Skewed

by Anne McAneny

  “Oh, my. What did he do with the old things?”

  “Not sure. Probably put them in storage.”

  “But they must hold rich memories for you, Janie. You’ll find when you’re my age that solid links to the past can be valuable, restorative really.”

  I sighed. “I guess I should find out, especially with Grandpa being sick.” I opened the book to point out the gargoyle, but stopped at an earlier page to show him the tall tree outside the huge living room window. “See this magnolia?”

  He nodded with an encouraging smile.

  “I used to hide there during hide-and-seek. Jack never found me when I used that spot.”

  “My spot was a divot in a giant evergreen where a branch had rotted and fallen. It offered the perfect indentation for a small boy to blend in if he crouched just so.”

  “Things don’t change much between generations, do they?”

  “Not as much as we think.” Hump picked up his envelope to remove the remainder of his photos. “All right, Miss Janie, show me how to scan one of these things.” He pulled out a photo and gasped. “Oh, my! I’m so sorry! I don’t think you meant for me to see this.” He thrust the photo of my prone and bleeding mother at me.

  “Jesus, Hump, sorry,” I said, stashing the photo out of sight. “Thought those were on the far side of the table.”

  He tilted his head at me. “Well, now it makes sense.”

  “What does?”

  “Forgive me, but that was your mother, wasn’t it? As she lay dying, as Faulkner might say.”

  His description gave me the chills and I swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  “You were trying to find an answer.”

  “To what?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “As I told you earlier, my niece let me read her materials on you. Quite the treasure trove.”

  “Just who is this niece you keep referring to?”

  “Jenna, of course. Jenna Abel. She kept her maiden name.”

  My jaw dropped. Yes, Jenna had become a reporter, one who allegedly wasn’t above using her good looks to coax quotes from otherwise reluctant public figures. “So you’re Uncle Hump? I remember you.”

  “It’s a name that sticks with you, that’s for sure, but how do you remember me?”

  “From playing at the Abels’.” The memory of my first and only childhood encounter with Uncle Hump would stay with me until my dying day. “Can’t believe you’re an Abel.” Accusation colored my tone a murky gray.

  “No, I married Abner Abel’s sister, Joann, but she passed five years ago. I’m a Banfield through and through.”

  “That’s a relief,” I said, not giving a hoot if he was a descendant of Cap’n Crunch, as long as he wasn’t an Abel by blood. “How come you only considered staying with Jenna, but not Mr. Abel?”

  “I’m afraid Abner doesn’t speak to me anymore. We had a rather serious falling-out over the care and treatment of my wife when she was dying. I encouraged her to fight with all she had, to try some experimental treatments, and he grew convinced that’s what killed her.”

  “I’m sorry. He can be rather inflexible, can’t he?”

  “He doesn’t even know I’m in town. Jenna’s been helping me out during my medical visits. She’s always been kind to me, probably against her father’s wishes, but she and my wife had been close.” He slapped his hands down on his thighs. “Enough about me. Seems like you’ve got more interesting things on your plate.”

  I studied the old man for a moment. Yes, his war photos were of an eerie variety but they’d also been of a superior quality, and I respected anyone who could draw story and emotion from a single frame. Maybe he could help. “Okay, Uncle Hump, I’m curious. What exactly do you think I was trying to answer with those photos? Because I’ve been a bit stumped myself.”

  Hump looked at me with suddenly shrewd eyes. “You’re looking for an explanation, Janie, an explanation that finally fits. Certainly both the prosecution and the defense came up short in providing a satisfactory story, one that filled all gaps and allayed all doubts.” His voice grew soft and hypnotic. “You’re seeking to understand why your mother died in that living room, why she ran home at all, why she thought she had a real haiku, and if she didn’t, why her boyfriend marched into her house and ended up taking her life. No matter how you dissect the situation, no single explanation really suffices, does it? At least not one that’s been speculated to date. And I can’t help but think that this absence of an actual answer has pecked away at you your entire life on some subconscious level. We both know what the pecking of a persistent notion does to us. It demolishes fragments of our nature before we’ve even had a chance to gain familiarity with the whole. And so we keep searching, searching for the answer that finally fits, finally fills the jagged void the pecking has wrought, with the dream of one day, maybe, putting it all to rest.”

  His tea had grown cold. I had grown warm. My heart had slowed. I felt lulled, pacified. No one had ever expressed it so ominously yet so succinctly.

  “You need to dig, Janie. You need to find the answers, for your own sake.” He touched my arm again. “Let me help.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Janie and Jack Perkins, Age 13

  Annelise Abel turned the hose on young Janie and sprayed so hard that the water shot up her nose. At first Janie giggled to maintain the illusion of fun, but Annelise stepped close enough that Janie thought the metal nozzle itself might be searing her skin.

  “Stop, Annelise! Cut it out.” Janie kept her voice light so the older girl wouldn’t banish her from their yard again. Annelise was one nasty bugger. If she told her siblings to make life hell for the Perkins girl for the entire summer, those devilish minions would take her orders to the nth degree. Three of the minions—Annelise’s sisters, Jenna, Mary, and Maureen—giggled inanely as Annelise taunted Janie with the hose. Meanwhile, two of Annelise’s brothers stayed busy filling water balloons at the spigot behind the house.

  Janie tried to outrun the reach of the hose, but Annelise’s spindly legs could cover a lot of ground. She was an expert at concentrating the stream into razor-sharp lasers, leaving red trails up and down Janie’s back.

  “Don’t be a baby, Janie! It’s just water.”

  Suddenly the sound of the gushing liquid halted and the pain ceased. Janie spun around to see her brother, Jack, behind Annelise, the tube made pinched and powerless by his strong grip.

  Annelise wheeled, ready to verbally thrash whoever had interrupted her fun, but upon seeing handsome Jack Perkins, she lowered her head into her shoulders like a turtle in retreat. “Oh, Jackie, it’s you. When did you get here?”

  “Why don’t you cool it, Annelise?”

  Annelise held the nozzle behind her with both hands, swaying her hips and acting like the most misunderstood gal in all of Caulfield. The pose made her tiny breasts stick out through her cousin’s ratty, hand-me-down bathing suit. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, Jackie. We was just playin’.”

  “Didn’t look like Janie was havin’ much fun.”

  “Course she was. Weren’t you, Janie?” Annelise turned to Janie with viable threats looming in her close-set eyes. The threats spelled weeks of being it in all games and future dares, like putting sausage just beyond the reach of Mr. Clark’s dogs and ringing old ladies’ doorbells—things Janie hated but did anyway to stay in the good graces of her only playmates. A lapse of loyalty here would mean a lonely summer, especially with Jack being so busy and popular.

  “It’s okay, Jack,” Janie said. “You can let go.” Her body shivered at the thought of being attacked again, but luckily, she and Jack—despite plenty of sibling animosity—shared an unshakable mental conduit, as if the normal twin bond had multiplied exponentially when they’d been denied attachment to actual parents.

  “I don’t think so,” Jack said. “Give me the hose, Annelise.”
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br />   Annelise hesitated only a moment before strutting over and relinquishing the hose to the boy she’d had a crush on for two years. Despite being older, Annelise would have given anything, including her not-so-sought-after virginity, to Jack Perkins at the snap of his fingers. Luckily, Jack had the wherewithal never to snap his fingers in her presence.

  The next twenty minutes held shrieks of delight, with Jack using the hose as a toy rather than a weapon. But when a strange car pulled into the Abels’ driveway, all the kids ducked down and watched. Visitors were a rarity and the ultimate excuse for spying.

  “Let’s go,” Annelise commanded as her father, Abner Abel, came out on the porch.

  To Janie’s young eyes, Mr. Abel always looked ill, but since he’d looked that way forever, she figured some fickle disease must’ve wasted him into a sunken-chested, hollow-cheeked man and then up and left. The boys looked the same way. Maybe it was destiny for Abel males to look like death had painted them with a soft brush and then moved on in search of meatier subjects. Not to say Mr. Abel wasn’t strong, though. His power multiplied tenfold when he took a switch to his sons’ bottoms.

  Mr. Abel waved to his guests—a short, chunky man and a slim woman in a hat. When they entered the house, the kids skedaddled toward the cellar doors that lifted up from the ground and offered entry to the cool sanctuary where they all told ghost stories on Saturday nights.

  Janie loved the cellar because anything could happen. Imaginations ran wild and morals flew out the spiderwebbed windows. Annelise had gotten her first kiss down here, and Robbie Abel—dumbass that he was—had inhaled his first cigarette at the bottom of the stairs, letting the telltale smoke travel straight to the kitchen. His first ciggy had been followed by his hundredth belt whooping.

  Annelise settled herself on the tall, creaky chair that Janie and the younger Abel girls had garbage-picked two years ago. They’d carried it clear back home, getting splinters and sweating up a storm, only to have Annelise commandeer it for her personal throne. As she wrapped herself in a towel and assumed her position on high, the rest of the girls squirmed on the floor, trying to find the thicker parts of a thin rug that smelled like rotten eggs.

  Annelise caught Janie’s eye and pointed to a white stool in the corner that was missing the bottom quarter of one leg. “That’s where our daddy got whooped by his daddy. He’d sit in that stool barebacked and if he yelled out while getting thrashed, his daddy started all over again.”

  “Why you tellin’ me that?” Janie asked.

  “Daddy says punishments must fit the crime. You keep actin’ like you did outside, we’ll have to put you in that stool, and I don’t think that lily white skin of yours would look so good with whoop marks on it, do you?”

  Janie hugged her knees and shivered, wishing Jack was within earshot, but he and the Abel boys were piling crates so they could uncover the ceiling hole they’d drilled last month. They used it to listen to adult conversations above.

  “I didn’t know y’all’s dad grew up in this house,” Janie said.

  “Course he did,” Annelise said. “We Abels been in this house over a hundred years. When I grow up, I’m gonna live here, too.”

  Janie couldn’t imagine a worse fate, especially if Mr. Abel was still around.

  “Who are the visitors?” Janie asked.

  “Aunt Joann and Uncle Hump,” said Jenna, two years younger than Janie and by far the prettiest of the bunch, not that the competition was real steep. “Aunt Joann’s real nice and all, but Uncle Hump, he’ll look at you funny and give you the heebie-jeebies sometimes.”

  “What kind of name is Hump?” Janie said. “It sounds plain wrong.”

  Annelise put a hand up to keep her sisters from answering. “Janie,” she said, “don’t tell me you don’t know what humpin’ is.”

  The other girls looked at Janie pitifully, and she gave thanks for the bad lighting that covered the blush of her cheeks. “Course I do,” she said. “I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday.”

  “Tell us, then,” Annelise said. “Tell us what humpin’ is.”

  “If you don’t know, it’s not for me to say.” Janie thought herself pretty clever for that one, but Annelise came back fast. She feigned a hurt look and leaned down with a desperate whisper.

  “Please tell me, Janie. I’m serious. I’m real embarrassed ’cause I don’t actually know. I heard the boys talkin’ last week and they was goin’ on about humpin’ and I felt stupid ’cause I didn’t have the slightest idea what it was. Please?”

  “Yeah, we don’t know, either,” said Jenna, apparently forgetting how she’d just laughed at Janie’s ignorance.

  “Well,” Janie said, enjoying her moment of superiority, “it’s when two animals go courtin’ one another, and the male animal tries to impress the female, so he struts around like he owns the place. And that’s when people say, Look at that raccoon, humpin’ for that lady raccoon, tryin’ to get a date.”

  Annelise burst out laughing, emphasizing it with a point of her prominently knuckled finger. The sisters followed suit. Their peals of laughter sounded like the jeering scorn of an entire town, and Janie felt like the hot one at a Salem witch trial.

  “That’s peacockin’!” Annelise said. “You have no idea what humpin’ is, and I don’t think you ever will, not with that indented chest of yours.”

  Janie curled her legs in even tighter. “You don’t know what it means any better than I do.” She realized as she spoke that Annelise had known all along.

  “Lemme tell you something, Janie Perkins, I know for sure that you should know about humpin’. It’s what your mama did to that lyin’ murderer in jail. She humped on him sum’n good and then got herself knocked up with you and Jack there.” Annelise glanced lustfully at Jack, who had his ear pinned to the ceiling. “I guess one good thing came out of your mama’s mortal sin.”

  “My mama was no sinner.”

  “Look it up, Janie. Your mama was the worst kind. And now you and Jack, you’re stained forever. It’s like a bad birthmark only God can see.”

  “I’m not stained any more than you, Annelise Abel.”

  Annelise began chanting and pointing at Janie. The younger sisters joined in. “Stained, stained, stained, stained.” The sound exploded in Janie’s head and before she realized what she was doing, she rushed Annelise, toppling her and her throne to the ground. Annelise’s head smashed into the rough wooden stairs and landed with an ugly thunk on the cement floor.

  Everything went silent and even the boys stopped their eavesdropping to take in the drama.

  The blood running down Annelise’s head sent Janie into a shocked frenzy. She took off, lifting those thick cellar doors like they were tissue paper. By the time they slammed shut, she was halfway across the Abels’ backyard, the woods ahead a blur of rage and tears. But when she got twenty feet from the shortcut to her house, she ran smack into Mr. Abel and the infamous Uncle Hump. A compact camera stuck out of Mr. Abel’s pants pocket—he often carried one to photograph birds—and each man held a pint of fresh-picked raspberries in pink-stained fingers.

  “Slow down there, young lady,” said Mr. Abel.

  As Janie skidded to a stop, the hot air molded to her body and she felt exposed in her flimsy two-piece. Her legs shook beneath her.

  “Young lady,” said Mr. Abel in his sticky, molasses voice, “where are you running to?”

  Uncle Hump chortled. “Might be more appropriate to ask what she’s running from, Abner.”

  Abner must have fixed Uncle Hump with a measured glare, for the latter stopped laughing abruptly while his stubby fingers found a loose button on his shirt to fiddle with. That was all Janie could see of the mysterious Uncle Hump, because she refused to lift her eyes to either man.

  “I asked you a question, Miss Perkins,” Mr. Abel said.

  He never called her Janie, as if the utt
erance of a familiar moniker would signal approval of her existence. “I was runnin’ home, Mr. Abel, sir. I needed to use the bathroom.”

  “I see.”

  “This ain’t one of yours, Abner?” asked Uncle Hump.

  “Heavens no,” said Mr. Abel, the two words smothered by the shame of the suggestion. “She belongs to the neighbors. And enough said about that.” Leaning down, he breathed in and out slowly, his sour breath making Janie’s nostrils flinch. “Where are my children? They need to say hello to their uncle Hump.”

  Janie refused to be the tattletale on top of being the idiot. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Weren’t you just playing with them?”

  “Yes, sir.” She was shivering and dizzy from her mad sprint.

  “So you’re lying. If one of mine lied to me like that, it would mean the belt and no supper. Punishments must be exacted. But then, we don’t expect much from the likes of you Perkinses, do we?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Just then, the basement door opened and Jack emerged, followed by the lanky Abel brothers.

  “Ah, there they are,” said Mr. Abel to Uncle Hump, adding quietly, “along with this one’s bastard brother.”

  With that, Janie had about had her fill of the Abels, because she sure as hell knew what a bastard was. She stomped down hard on Mr. Abel’s bad foot and sprinted away for dear life, heading for the safety of the woods and her own house.

  “You’ll pay for that, young lady!” Mr. Abel shouted. “Sinners always pay! Just look at your mother!”

  Despite the circumstances, Janie turned around, cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, “Grandpa says you’re a big, ugly blowhard, Mr. Abel, and everyone in town knows you’re a two-faced humpin’ bastard!”

  As she turned and ran, the wind whooshed past her damp ears and a smile lit up her face. The whoop of Jack’s laughter and the rapid cadence of his footsteps running behind her in support added the only sounds that could have made the moment any better.