Saying Uncle

by Greg F. Gifune

  She had gone to the beach earlier that morning with a few of her friends and now stood looking like a lost waif, dirt smeared across her face, shoulders and thighs. She looked impossibly tiny to me at that moment, abnormally vulnerable somehow, and her eyes did not possess their usual sparkle. There was an aura of darkness about them I had never seen before, like something sinister had settled behind them without her permission. Her lips were dry and a bit chapped. I noticed them part, like she planned to say something, but instead she looked away as if she’d forgotten the words.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said softly.

  “You’re all dirty.”

  She brushed a straggle of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear with exaggerated care. Her affectations were self-conscious and unfamiliar, like she had borrowed them from someone else and was just then putting them to use for the first time, and her face held the expression of someone for whom without warning, the world had become an alien, troubling place.

  “I cut through the path on my way home from the beach,” she told me, which explained why she had emerged from the trees behind the house. “I fell down.”

  I noticed the strap on her pink one-piece bathing suit was torn and had been tied back together in an effort to hold it secure. “Better not let Mom see that, bathing suits are expensive.”

  Angela nodded grimly, her bottom lip protruding and trembling.

  “She won’t be that mad, Angie,” I said. “You don’t have to cry.”

  Without response she turned and headed for the back door. I watched her cross the yard and noticed she was moving rather gingerly. “Did you hurt yourself when you fell?” I called after her. “You sure you’re OK?”

  She slipped into the house like a zombie, eyes fixed straight ahead and arms dangling lifelessly at her sides. I followed her to make sure she was all right, but by the time I had gathered my papers and carried my typewriter inside, Angela had already gotten into the shower.

  I found my mother at the kitchen table balancing the checkbook.

  “Mom, I think Angela’s sick or something.”

  “You what, sweetie?” she said in a distant tone, her nose still buried in the checkbook. “This damn thing never comes out like the statement. Never.”

  “Angela,” I said again.

  “She went to the beach with her friends.” She continued staring at the numbers, a pen resting in the corner of her mouth. “If you’re going to take a shower, Andy, do it, don’t leave the water running like that.”

  “Angela’s in the shower, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  She stabbed the register with a finger. “Ah-ha! There’s one I missed, I bet that’s why I couldn’t get—”

  “Mom,” I said, louder this time. “You’re not even listening to me.”

  She sat back, flashed me an annoyed look. “Honey, what is it? Can’t you see I’m right in the middle of something here?”

  “I said, I think Angela’s sick.”

  “Angela?” Her expression changed, as though she were waiting for a translation of what I’d said into her native tongue. “Why, what’s wrong?”

  “She just got back from the beach and she’s acting all weird.”

  My mother pushed the checkbook and accompanying paperwork aside, rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn. “Weird how? What do you mean, weird?”

  “She was all dirty and she said she fell. She was sort of limping.”

  “Angela fell? Jesus, Andy, why didn’t you tell me that? Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know, I mean—yeah, I think so, but—Mom, I was trying to tell you.”

  Instead of answering me she moved down the short hallway just off the kitchen to the bathroom where Angela was showering. With a final annoyed look in my direction, she let herself in and quietly closed the door behind her.

  I sat at the table, waiting, listening, perspiring in the awful humidity, and even then wrestling with the jumble of thoughts cluttering my mind.

  After a moment the shower shut off and gave way to muffled voices. I stood up and walked slowly to the head of the hallway just as the bathroom door opened. My mother poked her head out. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “Mom?” I said helplessly. “What’s the matter?”

  “Call Uncle,” she said. “Tell him to get over here as soon as he can.”

  “Is Angela OK?”

  “Damn it, Andy, just do as I ask!”

  The door closed and I stood there stupidly as silence returned to the house, an awful, unearthly silence.

  After a moment, I walked back into the kitchen and reached for the wall phone.

  4

  It felt good to be out in the fresh air again, even though the drizzle turned to an icy, pouring rain the moment I stepped outside. I put on my old fedora and stood in the desolate parking lot a while, probably from a distance looking like some mysterious stranger in an old movie. Sans movie, I suppose that’s exactly what I was. Standing alongside my car and battling my typical feelings of estrangement from the world, I listened to the rhythmic cadence of freezing drops pelt my coat and hat. Hands stuffed in my trench coat, I recalled the morning prior and watched my breath trail off in cloudy spirals as it tumbled from my nostrils and mouth.

  I had been safely insulated at home with Martha and the cats. A Sunday, I had spent the morning in my sweatpants and a t-shirt, sitting on the couch with a hot cup of tea and a novel. A light and playful Vivaldi tune played on the stereo, and in the space between my chest, where the book was resting, and my lap, where my cup and saucer were resting, two seven-week-old kittens, Benny and Boo, playfully wrestled with each other. Martha and I had found a litter of four kittens abandoned in the woods near our home during one of our evening walks. Two had already died but two were clinging to life. We buried the dead and took the others in, as we had with other stray or abandoned animals over the years, and after a few weeks of successful bottle-feeding, numerous veterinarian visits, and constant nurturing, the kittens not only survived, they flourished. Rather than finding them good homes elsewhere, we decided to keep these two, and finally healthy, we were just beginning to enjoy their company, and they ours.

  Across from me in a comfortable chair reading the newspaper, Martha sat with her legs beneath her, unaware of her grace and beauty. Later we would make love in the shower, have breakfast, go for a walk then lie on the couch and enjoy our day off, snuggling with the new additions to our family. We would watch movies and let the day slip past as if unnoticed, in silence. These quiet times were what I lived for, the moments when Martha and I existed together yet apart, in love and alive in a seductively meaningful place that existed somewhere just beneath the surface of everyday life and all the confines that came with it.

  We were alive. Gently.

  It had taken me years to find this place in the world, to renovate it and nurture it, and in sharing it with the woman I loved, transform it from a fantasy to what I had always dreamed it might be.

  And one phone call had interrupted and sent it spiraling downward, crashing into thousands of pieces, those shards threatening to turn the present into some parallel vision of the past, a black mirror reflecting that which I had presumed long dead. Fatally wounded, I had left it to die, and now, violently, it had returned from the darkness like a ghoul in a horror story.

  You pretentious pussy, a voice said from somewhere behind me. Always remember, Andy, there’s the way you want the world to be…and the way it just fucking is.

  The words were so clear I actually turned, expecting to see Uncle standing there. But there was only a cold rain slowly turning to snow.

  I let the memories of Sunday slip away with the winter wind, climbed into my car and headed for my uncle’s last known address.

  * * *

  About fifteen minutes after a frantic and confusing phone call, during which I was unable to report much of anything in the way of significant information, Uncle arrived and stormed into the kit
chen with a worried scowl on his normally pleasant face. “What the hell kind of call was that? You didn’t make any sense, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “Where’s Angela?”

  “Upstairs with Mom.”

  He turned and headed up the stairs, joining my mother and Angela in her bedroom and leaving me frightened and confused at the kitchen table. Within seconds I heard muffled voices trickling down the staircase but couldn’t make out any specific words.

  No longer able to contain my curiosity, I quietly climbed the stairs, cognizant of each squeaking step, and crouched in the hallway just outside Angela’s bedroom door.

  I could hear Angela sobbing and Uncle’s voice questioning her interspersed with sporadic interruptions from my mother. This went on for quite a while, but I could still only make out every third or fourth word.

  I’d been straining to hear and concentrating so hard that when my mother and Uncle emerged from the bedroom I didn’t have time to make an escape. Instead, as they quietly closed Angela’s bedroom door behind them, I leaned against the wall with arms folded casually and asked, “What’s going on?”

  My mother wiped tears from her eyes, smudging eyeliner into thick black splotches across her cheeks like war paint. “Go outside for a while,” she said in a dismissive tone.

  “Is Angie OK?”

  “Go outside for a while.” She spun toward me so forcefully I thought for a moment she might hit me. Then, realizing how I had interpreted her abrupt motion, she reached out tenderly and cupped the side of my face. “Go outside. Uncle and I need to talk.”

  Before I could object she descended the stairs.

  As Uncle followed he whispered, “Stay close to home.”

  I took my time on the stairs, crossed the kitchen slowly and pretended to slam shut the screen door as they met in the adjacent den. Out of sight, I inched closer, lingering just beyond the open door and heard ice clink glass as Uncle mixed drinks for them both.

  “Marie, maybe you should just call the cops.”

  “Never thought I’d hear that from you.”

  “Yeah, but under the circumstances it’s probably best.”

  “And what are they going to do besides put that poor little girl through hell all over again? Besides, the sonofabitch is a minor, nothing will happen to him. It boils down to his word against—”

  “She’s twelve, for Christ’s sake. They got tests that’ll show she’s been violated.”

  My throat cinched shut and it suddenly felt as if my stomach would burst.

  “And he’ll get a slap on the wrist and you know it.”

  “Marie, calm down a minute and try to think about this.”

  “Don’t fucking tell me to calm down.”

  “Whether he gets a slap on the wrist or not, that’s beside the point right now. You’ve still got to get Angie to a doctor. If you want to keep it quiet, I know a guy.”

  “Some back alley hack? Sounds wonderful. But what about this Michael Ring?”

  A small burst of bile sprayed into the bottom of my throat. I choked it back.

  “What about him?”

  “I want to do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like kill the little bastard.”

  The silence that followed seemed to last an eternity as countless thoughts flooded my mind and I attempted to sort them into something approaching a coherent order.

  “You know I can’t do that,” Uncle finally said.

  “I only know you won’t.”

  “Take it easy.”

  “You take it easy. I want him dead. I want you to cut his cock off and choke him with it. Use your connections, put some of those scumbags you know to work on it if you have to but I want him dead. I want him fucking dead.” Her voice broke as anger erupted into tears. “That sonofabitch! That goddamn sonofabitch!”

  “Listen to me,” Uncle said. “If you don’t want to involve the cops in this then I can…I can handle it, OK?”

  “Then do it.”

  “But I can’t kill this kid.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know you’re in a rage right now and you deserve to be—shit, so am I—but you have to try to use your head here. This isn’t the movies or some book. You’re talking about murder, and you don’t want that on your head. Trust me.”

  “I couldn’t give a shit less.”

  “And secondly, Angela is still alive.”

  “This is me you’re talking to, Paulie, not the kids. You don’t have to play the hero for me so just spare me your street ethics, all right? That asshole dragged my little girl into the woods and—that poor innocent little baby, he—”

  “Marie, it’s not that easy. If you go that route no one can know what happened, understand? You said it didn’t look like she has any serious physical damage, but we’ll take Angie to that doctor I know and let him check her out to be sure. Any other doctor’s gonna have to report it, and we can’t have that. Nobody can know a thing, and we’ll have to talk to Angela and make sure she understands no one can ever know what happened to her. No one. If anybody finds out, and something should happen to this Ring asshole, the first place they’re gonna come looking is your house and mine.”

  “I don’t care how we have to do it,” she said evenly. “I want him dead.”

  “What the hell do you think I am, for Christ’s sake, some psycho who goes around murdering people?”

  Silence answered.

  With my heart thudding against my chest I slipped out through the kitchen door into the backyard, the world a watery blur. I don’t know how long I sat at the picnic table trying to quell my tears and grab hold of a clear thought, only that it was Uncle’s sudden presence that snapped me back to reality.

  “Did you hear what we were saying?” he asked.

  I pawed the tears from my eyes and looked at him. “Is Angela going to be all right?”

  He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his inside jacket pocket, tapped one free of the pack and rolled it into the corner of his mouth. “What do you think?”

  I knew the answer. She would never—could never—be the same, and while I wanted desperately to feel the rage my mother was experiencing I could only marshal profound sorrow. Nothing we did, nothing we said would ever change things or save Angela from what had already happened. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going for a ride,” Uncle said, lighting his cigarette. “You and me.”

  “How come?”

  He inhaled deeply then released the smoke through his nose. “You know a kid named Michael Ring?”

  “I go to school with him,” I said, trying my best to control the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “We’re in the same grade.”

  “You know where he lives?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded. “Then show me.”

  5

  By the time I reached Franklin Avenue the rain had completely turned to a heavy wet snow. Even a working-class town like Warden couldn’t help but look beautiful and somehow magical draped in white. When I lived there as a kid, Warden was a constantly growing town struggling even then to maintain its identity. But now it was a full-fledged little city, and in its evolution had traded charm, warmth, familiarity and its individuality for the expediency and soulless flash that littered nearly every other town across the country. Even the main drag looked different. Most of the small businesses that existed there years before were gone, and those that remained were chains rather than the independently owned shops they’d once been. Where the quaint old General Store had been now stood a flashy convenience store with two rows of gas pumps out front, and the drugstore where Boone and I had spent our lawn-mowing money was now a video store with huge front windows covered in movie posters and gaudy signage.

  Mickey’s Diner had survived, but it too had undergone some substantial renovation and now more closely resembled a generic family restaurant than the stylized diner of yesteryear it had once been. />
  Franklin was a short jog of an avenue off the main drag, one of those neighborhoods that had been stranded between its more rural past and the urban present, a smattering of old homes and a couple apartment building holdouts sandwiched between acres of commercial property. Forty-four was an apartment building, and since the detective had not given me an apartment number, I found myself sitting in my parked car with both hands resting atop the wheel, watching the snow fall and contemplating my next move.

  The building itself looked dark and quiet, but it was only a two-story, so I knew it couldn’t house too many units. I waited several minutes but no one came or went, so I climbed from the car and tramped carefully across the small front lawn. While still several feet away I noticed a line of mail slots to the right of the front door. The third from the top was marked: Sutherland. Once on the steps I looked for buzzers or a doorbell but came up empty. On a whim, I tried the door. It was unlocked.

  I stepped into a small, dark hallway. As my eyes adjusted to my surroundings I removed my hat and brushed the snow from it, then moved deeper into the building. The first floor had what appeared to be two apartments, one to my immediate left and one directly in front of me. Neither door was marked, so I decided to try both.

  After knocking on the first door twice without any luck, I turned to try the second, when I heard a series of locks disengaging, and it opened slightly, still secured by a small chain. I cocked my head and squinted through the minimal light in an attempt to better make out the face peering through the few inches of space the chain allowed.

  “Can I help you?”

  I moved a bit closer and saw an elderly woman. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Louise Sutherland.”

  “I’m the landlord here.” The old woman’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What is this regarding?”

  “My name’s Andrew DeMarco. Ms. Sutherland lived here with my Uncle Paul.”