Kill 'Em With Kindness, page 18
“I’m good.”
“Good.”
We sat in awkward silence, neither one of us ready to break it. I closed my eyes, concentrating on the whirr of tires on pavement, the high-pitched whine from the engine, the solid rumble like a tiger’s chuff. Custom seats supported my back and legs. There was no bounce or shudder like regular truck seats. Instead it felt like two large hands were holding me, patting me, a momma saying, there, there, child. And for a few seconds, I let myself be happy.
“What?” Gator said.
I opened my eyes and looked at him. “I didn’t say anything.”
“I know, but you looked…I don’t know.” He shook his head, glanced in the side mirror and changed lanes, preparing to exit and take us west.
I closed my eyes again, but the feeling was gone. And worse than that, I sensed Gator staring at me.
He cleared his throat, then said, “Would you have done what she did?”
I figured he was talking about Candy, but it wasn’t up to me to make conversation easy on him.
“Who?” I asked.
“That girl,” he said. “Would you have climbed inside a total stranger’s truck and asked them to help you?”
“Given the same circumstances?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I shrugged. “Probably not. But then again, I know jujitsu, and I carry a knife.” I flicked my right wrist and produced a blade, scalpel thin, spun it twice, then stowed it away without a trace.
“Impressive,” Gator said, grinning. “Would it be crude of me to say that was a chub-worthy move?”
“Crude, perhaps,” I said, smiling and glancing at his crotch. “But I’ll take the compliment.”
I waited until we’d merged with traffic and settled into the slow lane, cruise control on, before I spoke again. “I did think it was weird that she and the boyfriend were even at the truck stop. I mean, there were other gas stations along that road and most of the food places were across the street. You know?”
Gator nodded. “I know.”
“So either the boyfriend is a driver—”
“Or, he works at the truck stop,” Gator added. “Don’t forget that.”
I ran my thumbnail over my bottom lip.
“Uh oh, look out. She’s thinking,” Gator said.
“Shut up.”
We could have gone on like that for hours. But my phone rang—an obscenely loud Zydeco version of Don’t Mess with my Toot Toot. I let it play long enough that we got to sing the refrain. It made Gator laugh every time.
“Hey, Père.”
Gator whispered, Toot Toot, as my father answered on his end of the phone, “Hey, Shâ.”
I’d missed his voice, the honey and whiskey purr, the way he could curl up a word on his tongue and unleash it like a chameleon after a fly.
There was a song in the mouth of every Cajun, and none knew how to sing it as well as Manny Boudreaux. I’d put him through a lot in the last year and a half. I owed him my life. Without his support I might never have recuperated from the crash—physically or mentally—even though I was a tough ass Boudreaux through and through.
I clicked on the speaker and set my phone in the cup holder, figuring this way I wouldn’t have to try to regurgitate the conversation to Gator later on.
I said, “How’s everything in Bunkie? Pilar treating you right?”
“You know she is. I got me a fine woman.”
“That you do,” Gator said.
I rolled my eyes and shook my head, surprised that my man still fell into that weird accent whenever he talked to my father.
What? he mouthed.
Toot Toot, I mouthed back.
Père told us he was concerned about heating all the rooms in the plantation house, now that winter had settled in and they had begun hosting hunters on overnights.
“Overnights? And that’s a good idea, why?” I asked.
“Men under the same roof are easier to gather up in the morning and get in the field. Men at night under the same roof are bound to buy more product, seeing their counterparts buying the same product.”
“Product?” Gator asked.
Père chuckled. “Pilar and I set up a small shop in the den. Simply some necessary items a hunter might have left at home.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “This product would not be bottles of Grand Père’s Rumdelicious, now would it?”
There was a pause on the other end. Père coughed. “I gotta go, Shâ, Pilar be calling me.”
Uh huh. “All right. Listen you go down to see Ivory Joe in town. He’ll know where you can get some safe electric heaters that look like fireplaces. If he has any questions, tell him to call me. Hell, tell him to call me anyway. Been a coon’s age since I heard from him.”
He said he’d do that and we should have a nice day, then added a bit of Cajun lingo just to fuck with Gator.
I clicked off the call and hit the touchscreen to check emails.
Gator said, “Okay, so I know podna is for partner, but what did he mean by tahyo? And what was that other thing he said, a boog?”
I laughed. “He told me to take care of you, because you’re more like a little boy—a little bug—than a big, hungry dog.”
Gator stared at me long enough that the truck drifted over the lane line. “He did not,” he said, pulling on the wheel, getting us back on track.
“Okay. He didn’t,” I said, going back to my phone and the word game I was playing with a faceless man in Missouri. I counted to five.
Gator said, “I’ll show you a hungry dog. You just wait till we park this thing. I’m telling you.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. It was almost like we were married.
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Here is a preview of Saying Uncle by Greg F. Gifune…
1
To this day I don’t know why they called me. My mother probably gave them the phone number with the intention of delaying the inevitable and sparing herself the horror of seeing her only brother like that. Maybe she was still in shock and hadn’t been thinking clearly, I can’t be certain. What I do know is that identifying Uncle Paul’s body for the police that night was just as upsetting as I’d imagined it would be. It struck me as darkly ironic yet necessary that I should be given this task, as without witnessing his lifeless remains firsthand the idea that he could really be dead would have remained beyond belief. What I pictured instead of those remains were the search parties combing the woods and beaches so many years before. People in town banding together, many of them completely unaware of whom the person they were searching for was but knowing it was something they had to take part in. An effort, perhaps, even by those removed from the missing boy, from the entire situation leading up to it and the aftereffects left in its wake, to connect with some larger portion of humanity beyond their reach until then. It was a time when people in towns like ours still cared—or at least pretended to care—about the people next door or across the street, because in many ways their friends and neighbors and even the majority of those town residents they didn’t know, but knew of, defined us all.
For some reason I remembered my grandmother’s funeral too, and how young I was at the time; milling about the funeral parlor aimlessly while adults around me cried and spoke in rapid whispers. I remembered standing in the front pew at church hours later as they wheeled her casket down the aisle and presented it to the altar. Both were covered in white, a defiant statement of clarity in the face of darkness, or maybe because there was just as much purity in death as there was in life. I remembered a woman singing, “Here I am Lord” in a beautiful soprano that echoed through the curved walls of the small church, and how it brought up the emotion in everyone, a reminder that my grandmother had gone on to some other place where we would all one day follow.
And what I thought about most when I remembered that day, and the day years later when all those people searched so frantically for a boy gone missing, was that none of those things would ever happen for his family, for his friends and neighbors, because right or wrong he was never coming back. Not to live, not to die. He was just gone.
As the past faded in favor of the present, an overweight, grim-faced detective greeted me at the entrance to the morgue, introduced himself with a nod and in an officious tone, thanked me for coming. Without further comment he escorted me across the foyer, past a series of darkened offices and into a labyrinth of hallways. After what seemed like an eternity we reached the room where the body was being stored.
The detective hesitated, his hand on the door. “Ready?”
“No,” I said.
Whenever my phone rings in the night, I am reminded of him still.
I cannot recall a time when I was not close to Uncle Paul. My mother’s only brother, he was a year older than she, and due to the absence of my father, an integral part of our lives from the beginning. My father worked in insurance sales, and although he didn’t abandon us until I was five, my memories of him are vague at best. When I see him in my mind’s eye he is a tall and lanky man in an inexpensive wrinkled suit, a mixed drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I remember being near him, sitting on the floor playing or coloring in one of my books while he sat in his chair, but I have no memory of ever having had a conversation with the man. More boarder than parent, he seldom used our home for anything other than a place to sleep. The fact that his wife and children resided there as well seemed irrelevant to him somehow. For years I tried to remember the sound of his voice but it always eluded me, and in the end he became little more than a phantom.
My mother married too young, and by the time she was twenty she had given birth to my younger sister, Angela, and myself. Memory dictates she was a good and loving mother, but with the passage of time I have come to realize she was never a particularly happy person. Raised in a traditional Italian-American family, she was taught to be somewhat subservient to men, a second banana, as it were, to her male counterparts. In families such as ours, women often wielded significant power but behaved, at least on the surface, as if it all rested in the men’s hands. Like an actor miscast, for my mother it was a role she seldom played convincingly but assumed nonetheless.
We lived in Warden, a primarily working-class town located on the southeastern coast of Massachusetts not far from Boston. It was a pleasant place to grow up, at least for a little while.
From the time my sister and I were quite young Uncle Paul became something of a surrogate father. He was young himself (only in his middle twenties when Angela and I were still in elementary school), and although he wasn’t married and had no family of his own, he had a wonderfully natural way with children. He was different somehow from other adults in the sense that he seldom behaved like one, a trait that made it easier for Angela and me to relate to him. He wasn’t immature, rather carefree and confident, someone who treated us and spoke to us like we were thinking human beings who deserved as much respect as anyone else, children or not. I suppose it was his air of confidence and control I envied most. As I later learned, there were many reasons for him to be full of nearly constant worry, but that was a side of him he rarely allowed us to see. He had two very divergent lives and for us existed only during those times when he was in our presence, like a toy that comes alive in the hands and mind of a child but ceases to exist once it’s out of sight and the toy box lid is closed.
Looking back now I realize there were many things I should have questioned more diligently. Angela and I never knew for sure what Uncle Paul did for a living. He told us he was a businessman but never elaborated beyond that point. He seemed to work when he felt like it, as there were often lengthy periods when he was free to do as he pleased. Yet he always had money. He wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but always had a stack of cash that he kept in a wad secured by a shiny billfold in the left pocket of his trousers. He usually wore tailored, double-breasted suits and calfskin loafers, but even his casual apparel was expensive and stylish. On his left hand he wore a diamond ring and an expensive watch, and strung loosely around his right wrist was a gold herringbone bracelet. Unlike most men in town Uncle Paul’s hands bore none of the scars or patches of rough skin generally associated with years of manual labor, and I rarely recall seeing him look disheveled.
I have always believed my mother knew from the start the sorts of things her brother was involved in, but when anyone asked her answers were just as vague, and Angela and I soon learned that when it came to our uncle those types of inquiries would not be answered with any degree of specificity.
It also seemed odd to me that he was almost always alone. He seldom spoke of friends or business associates, and although at times he mentioned women, I had known him for years before I met one of his girlfriends. None of his relationships with women ever seemed terribly serious, and on those rare occasions when I met someone he was seeing, they were gone from his life as quickly as they’d entered it.
He was less than six feet tall but carried himself like a much larger man. His build was compact and powerful; his hair dark, combed straight back and secured in place with styling gel, and his features were attractive if not traditionally handsome. His complexion was light olive, and although his nose was a bit large he wore it well. When he smiled he did so with his eyes first, his thin lips slowly curling just enough to reveal a hint of teeth seconds later. I remember the rapid cadence of his speech and even the specific tone of his voice, as it had a whispery sound often found in people who smoke.
Uncle Paul, or simply “Uncle” as we called him, was the lone positive and consistent male influence in our lives. Since our father’s departure we’d had no contact with the members of his family, and both our grandparents on our mother’s side had died by the time I was four and Angela just a toddler. Our mother and Uncle Paul were born to older parents who met later in life. Tragically, they died when their children were still quite young and their grandchildren mere babies.
After my father left, our mother dated from time to time, but those men had little interest in two young children and were generally gone before we had the chance to get to know them. Choosing men was never my mother’s strong suit, though I understand now how difficult it must have been for her in those days. She was a single mother with bills that far exceeded her wages as a cashier at a nearby discount department store, and while she must have been miserable, her pain, fear and loneliness were well hidden from us more often than not.
Because she’d married so young and had babies while most women her age were in college, when our father left she was the sole supporter of our family and had to do the best she could with no training and only a high school education. But even when I was very young, Uncle’s financial contributions to our family were evident. Looking back now I realize he was probably the only reason we avoided public assistance.
Besides our father, the only serious relationship my mother had was with a man named Ed Kelleher, a local welder who eventually moved in with us for a short time. Uncle didn’t approve of the arrangement, which led to several arguments between him and our mother. A loud and abrasive man, Ed Kelleher frequently took it upon himself to reprimand my sister and me without good reason. Our very existence seemed to annoy him. On one occasion he decided Angela needed to be punished for spilling a glass of milk on the kitchen floor. It had obviously been an accident, and even though he knew our mother didn’t believe in raising a hand in anger against children, she’d been at work at the time, and Ed put Angela across his knee and administered a spanking. She was five at the time.
After Ed’s threats, neither of us told our mother what happened, but later that evening, once I was certain my mother and Ed had gone to bed, I crept into Angela’s room to check on her. Only eight myself, when I saw her eyes fill with tears a rage exploded through me the likes I had never felt before. I sat on the edge of her bed, gently rubbed her back and whispered my assurances that everything would be all right. Her pain and tears seemed ghoulishly out of place in her bedroom, a space filled with stuffed animals and storybooks and dolls.
“We should tell Mom,” I said.
In a tiny voice she said, “Ed said not to or he’d hurt her too.”
“Everything’s going to be all right.” I told her I loved her and kept rubbing her back until she finally drifted off to sleep a few moments later.
And then I called Uncle.
He arrived early the next morning. I was playing in the front yard when his black Camaro pulled in, tires crunching gravel in the driveway. It was late July and the humidity was already rising, but when he stepped from the car he was wearing a charcoal gray suit and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. By the time he’d crossed our small yard his jacket had been removed.
“Do me a favor and hold this for me a minute,” he said.
I wiped dirt from my hands and took the jacket as he’d taught me, gently, and by the collar. “Ed spanked Angela.”
“You already told me that.” With methodical precision, Uncle neatly rolled up his sleeves. “I’ll handle it. Where’s your mother?”
“In the kitchen. Ed’s upstairs sleeping.”
“And Angela?”
“She’s in her room.”
Uncle gave a quick nod, removed his sunglasses and handed them to me. “Don’t get your fingerprints on the lenses, all right?”
Standing there with his sunglasses in one hand and his jacket in the other, I watched him go inside. After a moment my mother emerged from the house with Angela and sat with her on the steps, staring at me.
“Where’s Uncle?” I asked.
“He’s having a talk with Ed,” she answered flatly. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
Before I could respond the screen door swung open and Uncle sauntered out. He glanced at my mother, his face showing no emotion whatsoever. “You better call an ambulance. Ed fell down the stairs.”
