Shades of Eva (25 page)

I was pacing frantically. “Well then why
don’t you do this?” I said. “You’re the Army vet. Your aunt was in
there, too.”

Amelia remained calm. “Anna Norris knows my
face! She didn’t just visit you and your parents. She’s visited me
half my entire life. She’d visit you, now, if she knew where you
were. Dr. Norris is a freak of nature. She not only keeps up with
her former patients, she keeps up with their children. She went to
my wedding for Christ’s sake, and she went to Joe’s and Amy’s
funerals, and Aunt Emily’s, and my parents’!”

“And she’s the superintendent, now,” I said.
I was thinking back to my mother’s funeral. Hard as it was to
recall, I vaguely recalled that Anna was there, and so was Beth
Shurz—Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb Go to the Funeral!

But would she remember my face if she saw me
now?

I was quite sure I hadn’t ridden any
railcars with her in the last twenty years. In fact, that
wandering, the same thing that threatened my undoing was also the
thing that seemed to be allowing this charade to occur.

“If the only art we take is Emily’s art,” I
said, “and maybe my mother’s, if she has anything in there, they’re
going to figure it out after a while. They’re going to start
looking for us. Aren’t you concerned about that?”

“Mitchell, let me let you in on a little
secret: I don’t give a fuck if they look for me, and I’m not
handing myself over to them! If we do this my way, by the time the
police are done inventorying that place and redistributing those
artifacts to their rightful heirs, they’re going to thank us for
what we’ve done and we’ll be long gone.”

“And Elmer’s body?” I said. “You’re talking
about digging holes in a loony bin based on some hunch this
postcard math problem is a set of coordinates to his grave. What if
we get caught? What if I get made before we ever have the chance to
sink a shovel? What if there’s nothing down there but a few
acorns?”

“Mitchell, I spent a lot of hours looking
into this. If Ully was involved like I think he was, like your
mother wrote that he was—”

Amelia kicked the chest for emphasis.

“—then he’ll verify this one way or the
other.”

“Because you’ll demand that he does.”

“That’s right. I’ve planned for every
contingency. If you follow my lead, nothing is going to go wrong.
We’ll get in there, get what we need, learn what we have to learn,
and then get the hell out! We need one day—two tops. By the time
we’re done with that place, they won’t know what in the hell just
happened.”

If I’d ever needed a drink, it was then in
the flash-lit eeriness of that attic. My mind was racing. My heart
was pounding. I was thirsty as a well digger in hell, and I
couldn’t say no.

***

Shadow Journal entry

August 28, 1995

…
They say war is a terrible thing. People
come back with all sorts of fucked-up-ness, or can: Combat Fatigue,
Battle Stress, post-traumatic stress syndrome. A hundred names for
the aftermath of trauma, and I’d never heard of Rape Trauma
Syndrome until I met Ben Levantle.

I wondered sometimes what a scar really
means. Is it a memento of an event, like a picture? Is it a
reminder like a note on one’s palm, or more like a tattoo that
never fades? Is it a symbol of something sad and painful on the
inside? Or is it a mark of courage? And why don’t people talk about
their scars?

Amelia and I decided to get a room just
outside of town at the Furley Motel. I immediately pulled the
curtains on the place and Amelia turned on the air conditioner and
went into the bathroom to shower. I walked in on her and lifted the
lid.

“Can’t you wait until I’m out, Jesus,” she
said, from behind the curtain.

I laughed. “I’m not Jesus, but I appreciate
the compliment.”

“You flush that toilet and I’m coming after
you!”

I flushed.

Amelia screamed and yanked the curtain back
and sprayed me with cold water. It felt good to laugh. It felt good
to be with someone who had purpose. 

“Let’s order a pizza,” I hollered from the
other room, wiping my arms off with a washcloth.

“I love pizza,” she hollered back.

“What do you want on it?”

“Anchovies, tomatoes, and pineapple!”

I was in the giving mood, so I ordered two:
one for her and a meat lover’s for me.

“Don’t tell them your real name,” she
hollered. And I didn’t. I put the order under someone named Mike
Hunt, which brought about a muffled giggle from the girl on the
other end of the line.

I turned on the television and thumbed
through the channels. I settled on some outdoor nature channel
where two elephants were mating. I swear that the male had an elbow
in his penis. He reared up and put his front legs on the female’s
back and his penis bent. It looked like the arm of a weightlifter
curling a dumbbell, and in it went, bend and all.

Amelia stepped out of the shower. I could
see her reflection in the mirror through the doorway. I pretended
to watch the elephants. I figured she knew I could see her, but she
didn’t seem concerned. Her breasts were beautiful, as was the rest
of her body, before hidden by all those clothes. She had abs like
an aerobics instructor, and arms to match. She was skinny, but not
overly so as I had thought. She was sinewy, but she had curves
where she needed them, and lots of them. She reached down to dry
her feet. That’s when I saw her scars for the first time, and they
nearly took my breath away.

Scars were nothing new to me, but then again
I had always scarred myself. Be it scars from brawling or working
the trees, or older scars from more intentional incisions, I had my
fair share. The scars on Amelia’s back, however, looked like the
scars of a flogging or a caning, and they didn’t strike me as
self-inflicted. They had dimension to them, as if her skin had
healed over by folding outward and onto itself. The thickest of
them looked like tiny little snakes crawling just beneath her
skin.

I was too timid to ask her then, too
embarrassed to admit that I had been studying her. So I kept quiet
and turned my attention back to the elephants, one of which was now
smoking a cigarette and the other nagging. Wait! Different
show.

Amelia came out a minute later in a tee
shirt and a pair of shorts and her flip-flops. She sat down on the
bed with a toothbrush in her mouth, and mumbled, “Wuh-ta-yoo
waht-in?”

“I was watching two elephants having violent
intercourse,” I said. “Now it’s two humans arguing.” I scooted
toward the foot of the bed and put two hands on Amelia’s shoulders
and squeezed. She tensed up as I thought she might, but it didn’t
deter me. “Let me give you a massage,” I said. “I give a good
one.”

She mumbled something that sounded like I’m
brushing my teeth, and then she stood up and went back into the
bathroom. “Mitchell, we can’t get involved,” she said, throwing
back a mouthful of rinse and then spitting it in the sink. “You
wouldn’t want to get mixed up with someone like me. I’m probably
not long for this earth.”

Not long for this earth was something my
mother used to say about her own fate. Amelia’s expression bore the
same despairing quality that my mother’s usage used to evoke.
Perhaps it was an omen of things to come, which was an idea I
didn’t want to consider. I was just starting to like Amelia, and
now she was talking about death.

Amelia’s voice was sad, but genuine. It was
also alarming. I was already mixed up with her. I presumed she
worried about life expectancy because of her military background.
It was probably habit for soldiers to speak candidly about
premature death. Maybe she was considering a re-enlistment. I
didn’t think she was suicidal, but then again, I didn’t really know
her.

I tried to disarm her without getting too
serious. “I’m not trying to score with you or start anything. I
just thought you could use a backrub, that’s all.”

She came out and she wouldn’t look at me.
“You’re kind, but I don’t. Besides, you wouldn’t want to see my
back.”

“I saw your back in the mirror.”

I gave her a chance to explain her scars, or
feign embarrassment, or act surprised. She did none of that. All
she said was, “Well then, now you know.”

Of course I didn’t know. They were Amelia’s
scars, and if they held some secret, it was up to her to decide
when they weren’t secretive anymore. 

We had two beds in the room.
Amelia
took the one closest to the window, and me, the one closest to the
TV and we ate our pizzas, the better part of them at least. We were
both ravaged with hunger and we ate like it. When we were finished,
Amelia withdrew her whiskey bottle and poured herself a glass. She
asked me if I wanted some, smiling a temptress’s smile as she did
so while waving the bottle in the air. God, did it smell good.
Almost as good as she did.

Between the two of them, I wasn’t sure what
I wanted worse—a good long drink or those skimpy little shorts off
of her legs.

I shook my head, and said, “No thanks.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. You’re sober now,”
she said, laughing at me.

“That’s right. I’m sober, so don’t tempt
me.”

“How’s that working out for you anyhow?”

“Not well,” I said. “I’m hearing things. I’m
seeing elephants with joints in their penises. I’m having lurid
thoughts.”

Amelia laughed. “Hallucinations are common
with withdrawal. In a few hours you’re going to be wishing you had
some medication. You might not want to do this cold turkey.”

“I’m going straight,” I said. “I don’t want
to replace one addiction with another. I need to do this sober.
Pills aren’t going to help me.”

She dropped the topic and drank some more. I
wondered if she might talk again about the car accident and what
she did to those men once she was two sheets to the wind. She was
drinking when she confessed the incident in the first place. She
was drinking when she said she was in the Army, too. Maybe she used
the spirits to help her talk, sort of like I used them to help me
shut down.

After we’d long finished our food and she
was finding my jokes funny and I was sure she was drunk, I turned
the lamp off and muted the television, sat down on the edge of her
bed and slid myself over to lie beside her. She didn’t resist.
Neither of us said anything. We just lay staring at one another in
the flickering light of the television.

I kissed her for the first time, and she
kissed me back. I could taste the Jack Daniels on her breath; it
was almost as intoxicating as if I had tasted the real thing. And
then again, her kiss was intoxicating by itself. After a minute, I
stopped. Even I had the scruples to leave a drunken widow alone,
despite the images of the elephants mating parading around in my
head.

She stared at me with those penetrating
eyes, and then asked, “How do you want me?”

I didn’t hesitate. “On your front.”

“On my front?”

“Yes, I want to see your back.”

Amelia seemed surprised by me, and reticent,
but she turned over.

It’s easy to feel vulnerable when you’re
that close to someone and can’t look them in the eye, especially
when you’re a woman and that someone is a man, and obviously one
attracted to you. I imagined it had been a little while since
Amelia felt that kind of vulnerability.

“Raise your arms,” I said, and she did. I
pulled her tee shirt off and she placed her head in her arms and
said nothing.

I put a hand on the small of her back and
ran it up her spine to her neck and started making small circles
there, feeling the stiffness of her muscles and the softness of her
skin. The stiffness felt more like tone than tension. I traced the
contours of her shoulders and worked my way down her back, tracing
the lines of each scar when I encountered one, measuring each with
my fingertips, counting each one, wondering where they came from,
wondering why they were there, damning whoever put them there, but
not asking. I kissed them, each one, kissed them as if I could
somehow heal them with my affection.

I finally asked. “Was it the war?”

Amelia seemed to be nodding.

“Who did this to you?”

Amelia took in a long deep breath and let it
out. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

I didn’t know what to say. It mattered to
me. I wanted to ask why, how, and who—all of those W questions
police and social service people like to ask in the middle of the
night. I wanted to get the bastards that did that to her. I didn’t
want her to feel muted like I used to feel. I wanted her to talk to
me like Mom and Dad used to want me to talk to them when I
wouldn’t, but Amelia couldn’t, just like I once couldn’t.

“It matters that you lived,” I said.

“It matters,” she said, turning back over to
face me, “that I kept my secrets. Sometimes you need to talk, and
sometimes you can’t.”

“You can talk to me,” I said, staring
longingly into those beautiful green eyes. We kissed again and then
I covered her back up. We held one another until we finally fell
asleep.

I awoke not long after that thinking
about her aunt Emily and this supposed art gallery. When Amelia
talked about patient art, I had in mind the sort of Popsicle stick,
Styrofoam ball craftwork we did in elementary school. But it wasn’t
like that. My little trip to my grandpa’s disappointments room had
given me a new opinion of what my mother—and by extension her
friend—must have been capable of.

Amelia awakened shortly thereafter. Neither
of us could sleep for long. We were energized by each other and by
the mission we’d undertaken. I was energized by the possibility of
love, and in the possibility of putting together, finally, a
semblance of a family tree. I was also racing from the effects of
alcohol withdrawal, mentally and physically.