Eddie Stoller’s Gone

1.

It crashed through the TV today and smashed into my chest at 90 miles an hour, the man himself driving his big ugly Lincoln Continental right through televisionland and into our very own living room—Eddie Stoller, 41, M.I.A. Blew my mind. Except it wasn’t that sweet black Lincoln of his they found. Apparently, he’d traded that in for a boxy red Grand Am somewhere along the line. Hard times, I guess. They got a shot of the new ride right there on the tube, reporter in the foreground weathering the rain, car in the background with its driver side door hanging open like a dead mouth. Somewhere along the curvy part of Route 81, up near Syracuse, twenty miles from here. Sheer drop on one side and climbing foothills full of trees on the other. No Eddie Stoller in sight. Keys in the ignition, blood on the seat, rain took care of the rest, and that’s all she wrote.

Except it wasn’t. “Mr. Stoller was on a book tour for his latest collection of poetry, At the Corner of Heartache and Hatred.” Ah, so what do we know, Ms. News Reporter, what are the facts? He attended a writer’s forum at SU last night and was supposed to be at a reading engagement in Ithaca tonight, but, well, things happen along the way. Police weren’t yet saying “missing person” or “murder investigation” and anyway what’s the difference with a guy like Eddie?

Allison sat next to me on the couch, rubbing my back. After a while she said, “Could it be a publicity stunt, Shane?” I looked from the TV to little Benny sitting on the floor in front of it, lost in his own world, playing with his Nintendo DS. “Nah, not him,” I said. “His whole life’s a publicity stunt. If he wanted to do something to wow people, he’d get a steady job, marry one of those fangirls of his, and settle into a nice, quiet life. His critics would shit themselves.” Alley laughed but I wasn’t feeling it.

So this made the six o’clock news and why not—Eddie was the closest thing Cortland’s had to a celebrity since Ronnie James Dio left town to go play with Sabbath somewhere in the early ‘80s. Then again, Dio at least got a street named after him. Eddie didn’t get so much as a passing barroom belch. People may get rock n’ roll around here but they sure as hell don’t get poetry.

Up before dawn typing all of this out like some kind of asshole.

*

I got bonkers on a fistful of pills and went down to see his old man this morning. I had to know what he thought about all of this. The curiosity kept gnawing at my brain ever since I typed that first bit out on the laptop. I kissed Alley goodbye and walked Benny to school and by the time I was alone I had it all figured out in my head. I’d slide into the seat across from him, order my coffee, and say something offhanded and witty like, “I see your boy went AWOL the other night. Any clues, Pops?” So I medicated my brain and somehow managed to climb down the flight of steps from our second floor duplex. Elbows and ass, scootching down step by step. Crazy. Too much at once. At the bottom, a breather and a nap, then out the front door flying.

We’ve got a whole history of breakfasts together, me and Eddie’s old man. It’s not like both of us can’t afford to have these old lady rituals, we have plenty of time to kill—me disabled and him retired. Used to meet up at The Doughnut Box, then it was the Koffee Kup out in the old Tops Plaza, and for a little while there it was The Golden Skillet, but the night crew got fired for toking dope on the job and shortly after that the whole damned diner burned down. These days we meet up at the new place out on 13, Sugar n’ Spice, half an old used-car dealership run and partially waitressed by a woman named Bunny. Inside, it’s a mishmash of acid dream leftovers and truck stop blues—life-sized standing dolls dressed up as cowboys and Indians, maybe a hint of ‘50s-era sensibility behind the counter with the light-up wall clock and the Elvis decorations, but mostly just Salvation Army findings. It’ll all probably fall over someday. What the hell. Not a longstanding coffee dive in the whole damned town. How’s that even possible in a place like this?

Then it hit me—Eddie left us all those years ago to find himself a nice cup of joe, that’s all. Be right back, buddy boy, just give me twenty years or so. The same way some kids’ fathers say they’re going to the corner store for a gallon of milk, never to return. Maybe this whole thing with him disappearing now is all about the coffee—all the good grinds gone so why not cut your wrists and walk off a ledge?

I spun into the diner laughing my head off. I couldn’t even remember the drive there, just strobes and tracers from headlights in the rain. Inside, the savory smell of bacon and the hard stares from people cocking their eyebrows but not saying a thing. I made faces at some children as I passed on by, sticking out my tongue and giving them the wiggly moose antlers with my hands. “Ahhh,” they said, “you’re so silly!”

Abe Stoller was wedged into one of the side booths, just like I’d imagined, gut closing the gap between spine and table. He’d already ordered his coffee and bear claws and was now gnawing thoughtfully on the latter, looking at some distant point out the window. He was decked out in his usual navy blue work shirt and slacks, a holdover from his Pall Trinity days, I think, back when men had a particular uniform they wore to the factory. The Cortland Standard was spread out on the table before him, crumbs flecking the page, brown coffee rings staining the corners. Eddie once told me, “You can tell the good ol’ boys from the wannabes around here—the good ol’ boys wear duck boots and that ain’t no lie.” I think he was talking about his pops. I checked, saw the duck boots planted firmly on the floor beneath the man, and slumped into the seat across from him, snickering and wiping a tear from my eye. It hurt so bad trying to keep it all in—everything was funny.

One clear look at his face and the old man sobered me up right away though. Enough so that I wondered if I was tripping at all. Maybe I’d been fooling myself, it was all an act. I felt like a teenager again, shame-faced and ugly.

He barely paid me any attention, just kept chewing and staring out the window, not even a “Hey, Buster Brown” or any of those usual old-timer sayings of his. All serious and closed up. Instead, he grunted, “Look at you, you get any thinner and you’re going to blow away in the breeze.” Then he stuffed a hunk of bear claw into his mouth and licked his fingers. “Ah-ha-ha-ha,” I said back to him. I ordered coffee—“I’ll forego the double mocha espresso latte today, ma’m, just give me a cup of joe,” but the waitress didn’t even crack a smile—and me and the old guy muttered through some of the usual cant, the weather, the potholes, the new ritzy hotel that went up out by the college. I thought maybe what he said to me about my weight was something he’d once said to Eddie, back when he knew his son. And then I thought maybe it was something he’d never said to Eddie but wished he had, some safe fatherly advice.

Damn it, old man, at least I’m not starving out there on the road!

Mostly, though, we just sipped our coffees.

*

I go to doctors. I tell them all kinds of crazy stories. We do the medicine dance, the prescription tango. They listen and hand me slips of paper, I pay them and cash the scripts in and then I get gone. I got a neat little battalion of these dudes all over town. At first, it was just pain pills, for real pain, working maintenance at Pall just like Eddie’s old man, only by the time I showed up it was all heavy lifting and I had a nasty habit of not wearing the belt. No one needed to know that part, though. When I got the hernia and the worker’s comp and then the settlement came through for my back I suddenly had a lot of time to sit around and get creative. “I get these ideas, doc. I get these strange ideas no one should have.” I felt 15 again, screwing with the guidance counselors. I mean, you’ve got to be careful with what you say because one of them wanted to put me away, but, yeah, mostly the MDs toss out mood-altering drugs like Halloween candy. They don’t like the touchy-feely stuff so they cram what they can down your mouth and hope for the best.

Allison pretends not to notice when I get a bit kooky. So long as I don’t do anything stupid in front of Benny it’s all right, I guess. She’s always been good like that

2.

Okay, so this is how old Shane-man imagines it went down:

After a long, wild, poverty-stricken career with what he affectionately called “The Beast”, Eddie Stoller, 41, poet of the road, longtime Lincoln owner and lover of classic cars, traded in his Continental for a ‘95 Pontiac Grand Am. He felt like Zorro stabbing Tornado in the throat with his rapier, but, well, sorry, baby, that’s just the way she goes. You’re getting old, I’m getting old, and I should really settle down with a more convenient, more compact model. Maybe a Shetland Pony.

So there he was, chugging down Route 81 at 75 miles an hour, taking the curves so hard the car felt like it was going to flip over the rails. Windows down and spring rain just starting up. Awful. Past midnight and driving from one reading to another, tired but not really wanting to make it to the hotel anyway, preferring the backseat of his car to a lumpy, stained hotel mattress. Passing through, passing on, yeah, yeah. At least, he would have preferred the backseat if it was the one he’d come to know and love over the years. Instead, the backseat of the Grand Am looked and smelled more like the guest bedroom in a house full of strangers. More like the saddle someone else had worn in.

So what? The new ride got good miles to the gallon, sure, but Eddie wasn’t that type of car owner. Four cylinders and all of them firing away like asthmatic lungs. It was tearing him up inside, this new car. All through the reading at the college all he could think about was this fucking car sitting out there in the parking lot, a waste of metal and money. What the hell was he thinking when he made that trade anyway? About how he’d spent all his mother’s inheritance money to get that Continental? About how he wanted to be buried in that fucking car? About history and memories? No, for once in his life, Eddie had been thinking of practical things—how much the car cost to keep repaired and gassed up these days, how he really needed the dough in his pockets, how he’d come back for that car some day. Mostly though he was starved and hurting and hating that girl up in Manchester who took him for everything he had and he wanted to take it out on someone, so he told the dealer, “Take The Beast and give me whatever heap of crap you’ve got lying around.”

Back on 81, the rage building up in him was too much to be contained by the car. If the Pontiac were that Shetland Pony, he’d be stabbing it so hard with his spurs the blood would be running thick and strong down its ribs. There was real live blood though, so thick he could smell it, and it brought him around. He’d been pounding the dashboard so hard with his fists that they were now bloody pulps of knuckle and skin. His right hand felt broken. Didn’t matter, though.

He slammed on the brake and the Pontiac skidded in the rain. Eddie cranked the wheel in the direction of the slide and got control of the car but his foot still smashed the brake to the floor and the whole thing lifted up on two wheels before coming to a thumping halt on the side of the road.

He got out of the car, smearing bloody handprints all over the seat.

In the rain, he couldn’t see anything but the cones of road lit up by the headlights, and he began to walk north with his right hand wrapped in his shirt, toward New Hampshire, toward that damned dealership where he traded in that damned faithful car.

*

It’s strange. I wrote “Eddie” throughout that whole hypothetical scenario but what was his real name? What did he call himself, in his own head? It’s funny the things you start wondering and remembering when the person isn’t around for the asking.

He had this thing about his name, always changing it. When we were in grade school, he insisted people call him “Edvard,” real hard on the v, as if he knew something no one else did about being German or half-German or whatever the hell he was. In high school it became Edwin and then during his brief college career it became Edmond. Me and the other guys, Birdie and Clem, we’d ask him about his multiple personalities. “Hey, man, what happened to Edvard?” we’d say. “What?” he’d say, “What? Oh, fuck off!” When he started publishing he became simply Eddie—right there on the covers of his books, Eddie Stoller, real familiar sounding, like the name of a close friend and drinking buddy, someone you never see enough of.

Yeah, but what’s on the birth certificate?

*

Got jazzed up on Ritalin and took my question to the only man who could answer it—Abe Stoller, wise man of the doughnut shop. The ride out there was painful. I gunned the car bumper to bumper with whoever was in front of me but the ride felt like I was being made to drive ten miles under the speed limit and my flesh was on fire. Like I was in my coffin and the road was a conveyer belt taking me straight into the maw of a crematorium incinerator. Nearly crashed. Twice.

Swung into Sugar n’ Spice and dropped myself into the seat across from Abe. The whole world twisted horribly around me and for a minute I was in zero G, upside down and watching forks and plates float by. Cold sweat and every bead of it like a pinprick. Gripped the sides of the table in the chill of the panic and prayed to God. I was that messed up.

Abe glanced up from the paper, said, “You should lay off the pills, boy.”

“Huh?” I said, only it felt more like “HUH?” in my skull, and it echoed awfully.

The old man just nodded, hadn’t said a thing.

The waitress came up to me and said with a nasty smile, “Mister, we’re all out of the mocha latte espresso.”

“Some kind of juice,” I said and waved her away.

Everything eventually calmed down a bit and Abe said, “You ever think about going back to your old job at the Standard? Heaven knows the paper could use some good writers these days.” Back before the long stint at Pall, I wrote a column for the paper. “Historical Cortland” it was called, filled with all kinds of odd facts and interviews, except nothing ever happens around here and I ran out of interesting local history real fast. By the end it felt like I was digging up the same old corpses. The editor said I was wasting my talents on the column anyway but really he was trying to find an excuse to fire my ass. I saved him the trouble and quit when I stopped dating his daughter. When I got the settlement years later I bought this laptop hoping to start writing again someday. Yeah.

“Nah,” I said. “But listen. I’ve got a question. What was—” and then I had to think hard about it and correct myself before Abe could catch it—“is Eddie short for?”

“What?” the old man said. “He ain’t short. He’s tall.”

I had no idea if he was messing with me or not. He was that convincing. “No. What’s on his birth certificate? When we were kids he had all these names for himself, Edward and stuff. He kept changing it.”

“Kept changing it? What are you talking about?” Oh, he’s a sly one all right, then the kicker. “The name Eddie isn’t short for anything. It’s long, for Ed.”

“What?” Astounded.

“Sure. We named him Ed. That was all.”

*

Later, home. Thinking about how Eddie’s rage in that scenario I wrote a few pages ago seems a bit false now, as if his anger’s actually my anger, as if that was me pounding on the dashboard and not Eddie. Still, a bowl of Lucky Charms and a tab of Halcion later and I’m feeling fine. Cough syrup and orange juice, glug, glug, ahh. Laundry’s done, dishes done, maybe take the car in for a lube, oil, and filter. Scrubbed the bathroom floor until my fingernails started bleeding around the edges. Bleach in the air, shine all over. Mid-day mid-week homemaker’s blues and my best friend’s gone. All of it fell on me while I was sitting on the couch, catching my breath, like I opened a closet and all the junk I’ve ever owned toppled out onto me, memorabilia, odds and ends, boxes of all the things I thought I’d thrown away.

This: Wednesday night and wasted on SoCo, ditching our night class at the college to go play Bingo at St. Mary’s. Shouting “Bingo!” every time one of our numbers was called, even though we never had anything. We got carried out with Eddie screaming, “I said I got Bingo, motherfucker!”

And this: Some other time, beer cans all over the graveyard and climbing the wrought iron fence trying to evade the cops. Finally got over and looked back only to see how the fence ended a few yards down and we could have just run around the whole thing. Cops picked us up because we were bent over laughing at our own stupidity.

Others, too. All of it like a closet of junk being dumped on me, drowning me, or maybe more like a car coming through the TV screen and smashing me down. No one to call me Sheemie again. I panicked then, got tempted to dial up Birdie or Clem, but I already knew what they’d say. “Shane buddy? Holy shit, man, is it you? Oh wow. It’s been years, bro. Oh wow.” And that’s Birdie and Clem all over—“Oh wow,” but not much else.

Besides, they’ll probably be paying homage to Eddie’s memory this evening, in their own way, downing Miller High Lifes and watching the mosquitoes rise up in the yard as the sun goes down. Drunk and loud, then just drunk and sad, playing badminton and crying. You can’t say anything real to them.

For instance, I never told them about why Eddie took to calling me Sheemie back in high school. I never told them how I once told Eddie I hated my name and he asked why I didn’t legally change it and I said, “To what?” He didn’t know either, said I didn’t look like anything else he could think of. So, in an effort to make the name fit me better, he took to saying it with some kind of accent, something between a donkey and a redneck, an accent that couldn’t quite figure out how to pronounce the word as it came out. “Shaaaaane-man,” he’d say. “Sheeeeemie! Shhhhheeeee-IT!” So the name stuck—Sheemie—but only for him. He’s the only one I’d let call me that.

“Now why’s that?” Birdie and Clem would say. Why indeed.

*

I thought it was time someone told Benny about his missing “Uncle” Eddie, so when he got home from school today, I sat him down on the couch and tried to get it out. “Your Uncle Eddie’s gone missing and nobody knows when he’ll be back. But he will be back.” I’d rehearsed that line but didn’t get a chance to use it. Instead, Benny had a surprise for me.

Fourth grade. That’s when you start to see how they’re going to turn out. How much trouble they’re in, how much work they do, what kind of grades they get. He’s his own little man now. I used to say, “Hey there, Benjy-man,” and ruffle his hair like dads are supposed to, but he’d always squirm out from under me. “Kid, you think you’re embarrassed by me now, wait ‘til junior high,” I’d say. He never got it.

In the mornings, I used to walk him to school. We live right across the street from Parker Elementary, and I love walking him right up to that front entrance every morning, all proud and tall. Today Benny said, “Dad, is it okay if you don’t walk me to school anymore?” I knew right then I couldn’t tell him about Eddie. It wouldn’t matter anyway. It’s not like Eddie’s been anything other than a name his mother and I argue about sometimes. “Hey, no problem, kid,” I said. Hands in my pockets, the whole aw shucks look.

Part of me always thought Eddie was smart for not having any kids, at least not any he’d own up to, but when Benny said that to me I suddenly understood Eddie’s dad sitting in the coffee shop each morning worrying about his son. I’d never seen Abe more clearly. You don’t have kids because you want them, you have them because you need them. The company, the something to do. For a while, anyway. And then it’s Hey, no problem, kid. Breaks your heart.

It’s what kept Eddie young even when he started getting old—he didn’t have to learn about that kind of thing, growing up so other people can grow up, too. It’s why he could still have that easy, boyish grin after all this time.

*

I gave our son the name Benjamin after a lie Eddie told me once, back in grade school, first time he’d ever spoken to me. He said his name was Edvard Benjamin Stoller III, right out of the blue, right in the middle of a kickball game. Where would a kid get something like that?

3.

A rainy midnight spring outside the Grand Am as Eddie Stoller, 41, lover of fine women and one-time admirer of fine automobiles, cruised down a black empty stretch of Route 81. His hand was bleeding through a rag and onto the crotch of his jeans and into the seat beneath him. On the radio, CCR started singing about a bad moon rising and Eddie shook his head, smirked, and said, “You got that right.”

A few hours earlier, he’d been at a forum at Syracuse U where, at some point during the panel discussion, a shapely green-haired student in the front row had raised her hand and asked him why he wrote poetry. For a moment, he was embarrassed, not because he was caught off guard or because he didn’t have a readymade answer but because he’d been staring at the girl’s breasts through half the q-and-a trying to figure out what was written on her shirt. When she raised her hand he saw that her shirt read Melt Banana. Eddie gave her his best grin and replied, “It’s a good way to meet cute girls.”

Later, she bought him a few at a local bar, they had quasi-protected sex in the bathroom, and he tried to make it out the door before he became anything more than a passing daydream to her. But she wasn’t going to let that happen. She followed him out calling, “Where you going? Where you going, Eddie Stoller? I thought we had something here.” Playful at first, then serious. Out on the sidewalk, she went ape-shit and started screaming about statutory rape. Didn’t he know she was only at his stupid forum for an extra credit assignment for her high school creative writing class? Didn’t he know she was only sixteen? Screw him and his bad poetry!

This was, of course, bad PR. Stupidly, stupidly, he went back to her, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her back into the bar. He had no idea what he was saying to her and he probably would have promised her an engagement ring, anything to calm this crazy chick down, when she squirmed away from him. Irate, belligerent. It got bad then, it happened so fast.

She broke a beer bottle on the bar and came at him with it, wielding it like a fencing master working out some new techniques with her foil. He ducked two thrusts before she got him with a downward swing. Sliced him across his right hand, his goddammed writing hand. After that, two guys were on her and holding her back, each pinning an arm and barely able to contain that whacked-out adolescent rage. Nothing left to do then, just one of the guys saying, “You better move along, buddy,” as if Eddie had started the whole thing.

He grabbed a bar rag on his way out and it’d been a straight drive out of the city ever since. It didn’t even cross his mind that he might need stitches until now. Then, another thought.

Okay. Maybe next month he’d get a checkup. Quasi-protected sex with green-haired teen lunatic bitches makes you mighty curious about your sexual health, no matter how fortunate you’ve been in the past.

He had a blast at the clinic anyway, every time he went, had ways to offset the usual fear. Especially with the nurses when they handed him the clipboard with the personal history fact sheet. Eddie always read it aloud, made a show of it for anyone else nearby. “Check all that apply? Genital warts? Gonorrhea? Syphilis? AIDS?” Hand up. “Excuse me, ma’m. Can I just put a big checkmark over the whole page and be done with it? I really just need some penicillin.” It was all a joke to him. Even if he’d spent the last three weeks with a Mexican slum whore and was riddled ugly with disease he could still get laid. He was that charming.

In the middle of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, the Grand Am sputtered, choked, and died. He directed it onto the shoulder of the road and found himself once again regretting trading the Lincoln in up in New Hampshire last fall. He also found himself thinking that if he’d stayed with that girl in Manchester like she wanted he wouldn’t be here now, bleeding all over the seat and wondering if he had VD.

He checked the gauge and saw he had plenty of gas so it was something else. Engine trouble or whatever. Eddie touched his forehead to the steering wheel and said, “Out of love, out of cars, out of luck. Eddie Stoller, this is just not your fucking day.” He laughed, got out of the Grand Am, and walked down the road with his thumb out.

*

I don’t honestly know if it’s possible to break a beer bottle on a bar or not. I’ve never tried it, never had a need to do anything like it before, but he did actually give me that line about poetry being a good way to meet cute girls, which is funny because most of Eddie’s poetry is mediocre at best. I mean, he has his moments—bouts of startling clarity, stanzas of amazing raw power—but, yeah, mostly his stuff is just okay. That doesn’t stop the students and profs from loving him though, eating up everything he wrote. He used to say it was because most of the college crowd are apt to confuse the words and the poet. Anyway, that’s how he spent most of his time, on the road, driving from one campus to another and working odd jobs in odd towns between gigs.

I remember one late-night phone conversation in particular when he was calling from some town in Texas. It was after a reading and he was drunk and angry as hell. “Those fuckers,” he said. “Too much love for that biographical psychoanalytical bullshit. Not enough good ol’ fashioned New Criticism. They don’t even read what’s on the page. They didn’t even ask about the poems. They wanted to know what I dream about, man, what I fucking dream about!”

“What did you tell them?” I said.

“I told them I dreamt about having sex with my mama,” he said. “Frequently.”

He has a biography written about him, and it does okay—appeals to the Kerouac life-on-the-road crowd, will probably get bigger now that he’s gone. I told him he should write his story down, say what he wanted, teach people something about writing. It would probably even sell, too.

He said, “How am I supposed to do that? It’s not like I can even fucking write!” We laughed.

*

The allusion to all those girls Eddie slept with was true, too. He got so many girls he had leftovers. Alley was a leftover. She was a longtime fan but apparently not his type and I was the closest she could get. Over the years, she grew to hate him for that. Benny’s kind of the proof of that hatred, an act of defiance, I think, a way of showing Eddie how much she doesn’t need him, even though he’s not looking and doesn’t care. Didn’t care?

But Eddie and the girls, now that was a weird mating dance to watch. Whenever he rolled into town after his career had started, he had all of these brief impassioned courtships. All these weekend bar girls gathered around him like a harem while he’s telling jokes and stories, reciting other poets’ poetry and claiming it’s his own. All of them making him pick them up, shoulder rides and piggyback rides for everyone, even the one girl who wanted him to scoop her up and carry her across the bar’s threshold like a newlywed. It was like they could all tell he was going somewhere, and even though they didn’t know where they still wanted to go with him, any way they could.

We were great together, the two of us—Eddie, crazy, in love with every girl he met; me, unhappy and looking for something a bit more permanent, afraid of nothing but a lonely death.

*

At the doughnut shop, I dribbled my coffee because the Concerta was kicking in. My lips went numb, my mouth dried up, I was a mess. Abe barely talked to me except to say “Keep it down” when I started laughing. Pointing at him and chuckling. “Your name is Abraham,” I said. Snorting, cackling. “Your name is Abraham and Eddie drove a Lincoln!”

Maybe he’d said, “Keep it together.” I don’t know.

*

When Benny got home from school today, I played the disaffected parent, sitting in my chair and punching keys on the laptop. Playing Solitaire, Free Cell. Pouting, really. Over the display, I watched Benny watching Spongebob on TV, textbook open in front of him in a halfhearted attempt to at least seem hard-working. Both of us appeared busy anyway.

“How was school today?” I said.

He shrugged.

“How was it going to school on your own this morning, huh? Miss your old man?”

He shrugged.

I knew already anyway. I’d watched him from the front window when he left, running down the sidewalk, red backpack bouncing behind him, excited like I haven’t seen him in weeks. He even stopped to chat with the crossing guard. We never stopped to chat with the crossing guard. Mostly because we were always talking. Or I was.

“Hey there dude, you got anything to say to me?” I threw the pillow I had under my back at him and it clipped him on the shoulder.

He swung around and glared at me, didn’t say a word, not even “Knock it off, Dad!”

Scared the shit out of me, that glare. Made me ashamed and embarrassed all at once, but something else, too. I was reminded of Eddie when Eddie was his age. He’d been a mean-looking kid, the kind with the brutal buzz cut and the scrunched-up face, ears that stuck out at the sides and muscles a bit too big for someone his size. Wore a scowl all the time, too—didn’t matter if he was playing kickball or reading a comic book. Not a bully, really, but that didn’t stop him from getting into fights because he looked like one. He could hold his own when he was pressed and Benny looked just like him then.

And I know Alley never slept with the guy, couldn’t have since he wasn’t even in town the month Benny was conceived, but, still, I sometimes get the feeling that little Benny is more of Eddie’s than mine, like I’m a carrier for the man’s DNA, like maybe some day he’ll grow up and be just like his old man’s friend instead of his old man. Who could blame him anyway?

Alley came home and both of us ignored her. “Hi, Hon,” and, “Hi, Mom,” and that was all.

4.

When we were around 15 or 16, Eddie and I stole my dad’s Dodge one afternoon and went joyriding with Birdie and Clem—me driving, Eddie riding shotgun, and the other two crammed in the back. We paid a bum to buy a case of Coors for us out at Groton Ave. Liquors, picked up some cigarettes at Basil’s, and headed for the countryside. The plan, I think, was to cruise around a bit and get tanked before Eddie gathered enough courage to go up to some girl’s door and ask her and her friends to come out with us. In those days, he was shy and turned bright red whenever he had to talk to any girl his own age. It was summer and we were bored. Something happened along the way, though.

Later and later and the sun was turning down and Eddie wasn’t getting any drunker. We ended up sticking to the country roads longer than we’d planned, jeering Eddie and popping the car into neutral at the top of the steep hills. Rollercoastering, we called it—plunging down broken roads with the stink of skunk and cow shit all around us. Anyway, somehow we’d managed to completely turn around, head back around the south end of Cortland and up through the western city limits.

We were out near Cosmos Hill when it happened. Cigarette sick and buzzed, Eddie screamed, “Stop the car, I’m getting out!” and swung his leg over and stomped on the brake. I lost control of the car and it started doing a grinding fishtail. The car lurched into the other lane and beyond before I could stop it and we found ourselves staring down the hood at a nice twenty foot drop. The front wheels must have been inches from the edge. I tried to say something but couldn’t find my voice, so I got out. Eddie pushed open his door, fell out of his seat, and puked all over the ground. Birdie and Clem popped out of the backseat whooping and laughing and clapping my back.

When Eddie finally stood up, his eyes were weird and distant.

“What is it?” Birdie said. “Eddie, man, what is it?”

Eddie just put up a hand to quiet him and then we felt it, too.

We stood there staring out over the valley for nearly an hour, not saying a word.

We went home that night without picking up any girls, the four of us moved by something we couldn’t explain. Birdie and Clem ended up waving it off as just some bad alcohol-induced head-twist. Eddie thought it was something else, though, felt like, I don’t know, like something was calling to him from out of that valley. He never really talked about it, just smiled and nodded the few times I tried to tell the story to people. No one ever gets stories like that though, so I stopped telling it. But Eddie, he changed after that—not enough so anyone would notice, really, not enough so that I’d notice until years later, long after the timeline of his life had abruptly veered off at that odd angle and he’d become a poet and traveler, someone no longer like the rest of us.

That night I was talking about, my dad caught us. We pulled into the driveway with the car and there he was, waiting for us on the doorstep with a couple of cops taking notes. We hadn’t said a thing since pulling away from Cosmos Hill and we didn’t say a thing when my old man let us spend a cold hard night in a jail cell.

He died of a heart attack a few months later, my dad. Skip ahead five years and Eddie’s mother died, willed her son some money, and he quit school, got The Beast, and took off on some kind of whirlwind expedition to write poetry. The week after he left, I met Abe Stoller at The Doughnut Box for coffee and crullers and ended up explaining how I had this idea for a weekly column on local history. The old man loved it, said people around here were in need of a sense of home and belonging and anyway I had a sharp brain and should find something to do with it before it went dull or drove myself nuts.

Eddie though—maybe all these years later, alone and driving, alone and thinking, he just realized he’d lost himself somewhere along the way. He suddenly saw exactly how far he’d gotten from that evening out on Cosmos Hill, the way people do when they start thinking things like, “Oh my God, what the hell happened to all of that time I had?” Maybe it just hit him like that, and he stopped the car and got out and looked around. People do that sometimes—why couldn’t he?

Syracuse all lit up behind him, a vast sparkling chasm in the distance. This isn’t what he’d felt all those years ago. What he’d felt then was magical, unspeakable, incredible. It had been like a voice rising up from the ground, or a song coming across the landscape, that first narcotic tingle of summer. That was the problem though—it was only explainable through similes and metaphors. He’d started writing poetry not because he thought it was fun or fulfilling but because he wanted an answer to the question, What the hell was that, out there that night on Cosmos Hill? And then everything seemed like him asking that question—skipping town at 21, the Lincoln, the girl in Manchester, all these years on the road—and the question went unanswered. All these years and he hadn’t aged a day, was still just some adolescent kid staring out over a valley.

He started walking then, not following the road, but away from it, into the trees.

*

I don’t know if there ever was a girl in Manchester or not, I’m making that up too. I’m making it all up. It’s a theme.

*

At Sugar n’ Spice today, I tried to explain all of this to Abe. I got to talking, then yelling and sweating, and I knew I wasn’t getting my point across. I tried to tell him all of it, all of these pages I’ve written down so carefully, especially about that night out on Cosmos Hill with Eddie and the guys. The whole thing came out in one continuous stream, a single word that took minutes to get out, a single word that choked and died in my throat. All gobbledygook, drivel, nonsense. I wasn’t doing it right. The whole world turned wet and bleary and suddenly I couldn’t see. I tried to get up and go but my foot got locked behind the table leg and I landed flat on my face. I turned over and there was Abe, standing over me, Standard under his arm, shaking his head. He dropped some bills on the table, bent over, and said, breathing coffee breath into my face, “He may be the son I wish I knew better, but he’s also the man you wish you were, and that’s worse if you ask me, much worse. Now start acting your age. Get yourself cleaned up.”

*

He didn’t say most of that but I wish he had. The only thing he said was, “Get yourself cleaned up.” I wish I’d told him I haven’t taken anything today. I’m clean now.

*

When Benny got home from school, I scooped him up and held him for a while. He struggled and kicked for a bit, then just went limp in my arms. When I looked at him, his face was screwed up into a scowl and his eyes cut sideways, away from me. “Son,” I said, and the word felt like a stone in my mouth because I’d never called him that before. What could I say after that? “Will I be old some day, looking out a window in a coffee shop while one of your friends talks to me about the weather? Where will you be?”

Benny scowled. “Put me down,” he said. Not like a kid, but like an adult giving an order to another, weaker adult.

5.

I spent the rest of the night scanning the local news and flipping through the paper, typing sentences on the laptop that I eventually deleted. No news of Eddie, none expected. Then, later, after we’d gone to bed, I freaked out and woke everyone up, threw myself out of bed like I was throwing myself out of a moving car, made a racket, banged my elbow against the nightstand. Alley jumped out of bed and a minute later Benny was at the door. Alley kept saying, “Are you all right? Are you all right?” I told her I was fine, just had a nightmare, sorry, sorry. She took Benny by the hand and led him back to bed, but before she did, she gave me this look over her shoulder, the same kind of glare she gives Benny when he misbehaves.

It’s not the drugs, I wanted to say, but I know, Hon. In a year, you’ll be gone, too.

*

I don’t actually remember what I’d dreamed but this is what I want to have dreamed:

I was in the car with Eddie the night he disappeared, and I was sitting beside him and we were just cruising in silence, like we used to, taking that midnight road from nowhere to nowhere. Out the window, out there at the edge of the world, past all the hills and trees, the silhouette of the horizon was backlit by the low, spooky-blue sunset glow you get out in the country. When I looked back, Eddie was gone and the car was rolling downhill all on its own. His door flapped closed and when I twisted around to look through the back window, he was there, standing at the side of the road, caught in the shine of the taillights, waving.

I called his name and pressed the seatbelt button, pulled at the strap and still it wouldn’t come off—I was tied down and the car was out of control. When I tried to yank at the belt, three of my fingernails tore off. I reached for the steering wheel and it was slick beneath my hands, the blood coming through my fingers.

The car began to freefall, no road beneath it, nothing to keep it anywhere, and I clutched the driver’s seat then. I glanced over my shoulder, looking for Eddie. Birdie and Clem were in the backseat now, still and staring straight ahead, no Eddie in sight.

I screamed like mad as that car went down and down, never to come back up again, rollercoastering one way only, no hope to hold onto, no Eddie to keep us all steady. It was my blood on the seat.

***
Aron Efimenko received his MFA in fiction from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and teaches English at Morrisville State College.