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“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.”
