Saying Uncle

by Greg F. Gifune

  “Couldn’t believe he went out that way, not him.”

  I nodded but said nothing.

  “I used to see him now and then around town,” he said, smiling slightly. “He’d always say hi and he’d go, ‘Hey Boone, how about some topless Elvis?’” What began as a laugh became a cough that emanated from deep within his lungs. “He loved it when I did that, remember?”

  “Yeah,” I said, matching his guarded smile with one of my own. “Who could ever forget topless Elvis?”

  “That was some of my best shit.” Boone took another swallow of vodka. His face darkened a bit. “So what are you doing here, man? I mean, I’m not trying to be a dick or nothing, but I haven’t seen you in years, Andy. You didn’t even invite me to your wedding. No phone calls, no letters, no nothing for years. Why now?”

  “I’m sorry I let our friendship slip away, Boone, truly sorry.”

  “Like you said, things change, right?”

  “I thought we should talk, considering the past.”

  “What difference does it make all these years later? Besides, Uncle’s dead.”

  Against my better judgment I held my hand out for the bottle. He pushed it into my palm and I took a quick gulp. The liquor spread through me like a fast moving virus, or perhaps an antidote. “I want you to go somewhere with me.”

  * * *

  My mother and Angela were still asleep when I left the house that morning. Angela was in bed cuddled up with her stuffed animals and oblivious to my presence even when I leaned over and gently kissed her cheek. My mother’s bedroom was empty, but I found her downstairs in the den, asleep in a chair. Although her chest rose and fell with the steady rhythm of sleep her features retained a look of tension and discomfort—torment—she could not escape even in a world of dreams.

  I’d read the newspaper article and seen the news reports on television the evening prior, and so had they. These things rarely happened in Warden, yet my mother and Angela had pretended to be completely unaffected by what we all knew to be the truth. They were able to turn their backs on it like zombies, to say nothing and do nothing and pretend we were free of it while so many others in town came together to help.

  While they slept I rode my bike to Uncle’s apartment on Bay Street, a touristy part of town located near the largest beach in Warden. He lived above a bicycle shop directly across from the water that was sandwiched between a bakery and a small bookstore. Within hours the area would be mobbed with summer residents and tourists on their way to Cape Cod, but for now the neighborhood was still awakening, still suspended in serene early-morning moments, and despite its underlying commercial intent, the tranquility allowed an enchanted facade to cloak all that slept just beneath this fanciful exterior. Outsiders saw the innocence of a storybook village, but like a carny in the know, I saw the mercenary, dispassionate nature behind its colorful mask, thereby dismissing all else.

  I leaned my bike against a streetlight then climbed the staircase on the side of the building.

  Uncle answered my knock on his door quickly, standing just inside the entrance in a pair of boxers, his usually perfect hair mussed and looking like it needed a good washing. “Andy,” he said, surprised to see me, “what are you doing here? Is everything all right?”

  “No,” I answered. “Nothing’s all right.”

  He looked me over then stepped back so I could enter.

  With a deep breath I walked into a modest studio apartment. But for a handful of spent beer bottles and an overflowing ashtray on a coffee table, it was neat and clean. His bed was unmade, as he had just rolled out of it, and the window shades were drawn, casting the room in near darkness. Although he had lived there for years the apartment had an institutional, impersonal aura I had always found peculiar. Despite his fancy clothes, expensive jewelry and flashy car, Uncle had few meaningful personal possessions, and I realized years later his apartment was typical of many professional, single, lifelong criminals. It was set up and maintained with the bare essentials so that if he had to abandon it he could do so at any moment without being burdened by a living space that might in any way impede his departure. Much like him during times of intense thought or serious trouble, there was something inherently bleak about it, bleak and solitary and sad.

  Uncle scratched his bare chest and switched on a small lamp. On a nightstand beside the bed was a handgun we both pretended not to see. “So what’s the problem?”

  “Michael Ring’s missing. He’s been gone for a few days. It’s all over the news. Teenage boy vanishes. They’ve got search parties all over town. They’re looking up in the woods and along the beaches. They even called the National Guard to check the ocean in case he went swimming and drowned.” I stood glaring at him, yet I was the one who felt like a corpse twisting in the wind. I wanted so fiercely to be a man, not the kind he envisioned but enough of one to control myself, and was already failing miserably. “They’re not going to find him are they?”

  “Couldn’t tell ya,” he said.

  “They’re not going to find him because he’s dead.”

  Uncle shrugged. “Never know. It’s a dangerous world out there, lots of things can happen to a person. Even if he is dead, the world’s not gonna stop spinning just because that piece of shit stepped off, Andy. Look, any fifteen-year-old who could attack a kid like Angie isn’t worth worrying about, all right? There’s no telling how many other girls he did that to, or how many he would’ve done it to down the road.” Something in his eyes shifted, like he was remembering an old joke. “Maybe something happened to him, maybe not. Who knows? But if he’s dead, so what? Who gives a shit? We know he did a lot of bad things, right? Maybe he pissed off the wrong guy.”

  I nodded, mostly as a means of clearing my head. “Are you the wrong guy?”

  He sat on the edge of his bed. “What do you want from me, Andy?”

  “The truth.”

  “The truth.” He chuckled. “Everybody always wants the truth. Problem is nobody ever knows what the hell to do with it once they get it.”

  What I said in response to his dismissive laughter was not a question, and he knew it.

  “You did it, didn’t you.”

  11

  Boone and I drove across town in silence, the memories gliding past distorted through a windshield smudged with ice and snow. I was certain he had searched his mind for things to say, as had I—be it small talk or things more relevant—but not a word passed between us until I pulled into the entrance to Smyth Park. I heard him shift in his seat then, saw his pudgy hands reach forward to grasp the dashboard.

  “Haven’t been here in a long time,” he muttered.

  I pulled over to the side of the dirt road, dropped the car into Park and switched off the wipers. The remainder of the pitted road leading into the park lay before us, the trees that lined either side weighted down with snow, the branches hanging to form a tunnel of white. Again, we sat quietly for a time. Watching. Thinking.

  Snow fell against the windshield, slowly covered it, sealing us off.

  “You never liked it here,” I said.

  “No.” He sighed heavily. “Even all these years later it just sits here. While back some developer tried to buy it but the town blocked it. They want the park to stay the same: whole lot of nothing. History and all that.”

  History. They had no idea.

  The last time we’d met here the things I told him—good, bad or indifferent—had shackled us together. Now I hoped they might finally set us free.

  “What the hell we doing here, man?”

  The car began to feel like a tomb. “Come on.” I pushed open the door and was greeted by a burst of snow and a cold gust of air.

  Boone pinched his face into a dramatic frown but followed me anyway.

  The snow here was lighter, fluffier than the wet stuff that had been falling earlier, and but for the occasional rumble of a car along the street behind us, the quiet remained, the utter stillness. When we shuffled through the snow and moved into th
e stark passageway of weighted trees, Boone’s breathing became labored, and the spell was broken. Still, it was like a living painting here, a space we had crossed into impossibly, two sentient creatures trekking into a beautiful but lifeless vista brushed onto canvas.

  The frigid air stung my eyes, reminded me this was all real, and as we ventured into the beginnings of the park I rubbed them and focused on the open field. Boone was right. Nothing much had changed. I stuffed my hands deep into my coat pockets and hunched my shoulders up against the cold. Boone, in an inexpensive parka, looked like he was slowly freezing to death. His cheeks were bright red and his nose was running, and every few seconds he wiped it clean with the back of his sleeve then looked at me for some explanation as to what we were doing out there.

  I took a few steps deeper into the park and scanned a line of trees along an incline roughly forty yards in the distance. “After the summer when everything happened,” I said, my voice hollow and oddly foreign, “when Uncle ended up going to prison for that bank robbery and—”

  “I remember,” he said before I could finish the thought.

  “We were almost sixteen by then. Things were changing.”

  “For you. Not so much for me.”

  I nodded through plumes of breath. “That year and a half or so to graduation is still a blur to me.”

  “You got caught up with that chick.”

  “Carrie Weller.”

  “Yeah, Carrie Weller. She still lives in town. She’s a nurse’s aid. Divorced, couple kids. I never liked her.”

  “I never liked her much either.” I glanced at him and we both suppressed smiles. I hadn’t thought about Carrie Weller in years. My first serious girlfriend, I remembered her mostly in severe montage; making out, having barely competent sex, arguing over the most ridiculously mundane things imaginable—welcome to the wonderful world of teenage romance. Time had surely weakened the power of my emotions since then, as things seldom felt that intense anymore, like they had in the days when every word and thought and action was so concentrated and passionate that it seemed we might physically implode at any moment. “Thank God it didn’t last.”

  “Most things don’t,” Boone said softly.

  “The things that matter do. Sometimes they falter or go off track a while, but they find their way back.”

  He shrugged awkwardly. “Hey those were—they were hard times, it’s—I knew you were struggling with a lot of stuff.”

  “All I could think about was getting the hell out of this town. That’s why I went to college in Rhode Island. Wasn’t too far but far enough. Hell, anything outside these borders was far enough. Besides, I had to rely mostly on financial aid money, and you can’t be too choosy when you’re going on someone else’s dime.”

  “At least you got to go.”

  “But I became somebody else, Boone.” I walked a few steps away, kicked lazily at the snow. “All I did was drink and party and get into fights. Christ, I’d fight at the drop of a hat—me—always hated that crap and there I was throwing with anybody who looked at me funny or said anything I could even remotely construe as a challenge.”

  “Maybe you were trying to prove something.”

  “That’s exactly what I was doing. I did it all through college and even a few years after that. It’s why it took me so long to finally land a decent job. Not much call for a schoolteacher who spends his off-time brawling in bars.” I shook my head. “I had so much anger, most of it directed at myself, ironically. I guess I wanted to convince myself and anyone else who happened to be within arm’s reach that I wasn’t a coward.”

  I could hear Boone shifting about to my side but he said nothing.

  “It all changed—I changed—when I met Martha. She saved my life, really, made me realize that who I was trying so hard to be wasn’t the real me. The real me was the one I’d lost before, the one I’d been before I even knew her, the one I’d buried back here in Warden with all those memories and nightmares. She helped me get myself back, Boone. She made me whole again.”

  “You’re a lucky guy.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I am.”

  “Me, I mostly whack it to porn.” He offered a self-depreciating smirk. “Ain’t life grand?”

  Years before I would have laughed, but I could no longer be so sure of us. Rather, I reached out and grasped his shoulder, gave it a fond squeeze then dropped my hand back to my side as the natural quiet closed in on us again. “I know back then—before I went to college, when everything happened—I know you always thought I should’ve reacted differently, that—”

  “Andy, for crying out loud, you’re talking twenty years ago. We were kids.”

  “I wanted to feel anger toward Michael Ring.” I nearly choked on the words. I hadn’t uttered his name in years, and seemed to realize this only then. “I wanted to feel that kind of violent rage everyone else had, believe me I did—and eventually I did feel it—but in the beginning I just felt so goddamn sad. All I could feel was sorrow, Boone. This crippling sorrow for Angela and for all of us, and this confusion like I was in a dream and not the real world, where no one—even myself—was who or what I thought they were.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself on my account, man.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t solely for him, that it was as much about me as anyone else. I wanted this to cleanse us, to release us both. The wind picked up a bit, cut right through us and continued on across the open field to the forest beyond.

  “Eventually that sorrow turned to hatred,” I said. “I fantasized about killing the sonofabitch myself. I killed him in my mind a thousand times. But by then he was already dead, and in some ways we’d all died right along with him.”

  “I never felt good about what happened,” Boone said a moment later. “I had to carry this around too, remember? But I figure Michael Ring got what was coming to him. He was a piece of shit, Andy, and right or wrong he got what he fucking deserved.”

  “But once that happened, once that’s the way it went then it wasn’t about him anymore,” I said. “It was about us.”

  “See, that’s always been your problem, Andy. You think too goddamn much. You’re like a machine that way, you always were. The rest of us human beings have emotions too, and we react. We do stuff we shouldn’t do, we say things we shouldn’t say. We screw up. We do things wrong. We do things right. And sometimes—most of the time—the things we do aren’t either one but something in between.”

  “I’m no different than anyone else and never pretended to be,” I snapped. “Why is it always about me being holier than thou? You always accused me of that and that’s never how I really felt. It was never my intention to come off that way.”

  “You ever listen to yourself?” Boone shook his head; his breath forming a cloudy ring about him like the motion had dislodged it from within him just then. “It was never my intention to come off that way. Who the hell talks like that besides you? Everything you do, everything you say is so thought out and considered from every possible angle. But in all that thinking you’re the one who misses the point, Andy. You, not anybody else.”

  “The things Uncle did hurt us all, Boone. It made us all the same.”

  “You want to think that? Fine. But I live in the real world, Andy, and in the real world things aren’t pretty and they aren’t perfect and sometimes people let you down. Did you ever stop to think about it from his side? I doubt it. You want to play the martyr, go ahead. It’s twenty years ago, who cares?” Boone glared at me. “I bet the whole pacifist thing makes for good conversation at your little academic cocktail parties, but in the real world where the rest of us live, it don’t wash. You know what happened in the real world? They shot Gandhi. They blew Martin Luther King away. They nailed Jesus to a cross. That’s what they did in the real world.”

  “Who are ‘they’, Boone?”

  “What am I supposed to say? People like me? Is that it?”

  “Why am I the bad guy here?” />
  “You’re not. You weren’t then and you aren’t now. Michael Ring, he was the bad guy, Andy. Not you. And not Uncle.” For an instant he became the same young boy who had referred to him as Uncle the same as Angela and I had, a boy who had worshiped Uncle because he had been everything he’d wanted and needed so desperately in his own father but could never find there. But the young Boone slipped away and the new one stood before me in the cold, shivering while shifting his weight from his bad leg to the good. “I’m gonna ask you one more time, Andy. What are we doing out here?”

  I turned to the incline at the edge of the park and the row of trees silently staring back at us. Without answering I moved in their direction.

  Within moments we were standing amidst the trees, peering into the beginnings of the surrounding forest. A small building sat perhaps thirty yards in, old and decayed. It had been there since the 1940s, when Smyth Park had employed a full-time caretaker, but had been empty and unattended for decades. A squat but two-story box-like structure, its brown shingles had rotted and its roof had worn. The windows were barely intact; the glass that had filled the multiple squares in each mostly distant memories now. Miraculously it managed a guise not without hope however, and appeared still structurally sound for the most part, an odd little house alone in a forest clearing, woefully awaiting the return of the man who had lived there so long ago. Or perhaps it was awaiting something else, something similar to what I had been waiting for all these years.

  “The old caretaker’s place,” I said softly, so as not to disturb the spirits that surely slept here.

  Boone struggled through the deep snow until he was alongside me. Again out of breath, he took a moment to compose himself then said, “We came out here so you could show me this?” His voice slipped between trees hundreds of years old, trees blanketed in snow and shrouded like icy ancient brides behind thick white veils. The sound escaped the clearing somewhere on the far side of the weathered building, absorbed into the past with all else that had passed through before it.