Saying Uncle Read online

  She sighed and shook her head, her onyx dangle earrings swaying. “You new? Thought I knew all the cops on the force these days.”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “What do you want?” Her eyes were large, brown, and saddled with dark bags, and her makeup was a bit heavy but did little to cover how truly tired she looked. At one time this had been a stunningly beautiful woman, and despite her palpable exhaustion, traces of that beauty still remained.

  I pulled off my hat, held it down by my side. Rainwater trickled across the bridge of my nose. I wiped it free. “I’m Andy DeMarco,” I told her. “Paul’s nephew.”

  Recognition of my name dawned across her face, and she self-consciously ran her fingers through her short hair, combing a few thick strands off her forehead. I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head. “I…I’m Louise.”

  “I was hoping maybe we could talk.”

  She nodded absently, like her mind was racing, already jumping ahead. “Yeah,” she finally said. “Sure, of—of course.”

  She slid down off the stool slowly, with more effort than it should’ve taken, and walked out of the booth through a back door. I watched as she crossed to the bar, leaned over and said something to the bartender. He nodded, signaled to another employee, and that man followed Louise back to the booth and took her place on the stool. He glanced at me long enough to let me know he’d seen and made a mental image of me, but otherwise seemed completely disinterested in my presence. Louise reached under the counter, retrieved a clutch-purse, slipped into a long black coat then joined me on the free side of the glass.

  From her hairstyle to her wardrobe, Louise Sutherland had the look of a woman better suited to the late 1940s or early 1950s. She wore a simple but clingy black dress that sported quite a bit of cleavage and stopped just above her knees, nylons and spike heels that struck me as something one might wear to a dinner party rather than a day job on a stool at a skin bar. I guessed she was in her middle forties to early fifties, but couldn’t be certain which end of that spectrum she fell into. Her life had not been an easy one, and it was evident in her face. She was not overweight by any stretch of the imagination, but neither was she particularly skinny, with a busty, hourglass figure that looked as dated as the rest of her persona. There was an air of overt sexuality about her, of unmistakable femininity mixed with a harder exterior, all of which she seemed wholly unaware of. Or perhaps she was all too aware, and years of practice only made it appear that way. As she came closer the smell of perfume and makeup wafted from her in a slow wave.

  “There’s a little place right around the corner,” she said. “We can get some coffee.”

  It wasn’t until we got outside that I realized how stifling the heat had been inside. Louise walked a few paces ahead of me, noticeably surprised to find it had begun to snow. My eyes watered in the cold air, blurring my view. I followed her to the end of the block and across a narrow side street, her heels clicking pavement and our breath trailing and swirling about us like freshly expelled spirits.

  Louise led me to a small café sandwiched between an unoccupied and rundown storefront and an equally dilapidated pawnshop. A counter with stools overlooking a grill filled the back wall, and a few tables were lined along the front window. It struck me as peculiar that there would be such a large window in a place so dreary, the view through which consisted of another vacant and decayed building covered in graffiti.

  As we entered, a rotund man in a stained apron waved his spatula at us from behind the counter then turned back to his grill. A couple of old men sat huddled on stools, but all the tables were empty. Louise chose one in the far corner. As I helped her off with her coat then took the chair opposite her, an awkward silence passed between us.

  From her purse Louise pulled a cigarette case and a matching lighter. Rather than make direct eye contact with me she looked out the window at a neighborhood on its last leg. “Do you drink coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you take it?”

  “Black.”

  She opened the case and slid a cigarette free. Her fingernails were manicured and painted blood red, which contrasted oddly with her black dress. “Freddy,” she called to the man at the grill, her face still turned to the window, “couple black coffees when you get a chance.”

  “You got it, Lou,” he called back.

  Louise slipped the cigarette between her lips, snapped shut the case and placed it on the table between us. Several seconds passed before she lit it, and when she did she took a slow drag, held the smoke in her lungs for a beat then exhaled gradually. As she plucked the cigarette from her mouth I noticed a lipstick stain along the filter. She smoked in silence a while longer with a precision and fluidity that seemed nearly religious in its execution. She began to relax, her posture softening with each new drag, and I found myself mesmerized until Freddy slapped two mugs of steaming coffee on the table. When he moved away Louise finally turned from the window and gathered her mug closer. “The coffee’s not bad but stay away from the food.”

  The clearer light revealed eyes reddened from sleeplessness and hours of crying. There was an innate toughness to this woman who had spent so many years with my uncle, a protective shield against the daily life she led, I supposed, but there was also a self-conscious vulnerability that was more than likely only detectable during times such as these, when trauma and fatigue conspired to expose the depth of her true nature.

  “I’m sorry to just spring myself on you out of the blue like this,” I said.

  She sipped her coffee, leaving behind another lipstick stain on the rim of the mug. “Actually, it’s nice to finally meet you. Just too bad it’s under these circumstances.”

  I sat there trying to think of something to say as the steam from my mug slithered up across my chin and cheeks. Mercifully, the aroma of coffee covered the otherwise dominant stench of grease in the room. “I know you two were together a long time,” I eventually managed. “I can’t imagine what you must be going through, but I want you to know I appreciate you seeing me like this.”

  Louise gave a spasm-like smile that came and went so fast I barely noticed it.

  “I just thought we should talk,” I told her.

  She took another pull on her cigarette, this time more forcefully, then crushed it in a small plastic ashtray. “What about?”

  “I identified his body a little while ago.” I expected her to say something in response. When she didn’t, even though I didn’t really want it, I forced down a swallow of coffee and said, “I was surprised at how different he looked. I’d forgotten I’m thirty-five myself, which made him fifty-six. I realized then how long it had been since I’d seen him. All this time, all these years seem more real, suddenly.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  I felt like a salesman who had forgotten his pitch. “Time has a way of doing that.”

  “That’s because Time’s a thief,” Louise said evenly. “And like all the good ones, once you realize he’s been there, he’s already gone.”

  * * *

  Boone leaned against the concession stand wall and slid slowly to the ground. He looked like I felt, like he’d been punched in the stomach. Hard. “Whoa,” he said, for about the fifth or sixth time since I’d finished telling him what had happened earlier.

  In the silence that followed crickets buzzed joyously, oblivious to my plight and reminding me that we were the intruders here, the strangers. I envied their ability to be heard and not seen, and wanted to join them in the shelter of the tall grass surrounding us, hidden and protected in their invisibility, their concealment and the safety of their numbers.

  But in that here and now there was only Boone and only me and the things we both now knew. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that revealing what I’d seen and heard that day not only relieved me of some burden, it transferred it to him. Perhaps unfairly, but such was our relationship in those days, the friendship of youth—friendship in its purist form—pitfalls and all.


  “Michael Ring’s always been an asshole,” Boone said. “But Jesus, why would he do something like that to Angie? Sick fuck, she’s just a little kid. You sure she’s OK?”

  “I don’t know, I—I think so. They’re supposed to take her to some doctor my uncle knows, some guy who’ll keep it quiet like they want.”

  “He’s so dead,” Boone mumbled. “Michael Ring is so fucking dead.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  He seemed puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Boone, what if he killed him?”

  He tore a piece of grass free from the field and began twisting it in his hands. Boone had always been close to Uncle too, and looked up to him as much as I did. But he had heard the stories and rumors, and knew there was mystery there, areas no one ventured to, darkness we never talked about except in carefully calculated ways, albeit in the form of hero worship.

  Nobody messes with my uncle.

  Yeah, your Uncle’s a bad dude, he kicks ass! You think he’s in the Mafia?

  I don’t know, man. Maybe. He doesn’t talk about it.

  Your uncle’s so cool.

  The coolest.

  In an instant everything had changed. We no longer had the luxury of whimsy, of comic book or teenage-boy versions of valor. It was more than just talk now, more than empty words, braggadocio and blood and guts fantasies as phony as a drive-in horror movie. This time it was all too real.

  “He probably just kicked his ass real bad,” Boone said.

  “But what if he really killed him?”

  Boone sat there quietly a moment. “If Michael Ring did that to Angie he fucking deserves it. Shit, if I had a sister—”

  “You don’t.”

  “But if I did, I—”

  “Yeah, but you don’t.”

  “Fine.” He sighed, tossing the now mangled blade of grass aside. “My mom then. I do have one of those…sort of. If somebody did that to my mother I’d fucking kill them myself.”

  “This is real, Boone.”

  “Remember Ed Kelleher? Your uncle kicked the shit out of him and all he did was spank Angela. You were cool about that.”

  “That was years ago, and I was just little too. And—Jesus, Boone—nobody died.”

  “Dude, what do you care if he kills him?”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “Are you? He raped your sister. You should’ve kicked his ass when you had the chance. Shit, it woulda taken ten guys to hold me back, and you couldn’t even get out of the car.”

  “Like I could fight with Michael Ring. He would’ve kicked my ass.”

  “So what?” Boone struggled back to his feet. “You’re a man. That shit happens sometimes. At least you’d be doing the right thing.”

  “The right thing? Jesus, you’re as bad as the rest of them. Everybody’s so pissed they’re not thinking about all this. No one’s thinking.”

  “Seems to me you’re worrying more about Michael Ring than you are about your little sister.”

  We were just inches apart. “Fuck you, man.”

  “OK whatever, get mad at me.” Boone waved at me dismissively. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.”

  “Nothing’s going to change what happened. No matter what I do or Uncle does or anybody does, it’s not going to change what happened to Angela. It’s not going to make her feel better, it’s not going to make what happened to her and what she’s feeling go away.”

  “So what? Maybe that’s not even the point. He raped Angela, Andy, he—”

  “I know what he did.”

  “He has to pay for that. He has to be punished.”

  “I’m not saying he shouldn’t be punished. I’m not saying that what he did was OK. But they should call the police and have him arrested. He should go to jail.”

  “Shit. Juvenile, maybe.”

  “Boone, if Uncle kills him he’ll go to jail, probably for the rest of his life. I don’t want my uncle to go to prison.” I turned away from him and ran my hands through my hair. They came back damp with perspiration. “And besides,” I said. “It’s murder.”

  “Maybe nothing happened,” Boone said. “You said when you took off running he was just talking to him, so maybe he didn’t do anything.”

  I wanted to believe that could be true, but my gut told me different.

  Boone wandered off, putting some necessary distance between us. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what you should do.”

  “No matter what,” I told him, “you can’t say anything, Boone. Not to anyone.”

  He nodded.

  “If something does happen, and we know about it, we could be in trouble too.”

  “I’d never rat,” he said softly. “Ever.”

  I wished I could go somewhere else for a while, even if only to sit and think, but it had never been more evident than at that precise moment just how cloistered we really were. We rarely left town regardless of circumstance. We couldn’t even drive yet. There was nowhere to go, and no way to get there even if there was. Warden was our entire universe, our existence a life on the head of a pin.

  Darkness arrived unnoticed.

  8

  “Angela called me last night,” Louise announced. “She’s flying in tonight.”

  I nodded. “I’m planning to meet her over at our mother’s.”

  Louise visibly grimaced, her pain and my mother’s shared in that moment. “I’m going there later too. I don’t know why the hell I went to work, I—I just couldn’t spend another minute in that apartment by myself. I talked to Marie on the phone for a while but…but all we did was cry.” She shrugged almost apologetically, and I wanted to reach across the table and touch her, to reassure her that there was no need for any of that.

  “I’m headed to the house a bit later,” I told her. “But I wanted to see you first.”

  “Why?”

  This time I looked away. In her mind I was sure I’d deserved that. After all, she’d been with my uncle for a decade and had a relationship not only with him, but with my mother as well, and as much as one could have with Angela, who lived across the country and who returned to Warden generally only for funerals, weddings, and on occasion, for the holidays. Louise had been more a member of our family these past years than I had.

  I remembered my mother telling me about some woman Uncle was with, but we rarely spoke about him when I called, and even when we did it was sparingly, so until earlier that day I’d had no idea Louise Sutherland existed in any real sense. To me, she had been someone briefly referred to in conversation with my mother or Angela over the years, a woman to whom I had dismissed and assigned the same insignificance I had labeled all of Uncle’s other girlfriends with. But Louise was something different. She was real, probably the only meaningful non-plutonic relationship Uncle had ever had with a woman. And I’d missed it, missed them. I’d missed her.

  “You look a lot like him,” she said rather unexpectedly.

  I found Louise’s comment curious since she hadn’t sustained a look in my direction for more than a few seconds. But she was right. I could’ve easily been mistaken for Uncle’s son rather than his nephew.

  “When he was younger, anyway,” she added. She held her coffee mug like it was a baby animal, cradling it between her fingers tenderly. “I’ve seen pictures of you when you were little but…” her voice faded to silence. “He carried this one snapshot in his wallet of him with you and Angela. You two are standing on either side of him holding his hands. You were probably—I don’t know—eight or nine, maybe, just a little fella, so Angela can’t be more than five or six. He looks so happy in it. Whenever he’d talk to somebody about you or Angela he’d pull that picture out. ‘Course he had more recent ones of Angela; we had them all over the house. But he didn’t have any of you besides old ones. He did have a copy of your high school graduation picture, though. Your mother gave him one. I guess you’d already stopped talking to him quite a while before that, though.”

  Louise s
tared down into her coffee for a while.

  “It’s complicated,” I told her.

  Her dark eyes lifted. “I know.”

  I wondered just how much.

  Pain and regret hung in the air between us like a gossamer curtain. I imagined Uncle holding this woman, kissing her, loving her. I imagined him laughing with her, clowning and pulling her from a chair for a quick dance around the kitchen the way he’d done with my mother so many years before. I imagined them in their apartment, lying in bed together in silence while shadows played along the walls and ceilings of their bedroom. I imagined her resting her head on his shoulder, and him wrapping his arms around her, holding her tight, and smiling the way he so often did, as if he hadn’t a worry in the world and there was nowhere else he’d rather be.

  “The police told me he was killed with another man,” I said.

  Louise gave a noncommittal nod and reached again for her cigarettes. “Yeah, that’s what they told me too.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Ronnie Garrett. He’s been around a while. Younger than your uncle—he’s only in his thirties, maybe your age—but he was an associate of Paulie’s for a long time.”

  “An associate.”

  She sparked another cigarette. “That’s what I said.”

  I sipped my coffee. “Do you know what happened?”

  “They got shot, that’s what happened.” Tightening her lips, her chin held firm against the onslaught of coming tears, but she managed to chase them away before even a single drop surfaced. “Didn’t the cops tell you?”

  “I guess I meant why,” I said quietly.

  Louise released some air through her nostrils that could have been a sigh or perhaps even an attempt at ironic laughter, I couldn’t be sure. Like a dated movie queen she smoked her cigarette dramatically for a while before answering as a gray cloud of smoke engulfed us. “Your uncle was in an unforgiving business, you know that.”

  “I never really knew what business he was in.”

  “Sure you did. Not knowing isn’t the same as not wanting to know.” She peered at me through the smoke like a specter. “Look, this is a tough time for all of us right now. If you think I’m going to sit here and dance with you about this bullshit then you got the wrong gal, OK? Your uncle was a lot of things, but never the monster you thought. He was what he was. Period. He missed you, never stopped talking about you. You broke his heart.”