Saying Uncle

by Greg F. Gifune

  Angela gradually began to emerge from her previous state, and she and I would spend a few minutes each morning at the kitchen table. Our normal raucous behavior and laughter-filled conversations were no more, replaced instead with uncomfortable stillness. On those rare occasions when we did speak, it was by rote and never concerned what had happened. Angela was gone even when she was sitting right next to me, hidden in thoughts no one else could share.

  On one afternoon I went to her room to find her sitting at the foot of her bed surrounded by her stuffed animals. She had positioned them about her in uniform circular walls so that they faced her, their glass eyes watching over her, their stitched limbs outstretched to protect her. Sitting cross-legged in the center, she cradled her favorite doll in her arms, her head cocked and her chin resting on her shoulder, small lips moving silently as she whispered to her. Angela looked up when I crossed the doorway, and I thought for a moment she might smile. But she blinked at me with her beautiful eyes, slow and purposeful blinks that let me know she was as close to all right as she was likely to get in the next few days, then resumed her conversation with the doll. In her own pain, confusion, fear and anger, she had found refuge and solace in consoling a baby not of flesh, blood and bone, but plastic. In the moment, it made perfect sense, and summoned up exactly who Angela was in a way she could’ve never expressed verbally. I had never before wanted to hold my sister so badly. I entered the room, leaned over and kissed the top of her head the way Uncle often did.

  After a moment I moved to a rocking chair in the corner of the room and sat down. I never interrupted her or spoke a word, only sat watching over her, being with her, near her, and for the first time was able to do so without seeing the horrible visions in my mind. Each time I had thought of her, looked at her, or even heard her moving about the house prior to that, I had guiltily coupled her with the savagery she had endured. For me, they had become one in the same, and it wasn’t until that otherwise innocuous moment that I was able to separate her face, her tiny body, her movements and sounds from what had happened to her, from what had been perpetrated against her, and with that newfound revelation, rediscovered the ability to once again see my sister—and only my sister—as I had previously. It was only Angie, only me, and short-lived as that instant may or may not have been, for the time being, we were all right again.

  Perhaps motivated by this epiphany, or perhaps an extension of it, the hallowed presence I had felt in our house grew stronger, a presence of love and warmth and acceptance and hope that pushed away all the darkness, if only for a little while. It was pleased, and for those few hours that afternoon, so were we.

  When I left Angela’s room the warmth dissipated, and I found myself swallowed again by the outside world. I spent the rest of the day at the picnic table in the backyard, staring at a blank sheet of paper loaded into my typewriter. Meaningful words in any form refused to come, as if I were sleepwalking and only vaguely aware of my own existence.

  My mother spent most of her time drinking and sitting in the den staring at the walls. She rarely showered or dressed until late in the afternoon, then prepared simple meals, soup or sandwiches for dinner each night, before returning to her roost in the den. Now and then she’d talk on the telephone, mostly to Uncle, who for some reason also stayed away during those three days, but the rest of the time she’d sit quietly and sip her drink. It was a habit my mother would never lose.

  Over the course of those three uneventful days Boone called a few times but I never agreed to see him. I knew he’d understand that this was a time the three of us—my mother, Angela and myself—needed to be together, even if we spent that time together apart, wandering about our small house and smaller yard, filling spaces with sighs and footfalls, breath and quiet attendance, because for each of us to know the others were there was somehow enough.

  On the fourth day of our self-imposed vigil, Angela and I were playing checkers at the picnic table when our mother slipped through the backdoor to let us know she was going off with Uncle for a while. I remember her face that day, because it was even more drawn and pale than usual. She had made an attempt at styling her hair but it still looked unusually mussed, and her clothes hung on her, wrinkled and thrown together with little care. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a very long time, and probably hadn’t.

  I wondered if she felt the same benevolent presence in our home that I had, or if it was simply a figment of my imagination, wishful thoughts conjured to protect us all.

  “I’m going out with Uncle for a while,” she said softly. “I’ll be back soon OK?”

  “OK,” I answered for both of us. I made my move, sliding a black checker onto a new square. When I looked up to say goodbye, she was already gone. The screen door slapped the frame then came to rest in her wake. I noticed Angela staring after her.

  “Angie?”

  She turned at me.

  “Your move.”

  On the fifth day, just when I’d started to think that perhaps everything would be all right, everything changed yet again. All I had thought healed became further diseased, and everything I feared the most became reality.

  10

  The world is not the same when it snows. Things look differently, feel differently, and even sounds—natural and otherwise—become altered. The same can be said of silences, as there is nothing quite like the hush that accompanies a snow-covered landscape. Coupled with the steady swirl of flakes, it reminded me of the obvious—or what should have been obvious—that I was alive. I often felt like I was under a spell that left me largely unaware, a machine on automatic pilot. But in that silence and snow, breathing fresh air and standing beneath the immensity of a gray and vacant sky, it all slipped away.

  As I hesitated at the top of the staircase alongside the liquor store, I looked out over the woods in the distance. Amidst the otherwise innate beauty of such a setting, between the back lot and a sea of trees draped in white, the rotted carcass of an old automobile sat alone on a stretch of flatland like a work of modern art, offering a fitting, if not perverse dichotomy.

  Nothing moved but the falling snow.

  I knocked on the door and after several moments heard sounds of movement within the apartment. “Yeah?” a gruff voice asked.

  “Boone?”

  “Who’s there?”

  I leaned closer; spoke to the door. “It’s Andy.”

  “Who?”

  “Boone, it’s Andy DeMarco.”

  A deadbolt clicked free and the door pulled open with an abrupt scraping sound. There was not much light in the apartment behind him so it took me a moment to make out the person in the doorway. I had not seen Desmond Boone in more than ten years but it appeared as if he’d aged twenty in that time. He squinted at the intrusive light, his face contorted. He was either hung over or had just woken up. Maybe both.

  “Boone,” I said through a smile. “It’s good to see you.”

  He stared at me a moment as if he were trying to place me. Still quite heavy, he was dressed in an old sweatshirt and sweat pants and looked slovenly as ever. His once unruly bush of red hair was only a memory, as he had gone almost completely bald, and his face was bloated, pale, unhealthy looking.

  “Boone? You all right?”

  This time he responded with an awkward nod and self-consciously wiped his hands on his shirt. “Andy,” he finally said. “Holy shit, I—I didn’t expect to see you standing here. Figured it was a bill collector or some douche bag selling something.”

  “I’m back in town for a couple days, needed to see you.”

  “Yeah,” he mumbled. “I heard about—I was real sorry to hear about your uncle.”

  “Me too.” I shrugged snow from my coat. “Can I come in or is this a bad time?”

  Boone seemed to ponder my question with more intensity than it warranted. “Um, yeah—sure, it’s kind of messy in here, I didn’t get a chance to clean up yet this week, but—yeah, of course, man, come on in.”

  The interior of the
apartment was dark, musty and cluttered. An array of smells hit me, an odd fusion of stale foods, stagnant air and body odor that was so strong I had to fight the urge to bring a hand to my face to cover my nose and mouth.

  In some ways I felt like I’d entered a sacred haven and solved a mystery of our childhood simply by entering the apartment. For so many years it had been known as the place where poor “crazy” Wiley had lived, and stories had circulated about what it looked like inside or what he did or didn’t do within these four walls, that it had become a kind of legend, one of those places kids spoke of on Halloween or at sleepovers. Wiley had been accused of everything from collecting bodies in the apartment to doing odd experiments on unsuspecting children he kidnapped—all foolishness, of course, but the kind of fodder prepubescent imaginations thrive on.

  Now that I was here, it was anything but mysterious, and I couldn’t help but think back to the days when Boone and I had been two kids sitting on our bicycles watching Wiley go in or out of this place, wholly unaware that fate had conspired to one day land Boone here as well. With his odd appearance, eccentric behavior and impoverished lifestyle, I wondered if kids in town these days told the same silly stories about Boone that we had once told about Wiley.

  As my eyes adjusted to the sudden lack of light, I found myself in a cramped living room with low ceilings and a large, badly stained throw rug in the center of the floor. Clothes, empty pizza boxes and an assortment of spent liquor bottles were strewn from one end of the room to the next. Against one wall was a cabinet that housed a small television on one shelf and a boom box on another. Atop the cabinet were three framed photographs faded with age and blurred through a film of filth that had collected across the glass. One was of Boone with his brother and parents, a posed and overly formal looking picture reminiscent of family portraits in the 60s. Boone was quite young in the photograph, perhaps five or six, bright eyes and that memorable unruly red hair his dominant features even then. He was smiling widely, as if he’d been laughing when the photographer snapped the picture. The second was a picture of his brother Jonathan in full football regalia that captured him in the prime of his physical prowess and athletic glory. He had gone on to play at Ohio State on a football scholarship, and though he’d been an athletic god in a town like Warden, his college career turned out to be less than spectacular, and his dreams of one day playing in the NFL never came to fruition.

  Last I knew he’d become a gym teacher somewhere in the Midwest.

  As poignant as the first two photographs were, particularly considering the way his family had treated him over the years, the third one hit me hardest of all. Standing in his living room amidst the mess, I stared open-mouthed at the picture, remembering the night it was taken like it was only days rather than years ago.

  Uncle had taken the two of us to a carnival that had passed through Warden one summer, and at one point we had stopped to have our picture taken standing behind a plasterboard front painted to look like the headless bodies of two well-sculpted bodybuilders. Those having their pictures taken would stand behind it and rest their chin on the cutaway portion, thus creating the illusion that the body and head belonged to the same person. With the bright lights of a Ferris Wheel in the night sky behind us, versions of Boone and myself—eleven-year-old versions—stared back at me from a place and time generally reserved for the foggy landscape of dreams and distant memory.

  “Sorry about the mess, man, I really need to clean this place up.” Boone swept by me, gathering dirty laundry from the couch. “Have a—have a seat.”

  I did, sitting carefully on the edge of the sofa as he lumbered into a small hallway between the room we were in and a tiny kitchenette on the other side of the apartment. The sink was overflowing with dishes covered in grime, and the kitchen table was piled high with mail and old newspapers. But for an old Rolling Stones poster and a centerfold featuring a busty brunette from Hustler or some similar magazine, the walls in the living room were bare and painted a curious shade of bluish-gray that lent an even greater degree of dreariness to what was an already gloomy apartment.

  Boone threw the pile of clothes into the hallway then returned to the living room and stood before me looking much like a child suddenly summoned to the principal’s office. “Jesus,” he said sheepishly, “I can’t—dude, I can’t believe you’re sitting here.”

  It took me several seconds to form a response, as I wanted to apologize for having not seen him in so long, for letting our relationship lapse, but instead I smiled and shrugged and said, “How’re things, Boone? You OK?”

  “Yeah, I mean—well, yeah, I’m cool.”

  The last I had heard he worked at a fish processing plant in town, but it looked as if he hadn’t left his apartment in months, much less to go to work. “Are you still working at the plant?”

  “Nah, I’m ah, kind of between gigs at the moment.” He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his sweat pants and shuffled about awkwardly, favoring his right leg. “Being the graceful motherfucker I am, I fell down the stairs a couple months ago and busted up my knee pretty bad. Bit of advice, dancing down a staircase after drinking a fifth of vodka is never as good an idea as it seems at the time.”

  Glimpsing his former humor, I laughed lightly, but it was more a courtesy than a genuine reaction. There no longer seemed to be anything funny about Desmond Boone.

  “I had a couple operations on it and had to do all this therapy shit, but the doctors told me it wouldn’t ever be like it was before. So anyway, I’m on disability for now. Sucks, it’s not much—I’m trying to live on a month what I used to live on a week—but what the hell you gonna do, right?” He hobbled over to a chair across from the couch and plopped himself onto it without bothering to brush away the debris and clothing. “How’s the teaching thing working out, you still doing that?”

  “Yup, still at it.”

  His eyes brightened a bit. “Still writing your stories?”

  “Now and then,” I said. “But not much anymore.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said softly. “You always wrote the coolest stories.”

  “Things change, I guess.”

  “You can say that again.” He glanced away, uncertain. “I see your mom sometimes around town. She said you got married.”

  “Ten years ago now.”

  He nodded. “Long time.”

  “Seems like my thirties are just flying by.”

  “It goes quick. Too goddamn quick, you ask me.”

  “For sure.”

  “Last time I saw you I remember you saying you were getting engaged or something.” He scratched his head. “Remember when we had lunch that time?”

  I did. I’d come home briefly to visit my mother and had arranged to meet Boone for lunch. We hadn’t been in each other’s company for a few years and while the get-together was pleasant enough it was also awkward and a bit strained. Our lives had gone in different directions, and through no fault of his own, Boone represented to me a past I wanted to forget, a connection to a time and to events I wanted to put behind me, and I was sure I represented the same to him in many ways. We shared the same secrets, and those secrets haunted us both, then and now.

  I had not seen him since.

  “I’m sorry it’s been so long,” I finally managed. “It’s really good to see you.”

  “You too, man.” He smiled, and this time it was genuine. “Can you believe I’m living in Crazy Wiley’s old place?”

  I hadn’t planned to say anything, but since he mentioned it, I played along. “Last time I saw you, you were still living at the house.”

  “Yeah, well, seven years ago my dad died.”

  Despite my memories of the man and the cruelty he’d shown toward his son, I offered the appropriate condolences.

  “Couple years later my mom got sick and I had to put her in a nursing home. That Alzheimer’s is some horrible shit, man. Horrible shit. She didn’t even know who I was toward the end.” He stared at the floor as if recallin
g a specific episode. A moment later he snapped out of it with a helpless shrug. “They took everything to pay for her care—even her house—can you believe that? Her and my father worked their whole lives. She gets sick before her time and has to go into a nursing home and those bastards took everything they worked all those years for. Me and Jonathan were supposed to get that house. Ended up getting nothing. They put me out in the street so I had to get a place and this was about all I could afford. Jonathan didn’t really give a shit, he’s got his own house and the wife and kids, the whole bit, you know? He’s a teacher too, Gym, though. Figures, right? Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.”

  It was an old joke I’d heard before, but I laughed dutifully.

  “Anyway, my mom died a couple years ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Boone.”

  “Thanks.” He flashed a lonely grin. “Soon as I get this knee strong again I’ll get back to work. Not sure doing what, exactly, but I’ve been thinking about moving. Always wanted to go to California. Heard they got more jobs out there.” After another strained and uncomfortable silence Boone clapped his hands together to signal the next phase of our conversation was to begin. “Hey, you want a drink? I could use a drink.”

  “No thanks. I’m good.”

  He struggled to his feet, went to the kitchen area and retrieved a half-empty bottle of vodka from a cabinet over the sink. When he returned to his chair with the bottle and took a long pull like it was water, I realized that along with all the hard luck he’d also inherited his father’s drinking problem. He held the bottle in his lap with one hand and wiped his mouth with the back of the other. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard about Uncle,” he said. “Couldn’t believe it.”

  “I know the feeling.”