A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak Read online

  Weird.

  “I’m starving,” Walter groaned, pulling his hand out of the snow. “Aren’t you hungry? Or don’t you eat?”

  “Don’t eat, but I imagine if you just tell yourself you’re not hungry you won’t be hungry.”

  “I’d rather tell myself I was eating popcorn,” Walter mumbled. The kid tore his gaze away from the lights of Beaverton, which twinkled below them in all of their grid-pattern beauty, except for the Exxon sign that glowed with a neon beauty all its own on the south side of town. Peter’s eyelashes twitched and a paper cone filled with popcorn from the Hub Theater, which was somewhere in that grid of lights, appeared in Walter’s hand.

  “There you go,” Peter said.

  “Thanks, kid.” With real glee Walter tossed a kernel of corn into his mouth. The salty fat deliciousness touched his tongue and then vanished. He crammed a handful into his mouth and it was the same thing—a taste, the familiar squeeze and gush of his tastebuds, and then nothing. It was a bitter tease. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re dead.” Peter shrugged. “What do you want from me?” Peter turned back to the lights of the town. “It’s pretty up here.”

  Walter had never noticed, but Make-out Rock did have a sort of picturesque quality to it that had nothing to do with trying to get to second base with a girl. It was dark and private, and the rolling lowlands of southern Wisconsin were an ebony sea before them, gilded in elevated places with the illuminated specters of far-off towns.

  “It’s gonna get prettier.” Walter grinned, feeling like the hormone-riddled seventeen-year-old boy who’d won that state championship.

  The windows of the ‘61 Skylark were getting pretty steamy.

  The boy checked his pager again.

  “I thought the woman chose chicken?” Walter asked.

  “She did, but I’ve got my eye on a guy who has been drinking and is looking for his keys.” The kid nodded and then smiled at Walter. “He called a cab.”

  “I thought all of this was planned out—”

  Peter scoffed.

  “It’s not?”

  “No way.” Peter crossed his legs and fiddled with the crease at his knee. “Every person is born with general decency. We miss some—Manson, Hitler, Dahmer. But for the most part you all get a sense of right and wrong at birth. But what you do with it is constantly surprising.” Peter gave Walter the hairy eyeball. “You people should know better by now. But…” He heaved a dramatic sigh. “That’s life. Literally.”

  Walter let that little insight sink in like a rock. “There’s no plan?”

  “There’s faith, Walter. That’s all. Faith on every side of the coin, from every angle, it just comes down to—”

  A loud squeal and some shrieking laughter pealed out of the Buick.

  “Kid, hold that thought.”

  Walter grinned and the Skylark shimmied and shook and the screaming laughter got louder.

  “Any minute now…”

  The back door flew open and MaryAnn Arneson fell out into the grass and snow, laughing her head off and wearing—oh dear God—nothing but her cheerleading skirt.

  Rosie was the love of his life, the most perfect woman in the world. But MaryAnn Arneson had a pair of tits that he used to dream about.

  MaryAnn picked herself off the ground, her pale skin glowed in the moonlight and those breasts, high and round and young, bobbed slightly as she stood.

  “Amen,” Walter breathed, so pleased that those mythical breasts were better, more perfect than he remembered.

  An arm, his own, seventeen-year-old arm reached out from the car and grabbed her hand.

  “I don’t know, Walt,” she said, all the laughter and giddiness gone, and now she just looked like a young woman, a girl really, standing at the edge of adulthood. Walter felt her innocence all over again, but sharper, more real and fragile than he could have even comprehended at seventeen. It was beautiful and humbling the trust she had put in him that night.

  “I’ll stop, sweetheart. Just say the word and I’ll stop.” Walter’s young voice cracked. He’d meant it. He actually remembered, despite all his hormones, that part of him hoped she would say stop. He had been a scared virgin, too.

  “Promise?” Her hand fluttered over her chest like she was crossing her heart and Walter felt the sudden bite of tears. Don’t do this, he wanted to say. Be a child a little longer. Don’t let go of this guilelessness.

  “Of course, of course I promise,” the young him panted.

  “Okay,” she breathed.

  MaryAnn crawled back inside and the laughter turned to low moans.

  “Do you want me to stop?” his voice asked.

  “No, Walter. No. It’s okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because I can—”

  “Walter!”

  There was a quick pained gasp. A deep groan.

  Walter stood and looked away from the car, at the lights of the town. The memory was altered from this perspective, tainted by age and knowing better and filled with a wistful wish that perhaps he had held on to childhood a little longer.

  Because things were never so simple and sweet again.

  “I want to go,” he said.

  His own youth left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  10

  In the little girl’s backyard the sun burned off the clouds and steam drifted up from the earth.

  Walter lurched and collided with a swing, the earth unanchored and fluid in the moments just after arrival in this backyard after leaving the escarpment.

  The pain radiated through his body like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer.

  “Uh, God,” he moaned and belched up the bubble of nausea.

  Walter rolled over to his side, trying to remember Rosie’s Lamaze breathing lessons.

  It was getting harder. Peter had been right about that.

  The girl had taken off her pink raincoat in order to slide down her plastic slide and right into a puddle that had formed at the bottom. She landed, pink boots first, and mud, water, and pine needles sprayed heavenward and a rainbow appeared in the wet air around the girl’s poofy pigtails.

  Peter applauded the girl’s spectacular splash landing and she threw her arms over her head. For a second Walter thought maybe the girl could hear him.

  “Her mother is going to kill her,” Peter said. The little girl ran right through him to climb back up the slide.

  For a moment, while her flesh and bone passed through the air and glitter of his phantom shape, it seemed to Walter’s untrustworthy eyes that Peter glowed bright.

  “Beth!” A woman, tall and thin and mad, stood at the sliding glass door, her hands fisted on her hips. “What in the world do you think you are doing?”

  “Told you.” Peter smiled and sat at the top of the slide to watch. “This girl never learns. Watch.”

  “Mom, it’s getting hot out,” Beth whined, and Walter remembered a day by the lake when Jennifer, about Beth’s age, had pushed Rosie’s “stay away from the edge of the water” rule until Walter had to go in after her.

  “I don’t care, you’re coming in.”

  “But Mom…”

  “One.” The woman’s posture became that of a mother not to be messed with. “Two.” Beth grabbed her jacket, dragging it through the mud puddle, and clomped up the stairs and in the sliding glass door.

  The mother took the tea towel from off her shoulder and swatted her daughter on the butt as she tramped by.

  Peter watched until the vertical blinds swayed back into place before looking over at Walter.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Where?”

  “This yard.”

  The boy was acting strange. And strange, to a dead man, who’d tried to bring himself back to life and had been traveling willy-nilly through his own past, was really saying something.

  “Where would you rather be?” The boy asked, and for a split second the yard and the mist and the smell of pine
vanished, and they were in the basement of the Horner Funeral Home in Beaverton, Wisconsin. Walter’s body was laid out like a raw turkey on a table and Jay Horner, who used to run track with Walter in high school, was putting socks on Walter’s pale, dead feet, humming along with the radio.

  Walter cringed at the sudden change and the sweet chemical smell. “You want to keep coming back here?” Peter asked. “Watch yourself get dressed for your funeral?”

  “No,” Walter said, trying not to breathe through his nose.

  “Of course not,” Peter nodded. “It’s depressing.”

  And in a flash they were back in the yard, swinging in unison on the little girl’s swing set.

  “But who are these people?” Walter asked. “I mean, why do we…”

  Peter’s phone rang and the boy dug his feet into the soft mud to stop his swinging. He checked his phone, nodded grimly, and cast an apologetic look at the sky.

  “You still need to pick a day,” Peter reminded him, and Walter dug his own feet into the ground.

  “Okay,” he said, not intending to ever pick a day, but willing to use up whatever time he had available for these fluid trips to the past. “Something else from when I was a kid.”

  Peter nodded, and from the ground between the slide and door a hulking black metal machine, like an early arcade game, ripped through the earth and Walter recognized the old microfiche machines. The boy leaned down and looked through the viewfinder; his hands on the knobs toggled whatever he was watching on the screen forward.

  “High school graduation?” Peter asked.

  Walter shook his head. He’d gotten blind drunk and passed out on his front porch.

  “Science fair, summer camp, spelling bee—”

  “Spelling bee!” Walter grinned. “Not mine, though. Chris’s.”

  “You want to go see your brother win a spelling bee?”

  “That night. My mom took us into the city.” She’d done that a lot, taken them out for dinners without their dad, but this night she’d been particularly fun. Silly, even. She’d put a straw between her lips and nose and pretended it was a mustache. They’d had ice cream before the meal. She let them share a beer, telling them strong, smart boys deserved such things. Such fun.

  All the way home they’d sung the Polish folk songs she’d taught them as babies.

  Peter consulted his magic device and nodded in surprising agreement. “Good idea,” he said. “But there’s something more to that night that you should see.”

  Peter blinked and Walter was hurled backward, lifted up, and spun. His stomach knotted, his guts twisted. And then—light as a feather—he landed in his parent’s bedroom.

  * * *

  March 17, 1955

  The night of the Beaverton County Elementary School Spelling Bee

  * * *

  Vicktor lay back on the bed, his arms over his chest as he watched Paulina get ready for her celebratory dinner with the boys.

  “I’m not here,” Walter said, looking around his parent’s small bedroom. “I thought you could only show me things I was around for?”

  He’d rarely gone into his folks’ room. It was like a dragon’s inner sanctum when he was a kid. Dad spent a lot of time here, watching the old black and white, stretched out across the bed with a beer.

  Walter had never noticed the needlework sunflowers framed in the corner—his mother’s handiwork. Or the stack of books by his father’s side of the bed. Walter tilted his head to read the titles. Nonfiction, mostly. A couple of Agatha Christie mysteries.

  “Usually,” Peter said, smiling and twinkling like a boy with a secret. “But I think it’s for the greater good to break the rules in this instance.”

  Wearing his most annoying all-knowing expression, Peter sat down on Walter’s parents’ bed. He slid up the white chenille bedspread to lean against the cheap pine headboard, next to Vicktor.

  Walter—even though he was dead, even though Peter was a ghost or an angel or whatever—Walter was nervous about those black shoes on the bedspread.

  That was the power of Vicktor Zawislak.

  Peter looked small, ridiculous, like the utter opposite of Walter’s father and Walter had to stop himself from warning Peter to stay away from the man. Like his father’s anger and bitterness might, across death, infect the boy with something. A cold, maybe. Strep throat.

  “I think you’re going to be interested in what your parents have to talk about.” Peter’s black eyes glittered.

  “Why can’t I go?” Vicktor asked his wife.

  Walter’s jaw dropped, not just at the request, but at his father’s tone. He was whining. Walter and Christopher would have been slapped, called babies, had they used that tone of voice. “I’d like to go into the city. Have a pork chop.”

  “You wanted to go?” Walter asked his father. “But you never went out with us for these dinners.”

  “Keep watching,” Peter whispered, like they were at a movie.

  Mom sat at her vanity table, powdering her face with an aged pink puff. The smell wafted up to Walter—flowery and sweet and undeniably his mother. She wore her one good dress—red sateen with the belt and embroidered collar. It reminded Walter of weddings.

  Paulina looked back at her husband’s reflection in the mirror, her face soft. Her eyes warm. Loving.

  This is what happened in his parent’s bedroom? Walter wondered. His father whined and his mother was affectionate to him?

  No wonder they rarely let him and Chris in here.

  “Come now, Tata. You spoil the fun.” She clipped on the white pearl earrings she’d said were her mother’s. “You make the boys uncomfortable.”

  Walter braced himself for his father’s explosion, even going to far as to step between them. As if his ghostly body would be better protection than his earthly childhood body. But he’d never heard his mother speak to Dad like that. Never even dreamed she was capable of such honesty.

  “I am too hard on them,” Vicktor said, picking up the beer he had sweating on the bedside table.

  “Tata.” Paulina stood, her solid body wide, stout, and capable. She walked over to the bed where Dad pouted, and braced her hands on his shoulders. She stroked his face. Smiled into his eyes with unflinching affection.

  Walter collapsed onto his mother’s vanity stool, his knees weak, his perceptions of his parents blown to bits.

  “I told you it was good,” Peter said.

  “You are their father,” Paulina practically cooed. “It is your job to make them men.”

  Vicktor shook his head. “I know, but they don’t like me. My own sons. I scare them—”

  “They love you,” Paulina insisted. “And when they grow they will thank you for what you’ve done. For the way you have made them strong.”

  Vicktor nodded, reluctantly, and Paulina leaned down and kissed his forehead.

  “Here.” Vicktor dug into his blue work pants. “Buy the boys dessert. Ice cream or whatever they’ve got.”

  “Thank you, Tata.” Paulina kissed him again and turned to leave.

  “Flip on the set,” Dad said, and Paulina hit the button that sparked the old TV to life.

  She walked right by Walter and there was no misinterpreting the satisfaction that wreathed her face as she left Vicktor behind.

  Walter spun to face Peter.

  “See?” Peter crowed. “You don’t know your mother as well as you thought.”

  “She encouraged him,” Walter said, flabbergasted. “She—” He couldn’t even find the right words for what he’d seen.

  “Manipulated him?” Peter supplied. “Not everything is as it seems.”

  Walter watched his father settle into his place in front of the TV, while the sound of the old Buick starting came in through the open window. Christopher called shotgun.

  “I don’t get it!” Walter cried. Every betrayal of his childhood doubled and redoubled. It wasn’t just his father’s cruelty he carried anymore, it was their cruelty. “Didn’t she see what he was doing
to us?”

  “Walter—”

  “She wanted him to treat us that way? How could a mother do that?”

  “Walter, you’re getting worked up.”

  The walls of the room started to smoke. Gold flames with blue hearts that mirrored Walter’s wounded memories flickered up the walls, eating the needlepoints and stacks of Agatha Christie novels.

  “Of course I’m getting worked up!” he yelled. “Why did you show me this? What was the point? Like this whole thing isn’t painful enough? You have to do this to me?”

  “Okay.” Peter climbed off the bed where Vicktor remained, unaware of the flames, the ruination of Walter’s fond memories of his mother. “This was a mistake. I get that. This is why there are rules about these things.”

  Flames cruised over the ceiling and Peter grabbed his phone.

  “Something happy, something happy,” he muttered. “Got it.” He looked up at Walter, the smarmy expression gone. Regret carving lines into his young face. “I’m so sorry, Walter.”

  The floor dropped out of his parent’s bedroom and they landed in the alley behind that crappy apartment above the liquor store that he’d lived in after the war.

  Walt recoiled at the sudden smell of urine and sour booze.

  “Walter?” Peter said stepping out from behind the dumpster.

  “Why did she want him to treat us that way? All these years I thought she was scared of him. That’s why she never stopped him. But she wasn’t scared she was...” He tried to find a word to match the satisfaction he’d seen in her eyes, that smile on her lips, but the only word he could think of made him sick. “God, happy? She was happy with the way he terrorized us?”

  “She’s from a different generation. A different place,” Peter said. “Different ideas of what it meant to be a man and a father.”

  “But it’s like she didn’t want us to like him.”

  Peter shrugged. “She got all your love that way. She never had to be the bad guy.”