Shades of Eva (18 page)

“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?”

“No. I still don’t have my
private-investigator license. I’m working on it.”

I was a little surprised. “I thought you
said you were a private-I.”

“You don’t have to have a license to do what
I do?” Amelia replied, staring dreamily out her window at a couple
blackbirds perched in a dogwood tree.

Amelia turned to me after a moment of
awkward silence. She commented on the mystified expression I must
have been wearing. “If you’re looking for a way to legitimize what
we’re doing,” she said, shaking her head again, “you might as well
stop. We aren’t using the Court. We aren’t using law enforcement.
What I do is old school justice, Mitchell. You can’t learn it from
a book.”

“Right,” I replied. “Under the radar. I
know.”

“I think you better start accepting
that.”

“But you want your own land,” I countered.
“Your own business someday. That’s not old-school.”

Amelia had to agree. “I do want my own land.
I have big ideas, Mitchell Rennix…big plans. I’d like a
headquarters with a staff—like a compound. Yeah, a compound with
black wrought-iron fencing around it, and Doberman Pincers to guard
it, sort of like that old show—

“Magnum PI?”

“Yeah, Magnum PI, but it’d be Amelia
PI.”

“His last name was Magnum,” I told her. “Or
was it that he carried a Magnum?” I didn’t remember. “It would be
Beretta PI.”

“Yeah, I like that. Beretta PI. But wasn’t
there a show called Beretta?”

“I think there was. You’d be important, no
less,” I said, staring at the brown paper sack between her legs,
watching a dreamy smile return to her pretty face. 

Speaking of $121-million
, it was
about as good a time as any to bring up the subject of this
pseudo-inheritance Amelia had in mind, and how we were going to go
about inheriting it.

I entered the topic reluctantly given
Amelia’s earlier disdain of all things money. I had considered
bringing the issue up on the flight over, but thought better of it.
My mother’s autopsy report had become the book I couldn’t put down,
and Amelia was preoccupied with a read called The Hiding Place by a
Nazi concentration camp survivor named Corrie Ten Boom. She had
another hardcover Holocaust survivor book in waiting by someone
named Victor Frankl. Frankl’s novel had something to do with
mankind’s search for meaning, which probably wasn’t a search for a
mattress full of greenbacks.

When we left the airport, Amelia had tossed
each of those books on the rental’s dashboard such that I had the
pictured faces of two literary saints staring at me the entire
drive to Mom’s old house. Those faces didn’t seem sympathetic to
the idea of revisiting cruelty on the cruel, either. They seemed to
be singing some other song, something akin to forgiveness, which,
admittedly, I knew very little about.

Despite their faces, I took my chance to
address my concern. “So how did you come up with a figure like
one-million dollars?”

“I just threw it out there,” Amelia replied,
casually.

“Sort of like an arbitrary fine?” I
said.

“It’s a bid. I wanted to get your attention.
Maybe you can tell me what sort of a fine you’d impose for rape and
murder. One-million dollars is a drop in the bucket if you ask me.
It’s an afterthought. I want you to come to your own conclusions
about your uncle. You haven’t even talked to him yet.”

“But you said someone working for you paid
him a visit, didn’t you?”

“I did have a contact pay him a visit,”
Amelia admitted again. “He struck a chord with your uncle. Said he
was investigating the disappearance of Fred Levantle and needed to
ask him some questions. Ully was very evasive. These were just
questions though, mind you.”

“As opposed to what?”

Amelia answered without hesitation. “As
opposed to demands! We were interested in his attitude that day,
not his money or a confession.” I sat there staring blankly out the
window. Amelia must have thought her answer needed some
clarification. “He’s not my uncle and this wasn’t my mother.”

I responded. “You think I should confront
him? Make more of a demand to know?”

“I’m not sure if that’s what I’m asking you
to do, Mitchell. You asked about money. I’m wondering if you think
it’s worth your while to penalize someone for something they’ve
done, or if you think everyone should just run free.”

Amelia emphasized the word run, which was
exactly what I’d been doing for twenty-five years. It was a bit
hypocritical for me to chastise Ully for being evasive when I’d
shed my name and left my fate to a half-dozen coin tosses over the
last quarter century. So I knew where Amelia was going with that.
She needed to know which Mitchell she was talking to: the
let’s-forget-things-and-move-on-with-your-life drifter from Neah
Bay Mitchell, or the emerging Mitchell who was considering how best
to demand answers that should have been his in the first place.
 

I couldn’t answer a question pregnant with
that much expectation without looking at the pictured faces of
Corrie Ten Boom and Viktor Frankl for inspiration. I was wondering
what they might say to such a question about restitution, two
martyrs who wrote two books about finding salvation through the
forgiveness of sins, and some pretty egregious sins at
that. 

It made me wonder about what was right. It
made me wonder if these authors were preaching the doctrine of
forgiveness, or if they were preaching the doctrine of forgetting,
which was another doctrine altogether.

Forgetting was what Amelia called running.
It was what my mother called murder. I believed in restitution. I
believed in atonement. Even if Viktor Frankl and martyrs the likes
of Corrie Ten Boom were content to leave evil to the Lord’s
recounting, someone needed to tend to penance on earth. There was a
book in the Bible called "Judges" for just that purpose. We weren’t
put on earth to wait for God to judge every situation, were we? Are
we not to hold our fellow man to account at times? Particularly in
instances of murder where the victims have no opportunity to
express themselves?  

It was a question that made me take a good
look at myself again. I held no one to account. Not even myself. It
made me take a good look at the woman sitting beside me, too. And
when I did, I realized that Amelia had just asked me another loaded
question. She knew the answer to it. She knew there was only one
answer that a sane person, that a brave person, could give to the
question of penalizing a murderer and a rapist. She believed in
holding people to account. It was the Lord’s work if you would ask
her. It was His old school, Old Testament message of
accountability, and it was her message to me.