Saying Uncle

by Greg F. Gifune

  * * *

  I pull up in front of the body shop. It’s closed and dark, an old sign, pitted and dirty perched on the roof. I shut the engine off and then the headlights. The car silently coasts closer. A single light on at the far end where the body shop gives way to the residential part of the building catches my attention.

  Before I know it I’m out of the car, my feet crunching the rock hard snow as I cross the yard to the front door. Before I reach it a shadow moves by the window, peeks out at me. Joey Peluso is the kind of man you don’t sneak up on. He’s the kind of man who always sits in a restaurant or bar facing the door, so he can see who may or may not be coming. He’s the kind of man who looks over his shoulder. He has his entire life, and will continue to do so until the day he dies. Until the night he dies. Tonight.

  I hesitate when I see the shadow in the window, but when it moves away I continue to the door, the tire iron held down by my leg and covered by my long coat. With my free hand I give the door a few solid knocks.

  “Who is it?” a deep voice asks from behind the door.

  “Just passing through town,” I say. “Had a little fender bender, wanted to get it fixed before I head out tomorrow. I saw your sign and—”

  “We’re closed.”

  “I’ll pay top dollar, I really need this fixed. I’ve got cash.”

  The locks disengage, as I knew they would, and the door opens slowly, cautiously. Peluso is as big as I imagined, more than six feet and over two hundred pounds. He wears a sweatshirt with no sleeves, a pair of jeans and boots. He’s not a young man but his build is still powerful and sculpted. His arms are massive and covered in thick veins and a few tattoos. His hair is buzzed short, and he has not shaved in a few days. He looks me over without subtlety, then steps closer. “You deaf? We’re out of business. Couldn’t fix your car even if I wanted to.”

  His eyes are bloodshot and I can smell liquor on him. I wonder if he can also smell it on me, or if he can sense my fear or hear my heart thudding against my chest. I wonder if he looked this way the night he shot Uncle in the back of the head, spraying his brains out through the hole in his forehead all over the windshield. I wonder if he shot Uncle first or the other man—Ronnie Garrett. Were they laughing and talking when he shot them? Was Uncle afraid? Did he have time to feel pain or fear or was he simply alive one moment and dead the next?

  “You sure you can’t just take a look at it real quick?” I say stupidly, and I know this time he has sensed the tremble in my voice.

  He glances beyond me, as if to be certain I’m alone then returns his attention to me. “You some kind of fucking retard, buddy? You hear a word I just said?”

  I feel myself smile. The tire iron is so cold in my hand, like a dead frozen limb.

  Peluso frowns, raises his head and subtly adjusts his stance. “Who are you?”

  “Andrew,” I say softly. “Andrew DeMarco.”

  As my last name registers, his frown deepens, and he steps forward, so close now I can feel his breath as it hits my face, hot and sour. “DeMarco?”

  My mind screams at me, pleads with me to run, to turn and run and get as far away from all this as I can. But I stand as still as a man set in cement, eyes locked on his. “I’m Paulie’s nephew.”

  He puts his hands on his hips and his suspicion slips away, replaced by what appears to be amusement. “Paulie’s nephew? Didn’t know he had one.”

  I nod, blink rapidly, sweating despite the cold.

  “Real shame about your uncle,” he says with a smirk. “We were tight a long time.”

  I say nothing.

  “So you didn’t come here about no car then.” His eyes turn darker than before, black veils descending behind bloodshot whites. “What the fuck you want?”

  I am barely cognizant of movement, like I’ve left my body for some other place, the car maybe, and am sitting there calmly and safely, watching the two of us in that doorway as in one fluid motion I pull my arm out from beneath my coat, swing the tire iron high over my head and smash it down onto the top of Joey Peluso’s skull. I do it twice, with more speed than I thought I had. But Peluso doesn’t move. He doesn’t fall or try to avoid the blows or even make a sound. He simply stares at me, befuddled, like I’ve just told a joke he doesn’t quite understand. We stand there locked in each other’s stares for what seems forever, until I notice a small trickle of dark blood—so dark it’s nearly black—glide slowly from his hairline down across his face.

  It leaks slowly at first, like maple syrup, across his forehead, to the bridge of his nose, along the corners of his mouth and onto his chin. I watch as the blood gradually flows faster and stronger, and it is then that Peluso seems to notice it as well. But still, he doesn’t move. He just stares at me for a moment longer, then without a word, he collapses, falls straight down to the floor like he’d been dropped from a platform overhead. His body makes a strange thudding sound as it collides with the floor.

  I look down at him. His eyes are open, but they no longer see anything. His chest rises and falls every few seconds, but the intervals are longer each time. He is dying slowly, the blood from his head forming a growing puddle that fans out around him like a satanic halo. He makes a sudden wheezing noise, and his back arches, his legs shooting straight out as if he’s been hit with an electric shock.

  I notice the puddle of blood has nearly reached my feet. I step back a bit to avoid it, watch as it runs like a tiny river across the doorstep, chasing me into the snow and ice outside.

  Peluso’s body goes limp again, and I hear a hard gust of breath escape him in a gurgling rush. He lay still then, the flowing blood the only thing moving.

  Leaned against my car, arms folded, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, I see Uncle watching me. He has no discernable expression, neither acceptance nor disapproval. Nothing. Only a blank dead stare mixed with blood and brain sprinkled across his face, a stare that means everything…and nothing at all.

  …I pulled over to the side of the road, my head spinning. The tire iron was still on the seat next to me. Stained neither with blood nor bits of skull, it was as clean and new as it had been when I’d removed it from the trunk only moments earlier. Parked on a side street near the neighborhood where I’d grown up, I drew several deep breaths until my dark fantasy faded.

  I’d nearly gone through with it, was only a few blocks from Covington Avenue and the old body shop that surely resided there. Ignoring my shaking hands, I dropped the car into Drive and turned around.

  I knew now where I needed to go.

  Martha sits on the far edge of the bed, knees drawn close to her body, her chin resting atop them, arms hugging her shins. Motionless, contemplative, and swathed in shadow, she looks like a living sculpture, a fusion of supple flesh and deftly carved wood.

  Her hair hangs forward, partially shielding her face Veronica Lake style, so that only one of her eyes is visible. At first glance she appears much younger than she actually is. The skin on her face is soft, taut and clear, and always has been. She claims the years of applying exotic moisturizers, creams and lotions are responsible, but I think it’s simply a trait given her by higher powers, the way some receive striking violet eyes, gorgeous smiles or natural, effortless bodies that appear to have been sculpted from marble.

  She scoops these creams from jars with her fingers, the way a bear cub scoops honey from a pot, then applies them with a tender efficiency I wish I could master in some way too, a natural poise and elegance that often leaves me feeling like an oaf stomping alongside a ballerina.

  Although she is only a few feet from me, she seems impossibly far away.

  I stepped from the car and moved cautiously across the street to the church. It had become so cold it was difficult to breathe, but I stood at the steps for a while just watching the doors and stained glass. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was there, as I hadn’t set foot in a church since the morning I’d sat in this same one all those years before, but I climbed the stairs and tried the door anyw
ay, surprised to find it unlocked.

  The interior was frozen in time, nothing out of place or changed since I’d last been there as a teenager.

  As the door closed behind me I noticed a woman in a bandana near the altar. She had a rag in one hand and a spray bottle in the other, and though the church was nearly dark, I saw her smile at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “is it all right for me to be here?”

  “Of course.” She gave a slow nod and motioned to the pews. “I have to lock up when I’m finished, but I’ll be here another half hour or so.”

  “Thank you.”

  As the woman resumed her cleaning duties I slid into the last pew, the one closest to the door, and watched the altar a while. The same enormous crucifix hung on the wall behind it, beauty and horror both. Life itself.

  It’s raining. I watch it sluice along the windows overlooking our backyard, slinking over the glass like a liquid serpent blurring the trees, the birdbath, the picnic table and forest beyond. It has been raining for days, but I don’t mind. I love rain. I find it peaceful and cleansing, something that reminds me I’m alive on Earth.

  Martha and I have spent the day inside, but later we’ll go for a walk in the rain, and she’ll tell me about her day, her voice barely audible over the thud of raindrops on her umbrella. Until then, we huddle indoors, quiet for a long while now, listening to our thoughts and the slow steady rhythm of the rain.

  I turn from the window, watch her there on our bed, and when she notices my stare she raises her head slightly and blinks, awakened from daydreams. Her eyes drop from my face to the drink in my hand. “Why do you drink on quiet days like this?” she asks.

  “To forget,” I tell her. “Why do you?”

  “To remember.” She pats the bed next to her as if summoning a child or a dog. “Come here,” she whispers.

  And I do.

  There is no quiet quite like the quiet of an empty church. I’d forgotten how profound that kind of silence could be, and opened myself to it, let it wash over me. Even with the woman wiping down nearby pews, I remained focused on the altar and the sculpture of Christ hanging behind it, remembering how when I was a child this had all seemed so real to me—alive and vibrant—sacred and holy. All these years later I had allowed God to become something impersonal and elusive, a phantasm obscured in distant mist, and while I still believed, it was in a manner far more mundane, the way I believed in the past, in the Civil War or The Great Depression, in a detached and analytical sense. The magic and mystery life once held had dulled elsewhere, so why not here too? Time had beaten them down, rendered them nearly useless.

  “Nearly,” I said softly, answering my thoughts, maybe my prayers. “But not quite.”

  I lie on my back; my head in Martha’s lap, her hands and arms cradling me like an infant. I can feel the beat of her heart and the gentle caress of her warm breath as it pulses across my forehead and down along my neck. Her hair hangs over me like a curtain, and she smiles ever so slightly, eyes blinking slowly.

  Rain sprays the windows as a delicate wind kicks up then vanishes as quickly as it arrived. Outside the world is clean and wet and trickling and dripping—alive and in motion—but here in our nest we are sheltered from all of it, near but apart, the advantage, or perhaps the price, of safety.

  As her fingers stroke my cheek, I gently take her hand into mine; turn it over slowly to expose her palm and the scars along her wrist, carved there long ago when she was someone else. She allows me to study them, as I sometimes do, but I feel her tremble.

  I look up at her beautiful face, at the scars that live there too, not embedded in her skin but hidden somewhere beneath it, and know she is also looking at mine.

  I run my thumb across the scar tissue on her wrist, jagged like cracks in a desert floor. “I can protect you,” I say.

  “We can protect each other,” she answers.

  As Martha leans closer and we kiss, I feel the kittens stir at the foot of the bed, tiny paws reaching for us as they come awake. And as the rain continues to fall just beyond the walls surrounding us, we slip away to somewhere else. Together.

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d sat in the church, but it seemed quite a while. Though it wasn’t terribly warm there, the chill I’d sustained outside had faded. As the cleaning woman slipped out of sight behind the curtain on the altar, I studied the scars of Christ, the crown of thorns and the blood forever engraved on His face.

  “Did you know?” I asked. “Did you know what you were meant to become?”

  I fought the emotion but it hit me in waves, one after the next, pulling me down like an undertow and holding me there. Memories came to me in mosaic, and I struggled to focus on them as they rushed through me: Henry in some dingy room over a pool hall, spending his nights drunk and clutching a crowbar like a lover, contemplating shattering collarbones with eyes glowing red like a demon. How easily he could be any of us. Boone alone in his apartment, staring at old photographs and thumbing through comic books, waiting for something—anything—to rescue him. Louise, in her vintage dresses and spike heels, smoking cigarettes, touching up her lipstick and sealed away in her glass booth, fighting to remember a brief moment of contentment and a life she never quite had, her lover’s promise of happiness-ever-after always just beyond their reach. My mother, struggling with nightmares all too real, shuffling through the remainder of her life like an old car coasting on fumes, only vaguely aware of her life before, and the potential it held. Uncle, alive and dead and everything in between, slipping between memory and shadow, blood and laughter, smashing and destroying and loving and holding us, sitting in the front seat of a car before vaulting forward, the bullet smashing into him from behind and exploding out through the front of his head. His brains on the dash and windshield, his memories gone in an instant, his eyes turned to black, dead on a coroner’s table. Gone. Martha at home with the kittens, waiting for me, part of her hoping I’d be back, another hoping someone else might walk through that door instead, someone changed, someone healed. Angela, young and innocent, older and wiser, both at once somehow, an angel soaring through flames then hovering just above them, wings singed but carrying her still with grace and strength. And amidst all of it—God and man—life and death, pain and joy exploded as one, drowning me in a dust devil of crimson tears.

  There we sat, the man on the cross and I, as I wept like a child, uncontrollably and without reservation, my body bucking, eyes blurring, nose running and throat constricting, while everything gushed free of me like the blood that it was. For the first time in a very long while, I felt Him there with me, down from that cross, His hands in mine, murdered eyes alive and open, seeing me too.

  I’m sure the woman heard my outburst, but thankfully she remained behind the curtains.

  It wasn’t until I heard the door open and felt the slap of cold air behind me that I even attempted to control myself. Wiping the tears away with the sleeve of my coat, I glanced quickly over my shoulder, certain I was caught in a dream.

  Just inside the door, stood a woman partially hidden in shadow.

  “Angie,” I said, voice breaking.

  15

  She stood a few feet from the pew, unsure of what to make of me at that moment, I’m sure. Though it had been a few years since I’d seen her, bundled in a heavy black coat flecked with muted grays and whites, and a matching scarf and beret, she looked every bit the mature and confident woman she had become long ago. Still, I couldn’t help but see the same little girl standing alongside her as well. Angela had gone on to become a successful prosecutor in Arizona, married with two children, but no matter how many law degrees she obtained or children of her own she had, to me, a part of her would always be the little sister who’d once followed me around like a loyal sidekick, the tiny waif on her bed surrounded by stuffed animals, storybooks and dreams.

  She raised a gloved hand to a wisp of hair curling out from under the beret, the tip of which had come to rest in the corner of her mouth, and combe
d it away. “Are you all right?” she asked gently.

  “Is this a religious vision or is it really you?” I laughed despite the tears in my eyes.

  “It’s really me, I’m afraid.” Angela smiled, her bright teeth cutting the dim light, but I knew that her own tears were not far away. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  I wiped my face clean as best I could and stood up. “Did you just get into town?”

  “I landed at Logan about an hour ago, had a rental car waiting.”

  “Seen Mom yet?”

  “No. I wanted to come here first.” She stepped a bit further up the aisle, the heels of her boots clacking the floor as she looked around the old church, taking it in as if she’d never seen it before. “Just for a few minutes, anyway.”

  I stepped from the pew and opened my arms. She came to me like it had just then occurred to her to do so. I could smell her hairspray and a faint trace of perfume as we hugged, felt her heart beat against mine. She pulled away after a moment, fearful, I think, of lingering too long and allowing emotion to get the better of her.

  “I called the local authorities this afternoon,” she said quickly, assuming an official tone I imagined she used during press conferences. “Figured I’d get a little professional courtesy, but apparently they don’t have many leads. They didn’t seem terribly concerned about Uncle’s murder, frankly.”

  “I know. Not too surprising, though.”

  “No,” she said, her tone softening again. “I guess not.”

  “It’s good to see you.” I tried on a smile but it felt out of place. “How’s Dean?”

  “He’s doing well.”

  “And the kids?”