Bunny shrieked and rolled on her back. “You ought to see his wife,” she said, when she got control of herself. “All things considered, I think I’d rather feel up his butt than hers.” She shrieked again and then pulled me close, rubbing her forehead into mine. “Oh, I’m sorry, Martha. I just couldn’t help it.”
Eddie grinned grudgingly. He doesn’t like other people making jokes.
“Anyway,” said Bunny, “Martha won’t be with the Vernons long. Only till next Friday, when the judge hears our side of it.”
“Yeah,” said Eddie dully.
His tone worried me. “Do you know Judge Horner?” I asked. “I’ve heard he’s very fair.”
“Who told you that?”
“My social worker. And Reverend Vaughn.”
“He’s Martha’s new friend,” said Bunny. “The minister down at the Congo.”
“That fairy,” muttered Eddie.
“Hush!” snapped Bunny.
I pretended I didn’t hear. Eddie’s always calling everyone a fairy.
“We aren’t going to talk about it anymore,” said Bunny. “We aren’t going to let this stupid town spoil this beautiful day and this beautiful picnic.”
Eddie crawled over to the bank and pulled out another Hamms for himself and one for Bunny. “I guess you’re right,” he said, settling down on his back again. “There’s not much better than cold beer from a stream on a hot day.” He set the can in his teeth and lay back and started drinking.
“There’s not much better than a beautiful daughter,” said Bunny, petting my hair. She was feeling her beers by then, too, and her eyes got big and moist as she looked at me.
Presently, Eddie announced he was going down to see how the carp fishermen were doing. He took another beer out of the river and trudged away along the bank. Bunny watched him go. “I know you don’t believe me,” she said, “but he’s different. I can just feel it, I really can.”
“But that’s what you always say.”
“Oh, don’t argue. Maybe I always say it, but this time I mean it.”
“Doesn’t it make you feel strange, though—going through so many men? I mean, even here.” I swung my arm to indicate the picnic spot. “We’ve been out here with Wayne and Johnny and Lester.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” Bunny interrupted, grabbing my arm. “You’ll never guess who I came out here with.”
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“I can’t. Who?”
“Guess.”
“Mayor Krullke.”
“No!” She put her mouth to my ear. “Your daddy,” she whispered.
“Really?” I pulled away.
“Jeremiah P. Calhoun himself.” Bunny rolled over onto her stomach. “And what’s more, you’ll never guess what happened.”
“What?” I didn’t really want to play this game. I didn’t really want to know that much about my father, at least not at this point, with so many other things to worry about.
“Guess,” said Bunny.
“He proposed.”
“Better. We made you.”
“What? Right here?” I squirmed. It seemed wrong to be lying on top of the spot.
“Right here. God, was that a surprise.” Bunny stared up through the willow branches, off into the sky. “What a day.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear about it.”
“Sure you do,” said Bunny, looking at me again. “It’s about your daddy. Every girl wants to know about her daddy.”
“You told me there wasn’t anything to know.”
“Well, there isn’t, but you’re old enough to decide for yourself.” Bunny rolled over to face me and leaned up on her elbow. “It was when we were living in that little house on Trundle Street—62½ Trundle. We were the only half-a-house in Katydid. That was nice.” I picked a few pieces of dried grass out of Bunny’s hair. “Anyway, I was staying home, taking care of Tom—he would have been about six months old—and your father was bagging at the A&P.”
“He was a bagger?”
“You knew that.”
“I knew he worked at the A&P, but I thought he was an assistant manager or something.”
“Well, he was young. He would have moved up. Your father had a lot of questionable qualities, but he did know how to work hard when he had to.”
“A bagger?”
“Put it out of your mind. Anyway, he was working hard and I was always up all night with Tom, who was a colicky baby. It seemed like we’d gone for years without doing anything fun. So one Sunday morning—it was a beautiful day, like today, only later in the year—I suggested that we go on a picnic. Jerry wasn’t too crazy about the idea. I think he just wanted to drink beer and lie around, which is what he did every Sunday, but I finally talked him into it. So we wrapped Tom up and put him in a little basket and came out here. We had a wonderful picnic. I was a much better cook in those days, and I’d made some fried chicken and potato salad, and we drank some beer. And the next thing I knew, I’d fallen sound asleep. Conked right out on the tablecloth—in fact, it was probably this one right here.” She lifted an edge of the red-checkered cloth. “And did I sleep! You know how it is when you’re real tired on a hot day? The air, the ground, the whole world feels like a huge pillow? That’s what it felt like to me. Well, when I woke up, there was Jerry, leaning right over me, with a big grin on his face. ‘Guess what?’ he says. ‘We’re gonna have another kid.’ ”
“Huh?”
“That’s right,” said Bunny. “We made you while I was asleep.”
“Is that possible?” I couldn’t believe how careless Bunny could be.
“It worked with you,” said Bunny. “And don’t look so disappointed. A lot of babies are surprises to both parents. You only surprised one.”
“I’m not disappointed,” I said, more snappishly than I’d intended. “I don’t care.” In fact, I wasn’t sure whether I should care. I mean, I’d never stopped to consider whether I’d been planned. It wasn’t a fact about myself that I’d been relying on. Still, given the choice, I suppose everyone would rather be a conscious decision. And it seemed strange that the person who’d intended me had disappeared, leaving Bunny with the consequences. Of course, Tom was unintended by both of them. He came six months after the wedding.
Bunny looked away. “Jerry didn’t last long after that,” she said. “He was gone by the time I started to show you.”
I remember how Tom and I used to study the few bits of evidence my father had left behind. There was a heavy wool suit. (“He’d run out during a false spring,” Bunny had explained.) It was mossy colored and hung limply in Bunny’s closet, all traces of creases having long since drooped out. There was a thin little box of mechanical pens and pencils that all looked too dangerous, or at least too complicated, to use. There was the old suitcase, of course, and for some reason there was a bottle of Aqua Velva that sat for years in the medicine cabinet. Sometimes, when Bunny wasn’t around, Tom and I would take the bottle down and sniff it. Today, I don’t know much about my father, but I do know what he smelled like. And there was also one snapshot—I haven’t seen it in years now. My father and Bunny are in overcoats, standing in a snowy street. They’re looking at the camera and smiling. My father could have been anyone. He had the most unrecognizable face I’d ever seen.
“Why did he leave?” I asked. Bunny smiled to herself and stretched languidly. In the dozens of times Tom and I had asked that question, her response had always been the same, almost down to the last word: He was weak and a drifter and he couldn’t face the responsibility of a family. This time, she repeated all that, but after thinking for a moment, she went on. “There was more, I suppose. He’d been hearing stories about me.”
“Were they true?”
“It didn’t really matter. After a certain number of stories, I think he’d just heard enough.” She yawned. “It would never have worked anyway. There’s no use looking back, ’cause it would never have worked.” She put her arms around my waist and
snuggled her head against my side. “But look what he gave me,” she said.
By the time Eddie returned, wading up the river and carrying his shoes in his hand, Bunny was asleep. Eddie pushed through the water to the overhang, grabbed a Hamms and pushed on a few more yards to a stretch where the bank was lower. He hauled himself up and sat in the sun, his feet dangling in the water.
After a few minutes, I walked over to him. He didn’t ask me to sit, so I stood awkwardly for a moment and finally plopped down beside him. He kept staring out across the Little Carp, toward the reeds on the other side. You could see bugs swarming over there in the hot afternoon sun. They’d come close enough together to form a dark cloud and then spread out again and disappear.
“I wonder why they move,” said Eddie. “They aren’t landing anywhere. They don’t seem to be eating. You’d think one clump of reeds is as good as any other. Why go through all the effort?”
“Maybe it’s instinct,” I offered.
“But what for? Instinct’s got to have some purpose. Like a fish swimming upstream, or a foal climbing up on its legs as soon as it’s born. But what’s the purpose if you’re a swamp bug of just movin’ over a few feet? You want a beer?”
I shook my head. “Bunny’s asleep,” I said.
“Figures,” said Eddie, looking at me. His eyes are a color blue that’s so pale they’re bright, like tissue paper that someone’s shining a light through. They don’t give you much of a reading on what he’s thinking, and that’s probably okay with Eddie.
It’s been years now since his wife left him, but people still mention it whenever his name comes up, as if it were the only important thing about him you had to know. He was in the army and got stationed overseas, and while he was away, his wife fell in love with a mailman. She was pregnant with Eddie’s baby, and still she carried on with the mailman, even going out dancing and to restaurants in her maternity dresses. It was a huge scandal, but everybody liked the mailman, so they hardly blamed the girl. Even Eddie never speaks badly of her, Bunny says. Anyway, just before he was supposed to come home, his brother, Cecil, wrote him a letter and told him what was going on. Actually, Bunny helped write the letter, since she was dating Cecil at the time. They didn’t know how to break it to Eddie, not wanting it to sound too bad. Finally, someone suggested, “You’ve been replaced in her affections.” I guess that came from a book somewhere and sounded gentle enough. So that’s how Eddie learned. They got divorced, but she never did marry the mailman. It turned out he wasn’t such a nice guy after all. She and the baby just moved away, and Eddie turned wild.
Watching him now, as he stirred the river water with his feet, his blue jeans soaked to the thighs, it was hard to imagine how he must have felt once. “You’ve been replaced in her affections.”
I asked him how the carp fishermen were doing.
“Awww, they’re goin’ about it all wrong,” he said, sounding pained. “They’re walking around in the water, stirrin’ things up. That’s no way to catch carp. What you got to do is find where they hang out. See, every carp has a favorite place that he always goes back to. Once you find it, you lie on your stomach on the bank above it and hold your spear in the water. Eventually, the carp will come back and park hisself right there beneath you. As soon as he’s relaxed, WHAM! You got him.”
“Then what do you do with him?”
“You hold him up and look at him and show him around.”
“Do you eat him?”
“A carp? Hell, no. I guess niggers do, but I sure wouldn’t. A carp’s got flesh like mud. Carp fishin’ is just sport. You throw him up on the bank and go after another.”
An empty beer can, probably dropped by the fishermen, came bobbing down the river. Eddie pulled a clump of sod out of the bank and bombarded the can, trying to sink it. He missed, and flicked his cigarette at it as the little tin boat floated around the bend and out of sight. We sat there listening to the swamp noises. Every now and then, there was a shout and some splashing upriver. I’d come over here to have a talk with Eddie, but now that the time had come, I was having trouble finding my nerve. That’s one thing that used to worry Bunny about not having a father around the house. Actually, two things. For me, she was worried that I’d grow up shy and wouldn’t know how to talk to men. For Tom, she was worried he’d turn into a fairy. The fairy part really worried her more—so much so that she took us camping up in Wisconsin once because she thought that’s what a father would do. Then it rained, and Tom decided he hated camping. He cut a hole in the tent with his new knife. We ended up coming back early. As for me, I never thought that talking to men was different from talking to anyone else, except that maybe they like to joke more.
“What do you think about the KTD closing?” I asked finally. Eddie’s worked there ever since he got out of the army.
“Don’t bother me none,” he said.
“But what’ll you do?”
“Somethin’, I suppose. Or else nothin’.” He kept stirring the river. Under water, his feet looked amazingly white, as if they were bloodless, or made of snow. “I used to have ambition but I got rid of it,” he said. “It didn’t do me any good. Just made me feel bad, and I’m better off without it.”
I was still wearing my sneakers, so I kept my feet just above the water. Now, I kicked at the surface a few times, chasing a water bug that was lurking in a quiet spot under the bank. “Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“You already is.”
He knew it galled me to hear him talk like that. Bunny uses excellent grammar. “It’s a personal question,” I said.
“Go on.”
“Do you love Bunny?”
“What kind of books you been readin’?”
“No books. I was just wondering.”
“Well, you’re askin’ the wrong person. I don’t know nothin’ about it. Not by a long shot.”
“But you must feel something when you’re around Bunny. You know, when you see her across a crowded room and all. Something must happen.”
“Yeah. I take my hands off the chick I’ve picked up. Ha. Ha ha.” Eddie tried to laugh, but he could see I wasn’t going along with it. “Ha, well, I don’t know what happens. Whatever does, it just does, and I don’t think about it.”
I plucked a few strands of grass and dropped them in the river. “But you’re sure that something does happen?”
“I told you, I don’t know. See, you gotta understand. Things don’t just happen for Eddie Boggs. Nothin’ happens. I take every day straight.” He started getting excited. “See, when I get up in the morning, there never was yesterday. You understand? And tomorrow is nothin’. Tomorrow is shit. Look.” He held up his wrists. “I don’t even own a watch. During the week, I live by the KTD whistle. For the rest, there’s no time, there’s nothin’. Bunny and I are together ’cause we ended up together, and that’s it.”
I waited a few seconds. “Well, what do you think will happen—I mean, with your job and with Bunny?” I asked finally.
“Nothin.’ ” He was staring at the water.
“Nothing?”
“Nu-thun. You heard me.”
“Bunny’s got to make plans,” I said. “She’s got to, you know, decide whether to stay in Katydid—”
Eddie whipped around and grabbed me by the wrist. “You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, girl.” His words made hissing sounds through his teeth. “You’re messin’ in adult stuff, and you got no idea what’s goin’ on. That’s how you messed all this up to begin with. You’re still a child but you’re pretendin’ to be a woman.”
I tried to shake loose, but his hand was locked around my wrist. His other hand fidgeted. I was afraid he might hit me, so I ducked and pulled back, but he yanked me toward him, still torturing my wrist. Suddenly, Bunny shouted behind us. “Hey!” she yelled. Eddie dropped my arm. “Hey!” Bunny yelled again. “There’s a weird raccoon here.” Eddie jumped up and ran toward her.
“Don’t get near it,” he screamed.
> Bunny was on her hands and knees in the middle of the tablecloth, eye-to-eye with a raccoon, about three feet away. The animal looked sick. It was shivering and foam was coming out of its mouth. I ran up beside Eddie just as the coon seemed about to collapse. Its eyes rolled up in its head, and it teetered a few steps to the side, but then it pulled itself back and glared at Bunny again, baring its teeth and making a gurgling growl.
“Rabies,” whispered Eddie.
“Get it out of here,” moaned Bunny. She seemed mesmerized by the animal’s stare. She crawled back a few inches, and the coon lurched forward, as if about to attack. “Aii-eee,” she screamed.
“Don’t move!” ordered Eddie. Then he shoved me away. “Go get the fishermen,” he said.
I backed up a few steps. “But, Bunny—”
“Go!”
I turned and ran to the river, then dashed up the thin path along the bank. My feet sank in the wet soil, and mud soaked my sneakers. Low weeds sliced against my legs. I started yelling when I was still twenty yards away. The fishermen heard and hurried toward me, running in slow motion in the thigh-deep water. I recognized one of them from the News Depot, a short, stocky, dark-haired man with a flattop. His friend was younger and was wearing a White Sox cap. They both had on wading boots that came to their chests. They clambered out of the river, shook off the water and ran down the path, carrying their spears in front of them like a couple of native hunters.
Back at the picnic spot, Bunny was still on all fours, slowly backing away from the coon. Eddie was crouched beside her, one hand on her backside and the other holding an empty Coke bottle, gripped around the neck for use as a weapon. He guided her with his hand, making sure she moved gently. Still, the coon jerked closer, its eyes locked on Bunny’s. No one spoke. The animal’s madness seemed to poison the air. I didn’t want to breathe. Finally, Bunny slipped her knees off the tablecloth and then her hands.
“Now, stand up slowly,” said Eddie, in a low voice. She rose cautiously onto her bare feet. The raccoon gurgled and suddenly hopped forward. We all stumbled back. It snarled. “Now, back off,” Eddie told us. The man with the White Sox cap held his spear in front, pointing at the animal. When the rest of us were about ten feet away, Eddie stooped slowly and picked up a corner of the tablecloth. The coon stared at Eddie, shaking its head, a long string of drool dropping out of its mouth.
Martha Calhoun Page 17