Eureka Man: A Novel (8 page)

On their first Christmas holiday visit
together, she arrived at six o'clock wearing what she knew would
arouse him to no end. Her old Catholic school uniform. A white
blouse with a little black ribbon tie, a navy blue blazer, plaid
pleated skirt, and knee socks and loafers. They stood in the line
that led to the back of the room where a Christmas tree display
table, covered in a snow white sheet that hung all the way to the
floor, awaited couples who wanted their pictures taken and others
who wanted ten minutes of privacy. Ten dollars for ten minutes of
privacy was what the Jaycees photographer charged. When Oliver and
Penelope reached the front of the line other couples hid them from
view while they crawled under the table and made clandestine love
to the sound of the Lionel train choo-chooing around the Christmas
tree overhead.

THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Freddie the runner
brought another visiting pass to his door at nine o'clock in the
morning. Oliver thought the word family at the bottom of the pass
meant his mother June, his brothers, Skip and Huck, and his sister
Anna. So he bolted to the visiting room and then pulled up like a
buck in headlights when he saw a man who looked vaguely familiar
standing there smiling awkwardly at him. With him were two children
and a woman who were also staring and smiling as if they all knew
something he didn't. And they did.

Surprised you, didn't we? That's what the
woman said. As if it were something pleasant. Good to see you, son,
the man said. Meet your new family. This is my wife Isabella. This
is your brother, Dickie. Dickie's twelve. And this is Lottie. She's
thirteen. Fourteen, Dad! I'm fourteen, the nubile girl told
him.

Speechless, Oliver shook hands with each of
them and did his best to smile. He took a seat beside Ernie Boy the
First, whose nervous apprehension showed each time he blinked and
forced a smile.

While they took turns describing their
hour-long trip from Youngstown to Pittsburgh, Oliver studied Ernie
Boy's face until he found the lie he was looking for. It had been
sixteen years since this man had skipped town on his family like a
fugitive. Oliver was only five years old and Skip was six the day
they had stood on the side of 301 Highway waving to their father as
he drove away in his new red Ford. See you boys soon. Those had
been his last words. Every day for six weeks, Oliver had looked out
the front window of their apartment hoping to see Ernie Boy's car
pull up into the parking lot. Each time he saw a new red Ford
Fairlane coming up the highway, he thought it was his father. Six
week went by and when his father still hadn't returned, his mother
told him to forget about him. “He's gone, Oliver, and he's not
coming back. Just forget about him.” Every night before they went
to bed, he and Skip knelt at the windowsill and watched the
tractor-trailers scream through the intersection of 301 Highway and
Hawthorne Drive. One night they saw a sixteen-wheeler slice a new
red Ford Fairlane in half in the middle of the intersection. The
boys put on their sneakers and ran to the scene in their pajamas.
Skip stopped at the edge of the highway while Oliver darted around
the debris and the men who had come from Mr. Mack's Texaco station
to help. He had never seen so much blood. The dead man was lying in
front of the car and he was wearing burgundy wingtip shoes. The
same kind their father had been wearing when they last saw him.
Oliver maneuvered close enough to see that the man's eyes were wide
open and were as blue as his father's eyes; his hair was parted on
the left side, too, just the way their father parted his, and there
was a diamond ring on his left pinkie.

What if it was him? What if God had worked
that traffic light to send their father to hell for playing such a
bad joke on them? Oliver started to cry. He yelled for Skip. That
ain't him, Oliver. But the car's red and he's wearing the same
shoes and the diamond ring and… That ain't him, now come on. Oliver
wanted to go back and look at the man one more time, but Skip said
no. Tears streamed down his face as he watched the ambulance driver
pull the white sheet over the man's face. It's him! I know it's
him! It is not, Oliver. But this was one time Oliver refused to
believe his brother and he was glad his father was gone and he
didn't have to wonder about him anymore.

Now he searched the harsh lines on both sides
of Ernie Boy's lying mouth-smile lines, but frown lines too and
crow's feet at the corner of his lying baby blue eyes. His hair,
totally gray, was thick and curly, and he had the great Priddy
teeth. He wore a tan suit and a white shirt, with an ice blue tie
and high-shine brown Oxfords. Oliver was no more glad to see him
than Ernie Boy was to be there. But they talked. They talked and
the family went on as if they had just seen Oliver last week and
the week before. The kids were beautiful and gracious. Lottie told
him at the Coca-Cola machine how she had waited all these years to
meet her big brother and how handsome he was. Dickie didn't say
much. When it was time for them to leave, they promised to return
soon and often.

Oliver went to bed that night using sixteen
years of pent up love and anger as the ignition to fire up his
memory. Seeing his father had left him feeling nostalgic and
longing to see his mother June. Nothing in God's creation could
console him the way his mother could.

He was not dreaming nor was he asleep.
Rather, he was in that space before sleep comes where thoughts and
images were like a random slideshow. Chalk and erasers. Venetian
blinds and folded letters. Jealousies and longing. Images heavy
enough to entertain but not distinct enough for dreaming. Yet he
was hopeful that sleep would bring him a dream, the one that always
left him with renewed hope and energy. It always started in the
kitchen where his mother June was at her best, cooking and baking
and tending to her African violets that thrived on the windowsill
over the sink. There was joy and contentment in her lovely face.
For as long as he could remember they had played a game, his sweet
tooth against her ingenuity. He always won. She hid the chocolate
candy, he found and unwrapped the foil. Except that one time when
his little arms weren't quite long enough to reach the bottom of
the ten-pound cut glass punch bowl. It looked like the biggest
snowflake God had ever made when it tumbled off the shelf over the
kitchen sink and knocked him off the counter and clear across the
linoleum floor. Shocked as any child would be, he sat there in a
heap of broken glass and O. Henry bars and didn't know whether to
laugh or cry. After he felt blood dripping off his forehead, he
cried. But there she was. Shocked, too, but she made it all better,
and by the time they left the emergency room and she bought him a
double scoop of Rocky Road ice cream, she was calm again. He was
still seeing stars when she told him to sit in Mr. Winkler's parlor
while she disappeared into Mr. Winkler's bedroom to discuss a
business matter that had a squeaky rhythm.

It wasn't until years later when he was in
the county jail waiting to stand trial for Jimmy Six's murder and
Mr. Winkler brought her all the way from Southern Maryland to
Pennsylvania to see him that he understood. But it didn't matter.
It didn't matter because she was there. With chocolate bars and her
beautiful face, she was there. It didn't matter because he and his
siblings had never had to eat grits or scrapple for breakfast;
there had always been sizzling hot bacon or cured sausages floating
beside the sunny side up eggs. Even on Sunday evenings when he and
Skip and Anna returned from their weekly visits to their
grandfather's farm, after a day of running across acres of
honeysuckle and the greenest fields, singing I can't begin to tell
you how lonely that song was, even then, she was there. Not June
Cleaver in an apron with pearls draped around her neck. But his
June, she was there. Hot or cold, in or out, she was there. And he
had sooo liked her company, to talk with her, to be around her. Not
just because she was his mother, but because she was humorous and
witty. They were special to each other. They sang and danced
together. She taught him how to jitterbug and when they walked
through the side door of the American Legion bar, every man sitting
at the bar turned his head to gaze into her big brown eyes. They
sat at a corner table with her girlfriends, Mary Jo and Elsie. The
women drank Pabst Blue Ribbon; Oliver drank Hire's root beer. And
after a dance around the jukebox, Oliver sat on Mary Jo's lap and
the first time she pressed his head against her breast, he kept it
there for as long as he could because he didn't want the warm
feeling that ran through him to end.

When he reached his mid-teens, June and Ernie
Boy the Second separated and so did Oliver and his siblings. Anna,
who had despised Oliver for as long as he could remember, went to
stay with June's sister. Skip, who had always treated Oliver with
brotherly affection and relished the role of doing brotherly
things, moved to their grandfather's farm and drove a little French
car to school. Their younger half-brother, Huck, who was the apple
of Oliver's eye, went to live with Ernie Boy the Second and his
mother, leaving June and Oliver living in the house. Ernie Boy
still had belongings there, but the marriage was over and he only
came around occasionally in the middle of the night looking for
June. Right around this time Oliver started to do bizarre things to
capture June's attention and hold it. On Friday nights instead of
taking his girlfriends to the drive-in or to a firehouse dance, he
brought them home. One summer evening June came in early and there
he was lying on the sofa as naked as the day she had pushed him out
of her womb, with a beautiful girl wrapped around him like a vine.
June lit an L&M and said who's your friend, Oliver? Oh, this is
Marianne, Momma. You're very sexy, Marianne, but not on my good
sofa. The kids rose like synchronized swimmers and held hands all
the way to Oliver's bedroom. And June saw him. She saw him. And he
had never been as proud as he was that night when she saw that he
was a man.

That summer, June began an affair of her own
with a pint-sized bottle of vodka and Oliver saw less and less of
her. She had never been a brood hen and had always enjoyed Oliver
and his siblings when the mood struck her. And moods she had. All
her life she cried off and on for days at a time and wouldn't talk
to Oliver or anyone. But then, just like that, her mood would
change and she would feel, once again, natural and easy and playful
with him. They talked about piano keys and dance steps, perennials
and annuals, cats and stray dogs. They never held grudges, and
there was no winning or losing. On Friday and Saturday nights she
dolled herself up and in his presence alone she never forgot to ask
do I look pretty before she slipped out the door for the evening.
There was more than a residue of interest in her big brown eyes as
she held her gaze toward him while he told her over and over how
beautiful she was.

There wasn't a damn thing he could do that
Saturday night when Ernie Boy the Second stumbled into the house at
two in the morning and held her hostage in her bedroom. Oliver
could hear Ernie Boy punching her and tearing at her gown and when
Oliver called out her name from the hall, Ernie Boy dared Oliver to
open the door. There wasn't a goddamn thing he could do. After that
night though, June got wise and found her way to Oliver's room,
knowing perfectly well the bastard wouldn't have the nerve to
bother her there. Not in front of her grown son. Oliver, of course,
was grateful to tears to protect her. On the morning after the
twelfth night he had watched her nightgown fall to the floor, seen
the float of her breasts before she crawled into his bed and
spooned up beside him, his grandfather called and told Oliver that
he was welcome to come and stay for as long as he wanted. June
encouraged him to go since they were the only two left in the house
and she was often gone for days at a time. Oliver decided to go,
but not before he held her like a prom date and promised to stop in
every week to see her. He even left some of his belongings there as
a reason to return and as a sign to her that his leaving was only
temporary. After moving out he spent some part of every night
thinking about her living alone in that house. The same house he
used to sneak into just before dawn on those nights when he had
stayed out all night. He had to admit he liked living in that house
when it was just his mother and him. It became his, sort of. A
nighttime possession complete with a beautiful mother who let him
come and go as he pleased, no questions asked. It was the life. And
to think he had traded all that to live on a four hundred acre
tobacco plantation just so he could have a little French car of his
own.

He had wanted to burn that house to the
ground the day he and Skip stopped in after school and found her
curled up in a fetal position, rocking back and forth as she stared
vacantly at the wall. The boys were terrified. Her jet-black hair,
always meticulously coiffed, was hanging in greasy strands. Her
eyes were sunken and the skin on her face sagged like dough. At
some point she had tried to put on lipstick but had gone wide of
the mark. Her face resembled a sad clown. Oliver sat on the side of
the bed and held her hand while Skip left the room to call their
aunt Harriet, who came right away along with the rescue squad.
Oliver and Skip watched helplessly as the attendants loaded her
into the ambulance and drove her away to a sanitarium in Baltimore.
Ninety-three days later when she returned looking like Maggie in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Oliver was there to greet her. It was the
happiest day of his life.

Pleased once again that he had witnessed her
sobriety from the day she came home from that sanitarium all the
way up to the day he had broken her antique chair over Ernie Boy
the Second's back and fled to Pennsylvania, Oliver finally fell
asleep. But he did not have the dream he wanted.