Shades of Eva (10 page)

All of that was almost manageable, but the
next thing she said was right up there in the clouds. “I also know
what you and Baby Elmer were supposed to do. That poem of your
mother’s isn’t quite complete, you know. There is another line or
two.”

There always seemed to be another line.
Amelia repeated the verses I’d recited to her: 

Two sons born in insane times—

Similar in every feature.

One thinks and dreams of things unknown.

One dies and returns a
creature.
 

And then she added,  

But, babies don’t die when they are
taken.

They lay still, but they reawaken.

Father and brother they will slay,

And burn this place amidst I
lay!
 

There it was: a fraternal, predestined
vengeance by Eva’s two sons! A father and a brother slayed—and I’d
forgotten it.

There was an awkward, tension-mounting
silence in that room as Amelia finished reciting that old,
half-forgotten poem. She waited for a reaction, waited for the
answer that almost never came, as if hearing those extra lines was
supposed to fan some fire in me. All it sparked was another sharp
twinge of pain in my ribs. My heart felt like someone had just put
a blood pressure cuff around it and was squeezing the hell out of
it. My ears were starting to ring, and the congregation of voices
in my head was starting to hum again, and giggle even, as they
were, no doubt, devising their next collective admonishment.

“I believe Ully and his friend killed your
brother, and in so many ways, they killed your mother, too! They
shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”

I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say
because I didn’t feel anything for anyone back home. I didn’t feel
much anything at all that night except pain, and a good bit of
thirst.

I stared hard at Amelia. She was offering me
a chance at vengeance, or something like it, which probably had
another name. Maybe it was punishment. She was virtually handing me
the name of this killer friend of Ully’s, this rapist, but all I
felt was apathy.

It had been a long time since I thought
about Mom, truly thought about her, so long that it was hard to get
a sense of her as a person anymore—as a mother even—as anyone much
more than a simple word: Mom. Had I fallen so far as to have robbed
my mother of her maternity, and dare I say, her humanity? Had I
punished her for dying young? Had I convicted her for being late to
the toolshed when I should’ve never been there in the first place?
Had I executed my mother by forgetting about her? Was I, even if it
wasn’t the most active form of killing, a murderer, just like she
once said that I was if I took my father’s side of things?

All I could do was to shut my eyes and shut
Amelia out.

I fell into a shallow, drug-induced,
poem-induced sleep again, and when I opened my eyes once more, I
was staring down the barrel of Amelia’s Beretta. 

“I want you to reconsider,” Amelia said,
giving me a look of rueful indignation as she tapped the muzzle of
her gun to my forehead, and then pulled its slide back.

I would have jumped backward, but I was
frozen. The slide made that loud locking sound; the kind of sound
that gets your attention in a quiet room in a very visceral way,
much like the unexpected roar of a lion might get your hair up on a
quiet night in the savannah.

Amelia only smiled that coy smile of hers
and pressed the pistol a little deeper into the aching flesh of my
brow. I thought for a moment she was going to shoot me for being so
evasive, for being so apathetic. I thought, then, that maybe this
was her way of coercing the hometown kid to get his ass back home.
I could feel her depressing the trigger, and as she did so I closed
my eyes, as was my habit when someone held a gun to my head and
began to pull a trigger.

Funny how someone could habituate to such a
thing—but I had. For a moment, I wondered just why that could
be.

I wondered until I heard the trigger
snap.

My head snapped reflexively to one side as a
click resonated in the room. I opened my eyes and then I heard
Amelia laugh.

Who the hell shows up out of nowhere and
pretends to shoot you in the fucking head because you can’t quite
see the forest for the trees? And, amazingly, I came to an answer.
Fathers! Fathers, I thought, recoiling at that familiar, lucky
click of an unspent round. Fathers do just that!

***

Shadow Journal entry

August 13, 1995

Amelia put a gun to my head and pulled the
trigger. It reminded me of a time when Dad did the same thing to
me. Amelia’s little taunting gesture left me shaken, though I had
pride enough not to admit it. But then again, why wouldn’t I admit
it? Why couldn’t I express my fear? It was as if I was
five-years-old all over again and mute as a clam. She asked me to
tell her what I was feeling, but somehow I couldn’t. I couldn’t
express myself, and I didn’t know why. But she knew. She knew a
child’s muted state was a reaction to being told to shut up! She’d
talked to Dad, and I think he reminded her of the game he used to
play with me. I think they call it Russian roulette.

But why? Why would he tell her about
that? Why would he tell her about the peacemaker?
 

Dad kept a pistol in one of the
drawers
of his toolbox. It was in the drawer labeled drill bits
and drives. He called the gun a peacemaker. Sometimes when Dad and
I would drink together, Dad liked to play a game. He would pull the
peacemaker out, insert a bullet into its chamber and spin the
cylinder. Then he’d hold the muzzle of the gun to his head and pull
the trigger, usually laughing as he did so. They call it Russian
roulette. I guess this was Amelia’s way of making me remember this
so-called game.

After Dad had his go-around, he’d hand the
gun to me and tell me to try it. So goes the etiquette of Russian
roulette. I was always too afraid to try, however, and I never did
take the gun.

Dad probably laughed as much at my revulsion
at this suicidal game as he ever did the sport of it. Luckily, the
peacemaker never went off. I never laughed because I didn’t see the
humor in such a game. I didn’t laugh at Amelia, either, pulling
such a stunt, and that seemed to add to her delight just as my
horror seemed to add to Dad’s.

But at least I was remembering.

You see, after my rape and before Dad left
us, I had lost my ability to speak. I’m not sure why I couldn’t
talk, or if I couldn’t talk because I wouldn’t talk. I just knew
that my silence aggravated Dad to no end. So did my newfound
avoidance of the toolshed.

Dad wasn’t content with any of that. He
believed that if someone fell off a horse, hit his head and lost
his memory, that the best way to regain that memory was to suffer a
similar blow to the head. That meant getting back on the horse. I
had, in effect, hit my head, except I hadn’t lost my memory—I’d
lost my voice—and it wasn’t a fall from a horse that took it. That
had something to do with a dead neighbor and a gun.

So off we went one last time. He said we
were going to have a drink like old times…that it was time to put a
stop to the game I’d been playing.

He turned the light on, slammed the shed
door, and sat me forcefully down on the spinning stool.  He
ordered me to sit there on my little island amidst the mash of bugs
on the floor, and withdrew the peacemaker from Drill Bits and
drives.

The police had confiscated the gun for a
short while, but when they determined Mom’s use of it was something
called a justifiable homicide, they returned it to Mom and Dad.
They were advised to destroy it. Mom didn’t want anything to do
with it, and told Dad to sell it. But against police advice, and
against Mom’s wishes, Dad put it right back where he had always
kept it—right back into the toolbox.

Despite my whimpering and my crazed look,
I’m sure, Dad put a bullet in and then spun the cylinder like
always, put the muzzle to his head, and then pulled the trigger. I
heard that usual lucky click I always heard with no bang, and then
waited for the laughing to begin. But Dad wasn’t laughing this
time. He re-chambered a bullet and spun again. This time he didn’t
put the barrel to his head—he put it to mine and said, “If you
don’t speak, I’m going to pull this fucking trigger. Now speak,
boy!”

I sat still and closed my eyes. “Speak!” he
yelled, pressing the barrel more firmly into my temple. “Tell me to
put this fucking gun down or I’m going to shoot you in the fucking
head!”

But I couldn’t speak. And then I heard the
pull of the hammer being drawn back. I closed my eyes, just as I
did when Amelia did this to me, and listened for the snap of the
firing pin. After five seconds or so of silence, I eased one eye
open to see if Dad had changed his mind. Just as I did, he pulled
the trigger.

 I lurched backward and fell off the
stool. There was no bang, just that resonant, lucky click as
always. Then the laughter came.

I looked up at Dad from my new seat amidst
the earwig carcasses, from about the same place where I had tossed
my cookies a few weeks prior, from where our neighbor’s blood stain
was still faintly apparent. Dad was still pointing the peacemaker
at me with one hand, but he had extended his other in some sort of
offering, and was now smiling.

I reached out to him, half-expecting him to
help me up, half expecting him to pull his hand away when I reached
for it as he sometimes did, and then noticed there was something in
the palm of that hand. I looked closely, trying to focus on what
that something was, and then noticed it was a bullet. It was the
bullet.

“You thought I’d risk shooting my only son?”
Dad said. “Or myself?” He continued on with his laughter as he
hefted me back onto the stool. His lessons always did seem to amuse
him.

Now I know that Dad never chambered a bullet
when we played his game. He only pretended to, which was just what
Amelia had done, for she reached out a hand to me after I opened my
eyes, and there, just like in Dad’s palm, was the ammo—this time in
the form of a magazine clip.

This was Dad’s way of teaching me to pay
attention, a test not of my trust in him, but of my ability to see
the tricks people can play on one another—to observe deception when
it arose. It was a test not unlike my birthday party drinking
test—a test I thought I had passed by drinking with Dad, but
hadn’t. The challenge wasn’t to drink. The challenge was to say no
and to control myself.

I was a follower, and a needy one at that,
and Dad knew it. I felt every shred of that neediness and that
misperception staring at that bullet in Dad’s hand. I felt a
similar neediness and self-contempt staring at Amelia’s smiling
face as she re-holstered her Beretta and reclaimed her seat in the
chair by the window and lit yet another cigarette.

Dad’s bullet-less version of Russian
roulette was a lesson in detail. Because I didn’t see the big
picture, I couldn’t see any of the little pictures: the missing
lock on the shed door, Mom’s Aunty Em-like pleas for me to come in,
and the way Fred Elm’s used to stare at us over the hedgerow into
our windows, the way he used to speak to me and to Mom with a
perverse smile and self-stimulatory flailing hand in his pocket,
and boot prints in the mud—boot prints that might mean a burglar
was in there, or a thief, or worse, a rapist, each a detail that
together should have formed a bigger picture, a sign more like it,
that flashed stay away in luminous, neon clarity.

I should have seen the bullet. I should have
sensed the lesson he was trying to teach me. I should have known
from where the bullets were coming, and to where they were flying,
and I should have refused the drink. I should’ve never anguished so
badly for attention, and I should have never entered that damnable
shed.

The game didn’t kick-start my speech. It did
nothing but add to the torment that was sustaining my silence.

We left the toolshed—me disappointed in
myself at having failed to see any pictures, big or small—and Dad
disappointed, most likely, that I was as mute as I ever was, that I
didn’t have the guts to trust him, or to pull the trigger on
myself, and worse—didn’t even understand the game.

All I can say to any of that now is to echo
the sentiment of a counselor I’d come to know. His name was Ben
Levantle. He was the brother of my mother’s rapist. Ben would
listen to these strange stories and bazaar challenges for two days,
and he’d take the bitterness of the fruit that was my father’s
lessons and dispel them with five simple words: You were just a
boy!

But were those words enough to dispel the
grief? Words are never quite enough to get you to mourning.
Grieving takes time, and in that time there must be action. It’s
action that brings about mourning, Amelia would say, not words, and
I think Amelia knew that all too well. 

Mom had been taken to Coastal State
for evaluation after shooting Fred Elms. I guess she’d shot him
something like thirty times, and cut him up to boot like he was the
Sunday salmon.

It was an overkill to say the least—but she
never once shot Elms in the face, or cut him there. It was as if
the mask he wore had offended her, as if she wanted police—and
everyone else—to see the face he tried to hide, to recognize the
monster Fred Elms truly was.

It made me think of Amelia’s little stunt
she’d just pulled, withdrawing her sidearm, pointing it directly at
my face, and then pulling the trigger. Maybe there was something
Amelia wanted people to see about me, too. Maybe there was
something shameful on my face that needed exposing. Maybe that’s
why I lost my voice as a child; maybe that’s why I hid all my life,
why I rode the rails to nowhere. There was something in my eyes
that needed exposing.