Saying Uncle

by Greg F. Gifune

  Of course I idolized my uncle, so a good portion of my remaining childhood was spent trying to please him and earn his approval.

  “The difference between a boy and a man is that when a man gets knocked down he always gets up,” he used to say. “That’s what life is, Andy, getting knocked down and learning how to get back on your feet. There’s no shame in going down, but never stay down. Get off your ass and fight back. It’s not easy being a man, but what choice have we got?”

  No truer words were ever spoken.

  I was fifteen when everything changed forever. The events that summer helped shape me as a human being and define me as an adult, but also tore a wound through the heart of our family that would never completely heal. For any of us.

  2

  The room was cold, sterile and antiseptic smelling.

  On shaky legs I moved closer to the coroner’s slab and gazed down into Uncle’s sightless eyes. Shocked to find them open, they were fixed in a blank stare and covered with an odd film. A white towel had been draped over the top and front of his head in an apparent effort to spare me from seeing the trauma his skull had sustained.

  He was much older than I remembered him, his skin looser and the lines in his face more pronounced. The hair close to his temples was streaked with gray, as was the stubble along his chin and neck. He apparently hadn’t shaved the day he’d died, and that struck me as wholly unlike him. At least the version of him I had known.

  Then again, I thought, hair continues to grow after death, so maybe it was—

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.” I turned away from Uncle and returned my attention to the dour-faced detective. “That’s him.”

  The detective nodded and a man in a white lab coat I had forgotten was there slid the body back into the wall unit. “I realize this is a difficult situation,” the detective said, “but I need your signature on a few documents and then I’ll let you get out of here.”

  We stepped back into the dimly lit corridor. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “The case is still under investigation so I’m not at liberty to go into any specifics at this time.” He hesitated, allowing the awkward silence to take hold. “But I can give you the basics.”

  Visions of Uncle’s death mask flashed through my mind. “I just saw the basics.”

  * * *

  My wife once described me as a helium-filled balloon floating along the landscape, occasionally dropping low enough to scrape the Earth but always returning to the air before a fixed location could be established. It was her way of telling me I behaved more like a spectator to life than an actual participant in it, and I suppose in hindsight she was right. It was a role I assumed from a very young age, though in the summer of 1979, at fifteen, I did not yet know why.

  But for Desmond Boone, my sidekick since we were in the first grade, I had few friends, was not good at socializing and spent most of my free time pounding away on a portable typewriter Uncle had given me for my thirteenth birthday. While most children my age spent the summer months at the public beach or playing sports, I could either be found killing time with Desmond, who always went by simply: Boone, or huddled at the picnic table in our backyard writing stories. Even though I didn’t know why I wanted to be a writer, like a ratty old jacket, it just seemed to fit, and I pursued it frantically, writing nearly every day, sometimes for hours at a time. Boone loved my stories and was the only person on the planet convinced I’d one day be a famous author.

  But then poor Boone—as loyal and dedicated a friend as he was—believed in a lot of foolish things, me among them, I suppose. He came from a dysfunctional home and was verbally abused by his alcoholic father, who took particular glee in pointing out what a devastating disappointment Boone was and how he would never measure up to his older brother Jonathan, a star athlete without a quarter of the intelligence Boone possessed, but who could throw a ball well and was thus rather ironically treated like a higher life form.

  I had always been a decent athlete myself, but never took it all that seriously. Where I was quiet and more introverted, Boone used humor for defense and food for comfort. I kept mostly to myself, and he cracked jokes and drew attention. I was thin and wiry; he was quite chubby. Boone was large for his age, a big-boned kid with a shock of unruly reddish brown hair, striking blue eyes and a pudgy face sprinkled with freckles. I was a bit small for my age, with dark hair and eyes and a rather brooding guise. We offset each other nicely. Like me, he was ignored more often than not by most everyone else, and in each other we saw certain traits lacking in ourselves, which is perhaps why we got along so well, and over time became the best of friends.

  In the summer months Boone and I earned spending money by mowing and raking several yards in the neighborhood. We’d get to work early so we could be finished by noon, before the humidity became too unbearable, and so we’d have time to spend a bit of our earnings on cheeseburgers and frappes at Mickey’s, a diner downtown, and plan the remainder of the day.

  Generally we’d hit the drugstore first, then make a beeline for the book and magazine section at the rear of the store so Boone could grab the latest comic books and I could check the paperback novel rack. That summer I had become hooked on Alistair MacLean adventure novels, and bought and read one nearly every week. Boone was a Captain America fanatic and hadn’t missed an issue in years. Mission completed at the drugstore, we’d ride our bikes to the beach, take a quick swim then head back to my house.

  Eventually, after playing some records or talking for a bit, I’d find myself sitting at the picnic table with my typewriter, working away on a new story while Boone sat quietly across from me reading his comic books and awaiting my next tale.

  It is that memory I recall most fondly when I think of Desmond Boone. The times we spent together at that picnic table, beneath a summer sun, content to simply be in each other’s company.

  The day before it all started, Boone and I had finished our lawns, collected our pay and made our usual rounds to the diner and drugstore, and were on our way back to his house so he could put away his newest comic book. He kept them all meticulously stacked and organized in a series of cardboard boxes under his bed, and since on this day the issue he had purchased was a special edition, Boone was adamant about getting it safely tucked away in his room before anything happened to it.

  Boone lived a few streets over from my own, but in our neighborhood all the houses looked pretty much the same: rows of small, modest homes with tiny front yards and slightly larger backyards. It was a lower income, working-class area, where most people rented rather than owned. I suppose Boone, like us, was poor, but we didn’t realize it at the time. Things just were the way they were, and since we’d never known anything else, it didn’t occur to us that we were the “poor” people folks on the other side of town often referred to.

  To us, people like Beau and Lonnie Miller were poor. They lived with their mother in a literal shack on the edge of town, adjacent to the state forest, and were the resident whipping posts when it came to such discussions. No matter how bad off anyone was, they always looked to the Millers and labeled them as worse off, thereby perversely elevating themselves, if only in their own minds. I never knew Beau and Lonnie that well because they were a couple years older than I was and ahead of me in school. But I often saw them around town or congregated in their yard working on some archaic mini-bike, and always wondered why it was considered universally acceptable in town, regardless of neighborhood, to make sweeping, unfair and often outright cruel assumptions about people who had done nothing to deserve such treatment. Apparently their crime was poverty, and in crossing that line from poor to impoverished, it had somehow been determined that a perpetual open season on their dignity was not only tolerable, but encouraged.

  Whenever I heard someone make a joke or ridicule them, I always found myself curious as to whether that was how the people across town talked about me. It all struck me as foolish even then, monumentally unimportant in th
e overall scheme of things, since everyone, it seemed, was just trying to get through life as best they could. And one of the life lessons I learned that summer was that no one escapes unscathed. No one.

  As Boone and I crossed the sidewalk and approached his house, Boone’s father emerged from the front door to greet us, hands on his hips. His hair was mussed and he was unshaven and wearing a bathrobe despite the fact that it was early afternoon. We hesitated just inside the property line and I felt the usual discomfort well up at the sight of him. He squinted, shielded his eyes from the sun with the back of his hand and peered down at his son. “What are you doing, boy?”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hi, Mr. Boone,” I added quickly.

  He stood there silently a moment then dropped his eyes across Boone’s body. Due to the heat, we had removed our shirts and tucked them into the back of our shorts. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said through a heavy sigh, “will you take a look at this one.”

  The slurred speech and overwhelming stink of liquor signaled that as usual Boone’s father was drunk.

  “Do the neighborhood a favor and put your shirt back on, boy. Christ almighty, you got bigger tits than your mother.”

  Boone turned a bright red color that began in his cheeks and spread throughout his body like a recently injected dye. He fumbled for his shirt and quickly slipped it back on. “I just came to drop this off,” he said quietly, holding up his comic book, “then me and Andy are going back to his house.”

  His father glanced at the comic book and chuckled. It was a mean laugh, void of joy. “Fifteen years old and still reading the goddamn funnies.”

  “They’re comics, Dad.”

  “Big fat slob walking around with funny books at your age—Jesus—like some kind of faggot. What the hell is wrong with you, boy? What is your problem?”

  I tapped Boone’s arm and motioned for us to leave. “Let’s just go.”

  “You mocking me, boy?” Mr. Boone said, this time addressing me.

  “No, sir,” I answered.

  He glared at me for several seconds before he spoke. “I’ll tell my kid when he can leave and when he can’t.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His glazed eyes shifted back to Boone. “You know, maybe if you spent a little more time with your brother and a little less time with your girlfriend here, you wouldn’t be such a fucking pussy.”

  We both stood frozen, uncertain of what to say or do. Boone was mortified, of course, and I was mortified for him, but this was typical behavior when it came to his father, and as unpleasant as it was, we’d grown somewhat used to his drunken nonsense.

  “Big kid like you should be playing football.” His father coughed then hacked up a ball of phlegm and spit it not far from where we were standing. “Go on, get out of here,” he said, plopping himself down on the bottom step. “Not that you ever miss a meal, you fat bastard, but be home for dinner tonight. Your mother’s making meatloaf.”

  “OK, seeya, Dad,” Boone said, as if all was right with the world. He gave a slight wave to his father and together we turned and headed back in the direction we’d come.

  “Sorry,” he said once we were out of earshot.

  I patted him on the back as we walked. “Don’t worry about it, man.”

  We were quiet for a time, just walking and thinking, or maybe trying not to think at all just then.

  “So,” Boone eventually said, “you hear the one about the midget fucking a giraffe?”

  I laughed and his face lit up, releasing the pain and embarrassment and embracing acceptance instead.

  Moving nonchalantly to the middle of the street, Boone turned, looked at me and offered a mischievous grin. “You know what time it is?”

  “Oh, no.”

  He nodded and struck a sudden comic pose reminiscent of Elvis Presley. It was only one of the over-the-top comedic impersonations in his arsenal, but one he saved for those times when we needed a laugh the most. “Ladies and gentlemen…topless Elvis.”

  “Oh, God—no!”

  Boone peeled his shirt off, flung it in my general direction and instantly assumed the persona of Elvis, swiveling his hips about and singing into his clenched fist. As I laughed hysterically, he stopped singing as suddenly as he’d begun and pointed at me. “What the hell’s the matter with you, boy?” he said in a bad Elvis voice. “Ya got titties bigger than your mama’s! Well—thank ya ver-ay much!”

  I was laughing so hard tears had filled my eyes. “Stop, man, I can’t breathe.”

  Waving to a crowd only he could see Boone sauntered over to where his shirt had landed and put it back on. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here before I do it again.”

  We spent the remainder of the afternoon in my backyard that day, talking, hanging out, laughing; just being kids. Kids on the verge of something else, because despite the hideous encounter with Boone’s father, that day was my last as a real child. For childhood to exist, there must also be innocence, and innocence—my innocence and Angela’s innocence—was about to die a horrible, violent death.

  That summer of 1979, Angela, only a few months beyond her twelfth birthday, was already far more accomplished than I was. She had beauty, brains, an inherent sensitivity and a gregarious nature that attracted others to her. She was an outstanding student and very popular with peers and teachers alike, and though still a child, she managed to combine the innocence of youth with the common sense normally found in those much older. We had always been close, and while we remained that way, as we approached our teenage years something in our relationship changed, a shifting of power perhaps, and by the time I had reached fifteen and Angela twelve, all the hopes and dreams Uncle and my mother had for us began to focus almost exclusively on her.

  It was a bitter pill to swallow at times but made perfect sense. I wanted to be a writer, and while they were both supportive and rooted for me in their own ways, I knew they also often dismissed my dream as just that—a dream—something that would at one point or another eventually have to be traded in for reality. Angela wanted to be a lawyer. That career path was not only possible; it was probable. It was real.

  “Always bet the favorite,” Uncle often said. “Underdogs are underdogs for a reason, Andy. They’re dreamers, and most dreamers are losers.”

  Regardless, I thought I’d have plenty of time to dream that summer, to indulge my fantasies of one day writing a great novel, to be able to spend hours at my typewriter escaping into worlds of my own creation. The days were longer after all, the pace slower and less stressful than during the school year.

  But there would be no room for dreams that summer.

  Only nightmares.

  3

  “How well did you know your uncle, Mr. DeMarco?”

  I looked beyond the detective, across the small lobby to the windows at the front of the building. The gray sky threatened snow but was still spitting the same drizzling rain that had been falling when I’d arrived. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “As I mentioned on the telephone, this is a murder investigation.”

  I stuffed my hands into my coat pockets. “Can you tell me what happened or not?”

  “He was found with another man in a parked car over by the town dump. Both had been shot, executed gangland style.” The detective gave a bored sigh. “That’s about all I can say at this time.”

  “Tell me, was he still living in that apartment over on Bay Street? I can’t remember the number but it was right by the water, a second-floor apartment above a bicycle shop.”

  “Nope.” The detective consulted his clipboard and the paperwork there. “We have his residence listed as forty-four Franklin Avenue. Our records indicate he’s used that as his permanent address for the last ten years. Shared the place with his live-in girlfriend, Louise Sutherland.” He looked up from the paperwork and smirked the way cops sometimes do when they mention someone they consider unsavory.

  If she’d lived with Uncle for a decade, odds were she was.


  “Why didn’t she do the I.D.?” I asked.

  “She declined.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  The detective shrugged. None of this meant a goddamn thing to him, and he didn’t care if I knew it. This was some extra paperwork and a bit of overtime, not much else. I figured the way he saw it, when someone like my uncle was murdered there was just one less piece of trash in the world he had to deal with, so there wasn’t anything to be particularly upset about. “I know how unpleasant this kind of thing is,” he said with the bored sincerity of a telemarketer. “Appreciate your time. We’re sorry for your loss.”

  I nodded absently and wandered into the rain.

  * * *

  The humidity was brutal that day, growing to unbearable heights even before morning had turned to afternoon. In anticipation the world became unnaturally still, and even the ocean breeze that normally swept through the small section of forest behind our house was eerily absent. Only the heat itself remained in motion, growing more powerful with each passing moment. Rising in rippling waves from paved and dirt roads alike, it blurred the sky and clung to the skin like a moist film.

  I had spent the morning at the picnic table writing a new story, but by early afternoon I could no longer take it, and was preparing to go inside to seek refuge in some cool corner of the house when I saw Angela drift into the yard as if from thin air.