Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  “They were raped by Israeli soldiers,” Annie said, as we went upstairs. “That’s what’s with them, okay? Not just once. Dozens of times. So they don’t really like men that much. I was explaining to them that you were all right. That you weren’t going to hurt them.”

  “Holy cow,” I said. “Why were they raped?”

  “What do you mean, why?” asked Annie. “Is there ever a reason for that kind of thing?” She stopped on the stairs and faced me. Her lips were set in a tight line, small wrinkles of displeasure forming fissures around her mouth. For a moment she looked about forty years old.

  “I guess not,” I said. I almost said Sorry, but something in me wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t have anything to apologize for. I wasn’t a rapist. I was only sixteen years old. But my belly quivered with nervousness, and suddenly I wished very much that I hadn’t come.

  Annie’s apartment was a three-room affair, with a kitchen, bedroom, and small sitting area, and it was thoroughly permeated with an odor of grease and Middle Eastern spices that seemed to hover in a cloud over everything. It was the same smell that had clung to the letter she’d sent me.

  I unpacked my picnic basket full of food. “Grandpa has a girlfriend now,” I said. “She loves to cook.”

  “I see,” Annie sniffed.

  “Well, help yourself,” I said.

  “Does she love to cook, or is it that she’s supposed to cook?”

  “What?”

  “You know. Keep ’em in the kitchen? Barefoot and pregnant?”

  “All right. You know what?” I said. “This is fucking bullshit. You better get civil right now or I’m out of here. I don’t know what the hell your problem is, but I don’t deserve this.”

  “Look,” Annie said. She ran a hand over her head. “I don’t know what you expected in coming up here, but—”

  “Annie,” I said, thoroughly exasperated, “do not assume for one second that I want anything from you. I told you already. I miss you. I mean, I missed you. I wanted to see you, make sure you were all right, spend some time with you. Maybe I should go stay at a motel or something. Jesus. In fact, you know what? Fuck you. I’m leaving.”

  I picked up my bag and went toward the door.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “No. You wait.” I opened the door.

  “Please, Billy,” she said. “Just hang on. Just—”

  I stopped.

  She sat down and put her face in her hands. I sat next to her. Automatically my arm went up around her shoulders. She started like a colt.

  “Please don’t do that,” she said, but her voice was her old voice again—it was just a request, nothing more.

  “I’m sorry. Habit.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’m on your side,” I said. “I always have been.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s just…”

  “I know what it is,” I said.

  She was silent.

  “Annie, you don’t owe me anything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said. “I didn’t mean to come up here and make you remember a bunch of stuff you don’t want to think about. I just wanted to make sure you were all right. I’m proud of you. I really am. Jealous. Do you know how much I’d love to have an apartment of my own?”

  “You would?”

  “Yes, I really would.”

  “It gets really cold here,” she said. “I mean, even worse than this. It’s not as great as it looks.”

  “Well, you know what I mean,” I said.

  “Billy,” she said, “I’m glad to see you. I really am.”

  “Well, that’s more like it,” I said. “I’m glad to see you too.” Oh God, I thought. If only you knew.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I’ll show you around. We can go get a beer.”

  “We can get beer?”

  “You can drink younger here than you can at home,” she said. “You only have to be eighteen.”

  “We’re not eighteen, though.”

  “They never check,” she said. “Just act natural, and they won’t even bother you.”

  This struck me as a brilliant plan—a country in which teenagers could buy beer. America, which had already been faltering in my eyes as the country that would not publish me, slipped even lower on the scale in favor of Canada. We got dressed to go outside: long underwear, jeans, flannel shirt, sweater, winter jacket, scarf, hat, gloves, and two layers of socks under heavy boots. The sun was down, and when we emerged onto the street the cold hit me like a fist in the stomach. Annie was right. It had gotten even worse.

  “Pull your scarf over your nose,” Annie instructed me. “Breathe through it. Don’t breathe straight air. You’ll freeze your lungs.”

  I was nearly paralyzed. The temperature had plummeted a further twenty degrees or so in the short time since my arrival. I’d never imagined a cold like this was possible. It seeped through the cracks in my thermal armor and stung like hundreds of hornets. We walked rapidly to stay warm. Everyone else seemed to have the same idea. It was a Friday night, and the streets were filled with people, chattering in a melange of languages and striding briskly to and from bars, restaurants, clubs, and various darkened places that seemed to prefer discretion over advertising. I’d never heard French spoken before that day, but now it was everywhere. I thought it was a beautiful language, birdlike and airy even in this frigid weather—one expected the words to shatter in midair because of the cold. We passed two intoxicated men having an argument. They were bearded and large-bellied, the same sort of men one might see driving pickup trucks or tractors in Mannville, and it amused me greatly to hear them speaking this flowery tongue instead of western New York twang as they shouted, two potbellied and unshaven drunks insulting each other in the language of diplomats and kings.

  We arrived at a small place with an unpronounceable name. Annie ordered a pitcher of beer. It was red and dark and glorious, and all the more delicious because it was my first beer in a bar. We sipped it slowly.

  “Boreale Rousse,” said Annie. It was the name of the beer. She made me say it over and over until I was close enough to pronouncing it correctly to satisfy her: Bo-ray-ahl Roos, except she was doing something funny with her r’s that escaped me completely, swallowing them while they were still only halfway out of her mouth. It was a great trick, and as I drank another beer it seemed to become even more remarkable.

  “That’s just amazing,” I said. “Why does that make me so happy?”

  “Be careful,” she warned me. “This stuff is stronger than the beer at home.”

  “Let me ask you something else. Why did you cut off all your hair?”

  She shrugged, taking a large sip of beer. “Men,” she said simply. “There’s something about baldness that kind of makes you invisible. They don’t look at you, they don’t hassle you. I did it because I wanted to be invisible.”

  “Did you really get hassled all that much?”

  She looked at me in disgust, but it was no longer mixed with loathing; it was more pity for my ignorance, and the tiniest bit of amusement.

  “You will never understand in a million years,” she said.

  “Understand what?”

  “What it’s like to be a woman.”

  “Well,” I said, already a little drunk, “that’s because I’m a man.”

  “I know you’re a Mann.”

  “No, I mean a male.”

  “I was making a joke,” she said.

  I threw my head back and laughed uproariously.

  “All right,” she said, and now she was actually smiling. “I think we’ve had enough beer.”

  We went home, wrapped ourselves in blankets, and sat on the couch talking. There were perhaps ten thousand things I wanted to tell her, little details mostly. It was impossible to get them all out, and it was then I began to see that there was a segment of my life Annie had simply missed and would never understand, and that the same was true of me for her. But at least we were togethe
r again. We rubbed toes under the blanket. Words came more and more easily until we were talking freely and laughing; things began to seem more the way they had been and Annie began to seem more like Annie; and I realized I had passed a sort of test, although exactly when it had happened and of what it had consisted escaped me. We fell asleep with our legs entangled, sleeping like children, and late in the night she awoke and led me to her bed and snuggled in next to me.

  Once, three-quarters asleep, I thought I felt a hand stroking my hair, and a voice whispering, “You’re still my hero, Billy Mann.”

  But it was probably just a dream.

  The days were not quite as cold as the nights, so while Annie labored in the kitchen of the Palestinians, I wandered around and explored Montreal. The sheer magnificence of the city plunged me into a state of culture shock. Even the mailboxes, which were tall and thin and red, seemed fascinating. My first morning there, munching cold falafel that Annie’s Palestinians had given me, I headed down Sherbrooke to Mont Royal and listened to some hippies—at least I thought they were hippies, but I’d never seen hippies before and couldn’t be sure—bang on their drums in the park. Then I turned around and headed downtown, pausing to explore the ruins of a burned-out cathedral. A flock of pigeons exploded from their hiding place among the exposed rafters and scattered skyward. I watched them go, noticing that the sky was a deep blue and the sun was warming the city. The influence of France seemed to be everywhere, in the architecture and the food and the language; I felt as though I’d gotten on the bus in Mannville and arrived some hours later in Europe.

  It was an odd sensation, and I relished it thoroughly. I’d never been anywhere in my life. I realized with shame that I’d never even been to Buffalo, except to pass through it on the bus. I thought of my seventeen years of solitude and stagnation. No wonder I was such a lousy writer, I thought. I hadn’t done anything yet. I needed to meet new people, eat strange food, learn foreign languages, worship bizarre gods, if only to see what it felt like to do these things. The hunger to see more of the world was blooming in me like a ravenous flower, demanding to be fed. Compared with Montreal, Mannville seemed like a depressing backwater, its inhabitants a bunch of ignorant hicks in baseball caps that said CAT on them, who chewed tobacco incessantly and said “ain’t.” No great writers would ever come out of Mannville. I didn’t want to go home.

  Around noon I stopped in a little bakery and bought some mineral water and a few pastries. There were several small tables with chairs on the sidewalk, but they were all occupied, so I sat on the curb to eat my lunch. I was nearly done eating when I heard a great commotion in the distance. I perked my head up and listened. Whatever it was, it was coming closer. It sounded like hundreds of voices singing in unison, accompanied by the tramping of many feet. I stood up and brushed my hands on my jeans, looking down the street in the direction of the noise. Others around me had heard it too; the sidewalk was crowded with pedestrians, all of whom suddenly fell silent and paused to listen.

  Swinging into view around the corner I saw a line of men and women. They marched in unison, their arms swinging, bearing banners in French. I tried to pronounce the words on the banners to myself, but it was hopeless; they were protesting against something, or perhaps in favor of something, but I had no idea what it was. Another rank of people appeared behind the first one, bearing more French banners; they were followed by another rank, and another, and another, and soon the street was jammed with people marching and waving banners, passing only inches from me.

  Among the many experiences I’d never had in Mannville, seeing a protest was chief among them. Protests were something I read about in the papers, involving total strangers upset about something that had nothing to do with me, or so I thought—unemployment, or nuclear disarmament, or logging. But these people were right in front of my nose, not on the front page of the Megaphone. It was possible, I thought, that I was witnessing an event of historical significance. I began to grow excited. This was great fun, whatever it was. This was the sort of stuff I needed to see if I was to become a writer. This was real.

  There were hundreds of marchers, perhaps thousands, all singing the same song. The cement vibrated under the weight of their feet. All motor traffic had been forced from the street; I could have walked from sidewalk to sidewalk on the heads of the marchers, so dense were their numbers. The people sitting at the tables behind me stood up and began chattering to each other excitedly. One of them poked me in the ribs and said something in French.

  “What?” I said. I had to shout to be heard above the roar of voices.

  The man who’d poked me looked to be in his mid-forties. He had a thin, carefully curled mustache, and he wore a sort of beret tilted to one side. He was a very French-looking guy.

  “You don’t speak French!” he shouted.

  “No!”

  “Why you sing?”

  “What?”

  “Why you are singing?”

  “I wasn’t singing!” I said, but as soon as I said that, I realized I had been singing, in unison with the marchers. Their enthusiasm was infectious. I’d no idea what they were singing about, but whatever it was, I was highly in favor of it. It was the greatest cause in the world.

  “What is this about?” I said to the man.

  “Eh?”

  “What are they protesting?”

  “You don’ know?”

  “No! Tell me!”

  A crafty look came over his face. “You are American?” he asked.

  “Yes!”

  “I do not like Americans,” he said. “Not one bit do I like them.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “In fact, I hate Americans. You are all a bunch of drug-taking pigs.”

  “Well, hold on there,” I said.

  “But you I like,” the man went on. “And for that, I will tell you what it is about. It is a march in favor of a free Quebec.” The man had a strong French accent—he made his t’s into z’s, and he said “favair” instead of “favor.”

  “A free Quebec?”

  “You like Quebec?”

  “Oh yes! Very much!”

  “Do you love Quebec?”

  “I do!” I said. I was getting quite worked up; I could feel my heart pounding.

  “You are American but you love Quebec!”

  “I do love it!” I roared. “I love it more than anything!”

  “Then you must march!” the man screamed. “You must tell the world ’ow much you are loving Quebec!”

  “I will!” I shouted. “I’m gonna do it!”

  “Go! Go! March your brains out!” the man howled.

  I was nearly delirious with excitement. Without another word to the man, I threw myself out into the street and fell into step with the marchers. They opened their ranks briefly to admit me and then closed in again, and I found myself linked arm in arm with two burly men, each of whom were easily four inches taller than I was. They looked down at me briefly and gave me broad, toothy grins. I smiled back. I couldn’t understand the words of the song, but I could carry a tune, and I imitated the lyrics as best I could. My heart pumped madly and adrenaline coursed through my veins with the heat of molten lead. I’m protesting, I thought happily. I’m a demonstrator! If only Grandpa could see me now!

  We marched on for several blocks. I sang, I shouted, I took part. I knew nothing about the Canadian province of Quebec, but that didn’t matter. Freedom was a great thing, and if I could march for it anywhere, I would. Freedom was the underlying principle of America. It was what we fought wars for, usually.

  The streets were lined with people, but few of them were singing along; they seemed curious, but aloof, uninvolved.

  This gave me pause. Although I’d only been in Quebec a day, I’d already heard much about how strongly the French-speaking Canadians felt about their independence from the rest of Canada. It was the sort of subject about which it was impossible for Canadians to be ambivalent. Yet few of the bystanders, most of whom I assumed
to be natives, seemed moved by the marchers. In fact, one or two of them seemed to be jeering.

  “Free Quebec!” I shouted.

  “Fuck you, you faggot!” shouted a man from the sidewalk.

  Faggot? I thought.

  I looked around. Behind me, two women were carrying a banner. My French was atrocious, but I’d found that in the French language there were several words that matched the spelling of their English equivalents almost exactly, and in this way I was able to understand many of the signs I saw in shop windows. I’d been too excited to concentrate on reading the banners earlier, but it occurred to me now that perhaps this march was not, in fact, everything the very French-looking man had said it was.

  I mouthed the words on the banner silently to myself. One or two of them stood out. VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE, said one line. I’d read that somewhere before. It meant something like “Long live the difference,” which in turn meant that different things were good, that one should encourage diversity. Well, that was nothing radical; I was in favor of that too. But it seemed a strange thing to protest about. I read on.

  Suddenly my blood chilled. I’d recognized another word. It was HOMOSEXUALITÉ.

  I was not marching for a free Quebec. I was marching for gay rights.

  At the same moment, I realized that the gentlemen on my left and right had relinquished their grips on my arms. One of them had casually sneaked his arm around my waist; the other was holding my hand.

  I turned back to look at the crowd again. A leather-jacketed teen on the sidewalk was attracting a good bit of attention to himself by dancing around in a little circle with one limp wrist extended. Several of his friends stood around him, laughing and pointing at the marchers. At us. And near him, aimed directly at me at the moment I happened to look, was a television crew complete with camera, wide-angle lens pointing at myself and my two large companions. A heavily made-up man stood in front of the camera with a microphone. He was looking directly into my eyes.

  “Excuse me, guys,” I said to the men next to me, and I twisted out of their grasp and jumped onto the sidewalk. I wanted to run, but I tripped on someone’s foot and sprawled onto the cement. A hand grabbed me by the collar and hoisted me to my feet.