Eleanor Gatsby

Eleanor Gatsby was no lady. She would earn no awards for any measure of decency or righteous moral character. Eleanor Gatsby was a roughneck, a hoodlum, a delinquent. She was a hooligan, a rogue menace, a mistake. Eleanor Gatsby hated herself and everyone responsible for her sentence of life.

The year was 1951 in Mobile, Alabama. They lived in a modest, log house which sat a bit off of Jones Rd. Nestled slightly within the cover of a couple of oak trees. It was the only home they’d ever known. It was the only home they’d ever wanted and one day, by her father’s word, they would own it.

“El,” her mother yelled to her. “Stop running. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Five-year-old El, as her mother was apt to call her, seemed like a normal kid. She acted like a normal kid. She didn’t know she even had a “thing” inside her. No one did. But that “thing” was there and soon it would demand to be set free. Eleanor’s mother looked on as she ran freely through the fields, waving her little hands above her head as she made circles around the big tree. Her mother saw a child, a beautiful child at an unspoiled time of life. Her father, on-the-other-hand, saw no such thing. He wanted nothing to do with Eleanor Rose Gatsby.

Jim Gatsby had been known to pull a cork every once in a while. Such was the case the night he discovered precious little Eleanor was not as precious as his wife, Oaklynn, wanted to believe. It was her eyes. Her little five-year-old eyes. They seemed to see through him as she sat watching her father take a giant gulp from the bottle. He didn’t like her stare and told her to leave the room. She obeyed… that time. But he felt a chill that made him extremely uneasy.

He told his wife about it the next day and she blew him off, as she normally did when he voiced drunken opinions about her little Eleanor. When he turned to leave, Eleanor was standing in the doorway staring at him again. Again, he felt a chill that overtook the anger he wanted to project.

“Move,” he shouted, pushing little Eleanor aside as he stormed by.

Oaklynn motioned for Eleanor to come and give her a hug. She gently broke it off and pushed Eleanor out to arm’s length while she looked at her. She loved her daughter more than life itself and made a habit of telling her so every day.

“I love you too, mommy,” little Eleanor would always respond.

But there was something in her eyes, those little dark brown eyes that seemed to always hide a lie just under the surface. Oaklynn couldn’t see it yet, and she never believed her husband, but it was there. It was real, and it was getting worse each year.

⁂

He ran as if the devil himself chased him. If he could make it home, there would be plenty of places he could hide where they’d never find him. The guys chasing him that evening were cops who had just witnessed him rob a convenience store a few blocks away. As he approached the house, he saw Eleanor standing in the doorway.

“Eleanor, honey, unlock the door for daddy and step aside,” he yelled to her.

She just looked at him and said nothing. She had no particular expression on her little face, but she did not unlock the door, and she did not step aside.

“Eleanor, what are you doing? Unlock the door and move aside. Do it now, you little fart.”

Eleanor just stood there watching, and giggling as if she thought daddy wanted to play a game. As he approached the door and couldn’t get in, and the cops caught him, brutally beat him with their nightsticks, and hauled him off to jail. Eleanor never moved or said anything. She simply smiled and waved as he turned to look at her from the backseat of the patrol car.

⁂

Eleanor was twenty-three years old when her daddy got out of prison. During his time in, he made no secret of the fact that he would hunt his little monster of a daughter down and kill her slowly with a straight razor. He could never get the look on her face out of his mind as the cops hauled him away. He knew for a fact that she knew what she was doing and he knew it was likely she who alerted the cops to his whereabouts.

That she was only five years old at the time didn’t matter to daddy. He was convinced she wasn’t playing with a full deck and when he got out; he was going to figure out just what the heck was wrong with her and rid the world of whatever it was.

Jim Gatsby walked out of the old Kilby Prison in Montgomery, on July 20th, 1969. He had one thing on his mind: find the little munchkin responsible for the eighteen years of hell he had endured and kill her as slowly and as painfully as he could. The problem, and it was a big one, was that the little munchkin he referred to was no longer a little munchkin. And she was looking forward to seeing her old daddy. In fact, she waited for him at the house, figuring that would be where he showed up first.

When he arrived, the first thing he noticed was how rundown the place was. His wife never visited him in prison, so he just imagined she had run off with someone else. She was of no concern to him. It was obvious no one had lived there for years, so he would have to find Eleanor the hard way. He needed sleep, though, and the house was the only source of refuge at the moment.

Once inside, he got a familiar chill. Something wasn’t right. Something didn’t feel right. He felt sick and went to the bedroom to lie down. As he lay there, he began having flashbacks, flashbacks to times long ago.

⁂

They would come in the wee hours of the morning smelling of beer, wine, and whores. Jim would rent his wife out to them for as little as a pack of smokes. Little Eleanor was only four, but she could hear her mother’s screams of pain and fear. Eleanor would watch her father as he sat in a chair and watched the nightly shows. At first Eleanor would cry herself to sleep while trying desperately to drown out the noises from her mother’s room. Eventually, she became numb. And then they came for her.

Her father explained he had no choice. They had broken her mother. She was no longer desirable and of no use. He told Eleanor she would be fine, to just concentrate on happy thoughts. Little Eleanor, trembling in fear, ran out of the house and kept running as fast as she could. Eventually, a neighbor found her and took her back home. Luckily, her father had sobered up and forgot all about giving her to his friends. But Eleanor had not forgotten. She vowed to make him stop hurting her mother.

Her father had talked openly for weeks about robbing a convenience store, thinking Eleanor was too young to understand him. The night of the robbery, she waited for him to leave and then called the police and in her little child's voice, told them everything. They, of course, thought she was making it all up, but the alarms at the store started going off and they rushed over to find Jim and friends running from the scene.

They cornered Jim at his house and arrested him as he tried desperately to run inside. Eleanor stood in the doorway, smiling and waving as they hauled him away.

⁂

Jim woke up in a cold sweat to see a fully grown Eleanor standing by the bed. She had a gun, and he got the distinct impression she knew exactly how to use it. She threw a picture on the bed and with her gun motioned for Jim to look at it. It was a picture of her mother’s naked, bruised body right after she died. Jim’s old friends stood around her, smiling as if posing with the body of a deer they had just hunted. They kept coming for her after he went to prison, kept coming until she could give no more.

Without saying a word, Eleanor walked to the side of the bed, rested the barrel of her gun on her dad’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. He fell back against the headboard, dead.

Eleanor successfully ran away from home when she was ten years old and had known nothing but a life of crime her entire life. She was a cold-hearted professional and had finally made the man responsible for her and her mother’s pain pay the ultimate price. The pain in her eyes, her visions of despair, were finally gone, but could she, would she find the peace she so desperately sought?

K.R. Eaton - Eleanor Gatsby

Short Stories by K.R Eaton