Fatherhood

by Thomas H. Cook

He heard his brother Jack’s true voice for the first time in almost thirty years, heard it as it actually sounded, not over the phone, but here, beside his bed.

  “Eddie the Odds, they called him.”

  There was a hopeless sorrow in Jack’s voice, a yearning for things to have turned out differently, and so he didn’t open his eyes because he knew that his brother’s long sad face would break his heart.

  “He was always figuring the odds.”

  “The odds on what?”

  “Everything, I guess. But he made his living figuring them on horses.”

  The voices came from a world he could not live in, where men and women moved easily about, heedless of the way things really were, the awesome knowledge that was his, how the odds, no matter what they seemed, could abruptly change. Her sad sweet voice curled through his mind, What’s wrong, Eddie? Even then, his answer, thrown over his shoulder as he fled from her, had seemed more truth than lie, I just have to go.

  “They find him on the street?”

  “No, he had a room. Nothing more than that. He didn’t need anything more. He’d stopped seeing other people years ago. Even me. He said he’d figured the odds that on the way to his place something might happen to me. A car wreck. A plane crash. Too risky, he told me. Anything can happen.”

  “So how’d he get to the hospital?”

  “He had a heart attack. Somebody heard him moaning in his room, I guess. Called 911.I don’t know who called. Just someone.”

  Someone, but not her, Eddie thought. Someone anonymous, a neighbor down the hall who knew only that the guy in Room 603 was Eddie the Odds, one of nature’s freaks, a human calculator who never went out, was never seen, never visited, with no dog, no cat, with nothing but his streaming numbers. Eddie the Odds. Eddie the Oddball.

  He twisted about violently, the odds streaming through his head, each number an accusation, reminding him of that day, the sudden movement, the heavy fall, the way she’d seen him in the playground the next day, started toward him, the look in her eyes as he’d risen and walked away. He’d wanted to tell her what had happened, but what were the odds she’d have felt the same about him after that? What were the odds she’d ever laugh with him again, or touch his hand?

  “So all these years he just stayed in his room and figured the odds?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On what?”

  “On crazy stuff. Whenever a tree would fall or a car would jump the curb. Stuff like that. He never got close to anyone. Never married, had kids. He was afraid the odds were against them if he did. That he increased the odds. He said he couldn’t help it. It was something his mind couldn’t stop doing. All day, figuring the odds.”

  “So he’s like … deranged?”

  Yes, Eddie thought. As deranged as someone who washes his hands a hundred times a day, repeats the same phrases over and over and over, turns off the light a thousand times or compulsively opens and reopens the refrigerator before he can withdraw that single bottle of hyper-filtered water. He’d finally turned it into a profession, the only choice he’d had since the fearful results of his compulsion had made it impossible for him to do anything else. He couldn’t go to an office, couldn’t have a profession.

  “So when did this thing start, this thing with the odds?”

  “When he was still a kid.”

  “What did it start with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  With a girl, Eddie answered now, though without speaking, keeping his secret safe, the odds now incalculably vast against his ever revealing it. Her sea-blue eyes rose like two lost moons over a turbulent river of rapidly streaming numbers.

  She.

  The only one he’d ever loved.

  He saw her as she looked the morning she’d first come to Holy Cross, Margaret Shaunassey, twelve years old, a new girl in the neighborhood, with a smile like spring rain and sea-blue eyes. What were the odds, he’d asked himself at that first moment, that she would even notice him, a kid from West 47th Street, Eddie the kidder, Eddie the goof, a schoolyard prankster, tall for his thirteen years, with a freckled face he could do anything with, shape like dough, turn tragic or comic by turns, hide all his shyness and uncertainty behind.

  “So he’s been this way his whole life?”

  “Not his whole life. But most of it. It came on him when he was thirteen.”

  Thirteen, Eddie thought as he lay silent and unmoving, save for the backward journey of his mind. Thirteen and in love with Margaret Shaunassey. But what were the odds that he could win her against the likes of handsome boys like Angelo Balderi and smart ones like Herbie Daws? Not very good, he guessed, but in that same instant he knew he would shirk off all his fearful lack of confidence, and boldly go where he had never gone, go there with everything on the line, all his chips on this one number, spin the wheel, regardless of the odds.

  “And since then?”

  “Since then, he’s been Eddie the Odds.”

  Eddie the Odds, alone in a cramped little room in a Brooklyn hotel, staring at Manhattan, but never going there, because he couldn’t stop his mind from figuring the odds of a subway accident or a bus collision or the even greater odds against a flooded tunnel or collapsing bridge, odds that were constantly changing, like the flipping numbers on that immense scheduling board he’d once seen in Grand Central, odds forever racing by at an impossible click, turning on him suddenly, throwing endless strings of calculations, odds that exploded all around him, hurling earth and shrapnel, lighting his inner sky with millions of sparks. But worst of all, as he knew too well, they were odds that he increased simply by being on that train or bus, increased by being the carrier of bad luck, misfortune like a virus he could spread to anyone, and so increased the odds that the little girl next to him on the subway or the little boy beside him on a bus would be dead, dead, dead. Dead because of him. Dead because he defied the odds, brought death with him where he stood and where he went, untimely death, against all odds.

  He felt his fingers draw into a fist, then the fist thrust outward, the way it had that morning, just a little shove, but one that had finally recoiled and come rushing back toward him, invisibly penetrating the hard bone of his skull, reconfiguring his brain in a freakish and irrevocable way, turning him into what he had become since then, Oddball Eddie, Eddie the Odds.

  In a quick vision, he saw the home he might have had, and had so often imagined during the long years he’d lived in his small cramped room. A large house with a large yard, kids playing on the green lawn, and she there too, the one he’d done it for, Margaret Shaunassey, the girl with the spring-rain smile.

  He’d first spotted her in the school playground, and against the odds, approached her.

  I’m Eddie Spellacy.

  Hi.

  You’re new, right?

  Yes.

  After that it had been all jokes, and Eddie the jokester had made her laugh and laugh, laugh until her eyes watered and she fought for breath and clutched her sides and begged him to stop, stop, because it was killing her, this laughter.

  And so he’d stopped, fallen silent, then, more in love than anyone in books or movies, revealed the mission of his lovesick heart.

  I’ll always look out for you.

  And he’d meant it, too, meant it as deeply as he’d ever meant anything. He would be her knight, escort her through the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen, fend off the neighborhood dragons, its street toughs and bullies, protect her from catcalls and leering glances, and still later, as they grew older, married and had children, he would protect her from the fear of loss and abandonment, the dread of loneliness and the steady drip of age. He would do all of this. And he would do it forever. He would never cease, until she was safely home.

  You can feel safe with me, Margaret.

  That was when she’d reached into her lunch box and offered him one of her mother’s homemade cookies.

  I do feel safe with you, Eddie. I really do.

  What else is there but this? he wond
ered now, the thought cutting through the flaming trails of exploding odds. What else is there for a boy but this offer of protection? If he had ever known nobility, it was then. If he had ever known courage or self-sacrifice, these had come to him through her, fallen cool and sweet upon his shoulders like spring rain. All he had ever wanted was joined with her, his hope for marriage, family, an ordinary life.

  And against all odds he had lost it.

  A new voice cut through the fireworks of numbers, returning him to the here and now.

  “I’m Doctor Patel. Your brother looks agitated.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “I could give him something to help him relax.”

  His endlessly churning brain immediately figured the odds against just slipping away, quietly and without fuss, a welcomed end to laying odds, and in that instant he tried to imagine the cooling of his brain, its inflamed circuitry finally soothed, the flood of numbers it sent like flaming stones through his mind now little more than a quiet mound of dying embers. If he could just get to the point of rest, that place where his mind could embrace the sleep for which he’d yearned since that day.

  That day.

  He saw it dawn over the city, a warm glow that slanted through his tenement window and curled around him and seemed almost to lift him from his bed and send him on his way, out onto the street and down the avenue to where the sweet and lovely Margaret Shaunassey waited for him each morning, her books in her arms before he drew them from her and together they set off for school. He had during those brief preceding weeks been one of life’s winners, the boy who’d won the heart of the kind and beautiful Margaret Shaunassey, she of spring rain and sea-blue eyes. No more Eddie the prankster, with his gapped teeth. No more Eddie the loser, with his indifferent grades. Because of her, because of the love he’d won from her deserving heart, he’d become the walking Miracle of Holy Cross, looked at in wonder by the other boys, the guy who most among them had truly beaten the odds.

  “Mr. Spellacy, you’re going to feel a slight pinch.”

  He did, and with its bite he suddenly found himself lifted and carried away on a river of exquisite softness. The eternally cascading numbers slowed and after a time he became pure sensation, beyond the reach of clearly defined thoughts or expressions. Here, levitated, he had no need for devices of any kind, no need for pencils, or racing forms, or the little scraps of paper on which he figured the odds against this horse or that one winning this race or that one. The world of racetrack betting, of starting bells and photo finishes, now lay decidedly in the past, the odds against returning to it increasing with each passing second. He felt only the silent churn of his body drifting delicately forward, as if on a pillow of air, moving steadily and smoothly toward a final endless calm.

  Only his thoughts were as weightless as he was. They came and went effortlessly, like small eddies within the gently flowing current. Translucent faces swam in and out as he lay silent and without fret, his bed now a raft gliding peacefully down a misty river. They stayed only a moment, these faces, then faded back into the mist. His mother, her hair pulled back, peering into a steaming kettle of corned beef and cabbage. His father’s face, smudged with grease from the mechanic’s shop. His older brother, Jack, all spit and polish in his army uniform.

  The faces of horses surfaced, too, black or brown, with their huge sad eyes. They had given him more pleasure than any human being, and now, as he floated, they sometimes came rushing out of the engulfing cloud, strong and beautiful, their tails waving like banners in the bright summer air. Holiday Treat appeared, with Concert Master a link behind, noble in their ghostly strides, his only source of awe. They came prancing by the score, these horses upon which he had laid odds without dread. Something he’d never done with human games, baseball, football and the like, least of all on boxing. No, he had laid odds only on horses because though chance might rudely play upon them, it never fell with the dark intent of malicious force, and thus despite its storied wins and losses, for him the track remained unbloodied ground.

  Suddenly, he saw a head slam into a brick wall, a splatter of blood left behind, and closed his already closed eyes more tightly, working to seal off this vision, return it to the darkness.

  It worked, and in the blackness, he felt the raft move on, bearing him gently away, down the placid, mist-covered stream. As he drifted, he saw a few friends from his boyhood, but none beyond those early years because his mind’s obsessive calculations had figured the odds against having friends his evil, odds-defying presence would not harm. He’d done the same with marriage and parenthood, and so no wife or child greeted him from the enfolding mist. The odds, as his eternally fevered brain had so starkly calculated, were against the safe passage of anyone who walked beside him or even passed his way.

  A newspaper headline abruptly streamed through his mind, the words carried on a lighted circle, like the zipper on Times Square: LOCAL BOY DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT.

  Freak accident.

  It had begun the morning after he’d first heard the news that a local boy had tripped and fallen, slammed his head against a nearby wall, and by freak accident, died as a result. He’d stepped out of his third-floor apartment, on his way to school, when he’d glanced down the flight of stairs that led to the street. What were the chances, his mind had insistently demanded, of someone falling down them, because they were with him? He’d frozen in place, with his hand on the banister, briefly unable to move before he’d finally regained some control over his mind’s building oddity, then walked slowly, with a disturbing caution, down the uncarpeted steps.

  She’d been waiting for him at the corner, just as she’d waited for him every morning for the last few weeks, her eyes upon him with unimaginably high regard, never noticing his hand-me-down clothes, the gap between his teeth, seeing what no other girl had ever seen, the nobility he craved, tender and eternal, his ragged knighthood. But now she seemed to stand amid a whirl of wildly hurtling traffic, a universe of randomly flying objects, the cement curb no more than a trapdoor over a terrible abyss, a door held in place only because he did not join her there, he, Eddie, against whom the odds were cruelly pitted, Eddie who brought misfortune, imperiling by his own ill luck everyone he loved.

  And so he’d turned from her, and walked away, turned from her sea-blue eyes and spring-rain smile, and glimpsed, in his turning, a dimming of those eyes, a winter in the rain.

  “I think my brother needs more.”

  “It’s dangerous, Mr. Spellacy.”

  “How long does he have anyway?”

  “Not long.”

  “Then it doesn’t matter. He just wants to rest.”

  Another pinch and the voices ceased and night fell abruptly within his mind, sweeping everything from view. For a long time he lay, breathing softly in the mahogany blackness. Then from the depths of that impenetrable darkness, he sensed movement, but saw nothing, no relatives, no horses. Seconds passed. Or minutes. Or days. And far, far away, a tiny light emerged, pinpoint small at first, but growing like the dawn, until once against he was on the pillow of silence, drifting down a watery corridor of hazy light.

  Still alive, he thought disconsolately, though this knowledge did not come to him as words spoken silently by his mind, but as a sensation mysteriously carried on the subtle beat of his pulse. It was like all his thinking now, composed not of coherent thoughts, but rather the product of unpredictable mental surges, the firings of his brain tapping out codes that seemed to be transmitted, soundlessly and without grammar and syntax, to his decoding heart.

  Freak accident.

  Night fell within him again, but not the blackness he sought, the dead calm of oblivion. Instead, it was the mottled darkness of his spare room. Within that room, he saw nothing but the gray-and-white flickering of the small television he kept on the tiny card table where he dined each night on food that required no cooking, since he’d figured the odds that a single match, used to light the single eye of a small gas range, might set his room on
fire, then the hotel, then the neighborhood, a whole city ignited because Eddie the Odds defied the odds, Eddie, whose cautiously discarded match, dipped in water, cold to touch, might yet devour millions in whirling storms of flame.

  A horn blared in his mind, and the flickering screen dissolved into a view of the track, the horses prancing toward the starting gate, Light Bender in sixth place, hustled unwillingly into her stall, the odds against her ten-to-one.

  Now a pistol shot rang out, and they were off, Light Bender in tenth place as he’d figured she would be, but moving in ways he’d failed to calculate, her head thrust forward like a battering ram, her stride lengthening, as it seemed, with each forward thrust, her black mane flying as she tore down the track, black hooves chewing up the turf.

  From his gently flowing pallet of air, he watched as she rounded the track, eighth, seventh, sixth, now moving within striking distance of a fabled win. Then, suddenly, she began to fall apart, fall into pieces, like a shattered puzzle, her hooves no longer connected to her legs, her haunches no longer connected to her torso, her head thrust out farther than her long neck as if it were trying to outrun the rest of her.

  He felt a violent agitation in his drift, and behind closed eyes looked to his right, if it were his right, and there was Light Bender running at full speed beside him, racing the fiercely boiling current, but running without legs, and now without a body, and finally without a head, so that nothing was left but her mane, long and black and shimmering … like Margaret Shaunassey’s hair.

  Without warning she appeared before him as she had so many, many times, come like an incubus to pry open the still unmended rift within him, the cut that bled a crimson stream of numbers, and from which spilled, on each red molecule, the odds against his life.

  She stood in front of Holy Cross School on West 43rd Street. He wasn’t sure he’d ever actually seen her on the steps of the school, though even if he had, she’d have been standing under the red-brick entrance marked GIRLS, not as she was now, poised between that entrance and the BOYS on the opposite side of the building. She stood silently, with her arms at her sides, dressed in her school uniform of white blouse, checkered skirt, white socks, black shoes. Margaret Shaunassey. How kind she would have been, a wordless impulse told him, to horses.