Shades of Eva (17 page)

He was still resisting. I slammed him
facefirst into the boardwalk at about the same spot where my
bloodstain was, and mounted his back. I tossed his knife into the
street and began rubbing his already broken nose into that stain,
mixing his blood with mine. He was retching and sneezing, and still
hadn’t caught his wind. He finally ceased his fighting.

“You’re going to remember me, Meade,” I
said, pressing his forehead deeper and deeper into the wood.

All at once he drew in a shallow breath. He
began whispering frantically, heaving, and then yelling. He was
screaming then, panicking, begging for someone to help him. There
were spectators screaming, but no one pulled me off of him. No one
dared try.

I turned him over and grabbed the collar of
his shirt. His hands went up in submission and he began crying,
begging me not to hit him again. “You’re going to pay for what you
did!” I told him, then reached a hand into his pocket and withdrew
a wallet he had chained to his jeans. I let go of him and withdrew
all the cash he had, which looked like about four-hundred
dollars.

“This will help pay for Scotty’s window,” I
said. “Do we understand each other?”

Meade nodded.

I dismounted him and stood up. I walked in
and slapped the cash on Scotty’s countertop, and told Scotty, “I
hope this covers some of the damages.”

Scotty looked at the money, and then
reluctantly took it up. “Mark, you better get going. Police are on
the way.”

“You didn’t call an ambulance?” I asked,
grinning just a bit.

Scotty nodded. “I called both. There were
three of them and one of you. After what happened last night—

“Where’s your faith in me, Scotty?”

He smiled and we shared a brief laugh. I
thanked him for putting up with me. He told me I was always welcome
at the Den.

I gestured a thanks, and said, “Scotty,
there’s something to be said for clarity. You know how you asked me
last night, when was the last time I was happy?”

“Yes.”

“I was happy today.”

“Was it that pretty little thing who saved
your neck last night?”

“Kind of,” I said. “I met a real woman for
once. She wasn’t looking for money or sex.”

“What did she want then?”

“Art.”

“Art?” Scotty echoed.

“It’s complicated. She wants me to come home
for a while to explore my past.”

“I thought you wanted to pluck the past out
of your head,” Scotty said. “Amputate it or something like
that.”

“I did.”

Scotty frowned. He looked to the doorway
where several people were tending to Meade. “You might have time
for a quick one…on the house,” he said, reaching for a bottle of
Jameson.

On any other day I would have taken Scotty
up on his offer. But this wasn’t a life I wanted anymore. I put my
hand out to stop Scotty from pouring.

“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.

***

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.”