far in the offing. The longer I remained awake, and the longer I stayed sober, the closer he was to returning. The longer I stayed sober, the sooner they would all return.
Sobriety had always fed these apparitions, and the only thing that seemed to keep them at bay was the same thing that brought Dad closer to me—the drinking. I should have associated alcohol with putrid smells and dark, creepy bugs and toolsheds and rage and other bitter things, but I hadn’t. When I was five, drinking was a way to turn off the noise in my head; it was a way to connect to something besides the maddening hum of my reality, our poverty, and the dysfunction that permeated our lives.
I wanted a drink. I needed a drink to stop the memories, but it was my want to see things clearly, to experience things as they truly were, that kept me from drinking that night. It was my respect for Amelia’s quest, to give her plea a fighting chance that kept me sober that night. And besides, Amelia had finished her bottle.
I looked outside the window and in the distance I thought I heard my name being called. It was faint, almost echoing in the rain-soaked atmosphere, but I heard it. Mitchell! Mitchell! Somehow something, or someone, was calling me to come. That voice had something to do with that toolshed and the spirits within it. And so I left Amelia. I needed to open that shed door again. I needed a drink. I needed peace.
I left the motel. I walked until I came to town, to the bars that would alleviate my tremors, and then past them, past the convenience stores and markets whose neon lights and flashing counter signs from within seemed to be calling me like a siren singing some fated song. I passed them all, hugging my trembling flesh as if it were freezing, though it was a balmy seventy-seven degrees outside.
I came to my old block where Mom’s banshee-like screams used to echo throughout the neighborhood like a coyote’s cries. I peered eastward into the fields toward the old Smith cornfield where all the scarecrows used to perch. It was on this street where my mother gave her life, or where the stress had taken it. It was in this place where a part of me died, too. I was in her arms that night sleeping, my flesh pressed warmly into hers, a five-year-old boy wrapped in his mother’s last embrace.
It was there, in the house I was approaching, where I struggled to free myself from that hug. I wondered if there was such a thing as a zero point on the earth, that place where every other place is relative to it. I wondered if I had a GPS in my hand if it wouldn’t read zero. Isn’t that where home is—a zero place—that place that seems the birthplace of your soul, that place where your conception is numbered, where every other place stands relative to it?
My house was there. The shed was still there. The juniper bushes behind the house were still there, though overgrown now. The old white brick was now a deep red, and the shed that was once burgundy red was now dirty white.
I stood in the bushes behind my mother’s window, outside the bedroom in which she died. There was no activity inside. There were no dogs barking, either. Just the distant hum of traffic, and if one listened just right, the ancestral echo of gut-wrenching cries and belly-laughter from nearby apparitions who seemed somehow connected to this place.
Maybe these were the sounds of genetic memory, the tangible subject of remembrance brought about through some chemical aberration or some subtle rupture in space and time, a chemical aberration similar to that of a dream, perhaps.
I craved something to stem the brooding fear in my heart and the pain in my chest and in my ribs, and all of the noise in my head, but there was nothing at hand. I thought, instead, about the penetrating strength of Amelia’s personality and the directness of her advice: to be with my memories and to embrace them as parts of my heritage, as disturbing and as smothering as that embrace might be.
I was to be present, but I wasn’t to forget the eternity of all that came before, or all that lay ahead. I was simply to be, and that would have to be enough.
Then a face flashed before me. It was the face of our neighbor, and the mask he wore that night he raped me. I turned to the yard next door where he used to be, and then to the shed, wondering if Fred Elms’ wife was still alive. How she hated my mother and me! I was the child who got her husband shot. Mom was the monster who ruined everything. We were the demons she targeted for days after that; the reason she incited older boys in the neighborhood to throw stones through our windows, rocks with tiny messages painted on them like get out, murderer, liar, and crazy bitch. They were messages of retaliation, of the kind of rage only those who have lost a husband in violent fashion could ever understand. How she hated my mother and I!
I thought I heard the gunshots again, the snaps that sounded like firecrackers, but weren’t. I watched the neighbor’s head snap in succession with the gunfire, and the burlap—yes, it was burlap that he wore—turn a dark red or purplish black. I saw him fall, just like the smoking peacemaker falling from my mother’s hand, and then I vomited—just like the little boy vomited in that shed.
I vomited in the juniper bushes, not from the effects of whiskey, but from the re-experience of that violation and the detoxifying pain of withdrawal. I needed to purge whatever poison had infected my spirit, and with every upheaval I cursed the shed and Fred Elms and Fred Levantle, standing, hovering, just feet from my zero place.
I left the junipers, calming myself as best I could, zeroing out my world. I turned one last time to the neighbor’s house, then to my mother’s window, then to the shed, and then to the field. I trembled. I listened to the voices in my head and the cries and the laughing. I watched the troubled faces of the spirits around me, spirits wondering how long it would be until I drank again, wondering if I would drink again, or if they could stay for a little while longer, or maybe even, forever.
I took a deep breath in and took that first step toward vengeance. I was drunk with the same kind of thirst for violence that seemed to permeate my ancestry. It was all that kept me from imploding that night, that and Amelia’s insistence that I feel everything, especially this pain. Rage, she said, was a component of grief, just like despair, and I should feel them all.
If that retaliatory spirit of rage was part of my inheritance, if that was what Amelia wanted me to accept, then so it would be. I would proceed back to the motel to suffer the night in delirium with my ancestral family whose single intent seemed only to lead me back to the Asylum to reclaim one of us and fulfill Mom’s prophesy. I had no doubt it was Elmer’s destiny, from the poem my mother sang:
Babies don’t die when they are taken,
They lay still, but they reawaken.
Father and brother, he will slay,
And burn this place amidst I lay.
I made my way back to the Furley, finally feeling something like fatigue. If only I could simply lay down and stop remembering. If only I could sleep.
Amelia heard me knocking, and she let me in without asking, without prying, and without digging. She had something in her hand, and she seemed very relieved. It was the poem I had written earlier.
“I missed you,” she said, and with a hug she took me in.
***
Chapter 21
Monday, April 22, 1995
Sometime that Monday morning when I was somewhere between hell’s bells and total neurological collapse, the door opened and Amelia strolled in. I’d been watching the news about the McVeigh bombing. Turns out he wasn’t alone in his operation. Some guy named Terri Nichols had been assisting him.
Amelia came in carrying a newspaper and flipped a light on and tossed two pill bottles at me, interrupting the report, and said, “Here, take these. I went to a lot of trouble.”
I looked at the digital reds on the clock beside my bed. They read 7:42 AM. The bottles’ labels read Lorazepam and Dilaudid. “This is Valium,” I said. “I don’t need a tranquilizer, I need something for pain.”
“That’s what Dilaudid is, stupid. The Valium will help with the DTs.”
I took in a long sigh. “I told you I don’t want any pills. I want to do this—
“I know what you told me, but you are going to have to take something or you’re going to have a freaking seizure!”
“That would all be fine, but these aren’t mine,” I said, looking at one of the labels. “Who’s Abigail Fan? And where did you get these?”
“Corporal Fan just went to the clinic with a cluster headache and a panic attack. She has PTSD and she was very convincing.”
If I could have, I would have laughed.
Amelia handed me a glass of water and told me to take one of each medication. Even though I felt like a bag of bones being passed through a ringer backwards, I didn’t want them. I was determined to cleanse my system of the poison I had been ingesting, a cleansing that didn’t involve getting mixed up with benzos and opiates.
“I really shouldn’t,” I said, trying again to give the bottles back to her.
“Listen, I’m not putting up with your withdrawal bullshit! It’s admirable, but you can’t quit whiskey cold turkey or you could die! Now take the damn pills!”
Amelia turned around to set her bags on the dresser. I unscrewed the cap of the Valium and took a couple, then dumped three or four Dilaudid down my pie hole. Amelia turned back around. I smiled up at her and stuck out my tongue to demonstrate I’d taken the pills.
She seemed relieved. She then handed me the newspaper she had brought in. “Here, you have an application to fill out later.”
“Application?”
The paper she had given me was a copy of the River Bluff Gazette. She pointed to an ad she had circled that read:
Coastal State Psychiatric Hospital
Wanted: Security Guard.
Experience Preferred.
Must work well with adverse populations!
754-555-3500
“I want you to get some more sleep and get yourself together. We can’t blow this, and we need to move fast. There are two other candidates they’re looking at for this guard position.”
“Guard? What are you talking about?”
“Security guard, Mitchell! Pay attention! The young woman who is going to handle your application likes men like you, and she has influence with those who do the hiring. Her name’s Daisy Jenkins?”
