The Devil's Own Rag Doll (8 page)

I let him rub his thumb over the long, ragged scar on my hand, and on the sly I even gave him a look at the empty socket. He marveled like it was monkeys riding bicycles at the zoo, which didn't bother me. Kids don't give a damn what you look like. Alex had been goofy as a kid anyway, prone to laughing out loud when he was playing alone. He was clumsy, forever falling out of trees or getting hung up by his trousers from the top of a fence.

Alex hadn't changed so much even two years ago, when Tommy and I pulled him out of school to play hooky at the ball game. We had box seats just a little beyond third base, right along the rail. Even though I was loopy from lack of sleep, having worked the graveyard shift the night before, and even though I had only the one eye, I managed to snag a hot foul tip with my bare hand. Pinky Higgins, who was playing third base, cranked his head and tipped his cap to me as I was sitting back down. It went so quickly that I don't think Alex even knew what had happened until I handed him the ball.

“Man oh man, Uncle Pete,” he said. “That's some pepper.”

“That's the lightning right that laid down the Bomber,” said Tommy. “Laid him out like a bindle stiff on the Bowery. Crossed his eyes and—”

“Don't start telling stories,” I said.

“Did you or did you not lay down the Bomber with that right hand?”

“He wasn't the Bomber then,” I said. “He was just a kid.”

“Don't try to bog me down with technicalities, Pete. You should have seen him, Alex. What a mauler your uncle was!”

“You weren't even there,” I said.

“Technicalities,” said Tommy. He had been saving up to try to go back to school for a law degree.

“Can you teach me how to fight, Uncle Pete?”

“Well,” I said, “you better ask your mother about that.”

“All right!” Alex turned his attention back to the game, working the ball in his glove and squirming with excitement.

It was a crisp fall day in 1941, and even though parts of the world were already fighting, it seemed nothing could touch us. But things fell like dominoes for the boy shortly after that: Within a year he'd stand stricken at his father's graveside, his body erupting with change and the world turned blacker in his eyes.

I couldn't blame him for changing. Standing there looking down at the bristling young man working out his frustration on his old ball glove, I could see that he was a world away from me now. He was not five feet from me, sitting on the same sofa we'd roughed up listening to games on the radio while Tommy was alive, but I could not in my fumbling manner find a way to touch him.

I had made the mistake of telling Eileen that my favorite meal was meat loaf with mashed potatoes and lima beans. So now she made the same meal whenever I stopped by. Still, it was good, solid, heavy food, and tasty, and I was glad to sit down at the table to eat, especially after the grim and unsatisfying day I had suffered. I mumbled a terse but serviceable grace before the meal, adding a silent prayer afterward, more like an undirected birthday wish, that I could somehow bring back the easy feeling of family that I had known as a child. When Tommy and I were kids, we scrapped and tussled bloodily, as boys will do, and our father tarred the both of us regularly, but at the end of the day we were a family, tight and loyal. But here it was like a minefield of emotions that I did not feel I could navigate. Alex seemed ready to burst, as if he were holding his breath all the time. I knew that it was a problem of his age. The world was opening up for him; he was finding out about any number of things that he couldn't well share with his mother any more. It's a normal thing for a boy to go through, and in a regular family, the house holds together. But with Tommy gone—especially Tommy—I could see that pressures were building up and that something would have to give.

It was hardest for me to judge how I should act toward Eileen. Tommy had been our connection, and with him gone, I had a slippery feeling that somehow things were improper. I continued on the same way I always had, or so it seemed to me, but I had more and more come to feel that I was missing something that everyone else could see. Early on in life, I had skipped out on the lessons in social grace and etiquette, and now I was a rube, a laughing-stock. It could be that I was just generally uncomfortable in my own skin. Had I always been?

I could see that Alex was in a big rush to get away, though he clamped down on his squirming well. He ate quickly, smart enough to head off any objections by wolfing down a hearty portion of food. He had lately taken on an odd smell, with all the chemicals in his body churning and roiling, and this, too, was hard for me to handle. It would have been better for the boy to have a father or some other older man that he could trust to help him through this part of his life, someone to show him the ropes of shaving and showering and talking to the girls. But how was I to be of any help, when my own life and history had become such a botched affair? I ate slowly and chewed thoroughly, rolling the salty gravy over my tongue to get all the flavor I could out of every bite. We ate for a time as if famished, and an uncomfortable silence grew.

“Well, it's a year this week,” said Eileen finally, “since Tommy died over there.”

“Mother,” said Alex, “we shouldn't talk about it during dinner.”

I swallowed my words.
If she wants to talk about it,
I thought,
she can talk about it.

“I think that's just silly, Alex. If we don't talk about him, who will?” Eileen's voice seemed too young for her thirty-three years, almost girlish, and I noted that it wasn't the kind of voice that could keep a boy of that age in line.

“What I meant was, it's not a good thing to talk about while we're eating. It's not good to talk about dead people for dinner conversation.” Alex's hairless cheeks blushed livid red.

“Listen, son,” I said. “It's your mother's house, and I guess she can talk about what she wants. When you get to be in charge, then you can talk about whatever suits you.”

“I'm not your son,” muttered Alex. He didn't meet my eye.

“That's right,” I said. “Because if you were my son, you wouldn't be talking to me that way. And if I know your father, if I know Tommy, if he was here he'd slap you out of that chair.”

Alex said nothing but let his eyes focus somewhere beyond the remainder of his food. He gripped his bread and worked his jaws. He seemed about to burst or run.

“You're not the only one who's lost a father, boy. At least you can be proud of the way Tommy went out. Not like your grampa, hung himself like a coward. Too young to remember how that was? Or is that another thing we can't talk about at the table?”

Silence.

Since I had opened my mouth, I felt like I had to go on, and I tried to angle my approach. “As long as you're still eating food at your mother's table,” I told him, “you'll show her some respect. Do you think you really want to act like the punks I see every day down on the corner? You better think long and hard about it. You haven't got much family left to be careless with.”

Alex swallowed his anger and slowly composed himself. He pulled another bite from the dry bread and worked it down his throat. Without looking at Eileen, he said, “May I be excused? I've got to get down to the field while it's still light out.”

“Drink your milk and you can go,” said Eileen.

Alex sucked down the last of his milk and turned away from the table with his eyes averted. He stopped at the foot of the stairs to grab his ball and glove and hurried out the front door.

I wiped the gravy from my plate slowly and said nothing. I chewed the thick bread and tried to think what to do. It was plain to me that the boy needed a man around the house, someone hard enough to keep him straight. I wondered if my weekly visits were keeping Eileen from meeting another man. Tommy, I knew, would not have waited a year before stepping out. And Eileen was shaped pretty well, she laughed easily, kept a clean house. There was no reason for her to grow old alone, though of course most of the eligible men were caught up by the war. I thought also of how much simpler my life would be if I didn't have to worry so much about Eileen and the boy. As I kept working at the food and my plate came clean, I knew I'd have to say something.

“Maybe it's bothering him that I'm over here so much,” I said.

“Oh, no! You're practically the only family we've got,” said Eileen. “It's good for him to spend time with you instead of going around with those hoodlum friends of his.”

“Every time I come over here he runs out the door.”

“He's crazy about baseball.”

“Maybe.” Alex was not on the short list of those who seemed to enjoy my company. Offhand I could think of only two for the list: Eileen and Bobby—and Bobby, I thought, was in the same boat as me, at least around the precinct houses. I tried to think of a way to ease out of the house without hurting Eileen's feelings, but nothing came to me.
Maybe,
I thought,
I should think of how Bobby would weasel away.

“Pete, let's do something,” she said abruptly. “It's been a year. Let's go out and do something to celebrate that it's been a year and we're doing okay.”

“What do you mean, go out? You mean like boozing it up?”

“No! I mean let's go dancing. How long has it been since you've cut a rug? It's been ages. Honestly, I haven't been in ages.”

“You know I'm no good as a dancer.” I felt heat rise quickly over my chest.

“Nonsense. The last time you danced with me was at that wedding, that Polish girl, do you remember? Your neighbor? I think she would rather have married you than that little clerk. She must have been in love with you and Tommy, growing up across the street.”

“I don't remember,” I said.

“And don't worry about anybody seeing us. My friend Sally told me about a place up in Mount Clemens where her husband takes her. I'll go change, and we'll run out just for a little bit.” She pushed her chair away from the table. “We'll just leave the dishes for tomorrow.” She turned from the table and hurried to her room to change.

I felt the dropping feeling again. It was easy to see that men ran most things in the world—we kept most of the money for ourselves, and we owned most everything—but in the little things, the day-to-day things, women had the advantage because they were better at
talking
than men. It was like boxing. If you were good at it, if you'd spent years in the gym, sparring and scrapping, you got so you could put your fist on a man's chin. You got so you could weave and duck without a thought. In a household, the little things got settled with talk. The women had all been raised up talking, just sitting and talking, and it gave them the instincts to duck and bob in a conversation, so that they could slip in a punch and be gone before you could do anything about it. Long talk always made my skull crawl, and if there were too many characters or if the story was too complicated, like in a book, I couldn't keep everything straight. I pushed myself quietly from the table and walked toward the door. In the usual place, inside a cookie tin atop the old china cabinet, I placed two folded twenty-dollar bills. I picked up my hat and held it, scratching my head. Then I pushed the screen door open and winced as the spring squealed.

I slipped out onto the wood porch and tried to keep my big shoes from clumping. Could I just sneak away? My heart pumped thick sludge in my chest. I scratched at the back of my head and around my neck and tried frantically to think of something. After working through all the legitimate excuses and all the far-fetched ones, I realized that I could not bear to crush Eileen any more than she had already been crushed. And not especially after driving her son from her house. It was only a little something to pay, an hour or two or three of discomfort and embarrassment, to ease her mind a little. She deserved it, if anyone did.

So I sat on the gliding rocker and tried not to think about how awkward it would be. I tried not to think about anything. The sun was getting low and hung just over the rows of houses and businesses to the west across Campau, glowing through the haze kicked up by the auto factories out that way. A breeze came through now and again, cooled my cheek, and drew a bit of the heat out of my unbuttoned jacket. I turned toward the door and strained to hear Eileen, but my eye fell on something out of place. On the far side of the wide porch, tucked under a wicker footstool, lay Alex's tattered ball glove.

I lifted myself and felt my knees flutter as I crossed the porch to the glove. I scanned the area quickly but saw no sign of Alex. From the placement of the glove, I could trace the steps he had taken across the porch, but it was impossible to tell where he might have gone. He might have run off in any direction. He might have turned down the alley next to the house and holed up in the garage. He might have been watching from a bush or from the window of a house across the street, or, for all I knew, he might have arranged to meet a girl somewhere. This last was too hopeful, I knew. The anger I felt stewing in the boy wasn't the kind of emotion you'd have if you were thinking of meeting up with a girl, if I could remember well enough.

Voices carried from nearby houses, laughter and table talk, squeals of babies. I heard the thump of a big woman beating a rug across the street and saw the puff of pale dust rise up with each stroke. On Campau the cars rolled up from downtown, full of tired laborers heading home from their day of backbreaking work. An old, old woman tended the roses that grew in front of her porch down the street, and it seemed that I could hear the gentle clipping of her scissors. Though I had not traveled much, I could imagine that it was pretty much the same the world over. In the evening like this, folks would be eating and tending to things, settling in for the coming night. It worked me over somehow, and I felt like I could get choked up just knowing how the world had to go on, knowing that you couldn't ever escape. With all that I had seen and lost myself, I wasn't sure that I could ever bear to have a child of my own in the world. I looked up to the sky and tried to picture how it would feel to worry about bombers dropping death down onto my own city, down onto my family.