Saying Uncle

by Greg F. Gifune

  “Take Dolores and Reggie, for instance,” he continued a moment later. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Never been a big book guy, but lately I’ve been reading some books about the body—bones and shit, mostly. And I got this crowbar. Heavy bastard. I’ve had it for a while now. Keep it under my bed. I tried talking myself out of it but I know it just is what it is. I need to do what I need to do. It ain’t my fault my wife and my best friend decided to fuck up my life and theirs. That’s their fault, am I right? So whatever happens, they brought it on themselves the way I see it.” He smiled, took another swallow of vodka. The darkness in his eyes had vanished, replaced by a disturbing sparkle. “I’m going to take care of Dolores first. Then Reggie. I was gonna whack them in their legs, right? Figured that’d be best. But then I got to reading this book, and I decided I’m gonna hit them right here.” He pointed to his upper chest. “Break their collar bones. Very painful and a bitch to heal, that’s what the book says. So I figure I’ll break their fucking collarbones. What are they gonna do to me, Andy? Put me in jail?” He laughed suddenly. “Probably. Do I care? No. Like I give a shit. Do I think it’s right? Is it right to put me in jail for defending my fucking life, my sanity, my honor, my manhood? Is it? I don’t know. I say no, but who the hell listens to me?”

  “I’m listening to you,” I said quietly.

  He nodded then finished his drink. “You’re a good man.”

  I looked down the bar. The bartender had been off the phone for a while and had resumed his conversation with the old man. I turned back to Henry. “I know you’re in a lot of pain,” I said carefully, “but don’t throw your life away. It’s not worth it.”

  Henry grinned like an amused child. “What is then? Tell me that. Anything? Anything worth it?”

  Uncle’s smiling eyes blinked through my mind. “I don’t know, I—”

  “You believe in fate, Andy?”

  The way I felt at that moment I wasn’t sure I believed in much of anything anymore.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  Before I could answer the door opened and a gust of freezing air shot through the bar. A man bundled in a coat, hat and gloves stood in the doorway with a scowl. He waved to the bartender, who then nodded and said to Henry, “Your cab’s here, chief.”

  “Got to go, my man.” Henry looked at me and shrugged helplessly, that silly drunken grin still plastered on his face attempting to hide what really lived there. He tossed some money on the bar, put a hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Got a herd to tend to,” he said with a wink.

  The bartender came around the counter, helped Henry on with a long coat then walked him over to the cabbie. Once they had left he sauntered back to the bar, laughing lightly. “Don’t worry about any of that,” he said to me. “Henry’s got problems.” He pointed to his ear and made a circular motion in the air next to it.

  The old man at the end of the bar let out a cackle of a laugh but said nothing.

  “That stuff he told you about his wife and his best friend did happen,” the bartender said. “But it was eight years ago. He broke down when it happened, lost his job and ended up on disability for his emotional problems. He lives in a room off of Main Street and comes in here every day, drinks himself silly and tells the same story to anybody who’ll listen. Same one. Every day. I’ve heard it hundreds of times. When he’s done and I figure he’s had enough to drink I call him a cab and he goes back to his room and sleeps it off. The next day, rain or shine, snow or sleet, back he comes to do it all over again.” The bartender cleaned up the mess Henry had left behind then wiped the counter down with his rag. “So, like I say, don’t worry about it.” He chuckled a bit harder. “But he gets you thinking, doesn’t he? Crazy bastard.”

  “He’s like the Devil,” the old man said through crow-like laughter, pointing a crooked finger at me from the far end of the bar. “Don’t listen to him, he just might have a point.”

  I forced a smile, hopped down off the stool and slipped into the phone booth in the corner. I flipped through the phonebook but there was no listing for the name I was searching for so I dropped a quarter in the phone and tried Information. The number came up as unlisted.

  I hung up, returned to the bar and ordered one more drink. When the bartender put it in front of me I asked, “Do you know a guy named Joey Peluso, by any chance?”

  He smiled. “I don’t know anybody, OK, pal?”

  “Local guy,” I said. “Lives in town. You know him?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  I dug out my wallet, paid for the drinks I’d ordered. I had a twenty and a fifty left. “Do you know him or not?”

  He leaned close, forearms on the bar between us. “I know of him. Don’t know him personally or anything.”

  “You know where he lives?” I dropped the twenty on the counter, slid it over to him.

  “You know where South Street meets Covington Avenue?”

  I did. I had grown up on South Street, and at the top of the road where it met Covington you could see our house and front lawn. “Yeah.”

  “OK, if you go straight you’ll stay on South Street, so don’t do that. What you want to do instead is turn left onto Covington. You follow that for about half a mile and you’ll run into an old garage. Ye Ole Yankee Body Work. Joey Peluso’s father owned it. It’s closed up now, the old man died a couple months ago, but the sign’s still up last time I went by. Anyway, Joey lives in the house, last I knew. Real piece of work, that one.”

  I nodded and he scooped up the twenty.

  “Another drink?” he asked cheerfully.

  But I was already on my way out the door.

  * * *

  Warden was no longer sleeping by the time I left Uncle’s apartment that morning. It had come awake just as I’d once again begun to drown in my own thoughts and fears. I descended the steps, hopped on my bicycle and rode away with no idea where I was headed. Away. Just, away. The air was thick and my vision blurred, like a dreamscape covered in soupy fog roiling in off the ocean.

  The next memory I have of that morning was finding myself standing before the small church we had attended as a family before my father left. Saint Anne’s. The bike still balanced between my legs, I dropped the kickstand and climbed off, mesmerized by the face of the church: the large white doors, stained glass on either side, the beautifully manicured shrubbery leading to the entrance and the life-size porcelain-white statue of Mary holding the baby Jesus in her arms, gazing down on Him adoringly.

  I walked slowly along the path to the entrance, unsure if it was all right for me to be there. We had stopped going to church regularly when I was still quite young, so my memories of this place were vague at best. And yet, I felt compelled to go inside and to see for myself what was really waiting there.

  The doors opened into a small, narrow church with a high ceiling. The altar at the rear of the church was covered in a white cloth, and two tall candles in ornate copper holders were positioned on either side, in front. The windows that ran along the sidewalls were stained glass, multicolored faces of saints and saviors looking down upon me with reserved expressions and loving eyes. It smelled clean here, like someone had recently washed everything down with a heady cleaner of some kind, and I noticed how the wooden pews were polished to the point of reflecting what little light was seeping through the windows. To my left was the confessional box, dark curtains pulled closed over one side, a closed door covering the other. The light that signaled a priest was inside hearing someone’s confession was off.

  Stepping further into the aisle, I selected a pew, genuflected before the altar as I’d been taught as a child, and slipped onto the bench. It was cool against my legs and felt foreign, not like normal furniture but somehow more removed, less comfortable.

  Behind the altar, on the back wall, an enormous crucifix hung, the dead figure of Christ hanging there, head ringed in thorns and face bathed in blood, hands and feet nailed to the cross, legs broken and the wound in his side eviden
t even in dim light. Boundless violence. Even here.

  I looked away from the carnage to the pews ahead; saw memories of my father sitting nearby in his typical wrinkled suit, a younger version of myself next to him while the priest conducted Mass. My mother, also younger, happy and alive, sat next to him, Angela—just a toddler—in her arms. I tried to see my father’s face but couldn’t quite make it out.

  “Why did Daddy leave?” I had once asked my mother.

  She smiled through tears, touched the side of my face like she so often did and looked at me adoringly, like I had asked why the sky was blue. To her, it was a question as simplistic and naïve as that, and one she never answered.

  Sitting in the silence of that church, I remembered my parents’ bedroom and how it had been before my father left. For Angela and me it was a sacred place where we only dared venture if invited, and where we behaved differently than we did in the rest of the house. This was a place of mystery, unanswered questions and things that were forever just beyond our reach. It never looked quite as lived in as the other rooms in the house, like the bureaus and dressing table, the immaculately made bed and perfectly organized closets could have been display pieces in the front window of a furniture store. Lifeless furnishings that seemed posed, as if only there for the benefit of others who might happen to see them.

  I remembered my father standing before a mirror in that bedroom, the mirror over my mother’s bureau because his did not have one. I remember him tying a skinny black tie and staring at himself in the mirror. I remember how haggard his face looked; the dark rings beneath his eyes, the shadow of his heavy beard and how evident it was even if he’d only shaved moments before. I remembered standing in the doorway watching him, wondering what he was thinking about and why he so seldom spoke to me. Even then I had no idea who this man was, or what he wanted. But I knew it wasn’t me, it wasn’t us. It wasn’t this.

  I missed him without knowing quite why.

  Later, Ed Kelleher stood in front of that same bureau, arrogant and large and clumsy, rough and dirty hands grasping a small comb he used to perk up his brush-cut hair each morning, barking at my mother in his gruff and disagreeable voice, and when I would watch him from the doorway he’d react as if I were challenging him somehow, crossing into his territory, pissing on his turf like some vagrant alley cat come to fight for his tiny corner of the world. Only it wasn’t his. It was mine. It was Angela’s. It was my mother’s. But that was something neither he nor I had fully understood until the day he returned from the hospital with a friend of his. He’d stayed in the car, slumped in the passenger seat, head looking down at the floor, dark sunglasses covering his eyes. I remembered his face that day, and the wooden crutches perched behind the front seat, poking out behind the headrest like errant bones. I remembered standing on the steps holding Angela’s hand as his friend retrieved Ed’s things from the house, and how my mother helped, bustling about awkwardly and trying to be busy rather than focused on the man outside in the car. A man too frightened to look at any of us anymore. A man broken by the same violence he used to try to break us, a man battered and bruised from being beaten and thrown down a flight of stairs, while somewhere, Uncle sat having a drink or smoking a cigarette, mingling with whoever it was he mingled with, smiling the smile of a conqueror, of an alpha male having protected the pack, and laughing as if all were right with the world.

  Angela, still only five at the time, raised a hand to wave to him, but I caught her by the wrist and gently placed her hand back at her side. She looked up at me innocently. “It’s OK,” I told her. “Just don’t wave goodbye.”

  “‘Cause he spanked me?” she asked in a whisper.

  I nodded; unable to take my eyes from the man slumped in that car.

  Those visions faded, replaced by Angela, a bit older now, running through the woods behind our house, a look of terror and confusion on her tiny face, tears streaming and her mouth open as if torn by angry hands and set that way as she screamed silently in my mind. And from the shadows behind her, Michael Ring appeared, gaining on her, closer and closer…catching her…tackling her…dragging her down into the dirt.

  Tears filled my eyes. “Where were you?” I asked the man on the cross.

  Uncle beating Michael Ring mercilessly, bloodying him, executing him, butchering him in a sea of spraying blood and gore filled my senses.

  “Are you here?”

  I didn’t realize until that moment that I had grabbed hold of the back of the pew in front of me, my grip so strong that my knuckles had turned white.

  “Where are you?” My voice echoed through the open space, but it sounded like someone else.

  And maybe it was.

  14

  It had gotten even colder, but it didn’t faze me, my mind was a million miles away. I drove from the bar with three drinks under my belt and headed across town, toward South Street and Covington Avenue and Joey Peluso, the man who had murdered my uncle.

  Louise spoke to me from the darkness. “Peluso?…Are you out of your mind? You think you can show up on his doorstep and start asking questions like you’re asking me? …These kind of people, they’ll kill you, understand?”

  I imagined what he looked like. Big. He’d be big. Muscular and wild-eyed, the kind of man you knew was dangerous the moment he walked into a room. A professional thief with a violent streak, not afraid to kill, maybe even the type who enjoyed it, got off on it, felt like a man when he was hurting and maiming other human beings.

  The tire iron from my trunk was now on the seat next to me, ice cold and black and deadly, playing these games with me…