The Thing About My Uncle

Jacket/Cover Images: 

Farmhouse with landscape (Patrick Jennings)/Shutterstock, 

Man Silhouette (Michal Sanca)/Shutterstock, Dog Silhouette (You1023)/Shutterstock

The Thing About My Uncle

Copyright © 2024 Peter J. Stavros

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by BHC Press

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945948

ISBN: 978-1-64397-397-5 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64397-398-2 (Softcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64397-399-9 (Ebook)

For information, write:

BHC Press

885 Penniman #5505

Plymouth, MI 48170

Visit the publisher:

www.bhcpress.com

To Niko

It wasn’t my fault.

I told him that, more than once, a dozen times at least, but he didn’t care. Mr. Smitherman didn’t want to hear none of what I had to say. And I couldn’t rightly blame him. After all, I did already have two strikes against me. Heck, more than that on account of my behavior and my attitude and my shenanigans, as Mr. Smitherman called it. I would admit, I wasn’t the best student at Putnam Middle School. In fact, I was probably one of the worst. Not that I was dumb. I had a vocabulary like a thesaurus on account of the crossword puzzles I worked on in class, and a keen intellect. Mama said so herself, usually when she was disappointed in me for screwing up at school, but even so.

Eighth grade just didn’t hold much interest for me, like grades one through seven before it, and no doubt like the rest of the grades to follow. I didn’t want to be cooped up all day in some stuffy classroom, being taught geometry or civics or whatever other nonsense they were trying to cram into our brains. I wanted to be out and about, having adventures, doing something else, anything else. I didn’t have time for school. Life’s too short, Pops would preach, before he went away. There was a whole wide world waiting to experience, and I had this burning urge to get on out there and experience as much as I could. But the State said I had to stay in school until I was eighteen, and I still had four more years for that. I just had to bide my time, and do what I could, and get away with what I could until I couldn’t get away with anything anymore.

I told Mr. Smitherman that it wasn’t my fault, nearly pleaded with him, and that wasn’t like me because it was usually much easier for me to be convincing. But I had lied to him a lot, so I could maybe understand his disinclination to believe me. Yet, this was the God’s honest truth. That gun he pulled out of my backpack wasn’t mine. It surely wasn’t mine! It was Timbo’s, of all people, my so-called best friend since kindergarten. He was showing it off to a bunch of us before class, shooting the shit out back behind the dumpster that smelled like sour milk, bragging about how he had swiped it from his old man’s dresser when he was searching for his nudie mags. That son of a bitch must have slipped it into my bag when he spotted Mr. Smitherman walking in our direction, and someone must’ve tipped off Mr. Smitherman since everyone snitched and tattled and told on everyone at this stupid school that I didn’t even want to be at anyhow. There was no honor here. But, dang, I never saw Mr. Smitherman coming. I must’ve had my head in the clouds, as usual. Nor did I expect what was to follow.

Expulsion! Mr. Smitherman shouted to me, at the top of his lungs, that one vein that ran up the side of his neck warped and crooked and purple, and I swore it was pulsing like some sort of alien earthworm. Jabbing his stubby finger in my chest—his chunky gold ring with the red ruby shimmering in the morning sun—he reeked of musty aftershave and stale cigarettes.

How’s that? I followed, barely able to get the words out, caught completely off guard by that, convinced I had misheard him as I had a knack of doing. I didn’t always listen to people when they spoke to me, especially adults, especially adults like Mr. Smitherman with his shiny bald head and that ill-fitting gray pinstripe suit and paisley bowtie he wore day in and day out: his uniform, we teased behind his back. What’d you say, I asked him, and to include some speck of respect for that asshole for once, I added, sir?

You heard me, Mr. Littlefield, he answered, abrupt as if he was expecting me to say that and pounced on my words. And when he called me by my last name, I knew he was serious, that this was serious, that I was in trouble, and if I had had any doubts prior, they were long gone. You’re out of here! I’ll have no more of your shenanigans!

Shenanigans, again. That was Mr. Smitherman’s favorite word. I would’ve laughed at him for that like I normally did—we all would’ve like we all normally did—but this wasn’t normal. A circle of students three or four deep had formed around us the way they did whenever there was a fight or something scandalous, materializing out of nowhere with a rowdy, manic energy. A piece of me, deep inside, broke off and fell heavy into the pit of my stomach with a kerplunk as it finally connected: the gravity of my predicament. Mr. Smitherman’s face was beet red and bloated like a balloon that was fixing to pop. The other kids oohed and aahed and whispered and murmured to one another, delighting in my demise. I just stood there, frozen. I couldn’t move if I tried. It was all I could do to keep breathing. I couldn’t believe this, could absolutely not believe this.

Perhaps I did have it coming—and for a while now—for all the other stuff I had done, all of my previous shenanigans. But not for this because this wasn’t my fault—I swore it wasn’t my fault! I turned to Timbo, threw my hands out palms up like, C’mon, buddy, say something. What gives? But he just shrugged and slinked away, disappearing into the crowd, leaving me out there empty and exposed, all alone on my own to deal with Mr. Smitherman, how he was with his entire body trembling, his hands forced stiff down at his side, both fists clenched, and that vein on the side of his neck growing bigger.

The school resource officer, Officer Smiley, who we called Cop Smiles—and he didn’t seem to mind it because he did always smile and wish us a nice day and to keep out of trouble as best we could—grabbed at my arm, and it hurt. He was grim all of a sudden, which was strange to see coming from him. He had his head bowed as if to apologize for this since he couldn’t verbally apologize because Mr. Smitherman was keeping a watchful eye on us, and I reckoned Mr. Smitherman, as Vice Principal, was Cop Smiles’s boss, so he had to do what he was told. And what Cop Smiles was told was to lead me off, making a hole through the circle of students who surrounded us. He took me into the building, down the empty hallway—our footsteps echoing, as class hadn’t yet begun and kids waited until the very last possible moment to go inside—and into the front office where Principal Vickers was waiting with a manner that told me I was in deep. She had me sit before her in that hard, wooden chair in the front of her desk that she made all the kids who got into trouble sit in while she called Mama and broke the bad news to her, glaring at me all the while, which only added to my discomfort.

From what I could surmise from the volume of her voice that came across clear as a whistle on the other end of the receiver even while Principal Vickers held it pressed close to her ear, Mama wasn’t one bit pleased about the situation either. When Principal Vickers hung up the phone, she just stared across her desk at me, wearing a smug countenance as if she had finally won. It was a long wait, the longest wait of my short life, as I sat there with Principal Vickers and Cop Smiles, straight and stiff, not even fidgeting—and I had to pee whenever I got nervous—and I waited for Mama to arrive, which she did subsequently in a huff and a panic. Principal Vickers told it to her all over again, what they claimed I had done, as if she needed to hear it again, but more likely because Principal Vickers just enjoyed saying it. And none of them still with any interest whatsoever in my version of events. Mama had to sign some official document, and Cop Smiles had to sign it too, and Principal Vickers affixed a stamp to it that she pounded into an ink pad and then pounded onto the paper with extra—and what I perceived as wholly unnecessary—vigor. Mama took me home without talking to me, not one word, without so much as a glimpse in my direction.

The next morning, I was on a Greyhound bus on my way to my uncle’s house somewhere deep in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky.

The thing about my uncle was that I hardly knew him. Uncle Theo kept to himself, some would say he was a recluse, and by all accounts, that was how he preferred it. I couldn’t precisely recall when I had seen him last in the flesh. I just had a foggy recollection from when I was little, like a grainy home movie with cracks and skips and frames missing, of him being around a bunch and doing just fine and all right one moment, and then being sick, deathly ill, the next. Mama visited him in the hospital, and Grammy and Gramps came in to see him too when they were still alive. It wasn’t so much a memory as it was this feeling of denseness in the atmosphere, choking and suffocating, with a heavy sense of dread, seriousness draped over everything. The sun didn’t even shine as far as anyone in our family was concerned, sour and dour expressions on everyone. That was also around when Pops left, just up and out unexpectedly, never to return. So there was a lot going on, and none of it any fun. It wasn’t a pleasant time at our house back then.

There came a point, though, when Uncle Theo got better, and he up and left too. And I never saw him since—I didn’t know of anyone who had—though he kept in touch with me, here and there, now and again. I would get cards and gifts from him in the mail on occasion, for my birthday or Christmas or whatever, sometimes with a crisp twenty-dollar bill folded inside. Once, he sent a card to congratulate me for making the Little League All-Star team. I remembered that one because the front of the card had a cartoon of a dog spinning a basketball, which struck me as peculiar, and it didn’t make a lick of sense given that I had made the baseball team, not the basketball team. But it could’ve been that Uncle Theo wasn’t able to find a card that had a cartoon of a dog with a baseball bat, and so maybe that card had to do.

Regardless, it was always a treat to get cards in the mail from Uncle Theo, just him taking the effort to reach out, his way of saying hello I supposed. He must have had some inkling of what I was up to, yet I hadn’t a clue how. Mama never mentioned him, and he never came back around, and since I wasn’t allowed on the Internet, I couldn’t hunt for him myself. It was as if Uncle Theo had just disappeared, except that he obviously hadn’t, not completely, since here I was on my way to see him, on what felt like an endless bus ride with a multitude of stops in-between, from Louisville across I-64 and then over the Mountain Parkway to Prestonsburg. The plan was for Uncle Theo to meet me at the bus station there and then drive me to his house to stay, as Mama explained, until I straightened the hell out, however goddamned long it took.

Although I didn’t properly know a whole lot about my uncle, I did venture to guess that he was a millionaire and that he lived in a mansion with tall white columns and a porch that stretched clear around the house that had rocking chairs and swings, an in-ground marble swimming pool out back with two diving boards, a high dive and a low dive, and a fizzy, bubbly Jacuzzi. And his lawn was the size of a football field and expertly manicured like a putting green, and you could lie down on it and sleep like a baby on a feather bed if you desired. Off to the side, there was a two-story garage chock-full of expensive automobiles—a Rolls, a few Bentleys, Jaguars and Porsches and Maseratis—and a speed boat that he would take out on his private lake to water-ski if he wasn’t in the mood to ride one of his fleet of Jet Skis. Uncle Theo ate steak every night, medium rare, with a loaded baked potato and a glass of red wine.

At least that was how I pictured him. I recalled Mama saying how Uncle Theo didn’t work anymore, so I just figured he was rich like some type of millionaire, that he had to be because everyone had to work if they weren’t rich. Sometimes, Mama worked three jobs, and I had a paper route until I got fired for tossing the Sunday edition onto Mr. Williams’s porch and knocking over his statue of a pig that I asked him, to be a wiseass, if it was a relative. So, with Uncle Theo not having to work even one job, it stood to logical reasoning that he had to have been a millionaire who lived in a mansion and ate steak every night. And that made me feel a little bit better about where I was going, that this trip would be somewhat worthwhile for me since, if nothing else, I would be staying in a mansion. Yet, I still didn’t altogether understand why I had to go and live with Uncle Theo to begin with. But as I pondered it—and I had nothing to do but ponder on this endless bus ride with a multitude of stops in-between—I couldn’t fully assert that it was a surprise either. Not with the way I had been, the way I had acted toward people, and to Mama specifically.

Mama and I had been having it out a lot lately, and we really had it out last night. Although, to be clear, Mama had it out with me, and I kept quiet as a church mouse to not give her any more reason to take the wooden spatula from the kitchen drawer and beat me along the backside with it. Mama was angry all right, the angriest I’d seen her. And sorry to say that I’ve made her plenty angry in the past. She yelled that she was fed up, Rhett! with her voice sharp and shrill and that liked to rattle the windows. "Fed up to here!" She motioned high above her head to indicate exactly how fed up she was, which was the most fed up I’ve ever made her as far as I was aware and was apparently more than she could take. Mama carried on such that she made Ella Mae, my four-years-younger little sister, cry, and Mama had to take a break from yelling at me to tend to her. But then once Ella Mae had settled down, Mama came right back at it with me.

At the end of her tirade—though I would have never dared to tell it to Mama that I considered she was having a tirade—Mama proclaimed, as she pulled herself together, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth and pushing her hair from her face and resuming to using her inside voice, that she had arrived at the conclusion that the best solution was to get me out of the house after my latest stunt. She called Uncle Theo—and that was the first ever I’d heard her call Uncle Theo—and went on and on and on with him about how fed up she was with me and how badly I’d been behaving, and a whole host of other stuff as Mama was quite the talker. She said something to Uncle Theo about how you need to see what you caused which seemed like an odd thing to tell him, but I wasn’t about to question Mama about it, not with how she was. Then, she sent me straight off to my room without dinner—and it was tuna mac night, my favorite—and instructed me to pack a bag, changes of clothes, clean underwear and such, my toothbrush and comb, and the Bible because she said it was high time I commenced to reading that. And the next morning, here I was on a Greyhound bus on my way to my uncle’s house somewhere deep in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky.

The bus was nearly full, nary an empty seat, which surprised me, as I wouldn’t have guessed there would be many folks inclined to travel to these parts. Across the aisle sat an elderly woman flipping through a worn copy of The Saturday Evening Post, her hair in tight curls with a pale-bluish tint and letting off a fragrance of flowery perfume and mothballs. I caught her looking at me, and she said I had sad eyes. When we were just outside of Frankfort, she reached over with a greasy paper bag of home-baked chocolate chip cookies. She shook the bag in my direction and whispered with a reassuring smile—and one of her teeth, on the top row toward the back, was silver—for me to take one cookie for now and one to save for later, which I gladly did. Although when she dozed and began to snore, I ate them both on account of, aside from missing dinner, I hadn’t had breakfast this morning either and I was fairly hungry.

The bus ride was tedious and boring, with not a lot to see, only anonymous stretches of highway under an overcast sky. When we got past Winchester and veered onto the Mountain Parkway, the view was slightly more scenic, with dense emerald foliage and a gradually building mountain landscape, like pine-covered walls in the horizon. I spotted a fawn gingerly traipsing through the brush on spindly legs to catch up with its family, as the foothills of the Appalachians began to rise on all sides. I felt my eyelids grow heavy, having not gotten much sleep last night from tossing and turning and being concerned for my quandary. But whenever I was just about to drift off, a coal truck would rumble by, belching out billows of black dust. I finally managed to nod off to the vibration of the bus and the monotonous humming of its engine, my head resting against the window, my jacket balled up as a pillow.

I had a weird dream where I was playing ball out in the backyard with Pops, and I hardly ever dreamed about Pops anymore. It was just him and me, tossing a baseball back and forth, Pops telling me to zing it in to him, to not hold back, to really let it fly. And I did, with the ball landing with a smack, flush into his mitt, and Pops grabbing it and lobbing it back to me. He kept yelling at me to go harder, to let him have it. The dream was so real that it was as if I was living it. My heartbeat increased and beads of perspiration gathered on my forehead as I threw the baseball at Pops as hard as I could, but not as hard as Pops wanted me to. I was giving it everything I had, but it was never good enough for Pops, no matter how I tried. This went on for what seemed like forever, tossing the ball back and forth like that, when off in the horizon, right beyond Pops, a storm cloud formed, dark and menacing with jagged streaks of electric lightning. It rolled in, but Pops told me to pay it no mind, to keep throwing the baseball at him as hard as I could, which I did—or at least I tried to—while the storm cloud got closer and closer and the wind picked up. It started to rain, blinding sheets of rain that drenched us and made it so that I could hardly make out anything in front of my face. But I kept throwing the ball all the same, with every ounce of my effort, an exertion I hadn’t known, until a clap of thunder like a shotgun blast rang out in my dream and jolted me back to consciousness with the bus grinding to a halt at our destination—the bus station in Prestonsburg—an exhale from the exhaust like a last gasp.

I gathered myself and my belongings, and I joined the other passengers as we patiently filed off. I let that elderly lady with the blue hair from across the aisle go ahead since Mama had taught me that stuff like that—being polite and whatnot—was the gentlemanly thing to do, and I was a gentleman after all, despite my shenanigans. I followed her out and then stepped to the side to wait for the bus driver to pull everyone’s suitcases from the luggage compartment at the bottom. My bag was the last to be freed, and when the bus driver tossed it to me, it had been scrunched and smooshed, but it was none the worse for wear, sort of like me. I slung it over my shoulder, thanked that elderly lady again for the chocolate chip cookies, not revealing that I had eaten them both at once contrary to her wishes, and wandered around to the other side of the bus with no inclination where I needed to go or what I needed to do.

That was when I saw him, standing over yonder in the parking lot, leaned against this beaten up and dented and rusted-out green-and-white pickup truck, yet the tires appeared to be brand new, for some odd reason, which didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the vehicle. It was my uncle. It had to be him, looking mostly the same as he did in the photograph Mama had given me this morning, which I pulled out of my pocket, now crinkled and creased, to compare it nonetheless to the person I was gawking at. He was older, and somewhat haggard, and heavier. Not so much a fat-heavy but a muscular-heavy, with an extra-large torso and a thickset waist. It was him. It had to be him. Even so, just to be certain, I called out, Uncle Theo?

Come on, boy. He flung his hand out like he was disgusted with something. Don’t just stand there, deer in the headlights. We gotta get a move on. Then he got into his truck.

That was him, all right. I nodded and hurried across the street as quickly as I could, almost tripping over my feet. My uncle had this presence—some attitude he conveyed, this air about him—that told me I had best do what he said, and posthaste. So, I hustled over to where he was and yanked open the weighty front door, the hinges screeching as if in mortal pain and they might snap, and climbed up into the truck cab, my bag on my lap. Uncle Theo turned the ignition, and the motor shuttered to life with a cough and a sputter, and we drove off with a jerk and a spurt. I was both excited and nervous, my belly overrun by a swarm of agitated butterflies. But I was also eager to get this adventure underway.

Uncle Theo wasn’t much of a talker. In fact, he barely spoke. He just drove, eyes forward, his left hand high on the steering wheel, and his right hand nursing something out of an insulated travel mug that he would put to his mouth and take a swig from, going about his business as if I wasn’t even sitting next to him. He could’ve been driving by his lonesome for how he was. I could’ve been invisible, nonexistent. I stared straight ahead, as well, while the truck bounced along on these uneven, potholed backcountry roads. Every so often, I’d sneak a peek over at him whenever I had the chance, whenever I could do it such that he wouldn’t notice, so as not to make it obvious, to see what I could gather about this man.

My initial impression of Uncle Theo was that he was hairy, a very hairy individual with wild sprigs of hair flipping out from under his sweat-stained ball cap and a bushy, unkempt beard, gray around his mouth and on his chin and