Shades of Eva Read Online Free Page A

once heard. “What’s the saying; that old
proverb about cutting things off? You know, the one about the right
eye offending you?”
    “Plucketh it out!” Scotty said, winking at
me as he finished the verse in Old English intonation. Then he
turned curiously toward Meade as if his answer had something to do
with the card game that was getting louder by the minute. And I
suppose it did.
    I nodded and raised my glass, gesturing a
toast, this one to Scotty, this time to plucking things out.
“Here’s to blindness,” I said.
    Scotty reluctantly mimicked the gesture, and
I drank.
    “So what needs plucking out in that life of
yours besides that melancholy personality?” Scotty shot a grin my
way that took some of the sting out his question.
    I thought for a minute about what part of
that to respond to: the dull personality part or the thrust of
Scotty’s question—why the long face? It was a question that had a
very obvious answer to me. “The past,” I said. “The past needs
plucking out, Scotty.”
    “The past?” he echoed, probably not
expecting so abstract a reply from a man who’d just killed a half
of a fifth of whiskey in about an hour.
    “Yeah, the past,” I said. “What if your
problem is your past? Can you just cut that out somehow? Just pluck
it out and somehow forget it?”
    I knew it was the type of question a drunk
might ask his bartender on a rainy night in the mountains around
midnight, but its absurdity didn’t prevent me from asking it.
Scotty just took it in earnest as he did all those types of
questions.
    “The past is up here,” he said, putting an
index finger to his head. “You can’t amputate a past, but you can
get a lobotomy. That will erase a lot of memories.”
    Scotty had my attention when he said the
word lobotomy. Said it as if he were talking about getting a wart
removed or something, as if I could show up at some clinic and walk
out lobotomized and all a sudden carefree. I knew that wasn’t the
case. Mom had one—a lobotomy that is—and it didn’t erase her past.
It nearly destroyed her memory, but it didn’t erase anything.
Memories linger like words on the tip of the tongue. They exist
like marrow in your bones and they don’t disappear despite how
severely you’ve been cut, and they live on in your dreams. That’s
how the past haunted her. It showed up in her dreams. That’s how it
showed up to me sometimes.
    “Engram, what exactly is bothering you?”
Scotty pressed. “I’m not used to seeing you moping around like
this. Is it this crap with the OKC bombing?”
    I shook my head. “Are you happy?” I replied,
answering his question with a question of my own. Scotty gave me a
look of misunderstanding. “I mean, are you happy tending bar way
out here?”
    Scotty was nodding. “I grew up here. I have
a good life. Wife treats me good. Two kids all grown. Meet a lot of
interesting characters, and I still have my health. A man can’t ask
for much more, except maybe for fewer loudmouth customers.” Scotty
tilted his head toward the Poker table as another two customers
left the Den.
    “So there’s nothing you want to do over
again?” I said, turning away from the carnage on TV to watch the
next hand between Meade and the boys. 
    Scotty didn’t answer me. Instead he asked,
“When’s the last time you were happy, Mark?”
    I had to think about that for a minute. All
that came to mind was whiskey and whores. It’s like a drunk to
confuse happiness with pleasure I suppose. I thought for a minute
about the high I’d found in a good drink, or the post-orgasmic
euphoria of occasional nights in the brothel, highs I’d describe as
mechanical at best that had about as much to do with happiness as
eating a good hot meal. I thought about the countless bar fights
I’d engaged in, which were sometimes fun, sometimes not—but fun
didn’t imply happiness either.
    All of these things: drinking, fucking,
fighting, they all had one thing in common—they were