Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  Grandpa found a cigar box full of letters in the attic. He’d stuck it up there among the rafters after the news came that my father was dead, in an uncharacteristic gesture of denial; it was more his style to keep relics of Eddie in plain view, such as the copy of A Farewell to Arms, which still sat on my father’s desk and had not been moved since 1969.

  Somehow in my wanderings, I had failed to discover the box of letters myself. My hopes surged when I saw it, but it contained only a few items of interest. There were three letters written on thin blue military stationery and a postcard from Thailand. There was also a funny-looking necklace, a choker with hundreds of tiny white beads. This I unclasped and refastened around my neck. It fit snugly, as though it had been made for me. Then I turned my attention to the postcard.

  The front bore a picture of a man pulling a middle-aged couple in a rickshaw down a dirt road near what looked like a jungle. The man doing the pulling was small and brown and nearly naked, and the couple in the rickshaw were white and puffy-looking, like two fancy foreign pastries being delivered to a bakery. They wore excessive amounts of clothing and superior expressions on their faces. For some reason the picture revolted me. I turned it over and read:

  Dear Pop—Am in Thailand. Rode in one of these things yesterday. Fun but I felt sorry for the guy pulling it. See you in November. Love Eddie.

  That was exactly how I would have expected my father to feel—relishing the feeling of riding in a rickshaw for the first time, but hating it that someone had to pull him. I imagined him hopping out and insisting that the bewildered coolie ride instead, then trotting around the jungle roads of Thailand in his blue Air Force uniform with the tired little man in tow.

  The postcard was dated August 1969—it was likely that Eddie hadn’t yet met my mother, or at least that she wasn’t yet pregnant with me.

  The letters were dated October 1969, January 1970, and May 1970. During the interval between the first two, Eddie had come home and created me. It was even possible that as he wrote the last letter, he knew I was coming.

  I took the letters to my room and scanned through them. They were short, printed laboriously in cramped writing. The ink changed colors once or twice in each letter, suggesting that he wrote them in several sittings with different pens, and perhaps that it was difficult for him to put his thoughts on paper. I had every intention of reading them thoroughly, but I was too excited just then to do anything but scan them. First I wanted to find names. Any name at all would be a possible lead. I was looking first of all for the name Eliza, but it didn’t appear. Neither did Sky. He mentioned his base commander, which gave me some hope, but in the next sentence I read that he had been killed in a Jeep collision, so I forgot about him. It wasn’t until the end of the last letter that I saw another name, and my heart leaped up into my throat and pounded there insistently.

  You remember that guy Henry Hutchins I went to visit in Buffalo when I was home? Well, he got lucky. He got a million-dollar wound right in the ass. A sniper snuck up close to the base and managed to nail three of our guys before we got him. Henry was the first one of them. I guess he had just bent over to tie his shoe when the gook pulled the trigger. Bingo—he gets to go home for good.

  A clue.

  And Buffalo was only an hour or so away.

  The Hutchins’ home was one in a series of row houses in downtown Buffalo, all of them identical, separated from each other by only a few feet of dingy cement driveway. I grew claustrophobic just looking at them. Henry Hutchins himself explained to me that the entire neighborhood had been built by a tire factory for the purpose of housing its workers; it rented the homes to them at exorbitant rates, which they were just able to afford, thus ensuring that they would never be able to move somewhere else and work for another factory.

  “It’s an old system of exploitation,” Henry told me. “It started with the first factories in England back in the seventeen hundreds, right at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. That’s when people first perfected the art of taking advantage of each other. Before then it was serfdom, feudalism, peasants working their fingers to the bone for the lord of the manor until they dropped dead. Like the southern plantations with their slaves. Factories are just another kind of plantation, really, except they pay a little better. My family worked for the tire factory for three generations. When I came home from the war I bought the house. God knows why. I always hated it. Come on in. You look just like your dad, you know. But I’m sure you hear that a lot.”

  Hutchins was a small, balding man who spoke quietly but forcefully. He wore thick glasses, the lenses of which made his eyes look the size of half-dollars. We entered the house and came into a darkened living room.

  “This is my mother,” he said, indicating a white blur in one corner. I looked more closely and saw a very old woman sitting in a recliner, staring at me vacantly.

  “How do you do, ma’am,” I said.

  “She won’t answer,” Henry Hutchins said. “She has Alzheimer’s.” He confessed this in a whisper, as though afraid I would find it repulsive.

  “Who is that, Jacob?” asked the old woman, in a high, trembling voice.

  “I’m Henry,” said Henry. “This is Eddie Mann’s son, Billy, Mom. He came up from Mannville.” To me he said, “Jacob was my brother.”

  “Poor Eddie,” said the woman. “Is he here too?”

  “No, Mom,” said Henry. He indicated a couch to me and sat down opposite it. Then he stood up again. “I’m sorry. Manners. I don’t get a lot of visitors. Would you like some tea or something?”

  “Sure,” I said. Henry went into the kitchen and ran water into a kettle. I looked again at the old lady.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Are you a friend of Henry’s?”

  “I’m Eddie Mann’s son, Billy,” I said.

  “Poor Eddie,” she said. “Is he here too?”

  “No, Mom,” said Henry from the kitchen.

  “There’s a man in here, Jacob,” called his mother.

  “Okay, Mom,” said Henry. “Come on and take a nap.”

  “Am I tired?”

  “Yes,” said Henry. He led his mother from the chair into a bedroom at the rear of the house. I could hear him say, “Swallow it. Don’t spit it out. Good girl…Want some more water?”

  “No,” she said. A door shut and Henry reappeared with a tea tray.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “Don’t apologize.”

  “Company works her up. Everything confuses her now. Anyway.”

  “I hope this wasn’t a bad time,” I said.

  Hutchins dismissed this concern with a wave of his hand. “I’m glad to have her here and not in some home,” he said. “She doesn’t have much longer left. It’s pretty advanced.”

  He sat down and sipped his tea.

  “I presume you’re not just here to reminisce,” he said, getting down to business. “I don’t mean to sound rude, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of you. I was kind of skeptical when I got your phone call. I never knew Eddie had a son. But I’m sure you are who you say you are. Which means you must have been born after he was killed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which also means you never knew your father, if you’ll forgive me being so direct?”

  “No.”

  “How sad,” said Henry Hutchins. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, yeah, I guess I would have preferred to have him around. But I never knew him anyway. So it’s not like I knew I was missing anything.”

  “You’re a tough kid.”

  I smiled, but my smile was lost in the dimness of the house.

  “Did Eddie get married?” Henry looked doubtful, pursing his lips. “No, he didn’t,” he answered himself. “He never had time. Which means,” he said, a look of satisfied understanding coming over his mild features, “that you’re here to ask me some questions. Am I right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You sh
ould have been a detective.”

  “That’s what your father used to tell me,” said Hutchins. For the first time he smiled. “Which proves you are who you say you are. Not that you’d have a reason to lie. If you don’t mind my asking, who raised you?”

  “My grandfather.”

  “Eddie’s dad, you mean, or your mother’s?”

  “Eddie’s.”

  “Ahh,” said Hutchins. “I met your grandfather once. How is he?”

  “Sober,” I said.

  Hutchins nodded. “Not an easy chore,” he said. “I battled alcohol myself when I came home from the war. It nearly won. I’m glad to hear he stopped drinking.”

  “Yeah.” I was surprised—Hutchins didn’t look like my idea of an alcoholic. He was neat, composed, intelligent. For some ridiculous reason he struck me as too short to be a heavy drinker.

  “So,” he said. “What exactly would you like to know?”

  “I’m trying to find my mother,” I said. I’d intended to be a little less direct. There was something embarrassing about admitting to a stranger that my parentage was a mystery, but in the few minutes I’d known Hutchins, I’d come to trust him. It was easy to see how he and my father had become friends. And he himself had taken a risk in introducing his mother to me. We were baring our weaknesses to each other. I felt suddenly that I had a powerful ally in my quest.

  Hutchins smiled again. “An ancient story,” he said. “Young man in search of his origins. Yes. You want to find out who your mother was. Is she still alive? I mean, do you know that for sure?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I admitted. “I know her name, and I know what she looked like. That’s it.”

  “Tell me what it was.”

  “Eliza,” I said. “Or maybe Sky.”

  Hutchins closed his eyes.

  “Tall woman,” he said.

  “Yes!”

  “Strikingly beautiful. Long brown hair. An earth child. A hippie, as they used to say.”

  “You’ve met her.” A rush of elation surged through me. It was an effort to keep myself from flinging my teacup into the air and doing a little dance.

  “Yes,” said Hutchins. He opened his eyes and came back from whatever world he’d gone into. “I met her once.”

  “Only once?”

  “Don’t be disappointed,” he said. “It was a significant meeting.”

  “When was it?”

  “A party,” he said. “When was that, now, let me think…”

  “November of nineteen sixty-nine?” I suggested.

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” said Hutchins. “Yes, that’s right. We were home on leave.”

  “And Eddie came up here to visit you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was the party?” I produced a small notebook and a pen and wrote down the word party. I looked up to see Hutchins trying to conceal his amusement. “Just so I don’t forget,” I said sheepishly.

  “I’m not laughing at you,” he assured me. “It’s just that you’re so serious.”

  “It’s a big deal,” I said.

  “I understand. Do you know why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why you want to find her?”

  I was wordless. “I—well—why wouldn’t I?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m not implying you shouldn’t be looking. It’s just that some people would be content never knowing. Most people, I guess. Most people are too lazy to look this far for answers. They’d give up. But you Manns are not like most people, are you?”

  “No, we’re not,” I said, and I knew instinctively that I wouldn’t have to explain myself any further, because I could tell by the way he moved and spoke and how he looked at me knowingly through his spectacles that Henry Hutchins wasn’t like most people either.

  “Anyway,” he went on. “We were out on the town. It was a weekend, I remember, probably a Saturday. I was still drinking then, of course, and Eddie and I had a few slugs of booze under our belts. We were at a bar. Don’t bother trying to find it—it’s closed now. Fire. We were wearing our uniforms, which was unusual. We hated our uniforms.”

  “My father hated his uniform?”

  “Well, not hated. He was proud to serve his country. So was I. But things in Vietnam had gone pretty sour. And neither of us really liked taking orders. I think we had the idea we were staging some kind of protest, going out and boozing it up so everyone would see us and think, Look at those two clowns. Not a protest against the war—a protest against the military. Our own personal protest, for our own private cause.

  “A few people shouted insults at us on the street. They were hippies, I remember. I don’t know if you know this, but there were serious doubts in America about why we were in Vietnam in the first place. A lot of people had the idea that we were over there just butchering people left and right. That we enjoyed it. Hippies in particular hated us, which”—he chuckled—“always struck me as ironic since they supposedly stood for peace and love. Anyway. We were walking down the sidewalk, kinda tipsy, and feeling too good to get into a fight. These hippies were shouting at us from the other side of the street. We went into the bar without paying any attention to them. No, wait—Eddie flashed them a peace sign. We had a good laugh over that. That made them even angrier, and they followed us in, I remember. There were three or four of them. Four. Three men and one woman.”

  “What happened?”

  “They called us baby-killers,” he said. “Boy, was that a mistake. It was a blue-collar type of bar, and a lot of the patrons were former servicemen themselves, veterans of Korea and the Second World War. Older men. They had a particular understanding of war that wasn’t shared by these hippies. Most kids who had the leisure to grow their hair long and roam around the country came from families with lots of money, you know. They were able to afford college, and so they didn’t get drafted. Which, as you might guess, caused a great deal of animosity among those who couldn’t afford college. I couldn’t afford it either, not before the war. I went on the GI Bill after I got back. But the war was never a moral issue for the working class, at least not until later, when it was over and they had time to think about it. Back then they didn’t have a choice. You got called, you went. It’s always been that way. It wasn’t within their power to question the government. And if they had, they couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. They just would have been causing trouble. Rocking the boat. You follow me?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “People still trusted the government back then,” he said. “Although that was just starting to change. So we’re in this bar full of beefy ex-Army and Marine and Navy guys, factory workers, and these hippies are hassling us and they follow us in, and suddenly they look around and think to themselves, Oh shit, what have we walked into? Everyone in there had gotten quiet. And then there was this sudden explosion of people toward them.”

  “You mean they rushed them?”

  “Yeah. They were about to get their asses kicked.”

  “Jeez.”

  “And I hate to confess I thought they deserved it,” he said. “They had pushed me just a little too far. I kind of wanted to get in a few licks myself.”

  “You?”

  “I know I don’t look like the brawling type,” he said. “But I was a different man when I was drinking. Anyway. I turned to Eddie and was about to say, ‘Let’s get in on this,’ when I realized he wasn’t there.”

  “He left?”

  “No.” Hutchins laughed. “Somehow he was suddenly in the middle of the whole thing. He was trying to protect them.”

  “Protect the hippies?”

  “Exactly,” said Hutchins. “He was standing between the hippies and the guys who wanted to get at them. Which caused some confusion on both sides, as you might imagine.”

  “What was he thinking?”

  “He didn’t want to see them get beat up,” said Hutchins. “It was really as simple as that.”

  “Go on,”
I said.

  “Well, what happened next was the kind of thing you might see in a movie. Eddie actually gave a speech. Everyone just sort of stopped what they were doing because he had taken them all by surprise. The hippies were surprised that he was protecting them, and the bar guys were surprised too. And Eddie just stood there in the middle of them. He wasn’t as tall as you are, and I couldn’t see his head through all the people. I could just see his hands, because he was waving his arms around while he was talking.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “He was talking about peace,” said Henry Hutchins softly. “He didn’t want any more fighting. He hated fighting. Odd, really, considering how many people he probably killed as a pilot. But he told everyone that he and I were home on leave for only a little while longer, and he told them how good it was to be home again, because America was a peaceful place and to him it meant safety. He said that even though war was a horrible thing, and maybe the peaceniks had a point, just for that night he wanted everyone to forget about it and be friends. And he asked them to do that for our sake—mine and his. So that when we shipped back in-country we would have pleasant memories of home, and not of more fighting. I can’t say it as well as he did. He was really eloquent, you know, when he got going. He couldn’t write very well, but he could really sway people when he was in the mood.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Exactly what he wanted. Which I knew would happen as soon as he started talking. Once Eddie decided he was going to convince you of something, he kept at you until you were convinced, and it didn’t take him very long, either. What happened was he made them all shake hands.”