by Jeffrey Ford
“After I finally started making a lot of money in Hollywood, I’d go back to the neighborhood once a year. Fly from California, get a limo from JFK, go to Sewer Pipe Hill, stand in front of the hole and call for David. It was my yearly tribute to my brother. That only lasted until the development went up, and I got caught standing in someone’s backyard one night yelling into the dark where a hole used to be. The cops came and I almost got arrested. Luckily one of them was the Weeze, and he remembered me and David. He was thin and wasted and his skin was leathery. like he’d been preserved somehow. You ever seen those Peruvian mummies? Who knows how old he was.”
I pictured the Weeze’s gaze still shifting but now more slowly, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Bill drained his drink. After ordering another, he told me, “You know, Weeze put a paw on my shoulder, patted my back, and said, ‘That’s all gone now. It hardly exists anymore. Once you let go, it’ll be like it never happened.’”
There was much more to this story, though. I can’t tell you what it was specifically, I just have a feeling that there was much more. Those parts that are lost to me passed their sell-by-date and my memory unceremoniously tossed them like gray chopped meat from the fridge. Whatever you see here is what I have left. Before I gave Bill my best and fled across the terminal, I asked him why he thought David had done it. “Was he escaping or searching for something?” I said.
He thought for a long time and gave me a heartfelt answer, but, wouldn’t you know it, I’ve forgotten what he told me. It was one of the two options I’d offered, I think, but which? It was so frustrating trying to remember. I spent years leaning toward escape and then switched for a decade toward a search, only to realize I just couldn’t definitively remember what he’d said. A sad thought, like a sour note from Lorel Manzo’s long-silenced cello—in another five years or so, what’s left of the story will have completely decomposed, fizzed away, fallen back into a big dark hole.
Thanksgiving
Five people sat around a dining room table in the glow of the overhead lamp while outside in the dark a light snow fell. The remains of Thanksgiving dinner had not been cleared, but merely pushed back. The group was into second coffees and slices of pumpkin pie. There was a sixth seat at the table but it was empty, though the plate of turkey bones, an abandoned sweet potato, and a few scattered pearl onions were proof it had but recently been vacated.
The old woman, Fran, with steel-gray braids wrapped in a spiral on her head, sipped at a hazelnut liqueur. “That was a great feast, Will,” she said to her son-in-law.
Will, in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, leaned back, his hands clasped behind his head, and smiled.
“I rank it as your second best effort,” said Tina. “Nothing beats that one you did last year.”
“My favorite too,” said Will. “Deep-frying’s dangerous business, though. I’m never gonna do that again.”
His wife, Sue, sitting across from him, said, “Every year’s a winner for me. It means I don’t have to do it.”
“People make a big deal out of Thanksgiving dinner, but it really is easy to prepare. I mean, I wouldn’t want to have to cook for a throng of people like Sue used to, but, you know. As long as you can put shit in the oven and take it out on time, it’s not much of a mystery,” said Will.
Sue pushed her long red hair back from her face and said, “Hear, hear.”
“How would you rank this one, Jerum?” Tina asked her husband.
“Oh, awesome. What the heck? Thanksgiving dinner’s always a hit with me.”
Will thanked everyone and took a drink of coffee.
Jerum then pointed his fork, holding a skewered bite of pie, at the empty seat across the table from him. “How did you all think Uncle Jake looked tonight?”
“Tired,” said Tina.
“Gray,” said Sue.
“Somewhat withered. Is he a drinker?” asked Fran.
“Did you notice when he stood to go home, he staggered a little? The act of putting his jacket on seemed to drain him,” said Jerum.
“He’s such a quiet guy. He was here all afternoon and I don’t think I got three words out of him,” said Will.
“I talked a little bit to him,” said Sue. “He was telling me about . . . What was it? A pet armadillo? Is that possible?”
“I guess so,” said Jerum, “but...”
“You know they’re responsible for spreading leprosy,” said Sue.
“Good lord,” said Fran. “Who’d want that?”
“He told me he found five dollars in his pajama bottoms three weeks ago,” said Tina. “He didn’t smile when he told me. He said it flat like the words were just soft noises he was making.”
Will laughed at Tina’s description. “Look, don’t get mad at me, because I know I should know the answer to this, but I don’t think I ever knew. Whose uncle is Uncle Jake anyway?”
“We thought he was your uncle,” said Tina, placing her hand softly on top of Jerum’s forearm.
“I thought he was related to one of you guys,” Sue said to the couple.
“That’s what I assumed,” said Will.
“He’s not in our family, is he?” Sue asked Fran.
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Are you sure you guys didn’t bring him to one of those Thanksgivings back when there’d be fifty people here?” asked Will.
Tina and Jerum shook their heads. She said, “The first time I ever saw him was back about fifteen years ago here. The place was packed and he introduced himself to me as Uncle Jake. He had a plate of food in his hand and was moving slowly through the crowd. He was kind of beat looking even back then. I remember thinking at the time he might not be all there.”
“I remember the same,” said Jerum. “I’ve talked to him through the years, but I’ll be damned if I remember anything he’s told me. Oh, except that he lives behind the Stop and Shop off of Currier.”
“You mean you’ve had him to Thanksgiving dinner for fifteen years and nobody knew who he was?” asked Fran. “That’s ridiculous.”
“He must be related to somebody we knew who used to come to the earlier dinners,” said Will. “I recall the first one that I cooked four years ago after Sue gave up on the big melees. I got in touch with everyone in January to give them plenty of time to plan and told them that we wouldn’t be having a huge affair that year or anymore to come. So when he showed up at the door that Thanksgiving, I figured he just didn’t get the memo. And I was like, Uncle Jake? What the hell. He doesn’t eat much. But then he kept coming back every year, and I didn’t have the heart to ditch him.”
“Kind of creepy,” said Tina.
“Kind of,” said Sue.
“I see this guy once in a while on the street, you know, maybe two, three times a year. I see him passing on the sidewalk, always dressed in that saggy blue serge suit. It’s like, ‘Hi, Uncle Jake.’ I shake his hand, he mumbles some bullshit about Thanksgiving dinner, and he’s on his way. His conversational repertoire is slim,” said Jerum.
“God, that suit,” said Will. “Every year without fail, that suit. It looks like he got worked over in it.”
“I always thought he was a greasy dude,” said Tina.
“I just thought he was lonely, like his wife had died some years earlier and it made him withdraw from life,” said Sue.
“That’s what I thought,” said Jerum. “Tina thought he was a perv from the word go.”
“You know,” said Will, “the other reason I never really questioned Uncle Jake’s Thanksgiving visits was because, with the exception of Fran, we don’t have any older relatives still living. It’s nice around the holiday time to have that connection to the past.”
“I guess I can see that,” said Jerum, “but if I run into him on the street tomorrow, I’m gonna hide.”
“I don’t want him here anymore,” Sue said to Will. �
��He could be dangerous.”
“After fifteen years you think he’s gonna suddenly make his move? You could put him down with a pipe cleaner. He’s harmless. Besides, I have a feeling he still might be related to one of us but we just aren’t aware of it.”
“That doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense,” said Sue.
“I know,” said Will. “I could hear that as I was saying it.”
“But what do you remember about him?” asked Tina. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pad and pen. “We should make a list.”
After that, they all just spoke out their tidbits of memory and Tina took them down, carefully printing each word and using hearts to dot the i’s.
“The only consistent theme to the sad-ass conversations I’ve had with him through the years,” said Will, “was the end of the world. He could talk the apocalypse like a door-to-door dust salesman. He’d spill the horrors in that drawl straight from dreamland and I’d listen, bored bone stiff.”
“Say you only got three words to describe Uncle Jake. What would they be?” asked Tina.
“At least one would be ‘turnip,’” said Jerum.
“Damaged,” said Sue.
“There you are,” said Tina. “He’s a damaged, threatening turnip.”
“In a blue serge suit,” added Jerum.
“That does kind of nail it,” said Will.
“OK,” said Tina. “What movie star does he look like?”
“Kind of a cross between Shemp from the Stooges and John Caradine in a cardigan sweater,” said Jerum.
“You’re on the right track,” said Will, “but I’m thinking more Basil Rathbone meets Willem Dafoe. You know, really run down and pale, under the spell of gravity.”
Jerum nodded in agreement.
“Pretty good,” said Sue, “but there’s one ingredient missing. I’m down with everything said so far, but you have to agree the mix needs more than just a sprinkling of Robert Duvall’s Boo Radley.”
They all agreed but for Fran, who saw Uncle Jake more like a dim-witted, arthritic Andy Griffith. “It’s not a good idea to ignore aspects of the supernatural like we have here,” said Fran.
“No one’s talking supernatural,” said Tina. “I’m thinkin’ sad loser hears a party going on, a Thanksgiving dinner, while walking by in the street one day some fifteen years ago. He goes into the party and joins it, not in his own name, but passing himself off as Uncle Jake. Since he’s a sad sack, he’s got nothing to do so he decides to return every year, and it happens that you two are the Thanksgiving couple.”
Sue nodded in agreement and said, “I do remember him once telling me ‘The gaucho laughs in your mirror.’”
“What’s that?” asked Will.
“I don’t know,” said Sue. “We were in the living room and it was crowded, people everywhere. Food hadn’t been served and everybody was getting loose. The Ronettes were on Pandora. I saw him slip through the crowd like a thought. Before I knew it, he was beside me and saying in that see-ya-later tone, ‘The gaucho laughs in your mirror.’”
“What ever the fuck that means,” said Fran.
“I know,” said Sue, laughing.
“Forget him,” said Jerum. “You’ve got till next year to consider what you’re gonna do.”
“What if we just let him in and let him join us for dinner,” said Will, “like he does every year, and he won’t know we know, but we’ll all know the depths of his weirdness?”
“I don’t think I could keep a straight face through that,” said Sue.
“What do you say would happen if he suddenly came to the realization that we all knew he was nobody’s uncle? I mean like right in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner?” asked Jerum.
“A killing rampage?” said Fran.
“The earth would swallow him like Rumpelstiltskin,” said Tina.
With that, they all breathed a sigh of relief. There was another round of the hazelnut liqueur and Uncle Jake was forgotten about until mid-September. It was Tina who mentioned it first. She called Sue on the day she noticed the leaves turning red and reminded her about Thanksgiving and Uncle Jake.
“Oh, yeah, I tried to forget that whole thing.”
“Well, you’ve got two months till he’ll be tapping at your door.”
When Sue reminded Will about Uncle Jake, he said, “It’s on my mind. It haunts me at night sometimes. I think what we need to do is have Thanksgiving out somewhere. He’ll tap on the door and eventually figure that we’re onto him or that something happened to Thanksgiving. Either way I don’t care. I just don’t want to deal with him.”
“I thought you were the one who wanted to let him in and play along that we didn’t know anything about his deception.”
“Hot air,” he said.
“Run away is the answer?” said Sue.
“Definitely,” said Will. “Got a better idea?”
So they rented the party room at the back of a local restaurant, The Colonel’s Wife. It was an old place with a history. The Colonel’s Wife was supposedly a woman from the Revolutionary War who tended an inn on the premises and poisoned a dinner’s party worth of Brits. It was a basic steak and potatoes place with candlelight and a well-stocked wine cellar. The room the five were ushered into was decorated with strings of bright yellow leaves recently fallen from the giant oaks in the library field across the street.
Fran was dressed in a pale blue-green gown that seemed cut from a waterfall. In her hair she wore a very delicate tiara made of looped wire. She told Sue and Tina about her trip to the snake mound in October. They nodded like they were interested, but both of them found Fran a little affected, although they still loved her.
Jerum sloughed off his coat and handed it to the young woman who’d ushered them through the restaurant proper, through the mists of roast turkey and oyster dressing, to the back room. Once she was gone and they’d each taken a seat at the long table, he said, “You didn’t say a thing about this but I knew when you called to switch Thanksgiving from your place to here that it was in order to avoid Uncle Jake.” He laughed.
“Guilty as charged,” said Will.
“Three days ago,” said Jerum, “I was walking home from the train, thinking about Thanksgiving Dinner, about having it here. I was looking forward to the event. In the next instant, Uncle Jake was in front of me with his hand extended. His presence shocked me because just that morning I found out from you that we were meeting at the Colonel’s Wife. When I looked up to greet him, there was a real energy in his stare. He clasped my hand tightly so that I couldn’t back away. He talked a string of bullshit about Thanksgiving. I mean head-spinning stuff. Then he gripped my hand yet tighter, widened his eyes, and said ‘See you there’ before moving on.”
“Did he seem to know we were gonna stiff him?” asked Sue.
“I couldn’t tell,” said Jerum. “It did feel as if he could look right into my head and know I’d lied to him. He was dreadfully run down. Creeping along the sidewalk. Smelled like bad milk. But his grip was extraordinary. It was like he was flexing his wrinkles. Otherworldly.”
“We’ll stay extra late,” said Fran, “and he’ll be gone by the time you get back home. I doubt he’ll sleep on your steps or anything like that.”
“I’ll tell him to fuck off,” said Will.
“That’s not necessary,” said Sue.
Then the wait staff appeared with cocktails and the Thanksgiving dinner got into full swing. The appetizer was fried mozzarella and slices of pear and apple. Tina and Jerum sat on the left side of the table, next to each other, and both ordered a double gin with an ice cube. Fran sat across from Will, and Sue sat at the head of the table. All three of them had red wine. The room, though long, was also fairly wide, the walls covered ceiling to floor with fading black and white photographs in cheap black frames. At each corner there was a nest of lit candles
sitting on a high stool. There were no windows and plenty of shadows.
The appetizer had been cleared and they awaited bowls of cream of mutton soup with lentils and rutabaga. There was a brief pause in the cross talk and Tina said, “Did any of you notice?” She was pointing down to the end of the table opposite Sue, where there was another place setting.
“How many diners did you tell them?” asked Fran.
Will held his hand up, fingers splayed. “Five. That’s all.”
After the soup course, from everywhere at once there came a persistent banging sound. There was a brief pause and then it resumed, almost like a code. They all looked up and around and into the shadows. Will finally left his seat and went into the darkness behind Sue’s chair at the very back of the room. “There’s a door here,” he called. They heard him open it, and the slanting red sun of a cold dusk shot into the room and gave the place the sense of a tractor trailer being opened at its destination. All at the table heard Will say, “Oh, Uncle Jake, glad you could make it.”
From the table came the whispered word, “Shit.”
The diners heard the door in the dark close and watched as Uncle Jake staggered into view. In his blue suit, he passed down the length of the table to his seat, without making eye contact with any of them. His hands shook and he wheezed. Upon sitting, he said, “Thanksgiving, yeah, you know, OK?” chuckled good-naturedly and then stared at his plate. Will crept back to his seat. Drinks were drained in silence. Tina looked at Jerum, who looked at Will, who stared at Sue while Fran watched all of them.
“You missed the cream of mutton, Uncle Jake,” said Will.
Two seconds passed and then Sue burst out laughing.
Uncle Jake looked nervously from one of them to the next and slowly lifted his butter knife.
Fran yelled, “He’s an entity. Deny his existence if you want to live.”
“Uncle Jake,” said Jerum, “we know you’re nobody’s uncle.”