Uncle Steve (edited)

I never noticed the glimmers of evil hiding under my Uncle’s fingernails. Don’t get me wrong, the construction work and bad decisions were evident, but the evil—that he became good at hiding.

He was so human.

I was born to believe in him. He was awfully beautiful some days. But someone must have been playing with his clocks. A minute would pass and a new year would begin. No time for resolutions. No do-over’s. No second chances. Just dirty work. Just a dirty man too full of regret to consider himself anything more than a boy; A dirty boy with evil under his fingernails.

There was suburban silence in his backyard. Even the crickets feared him, echoing speechless when his feet met their home. I never saw his evil, but I could hear how the pond in his backyard cried when he stepped in it. Handkerchiefs hung from my ceiling to catch every other drop that suicided from their home to mine. I never congratulated myself on the ones I caught. I just summed it up to luck as I memorized how heartache looked on the floor of my bedroom.

My Uncle was so eager to be a bad man. He knew what it meant to fail. He had shoes filled with pebbles and he resented being saved so we gave up trying on a Wednesday in Mobile, Alabama when the wind knocked him down with as much love as a big brother. He lay defeated at the wall where his mother marked his height until age fourteen and told him that with just a few more inches he could play pro-ball. He was 4’11. Momma knows best.

He thought with elbows and fists.

He loved with bullets spiraling out of the mouth like horror stories.

He was one of the drunks stumbling around town too frightening for company. Or perhaps, too frightened. Most nights I watched him pick dinner out of his teeth and wrote poems about how the moonlight worshipped the veins in his arms but he had lost the music at fourteen. There was too much winter inside his life. He let you down if you looked too close.

The big book of life told me he was no good. I didn’t believe it for a second until he ended it all himself, in the same way he entered the world.

Alone.

He quit. The evil, elbow man with pebbles in his shoes quit everything I stay alive for.

He had been kidnapped by bottles of scotch. He was a soldier in his own backyard.
He left an awful silence.