It had started with such promise. He had sat next to her at the study table, not across, and gentlemanly, he turned his head away from her to burp softly, excusing himself. He asked what schools she had applied to (Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, NYU), what she wanted to do when she graduated. She told him she was considering pre-med or art history, and he surprised her by wanting to major in history and asking if her father was a veteran. He was interested in military history and sometimes talked to the old men at the nursing home where his grandfather lived. Oliver invited her and her father to the nursing home next Saturday to meet his own grandfatherâit would be cool, he figured, if both men had a buddy from the older days.
She even confessed, swearing him to secrecy, that âLil Cindy was her mother.
“But country music stars are rich, aren't they?” He tried to reconcile the facts of her situation with what he knew about life.
“Yeah, but we've never seen any money,” she answered, picking at the spine of one of the books. “My parents were never married. I don't even know if she knew anything about me. My father said he sent school pictures, but I never met herâ¦my father didn't even tell me about her until the night she died.”
“Don't cry.” He put his arm on her shoulder as she sobbed. “They'll make us leave the library.”
“You don't understand.” She shook her head. “Your mother
wanted
you.”
She had stayed in the library bathroom, bawling, until her father came, drunk as usual. He dented the mailbox at the corner of the library with the front bumper of the truck as it shuddered to a stop and then left rubber on the road in front as he gunned it for home. She wondered whether she would be allowed back, her lending privileges suspended.
She had retired to her room with her leftovers, content to eat herself half-satiated to sleep. But her father's step was heavy, unsure, on the stairs. She stuffed the chalupa wrapper under her pillow and pulled the sheets high. Her father tied one on frequently, and his favoriteâhis onlyâaudience for his boasts, laments, and insecurities was Heidi.
Sometimes, if she pretended to sleep, he'd leave her alone. His face would dip uncomfortably close to hers, the sweet-sour aroma of whiskey penetrating her nostrils as she tried to keep her face from an involuntary twitch or sneeze, and he'd whisper “Heidi” at a decibel that most would not consider a whisper. Sometimes, a sprinkle of spit would coat one of her cheeks, the bridge of her nose. She would lay still, and the mattress would rock violently as he stood up and clomped out of the room to his own.
“Heidi.” His hands grabbed the edge of the sheets near her face and shook. “Heidi.”
“Dad, I've got school tomorrow.” She launched herself to her side, where his emphysemic breath just went into her ear.
“Heidi, this is important.” The bed rocked as he settled himself and his books. “I've been doing some research into the family'sâ¦history.”
“Can't you tell me after school?”
“No.” Apparently her father thought that his powers of elocution existed only when he was shit-faced drunk. “Listen. My mother, she emigrated from Poland, you know. She brought a lot of knowledge about herbs and stuff, always rubbing something on our chests for colds, awful-smelling pastes on our cuts, powders in our tea. Anyway, before I enlisted, she gave me an herbâburnette saxifrage. She told me to eat it, and that it would save me during the war. It would make me immortal.”
“Did you?”
“No.” His weight shifted on the bed a little. “I gave it to my buddy Johnson. He got his leg blown off by a mine. I put it in his mouth and made him chew, and then the medic came. Here's his picture.”
“Did he live?” She looked at the black-and-white, so old it was grey-and-white, photo of a slight, blond man with a wrinkled forehead and kind eyes next to a well-built, taller man with dark hair and a square face. They were leaning on the rail of a warship, cigarettes dangling from their smiling, crooked mouths. They could have been the seniors at Mount Zion who graduated the previous year.
“Noâhe was dead when I ran off. The shelling was something fierce. Not only were there mines everywhere, but they were shelling the treesâ¦it all came down on you. A lot of men died that way. Spent four months in the dead of winter hugging trees, trying to keep away from that shit.”
“So the herb didn't work.”
“I didn't think so. But I took some with me. Don't know whyâpulled some out of Johnson's mouth before I left.”
Her father stood and flipped on her desk lamp. The orange inverted triangle of light that filled the corner of her bedroom set her father's face in sharp relief. He almost looked like a prisoner in a concentration camp, she thought. The years, the alcohol, the war, her mother, had consumed him. He sat back on the bed and pushed a shriveled brown mass in a sandwich bag toward her.
“I tried to burn this not too long agoâ¦with all of your mother's stuff. All thisâ¦past, it isn't doing us any good. But I couldn't burn it. It refused to be burned.”
“What do you mean?” She wiggled up to a sitting position and looked at the bent, dried stalks and fragile white flowers molded into a shape resembling a dog turd.
“I mean I squirted it full of lighter fluid and it didn't burn. Maybe there's something to it after all. I tried to do some research at the library, but there's not much about burnette saxifrage. It's also called
Pimpinella saxifrage
, and it grew in the area where she said she and her mother lived in Reszel. She also told me and the other children that she grew up playing with a witch. We always thought she told the stories to scare usâof course, Cass and Thomas never believed any of it, but I used to sleep with Julia or Kathryn at night after your grandmother got done talking about the baba yagas. HehâI still get a shiver now.”
“How come I've never met any of my aunts and uncles?”
“Would you like to? I'm sure you must have cousins or something.”
“I don't know.” She drew her knees up to her chin. They would probably be blonde, blue-eyed starlets. “So, did you ever figure out what happened to Johnson?”
“Over the years, I've wanted to. After I stole you from your mother, I really couldn't do much traveling. But when you graduate high school and go to college, I'm thinking about traveling to Ohio, where he's from, and DC, to look into the Veterans Administration records.”
“Waitâyou stole me from my mother?”
“She didn't want you, baby.” He reached over to grab her shoulder but missed, his palm landing on her pillow. “I babysat you on the roadâshe never wanted to go home. Always one more gig, one more radio performance, one more thing that would make her famous. And I guess she did all right for herself. But one day, I decided I didn't want to be her nanny anymore, especially since you weren't evenâ¦well, anyway, I couldn't leave you there. You needed stability, not formula in a hotel room at four o'clock in the morning.”
“Is my fatherâ¦still alive?”
“I imagine.” He sighed, looking at his hands. “I imagine you could find him.”
“I don't want to find himâ¦I mean, you're my father.”
“Well, it makes me feel funny to hear you say that.” He smiled. “I mean, you were pretty free with your words when you was little, but as an adult, I'm sure you wonder how you got to be so unlucky.”
“I feel lucky fine,” she said, although she certainly did not feel lucky all of the time.
“Listen, I got this diary.” He pressed an old datebook from the drugstore into her hands. “It ain't much, but I been scribbling down my memoirs and what I remember of my family. I've been wanting for you to know your roots.”
“What about the herb?”
“I'm giving it to you. Don't ever feed it to me in the event of my demiseâI don't want to find out if it works. I want to die as soon as I am eligible for its benefits. But maybe you can use it somehowâa science experiment or something.”
“You're giving me an immortal herb for a science experiment?”
“This is all I've got.” He put the baggie and datebook on her night table. “I know it ain't no Corvette. I got to take a piss.”
He ambled out of the bedroom like some wounded animal, hanging on her doorframe until she thought he might pull the house apart from the inside. When he was gone, she turned off the light and tried to sleep. Her father's drunk stories were always crazy, and this one was no different. She picked up the baggie, wondering if the dropout who lived in a van by the zoo had sold her father a dime bag of pot outside the liquor store. She opened the baggie and smelled it. It smelled burnt and stale, not what marijuana was supposed to smell like. Maybe it was oregano. She put the baggie in her school backpack, wondering whether she could sell it to Melanie Huber, the girl who listened to the Happy Dead or whoever that druggie band was, for a little spending money, and held the datebook in her hands. Did she really want to know the true extent of her father's instability? She heard that train barreling down and opened the datebook, resigned to her position on the tracks.
When she got to school the next day, she noticed Shauna looking at her from across the room in Calculus class, her face placid and not twisted in its usual contortions when she met Heidi's eyes. She wondered whether Oliver had laid down the law already, if he took her aside before school, where they hung out on the bleachers with all the jocks and cheerleaders, sneaking cigarettes and sometimes pot, and told her to knock it off, maybe all of them, in his detached, no-nonsense way, taking a swig from a bottle of chocolate Yoo-Hoo, and speaking no more of it.
Mr. Davis, the math teacher, walked in and began to write derivatives on the chalkboard, silencing the chatter in the classroom. Then it started, Shauna and her girlfriends, like frogs: “Mid-get mommy, mid-get mommy, mid-get mommy.”
For once, he rode on the damn right horse. Years of Friday afternoons betting five or ten dollars of his pension on horses to show, and never had he left Delmarva Downs with as much as a nickel. Today, an unseasonably cool Friday in May, when he saw Cindy's Girl, a squat Palomino, posted at $15.50, he put down forty to win and walked away with almost 400 dollars.
He never actually thought of what he'd do with the money, since he'd never won before, but he stopped at the bus station and bought two bus tickets to Baltimore. He was not getting younger. He needed to find the other Polenskys, his brothers and sisters, and he needed to ingratiate Heidi into their care. She needed to know she had a home if his heart stopped, and by the slow, dull weight of it, the gasps of his breath at night, he figured it might be sooner rather than later.
And a steak. He wasn't due to pick up Heidi for another couple of hours. The Golden Corral restaurant had $7.99 sirloin tips. He could count on his fingers, since he had Heidi, when he'd eaten steak. Ten dollars for lunch, thirty for the bus tickets, and the rest for Heidi to do what she wanted. To live a little, for chrissakes. She had appointed herself house accountant over the years, and it broke his heart to see her move the expenses into his columnâfor medications, for Ben-Gay, for orthopedic shoes, a caneâand not into hers. She put her Christmas money and birthday money into her savings account for college, and although it accorded with the stinginess of his cheap Pollock heart, he didn't understand why, when she'd brought home straight As for the past five years, she didn't think she'd be eligible for a scholarship or five.
At the Golden Corral, he loaded up on the sirloin at the salad bar, along with a baked potato, green beans, and a few breaded items that he assumed were vegetables. He slid into a booth and took his wallet, bulging with tens and twenties and the tickets, and put it beside him on the table because its newfangled shape burred into his ass. He cut the steak and guiltily wondered whether he should have waited for Heidi, taken her to dinner. She'd always given him larger portions than hers at dinner, even though she was technically the one still growing and required adequate sustenance. But he wondered whether he'd just embarrass her. He saw her face every day when he picked her up at school, even crying the one day he met her teacher, Missus Fancypants. He'd thought of letting her have the truck during the week, if it weren't so unreliable. He imagined her breaking down at school and getting a lot of crust from her schoolmates, or worse yet, she'd break down on the way home and have to huff it for six miles. She had enough crosses to haul ass with every day; being with him, in public, no less, was not another he'd hoist on her back.
His stomach gurgled. The fried mushrooms and zucchini must not be sitting well with him, or maybe it was the fried egg he'd sneaked in for breakfast after Heidi was at school, washing the plate but leaving a clean bowl in the drainer to make her think he'd eaten oatmeal. He stood up and hauled off to the men's room as fast as his stiff leg and back would work, and while he sat on the hard, cold, slightly moist toilet seat, expelling large volumes of liquidated food, he remembered his wallet, sitting fat like a stuffed duck on the table.
He could not stop the waterworks, the grunting. Now his chest was getting into it, too, a little heartburn. He grabbed at his knees and remembered the days back in Germany, when he had the shits so bad and Johnson made fun of him, shitting in his helmet like that. He cleaned it out in the river, in the frozen water, but for the rest of the war, he could still smell it, the faint whiff of shit, and it got to the point where the next pile of dead they came upon, mostly newbies, he took a shining, clean helmet off a dead boy's head, not even dead a few hours, and left his on the boy's chest. No sense making the boy's hair smell like shit, too. Not that he wouldn't smell worse than that by the time he got to the Graves Registration Department.
Kind of the way he smelled now. Christ. He grunted and shuddered and forced what seemed like every spare drop out of his ass and then hurried back to his table. He felt light and achy, like he had a fever, but he broke out in sweat when he saw the table empty of his plate and his wallet. How long had he been in the bathroom?