Peter Pan and the Mayfly

by Bill Kowaleski

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

“Uh, where was I?” I continued: “Oh yeah, police at the door. They kept banging, and I thought they were probably going to break down the door, so I crawled out from under that sofa, walked down the stairs and let them in.

“‘Who are you?’ asked some gigantic, black-uniformed, crew-cut guy, who looked about a hundred years old to me.

“I told him, explained that my father wasn’t in. Then he got real serious and buddy-buddy with me. ‘Bill, let’s go sit down, okay?’ We did. Then he says, ‘Bill, this might come as a shock. Your father was shot and seriously injured a while ago. He’s in the hospital now. We can take you there, if you’d like.’

“I should have played along, I should have acted dumb, but I was so agitated, so curious, I couldn’t control myself. I said, ‘Did she shoot him in the entryway of that big fancy house on north Spenser Street?’

“You should have seen his face! He was so surprised. ‘Were you there, Bill? You must have been. How else would you know all of that?’

“I explained everything. Then the policeman took me to the hospital. By then, my father had died.”

Gerstner seemed strangely unmoved. He was staring at two young chicas who had just walked in. Then he turned to me.

“So that’s what made you grow up then? Losing your father, realizing that life was serious stuff.”

“Yeah, you get it after all. And I haven’t even told you about what happened after that.”

“Tell me about the woman in that big fancy house,” said Gerstner.

“Well, okay, I was going to tell you about how I ended up adopted by my aunt and uncle, but sure. Turns out my father owed a lot of money to those people. They took the entertainment center as partial compensation, but it wasn’t enough. There must have been an argument at the front door that day. But nobody knows, because they never found that woman.”

“But surely they could trace her based on who owned the house,” said Gerstner.

“The house was rented by some guy. Nobody knew who the woman was. Her fingerprints and DNA weren’t in the system. She must have taken off right after the shooting.”

“So how long did your father lie there injured?” asked Gerstner.

“Too long. I guess nobody nearby was home. The mail carrier found him, maybe half an hour later.”

“And this was fourteen years ago?”

“Yeah.” The waiter took away our plates. I wasn’t planning to spring for dessert too, so I stood. “I got a big day tomorrow, Gerstner, let’s get you home.”

When I pulled up to the shabby little house he and his mother called home, he said, “You’ve never been inside, have you? Come in for a sec, Billyboy. I want to show you something.”

I winced at that nickname again, but said, “Look, another time, okay? Like I said—”

“Seriously,” said Gerstner, his tone uncharacteristically forceful. “You want to see this.”

As he turned the key in the front door, he said, “Mom’s asleep by now, so whisper. She can be real crabby if I wake her.”

We tiptoed into a small living room illuminated by a bare-bulbed lamp. The furniture looked more than lived-in with worn spots on the mud-gray sofa cushions and the odd tear on the arms. The walls were a dirty yellow. Paint peeled from the ceiling.

“It’s pretty run-down,” whispered Gerstner. “But she just gets like fifteen hundred a month from Social Security and a tiny pension from some job she had years ago. Just follow me into the hallway here.”

The odor of cat hit me hard as soon as we entered the narrow passageway. He flipped a light switch which weakly illuminated it. There were two doors on each side, a bathroom with its door open at the far end, and lots of small paintings and photos on the walls.

“This one,” said Gerstner. He pointed to a dim rectangular shape on the wall beside me. But I couldn’t make it out.

“Let’s take it under the light,” he suggested.

He pulled it off the wall, tucked it under his arm, walked back to the living room, and then presented it to me under the bare lightbulb. My eyes took in the scene, and it was as if all those years had just vanished and I was back in that frilly pink bedroom, hearing those shots from downstairs.

Five cats sat around a campfire. They were brightly illuminated by its flames, the background quickly fading to black. Cheesy as it was, the painting was well-done. The sense of being outdoors in the forest was strong, and the cats had very humanlike expressions of fear and wonder. There was no doubt where I’d seen it before.

“It’s a painting,” said Gerstner. “One of a kind. Is this what you saw?”

I nodded.

“Mom bought it at an estate sale. The timing is about right to mesh with your story.”

“Any idea whose estate?”

“The landlord put everything up for sale because the tenant never came back after the shooting.”

“Then we still don’t know who they were,” I said with a sigh.

“It doesn’t matter who they were, Billyboy. Sit down.” Gerstner pointed at the tattered couch. “You’re gonna need some time to take this all in.”

I sat. He took an armchair across from me. “We were there that day, Mom and I. After the shooting, the one you heard, we panicked and ran. We stayed with her sister, my aunt, in Minneapolis for a few months. Then we started thinking: nobody saw the shooting, nobody could even put us in that house. Yeah, we heard you break that window, and that bothered us. But then we read the news accounts and realized how little you knew. We were home free.

“We came back just in time for Mom to buy a lot of their stuff in the estate sale. They sold most of it in a big, single lot, so we got stuck with all those cat pictures. But now Mom kinda likes them.”

“I gotta be missing something here, Gerstner. Wouldn’t the police trace you through the renter?”

Gerstner chuckled. “He hardly knew us, Bud. You see, we were there just to let in the furniture delivery guys. Mom worked with his wife. The renter had his own issues, didn’t want to deal with the police, so he took off. I have no idea where he went or where he is now.”

“Which one of you pulled the trigger?”

“Come on, Billyboy. I’m not gonna tell you that.”

“Why are you telling me any of this, Gerstner?”

He smiled. Then his expression darkened into one of anger. “Because, Billyboy, you owe me and it’s time you realized it. It was your father who messed up our lives. I thought he was attacking my mother when he came to the door that day, and maybe he was. That’s why he’s dead. Mom lost her job when we ran and hid in Minneapolis. And I missed a year of school. Never could get caught up after that.

“And it’s all because that bastard — your father — came to the door and pushed my mother down. So, Billyboy, I figure those twenties you’ve been fronting me are a small payback for all the crap your father brought down on me and Mom. Far as I’m concerned, you ought to be supporting us both. You could surely afford to.”

I just stared at him. Slowly, anger rose until I shouted, “You goddamned slug! You’ll do anything to avoid taking responsibility for your life! You blame me for the fact that you’re living in a dump? What nonsense! How about you grow some balls and get out there and mix it up with the world like the rest of us. And another thing: Who’s the guy whose father got murdered — by you!?”

Gerstner stood and shouted in the loudest voice I’d ever heard come out of him, “I’m so goddamned sick of your belittling me, of your telling me how much better you are than I am.”

“Don’t think I’m not going to pursue this with the police, Gerstner,” I shouted back. “You’re gonna pay!”

He laughed. “You’ve got nothing to go to the police with. No evidence but what you heard. You couldn’t even ID us. We got away with it, and now you get to spend the rest of your life knowing that. Makes me feel real good, even if I probably am going to have to find someone else to mooch twenties from.”

I shouted back at him, “You’re wrong! I will go to the police, I’ll tell them about the cat painting, tell them about our meeting tonight...”

The door to Gerstner’s mother’s bedroom door burst open, startling me. A short, stocky, elderly woman wearing a light pink frilly bathrobe, her hair a shocking mess, stumbled into the light. Squinting, she shouted — no — cackled, “Go to the police, jerkoff! Go ahead. I still got the receipt from that estate sale. The cat painting don’t mean nothing. And just remember: we dealt with your father, and we can deal with you too.”

I just stared at her, trying to decide whether she was threatening me or just blustering. Finally, I said, “Didn’t the guys who delivered the furniture see you both?”

Gerstner’s mother, in her cackly, witch-like voice said, “They never saw Jimmy, just me. Yeah, they gave the police a description, but we were three hundred miles away by the time it got out to the public. And I was never more than a person of interest anyway. They did a sketch and it was in the papers, but it didn’t look like me at all.”

Jimmy! So that was Gerstner’s first name. He’d never told me.

“What about your car? Someone must have seen that.”

Jimmy Gerstner laughed. “Parked in the garage. Just pulled out and drove away.”

Yeah, I could see it all now. They’d gotten away with it all right. But there was still one question unanswered, and Mrs. Gerstner did the honors for that one.

“Your dad tried to push his way in. I thought it was a robbery. Such a shabby, smelly, horrid man! Jimmy had been snooping around the house and found a gun. He came in right when your dad shoved me to the ground. Your dad lunged, tried to grab the gun out of Jimmy’s hand. That was his last and worst mistake.”

* * *

I still watch the games at Crazy Wings, and sometimes I still see Gerstner there. I ignore him, but he’s there, so somebody’s loaning him money. Just yesterday, I was staring at the big screen when I felt a startling, too-hearty slap on the back. I turned to face a giant of a man, middle-aged, dark-haired, long bushy beard and hair, towering over me, but wearing a friendly smile. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Well, if it isn’t Bill!” He said, his voice loud and familiar.

The second I heard him talk I knew who he was.

“Hey, Hector! Last time we were together, you were hauling me into that house on Spenser street inside that big piece of furniture. What are you up to these days?”

“Yeah, I remember that day like it was yesterday,” he said with a sigh.

He pulled up a chair next to me and sat. The chair almost disappeared under his bulk. “I got a good job in construction now.” He took a sip of his beer, watched the screen a minute, then added, “Things haven’t always been this good. It was hard times after your dad was killed. I was outta work a long time after that.”

Another pause. It felt like he had something more to say so I sat quietly.

He leaned in toward me, talking so softly into my ear that I could hardly hear him over the restaurant’s din. “I hate whoever killed your father.”

His face tightened into a look of pure anger. He turned and faced me full-on, his eyes big and frightening. Through clenched teeth he said, “If I could ever find that sucker, I’d tear his neck off with my bare hands.”

In a flash everything had changed, everything was possible. I smiled, reached up, put an arm around Hector’s shoulder, and said, “You know what, Hector? You just might still get the chance to do that.”