Saying Uncle Read online

  “Paulie?” she asked in a softer tone. “You’re Paulie’s nephew?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The door closed in my face but seconds later I heard the chain slide free. The door slowly swung open and a petite woman in a housecoat and slippers appeared. She looked as if she’d been napping. “Miriam Waters,” she said, extending a hand. “I’m so sorry to hear about your uncle.”

  I took her hand in mine. It was skeletal and cool to the touch. “Thank you.”

  “We just got the news yesterday.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Me too.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself as if cold. “Such a horrible thing.”

  I nodded, unsure of how to respond.

  “He was a very nice man,” the woman told me.

  “I was hoping to speak with Ms. Sutherland.”

  “Of course.” She peeked about the hallway dramatically, I assumed to make certain we were alone. “Poor Louise, they’ve been together a long time,” she said just above a whisper. “I told her she should take a few days off and give herself a chance to come to terms with all of this, but she insisted on going to work. Keeps her mind busy, I suppose, but she was so upset last night. I was up quite late with her, just talking. Well, listening mostly.”

  “Is she at work now, Ms. Waters?”

  “Miriam,” she said, patting my arm like the grandmother she probably was.

  “Miriam,” I repeated.

  “Have you ever heard of a gentlemen’s club called The Blue Slipper?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m afraid not.”

  “Not sure why they call it that.” She arched an eyebrow with conspiratorial glee. “There hasn’t been a gentlemen anywhere near that place since they built it.”

  I nearly broke a smile as she gave me directions.

  * * *

  Uncle and I had been parked next to the General Store, across the street and a few doors down from Michael Ring’s house, for more than an hour. The house was bigger than ours but more rundown, with a weed-infested front yard surrounded by a waist-high chain-link fence. The air was thick and stagnant, the sun blinding within the confines of Uncle’s car. He sat next to me quietly smoking a cigarette; eyes focused on the stretch of road while a thin film of perspiration beaded across his forehead. I had done my best to appear calm and collected, but my heart was still racing and my stomach was in knots.

  “What’s the deal with this punk?” Uncle asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you know about him?”

  I wiped some sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand and tried to separate my knowledge of Michael Ring from the rest of the madness filling my head. “I go to school with him. He—”

  “Who lives in that house with him? Both parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s his old man do?”

  “I don’t know, I—I don’t know him, really, I—”

  “Does he have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody in his family I need to worry about? Any cops in the family, or lawyers, that kind of thing?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t think, Andy. You either know or you don’t know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Uncle puffed his cigarette. “I’ll check into him.”

  I watched him a moment, but could not read his face. He didn’t look angry, rather quiet and composed to the point of near docility. “What are we going to do?”

  “It’ll be OK.” His face hinted at a smile as he reached over and gave my leg a firm pat. “We’re gonna do what we have to do.”

  I was about to ask what exactly that entailed when I saw Michael Ring turn the corner, dribbling a basketball and strutting along with his usual arrogant smirk. He was tall and muscular for his age, with a ruggedly handsome face and long hair he kept secured with a cotton headband.

  “That’s him,” I heard myself say. “The one with the basketball.”

  Uncle sighed, and there was a subtle change in his expression. He leaned across me and popped open the glove compartment, removed an object wrapped in dark cloth and pushed it into my hand without uttering a word.

  I felt its weight and reluctantly peeled back the cloth to reveal a pair of shiny brass knuckles. “What am I supposed to…” I looked at him but he was staring straight ahead. “You want me to fight him?”

  “If I touch him I’ll have the cops all over me. If you go after him it’s just two young guys having a fight.” Finally, he turned to me. “You walk right up, you don’t say anything and you don’t look him in the eye. You walk right up and you hit him as hard as you can dead in the center of his face, cabeesh? Go for his nose. You’ll snap it easy. There’ll be a lot of blood, and it’ll probably squirt like a bastard, so take a step back and to the side. He’ll be reeling, trust me. Once you move to the side, you hit him again. Right here.” He jabbed a finger against his temple. “Hard as you can. He’ll go down faster than a five-dollar whore. Once he’s down, you open your fist slow and let the knuckles slip free into your other hand. You hold them down to your side, and you do it slow and casual, so it doesn’t look to anybody watching like you used anything except your fist, OK? Then once he’s down, you get a good sturdy stance and you kick him three times, real hard. Once in the gut, twice in the balls. He’s gonna start coughing and gagging and all that, but don’t be afraid, you won’t kill him. After the third kick you crouch down and grab him by that long hair of his. Jerk his head back so your mouth is right next to his ear, and you whisper—make sure you don’t say it loud—you tell him you know what he did to your sister, and this is only the beginning if he tries to cause more trouble. You tell him the next time you’ll kill him. Next time, motherfucker, I’ll kill you. Say it just like that, but quiet, calm. I’ll park around the corner before all this, so when you’re done you walk—don’t run—over to the car and get in. You don’t do anything else and you don’t say anything else. You walk up the block and get in the car nice and easy, like it’s no big deal and we drive away. There aren’t many people around anyway, but if somebody sees all they’ll know is you had a fight and just walked away. If anybody asks later, you guys had a fight. He said some shit to you at school or something—make something up but leave Angela out of it, understand? You hit him a couple times then left, it was no big deal, and you don’t admit you hit him with anything but your fist, understand? If he’s hurt, well, you don’t know anything about that. You just punched him a couple times and he fell down but he was fine when you left.”

  I laughed a little, not because there was anything remotely funny about the situation but because I didn’t know what else to do. “Uncle, I can’t—I can’t do all that.”

  “Take a look at him and think about what he did to your sister. Think about Angie.”

  I tried to swallow but gagged. I had been in three fistfights in my entire life, and though Uncle had taught me how to handle myself, Michael Ring was physically much larger than I was and had a reputation at school as being a tough kid. I had seen him fight on several occasions at school and had never seen him come anywhere near losing. Most kids at school were terrified of him. “We should go to the police.” I dropped the brass knuckles on the seat between us. “He should be arrested for what he did and—”

  “Did you hear a word I said?”

  “Uncle, I’m…”

  “What, afraid?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s OK to be afraid, Andy. We’re all afraid now and then. But there’s a difference between being afraid and being a coward.” He took a final drag on his cigarette and flicked it out the window. “Which one are you? You afraid? Or are you a coward?”

  I squinted through the glare of the sun; saw Michael standing across the street, the sound of his basketball slapping pavement echoing in my ears.

  “Please, Uncle,” I said, hating how weak my voice sounded. “I don’t want to do this.”


  “Then get the fuck out of the car.”

  “What? I—”

  “You heard me.”

  “But Uncle—”

  The sudden look in his eyes stopped me in mid-sentence. It was cold and lifeless, almost evil. “Don’t worry about it,” he said softly. “Just get out of the car, Andy.”

  I pushed open the door and stepped out, my head swimming.

  “Forget you were ever here.” Uncle slid his sunglasses on. “Think you can handle that much?”

  But for Michael Ring, the street was virtually empty. Nothing seemed real anymore.

  I watched from the parking lot as Uncle pulled away and drove to the corner where Michael was standing. He asked for directions to the town hall, and before Michael could make his way to the car to respond I turned, and in a panic, ran in the opposite direction, unaware of where I was headed—or why—only knowing I had to get as far away from there as I could. I never looked back. Not once.

  6

  The Blue Slipper was located near the town industrial park and not far from the waterfront. Ironically, it was only a few blocks from the apartment where Uncle lived when I was younger. The neighborhood had never been a particularly spectacular one, but in the years since I’d left it had grown worse. Dirty and grim, it was a remote street with mostly old textile mills and fish processing plants—the two largest employers in Warden—mixed with a handful of rough-looking bars, an adult book and video store and the club where Louise Sutherland worked.

  I pulled into the parking lot but left the engine running so I could continue to employ the car heater. The Blue Slipper was a tan building, once white perhaps, built low to the ground and straight back from the road, with a flat roof and squared corners that reminded me of an enormous shoebox. A set of black double doors stood ominously on the face of the building and on the roof a neon blue slipper that looked more like a spike-heeled pump blinked in timed intervals beneath a painted sign advertising the name. No windows, no other visible doors.

  A sudden vibration on my belt caught my attention. I slipped my cell phone free. My home number scrolled across the digital display. “Martha?”

  “Hi.” Her voice was tentative, delicate. “They said on the news that area of the coast was in for quite a snowstorm, I just wanted to make sure you got there safely.”

  “The snow just started.” I pictured her at home, draped in kittens and a blanket from the couch, sitting in her favorite chair in the den. “I’m here,” I told her. “I’m OK.”

  Her breath whispered through the phone. “How’s your mother holding up?”

  “I haven’t seen her yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “I plan to a bit later. I just left the morgue.”

  “God.” She sighed.

  “Yeah.” I watched snow fall across the neon slipper. “How are the babies?”

  The mere mention of the kittens brightened her tone. “Great. They played themselves out a few minutes ago and they’re asleep now, all cuddled up together.”

  I wanted to drive away right then and there and go back home. A part of me still wishes I had. “I’m not sure about the funeral arrangements yet. Angela’s supposed to be getting in tonight, so once we’re settled in at Mom’s and I know more I’ll give you a call, OK?”

  “I wish you’d let me come with you,” she said softly. “I feel like I should be there.”

  “It’s better this way, trust me. I’ll be home soon, sweetheart.”

  “You do what you have to do. This is family.”

  You’re my family, I thought. These are ghosts.

  * * *

  I ran the entire three miles to my house without stopping before I finally collapsed against a neighbor’s stonewall. I knew my mother was home, knew I should go inside and warn her about what was happening but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  I spent the next several hours that afternoon walking, thinking, wanting to go back home but too afraid of what I might find once I got there to actually do so. Every time a car drove by or a voice echoed across the street from passersby, I expected to find Uncle there, telling me it had all been a bad joke and to get back into the car so we could go home. But he never came, and it was nearly dark when I finally crept in through the kitchen door.

  My mother and Angela were asleep upstairs, cuddled together like two undisturbed flowers beneath the serene eye of an otherwise violent storm. They looked so peaceful it seemed impossible any harm could come to either of them, and all the more perverse and dreadful that it had. I studied them in silence for several minutes, unable to convince myself to wake them.

  To that point I felt I needed to work things out on my own. This was a personal issue, one that I had no right to take outside our family circle, such as it was, but Boone was the closest thing I had to a brother and it seemed to me all bets were off. After staring at the kitchen phone for an eternity, I picked it up and dialed his house.

  “Can you meet me down at the park?” I asked when he came to the phone.

  “Now? It’s getting dark out. Monsters and shit.”

  “This is serious, I need to talk to you.”

  “So go ahead. First time using a phone there, Einstein?”

  “Boone, I’m not kidding around, this is really fucking serious.”

  I could almost see him frowning into the phone, contorting his face the way he often did when confronted with something he couldn’t deflect or allay with humor. “What’s the matter, Andy?”

  “Can you get out of the house or not?”

  “Yeah, I guess. My Dad’s passed out and my Mom won’t give a shit.”

  “The park in ten minutes, OK?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  And he was. The park, better known as Smyth Park, had been named after one of the town’s foundering fathers back in colonial times, and was really more a field than a park. Years before it had been a place where small independent carnivals and circuses stopped and set up shop on their New England tours, and where the town held little league baseball games. But over the years the public school fields and ballparks had replaced Smyth Park, reducing it to a large, often empty field with a rotting baseball diamond and backstop at one end, and an equally dilapidated concession stand at the other. To discourage people from driving cars into the park, particularly teenagers who for a time had used it as a make-out spot, the dirt roads leading in and out were roped off and purposely left unpaved and rutted. But for occasional walkers or kids who still played there now and then during daylight hours, Smyth Park was generally deserted. Since electricity had not been fed to the park in eons, at night, it was pitch black there. But in summer darkness fell slowly, and coupled with a bright moon, the area was easily negotiable.

  I leaned against the rotted concession stand until I heard the rattling of Boone’s bicycle as he sped along the bumpy entrance road. I waved to him as his bike turned and headed for me.

  He came to an abrupt halt in the grass a few feet away, winded from what had obviously been a breakneck pace. His bicycle looked tiny beneath his large frame, comical. “Andy?” he huffed, climbing off his bike and discarding it. It rattled on for a few feet then tipped over, the rear wheel still spinning. “Dude, it’s gonna be totally dark soon. This place gives me the creeps, especially at night. What’d we have to come way out here for?”

  It was a fair question. There were plenty of other, more convenient places we could have met in town, places where we could have benefited from privacy. But I wanted the approaching darkness here, the barrenness, and the cover it provided. I wanted to hide away until daylight returned, bringing with it clarity and reason and sanity.

  “I figured nobody else would be around and we could talk in private.”

  “We coulda talked in private out in front of my fucking house, shit-for-brains. Didn’t have to come out here for that.” Boone wiped perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked as disheveled as ever in a white t-shirt stained from dinner, a pair of shorts and sn
eakers with no socks. “Hate this place,” he said. I could tell by the way he was squinting through the dying light that he was trying to see my face more clearly, and then from his expression, that he had. “Jesus, Andy, you OK?”

  “I don’t think so, man.” Emotion pooled at the base of my throat as all the events of the day burst free in a single frantic surge. “Some bad shit happened today.”

  7

  It took at least a full minute for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting beyond the front doors of The Blue Slipper. I stood in a narrow vestibule dripping snow and rainwater onto a cheap industrial red carpet smattered with cigarette burns and various small tears. Music played somewhere nearby, the rhythmic thud of a baseline vibrating the floor. A cigarette machine sat to my right beneath a poster advertising the headlining dancer that week, a platinum blonde with a cartoon-like figure. Ignoring the reek of cigarettes and cheap booze, I followed the hallway entrance to a small glass-encased booth with an open window in front. Inside, a woman on a stool stared at the counter before her as if in a trance, only looking up when I was within a foot or two of the booth itself. Beyond her glass closet was a bar and runway stage where a bored-looking topless woman in a g-string gyrated to the music for a handful of men seated throughout the bar and table area. It was equally dark there, as along with the backlight from the bar, small candles encased in red glass on each table provided the only light.

  The woman in the glass booth stared at me for a moment without speaking then jerked a thumb at a small sign next to her that advertised the cover charge. She looked too old to be working in a strip club, yet possessed the weathered, experienced look of someone who knew the score, knew the streets and the characters that inhabited them because she was one herself. “Fifteen bucks,” she said in a raspy, smoker’s voice.

  Though I’d never laid eyes on her before I somehow knew who she was. “I’m looking for Louise Sutherland.”