The American Hero took his time to answer. First he took a long pull on the bottle, and slowly screwed the cap back on, and then he lit up a cigarette from a wrinkled old pack and took a long drag with discernable pleasure.
“Well, at the very least, for a miracle you have to pay a very high price,” he said, at last, slowly and thoughtfully.
I felt the effect of the whisky, even though I had only drunk a little, just a few sips. In addition, following my thoughts about Annie, a tidal wave of memories and emotions came crashing down, somehow penetrating the thick forest cover around me. The main emotion I felt was anger- anger at the whole world. Then all at once my anger dissipated and I felt like a little child- unjustly wronged and thrown into a world of strange adults, who were evil and unfair. I was not even surprised to find tears in my eyes, for at that moment I was seven, not twenty-seven, so to cry was not even the least bit shameful.
The American Hero just sat there smoking silently, staring into the fire.
“Why don’t you ever talk about yourself, Hero?” I asked him praying that he would not notice my tears.
“What’s the point?” he said not even turning around. “God already knows the whole story, and everyone else has enough of their own problems…”
“If you want, I can tell you my life story?” I offered, sniffing my nose.
“No, I don’t want,” sighed the Hero, “but you are going to tell it to me anyway, so you might as well get started…” and wistfully threw his cigarette butt into the fiery barrel.
I was born in Benningville, Oklahoma. This sounds crazy even to me now, but that is the God’s honest truth. The funniest thing is that I never felt unhappy in this little town of identical houses with white picket fences. Childhood doesn’t know that somewhere, a thousand miles away, there is another world, so it is happy with what it has.
For his whole life – from the day he graduated high school until the day he died, my father worked as a mechanic at the electric power substation. My mother sent him off to work every day with a tender smile and a big sandwich in a rough brown paper bag.
Benningville was the kind of town where everyone knew each other and would say “hello” when they passed each other on the streets. Until I was ten I called Sheriff Powell “Uncle Jack,” just like all the other kids. Nobody locked their doors. On Sunday mornings it was a ghost town – everyone was at church, even the sheriff and his deputies, fat Doctor Butler and his nurses too.
By a unanimous decision of the City Council we had no cable TV, we just had eight, as I remember them now, of the most boring and conservative TV channels in the entire United States of America. Computers were only allowed to be used in school during Computer Science lessons.
There was no crime in Benningville (I personally can’t remember even one fight, except for a few dust-ups between the kids on the school playground). No one cheated on their husbands or wives. No one ever voted against Mayor Daniel Sutton, a kind, thin man who rode to work on his bicycle.
On the weekend every back yard had a barbeque, and the whole town smelled of grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. The Fourth of July and Christmas were celebrated with such dogmatic fervor year after year that everyone was afraid to change anything and make a fatal mistake.
The whole town turned out for every one of the high school’s basketball games and I remember that the people who lived nearby would bring their own chairs so that no one would have to stand.
All the weddings and the funerals also looked the same. People in Benningville only died of old age. They only married once. No one ever got divorced.
I don’t even remember that anyone had a strange name. My father was called John, and my mother Marsha. In my class we had 4 Johnsons, 3 Jacksons, 3 Browns and 2 Wrights (including me).
So that is how it was – in this little place on our great big planet, where the electrical mechanic John Wright and his wife, the homemaker Marsha, bestowed the gift of life upon me.
Now matured by the barbed insults of the world, I understood that only childhood could paint my town with the patriarchal and sunny colors of America in the 1960s. And that in Benningville, just like anywhere else, there were probably fights and affairs, divorces and robberies, some people, mostly likely, were into drugs, others were into porn and didn’t care less about church services on Sunday. Nevertheless, it remained in my memory as a ridiculous and theatrical little patch of Earth, on which people were born only to grow up, get married, have children, mow the lawn, and die.
But, oh how I remember the day that the whole world changed! It was Friday. Honking loudly and crazily, a sparkling automobile without a top screeched to a halt outside of our house. Out of it climbed a shapely woman with a shock of fiery red hair, who stretched out and cracked her back, then reached out her hand and flicked her thin black cigarette with a golden tip right into the middle of the road (I was aghast – (I froze – if in Benningville we sometimes saw women who smoked, they did it much differently – usually off to the side, quietly, and a bit shy.) Her jeans were stretched so tightly over her legs that she looked like she was naked. The spiked heels on her fire-engine red pumps were as long as pencils. Huge dark glasses hid her eyes. Her nails were long and the same shade of red as her shoes.
Walking over to me, she bent down and slid her glasses down to the end of her nose revealing enormous green eyes, like a magical cat from a fairy-tale. She smelled amazing.
“Is that you, Stephen, you little punk?” asked the stranger in a hoarse laugh, “Eat all your vegetables – chicks love tall guys, got it?”
And that’s how Annie entered in my life. She was my father’s prodigal younger sister, the black sheep of the family, the skeleton in the closet of our respectable home, and the bane of Benningville. She was 16 when she left home, and hadn’t returned until this moment (she was 25 now). No wonder I didn’t know anything about her! Coming back from the neighbor’s, my mother almost fainted when she saw Annie. And she had absolutely no idea what to talk with her about until my father got home from work, and he didn’t know what to talk with her about either.
But it wasn’t a problem – Annie talked enough for all three of them. Having poured herself practically half a glass of whisky and smoking her beautiful cigarettes, she cheerfully told them about how she lived in New York, that she was married for the second time (“his name is Rodriguez, a gangster for sure, and a jealous bastard, but, boy, is he loaded!!)
In just one evening this eleven year-old heard a hundred times more swear words than I had in my entire life up to that point. Finally my mother, white as a sheet, came to her senses and quietly gasped with difficulty, “Stevie, sweetheart, go to your room…”
“Come on, really, what’s the big deal Marsha?” protested Annie, “It’s the weekend tomorrow! Let the kid hang out with us for a while, he might learn something!…”
Of course I listened to my mother, got up, wished everyone good-night, and went to my room. But I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. I just tossed and turned. I was afraid that my father would throw his “indecent” sister out of the house, and tomorrow when I woke up, that fantastic otherworldly automobile would no longer be sparkling in front of our house.
But I was wrong. At the end of the day, my father was as afraid of Annie as I was. In a different way, of course, but not any less.
I know that Annie was sent to me from heaven. In order for me to become who I was meant to be. So that I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life working as a shift mechanic at the electric substation of Benningville – the town of white picket fences and eight television stations.
I only called her “aunt” two times – the first was at the table on the evening of the day she arrived.
When I called her “Aunt Annie” the next day, she sauntered over to me, sunk her taloned claw into my shoulder and said:
“You know what Stephen Wright? If you ever call me “Aunt” again I’m going