Part II
On a tragically humid autumn night, the air conditioner rattled its last dying breaths. It was the kind of night that dad would come home late and I would lie in bed waiting to hear the black Camero roll into the driveway. Buried under a sea of red comforter, I listened while gazing beyond the glow-in-the-dark stars fastened to my ceiling.
Dad pulled into the driveway at 10:34. I sprung from bed, scurried through my room, down the stairs, through the living room, the dining room, into the kitchen and gave him the most tremendous hug around the waist. Normally, dad crouched to my level and accepted me with open arms but this time he was in no mood. With his tie hanging loose, his dress shirt un-tucked from his pants and his forehead glazed with sweat, he brushed me off and hurried into the dining room where he proceeded to dump the contents of his briefcase. He formed a paper mountain on the table, paperclips clicked across the wooden surface and a stapler landed with a thud. Dad was throwing a fit over a missing important work document and mom endured dad’s hysterics while quietly doing dishes. “Back to your room Billy,” she said looking at dad through the reflection of the window above the sink. Instead I hid behind the living room couch.
Mom fetched the whiskey without a sound. She placed the glass on the dining room table and went diligently back to the dishes. Dad moved from the table to the nearby filing cabinet and began removing folders by the handful, dumping them on the floor. “God dammit,” he muttered under his breath.
I sulked behind the couch, with disheveled hair, and swimming in pajamas. The ground was covered in dog hair and Lily, our Golden Retriever, looked up at me with sympathetic eyes. She placed her sleepy head in my lap. “Don’t tell them I’m here,” I whispered as I rubbed her neck.
“It’s about time you talked to Joe more often,” mom stated with profound consideration. Dad stopped his frenzied search and narrowed his eyes towards her reflection in the window.
“Are you kidding?” he replied. I could hear him tromp into the kitchen and mom’s persistent clanking of dishwashing carried on.
“No I’m not kidding. He’s your son.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” he blurted with a deadpan expression. I watched him slide across the hardwood kitchen floor in black dress socks, slowly approaching mom. “I work my fucking ass off every goddamn day…” His intonation smoothed into a native drawl and his nauseating voice buried the kitchen like an oppressive pall. “…and somehow I get the feeling you don’t appreciate that.” With the glass of whiskey in hand, dad’s enormous figure blocked out the kitchen light and projected a shadow over mom and the entire sink.
He loomed right behind her.
Mom dropped a dish, turned around, and then glared at him for a moment, showing her disappointment without saying anything. The dark circles under her eyes, the loose folds of her wrinkles and the way her skin sagged from her cheeks did all the work. Her silence was of the worst breed; you could feel it burning in the air. Dad knew how to break it, to taunt her in ways that she would rupture and explode. And when Mom did yell, she strained her frail voice from wavering and cracking and dad responded in a violent baritone. This time, however, mom maintained her composure.
She slipped past him and marched through the dining room, the living room, up the stairs, and into her bedroom. Dad remained in the kitchen looking at the floor. He pounded his fists on the counter, shaking the whole house and then he opened the window above the sink, sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. “Don’t smoke in the house,” I heard mom scold countless times over the years.
Mom shuffled about in her room above me and, in front of me, I could see my reflection in a cobweb-riddled window that was usually hidden by the couch. I patted down my chocolate brown hair and rubbed my green eyes that peered from behind slightly fogged non-prescribed black glasses. It bothered me how different I looked with them on and since they were just for fun, I took them off. I had perfect vision.
Suddenly Lily’s ears perked to attention and she turned towards something moving out the window, past my reflection. A man with a savage beard appeared outside. He put one finger perpendicular to his lips and, with his other hand, pointed in the direction of the front door. It had been over a year since I had seen Uncle Doc, so I ran quietly to turn the two bolt-locks and let him in. Uncle Doc postured himself between the half-opened mouth of the door, his greasy hair falling over the visible portion of his scarred face, and began to emphatically whisper his plans to first eat at Mc-yd’s and then to visit Julia. He invited me to come along and I decided to take the risk. Eating fast food at this hour seemed especially mischievous, a punishable thrill, and the thought of Julia filled my gut with a satisfying nostalgia. Exotic tapestries, shag carpets, baby blankets, Turkish rugs, goose-down comforters, and everything else delightful, warm, and soft lined the inside of Julia’s apartment. My favorite place among the padded room was on a bright orange corduroy couch draped with countless afghans. I could already smell the dank fragrance of mildew tenuously lingering on the fabric and combining with burning oriental incense. All of this I secretly craved while sitting in the passengers seat, on our way to McDonalds. In the van, the blue upholstery was worn with age but at the same time, miraculously spotless.
As we drove, I wondered about Uncle Doc’s relationship with Julia. I suspected that he must have broken up with her –it seemed as if he had broken connections with everyone. Last year dad said, “Uncle Doc isn’t coming to Thanksgiving because he’s having personal issues.” And a few times after, I heard mom and dad talk about Uncle Doc walking out of a hospital ward somewhere in Wisconsin; mom whispering harshly in dad’s ear, “Looking for him would be a terrible idea. We don’t want him to think that we’re the bad guys too.”
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At McDonalds, we sat in a shiny red and yellow booth with mayonnaise dribbling from our chins, chewing mouthfuls of Big Mac. I studied him voraciously devouring his food, frantically respiring between bouts of consumption. Since I last saw him, Uncle Doc had developed a nervous tick. He began to purse his lips and twitch his head from side-to-side like an overwrought parrot. When Uncle Doc finished his Big Mac, he slurped the last of his orange soda from the bottom of his cup and belched. Excuse me, he said and I excused him. We both silently examined the top of the table for a moment. The place smelled like a mixture of French fries, cleaning solution and plastic.
“Bill…um…” Uncle Doc stammered, “you’ve grown a lot.” He sounded cliché. Like the disjoint relative at a family reunion who extended their hand below their waist, parallel to the floor, to say: the last time I saw you, you were only this tall.
“It’s ok, I-”
“No no no” he said, cutting me off. “It’s not ok and…well, I wish I could explain to you why I’ve been gone for so long but…you’re…I don’t know, I just can’t.” I nodded and sipped on my soda. He pursed his lips, twitched his head, readjusted the way he was sitting, and ate a French fry.
“And anyways,” he continued, “this isn’t the place to be talking about these things out loud.” He twitched his head. “See that guy over there?” Uncle Doc pointed across the room towards a balding obese man. His pallid face was covered with barbeque sauce and he struggled to reach across the table to get a napkin. “I think he’s watching us.” Uncle Doc crooked his mouth into a meager smile and raised his eyebrows to reveal blood shot eyes. “Has your dad talked about me at all? What has he said?”
“Nothing,” I replied confidently, “I swear.”
“Now Bill, tell me,” he said dropping down into a whisper. “does your dad have any dangerous chemical products? Drano? Hydrochloric acid?”
“What?” I exclaimed. “I don’t think so.” My voiced revealed a hint of skepticism. “Well, maybe Drano-”
“Shhhhh,” he said ducking his head down a little. “Never mind that, never mind.” He relaxed himself back into the booth, projecting his satisfied belly in the air and rested his hands on top of it. He pursed his lips and a pensive expression came across his greasy face. “Let’s go,” he said.
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Leftover French fries in hand, we traversed the ominous parking lot. The streetlights illuminated toxic puddles in the sinister darkness. AMERICAN GUTTER SERVICE, it said on his van in large printed red and white letters over flaking blue paint. We cruised down the spotless Chicago suburb streets advertising his disenfranchised company the whole way to the solace of Julia’s glorious apartment. His company must’ve gone bankrupt around the same time he didn’t come to Thanksgiving last year since that’s when dad began to clean the gutters himself. The van had been the only thing he hadn’t abandoned. Sometimes while walking home after school, I would see AMERICAN GUTTER SERVICE drive past me and I would sprint after it until I was out of breath and it vanished down the street. Upon telling dad about witnessing the van, he would stare at me absently as if I was completely insane. “Uncle Doc lives far, far away,” he would say. “And I doubt he’s coming back.”
Curled up in the passenger’s seat, closing my eyes but trying not to fall asleep, I remembered the tree house. Every Saturday, for about a year, Uncle Doc would show up with a box full of doughnuts and a tool belt. He taught me how to balance a nail between my fingers before driving it into wood, how to insulate walls and install carpeting. Uncle Doc said the ladder holder was the most important job since I secured the lives of those above me. “Low five!” he would exclaim after a job well done and I would slap his hand so hard it would sting –we called this “spicy hands.”
It was a solid fort, on a crooked tree, true to the depiction of a standard house drawn by an eight year old: a triangle on top of a square. The main room was furnished with a space heater, plastic chairs made for kids with tiny butts, and a coffee stained chessboard on which Uncle Doc would beat me every game. We played cops and robbers on endless afternoons and the tree house served as the jail. One day, in a batman costume, I jumped off the tree house porch and my cape flapped backwards against the wind as I soared. I landed on all fours in leaves I had piled too thin and when mom heard my agonized yell, she called Julia over who was working as a nurse at the time. Julia compressed my broken arm in ice packs and told me that we were going to the hospital. She said I was very brave.
The attic was territory to the No-Girls-Allowed Club and the rules were strictly enforced. We wrote a constitution, the scribbles proclaiming: Rule #1: No Girls Allowed. Rule #2: Anyone Who Enters Must Sign The Wall. After months of continuous pestering, I allowed Lexy and Rachel into our secret lair. They wanted to sign their names on The Wall and their girl handwriting stood out like vandalism on whitewash. The next day, I received a letter saying that I was being dismissed from the office of president of the No-Girls-Allowed Club. I didn’t even consider that the tree house stood in my backyard, so it seemed fair at the time. After the No-Girls-Allowed Club disbanded, a raccoon took residence in the attic and no one had the courage to kick it out.
The low-pitched monotonous sound of the van’s wheels running along the smooth highway asphalt lulled me into the first stages of sleep. In this semi-conscious state, my thoughts carried me to recall Laura Bedford’s science presentation and the whole class laughing when her paper-maché volcano malfunctioned and spewed lava all over her white tank top. I thought about how the earth looked in my science book, separated into parts -the crust, the mantle, the core- and all the exposed lava dripping, oozing out from the seams. I imagined myself lying peacefully above this fiery subterranean world on Julia’s bright orange corduroy couch. I could feel the warmth of Lily curled up at my toes and a blanket descended to envelope me. The fuzziness of the couch vanished bit by bit against my cheek and everything merged into a feeling of weightlessness. Julia gently ran her fingers through my hair and then kissed me on the forehead, whispering: “Sweet dreams, I love you.”
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I woke up to the smell of gas station coffee and cigarettes. The seatbelt was poking into my side and I rotated about in a sleepy stupor, unable to find a comfortable position. Uncle Doc was still driving with pursed lips, hands placed ten and two, and making quick glances to check the progress of my waking. I sat upright in my seat and he gave me an enthusiastic good morning smile. I replied with a big yawn, stretching my legs out in front of me. Peering solemnly out the fogged window, I tried to get my bearings. It seemed like I had just missed the sunrise, the orange sky retained the same fading color as the piles of dying maple leaves that lined the grimy foreign streets. Suburban Chicago was nowhere in sight. We passed countless rusting warehouses with abandoned parking lots and the air possessed an industrial bitterness. Beyond the rising sun, I could see hundreds of smoke plumes and the silhouettes of just as many chimneys. We passed a sign that said, “Welcome Gurnee Heights,” and the events of last night slowly fell back into perspective. I imagined mom’s grief stricken expression, all the blood draining from her face upon waking me for school and finding only empty sheets. She called the police already, told them I had been kidnapped by a stranger. My entire body tensed with dread and I felt as if I was being submerged under arctic water. Where am I? And why is Uncle Doc still driving?
At first, I thought that we had actually made it to Julia’s apartment and that falling asleep on her couch was not just a dream. I looked down and saw the crumpled remains of last night’s French fries. I had smashed them in my sleep and squished out a glob of ketchup. A streak of red stained the floor mat.
“Uncle Doc? Do you have a napkin in here?”
“Yeah. Um, check in the glove compartment.”
I opened it and removed a Wendy’s napkin from amidst a bottle of liquid detergent, the car manual, and an unused first aid kit. At the back of the compartment, I could see the barrel of a gun.
The hairs on my neck perked to attention, my pulse quickened, pounding in my head. I quickly latched the compartment shut. Uncle Doc turned towards me and I felt him staring with an expressionless face, except for the corners of his eyes, which creased into a hidden smile. Dread sat like lead digesting in my stomach, flowing through my arteries, pumping through my heart, sliding between the endless folds of my brain, and poisoning me to the very margins of my nervous system. My legs trembled violently against the van’s plastic door, making a series of hollow knocks. My movements were too unsteady to wipe up the ketchup, so instead I pocketed the napkin and pretended to go back to sleep. I leaned my head against the window, listening to the bumps in the road and Uncle Doc’s van rattling with age. I felt the car slowly pull to a stop and, without looking up, I heard Uncle Doc open his door, step out of the van and pace slowly around to my side, his heels squishing into the wet leaves. He wrenched open my door and I tumbled onto the curb. The grime stuck to my cheek.
“Get up,” he said. Keeping my eyes on the ground, I did as he told. “What’s this?” he pointed at the ketchup stain. I couldn’t speak. There is a gun in the glove compartment. Uncle Doc stepped forward, right up against me so that I could feel his uneasy breath billow over the top of my head. He was beginning to twitch with increasing frequency. His invariably composed face was utterly drained of color, a single blue vein bulged from his temple and his eyes seared with anger. His finger, still pointing in the direction of the stain, jumped like a seismograph. “What the fuck is this?” he whispered through clenched teeth. “What kind of chemical is on my rug?” He let out a long sigh, walked toward the front of the car, put a finger to his lips and began to pace. “I’ve spent too much of my time…” he continued furiously, “too much of my life…too much of my money protecting myself from others trying to poison me to have you, my nephew, come from under my nose and put hazardous chemicals in my van…”
“I think it’s just ketch-“
“I’m not finished!” he barked while pounding his fist on the hood of his van. Uncle Doc jerked open the door and stripped off the plastic paneling, revealing a complicated system of chains and dials in a nest of blue and red wires. “Do you know what this is for?” he continued. “It’s a special lock system that I installed to keep people I can’t trust out! It cost me a fucking grand!” His twitch had developed into a series of brief seizures and his words were becoming less and less coherent. I wiped the sweat accumulating on my forehead.
“I thought I could trust you!” he shouted. Then Uncle Doc strolled over to me, knelt down to my level, narrowed his eyes, and scrunched his nose. “Who are you?” he asked pointing at my chest. I wanted to say something, anything. Then he marched back to his truck, pulled a crate full of cleaning agents from under the seat and slammed them on the ground in front of me. “Clean it up!”
Uncle Doc turned towards the open road, and twitching more than ever now, his entire body rumbled in a tumultuous fervor. “Julia! I Love you!” Uncle Doc shouted facing nobody. He began yelling in short bursts, panting at the same time and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. “...I know YOU get ME...I need PEOPLES like you…” His arms thrashed at his sides and his face was continuously shifting –his lips wrenched from back and forth, his eyebrows writhed about and his nostrils flared.
“Julia! My love…OH…OH YOU KNOW MY PREDICAMENT!”
Bending over, he appeared as if he was about to vomit, but instead burst into laughter. Opening his mouth wide, he projected it at the ground and manipulated the pitch so that it would rise and fall. This quickly turned into a violent coughing fit and Uncle Doc stumbled around the side of the van into the street, collapsed to the ground, and rolled flat on his back; his chest heaved in the air. For once, he seemed reasonably composed, and I tentatively approached.
“Uncle Doc?” I asked. “Are you alright?” He didn’t move at all. His eyes, opaque and wet with tears, stared blankly at the ashen sky. I got down right next to him and we laid there side by side in the middle of the filthy road in an abandoned industrial park far from home.
“I…I…I…” he stopped, sat up and looked down at me silently without any expression. Uncle Doc ran his hand through his hair and it stood up at unnatural angles. Looking up from the ground, I noticed for the first time in the morning light how haggard he looked. His clothes, stretched beyond their expiration and stained by the smell of Camels and mildew, hung loosely from his large frame. There were gray hairs in his beard that I had never seen before and his acne-scarred skin wilted from his face. His parched lips were lined with painful red cracks and shadows ringed his sunken eyes. I could feel the dew on the concrete seep through my pajamas and as I sat up, countless tiny pebbles stuck to my back. I shifted my weight, outstretched my arms, and wrapped myself around him.
I gave him a hug.
Uncle Doc released a deep exhale and hugged me back in a way I had never felt a grown man hug before, resting his entire body in my arms. He lowered his head tenderly into my shoulder, burying my ear with his overgrown beard, and I could feel his heavy gentle hands blanket my entire back. His odor was potent, not in a particularly bad way, but in the way that it had always emanated from him before, after every visit. Beyond us, the breeze ruffled the branches of trees that arched over the endless stretch of road and millions of helicopter leaves spiraled placidly into the grimy street, filling the empty parking lots, and descending like snow onto the peeling blue painted roof of Uncle Doc’s van. In my embrace, he didn’t tremble anymore.
“Can we go home?” I asked. He nodded against my chest, through my pajamas.
“Your parents are probably worried,” Uncle Doc said pursing his lips. I told him that Dad didn’t hug me last night and that he was drunk. I told him the air-conditioner was broken and that it was nicer to have slept in the coolness of his van. Then he smiled and strangest feeling came to possess my mind. I twitched my head, pursed my lips and everything was completely silent.
