by Chris Lynch
“It was just Mikie and Frankie, Alex,” I said.
“Ya, and if you can’t straighten out those two cream puffs—”
“You weren’t exactly mopping up the floor with them yourself, Uncle Alcatraz. You know what I think, I think maybe you were never in prison at all.”
It was a joke. See, if I said you had never gone to jail you would see that as a good thing.
His gleaming but scuffed white head dropped into his hands. He stared at the small swatch of ground in between his long, skinny feet, though one of them was mostly shoe. When he spoke it was soft and muffled and cracked so I was forced to lean in to him to hear properly.
“I used to be a lot tougher than that, I swear.”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly, before he cracked open the antidepressants.
“It’s not okay.”
“You did fine.”
“I was a disgrace.”
“You were not a... well, how do you mean?”
“I used to be tough. I wanted to show you how to be tough. I’m messing up everything now.”
“No, no, no, not at all. Listen. All right, I’ll tell you, I sort of have been wanting to do that, stand up to those guys, shut them up for a while. Been waiting a long time, in fact. Like, ten years. If it weren’t for you, I never would have even done it. It was kind of fun, in the end. Kind of a rush. I just might do it again.”
“Now?” He perked up, raised his head, breathed a tiny bit faster.
“Um, maybe later.”
“Oh. Okay then.”
I put my arm around his shoulders. It felt very weird. Even the sight of my hand on another guy’s shoulders looked foreign and peculiar enough to cause me to stare. I couldn’t think of another person I had done that to. Mikie? I don’t know. Probably. Would figure. Why wouldn’t I? But I couldn’t recall, or picture, it. Frankie? I’d probably remember. No, not necessarily. Didn’t matter. I could do it, could have done it already. But it must have been pretty far from natural since here I was sitting bald and bruised on a curb, and fixated on the sight of my arm around a shoulder of a similarly bald and bruised guy. And he was all grown up.
“Thanks,” I said.
He smiled broadly, and no longer looked anything like all grown up.
I got up, stood over him, helped him to his feet. He felt very light, more like opening a door than lifting a whole person.
“I really was a lot tougher before. I swear it.”
“Before what?” I asked.
“Before everything. Before your dad died. Before I did stupid things. Before I spent too much time in prison. Before I came out. Before I got sick, then better, then sick again. Before I lost it.”
“What do you mean, you lost it? What did you lose?”
Ever see that giveaway move when a person is trying to smile but his face is trying to do something else altogether? When it looks like the bottom lip is pushing up smile style, and his top lip is pushing just as hard against it? It is a very uncomfortable thing to see, don’t you think? You’d almost rather see a person break all the way down and scream and babble or something, wouldn’t you?
“Alex? Alex? What did you lose?”
He held that expression for an awfully long time. Held probably wouldn’t even be the right way to put it since he seemed to be held by the face as much as he was holding it. Finally he climbed out of it just enough to speak.
“You want to know. Sure you want to know. You’re a good kid, Elvin. My brother’s kid of course is a good kid. He would like that. Anyway, you have to know what I lost, since I’m kind of asking you to help me get it back.”
There are some times when I think I have regretted every single question I have ever asked.
11 Cool Family
I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED trains. If the Wild West could come back without the wildness but with horses and wagons for traffic that would be the best thing, but since it wasn’t coming back, trains were definitely the next best thing. I liked the idea of getting on a train, slapping it on the rump, and knowing it was going to know the way. That made me relax, that and the rhythm of trains, the sound of the clack of track, and even the kind of forlorn look of most places that trains seemed to go through anymore.
Alex may have felt the same way, because he closed his eyes just as soon as we took our seats and he snoozed or meditated or just ignored me. Whichever, I was okay with it.
Mostly I was content just to stare. I stared for a good bit out the window at whatever passed, and I stared for a good bit more at my uncle slumped directly across from me in the seat facing mine.
He was even older with his eyes closed. He was very lined, and very pale. He was smaller. Smaller than me, smaller than himself. Smaller than yesterday. His head shave was grittier than mine, more like coarse sandpaper, and his two noticeable scrape marks were more alive, more ready to weep.
I caught flashes, in my switching views, of my ghosty self in the window, looking not a million miles away from the old Bishop across from me. It was very much like a time-lapse series of photos, as a long row of scrabby pine trees flew past in the background of my face, seeming to move me too far forward, too fast, in the physical sense and in the rotten time sense.
I got a quick shudder for my troubles.
“Would you like to know anything?” Alex’s voice asked, making me jolt again. It seemed, with his eyes still closed and his speech slow and faraway, like I was dealing with two complete separate characters, and both a little eerie.
Would I like to know anything? If that were an actual honest question about an actual honest choice, I would have to say no, I would not like to know anything. If you could have no knowledge at all about the past or the present or anything not right in front of you, that would be a simpler, happier thing probably. If you could have no knowledge.
But it’s never that clean, is it? No, we have to have mothers and schools and calories behind us that we cannot help but know about, and dead relatives and undead relatives and train conductors coming to ask for tickets anytime now that we can’t duck either. So as long as we have to have at least part knowledge whether we like it or not, it’s probably for the best that we go ahead and take delivery on more information when it is offered to us.
“I would like to know, from an experienced, Bishop point of view, what is the scariest part of growing older?”
That opened his eyes. He sat upright and rubbed weariness from his temples and forehead.
“Well, I sort of meant did you want to know anything about the family, before you meet them. But, fair enough, the question was rather open-ended. The answer is nose hair.”
I waited.
The conductor came and took our tickets. Alex stared after him as if they were going to have to have a duel. Nose hairs at dawn.
“Nose hairs aren’t scary, Alex.”
He smiled. “One day about twenty-five years from now, you’re gonna look close in a mirror and you’re gonna want to cry. Remember your ol’ Uncle Alex that day, okay, boy?”
I shrugged and nodded.
“They are your cousins, Elvin. The kids you’re going to see. Can you appreciate that?”
“I cannot, no.”
“The boy works out, I understand. Like you do.”
“About that. I’ve been thinking, working out kind of hurts. My muscles are still aching me, and that’s supposed to be gone by now, I should think. So I’m thinking instead, rather than work out, maybe I’ll just let myself go.”
“Let yourself go? You mean this is you holding on?”
“Good one.”
“You like it?”
“No.”
Alex laughed like a kindly old man. Then he lifted up his shirt and produced a tall rectangular bottle from the waist of his pants. Tequila. He took a drink. “Here, try it,” he said. “Two buddies on a train with a bottle between them. It’s a special thing. A religious thing, really. Found this before I found Jesus, to be honest. Me and my brother had this thing. Now me and his boy ha
ve it.”
Alex was smiling so hard through that last bit it looked like his old face might tear open. I wanted to reach across and pat his cheeks down smooth to keep them together.
Instead, I reached and took the bottle.
“So now I have to keep up with Jesus and my dad, huh?”
“Big shoes all around, Elvin Bishop. Big, big shoes.”
“Is this stuff going to give you another seizure?”
“Nah. As long as I stay away from the too-sweet stuff, I’m okay.”
From what I understood, tequila did not fall into the category of too-sweet stuff. I leaned back and took my first-ever swallow of Mexico’s famous elixir.
And nearly filled my big, big shoes with big, big puke. I had been well informed on the lack of sweetness.
But I held it mightily together. I gagged a bit, half swallowed, brought it back up again, choked it back down, almost, then, for good.
“Ahhh,” I said loudly, that sound that could stand for refreshment or thank-God-that’s-over.
I had met the world’s worst flavor.
“I know, fine, isn’t it?” Alex asked as he took the bottle back.
He took another sip and then as we talked the bottle passed back between us. He sipped, passed, talked. I held the bottle politely, passed it back, talked. If he noticed I wasn’t drinking, he wasn’t saying.
Not that I needed to drink it. The first sip, fumes, and memories kept me spinning.
“Are they like me in any other ways?” I asked him about his kids.
“Your father was pretty self-absorbed too, you know that. But in a good way. In a funny way, like yourself.”
Did I ask that? Oh, wait, now I see it. I guess I did.
“But the kids, Alex? What are they like?”
He went into that scary, fractured grimace smile. I hated that. He took his drink, then he took mine as I sat with my hand outstretched. I was only doing it to break his pace anyway.
“I don’t really know,” he said.
“How come?” I said.
“Because. Of a combination of stuff. Because of mothers, and courts. And themselves.”
I let it hang, and I almost let him drink, then suddenly some other part of myself, some bossier, more together part of myself, snagged the bottle away.
“That’s why you don’t know your children, Alex? Those are the reasons?”
He was staring out the window now. It was the ugliest stuff; you wouldn’t want to stare at it. Thrown-away tires held his eye like they were talking to him.
“But you like me, don’t you, son?” he said, staring out the window still at the word but, but staring at me by the time he got to son. “You are a fine kid, and you like ol’ Alex, don’t you?”
“I like you, Alex.”
“I mean, I cooked for you, right? Cooked very well. I give you advice. I tell you stuff and show you stuff you ought to know, right? I let you in on Jesus and working out and saunas, but just enough and not too much, right? I fill you in on Thai food and Dead Bishops. I brought you your horn. We jammed, right? Told you not to worry about your penis, too. I fought for you. We fought together, remember that?”
Was it an effort to recall something that happened that same afternoon? Maybe. These were long days, these days.
“I remember, Alex.”
“And when you got your ugly hair off, who was right alongside you to get his own ugly hair off?”
“That was you, Alex.”
“Damn right it was me. We’ve had some times, you and me, haven’t we?”
“Technically it’s probably not plural, since really it’s more like one big, long time we’re having this week... but yes, we’ve had one, all right.”
“We have. And I found out you’re a good kid. Through it all. Even if you’re a little soft—that’ll pass—and a little goofy sometimes, you are a good, good kid. I found out my brother’s boy is a good, good kid. And you found out I was a good man, am I right? That your dad’s brother is a good man, ya?”
It was in the way he had to ask. It was in the fragile high note he hit when he asked that ya?
“It’s all true, Alex. You’re a good man.”
He went quiet, a steely quiet rather than a mopey one, which was good. He looked back out the window.
“Good, then. Very good. If you can like me, and I can be a good man with a good kid like you... then there’s something to me. There is something to me, and that will show. Thank you. Thank you very much, Elvin.”
I always thought having some power, any kind of power, would be an unquestionably good thing. I never had any that I was aware of, always wanted some, even a little taste.
This tasted like it was it. It was not an unquestionably good taste.
“You’re welcome, Uncle Alex.”
“Press the buzzer, Elvin.”
“You press the buzzer. At least they know you.”
“That’s my problem. Press the buzzer and I’ll wait around the side of the house.”
“How ’bout I press the buzzer and we both wait around the side of the house?”
“You know what’s incredible?”
“I can think of a number of things. You mean incredible in the whole world sense of things or incredible as in right here right now in front of this door? Either way, I can think of a number—”
“What is incredible is that I came around in the first place to show you how to behave more like me, and here you’ve got me acting just like you. You are like some kind of powerful force for God knows what, Elvin Bishop.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“That was not a thank-you; it was a confession.”
“Oh right. Then as long as we are here, skulking and cowering, etcetera, are there any other timely confessions you should make regarding this buzzer and why it isn’t being rung?”
The door by then had run out of patience and threw itself open. Perhaps with some assistance.
“What are you doing on my doorstep, you awful, awful man?”
Ah, a turn for the better.
“Hiya, Mags,” Alex said, truly excited to see a person who appeared to want to spit on him.
“Hiya nothing. What are you after?”
“I’m not after anything. I just thought... I just came... just thought it was time and all... this is your nephew, Elvin.”
He said that part, after the stumbling mumbling part, as if it were a momentous, big, warm deal to all parties. He may have misfigured.
“Elvin,” he continued, “this is your aunt, Mags the Lady.”
She paused, just long enough to build up some more steamy bile and to let out a threatening sigh.
“Hello, Elvis. But sorry, you are not related to me. You were sort of related at one time, by marriage, because I was married to this rat here, who was brothers with the other rat—sorry, kid—who was related to you. But since I am no longer related in any way to this rat here—thank God—and the other rat is no longer with us—sorry, and thank God—you and me, Elvis, pal, are released from those particular chains of bondage. Do say hi to your mother for me, though.”
I just kept blinking. My eyeballs were all dried out from the blast of her hostility, and I felt as if my lashes had been melted off, finally completing the morbid transforming of Alex and me into the same atrocity.
“Okay,” I said meekly, “I’ll tell her.”
I turned and started walking away, back toward the train station, away from here and from this and from Alex and toward home, toward my mother and my life and a long sleep to wipe it all away.
“What is that?” came a new voice at my back.
“That, I’m afraid, is your cousin, Elvis.”
I stopped. Curiosity grabbed and turned me, and I returned to the gathering. There, along with Alex and his ex, was a kid. About my height, my age, my coloring. He was a bit thinner than me, but bulky anyway, athletic in a footbally way.
I stopped at my usual spot, on the doorstep, and I stared at him. He stared at me.
“I heard about you,” he said with a hard, flat grin.
“I hadn’t heard about you,” I said.
“What happened to your head?”
“See,” Alex cut in, “look how the boys are getting along already. Peas in a pod.”
Then, behind the boy, a girl appeared. She was probably a year older. She looked nothing like any of us. She was tall and thin, had long, tea-colored hair and melon-colored eyes and cheeks that clearly had bones in them.
“Oh God,” she said, looking back and forth between me and Alex, “would you get them in off the step before somebody sees them.”
“Yes,” Alex piped, “get us off your step before somebody sees us.”
The two kids backed into the house. Mags the Lady didn’t budge. Alex, assuming the best, had started on in, then froze at her resistance.
“Look like crap,” she said to him.
“Feel like crap,” he said brightly.
“Are crap,” the two voices chimed from inside.
Slowly Mags the Lady relented, backing away through the front door, letting us follow along just so, like a lion tamer with a whip and a chair.
It got a lot more comfortable once we got inside. We were not invited to sit down; rather the whole crowd of us stood in the borderland that lay between the kitchen and the living/dining area, the only thing differentiating the two being the different tartan patterns of the carpet tiling.
“Hey,” I said, breaking the tension, “my dog got beat up by a dog wearing a little rain jacket that was almost the exact pattern as your floor. Huh. Small world.”
“Isn’t it, though,” the girl cousin drawled in such a way that I didn’t think she was considering my dog story at all. “And stop staring at me, you.”
I was not staring at her. I mean, if you were going to stare at anybody in this room, it would be her without question, but I wasn’t.
“Ma, the fat guy is staring at me.”
“Swan, don’t be unkind. His name is Elvis.”
Swan. Wow. That was a name. What a name that was. Swan. And it fit, too, because this girl was a Swan if ever there was one. Amazing how people’s names fit who they are.