Nebula Awards Showcase 2019

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  Because Suze is also Eddie’s friend, I didn’t tell her about the day Eddie Mackey entered the world of my grandfather and me. At age six, it was a dark calamity.

  I thought at the time that perhaps my grandfather was dropping by to visit relatives. But I’ve come to realize that an encounter with Eddie and me was why he was wandering along D Street that afternoon.

  Eddie was trying to get my attention by stepping on my heels as we walked. Back then, I thought my grandfather didn’t understand the situation. I see now that he read us completely and chose for his own reasons to regard us as friends.

  Grasping each of us by a shoulder (no sissy holding hands with him), he guided us across the street while talking to Eddie. “So Mackey’s the name? There’s a Joe Mackey, played baseball with my boys.” He gave a theatrical pause and stared like something had just occurred to him. “That would be your father?”

  Eddie nodded a bit hesitantly. I understand now that he hardly ever saw his old man, what with the guy’s time in prison and sobering up in hospitals.

  “And from the looks of you, I’ll lay money you play ball yourself.” And my grandfather was off talking about Eddie and the accomplishments he’d just invented for this kid he was maybe seeing for the first time. Eddie gave a little smile, which I’d never seen him do.

  The Millionaire Motorman said, “I well remember your grandmother, Eileen Mackey. She spoke to saints and they listened. You are a child of a magic line.” Then he poked Eddie in the stomach and asked him about his grandmother and how she was.

  The hard-eyed kid turned into a giggling little boy as my grandfather bought us not just lollipops but all-day suckers, with extra ones to stick in our pockets. And I remember my disappointment at having to share him with my enemy.

  The day after the one with my grandfather changed Eddie’s life and mine.

  We were in class ignoring each other. The nun who taught first grade also taught kindergarten in the same room and switched from the one to the other and back again. She’d pull Lithuanian and American kids through Dick, Jane, and Sally in English one minute and teach Lithuanian songs to children even smaller than I was the next.

  Was she a good teacher? Probably. But overworked. She was nice to me, ignored my trouble with writing words because of how I could talk.

  That afternoon, without warning though our teacher must have known, a knock came at the door. She opened it and into the classroom strode Sister Superior with an even more terrible expression on her face than usual. With her were three boys and three girls, all in tears. Thus began a nightmare.

  These were older students, nine years old—ten, even! The girls were dressed in the boys’ coats and pants. And the boys were all in dresses—total humiliation! Sister Superior told us that they were being punished because the boys had been peeking into the girls’ bathroom window and the girls had found this funny and they’d all been laughing when they were caught.

  I understood none of this, but God, It seemed, was quite angry. They all had to say how sorry they were and then were herded sobbing out of the room and down the hall to be shown to every class.

  As they left, I realized one of the boys was Joey Mackey. I glanced around and saw Eddie staring after his brother with tears in his eyes. He turned, saw me watching him cry, and shot me an angry look. I worried about after school.

  But when that came, Joey Mackey and the ones caught with him, now back in their own clothes, were getting jeered at and punched by kids even older than they were. Eddie, a loyal little brother, walked with Joey, tried to put his arm around him, was shaken off but stared defiantly at the world.

  That night, I had dark dreams. In one I saw myself in a dress with arrows sticking out of me. I’d seen a statue full of arrows in church and had thought the loincloth, which was all the saint wore, was a dress.

  Then I was in a hall in my school. Students, priests, and nuns all around me pointed and laughed. I realized I was naked.

  Awake, I kept getting reminded of the dreams. On a living room wall in our apartment was a double photo of my mother as Viola in a production of Twelfth Night. In one shot she was dressed as a man. In the other she was a woman.

  Joey Mackey didn’t come back to St. Peter’s. Eddie was very quiet and we avoided each other. My dreams began to fade.

  A few days later on my way home from school, I saw the Mackey brothers on the other side of D Street. Joey crossed with a scary smile. Eddie followed him, looking unhappy.

  I froze where I was. Then, in my mind, I heard the words my grandmother taught me. I whispered “Open and open the door that is locked,” and stumbled over a couple of the old words. But suddenly I was inside Joey, feeling the anger flowing through him. He wanted to smash someone and I saw myself, small and scared, and realized I saw this through his eyes. Then I remembered him standing in tears, wearing a dress. He caught my memory and froze. This was his nightmare. Rage turned to fear. Joey backed away fast, turned, and ran. Eddie hesitated then followed his brother.

  That Saturday, I was playing by myself in the open space outside my building. A waterlogged copy of the Boston American was my home plate. I tossed a stone up in the air, swung the blessed baseball bat and missed it repeatedly.

  The bat had taken lots of wear. There was a crack along its barrel. Around me, women hung their wash on clotheslines in a chain-link-fenced area. Men headed to the bars and a great roiling mass of kids played, screamed, teased, punched, cried.

  Suddenly, I saw Eddie angry and coming at me. I backed halfway up the front steps of my building whispering, “Open and open” and the rest of it.

  Then I was in his head, saw myself, bat in hand, felt his anger and bewilderment. He’d tried to be friends by making me tough like Joey had done with him. He’d thought his brother was a giant until I somehow made Joey back down. Now Joey had run away from home.

  Eddie was grief-crazed but brave. He hurled himself at me then realized I was inside him and scarier even than Sister Superior.

  I had my own fear and anger to deal with. When his sneakers hit the bottom step, I swung my bat and caught him just above his right eye.

  The flimsy bat broke but Eddie staggered backward and blood trickled from his forehead. He touched it and saw blood on his hand. I lost contact as he ran away.

  Soon after this, my mother appeared. She had seen a boy run past her, bleeding. With no idea of what had happened, she was horrified. I was grabbed and hauled up to the apartment before harm could befall me. The bat got left behind.

  She told my father, “It was awful: a little boy with blood streaming down his face.” She repeated the story on the phone to her mother and sisters. Never did it occur to her that I might have done the deed.

  I worried that she’d find out, but her contacts with people in the Projects were tenuous. And Eddie, years later, explained all the reasons why his mother had no interest in bringing her family to the attention of the authorities.

  My grandmother was another matter. A few days later, she met me coming out of school and we walked amid kids and talked baseball.

  Eddie, very subdued and with a bandage on his forehead, tried to avoid looking my way.

  My grandmother asked if I was practicing with the bat.

  “It broke,” I said. Just that, but something in my voice, or my involuntary glance at Eddie and her own uncanny instinct, told her more. Eddie’s return gaze was miserable, like we’d been friends and weren’t now. As at the parade, I believe my grandmother saw the shape of all that had passed between us.

  She didn’t get angry, just looked at me and nodded her understanding. “You learned all that poor bat could teach you,” she said. Her smile was a bit sad.

  When Eddie turned toward his building, she stopped me and went to him, put her hands on his shoulders. I thought he’d pull away from her but she whispered something and hugged him and he held still. She asked after hi
s mother and grandmother, said he was a fine boy. His eyes teared and he ducked to hide that.

  She summoned me over. Neither of us wanted to face the other. My grandmother made us shake hands. Even without magic, I felt his awe as he stared at her.

  “You’re neither of you ordinary boys. Each will need the other,” she told us.

  Before he went home, she kissed him and said, “You have a fine spirit. I’ll visit you and your mother.” He walked away glancing back at her.

  When he was gone, she put her arm around my shoulders and said, “You should be friends with Eddie. He isn’t well cared for.”

  But I felt cheated by her paying attention to him. It was like he had stolen both my grandparents from me.

  Part Three: Dreams in the Night

  Shortly after that, my family moved from D Street to a leafy neighborhood in Dorchester where we had a backyard and all the parks had baseball diamonds. I saw our move as a miracle caused by my slugging Eddie. My life got better. Sadly, I forgot any Lithuanian I may have known, but the saints in the huge church we went to never looked my way.

  Once in a while over the years I would dream of a streetcar all lighted up and rolling through the night. And the Millionaire Motorman at the controls smiled in my direction. Or I’d see a young girl walking a rocky road beside a gray sea and wake up remembering my grandmother.

  Looking back, I connect those dreams with Eddie Mackey.

  Many things changed. When I was nine, my grandmother died and I cried my eyes out. A few years later, my grandfather, who’d become quite distant, disappeared back to Ireland where he died.

  In time I found out I was gay, drank illegally, went to college, had boyfriends, did drugs, and moved to Manhattan. A quarter-century and more since I’d last seen Eddie, I was writing plays that got readings but not productions. For money I taught Drama Lit at the New School and worked the door at Manland Disco on Christopher Street.

  My ability to overawe belligerent customers despite my size gave me a certain cred. But the knowledge lurked that I was misusing my grandmother’s gift.

  In the wake of our affair, Steve/Suze and I remained fast friends. One night, she insisted there was a show I needed to see and took me to a small, worn-down theater way gone on the Hudson Waterfront. Sometimes it was a shadow play with silhouette figures. Sometimes it was actors in spotlights being sinister pantomime whores and street toughs.

  Lenya sang about Mack The Knife on a scratchy old record while at stage-left, a male hand held a stiletto to a silhouette woman’s throat. A shadow dog leaped for the hand but its teeth snapped shut on nothing. The silhouette woman took that opportunity to escape into the dark.

  Stage right, under a street lamp, was a guy hiding the blade in his jacket. The silhouette woman saw him and drew back. The guy stepped forward, hands stuck in his front pockets, Mack the Knife with a South Boston strut and a smile on his face that I recognized. It was the same one Eddie wore when he stepped on my heels.

  There were more silhouettes and sinister moments. But once I saw Eddie, I paid attention to nothing else.

  After the show, he stepped out the stage door into a back alley. In an instant, he spotted me waiting and asked in the thickest of Boston accents, “Why are you hiding in the dark?”

  We hugged, which surprised me as I did it. Over the years, I’d mostly thought about Eddie when I wrote him into scenes as a mean kid, a minor devil.

  Now with a Brando-like dinged nose and intense eyes, he was compelling. “They told me you were in this town and for once they were right,” he said. This time the voice had only the faintest residue of Boston.

  Suze had set this up at Eddie’s request. We three and a few people from the show stopped at a waterfront bar where hard-boiled eggs were the only solid food.

  I filled in my life since we’d last seen each other. Words spilled out of Eddie. He said, “You need to talk after you do pantomime.” He’d already appeared in a couple of Off-Off-Broadway shows that weren’t much reviewed.

  “With ’Nam after a two-year hitch, you’re entitled to be crazy if you made it back,” he said. “I did some rehab out in California. But there’s no therapy like acting. I ate it up.”

  Eddie was glad to find me. Especially since Suze had let him know my latest romance had moved out of my under-heated apartment on Avenue B. Suddenly, it was Eddie and me.

  Late one night, we lay stoned on the busted furniture, listening to the fire and police sirens, someone screaming on a roof. And he said, “I envied you your family. Your parents at the sight of a little blood—not even your blood—moved out of D Street and found a much nicer place to live. Great people! When I was maybe eight, your grandfather told me they were actors. Until then I never knew the figures on TV were actual people.”

  “Yours wasn’t like my family with a father who couldn’t have picked me out of a police line-up and a mess of a mother who’d been raised by a professional informant. Tell people you grew up in D Street and they stare at you like you sang with the Pogues and ran guns for the IRA.

  “I lived in that hellhole for another fourteen years as the Projects went down the toilet. Vietnam saved me. “My father’s dead, my mother’s drinking herself to death, my brother’s disappeared.”

  I gave a questioning look at the mention of Joey.

  “After the incident with you, he ran away, kept doing that, got institutionalized, got out, and vanished.”

  I winced and he chuckled. “Believe me, I understand why you did it. Seeing him come apart made me crazed.”

  He shook his head, stared off. Some years later, I saw the same action and glance when he starred in a revival of Eugene O’Neil’s The Iceman Cometh.

  We talked about my grandparents and I found he’d thought about them more than I had. Eddie said, “I’ll never forget them. Your grandmother was a magic woman. My own grandmother, Eileen Mackey, had sinister magic. I think she used it on my mother and Joey. I hated her. Your grandfather knew Eileen, talked about her that time he bought us lollipops.”

  I told him, “When my grandmother died, one of my uncles talked to me about his mother and said, ‘There would be a moment when you were a kid where she’d give a look that said, “You are as good now as you’ll get to be and that will be enough for you to survive.”

  I looked up and Eddie had tears in his eyes. Real ones, I think. We got it on that night. But it was curiosity and neither knowing anyone like the other that drove us. Our relationship was a narrow, rocky path.

  A few times back then I had wonderful dreams about my grandparents and thought it was because Eddie had jogged my memory.

  One night I read him a McGabber I’d just written.

  “My grandparents were born in the nineteenth century and grew up on the bleak, remote Aran Islands with Gaelic as their first language. I don’t remember them speaking to each other all that much.

  “But when they’d be talking in English about someone who was misbehaving and remembered I was present, they’d slip into their first language, laughing and bright-eyed. It’s the only time I remember them being close. Maybe it was a reminder of their lives when they were young. Even now when I hear Gaelic, I connect it with inappropriate gossip.

  “Last year I was invited onto a radio show about Irish writers, was asked about my granduncles Liam and Tom, both of whom wrote. What I talked about mostly was their sister, my grandmother, this lady I’d loved as a child.

  “In the 1930s, her brother Tom became an editor of the Daily Worker, the New York Communist newspaper. Her other brother, Liam O’Flaherty, is better known. His novel The Informer was made into a famous movie and a couple of not-so-famous ones. In his time he was a welcome figure in the Soviet Union.

  “We had Liam’s collected short stories around the house. One that intrigued me later when I began writing was about a boy, clearly himself, living in those bleak islands. Then hi
s older sister returns from America to visit her family. And she is a magic creature for the boy who has not yet ventured away from home. She touches and twists her younger brother’s imagination, makes him long for the wider world.

  “And her influence didn’t stop then. There’s a family legend involving the three of them and the Palmer Raids. After World War One, Palmer, the U.S. Attorney General, believed that communists had infiltrated the USA during the war to organize a revolution. His raiders traveled everywhere hunting commies.

  “They got to Boston where her brothers Tom and Liam, a pair of Reds, were crashing at their sister’s place. Somehow my grandmother barred the way, possibly cast a spell on the raiders long enough that her brothers got out the windows, onto the fire escape and away.”

  Eddie listened, fascinated. When I finished, he applauded and said, “My ambition is to play a rogue who has a bit of magic and a smile. I’ll use a big dose of our grandfather.”

  Before I could ask him what this “our” was about, he said, “That old guy had charm I’ve never seen anyone come close to touching, onstage or off. But could his wife or anyone else but small boys really trust him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In your McGabber, how did the authorities know the location of the red brothers?”

  “Anonymous informers, the Irish curse,” I said. “Kind of ironic: Liam is mainly remembered for writing a novel about an informer.”

  “Maybe not so anonymous. When the Millionaire Motorman said about Eileen Mackey, ‘She spoke to saints and they listened,’ he invented as lilting a euphemism for, ‘police stooge’ as anyone ever has.

  “My family had its stories, too. In them grandmother Mackey snitched for the cops. She had the power to pull secrets out of any man living or dead. Especially a man eight years younger than his wife.”

  My grandfather was that much younger than my grandmother. It had occurred to me that, like her brothers, he’d been captivated by this woman back from America.

  “Unfaithful, maybe,” I said. “But turning relatives in? That wasn’t him.”