Saying Uncle Read online

  SAYING UNCLE

  Greg F. Gifune

  Digital Edition

  Saying Uncle © 2014, 2008, 2003 by Greg F. Gifune

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

  Deep Night

  Dominion

  Long After Dark

  Midnight Solitaire

  Rogue

  The Bleeding Season

  The Living and the Dead

  Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

  http://www.darkfuseshop.com/Greg-F.-Gifune/

  For Carla, Brandon, Kendyl, and Hayley

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Jo Popek, former editor of The Roswell Literary Review, the magazine that originally published the short story on which this novel is based, for her encouragement and editing expertise when this was still a short story concept. Thanks also to Sandy DeLuca for her friendship and for her efforts in first getting this novel out to the public. A big thank you to Tom Piccirilli for all his support, friendship, thoughtful advice, and for taking time from his busy schedule to pen the introduction to the original publication. Special thanks to Shane Staley of DarkFuse for believing in this novel, getting it back into print and bringing a whole new group of readers to Saying Uncle. Finally, as always, thank you to my wife Carol for her patience, grace and love.

  “All violence, all that is dreary and repels,

  is not power, but the absence of power.”

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  WINTER, 1999

  “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only

  mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”

  —Mary Wollstonecraft

  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 alluded 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 lea
rned, 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.”

  As my mother stormed into the house Uncle signaled me to bring him his things. Once he had them back in place he pulled some cash from his pocket, peeled off two fifty-dollar bills and handed them to me. “Give this to your mother once she calms down. Tell her to go get some groceries.”

  “Thanks, Uncle.”

  “Thanks, Uncle,” Angela echoed.

  He leaned over and kissed the top of her head, then looked back at me. “Soon as he gets back from the hospital Ed’s moving out. Your mother’s pissed but once she calms down a little make sure you tell her what he did to Angela, and what he said he’d do if she told. She’ll still be mad for a while but she’ll understand and she’ll get over it.”

  My mother didn’t speak to me for a few hours, but Uncle was right, it didn’t last. Later, when we talked about it, I learned she was glad we had told someone, but would have preferred it be she rather than Uncle.

  “He loves us,” she told me, “but you know how he can get sometimes.”

  I certainly did. Regardless, my mother never let another man live with us again. At the time, with the purely selfish motivations children often have, I never stopped to think abou
t what that meant to her, what sort of sacrifice it meant in her life to never be able to enter into a serious relationship with a man without feeling she was somehow exposing her children to something they were better kept away from. Our unassuming little house became something of the sanctuary Angela and I had wanted it to be previously, a place where we were safely tucked away from the rest of the world and all its potential horrors. Our mother was all ours, concealed in a cocoon we thought would never again be broken, but that had begun to slowly suffocate the life from her even before the whole thing came crashing down.

  Though the episode with Ed Kelleher will forever stand out, most of my memories of Uncle to that point are equally poignant but far less dramatic. I remember him sitting with Angela on the floor of her bedroom, playing with dolls and plastic tea sets. I remember him coming to visit on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons; the sound of his laughter and suspecting he was having even more fun than we were. I remember him teaching me how to play basketball and how he’d usually let me win. I remember him coming to see our school plays and recitals, clapping and cheering louder than anyone else, and chaperoning each year on father-son field trips. I remember countless visits to the nearby zoo, having lunch at our favorite restaurant and concluding the day with a trip to the local toy store where Angela and I were allowed one item of our choice, regardless of price. I remember him helping me with homework and marveling at how intelligent he was despite his lack of formal education, and how he gave me pointers on defending myself after a bully at school smashed my brand new Charlie Brown lunchbox over my head. I remember him clowning with my mother—snatching her up when a particular song came on the radio and how they would dance around the kitchen holding each other and laughing while Angela and I gleefully looked on, thrilled to see that rare instance when our mother seemed genuinely happy to be alive.