Eileen (16 page)

It was dark as ever in there, just thin daggers of light needling through the chipping black paint on the window over the door. The smell of stale beer made my stomach churn. Sandy stood behind the bar drinking a glass of water.

“Can I borrow a bottle of gin?” I asked him.

“You're back,” he said. His smile perturbed me. He looked like a man who'd fondle children. He was a real creep.

“My dad needs a drink,” I said.

“You girls drank all the gin I got last night,” Sandy chuckled. “Would your dad believe that, huh?”

“You have anything else I can borrow?”

“I've got gin, dear,” he said, fatherly. He walked behind the bar, ducked and disappeared for a moment, came back up with a bottle of Gordon's. “And consider it a Christmas gift. To your dad, not you. You deserve much better,” he said. “Have a drink with me first, though,” he said, plunking down two shot glasses, breaking open the bottle with a violent twist, a crack like bones breaking as he twisted the cap. “One drink with me and the rest is yours.” He nudged the glass toward me. I swallowed it quickly. The soapy, burning taste at least seemed to cut through the taste of bile in my mouth. “Good girl,” Sandy called me.
When he handed me the bottle, he lifted his other hand to caress my face. I jerked myself away.

“Tell your dad this is from me, OK?”

“I'll tell him,” I said. “Thanks.”

That was the last time I saw him. In the years since, I've wondered what memories of Sandy I may have buried from that previous night, perhaps of his thick, beer stained hands grappling me, maybe his mouth on me somewhere, a sour tongue probing my throat, disgusting. Who knows? Sandy, wherever you are buried, I hope you've stayed out of trouble. But if you haven't, I'm sure you paid for it somehow. Everyone does, eventually.

 • • • 

B
ack home, my father appeared to be sleeping when I set the bottle down on the kitchen table, but before I could leave he bolted up out of his recliner. His hand darted out and gripped my wrist.

“Leonard, you said? Leonard what?” he asked.

“Polk,” I answered, stupidly.

“Polk,” he repeated. I could see his rusty gears turning. He shook his head. “Do I know him?”

“I doubt it,” I answered, wresting free of his weak grasp and flitting up the stairs. I was relieved to hear him crack open the gin. My guess is he washed away any memory of this exchange immediately. He never mentioned the Polk name again, though my hope is that it vexed him as a clue he'd failed to follow when I disappeared. “I should have known she was in trouble,” I've imagined him saying.

From under the bathroom sink I grabbed a bunch of rags and went back out to the car and slid the vomit off the passenger seat and into the snow. It was remarkable how easy it was to remove the frozen puddle in one piece, but it left a stain. I sprinkled dishwashing powder on it and covered it with a towel. I'm sure I was gagging and retching the whole time, though what I really remember is rushing up into the shower afterward. I scrubbed myself vigorously down there again—a mess had been brewing all night—and washed the vomit I found dried in my hair. My hands were swollen and tight as I fumbled with the towel, still damp from the night before. Those navy stockings were by then tattered, looked like ghosts where they lay dashed out across the bathroom tile. I dressed quickly, combed my wet hair, grabbed my coat and purse and ran back down to the car.

I suppose the details of my behavior that morning are unnecessary, but I like to remember myself in action. I'm old now. I don't move vigorously or frenetically anymore. Now I'm graceful. I move with measured and elegant precision, but I am slow. I'm like a beautiful tortoise. I don't waste my energy. Life is precious to me now. In any case, when I went back out to the car, there was a police cruiser blocking the driveway. I was aghast. The cop's name was Buck Brown. I remember him because we'd gone to grade school together. He was big and dopey and talked with a lisp, eyes still full of sleep, white spittle at the corners of his mouth, the kind of man to act dumber than he is, to deceive you into lowering your expectations. I really dislike men who do that. He corrected his cap and stuck his hands in his pockets.

“Miss,” he began, lisping. “May I have a word?” The police were always very formal. After how many years of knowing me, they never called me by my name. Never trust anyone who holds so strictly to decorum. “It's about your father,” Buck began. Of course it was.

“I'm listening, Buck,” I said impatiently. I tried to smile, but I was too tired. And there seemed to be no point in trying to appease him. Before Rebecca, I'd always been too ashamed and nervous to ever act as cranky as I felt. “What do you want?”

“It's about the gun,” was his answer.

For a moment I imagined my father inside, perhaps down in the basement, bleeding from a bullet wound he'd inflicted when I didn't return fast enough with his gin. Maybe he'd left the phone off the hook in the kitchen, line open to the police station, “I'm ending it!” his last words. But of course I'd just seen him alive and well enough to torment me a moment before.

“What about the gun?” I asked.

“We came by last night but you were out,” he said, looking at me accusingly. I really despised him, everyone. After a pause, he explained. “Yesterday afternoon we received several calls from neighbors, and from the school principal, that Father Dunlop,” he halted, “that Mister Dunlop was sitting at that window,” he gestured toward the living room window, “pointing his gun out at children walking home from school.”

“He's inside,” I said. “Go talk to him yourself.” Or maybe I wasn't quite so forceful. Maybe I said, “Oh dear,” or “Dear Lord,” or “I'm sorry.” It's hard to imagine that this girl, so false, so irritable, so used, was me. This was Eileen.

“Ma'am,” he said. I could have spat in his face for calling me that. “I've talked with your father,” he said, “and he's agreed to relinquish his property to your care, as long as you promise not to use it on him. His words.”

I really didn't understand the fuss. I didn't think he kept the gun loaded. He was too afraid to, I assumed. He still cleaned it regularly, that I knew.

“Ma'am,” he said, and pointed at the house. “I must put it on your person.”

“What does that mean?”

“Orders are to give the gun to you immediately. Children will be walking to school any minute.” I'd never wanted to go to the prison so badly. “It won't take a moment,” Buck said, and walked with me along the front walk and up the steps.

Inside, I called out to my father. “Dad, there's someone here to see you.”

“I know what this is about,” he said, tottering out from the kitchen in his robe now streaked with soot stains from the fireplace. He was smiling that drunken grin I'd come to recognize as an expression of compliance—mouth pulled flat, eyes nearly closed, just squinty enough to make him look the slightest bit delighted. He opened the front hall closet, shuffled around and pulled out the gun. “Here,” he said. “It's all yours.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Buck. The ceremony of all this was both comical and maddening. “I trust Miss Dunlop will take excellent care of the weapon.”

“As she does with all things, as you can see,” said my father, motioning with the gun in a circle around the dilapidated
house. Buck took a step back in alarm. I pictured one of those icicles hanging above him cracking off at that moment and diving straight into his skull. My father handed the gun to Buck, who placed it gently into my flat open palms.

I'd never handled my father's gun before, or any gun for that matter. It was a heavy thing, far heavier than I'd expected, and ice-cold. Holding it frightened me at first. I couldn't have told you at the time what kind of a gun it was, but I remember the look of it clearly. “Dunlop” was etched into the wooden handle. I've since looked in books about guns and have identified it as a Smith & Wesson Model 10. It had a four-inch barrel and weighed nearly two pounds. I kept it for a few weeks once I ran away, then I threw it off the Brooklyn Bridge.

“That should do it,” Buck said. He waddled back down to his cop car.

My father shuffled away, mumbling to himself, then said clearly, “Your lucky day, Eileen.” He was right. I put the gun in my purse. I didn't know what else to do. I expected my father to put up a fight to get it back, but all I heard was a glass clink in the kitchen, then the recliner squelch under his weight. It's not quite right to say that this ordeal with the gun disturbed me since I'd been numbed down for years by its presence in the house. Still, it was odd to hold it now. I locked the front door gently, mindful of the icicles, and left. In all his dysfunction, my father, while I'd been scrubbing the vomit in my car, I suppose, had left his shoes for me out on the porch. Perhaps it was to remind me that I had a job to do, that I was, above all, his caretaker, his minder, his prison guard.

As I drove to work, I considered what advantages that gun might afford me. It was the gun my father had carried around all his years on the police force. While I was growing up it even seemed to have its own place at the dinner table—Dad at the head, Mom across from him, Joanie and I on one side, the gun on the other. Then, in the years since his retirement, he concealed it in his holster against his bare abdomen while he clunked around the house. At a red light, I carefully removed the gun from my purse, thinking I would shove it into my glove compartment. But when I saw that frozen mouse in there, I decided against it. That little critter stayed in there to the bitter end. It doesn't signify much of anything, but I do remember its little face—long snout, mouth agape, tiny teeth, soft white ears. That was probably the last time I saw it. I kept the gun on my lap as I drove. It did something to me, as I expect it would do to anyone: It calmed me down. It soothed me. Perhaps it was just my hangover which made me lackadaisical, but when I pulled into the Moorehead parking lot that morning, instead of locking my purse in the trunk with the gun inside it, I carried it with me into the prison and let it sit out in the open on my desk. The ugly brown leather stirred my heart with fear and excitement every time I reached out to touch it.

 • • • 

I
suppose it was a typical morning at Moorehead, but every footstep I heard, and every time the door opened to let in a blast of wind, I would first cringe—the headache of my hangover like a blow to the brain—then look up, devil-eyed
and excited to see Rebecca walk in, but she didn't appear. I was eager to be with her again, to reaffirm what I had felt the previous evening. I could smell my excitement leaping up from my body like the pungent shock of burning sulfur when a match is struck. How could I leave X-ville now that Rebecca was in it with me? Maybe she would come with me when I disappeared, I wondered. She'd said she couldn't spend too long in one place, didn't she? We would have fun together. I fantasized how I'd change my appearance once I got to New York, the clothes I'd wear, how I'd cut my hair, color it if need be, or wear a long wig, a false pair of glasses. I could change my name if I wanted, I thought. “Rebecca” was as good a name as any. There was time, I told myself, to sort out the future. The future could wait, I thought. At some point that morning I went to the ladies room to apply my lipstick. That's when Rebecca squealed the door open and shimmied up beside me, aligning her face with mine in the mirror.

“Well hello, old gal,” she said to my reflection. She was playful. She was funny.

“Good morning,” I said. I made my mind up on the spot to sound confident, good-humored, like I was just fine and dandy.

“Aren't I cute in my holiday colors?” she asked, twirling. She wore a red wool skirt suit and a green scarf around her neck. “Dizzy,” she said, holding her head melodramatically.

“Adorable,” I said and nodded.

“I'm afraid I don't give a damn about Christ,” she said, or something crass like that. “Kids like Christmas though, I think.” She strutted into the bathroom stall and continued to talk while
she urinated. I listened and watched my face turn red in the mirror. I wiped my lipstick off. That new shade wasn't any good on me—far too bright. My father had been right about it. It made me look like a child playing around with her mother's makeup. “I was wondering what you're up to Christmas Eve,” Rebecca went on, “seeing as we have time off.” She flushed the toilet and came out, slip exposed, hiking up her stockings. Her thighs were as thin as a twelve-year-old's, and just as taut. “Would you be up for a drink tomorrow at my place? I think it'd be nice. That is, unless you have plans.”

“I don't have plans,” I told her. I hadn't celebrated Christmas in years.

Rebecca pulled up her sleeve and took a pen from her breast pocket. “We'll do it like this. Write down your phone number. This way I won't lose it, unless I take a shower, which I won't,” she said. “Barring a visit to the doctor, or from a gentleman caller,” she laughed, “I barely shower. It's too cold up here anyway. Don't tell.” She lifted her arms and comically craned her neck back and forth between her armpits, then held a finger to her lips as though to hush me.

“Me too,” I said. “I like to stew in my own filth sometimes. Like a little secret under my clothes.” We were the same, she and I, I thought. Rebecca understood that. There was no reason to hide anything from her. She accepted me—liked me, even—just as I was. She handed me the pen and stuck her arm out for me to write on. I gripped the pale, narrow wrist and wrote my digits up her forearm on skin so clean and soft and firm I felt I was defiling something as pristine as a newborn baby. My own
hands under the fluorescent lights were red and burnt from the cold and rough and swollen. I tucked them into the cuffs of my sweater.