Saying Uncle

by Greg F. Gifune

  “And he broke mine.”

  “Not big on forgiveness, huh?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to get to all these years. I’m trying to understand.”

  “No you’re not. You’re trying to feel better.”

  “I just want to know what happened to him.”

  “Because he’s dead now?”

  I pushed my mug aside and sat back. “Because I loved him too.”

  Louise smashed her cigarette into the ashtray, and this time, before the tears could escape, she blotted them away with a napkin. “Paulie was a thief. What the hell did you think he was? It was his profession. I’ve been around criminals my whole life. My father was one, it was how I was raised, get it? I’m a knockaround girl, have been for years, I know the score, OK? When I met him he’d already done time. I did some way back for bad checks myself, so I didn’t hold anything against him, you see what I’m saying? I thought he was just another mutt, another guy who’d be fun to run with for a while. I was still dancing back then. Men like your uncle don’t take women like me seriously, and trust me, honey, vice versa. But Paulie was different. He was special.” She swallowed hard and patted her eyes with the napkin again. “He was the one. My one and only, you see what I’m saying?”

  “I’m sorry.” I yanked another napkin free of the holder on the table and slid it over to her. “I didn’t mean to upset you, that wasn’t my intention.”

  “What is your intention?”

  “I don’t know, I—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have even bothered you.” I reached for my wallet. “Let me pay for this and—”

  “Paulie was a wheel man.”

  I returned my hands to the table, listened.

  “He was a professional, had a lot of skills in the life, but that was his specialty—he was a driver.”

  “The only time I remember him being arrested was right after the summer of 1979,” I said. “It had been a terrible summer.” I hesitated to see if she’d bite. She didn’t, but I wasn’t sure if it was due to a lack of knowledge regarding the things that took place that summer or a lack of willingness to let me know she possessed it. “That fall he was arrested, and he went to prison the following year for robbery. He was in jail for the holidays, I remember that, and how upset my mother was. She kept saying it wasn’t right for him to be away from us during the holidays. She couldn’t see beyond his not being there, as to why he wasn’t. Uncle and I weren’t speaking at that point, but I followed what was happening in the newspapers. He was the getaway driver on some botched bank job. The rest of the crew got twenty-plus sentences but Uncle got seven-to-ten because he was only the driver, he didn’t pull a gun on anyone.”

  “That was long before I met him, but I know he did eight of the ten in maximum stir,” Louise said. “He did his time like a man, but it haunted him for the rest of his life. He had nightmares, never slept real good, your uncle. Always blamed it on his time in the joint.”

  Among other things, I thought.

  “He did straight time for a while,” she said a moment later. “He tried, God knows he did, but it’s a way of life for guys like Paulie, they don’t know anything else. He held jobs but never for long. He was always working an angle, always looking for a score that could get us the hell out of here. When I stopped dancing and started hostessing I lost a lot of money every week. But he always made it right. He always took care of us one way or another. I didn’t ask about specifics—and he never told me—because that puts you in danger. If you know things, you’re responsible for them; you see what I mean? So he always kept me far enough out of it so I didn’t know exactly what he was doing. It was better that way.”

  Fifty-six years old and still trying to work the angles, I thought. It seemed incomprehensible that Uncle could have been pushing sixty, much less still a criminal at that age. While most men in their late fifties had settled down he’d still been swimming upstream, bucking the system and making his own rules.

  “He was on the same small crew for a long time,” Louise said. “Same guys, for the most part. Guys he knew and trusted. Him, Ronnie Garrett, Joey Peluso and Walt Dunham. Right before this job Walt Dunham got arrested, there was a warrant out on him for an A&B—assault and battery—on some guy at a bar. Anyways, Walt never made the trip. He’s still sitting in county waiting on a trial because of all his priors for violent offenses. All I know is, Paulie and the other two pulled a job that had to do with some jewelry. Maybe a store, maybe a courier, I don’t know. It was an out of town caper, I know that much. Paulie packed a small bag, enough for a couple days, mostly summer clothes so it must’ve been somewhere warm. California, Florida—whatever. How they got the lead I don’t know. But a job this big, where the swag was so valuable isn’t something pros like Paulie and his crew would’ve done locally—the job would’ve been too dangerous to pull in their own backyard and the merchandise too hot. Anyway, he was gone for three days. When he came back he was nervous, and that wasn’t like him, but he said everything was OK, that everything went fine. Obviously it didn’t.”

  “Obviously,” I muttered.

  “Two days later he was dead.” The words fell from her mouth as if she were unaware of them.

  “So this Dunham guy’s in jail even before they do the job, and Ronnie Garrett and Uncle end up dead two days after they get back. What about the other guy? Peluso.”

  “What about him?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s around. Covering his tracks, I’m sure. It’s no secret they were partners so it’s only a matter of time before the cops haul his ass in for questioning. He won’t run. Not yet. Running makes you look guilty. If he knows they got nothing on him he’ll just bide his time, eventually this’ll all blow over. Then he’ll go. One day, he’ll just go. The cops will probably haul me in too, but I don’t know anything, and what little I do know I won’t be telling those bastards. Just going through the motions for me.”

  I leaned closer across the table. “So this Peluso character killed Uncle and Garrett?”

  “Who knows?”

  “But you said they worked together for years, that Uncle trusted him. Why would—”

  “Because it was a lot of money. Isn’t it always love or money? I don’t know how much, but I know Paulie said it’d be enough for us to get out of here once and for all. He was talking about going to Italy. He always wanted to see it but we never had enough cash. He said if this worked out we could live there if we wanted. If he was serious then that’s the kind of money even an old friend might kill you for. At the end of the day they’re all criminals. You have to remember that. You swim with sharks sooner or later somebody gets bit.”

  “Do you know where I can find this guy?”

  “Peluso?” Louise released a loud and bawdy laugh I hadn’t expected, one so incompatible with her appearance it was unsettling. A single burst that left her as quickly as she’d summoned it, with a shake of her head she said, “Are you out of your mind? You think you can show up on his doorstep and start asking questions like you’re asking me? Aren’t you a schoolteacher? You’re just a bit out of your league.” This time she leaned closer, across the table. “These kind of people, they’ll kill you, understand? You want your mother to have to bury her son and her brother all in one week? You help us bury your uncle and put him to rest. Then you go back up north and you get on with your little life and you forget about all this. You have a wife up there, don’t you?”

  Martha and I had been married in Maine in a small, quiet and private ceremony nearly ten years before, which meant that it had been right around the time he and Louise had started seeing each other. “Yes.”

  “Then do what you have to do here and go home to her.”

  “This isn’t about her,” I said. “It’s about Uncle.”

  “No it’s not. It’s about you. You got your memories of Paulie—good and bad—live with them.” She gazed out the window at the
snowflakes as a renegade tear crept across her cheek to her jaw line and dangled there like a raindrop. “It’s all any of us can do.”

  * * *

  After Boone and I split up I headed back home. The front light was on, as was the one over the sink in the kitchen, so I knew that at some point my mother had come downstairs and turned them on for me. But she had long since gone back to bed. The house was silent. I found my way upstairs and collapsed into bed, but sleep refused to come and I was up all night staring at patterns on the ceiling and watching my thoughts and fears convert to endless loops of film in my mind.

  Hours later I sat on the windowsill in my bedroom and watched the sun rise. As it took its place in the sky, glowing over the nearby ocean and shining down on our world, perhaps fittingly, it reminded me of a doting mother hovering over her children. For some reason I thought of my father for the first time in a long while. Visions of him in his wrinkled suits haunted me, and I wondered if he ever thought of me, of any of us. But such concepts seemed traitorous somehow, so I let them go. They faded quickly.

  Gone, just like him.

  Not long after sunrise I heard Angela and our mother begin to stir.

  When my door opened a few moments later, I saw my mother standing there barefoot and wearing a lightweight bathrobe. Her hair was mussed and her face looked pale without makeup, drawn. An entire conversation passed between us without either of us uttering a word. The sound of tires on the gravel driveway outside distracted me, and I looked back out the window. Uncle’s Camaro was idling there, and I could just make him out, sitting behind the wheel, sunglasses concealing his eyes and a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “Uncle and I have to take Angie to the doctor. We’ll be back in a bit.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you been to bed, Andy?”

  “Not really.” I heard her feet padding across the floor as she approached me.

  “Try to get some sleep, honey,” she said, her warm hands rubbing my back. “Everything’s going to be all right. Angie’s OK, we just want to be sure.”

  I left the window, walked over to my bed and sat down. I knew what was coming.

  “Look,” she said, following and crouching next to me. Her eyes were heavy and sleepy. “This is hard for all of us, but we had to make some decisions about what happened to your sister. Very difficult decisions, do you understand?”

  “I guess.”

  “We’re going to keep this in the family, Andy. Your uncle knows a doctor who can be discreet about this. Angie’s only twelve, there’s no reason for this to get out.”

  “You make it sound like she did something wrong.”

  She shook her head as if prepared to better explain herself then seemed to realize my point. “It stays in the family,” she said sternly. “End of discussion.”

  “OK.”

  Softening a bit, she touched my knee and tried her best to smile. “I need you to be strong right now, Andy. I need you to be a man. We have to stick together now more than ever, OK? We have to look out for each other. None of this leaves the family. No one is to know about any of this. Not even Boone. No one. We just go on and we put it behind us, OK? If we need to talk about it, we do it with each other. I’m always here for you, you know that, and so is Uncle. But no one else is to know about this, and I mean it, Andy. Promise me. I need your word.”

  “What about Michael Ring? He knows.”

  She stiffened again, the mention of his name causing her physical appearance to shift. Pushing herself back to her feet with a muffled sigh she said, “Never mind about him.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell the police? You can’t let him get away with what he did.”

  “He’ll get what’s coming to him.” Her jaw clenched and I could see it working along the side of her mouth as she tried to contain her rage. “People like that always do.”

  “What if he does?” I goaded. “Do we keep that in the family too?”

  I tried to read her expression, curious as to whether Uncle had told her about my refusing to fight. In the end, it hardly mattered.

  My mother moved away, creating a chasm between us we were never again fully able to fuse. The distance established that morning by her seemingly simple act of walking a few steps away became a gulf that remained between us from that point forward, a hollow place void not of love or affection, but of camaraderie, solidarity, understanding, and ultimately, respect.

  She stood in my bedroom doorway with her back to me. “Will you promise me? Will you give me your word, Andy?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I give you my word.”

  Uncle waited in the car until Angela and my mother joined him there. I watched the car drive off, taking with it more than just members of my family. The entire world and nearly everyone in it I cared for vanished at the top of the street and crossed over into some other place that day. A place I believed then I could never accompany them to. Things had changed. Perceptions had become distorted, realities altered.

  And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  9

  I walked Louise back to the Blue Slipper in silence. The snow fell around us just as silently, blanketing the otherwise grimy neighborhood in temporary splendor, a hoax to deceive us into believing we were somewhere magnificent. As we closed on the club the barely audible thumping music from within bled free. Louise hesitated at the front doors then turned to me, her expression set as if to say something of great importance. But in the end she said nothing, and we both stood there a while in a sea of white flakes and visible breath.

  “Guess I’ll see you tonight over at your mother’s,” she said.

  I impulsively reached over, put my arms around her and hugged her gently. I was probably even more surprised by this than she was, but despite the awkwardness it seemed appropriate under the circumstances. The smell of her perfume was more invasive up close, and her body felt cold, unexpectedly frail and artificial, nearly mannequin-like. “For what it’s worth,” I whispered, “I’m sorry.” Her arms briefly found my shoulders, but she remained rigid, so I let her go and stepped back.

  The corner of her mouth curled with such subtlety I couldn’t be sure if it was a smile or a sneer, and without a word she disappeared through the front doors of the club.

  As I walked across the lot I noticed a phone booth across the street. I crossed quickly, my feet sloshing in the newly formed puddles of slush. Hanging from a shelf in the booth by a thick metal cord was a tattered phonebook. I flipped through it, located the name and address I was looking for then headed back to my car.

  I drove for nearly ten minutes, following a winding road that alternated between occasional ramshackle cottages littered along more rural stretches and brief clusters of independent commercial property leftover from an era prior to the expansive growth of downtown Warden. The address I was searching for was near the literal outskirts of town. At a small intersection I pulled over into the snow-covered dirt lot of a liquor store that had been there since I was a child. Across from it sat a lumberyard. A bar and grill occupied one remaining corner, a hardware store the other.

  A neon beer sign in the liquor store window distracted me. An elderly couple named McMullen had owned the store in my youth, but they had died years ago and the establishment had since been renamed Warden Liquor.

  Along the side of the package store an old wooden staircase lead to the lone apartment above it. When I was a kid an older man and hapless alcoholic named Wiley had lived there. Wiry, with stringy gray hair, he wore combat fatigues and rode a rickety bicycle around town from bar to bar every day, and I remembered him not because he had often been the brunt of jokes, but because even then I had found him fascinating. Always alone and always drunk, my mother had once told me he was a veteran of World War II who had lost his mind during combat and that despite his problems he was to be respected. I’d always wondered what the full story behind Wiley was but never had the nerve to ask, so to me, and I suspect most everyone else, he was dest
ined to forever remain an enigma.

  Black numbers to the left of the liquor store’s front door read: 23. I followed the edge of the building upward, along the staircase to the door at the top, where another set of numbers read: 23 1/2. Nothing much had changed here. Although we rarely ventured to this far end of town, to the best of my recollection the building looked the same as it had in my youth. Only now, all these years later, Wiley was long dead and buried, his agony and demons mere memories of people like me, people who never even knew him. And ironically, at least according to the phonebook, this tiny apartment above the liquor store was now the home of Desmond Boone.

  * * *

  Three days came and went without incident, as far as I knew.

  My mother took some time off from work to look after Angela, and I suppose, in the hopes of collecting herself as well. Our house assumed an otherworldly feel, like a monastery where the inhabitants had taken vows of silence and above which hung a perpetual sense of mysticism and cloistered segregation from the outside world. Although we were Roman Catholic by birth, prior to the events that summer I would not have considered our family particularly religious or our home exceptionally spiritual, but there was an undeniable presence of the divine about us in those days following Angela’s attack. I could sense it in the air, its essence, a feeling that something else was with us, something ubiquitous but normally unrecognized now revealed. And yet I felt no real connection to it, like it was in our midst but independent of us. A watcher, perhaps, a sentinel of sorts, watching over us from some other place; wanting us to listen but unable to force us to do so. For the most part we moved about and interacted like strangers sharing a boardinghouse, carefully and quietly going through the motions of everyday life, such as it was.